It was a quiet night on June 6, 2016 in a Glendale neighborhood. Suddenly several gunshots rang out through the street. A mysterious truck fled a bloody scene where police found two people dead and another critically injured.
Kimberly Lacount, who placed the 911 call, was found in the home unharmed along with her children. But an ominous message sent to her phone would make her a suspect in the case.
“Delete everything.”
Kipling Harris, Lacount’s secret lover, sent this message to Lacount at 10:55 p.m., minutes after the shooting. After detectives seized Harris’s phone for investigation, evidence showed that this was one of the last text messages exchanged between Harris and Lacount on that day. Through further investigation, detectives found many text messages that pinpointed Lacount and Harris as their suspects. Now, Lacount is accused of being the coordinator of the attack that killed her husband and mother-in-law and is several days into trial.
On March 6, at the Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County, prosecutors spent the day in the downtown Phoenix courtroom presenting text messages between Harris and Lacount from the days leading up to and after the murders.
Detective Eric Holmstedt provided examples of indicators that drew his suspicion when reading through the text messages between Lacount and Harris. Investigators accused Lacount of using “code words” in her messages with Harris to plot the murders. The words ranged from “accessories” to “movie night” to “storage.” In one conversation, Harris mentions to Lacount that he is not feeling movie night because he needs to get better DVDs.
“I didn’t know initially what they meant by ‘movie night’, however, in the context of the entire conversation, my belief is that the ‘movie night’ was the night that they had planned to commit these murders and ‘DVDs’ were the ammunition,” said Holmstedt.
Holmestedt claimed that certain words rarely made sense in the context of Harris and Lacount’s conversations. He provided another example of a conversation where Lacount was urging Harris to go to storage and pick up his camping gear for a camping trip. In this thread of text messages, Harris mentioned to Lacount that he was “a ball of nerves” and “I just can’t fail”. This caught the attention of detectives as they found it odd that Harris would be nervous about visiting a storage facility.
Detectives initially believed that “storage” was a real location where Harris retrieved his weapon and ammunition. They checked nearby storage locations for footage, but never found any footage that showed Harris, Lacount, or their truck on site.
“I realized that storage was the murder. Going to storage was the Kuhn residence,” Holmstedt said.
A week prior on February 27, prosecutors and defense attorneys questioned John Krystek, a computer forensic examiner for the city of Glendale. The counsels noticed many gaps in the time stamps from the storage facility’s footage and wanted to confirm with Krystek, who examined the footage, that camera systems at the storage facility were not faulty.
“Event based [recording] means instead of continuous recording, it’ll record when there is an event such as an alarm or motion detection. Without an event, there is no recording,” said Krystek.
The cameras at the facility were perfectly functional according to Krystek and the gaps in the footage is simply because there were no events at those times to trigger a recording.
Harris was found guilty by jury on counts of first degree murder, burglary and attempt to commit first degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2023.
Lacount is still currently on trial. If Lacount is convicted, she could face the death penalty.
Edited by Shi Bradley
