Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
On the morning of April 24th, 2012, someone shot 57-year-old Bruce Kachera in the parking lot of an apartment complex in New Orleans East, Louisiana. Businessman, baseball coach, and beloved member of the Covington community gunned down. Who could have done this? Why would they have done this? Oh my God, you're not going to believe it, but Bruce has been killed. From the start, all clues pointed to one motive.
Police say he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. We believe that there's people who can give us good information. We also want to rule out whether or not a robbery was involved. A random shooting in a rough neighborhood in one of the most violent cities in America. It didn't surprise anyone. New Orleans is averaged anywhere between 150 to 220, 230 murders a year.
Neither did the fact that the case has gone unsolved for 11 years. After all, crimes like this where a person was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and had no connection to their killer can be notoriously hard to solve. I cannot believe somebody can take somebody's life and just get away with it scot-free.
But this has been my driving question. Is that what really happened? Or are the answers to Bruce's case right in front of us? If we know where to look and who to look at. They took his wallet and his phone, but then never tried to use anything in the wallet. It just doesn't make any sense. I was convinced it was not random. It got to a point where NOPD was really telling us, look, this is 100%. They were like, this is 100% not a random thing. He was set up.
There was a paper. He was supposed to meet somebody. That person has never come forward. After more than a year investigating the case, it's become clear the whole story has never been told. Nobody around there killed him. He was dead before he got there. He just didn't know it yet. You find out who benefited from his death the most, and that's where you start looking at it. Getting to the truth hasn't come easy.
And I think that's exactly how some of the most powerful people in Louisiana want it to stay. I'm not interested in giving no kind of interviews, ma'am. And please don't call me anymore. St. Tammany is one of the richest parishes in the state and one of the most corrupt. The people with all the evidence and the tapes and all this other stuff, it's like they're not doing anything.
Mr. Kuchera lived in a high-stakes world where a lot of money was made and a lot of money was lost. You'd make a lot of powerful friends. You'd make a lot of powerful enemies. It's like you don't know who to trust and who not to anymore. It's like, can you actually trust the police to do their job? Can you not? Can you trust your dad's friends? Can you not? This season, I'm digging deeper than anyone has ever dug into the complicated life of Bruce Kuchera.
It is certainly an interesting turn of events that shortly before his scheduled deposition, he died. And his testimony would likely have been critical to that case. I just felt like he knew too much. Something happened to him. They took him out. What I found could unveil a villain behind this violent crime. End of the day, he got $5 million. We didn't. Only motive to me is money and greed.
Justice might not happen today or it might not happen tomorrow, but the Bible says justice will roll like a river. One day it will roll like a river. No one eventually will get away with anything. All 14 episodes of Counter Clock, Season 5, release May 11th, so you can binge. Be sure to follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts.