Bullet proof
Posted: 3/3/2010

By James Mulcahy

It's a story as old as cops and robbers. A boy -- or in this case a young man -- watched in awe as the fire trucks and police cars roared by. He yearned to be one of them; he wanted to be part of the excitement.

Did he ever get his wish.

Through a series of circumstances, Ron Freels ended up in Shelbyville, not on the streets chasing bad guys in high-speed pursuits, but in the lab chasing them in sometimes less-than-lightning-speed technology.

Now enjoying his retirement, in his heyday this Kentucky State Police CSI guy had his microscope deep in some high-profile investigations. Among his many cases, Freels investigated the Beverly Hill Supper Club fire, which killed 165 people on May 28, 1977; he helped nail a gangster who gunned down a CBS camera crew in New York; and he helped solve the deadly shooting of a UK football player.

Freels' den is like a small museum of Kentucky crime. The walls display his own personal memorabilia -- badges and patches -- as well as items depicting his career as a forensic ballistics expert. There's the original artists' rendering of Freels testifying against the gangster. There's the microscope he used in his crime lab (the microscope was retired by state police and given to Freels). There's the bullet casing souvenir he kept when he was allowed to test fire the gun that was used to kill John Lennon.

Reload

When Freels was a young man, living in a rural community near Owensboro, he was fascinated by the lights and sirens.

"I'd always see police cars and fire engines going by, and thought, 'I want to be part of that. It looks exciting,' " he said. "My dad knew the (Daviess County) sheriff and he got me a job as a radio dispatcher a couple of nights a week, and that was exciting."

When something tragic would happen, Dispatcher Freels would have to communicate with the state police. They got to know him and his voice, and offered him a job as a KSP dispatcher. He eventually ended up taking that job as dispatcher at the Bowling Green post while attending Western Kentucky University.

"A lot of exciting things happened on my shift -- mostly third -- and I didn't know whether I wanted to be a policeman or go to law school," he said. "I also liked science and mathematics, so I majored in mathematics and government."

At the time, the state police was initiating a new program called "Crime Scene Investigation," he said. "Those guys would come through my district when we'd have a major crime and process the crime scene. I thought, 'Boy, this is exciting.' "

In December 1972, Freels was accepted as a CSI trainee. He started Jan. 19, 1973.

"After six months of training in Frankfort, my first assignment was in Madisonville," he said. "My district would be the entire western part of Kentucky."

That was 1973. He and Joanna married and headed off to Madisonville, where he would spend the next two years as a road CSI officer and she began her teaching career.

"I got called one day from the commander. The captain asked me if I'd like to transfer to the crime laboratory -- it's called forensic ballistics or firearms identification. I said 'No! This is too much fun out here. Murders, robberies -- I'm in the heartbeat of the state police.' "

Six months later, the second offer came and for the second time Freels declined.

" 'You might want to think about that again. It might be your last offer,' " Freels said his captain told him. "We went to see my wife's preacher who said, 'The best advice I can give you is don't ever pass up an opportunity. I know you like your job, but this is a step up.' We thought about it and decided to do it."

When the Freelses came to visit Frankfort, the colonel's secretary, Clara Jane Jesse, from Shelbyville, helped convince them to move here.

"We wanted to get away from Frankfort," he said. "We made a circle around Frankfort and visited all the communities -- Georgetown, Lexington, Lawrenceburg, Versailles -- we ended up in Shelbyville. They had just opened Rose's department store, and we thought that this was a nice community. Mrs. Jesse said her husband was on the school board, and we thought he could help Joanna out. She picked up the phone and made a recommendation. She got the job right away because they were needing teachers."

Joanna began teaching at the former Henry Clay school in Clayvillage while Ron spent the next two years training to become one of two qualified firearms examiners in Kentucky. He spent the next 26 years there, retiring in 2001 as regional laboratory supervisor.

The fire

In June 1977 the nation watched in horror as flames destroyed the Beverly Hills Supper Club in northern Kentucky. "We had 165 bodies up there," Freels said. "When I was called to go to Beverly Hills, Joanna was pregnant with Stephanie. I spent two weeks up there, and I would come back and forth every night."

Two former Shelby Countians who lived in Hamilton, Ohio, near Cincinnati, were among the 165 victims. Robert Douglas Cottongim, 32, a supervisor at Mercy Hospital, and his wife, Carol Ann, 32, a teacher, were attending a retirement party for a teacher who worked with Carol Ann, said Clay Cottongim, Robert's brother. He said their daughter, Leigh Ann, who was 6 when the fire occurred, recently moved back to Shelby County.

The deadly blaze changed the fire codes across the nation and changed the way people think when they enter a crowded room — they now automatically look for exit signs in preparation for an emergency.

The fire was recently in the news again when a former employee and others who survived the blaze said the fire was set and was an attempt at mass murder. In October 2008, Gov. Steve Beshear appointed a panel to investigate claims of arson, and last March the panel recommended that the investigation not be reopened, saying there was "a very tiny shred of evidence of arson and a huge mountain of conjecture, unsupported speculation and personal opinion."

