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Start a 30-day free trial at walmartplus.com. Paramount Plus is central plan only. Separate registration required. See Walmart Plus terms and conditions. The journey a piece of paper with an important message can make, from a printer to its intended final destination, shouldn't be complicated. But back in 2019, several papers stuffed into a yellow folder made a very long journey.
A woman whose father had been murdered spent days at a crime convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, handing out dozens of eye-catching bright yellow folders. She was determined that their contents reached the movers and shakers of the podcasting and TV news industry. I'm talking true crime heavyweights like Dateline and Oxygen. Some of the folders were tucked into bags with the promise of, we'll look into it. Some ended up in trash cans.
Others were denied interest entirely, but one stayed in the hands of my friend Ashley Flowers. Back then, Ashley and I were just starting out. She was laying the beginning bricks of what would become AudioChuck and covering important cases on Crime Junkie. And me? Well, I was in the weeds working on CounterClock Season 1, neck deep in documents in North Carolina, or door knocking in a stranger's front yard. ♪♪
Waiting patiently, sitting somewhere in the depths of Ashley's office, was the woman's yellow folder. Ashley had shelved it temporarily because she had a gut feeling that in order to do the story justice, she needed an investigative journalist to take it on. The yellow folder and everything inside of it couldn't be unraveled in a single Crime Junkie episode. In 2022, Ashley gave that folder to me.
And now, I'm giving it to you in the only way I know how. I've spent more than a year investigating the subject of its contents, and Ashley's gut feeling turned out to be right. Bruce Kachera's story is a story for CounterClock. Bruce's name meant nothing to me at first, just like it probably means nothing to you now. But over the course of the next 14 episodes, I promise you, that will change.
It's been 11 years since the 57-year-old was murdered.
And still, no one knows who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed him. Businessman, baseball coach, and beloved member of the Covington community gunned down. Police say he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. New reaction tonight to a cold case that has haunted a family for seven years. A well-known Covington businessman and coach was killed in New Orleans East in 2012, 10 years ago, and his family is still searching for answers.
Peering into Bruce's life is like looking at a ball of yarn. Over and over, I've found myself asking, is it all one string wound so tightly that untethering it is impossible? Or is each thread independent? Am I looking at multiple balls of yarn and just don't know it? Or is there a nexus somewhere? The answer, by now, seems clear to me, but I'll let you be your own judge.
So, let's turn back the clock roughly a decade to April 24th, 2012. This is Counter Clock, Season 5, Episode 1, Gut Punch. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. Bruce Kachera, at 57 years old, is the oldest homicide victim I've investigated to date. Interestingly, his murder, which happened in 2012, is the most recent crime I've dug into.
It's a strange juxtaposition. All of the previous seasons of Counter Clock have focused on murders that occurred in the 1980s, 90s, or early 2000s. If you've listened to any of those stories, you know that older cases typically have a litany of evidence problems. Lack of good record keeping, limits in technology, memories lost to time. But Bruce's case, well, it's not 15, 20, or 30-something years old. It's recent.
An unsolved crime that should be able to capitalize on a new era of forensic testing and witnesses still being alive. Yet, it hasn't. It's still as stuck in time as it was on the day Bruce died. Which is part of the reason why I chose to take it on. People in Louisiana who remember news of his murder are used to hearing the same few things about him: businessman, father, coach.
But to truly tell you about Bruce, I've got to go back a few years, before 2012, to the late 1970s. I think it was in my first year of college, which would have been around 1977. I was out with some friends and I met him and, you know, he started calling me and one thing led to another. That's Marianne Kachera, Bruce's first wife.
He was very funny. He had a great sense of humor. He could come in a room and make a joke about something, and everybody would laugh, put everybody at ease. So he was, in that way, he was always the life of the party, so to speak. Life of the party Bruce was Louisiana through and through. He loved his home state and wanted to keep his roots deep. He and Mary Ann married in 1979. Hi.
