Witnesses found Eddie Vinson’s body in flames near the corner of Elliott Avenue and 26th Street in the early morning hours of Sunday, June 7, 2015. He’d been beaten, set on fire and left for dead.
Vinson, 49, was a neighborhood fixture who cleaned yards and parking lots for food money. In news reports from the time, neighbors and Vinson’s family were disturbed not only by the nature of his murder, but that someone would kill such a kind and helpful person.
Three days later, Louisville Metro Police detectives arrested Brandon Oldham, now 39, and Juan Lloyd, who is now 37. A jury sentenced the pair to decades in prison after a ten-day trial in September 2017. At the time, the convictions seemed to be the end of the story.
But now, both Oldham and Lloyd are appealing their convictions — each arguing that new information unearthed by the Kentucky Innocence Project casts doubt on the investigation that led to their arrest and the trial that put them behind bars.
If a Jefferson Circuit Court judge grants the men a new trial, they would not be the first to have cases reconsidered because of problematic investigations by Louisville Metro Police — a beleaguered agency that's beset with leadership changes and in the process of negotiating a consent decree after U.S. Department of Justice investigators found the department routinely violated people’s civil rights, especially Black people living in Louisville.
The Kentucky Innocence Project is leading Lloyd’s appeal. Oldham is represented by the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy.
Lloyd’s attorneys said his case exemplifies several of the issues highlighted in the DOJ’s report, specifically that LMPD failed to adequately supervise officers who routinely violated department policies. The attorneys say the detective that led the investigation into Vinson’s murder, Det. Dan Miracle, unnecessarily escalated interactions with key witnesses, failed to disclose information about potential suspects and broke department policy by not giving his full investigative file to prosecutors.
The tragedy of Vinson’s murder, the attorneys said, was “exacerbated” by “numerous discovery violations, a flawed and tainted police investigation, and the “flagrant misrepresentations of police and prosecutors.”
Officials with LMPD and the Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office said they could not comment on the case because of the ongoing appeals.
Miracle did not respond to the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting’s calls or emails, and he did not accept a certified mail letter sent to his current address in Michigan.
Miracle accused Lloyd and Oldham of stripping Vinson’s pants off before beating him and setting him ablaze. Taking the pants was a way to humiliate Vinson, prosecutors said. It was also robbery and tampering with physical evidence, the prosecutors said in court — charges that account for 25 years of Lloyd’s 30 year prison sentence.
But Lloyd’s attorneys argue the robbery couldn’t have happened, because Vinson wasn’t wearing pants the night he was killed.
Crime scene photos show Vinson wearing a pair of dark maroon shorts. Another detective also noted Vinson’s charred shorts in a report from the murder scene. And a witness said he’d seen Vinson the night of his murder wearing shorts, not pants. Together, the attorney’s said this is proof that Lloyd was “not only convicted of a crime that he did not commit, but a crime that never occurred.”
Lloyd’s attorneys also allege that Miracle and prosecutors withheld key pieces of evidence that made it “practically impossible” for Lloyd’s appointed attorney to effectively defend him at what the Kentucky Innocence Project attorneys call a “trial by ambush.”
Kentucky Innocence Project attorneys obtained Miracle’s complete investigative file in October 2023 — more than six years after Lloyd and Oldham went to trial for Vinson’s killing. In it, the attorneys discovered additional recordings, reports and documents that weren’t provided at the initial trial which, the attorneys say, paint a starkly different picture of the investigation than the one Miracle and prosecutors presented at trial
“There can be no confidence in the jury’s verdict and his conviction,” Lloyd’s attorneys said.
In recent court filings, a prosecutor with the Commonwealth’s Attorney said the new information obtained by the Kentucky Innocence Project would not have changed the outcome of the initial trial.
“Despite the undisclosed information, [Lloyd and Oldham] received a fair trial, and the jury’s verdict is worthy of confidence,” said assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jason B. Moore.
Lloyd’s and Oldham’s appeals await a decision by Jefferson Circuit Judge Annie O’Connell.
