Serial Killer Documentary - Kenneth Jackson

Serial Killer Documentary - Kenneth Jackson

Speaker 1: On September the 13th, 2007, a woman's body was found

in the burnt-out remains of a stolen van in Hillsborough County, Florida.

Speaker 2: When she was jogging in the early morning darkness, he

abducted her and dragged her into a secluded location just

off of a main roadway where he raped her and

stabbed her to death.

Speaker 3: She did nothing wrong.

Speaker 4: She was just a victim of an evil person.

Speaker 1: Investigators were struggling to find any clues, but the killer's

loose lips soon led detectives to his door.

Speaker 5: When the news came on about a body, he seemed

kind of excited about the whole conversation. It was almost

as if he had more information than what she even

heard on the TV.

Speaker 1: The man in question was unemployed 25-year-old Kenneth Jackson.

Speaker 6: Kenneth Jackson showed absolutely no remorse for what he had done.

He's a psychopathic killer.

Speaker 7: He was so proud of what he'd done that he

had to talk about it.

Speaker 1: Kenneth Jackson had inadvertently revealed himself as one of the

world's most evil killers. On June 5th, 2013, 30-year-old Kenneth

Jackson was sentenced to death after being found guilty of

murdering mother of three, Cooke Tran. He'd ambushed her while

she was out on an early morning run in her

hometown of Sefna, a small community just outside Tampa in Florida.

Speaker 8: We're talking about a very small area of Florida. So

you can imagine that a murder would send shockwaves through

that small community. They were literally horrified.

Speaker 7: I think the impact only reinforced the notion that women

aren't safe running alone in the dark.

Speaker 3: They're an easy target.

Speaker 7: No matter how many self-defense classes they may take or

they may carry a pepper spray, it's not enough. It's

just the element of surprise and the strength of the

predator is too much for any woman to overcome.

Speaker 1: Kenneth Jackson showed no remorse for taking the life of

an innocent woman.

Speaker 4: He had no emotion to the fact that this was

a woman with school-age children that she was working to

take care of.

Speaker 3: He didn't have respect for.

Speaker 4: Life in general, he didn't seem to care. Everything was

only about himself at all times.

Speaker 1: This killer story begins on June 26th, 1982. Kenneth Ray

Jackson was born in Hillsborough County, Florida. He was the

product of an inappropriate and unlawful relationship.

Speaker 8: It's hard to imagine a less satisfactory childhood than Kenny Jackson's.

His mother, when he was conceived, was 14. Her partner

at the time was 28. She gave him up, effectively,

at the age of six months to her mother, his grandmother,

and her boyfriend.

Speaker 2: Kenny did have a rough upbringing. He was moved around

from different family members. He suffered some abuse when he

was growing up, physical abuse. He saw a lot of abuse.

Speaker 1: And it wasn't just at home where Jackson had a

difficult time.

Speaker 8: Probably inevitably, Jackson's school reports reflected that he was aggressive,

he was belligerent in class, he was just a really,

really difficult boy.

Speaker 6: His teachers raised concerns about his behavior, about the way

he was turned out when he came to school, and

they had huge difficulties finding who his guardians even were,

who it was who was supposed to be looking after

this child. I don't think he had any stability in

his life, so not surprising that he turned towards criminality.

Speaker 1: In 2003, at the age of 21, Kenneth Jackson was

sentenced to five years in prison after a spate of

car thefts. He was released four years later on July

the 26th, 2007, and headed to the small residential community

of Sefna in Hillsborough County.

Speaker 2: When he got out of prison, he ended up moving

in with a couple, the O'Neills, Linda and Wally O'Neill,

and they allowed him to move into the trailer with them.

Speaker 8: Wally was Jackson's grandmother's old boyfriend. the boyfriend who'd been

with his grandmother when he arrived with her at the

age of six months. Although they must have had a

very strange relationship, it was probably the only place in

which Kenny Jackson felt at home.

Speaker 1: On September 13, 2007, 12 miles away in the neighboring

town of Gibsonton, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue were called to

a van engulfed in flames at 7 o'clock in the morning.