By May 1983, they welcomed their first child, a son named Christopher. We're going up in the camera. You ready? Up, up, that's stage one. And then up we go. Becoming a father transformed Bruce, as it does most men. Christopher, what does a puppy dog say? Peek-a-boo! Peek-a-boo! I see you!
According to Mary Ann, fatherhood made him the best version of himself. From the moment Chris came along, everything and everyone in Bruce's life revolved around family.
Family was always very important. Friends were always important. We were close with a couple of friends from high school that he was friends with in high school, and they were having children about the same time, and so we would take family trips together.
We would go over to their house for, you know, barbecues and swim parties and things like that. When I interviewed Mary Ann at her home, we went through a few photo albums together. This is Bruce holding Chris. Christmas was huge. Christmas was huge. He loved Christmas. She's not kidding. Bruce was king of Christmas. Baby's first Christmas. A Merry Christmas to everybody.
This audio of Bruce from the family's home videos speaks for itself. Whether it was a freak snowstorm... The great winter of 1983. Well, as you can see, folks, it looks like today's game is going to be called by ice. Real ice, folks. Real ice. Or unwrapping gifts he probably wrapped himself, but said they were from Chris. Feels like tapes. It's tapes. All right, I don't know what I'm going to do with these.
Bruce was all about some Yuletide. Whether it was the holidays or a regular day, life in the Kachera household was good.
Marianne and Bruce settled down in the small town of Covington, Louisiana, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, about an hour's drive 40 miles north of New Orleans. Covington sits in St. Tammany Parish, one of the largest and most affluent parishes in the state. Historically, it's considered much safer than New Orleans, and by all statistics, it is.
In the 1980s and 90s, lots of families like the Kacheras moved to places like Covington to escape the crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. Bruce desired to live there because it's where he grew up, and it's where he was determined to pursue a successful career in banking and business. Self-confidence. You know, I mean, he was...
From the beginning, always confident that he could do whatever he wanted to do as far as, you know, business. He wanted to provide for his family. You know, that was his way of showing his family he loved them and he cared for them was by providing for them. And so to be successful meant he could do that. In 1985, Bruce had one more mouth to feed when the couple welcomed their daughter, Caitlin.
I can like picture his smile and his laugh and like he would just crack jokes all the time. He could make friends, you know, everywhere he went. He was just, I don't know, just funny and happy all the time. The thing that brought Bruce the most joy, maybe even more than Christmas, was coaching youth sports for the city of Covington, a hobby that gave him ample time with Chris.
He was really into sports and coaching and that was him and I's like most our connective tissue was that was he was always coaching me, helping me get better in sports and whether it's baseball, basketball. You know, very actually passionate about his connection with St. Paul's, which is the high school I went to. He went to that high school.
I spent a lot of time watching my brother play and going to games and stuff, and my dad was always the coach. By the early 2000s, Bruce was working as the president of Resource Bank in Covington. He had two great kids, a wife, and a nice house in a low-crime neighborhood. Growing up, Chris and Kaitlyn had no complaints. Kaitlyn still lives in the area, right down the street from her mom. She's continuing to water the roots her father planted.
Chris moved away after college, but still has fond memories of his hometown.
It always seemed like a really nice place with good schools and good values and not a huge city so you don't have to worry about all the things that come with that. Everybody kind of knows everybody, that's the thing. You can run in, go out to a restaurant, you'll see people you know all the time. So it's kind of a close community in that way.
Like a lot of kids living in the suburbs, Chris and Caitlin grew up with a blissfully simple understanding of where the roof over their heads came from. And they knew their dad was the breadwinner of the family. He wore a suit, went to work, and paid the bills. Yeah, I just knew that he was a banker growing up. Banker's hours, you know, and then he would have to work sometimes, I think, till noon on Saturdays. And that was kind of it.
