They wait with tears, fears. KY family hopes this FBI search unearths Crystal Rogers
Tears welled up in Crystal Rogers’ grandfather’s eyes as he stood around the corner from a team of FBI agents who searched a property this week for evidence in Rogers’ disappearance.
Rogers has been missing more than six years. She is presumed dead. Years of investigation from the Nelson County sheriff’s office, Kentucky State Police and, more recently, the FBI have yet to result in arrests or finding her remains. Her family, including her grandfather, Till Ballard, and her mother, Sherry Ballard, at least wants to know what happened to her.
“From day one, I never thought my daughter was coming home,” Ballard said. “Never. I just knew she wasn’t. The day I reported her missing, I knew that minute that something bad was wrong.”
Family members hoped they would get answers when the FBI started a new search for evidence in her case. Investigators showed up in the Woodlawn Springs subdivision in Bardstown on Aug. 24 and began looking for “any evidence” they could find.
They focused on multiple houses before they eventually dug up a front yard and driveway at one property on North Howard Street. Large trucks were seen hauling dirt and mud away day after day. A security checkpoint was set up on Freeman Avenue, the only way to access North and South Howard streets, which are both dead-end roads.
Residents on North and South Howard streets had to go through the checkpoint to get to their homes. The checkpoint was staffed around the clock by the Nelson County sheriff’s office during the day and by Kentucky State Police at night. Curious passersby frequently tried to stop for a peek in the early days of the search and were turned away.
After a week, the only people going through the checkpoint were local residents and members of the community who wanted to show their support for investigators. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to stop by during the day with sandwiches, Gatorade and other offerings for Nelson County sheriff’s deputies and FBI investigators.
Till and his wife, Betty Ballard, sat outside the checkpoint for hours every day. They couldn’t see what investigators were doing. But the two still showed up daily, staying well into the evening and waving at workers as they drove excavators, trucks full of dirt and evidence trailers in and out of the otherwise quiet Kentucky neighborhood.
The FBI returned to the subdivision every day before suspending the search on Monday due to bad weather. The agency planned to resume the search once the weather improved. Multiple “items of interest” potentially relevant to Rogers’ disappearance have been found and are being analyzed, the FBI said Monday without providing details.
FBI representatives wouldn’t comment on why investigators targeted one specific property.
But Brooks Houck, Rogers’ boyfriend at the time of her disappearance and a suspect in the case, owns multiple homes in the neighborhood. He was building the houses around the same time Rogers went missing, Sherry Ballard said.
“I want to get my hopes up,” Ballard said of the FBI’s latest search. “I’m scared to. I honestly do believe we’re in the right direction. I do believe this is where my daughter is. A part of me wants to hold back on that because – I don’t know – I’m scared of the let down. I’ve been there before, and it’s hard. It’s so hard.”
The Ballard family has more than one victim for whom they want answers. Sixteen months after Rogers’ disappearance in July 2015, her father was killed while he was hunting with his 12-year-old grandson. Tommy Ballard, Till’s son and Sherry’s husband, had been relentlessly pursuing the truth.
Tommy Ballard was targeted on the morning of Nov. 19, 2016, according to the FBI. He and his grandson were on family property next to the Bluegrass Parkway when he was shot in the chest and died instantly.
Till Ballard told the Herald-Leader that Tommy believed someone was following him that week. But Tommy never said what type of vehicle it was that had been tailing him. It was early enough in the morning that it was still dark when Tommy was shot, Ballard said.
The FBI ruled Tommy’s death a homicide.
“He wasn’t going to give up on Crystal,” Till Ballard said, standing outside the FBI’s search site on Monday. “It cost him his life. He told me, he said, ‘Dad, I’ll spend my last dollar to find her.’”
“They had to get rid of him. Stop him.”
Till and Sherry Ballard said they believe the cases are connected and Tommy’s death investigation will be solved quickly after Rogers’ case is solved.
New hope inspired when FBI took over Rogers’ case
The FBI took over both cases last summer and has since executed several search warrants and questioned people in Bardstown.
The FBI said it would keep searching “as long as it takes” to find evidence.
Sherry Ballard hasn’t spent any time at the FBI’s newest search site, she said. She doesn’t want to be in the way. Kentucky State Police and the Nelson County sheriff’s office worked the cases for five years before the FBI took the lead in the summer of 2020. Searches and interrogations by those agencies didn’t lead to the discovery of Rogers’ body or any arrests.
The FBI started its investigation into Rogers’ disappearance by sending 150 law enforcement officers into Bardstown last year to conduct interviews and execute search warrants. No immediate answers came out of the searches as Rogers’ family dealt with the six-year anniversary of her disappearance.
“Every year, it gets harder and harder,” said Dana Walden, one of Rogers’ cousins and a lifetime Bardstown resident. “You hope this is the year, and then you get no answers.”
Walden said the FBI’s involvement brought “hope again.” Till Ballard echoed that confidence in the FBI.
“We’re glad the FBI finally has took over the case,” Ballard said. “We don’t have anything against the state police or the sheriff’s department; they’ve been good, too. But I feel like we’ll get justice.”
Crystal Rogers ‘had a huge heart’
Rogers was the first of Sherry and Tommy Ballard’s children. She was born and raised in Bardstown and was a “very shy little girl” when she was younger, Sherry said.
“She had a huge heart,” Sherry Ballard said. “She would do anything – she wasn’t the type to look at people different.”
Ballard said her daughter once took in a friend who didn’t have anywhere to live.
“She was an excellent mother,” Ballard said.
Rogers had five children. The fifth was with Brooks Houck.
“She was trying to make a life for her and her kids, and she looked out for her children number one,” Ballard said.