What they discovered when they got there was a scene

of unimaginable horror.

Speaker 4: When the fire department put the vehicle fire out, they

discovered a body inside. That, of course, triggered phone calls

to the homicide section, and supervisors had detectives respond to

the area. So I went down to the Gibsonton area.

At that point, I was assigned to be the lead

detective on the case.

Speaker 8: The body was charred beyond recognition. It was literally a mess.

Speaker 1: With no identification to be found on the charred remains,

detectives turned their attention to the burnt-out car.

Speaker 4: I was told at the time that they had recovered

a license plate off of the vehicle, and, of course,

that was a start. We were able to make contact

with the owner. We learned that the vehicle had been

listed at the gentleman's job site as for sale. It

had been parked in the parking lot there. He worked

part-time at an auto parts store, repairing it to sell it.

He had a sign for sale in the window. After

we determined that this vehicle must have been stolen, we

had the van taken back to our crime scene offices

at the sheriff's office. But during this time, during the

course of the day, there were other events unfolding that

I wasn't immediately aware of.

Speaker 1: In a seemingly unrelated incident 12 miles north of the

torch car, a discovery had been made in the grounds

of a church in Sefna.

Speaker 5: The sergeant was notified that there were some clothing items, shoes,

and some blood that had been located in front of

the St. Francis Church on 579 north of MLK.

Speaker 4: There had been a yard crew, and they had actually,

in mowing the lawns, found this bloody clothing, and a

sheriff's officer deputy had gone out there, and they had

recovered some of that clothing and items that were left behind.

Speaker 1: At this stage, police were unsure about whether these two

events were connected until a panicked young man contacted them

for help.

Speaker 4: Three in the afternoon or so, I received a call

from my dispatch saying there was a young man there

who was looking for his mother, and she'd been missing,

that she had left early in the morning and had

never came back. We had this person that we believed

was a female and could not identify at that point.

It's like, yeah, we need to check this out.

Speaker 5: Where they were calling in from was just north of

where that St. Francis Church was and where the clothes

and the blood was located. I went up there, and

I looked at the area, and that was when it

was very evident that there was not a little bit

of blood. Somebody had died there.

Speaker 1: The missing woman was 50-year-old Vietnamese immigrant Cuc Tran. Meanwhile,

more information was coming through about the unidentified body found

in the van. It was becoming increasingly likely that the

missing person's report and the body were connected.

Speaker 4: It appeared she had Asian features. And in learning that

this was an Asian male that was reporting his missing

Asian mother, of course, everyone was starting to think, this

is our woman. I asked for some details about some

particular jewelry because this body that was burned up in

the van still had lots of jewelry on.

Speaker 5: We were able to link jewelry from pictures in the

house to what was on her person. So at this

point in time, we were pretty positive that Cooke Tran

was our victim.

Speaker 1: The small community of Cefna was left in shock. Detectives

had no clue who had committed this terrible crime, but

the killer was about to make a huge mistake that

would lead police straight to his door. On the morning

of September 13th, 2007, in Hillsborough County, Florida, a pile

of bloodied clothes had been discovered in the grounds of

a church. 12 miles away, the charred remains of a

woman had been found inside a burning van. Detectives believed

her to be 50-year-old Vietnamese immigrant Cuc Tran from the

town of Cefna.

Speaker 3: She was a mother of three.

Speaker 4: She had an older son who was off at college,

a 16-year-old that was going to high school, and a 10-year-old.

Speaker 2: She worked a full-time job as a nail technician, She

lived at home in a trailer park, and she would

get up very early in the morning to try to

find a little bit of time for herself to go

for a walk or a jog to try to take

care of herself.

Speaker 1: Cooke Tran had settled in Hillsborough County after leaving her

homeland in search of a better life.

Speaker 2: Her and her husband were part of the exodus from

Vietnam in the 70s and 80s, after the communists took

over South Vietnam after the Vietnam War.

Speaker 7: It sounded like a pretty horrific struggle after the war

for her and her children and her husband to come here.