He didn't really talk a whole bunch about his professional life with us. We just kind of knew what he did and where he worked. In 2005, though, something changed. A tectonic shift ripped into the rock-solid Kachera family existence. Bruce lost his job. He was very distraught. He was very upset. I think he started kind of crying a little bit, and then he just kind of told me that he messed up.
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When I say Bruce lost his job, it was more like he resigned versus he was fired. I was in high school. I remember specifically, actually, when he came in and
told me sort of, I guess in a way that an adult would tell a high school kid that something like this has happened. He didn't go into too much detail. I remember I was in my room. I had a recliner in my room and he came in and kind of sat by me. I may have been playing video games or something. I don't know. And he just, he had just told me he actually, I think he started kind of crying a little bit. And then he just kind of told me that, that he messed up.
You know, that he wasn't going to be working at Resource Bank anymore. And, you know, he's sorry and that he loved me and he loved the family and everything. According to documents from FDIC, the independent agency that oversees banking institutions in the U.S., Bruce had been under investigation for unsound banking practices and breaching his fiduciary duty as Resource Bank's president.
In July of 2005, FDIC issued orders that prohibited him from ever working at a financial institution again. The sanction also required he pay a hefty $15,000 fine. Bruce didn't contest the orders and agreed to FDIC's terms.
The incident was not a criminal matter, but I wanted to know the details of what exactly Bruce did. And depending on who I asked, I got varying stories. FDIC wouldn't give me any official explanation about what Bruce's infraction was. The only documents the entity provided me were the finalized orders that were filled with a bunch of legalese.
So my next step was asking Marianne and the kids. But unfortunately, Bruce kept his family in the dark when it came to the details and really downplayed its significance. My understanding was it was more he was using a friend's account or money, but he had permission to do that, to invest. I think he acknowledged he probably did some things he regretted, but I think he felt...
He was portrayed in a way that it really didn't happen that way. At least that's the way he explained it to me. Of course, I was his wife, so I wanted to believe him, right? I remember him coming home and there being like a panic and him on the phone, you know, whatever. But that's about all I got and just kind of, he's not working there anymore. ♪
Bruce was extremely close with one of his sisters, Candy, and his mother, Vivian. So I figured maybe he opened up to one of them about what he'd done.
But unfortunately, they're both deceased now. So I tracked down Candy's widower, a man named Jack Weir, and he was able to shed more light on the subject. It was never specifically told to me. I'd get dribs and drabs from Candy saying that she thought he was making loans that were not approved loans of the bank's money. She was even thinking that there might have been jail time involved, which fortunately never happened.
So, Bruce clearly got into some kind of trouble at the bank, and it had to do with his handling of loans or funds. And because he was the branch president, I can see where that wasn't a good look. Even if, like Marianne stated, he was unaware his actions were wrong. Whatever went down, it landed him in hot water with a lot of money to pay. He needed to find a new job and had to kiss a career in the banking industry goodbye.
For a while, things looked grim. He had to find something to do. We didn't know how long he was going to be out of work. And we'd actually even talked about selling the house, you know, were we going to need to sell the house because we didn't know if we were going to be able to keep it. A few months after getting booted from the bank, Bruce took a job working as the chief financial officer for a privately owned wastewater and sewer utility business called Southeastern Louisiana Water and Sewer Company, also known as SELA.
I just remember him coming home one day, you know, I came home from school or whatever, and he said he got this job, you know, he was going to be working for the water company. So it kind of, okay, great. It kind of all worked out. Selah was owned by a man named Jared Caruso Rickey, a member of a prominent Covington family who had business and political connections across St. Tammany Parish and the state of Louisiana.