Semone Sales, Vinson’s 29-year-old daughter, said it’s “mind boggling” that these cases could be overturned. She was pregnant during the first trial, and didn’t have any doubts that police had found her father’s killers.
“For one, it would be scary because if they convicted the wrong individual, the person who did it is still out there,” Sales said. “But also… if he did it but [police and prosecutors] cut corners, and then he gets out and he’s free to walk, then that’s also scary.”
A gun, a tip and a fuzzy video
Vinson spent his last night alive cleaning up trash at a nightclub and a local BBQ stand — both just a few blocks from where he was eventually killed, according to a witness account recorded by detective Miracle.
Miracle joined the force in 2005, working in the 2nd division until joining the homicide unit in 2012, according to his personnel file.
For years, all that was known about the investigation into Vinson’s murder came from four reports written by Miracle, himself, that detail what he did, who he talked to and how he said he found the killers in three days.
He wrote the reports more than a year after the investigation ended, and only after Brandon Oldham’s public defender requested the documents for trial.
Waiting that long to write a report wasn’t common and went against “common sense,” according to LMPD officials who testified during the appeals process, but the police department had no policy that mandated when detectives should complete investigative reports.
KyCIR reviewed those reports and the recordings of related interviews and the details that follow are taken from those records.
At the murder scene, Miracle talked to a man that identified himself as Vinson’s cousin. He lived nearby and had come to see for himself what happened. He told Miracle that he’d last seen Vinson around 11 p.m. the night before. Vinson had an orange bag and inside carried a semi-automatic handgun he’d found in a yard and was looking to sell for $50.
With the gun, the man told Miracle that Vinson had attracted the attention of a group Miracle called the “Mississippi Crew” that allegedly ran a drug enterprise from a derelict house on Elliott Avenue. Jamarcus Glover, one of the targets of the 2020 police investigation that led to the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, was a member of the crew, according to Miracle’s reports.
Miracle initially suspected the crew had a hand in Vinson’s killing. A witness told Miracle that two members — Glover and another man — were at the scene the night of the killing. He also suspected the group of burglarizing a key witness’s home during the investigation. And one crew member told detectives where to find the jeans that Lloyd and Oldham had allegedly taken off Vinson’s body.
“They either know about it or had something to do with it,” Miracle told a group of people on Elliott Avenue during the investigation, according to court documents filed by Lloyd’s attorney.
Miracle included little detail about these potential early suspects in the investigative records he provided at trial, according to Lloyd's attorneys. Keeping those details from the jury put Lloyd at a disadvantage — the idea of another suspect could have changed his fate, the attorneys said.
Prosecutors, however, argue that the information would have done little to change the trial’s outcome. They say in a court filing that it “makes complete sense” for Miracle to have suspected the crew of being involved in the murder at first because “as his investigation began, they were the only people any witnesses placed in the vicinity that early morning.”
But that all changed after Miracle met Noah Oldham — Brandon Oldham’s brother and Juan Lloyd’s cousin.
Noah Oldham lived down the block from where Vinson was killed. A city code enforcement officer told Miracle that she’d heard from a woman in the neighborhood that two people at Noah Oldham’s house “saw everything,” according to his investigative report.
On June 9, Miracle showed up at Noah Oldham’s front door
At first, Noah Oldham told Miracle he didn’t know anything about the murder. That same night, the then 36-year-old’s girlfriend called the detective’s cell phone and told Miracle that the person who did it was close to Noah Oldham. A few hours later, Noah met with Miracle at LMPD’s homicide office. There, in a white-walled, windowless room, Oldham nervously told Miracle that he was on Elliott Avenue the night of the murder and that he saw his brother, Brandon Oldham, and cousin, Juan Lloyd, beat and burn Eddie Vinson.
Miracle showed Noah surveillance footage taken from a nearby camera that was set up by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to keep tabs on the so-called Mississippi Crew. Looking at the grainy footage, Oldham identified himself, Juan Lloyd, Brandon Oldham, and Vinson.
Brandon Oldham and Lloyd were arrested hours apart on June 10.