For Mrs. Tran to leave a war zone and come

to the United States was an example.

Speaker 3: Of the American dream.

Speaker 7: She was escaping violence of the war and coming to

a country where people are believed to be safe and

given opportunity.

Speaker 1: For Cook Tran, however, the United States was far from

the safe haven she'd hoped for, and her life had

been cut short in the most brutal way. With no

immediate suspects, police started to look into Cook Tran's life

for clues.

Speaker 4: There were some issues with her marriage. They weren't necessarily

living together, but they were still good friends. Both parents

were still very much focused on taking care of the kids.

She would get up, do some exercise. Her husband would

come by in the mornings, help get the kids ready

for school. She would get back from her morning exercise routine,

and she would get them to school, and then she

would go to work. She was a responsible employee, got

along well with everyone. She was evidently well-liked by her customers.

She did nothing wrong. She was just a victim of

an evil person.

Speaker 1: Cook Tran's daily morning run would take her past St.

Francis Church in Sefna.

Speaker 4: It was a very large church property where it had

quite a bit of open land between the roadway and

the church itself.

Speaker 5: If a car was going by at 5 in the morning,

they wouldn't see you down there.

Speaker 1: Detectives started working on the theory that Cooke Tran was

ambushed by her killer while she was out on her

morning run.

Speaker 7: She had a routine. She would run at 5 a.m.

in the morning before work. This was her only free time.

It was really the only time she had to herself,

which was even more tragic. That's all she had, and...

She never dreamed that there was this predator waiting.

Speaker 2: There for her.

Speaker 6: This isn't an area where there'd be lots of women

to choose from. So this person had probably gone to

that area before, checked it out, waited around, seen how

many people were around, whether they were likely to get caught.

I don't think that this was opportunistic. I think this

was targeted.

Speaker 4: We wanted to get the guy. I mean, that's the

whole goal, right? You want to solve this thing.

Speaker 1: Detectives were convinced that Cooke Tran was killed in the

grounds of the church and then her body driven away

in the van that was found on fire 12 miles away.

The autopsy confirmed the horrific circumstances of her death.

Speaker 4: The medical examiner was able to determine there were multiple

stab wounds in the neck. The carotid artery had been cut.

Speaker 2: One of the stab wounds had cut through the victim's

windpipe and would have probably prevented sufficient air from being

able to go through the vocal cords so that she

could vocalize.

Speaker 4: She was dead before the fire ever started. There was

no soot in the windpipe or carbon monoxide in the blood.

Speaker 1: The autopsy also discovered a possible motive for the crime.

Speaker 3: She had been raped.

Speaker 4: The medical examiner had collected blood slides and the vaginal

swabs and all for DNA, but we didn't have any

comparisons at that point.

Speaker 6: Usually when people use fire to destroy a body, it's

because they want to eliminate any forensic evidence at all.

They think, I'm never going to get caught because I

have destroyed every single piece of evidence. Well, fire doesn't

always destroy every piece of evidence. This would have been

an overconfidence, I think, in that person.

Speaker 1: Desperate to find Cootran's killer, detectives started to hand out

flyers in the trailer park where she'd lived, appealing for

information from her neighbors.

Speaker 5: There was probably 100 or so trailers In this trailer park,

we went house to house, handing the flyers out, talking

to neighbors. There was one trailer that I actually stopped at,

which was within eyeshot of where the victim's house was,

her trailer. And there was an elderly individual that was there,

a man, who was very inquisitive as to why I

was there. So I finished walking through. It was extremely

hot out that day. I was thirsty, so I decided

to go to the gas station at the corner of

MLK and 579, which is just to the south of

where St. Francis Church was. And I walk in, I

get my drink, and I'm soaking wet. I've got a

shirt tie. I walk up, I pay, and all of

a sudden, something hit me of saying, you know what,

I'm going to go get a flyer. I come back,

I give the flyer to the clerk. As I start

talking to her, she starts explaining how There was this

individual who was in the store, and when the news

came on about a body and an investigation, he seemed

kind of excited about the whole conversation and the subject

matter and everything that was being said, but also it

was almost as if he had more information than what

she even heard being said on the TV.