Bruce's new job paid well, kept his family afloat, and introduced him to a new kind of work culture. He liked that he didn't have to wear a suit and tie every day. So whenever you're in the bank, people expect you, especially if you're higher up in the bank, they expect you to present yourself in a certain way. He didn't have to do that anymore. He had a little bit more freedom in the new role, right? Whenever he was working for SELA,
It's kind of like you don't have to be somewhere at 8 to 5, right? You can kind of come in at 8. You got to go get lunch, whatever it is. I think it's just a little bit more freeing. Life for Bruce was looking up. Well, at least it appeared that way. Behind the scenes, though, he and Marianne's marriage was cracking. It had been for a long time. Little by little over their 27 years together, a chasm had formed.
I just lived in a different world. You know, I went to work every day. I was in education. You know, I wasn't in this world of finance and making money and investments and that kind of thing. And so it was almost two different worlds. And he didn't understand mine and I didn't understand his. I think when you're married that long and he's in his world and, you know, I was off in mine and we kind of just drifted apart.
While they drifted apart, Bruce had been unfaithful more than once. He was having an affair, and I found out about it, and that was really pretty much the end of the marriage. He did come back to me once, wanting to try to reconcile at that point, but we had proceeded down the path so far. It was like, you know, how do you put that back together again?
News that Mary Ann and Bruce were calling it quits upset Bruce's family, particularly his sister Candy. Here's her husband, Jack Wayard, again. She was upset when Bruce announced that he was divorcing his first wife, Mary Ann. And because Mary Ann was just such a sweet, sweet gal. And of course, she was Kristen and Caitlin's mother. And when he announced that they were splitting...
The split rocked Chris and Caitlin too. But by the time their parents finalized their divorce in September 2008, the kids were in their early 20s. They couldn't force their mom and dad to stick it out for them. So life went on. Caitlin and Chris didn't like what their dad had done, and Bruce's relationship with his children suffered for it.
But in the end, it was what it was. Everything happens for a reason, and that was terrible that...
A few years after the divorce, Bruce did an about-face.
Bruce had a encounter with the grace of God. The self-admitted flawed family man mended things with his maker and family when he became a devout Christian. The voice you just heard is Michael Sprague, Bruce's former pastor from Covington. Bruce, when he came to faith, he was just all in. And, you know, I think that's probably the way he did life. Whatever he was into, he was all in.
Bruce right away, his concern wasn't just for himself. He was interested in the interests of others. And he wanted others to find out this great news that he'd found out. And so, you know, at first, you know, he was just telling everybody, everybody about his change. And for Bruce, everybody included the family members he'd wronged.
He would try to, I guess, like convert everyone that he came across. All of us. I think he even tried with my mom at some point. And my mom's like, I don't know, you know, his sisters, everybody. I would have these conversations with him and he was really like going hard into the Bible study. So I would mess with him and I would just like ask him all these crazy questions, all the questions people have about the Bible. And he would get kind of worked up.
He's like full on, like really like diving headfirst into that, which is fine. Like it's, I'm not like criticizing or doing anything that's good. He found that kind of peace. He was at peace with that part of his life. It wasn't a, oh, well, like I'm trying to just show people I'm different or I'm...
I just want to put on this facade that I'm changing my life because I got caught cheating and this and that or I got divorced. No, he was really like changed. He really changed that part of his life and became a different person. Bruce used his troubled past to relate to other people, particularly men who'd made the same mistakes he had. He wasn't trying to pretend to be someone that he wasn't. He's just one beggar telling other beggars where to find bread. That was kind of his attitude.
Bruce was so committed to his newfound change that he organized a community Bible study in Covington, which grew to include nearly two dozen men. Bruce pulled all the people together. It was just people out of his life. You know, there must have been 20-some people in the room at his peak. So some people would come one time and some people gave it another try, and then some people just got hooked on it.
And a number of people's lives changed off of that because they saw this incredible change in his life. One person whose life was changed forever by Bruce was Jack Branch, a businessman from St. Tammany Parish who, as Michael Sprague put it, needed a fellow beggar to show him where to find bread.