Freels' agrees. "It was absolutely an accident," he said without hesitation.

The shooting

On July 17, 1994, while celebrating his 21st birthday, UK football player Trent DiGuiro was shot and killed on his front porch.

"He was shot in the head, and the bullet mushroomed and fragmented," Freels said. "This case went unsolved for about six years. I was on America's Most Wanted -- they wanted the public to help them solve the murder case. They came to Frankfort and filmed me. (In 2000) Shane Ragland's girlfriend said she had information that could help solve the case, that Ragland was the one that did it. She had a guilty conscience and couldn't stand it any longer."

In 2002, Ragland was convicted of the murder based on testimony from, among others, the girlfriend and Freels. The conviction was later overturned when it was determined an FBI agent lied on the witness stand. The court refused to retry Ragland, but a civil jury awarded DiGuiro's family $63.3 million.

"It was a fraternity/blackball kind of thing, and a girlfriend relationship," Freels said.

The CBS murders

Freels was thrust into a New York high-profile murder case when the suspect was pulled over while driving through Shelby County.

Donald Nash, then 41, a hit man from New Jersey, was caught murdering a secretary by three CBS technicians who were walking to their car.

"There had been a murder of a secretary up there; they never found her body," Freels recalled. "Another secretary in this business was getting off work, on top of a parking garage walking to her car and a guy opened his van door up and shot her, and he was dragging her into the van. Three CBS News camera personnel were also coming out of their office and coming up on this parking garage and they saw what he had done. So Mr. Nash fired three shots and killed those three CBS newsmen, got in that van and took off.

"The FBI had been watching Nash's house on some unrelated charges," he continued. "They saw him come in that night. Early the next morning, he comes out in his van, and it's painted a different color. They decided to follow him. They tailed him by helicopter and airplane all the way from New Jersey. When he came across at Huntington, W.Va., and entered Kentucky at Ashland, the state police in Kentucky were notified. When it got to Lexington, that's under the command of Frankfort, so the commander, Capt. Vanhoose, from Shelbyville, sent a state police car out there. When that vehicle and the FBI agents and the trooper got to Shelby County, the van pulled off out here at the rest stop. He got out and was preparing a meal and was getting ready to leave, and Capt. Vanhoose told the trooper to get the license number off the van. So they ran it and it was the wrong plate for that vehicle. Capt. Vanhoose made the decision on his own that no one was going to ride through his district in a vehicle with an unauthorized plate from New Jersey. We didn't know what the FBI was doing here. He told that trooper to pull him over. That's where my input came in. This was a big deal, and it wasn't long before the CBS jet landed at the Frankfort airport with a New York City police detective."

Freels collected shell casings from the van which matched casings from the murder scene. Nash was charged with the four murders in the parking garage, was found guilty and sent to prison. The prosecutor was Rudy Giuliani, who would later become the city's mayor.

The second career

Besides being featured on America's Most Wanted, Freels appeared on 48 Hours twice, and testified 560 times -- "98 percent on the prosecution side."

Since Freels retired in 2001, he has been a witness "34 or 35 times" on both old and new cases, and he's done some private investigations.

He also took a job as a ballistics investigator in Indianapolis, but after six months he was ready to come home.

"It was too much work," he said. "It's pretty dangerous in Indianapolis. Their carry/concealed laws are much more liberal than ours, and they have a lot of gun stores, so there are a lot of shootings. It wasn't unusual for me to have to test fire 10 to 18 guns on Monday morning. That was a good weekend."

He is a Shelby County Deputy Sheriff, called out for special assignments, and is a security specialist and deputy commander for the Kentucky Disaster Mortuary Operations Response Team.

Real CSI vs. TV

When CSI Miami's Det. Horatio Caine removes his very cool shades and pushes back his coat so the sun reflects just right off his golden badge, which is strategically attached to his belt, it means the bad guy is busted -- all within the confines of a 60-minute show. So how much is real and how much is pure, made-for-TV drama?

"It's glorified a little bit," Freels said with a grin. "Some is real; some is not real. Hollywood is Hollywood and they do more in 30 or 45 minutes on TV than it takes a scientist to do in a week or a month." The DNA profiling, for example, which usually takes several minutes on television, actually can take up to a week. "It's not something you throw a switch and get the results out," Freels said.

The popularity of CSI shows has brought the career to the forefront, but Freels said that people interested in pursuing it must realize that a science education is needed, not criminal justice training.

"Most kids see it on TV and they'd like to do that kind of work, but they don't understand that it's all scientific," he said. "They need a lot of math and chemistry. Some think you can just go and get a degree in criminal justice and go to work for the crime lab, but that just won't work."

Ron Freels didn't get to drive in many high-speed pursuits or take crooks to the ground and cuff them, but he did make his mark in solving crimes.

"It's really an interesting field," he said.