Speaker 2: But really what stuck out to her was he was

telling her he had seen Cooktron jogging, and the only

time she did that was very early in the morning

right around 5, 5.30 in the morning. And that's when

she was abducted. So that was pretty critical.

Speaker 1: The stranger's story confirmed what the police already knew about

Cootran's morning routine, but it wasn't information they'd released to

the public.

Speaker 4: This guy's talking, and he's saying things that really haven't

been publicly made.

Speaker 3: So that's a clue. That was a very.

Speaker 4: Strong, okay, we need to jump on this And that

started the ball rolling.

Speaker 5: I started asking her questions. Well, you know, who is

this individual? Do you know where he lives? And she

proceeds to tell me that his name's Kenny and he

had just gotten released from prison. So I asked her,

what did he go to prison for? Do you know?

And she said, I think Grand Theft Auto. At this

point in time now in the investigation, we know that

the van that was burned with our victim in it

was stolen from the advanced auto parts literally two blocks

from where I was standing at the gas station and

just south of where the victim was murdered. I said,

where does he live? Do you know anything about him?

She said, yeah, he lives in the trailer park north

of here.

Speaker 8: It turned out that this man, Kenny, lived in exactly

the same trailer park as Cook Tran.

Speaker 1: Detectives finally had a breakthrough in the case, but all

they had to go on was a single name, Kenny.

They knew they had to find this man and fast

before he killed again. On September 19th, 2007, six days

after the murder of 50-year-old Cooke Tran in Hillsborough County, Florida,

Detectives have therefore... lead. A man called Kenny, who'd aroused

the suspicion of a gas station clerk when talking to

her about the murder, lived in the same trailer park

as the victim. Troy was reminded of a strangely inquisitive

man he'd interviewed at the trailer park.

Speaker 5: Now all of a sudden, the red flags start going

off even more because now I realize, wait a minute,

I wonder if this Kenny guy is the guy that

I was sitting there asking myself. This guy's awful nosy.

He's asking, like, a lot of detailed questions.

Speaker 1: Troy made his way back to the trailer park. The

man he'd previously spoken to was Wally O'Neill, who'd once

been in a relationship with Kenny's grandmother. Wally confirmed that

Kenny was, in fact, 25-year-old.

Speaker 5: Kenneth Jackson.

Speaker 1: Police discovered this wasn't the first time he'd been on

the radar of law enforcement.

Speaker 4: He had had several arrests in the past. He had

recently gotten out of prison. He hadn't been in the

area long.

Speaker 1: Wally confirmed that Jackson had been living with him, but

told Troy that he'd left town just two days before.

Speaker 4: We learned that at the time of the murder and

the vehicle being burned, that.

Speaker 3: He was not at home.

Speaker 4: So they couldn't give an alibi as to his whereabouts,

but they did know for a fact that he did

happen to be in the area where the burned van was.

We haven't made contact with our person of interest yet,

but we are getting verification that he's in the right

place at the right times to be associated to it.

Speaker 1: Detectives learned that Kenneth Jackson had gone to live with

his girlfriend in North Florida. On September 20th, a week

after the murder, they drove upstate to find him.

Speaker 4: We went up there and asked if he was willing

to speak with us.

Speaker 3: He rode with us in the.

Speaker 4: Car over to the Carrabelle Police Department office where we

could sit down and do an audio recording and try

and find out what he might know.

Speaker 1: While collecting DNA samples from Jackson, the detectives got a

lucky break.

Speaker 4: During the course of this conversation, we got around to

the clothes that he was wearing, and he said, you know,

I think this is what I was wearing that day.

It's like, can we get that for, you know, testing?

And he said, well, I don't have anything else. I said,

we'll take you to go buy clothes. We went and

we bought him new shoes, new shirt, so he gave

us permission to take his clothes.

Speaker 7: He considered himself smarter than the police, so that made

him so careless.