At trial, Noah Oldham changed his story. From the witness stand, he said he couldn’t identify anyone in the footage. He said he initially pointed the finger at his brother and cousin because he suspected them of stealing from him and was angry.
“I was telling the truth about what happened,” Noah Oldham said. “But I lied about who did it.”
Noah Oldham did not respond to requests for comment for this report.
Are those his… shorts?
Before Miracle made the arrests, he pulled a pair of jeans from a city trash can on Elliott Avenue.
Someone affiliated with the Mississippi Crew had called another detective and told them about the jeans shortly after Miracle began canvassing the block the morning of the murder.
The size-36 jeans were about six inches too big for the 127-pound, 5-feet-8-inch Vinson, according to research submitted by Lloyd’s attorneys. But Miracle determined they were his and that Lloyd and Oldham stripped them from Vinson’s body before his death.
Kentucky Innocence Project attorneys ordered extensive testing on the pants in 2022. The results showed traces of Vinson’s DNA throughout the inside of the jeans — proof that he’d worn the jeans. But not enough evidence that he was wearing the jeans the night he died, said Miranda Hellman, one of Lloyd’s attorneys.
Vinson spent a lot of time on the block, Hellman said, and he stashed his belongings at a vacant house across the street from the spot he was killed.
Hellman said someone else could have found the jeans and thrown them away. Or Vinson, himself, could have tossed the jeans. There’s not enough evidence to show that Lloyd and Oldham took them from Vinson’s body, leaving him naked from the waist down, as Miracle and prosecutors described, Hellman said.
Instead, she argues that there is proof that Vinson wasn’t naked, a fact that Hellman said casts doubt on the claim that Lloyd and Oldham robbed Vinson of his pants.
Hellman said crime scene photos show Vinson was wearing a pair of shorts. Vinson’s cousin, who identified his body at the scene, said during one court hearing that he recognized the shorts because Vinson wore them often — he even remembers him wearing them hours before he was killed. And Leigh Maroni, another detective who cataloged the scene before Miracle arrived, noted in her report that Vinson was wearing shorts.
Henry Ott, the arson investigator who responded to the scene, also found Vinson had on a pair of charred shorts.
Even the judge at the initial trial, Jefferson Circuit Judge Darryl Lavery, noticed the shorts when he examined photos of the scene during trial.
“Are these his… shorts?” Lavery asked.
The prosecutor, Doug Meisel, quickly responded.
“It’s just debris, your honor.”
'Get to the truth'
Today, Oldham is at the Green River Correctional Complex in Muhlenberg County.
Lloyd is incarcerated at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex in Morgan County. He works out, plays basketball, reads, watches movies and spends a lot of time working on his case in the library.
His handwritten appeal convinced Jefferson Circuit Judge Annie O’Connell in 2020 to appoint the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy to the case.
The Kentucky Innocence Project took the lead.
Hellman, the Kentucky Innocence Project attorney handling Lloyd’s case, said the organization is “highly, highly selective” and takes on just about 1 in 10 cases that come through the intake system.
“The evidence has to be out there, and it has to be new evidence,” she said.
She thinks Lloyd’s case is strong.
“Because I saw misconduct on the face of the record,” Hellman said.
This isn’t Lloyd’s first time appealing the case.
In 2019, the Supreme Court of Kentucky rejected appeals from Oldham and Lloyd, acknowledging the lower court had found issues with the case — like prosecutors failing to provide evidence — but ultimately reasoned that the additional information wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the trial.
Angie Elleman, who was chief of the capitol trial division at the Louisville Metro Public Defender’s office and represented Brandon Oldham during the 2017 trial, reviewed the new information uncovered by the Kentucky Innocence Project and said she’s shocked at what they found.
“It's hard for me, in hindsight, to look back and say what my defense theory would have been at trial with that information,” Elleman said. “But I certainly think Mr. Oldham and Mr. Lloyd deserve lawyers who have the benefit of that information, [and] conduct a full investigation to present the citizens of our city with a reliable fact-finding trial that can get to the truth of what happened here.”
When information is withheld or obscured, Elleman said “the system itself fails to become a reliable judge of what happened and who's responsible for what happened.”