Rogers, who was 35 when she disappeared, loved to take her children swimming at the Ballard house, Ballard said. Rogers was also “very hands-on” with her children’s schoolwork. She would attend her children’s school parties and make efforts to help their teachers, Ballard said.
Ballard reported Rogers missing on July 5, 2015. She hadn’t been seen or heard from since July 3, according to the FBI. Houck had called the Ballards and asked if they’d seen Rogers, Till Ballard said.
“All of us went to the police station and reported her missing,” Till Ballard said.
The same day she was reported missing, her car was found abandoned on the Bluegrass Parkway near mile marker 14, roughly 6 miles from the Bardstown exit. It had a flat tire, and Rogers’ keys, phone and wallet were inside.
Sherry Ballard took care of four of her daughter’s children on her own after Rogers went missing and Tommy died. Houck has full custody of the child he had with Rogers.
Ballard plans to have Rogers buried next to Tommy if her remains are found, she said. She’ll never get total closure because she doesn’t believe she’ll see her daughter alive again. But it would help the family to know where she is.
“It’s so hard for a parent to just drive down the road not knowing where your daughter’s at or where they put her,” she said.
Tommy Ballard ‘would give you the shirt off his back’
Tommy was a “kind of quiet” man who built houses for a living, Sherry Ballard said. His father built houses, too, and still does as he’s gotten into his 80s.
Tommy didn’t like to be in the “public eye,” Ballard said. But he was “an excellent father” who was “very protective.”
“He always wanted to please the people he was building a home for, even if he had to go the extra mile,” Ballard said. “He didn’t mind doing that. He wanted to make sure when he was done, they were happy.”
Ballard said she “couldn’t have asked for better” than her late husband.
It was evident Tuesday that her feelings about her husband or daughter hadn’t diminished. Her living room prominently featured photos of them both.
“There’s never a minute I’m not thinking about them,” Ballard said.
Tommy didn’t like being in photos, Ballard said. He was usually unwilling to have his picture taken.
But one set of family photos featuring both Tommy and Rogers has been key. The FBI has used them to generate “seeking information” posters and large billboards featured prominently along the Bluegrass Parkway.
Tommy’s dad said his son was very charitable.
“He’d do anything for anybody,” Till Ballard said.
Tommy, a skilled handyman from the age of 15, once put up a dog fence for a woman battling cancer and didn’t charge her anything for it, Till Ballard said. He also volunteered to finish contracting work for a woman whose workers failed to finish the job after she already paid them.
“He wouldn’t take a dime from her,” Ballard said. “That’s the way Tommy was. If he liked you, he’d give you the shirt off his back.”
But he was unrelenting in his efforts to find his daughter. He helped form Team Crystal, according to the FBI. Team Crystal was a group of family members and other local residents willing to do anything for Sherry and Tommy to help them determine what happened to Rogers.
That included searches for Rogers’ body and any evidence they could find. Sherry Ballard said she and Tommy knew they could ask anything of Team Crystal.
Till and Sherry Ballard are adamant that Tommy was killed because of how hard he was working to find Rogers.
“He walked a million miles, looking and searching,” Till Ballard said. “ ... They knew Tommy wasn’t going to stop.”
Rogers’ boyfriend maintains he’s 100 percent innocent
Houck has said he didn’t do anything to Rogers. But the Ballards repeatedly said he was the last person to see Rogers alive, and the Nelson County sheriff’s office identified him as a suspect.
“I’ve never made that a secret,” Sherry Ballard said of her suspicion that Houck was involved in Rogers’ disappearance and Tommy’s death. The sheriff’s office hasn’t been able to do more than name Houck a suspect years ago.
The two met when Rogers was renting a home owned by Houck after she separated from her husband, Sherry told the Herald-Leader.
Houck said Rogers was still up on the night of July 3 when he went to bed. Days after Rogers’ disappearance, he told Nancy Grace in a television interview that he “was not in the least little bit alarmed” when he woke up on July 4 to find Rogers wasn’t home.
“We have had a stressed relationship at times, and one of the ways that Crystal has always chose to deal with that is by going to ... her cousin ... whom she’s very close to,” Houck told Grace in a phone interview. “She’s spent the night there on several occasions.”
On Nancy Grace’s show, Houck said he went to a July Fourth party without Rogers and was planning to check with others about Rogers if she remained absent for more than a day or a day-and-a-half.
Rogers’ family members said Houck didn’t help them try to search for her. He addressed that concern on Grace’s show.
“All of my efforts in searching for her have been done behind the scenes with the Nelson County sheriff’s office,” Houck said on Nancy Grace’s show.
Houck said that he had been “100 percent completely honest with everyone” and cooperative.
“I’m 100 percent completely innocent in this, and I have exhausted my efforts with the law enforcement agencies to gather all the facts necessary to allow me to have a clean name again,” Houck said on Grace’s show.
‘We’ve been through it’
Tommy was the second of Till and Betty Ballard’s children to be murdered. Their daughter, Freda Sharene “Sherry” Ballard was killed in 1979 and her car was submerged in the Ohio River, according to multiple reports. Her remains were found buried in the woods in 1983.
“We’ve been through it,” Till Ballard said. “We’ve had our share of bad luck.”
Till and Betty said Sharene was seven-and-a-half months pregnant at the time. Her estranged husband, Edsel Barnes, was found guilty of murder by a jury, according to court records. George Weir was also found guilty. Both are serving life sentences in prison, Till said.
Sharene’s child would’ve been Till and Betty’s first grandchild, Betty said. Rogers was the couple’s first living grandchild, she said.
Till said it felt like they’re living that grief all over again.
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 12:19 PM.