Speaker 1: It was time for investigators to sit down and interview

their prime suspect. They were certain of Jackson's movements on

the day of the murder, but they wanted to hear

it from the horse's mouth.

Speaker 5: During a course of our investigation, we put him down

there where the van was burned. And that was huge

because he had a family member that identified him being

down in Gibsonton.

Speaker 1: Why?

Speaker 5: He lives in Sefner. Why would you be down in Gibsonton?

So everything just started falling in. So we wanted to

get him locked into a timeline as to where were

you at? What were you doing? And we were able

to do that. But we were also able to get

him to give too many inconsistencies in his interviews that

could prove that he was lying. And he could not

stick with a solid alibi because he didn't have one.

Speaker 2: In all of the lies that he told law enforcement,

the one thing he was consistent on was that he

did not know Cooktron. And they showed him photographs of her.

that were very good depictions of her in the year

or two before her death. And he insisted, I don't

know her. I don't know anything about her. I've never

seen her before, even though she lived about five trailers

down from his. And you could step out from the

doors of those trailers and see the other trailer is

how close he lived to her. But he insisted he'd

never seen her before.

Speaker 9: I don't know nothing about this lady. I ain't never

seen him before.

Speaker 6: He was obviously super confident that he'd obliterated all of

the evidence and that he could sit and play games

with the police, almost, because they were never going to

pin this one on him.

Speaker 3: We both believed that we had our guy.

Speaker 4: After that first interview, we had our DNA that he

gave us, we had the clothing that he gave us,

and Troy and I got in the car and we

drove from Carrabelle, Florida, back to just north of Gainesville

to meet up with one of the detectives from Hillsborough here,

who was meeting us halfway so we could pass that

off so they could immediately get that back to FDLE

the next day to start the DNA comparisons.

Speaker 1: Six days later, on September 26, the DNA reports came

back from FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Speaker 4: I received a phone call from FDLE stating that they

had just gotten the report from their DNA analysis that

said that the samples collected from Kenneth Jackson did match

the semen that was collected from the medical examiner during

the autopsy of Cook Tran.

Speaker 5: At that moment, it's like relief. You realize, okay, we

knew we were on point. We knew we had our guy.

Speaker 1: Jackson had lied to detectives, but the evidence gave away

the truth.

Speaker 4: We had dealt with Kenneth Jackson for hours, and he

said that he didn't know this person, he had never

met this person, didn't even know that she was a

neighbor in his trailer park. and now we have his

semen in her. That is enough to get an arrest warrant.

Speaker 8: As soon as the DNA samples come back and they

are confirmed as being Kenneth Jackson's, the police fly by

helicopter to his new abode in North Florida to find him.

But when they get there, he's not there.

Speaker 4: We had the sheriff's office up there and the local

township PD and also the girlfriend's mother's assistants. She had

some ideas, and she thought, well, maybe they're over this

one place fishing, and they were, in fact. So this

was like 1 in the morning, but they were both

up there sitting at the dock.

Speaker 1: Kenneth Jackson's luck was about to run out.

Speaker 4: I talked with Kenny and said, we've got some new

information we need to talk to you about. Would you

mind coming with us back to the station to talk

about it?

Speaker 5: No matter what it was that we talked to him about,

he was very obstinate against anything that we said. Even

when we could point out his inconsistencies, it didn't matter.

He just was like water off a duck's back, you know?

He just didn't care.

Speaker 1: But this time, investigators were armed with a smoking gun.

Speaker 4: I focused on the point of DNA again, because I

had asked him at the first interview, will your DNA work?

show up on this lady at any point? And he

was like, no, no, no, I've never met her. There's

no way possible. He knew he had burned up this

victim in a van. He believed he had absolutely nothing

to worry about because that was all burned up and

there was nothing to be found. He felt that he

was safe. Well, in fact, your DNA is on her, Kenny.

How did that happen?

Speaker 3: Denial, denial, denial.

Speaker 9: So that your DNA just miraculously just appeared on this woman,

on this dead woman. It just miraculously appeared. Someone who

you've never met before. Someone who you don't know who

it is. And you're going to sit here and tell

us that you don't know how on top of the

other lies you told us. And you're going to tell

us that you don't know how that happened and you

want us to just believe that, right? We know what

we're believing. Forensic evidence is proven to us.