No, he and I both had some regrets in terms of, you know, first marriages that we had both had some similar stuff and shared that commonality. It helped one another kind of get through the regrets, if you will, and look at it through a fresher perspective. Bruce was a very nice looking guy and, you know,
When I was younger, I was much more, you know, and so let's just say we just put ourselves in bad situations that weren't real great. And, you know, conversely, we made some bad decisions and therefore, you know, our spouses and us just tried to go through counseling and didn't work out and
That was kind of the, you know, so we shared that commonality of, you know, some struggles that we both had. And we held each other accountable going forward in life to, you know, be the men we were really called to be. Living on the straight and narrow with men like Jack and Michael by his side, Bruce was in a good place by the end of 2009, which was right around the time he met a woman named Ann, a single mom from Baton Rouge who was 18 years his junior. He was so...
comical and happy and cute. I don't know. He's very, very handsome, charming, smart. In fact, our first date was a great date and he didn't want any more children. I thought I did, but then I went on another date with him and I was like, I can do without any because I was interested in him.
The couple had a whirlwind romance, and by the end of 2010, were engaged. We went away for Christmas near the Alabama-Georgia line. We went there and stayed there for a Christmas festival. We went on the rides on a horse and carriage buggy ride that night, and when we got back to the place we were staying, he proposed.
In March 2011, Bruce and Ann married in a private small ceremony at a historic property in Covington. Michael Sprague conducted the service. We just had my maid of honor, my best friend Dana, and his best friend Jared as his best man. It was an intimate crowd and just a special day. And, you know, they, he looked handsome and she looked gorgeous. And
You know, they wanted the wedding to be very Christ-centered and to be very personal. Despite what Bruce had put Mary Ann through, his first wife, she was still happy for him. She was glad to see that he'd found new purpose, was seeking reconciliation with their two adult children, and seemed to genuinely love his second wife. Even for all his failures, she couldn't hate him. I don't know if he ever regretted divorcing me, but I figured probably at some point he might...
regret it. And so I couldn't be angry, you know, people make mistakes. I said, congratulations, I hope you're going to be very happy. And happy was exactly what Bruce was, until he suddenly wasn't. The great track he seemed to be on dissipated when tragedy pierced the fabric of his life 13 months after his second wedding. It was a setback he couldn't overcome.
no matter how much faith or financial fortune he had going for him. By April 24th, 2012, he was dead, shot point blank in the parking lot of a run-down New Orleans East apartment complex, 54 miles from his home. It's a shock. It's a gut punch. You really don't feel like it's real, what's going on. That was just the kick in the gut. This is unbelievable. Unbelievable.
"Oh my God, you're not gonna believe it, but Bruce has been killed." The circumstances surrounding his murder dumbfounded everyone, including law enforcement. "It doesn't make sense why he would have went that way, being that he was meeting somebody down in the city. It just doesn't make sense."
If you're getting Bob Pelley vibes from everything I've told you so far about Bruce, you're not alone. Trust me, I get it. It's got Bob vibes, and no, this isn't Counter Clock Season 3. But the similarities were just too much for me not to mention. But let me tell you, once you get into the details of this case, Season 5 is quite different from Bob Pelley's story.
This story is about Bruce, and my investigation into his death begins in the midst of a puzzling and bizarre crime scene. So they took his wallet and his phone, but then never tried to use anything in the wallet. It just doesn't make any sense. Who led him to that apartment complex? We have no clue. But as you'll soon learn, understanding the crime scene is just the beginning of a very large and complicated mystery. This man was loved.
Who could have done this? Why would they have done this? The story of Bruce Kuchera is not just about murder. It's about motive. End of the day, he got $5 million. We didn't. We're like, this is 100% not a random thing. He was set up. Something happened to him, and it was intentional.
Up until now, this case has never been scrutinized. And I think that's exactly the way powerful people in Louisiana have wanted it to be for the past decade. The people with all the evidence and the tapes and all this other stuff, it's like they're not doing anything. 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?
So stick with me, because this is going to be a wild season. And it starts with Episode 2, New Orleans East, right now.
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