mtsu campus to check on her grades and meet some of the office personnel over there. after that, she was supposed to go to her grandmother s house to go swimming. investigators found laura s car near the store, miles away from the murder site. investigators found no fingerprints in the car, but they did find a foreign hair. they also found dirt in the wheel wells. the fbi lab determined that they were consistent and that there was a high probability that that vehicle had been on that road by the crime scene. dan goodwin was laura s friend and had been out with her a few nights before the murder. i just asked her if she d like to see a movie. and we wound up going to the movies on sunday, may 27th, of 1994. went and saw a matinee show of the natural with robert redford. at the funeral, dan goodwin promised laura s mother that he d help find the killer.
he noticed some clothing lying in the field. there was actually a body lying there. the victim was a young girl wearing only a bra. her body was covered with two pairs of jeans and a dark jacket. one pair of jeans was hers, the other was a pair of men s jeans. also there s a black jacket across her body with a sleeve tied around her neck and a pair of panties that she was clutching in her right hand. she was identified as 18-year-old laura salmon, a local college student. her life was stolen. her life was stolen. and in such a horrible way. the autopsy revealed laura salmon died of blunt force trauma to the head. the murder weapon appeared to be the rocks found near her body. the blood on those rocks and other material was consistent
with her being struck up to ten times in the head with those rocks. the medical examiner found evidence that laura had consensual sex sometime before the murder, most likely unrelated to the crime. we knew that ms. salmon had been involved in an intimate relationship with someone within 24 or 48 hours prior to her death. there were no injuries that would be consistent with forcible rape. on the men s jeans found with laura s body, scientists found semen from a different individual, presumably the killer. earlier that day, laura worked at her cashier s job at kroger grocery store. records show she left the store around 1:00 pm. she was supposed to be at an appointment at middle tennessee state university but she never arrived. she was supposed to go to
in 2000, a student at oakland high school was overheard talking about the laura salmon case, saying that his father had killed a girl and thrown her body in the quarry. the student s father, david patterson, had a police record for aggravated assault. but by the time the rumor circulated, patterson was dead. he himself was shot to death. we decided, of course, that we had to investigate that lead. they asked patterson s children to voluntarily submit dna samples for testing. testing on david paterson s dna or that of his family, which produced a presumptive profile, showed no possibility of him being any of the male dna profiles that was present at the scene of her murder. investigators also contacted john taylor, who had been an earlier suspect in laura s murder. his dna also did not match. and dan goodwin himself provided a dna sample.
16 years after laura s murder, her high school boyfriend, kyle gilley, was arrested and charged with her murder. laura s mother says she told the original investigators that gilley killed her daughter. she said his jealousy was out of control. his jealousy was out o control. i told them why i thought it was him or i knew it was him, and i was very frustrated that they didn t take that seriously. for the record, no one is willing to speculate why the original investigators didn t look deeper into gilley s alibi. it was clear to the cold case unit that gilley should have been the prime suspect all along. he s callous, cold-hearted, and had no more thought of killing laura than stepping on a bug. from the time he killed laura, he thought nothing else of it.