Speaker 4: And he finally said, well, if you have such good information,

why don't you arrest me then? It's like, okay, we

will do that.

Speaker 1: On September 27th, 2007, two weeks after the murder of

Cook Tran, Kenneth Jackson was formally arrested. Despite his constant denial,

detectives were convinced he was a dangerous predator.

Speaker 5: He planned that entire event. He stole the van from

the advanced auto parts, left it parked where he knew

he could ambush Cooke Tran because he knows she walks,

runs in the mornings, and he targeted her. And it

is as evil as it gets.

Speaker 6: This type of attack, a stranger in the dark jumps

out of the bushes to attack you, is the nightmare

that sits in the head of every single woman. And

if it actually happens to you, all of those nightmares

come to life at once. So for Cook Tran, that

must have been the most terrifying moment that she had

ever experienced.

Speaker 5: He thought everything through all the way up until the getaway.

Like once he burned the van, he didn't have a clue.

of what he was going to do after that. But

I am convinced that he would have killed again. Given

the opportunity, had we not have caught him, he would

have killed again.

Speaker 1: After he was arrested, information on Kenneth Jackson continued to

come in.

Speaker 8: One of the other significant pieces of evidence that the

police received was from a relative of Jackson's who gave

them a DVD, which he apparently habitually watched. It was

a pornographic DVD, which included particularly Asian women and also

had elements of bondage.

Speaker 5: Everything lines up that he's living out his fantasy.

Speaker 6: To me, Jackson appears to be on his first outing

as a potential serial killer. He wasn't responding to some provocation.

He was acting to please himself. And I think the

violence pleased him. The fire pleased him. The cat and

mouse he thought he was going to have with the

police excited him. This is a really dangerous individual.

Speaker 1: Prosecutors felt they had enough evidence to charge Kenneth Jackson

with murder.

Speaker 2: He was charged with first-degree premeditated murder. He was charged

with sexual battery with a deadly weapon. And he was

charged with grand theft motor vehicle of the van that

he stole so that he could dispose of Ms. Tran's body.

Speaker 1: Despite denying everything to detectives, Kenneth Jackson suddenly rediscovered the

loose lips that had put him on the police's radar

in the first place.

Speaker 4: While he was in custody for all that time, again,

that man talked.

Speaker 3: He ran his mouth to everybody.

Speaker 4: He did discuss about how he raped the woman, he

killed the woman. He burned her up in the van.

But one of the common threads from each of these

statements we got was that he never was talking in remorse.

He was bragging about it.

Speaker 7: He was so proud of what he'd done that he

had to talk about it.

Speaker 1: But if Jackson thought his fellow inmates would listen to

his secrets in confidence, he was gravely mistaken.

Speaker 4: Multiple inmates came forward with all the stories Kenny was

talking about.

Speaker 2: There were two of them that were in federal custody

being held in the local jail on federal charges. He

made statements to each of them independently where he talked

about the fact that he had seen her running, had

seen her jogging, had determined that he was going to

abduct her. He gave descriptions of the murder and how

he went about stabbing her and what was going on,

how she was reacting to him. He used a pretty

offensive pejorative in describing how he sexually assaulted her. So

it was pretty compelling evidence to have that in front

of the jury.

Speaker 5: Getting those leads and that information from other prisoners saying

that he's bragging about what he did only boosted our case.

Speaker 1: With the trial on the horizon, prosecutors in Hillsborough County

had DNA evidence, witness statements and jailhouse informants. But would

the jury find Kenneth Jackson guilty? Or would he be

able to outsmart everyone and get away with murder? In

October 2012, five years after the death of 50-year-old mother

of three Cooke Tran, Kenneth Jackson, the man accused of

her rape and murder, stood trial in Florida.

Speaker 7: It was one of the most heinous murder rapes that

had occurred that year. So there was a lot of

TV there and print media.

Speaker 2: We had many, many witnesses, and it went on for

several weeks. We were seeking the death penalty in this case.

The DNA was direct scientific evidence, but we wanted to

give the jury an understanding of how the crime occurred

and why it occurred. So we had lots of different

types of evidence in this case, from DNA scientific evidence

to jailhouse snitches to other witnesses that he had made

statements to that connected him to the crime.

Speaker 5: He planned this entire thing out to the point of

stealing a van so that he can then stalk his prey.

Speaker 2: This was an extremely premeditated murder driven by an extremely

evil motivation.

Speaker 1: Prosecutors were ready to present their case of what they

believe happened on the morning of September 13th, 2007.

Speaker 2: He had seen her jogging in the early morning hours

before he had become obsessed with her apparently and with

the idea of abducting her. He positioned himself in an

area in front of St. Francis Assisi Church where he

knew she would be running or jogging. And when she

came along in the darkness, he grabbed her, probably put

the knife to her throat and forced her off of

the roadway.

Speaker 7: Mrs. Tran was surprised by this man leaping out of

the darkness. There was no way she could have defended herself.

Speaker 3: It was just all too sudden.

Speaker 2: He took her down into this little valley, which was

concealed from view from the roadway. And he forced her

down on the ground. He took her clothes off of her,

probably ripped them off of her. And he raped her.

And when she was screaming or yelling in pain and

begging for her life, he began to stab her in

the throat. He knew he was going to kill her.

He knew he was going to rape her. This just

speaks to an extremely depraved level of evil.

Speaker 4: He made the decision to take advantage of someone in

the dark that he felt he could overpower. Then when

he was in fear for maybe being found out because

they were struggling, they were fighting, they were screaming, decided

he could kill them. And then at that point, to

think that he could make all this go away by

destroying this person literally by trying to burn them up,

that is evil.

Speaker 1: On October 15, 2012, Jackson's trial began at the Hillsborough

County Circuit Court.

Speaker 2: In my opening statements, I told the jury he was

trying to burn his biological evidence out of her body.

His intent was to try to destroy her body because

her body was evidence of the rape and the murder.

Speaker 3: It was all preplanned.

Speaker 7: It was extremely cold-blooded, calculated. It stayed with me for

a long time, even today.

Speaker 1: Jackson, who'd been all too keen to blab about the

murder to his fellow inmates, suddenly didn't seem able to

speak up in the courtroom.

Speaker 7: He didn't show any emotion at all throughout the trial.

He just was sat quietly. It was kind of eerie.

He had an eerie presence, this sort of calm, strange

demeanor throughout. I thought he didn't mind being caught that much.

Watching him, I think he had always wanted from the

beginning to be able to boast about it.

Speaker 2: He appeared to enjoy the attention of the trial. He

seemed to be very immature. He smiled a lot. He

just didn't seem like he was taking the whole process seriously.

Speaker 6: He has got all eyes on him. This is his

moment in the sun. He's not even thinking about what's

going to happen afterwards. He couldn't hide his enjoyment at

getting so much attention.

Speaker 1: Troy Morgan, the detective who'd made the initial breakthrough in

the case, was called to testify.

Speaker 5: I took great pride in being able to get up

there and testify, finding out the information that kind of

linked everything to him. And that was pretty much all

the testimony, you know, that I really had to bring

to the table was being in the right place at

the right time and asking the right question.

Speaker 1: The gas station attendant who Troy Morgan had spoken to

wasn't the only witness called by the prosecution.

Speaker 2: There were witnesses who put him near the area where

the van was found, and that was in the city

of Gibsonton. The murder happened in the city of Sefner,

and they are separated by about 10, 11, 12 miles,

so it's a significant distance. And there were witnesses, one

of which knew him, put him walking on foot in

Gibsonton that morning. And that really stood out to her.

Why is Kenny down here in Gibsonton walking? How did

he get here? That was significant because he told the

detectives and never would come off of the fact that

he rode a bicycle from Sefner down to Gibsonton through

the night. And that's why he was in Gibsonton.

Speaker 1: With the overwhelming evidence laid out, the prosecuting attorneys began

their closing arguments.

Speaker 2: I remember arguing to the jury, there is probably no

crime that is as personally and viscerally as a crime

where a person is putting part of their body into

another person against their will. And I think this may

have impacted the women on the jury, and I argued

to the jury, the last voice she heard and the

last person's face she saw in her life on this

earth was this defendant.

Speaker 1: The jury took less than a day to reach their verdict.

Speaker 4: The jury determined that he was guilty for the murder,

the sexual battery, the grand theft auto, and the arson.

Speaker 1: It seemed the jury had no doubt in their minds

about Jackson's guilt.

Speaker 2: When a jury returns a guilty verdict, the defendant is

entitled to have the jury polled. A clerk asks each

of the individual jurors to confirm that that is their verdict.

And I've never heard this before. In any case, I've tried.

Several of the jurors, when they responded yes, didn't just say, yes,

that's my verdict. They said, yes! I know two of

the women looked directly at the defendant and said it

very vehemently like that. So that's what kind of stood

out to me, was proof. how much they believed in

that verdict of guilty.

Speaker 1: The verdict was exactly the outcome the hardworking detectives had

hoped for.

Speaker 5: To be able to get a positive result, it's what

you want for every case. With this one here, everything

just kind of fell right into place, being at the

right place at the right time. Sometimes it's better to

be lucky than good.

Speaker 4: I mean, it's horrible what the people went through, and

the families, what they've gone through, but it's a huge...

feeling of satisfaction when you can conclusively say, this is

what happened.

Speaker 3: We got the guy.

Speaker 4: It doesn't change what happened. It's still a tragedy, but

this is what we can give you for some sort

of closure.

Speaker 1: A week later on November 1st, 2012, the next phase

of Kenneth Jackson's trial began.

Speaker 7: The murder conviction comes first, and then there's basically a

second trial with the same jury to consider the death penalty.

And then they come back to the same jury and

ask for a vote. In this case, it was 11

to 1, which at the time was all that the

state needed.

Speaker 1: On June 5, 2013, 30-year-old Kenneth Jackson was sentenced to death.

Speaker 7: When the death penalty was imposed, he had absolutely no reaction.

I don't even know that he cared.

Speaker 3: I couldn't tell.

Speaker 7: He just looked blankly ahead, and he didn't offer any

remorse or anything like that.

Speaker 5: I will say it was very satisfying to find that

he was found guilty, number one, but number two, that

he was given the death penalty.

Speaker 1: That wasn't the end of Kenneth Jackson's story, however. In 2016,

the United States Supreme Court agreed that Florida's capital sentencing

scheme was unconstitutional, which led the Florida Supreme Court to

abolish the state's existing death penalty law and require that

a jury's recommendation for death must be unanimous.

Speaker 2: Any case where we didn't have a unanimous verdict in

the penalty phase was now subject to collateral attack, and

that's what happened with Mr. Jackson's case. The case got

reversed because we didn't have a unanimous verdict. The decision

was made to allow him to plead to life, and

that's what happened, and he was resentenced to a life sentence.

Speaker 4: Whether he does life in prison without parole or whether

he does death penalty.

Speaker 3: Either way, he's off the street.

Speaker 5: I know for a fact that that person won't be

hurting anybody outside of those prison walls, and that's what

we're after.

Speaker 7: This case really haunted me, I think because it was

the first time I had encountered.

Speaker 3: What I thought was a true psychopath. I think there

was every.

Speaker 7: Possibility that Kenneth Jackson if he had not been caught,

would have gone on to kill other women, and that

one day he might have been labeled a serial killer.

Speaker 1: Kenneth Jackson stalked, raped, and killed 50-year-old Cooke Tran, an

innocent woman who'd done him no harm. He burned her

body in the attempt to destroy any evidence, but he

wasn't as clever as he thought, and when his DNA

was found on the victim, his fate was sealed. He

showed absolutely no remorse for leaving three children without a mother,

proving that Kenneth Jackson is one of the world's most

evil killers.