The Suspicious Death of Kasha Blount (Massachusetts)

On a Saturday morning in 1990, the body of a teenager was found on a dead-end street in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The scene raised immediate concerns, but the autopsy did not answer the question everyone needed answered most: how did Kasha Blount die? Police waited on the medical examiner. The medical examiner waited on police. Kasha’s mother pushed for answers and a reporter started asking questions. Finally, the investigation turned toward Kasha’s final plans, the boyfriend she expected to meet, and the belongings missing when she was found. The case would reach a jury, but the question at the center of it all never went away. View source material and photos for this episode at: https://darkdowneast.com/kashablount

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Kylie Low?

  On a Saturday morning in 1990, the body of a teenager was found on a dead-end street in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The scene raised immediate concerns, but the autopsy did not answer the question everyone needed answered most. How did Kasha Blunt die? Police waited on the medical examiner, the medical examiner waited on police, and Kasha's mother pushed for answers while a reporter started asking questions. Finally, the investigation turned toward Kasha's final plans, the boyfriend she expected to meet, and the belongings missing when she was found. The case would reach a jury, but the question at the center of it all never went away.

• 1:12Kylie Low?

  I'm Kylie Low, and this is the case of Kasha Blunt on Dark Down East.

• 1:28Kylie Low?

  Just after 7:30 on the morning of Saturday, February 17, 1990, Boston police and EMS were sent to Bernard Street in Dorchester, across from St. Mary's Cemetery. The call brought them to the end of a dead-end street, where a young woman was lying on her back, wrapped in a blanket. By the time police and an ambulance reached her, she had no signs of life. Her extremities and jaw were stiff and cold. A Department of Health and Hospitals report notes frozen blood and fluid coming from her nose, an apparent cut on her forehead, and possible bruises to her face. Under suspected diagnosis, someone circled cardiac arrest, simply meaning her heart had stopped. It didn't explain why.

• 2:13Kylie Low?

  There was no identification to give this person a name. She was a young, black female, visibly pregnant. She was wearing a cream-colored knit sweater pulled halfway up her torso, a black shirt, partially unzipped gray pants, black shoes, white socks, white underwear, round gold bracelets on her left wrist, and a white hair tie. Two responding Boston police officers also wrote in their report that the woman was bleeding from the nose and mouth area and had a bruise on her head. They, too, noted that her pants zipper was down and her underwear was exposed. A preliminary field report from the Suffolk County District Attorney's homicide division described the scene in even sharper terms.

• 2:56Kylie Low?

  It said the victim was found with apparent multiple trauma to face. The report also noted that the area was known for sex work and that spent condoms were recovered nearby, about 30 feet from the body. Investigators didn't know what or who they were dealing with yet. Meanwhile, across the city, the person who knew her best was just beginning to realize that something was wrong.

• 3:21Kylie Low?

  The last time Phyllis Johnson heard her daughter Kasha Blunt's voice was the morning before the body was found. In a written statement provided to Boston police, Phyllis said she woke up around 7:30 on Friday, February 16, 1990, and heard the kids downstairs. Her two nephews, one a teenager, one younger, who she raised as her own, and her daughter, Kasha. Around 7:45 or 8:00 that morning, Kasha came into her bedroom to borrow some perfume. Phyllis didn't see her, but she heard Kasha say she was going to work. Phyllis got home from work at 10:30 that night. Her nephews were there, but the older one, Michael, said Kasha wasn't, and he hadn't heard from her either.

• 4:05Kylie Low?

  Kasha was 19. She worked, she had friends. Phyllis assumed she would call, so she went to bed around midnight. When Phyllis woke up Saturday morning, Kasha still wasn't home, but because Kasha usually worked from 10 to 5, Phyllis thought she might have already left for work. The day passed, and still, Kasha did not come home. By Sunday, the worry set in. Around noon that day, Phyllis called Kasha's workplace. She was a sales clerk at Cherry Web and Terrain, or CWT, a clothing store in Dedham, about an hour away from home by public transportation. The CWT employee Phyllis spoke to said Kasha wasn't there yet.

• 4:48Kylie Low?

  When Phyllis called back later, Kasha still hadn't arrived. Then the employee told Phyllis that this was the second day Kasha missed work without an explanation. Phyllis tried to reason through it. Maybe there had been a delay on the bus or train? Maybe something had held her up? Phyllis called Kasha's father in New York. He was supposed to be having a party, and Phyllis wanted to know if Kasha decided to attend. She hadn't. By Monday morning, February 19, Phyllis went to see Kasha's on-again, off-again boyfriend, 19-year-old Lennox David James Jr., who went by David.

• 5:28Kylie Low?

  According to Phyllis's written statement, David said he hadn't seen Kasha in two months and had last talked to her about a week and a half earlier. After checking with area hospitals to see if Kasha had been admitted and not finding her there either, Phyllis reported her daughter missing. The next morning, Phyllis met with a Boston detective who suggested that maybe Kasha was with a friend or boyfriend and didn't want to call. But Phyllis rejected that. Kasha always let her know where she was, and she was more than five months pregnant. She wouldn't just go off-grid without telling anyone. While Phyllis was still at the police station, an officer told her they'd located a person

• 6:11Kylie Low?

  who matched Kasha's description. Phyllis went to the morgue and viewed an image of the person on a television screen, and at first, she didn't think it was Kasha. But back at the police station, she was shown a Polaroid of the same person. That was when she realized she was looking at her daughter.

• 6:32Kylie Low?

  Kasha's full name was Kasha Latice Akita Michelle Blunt. Phyllis told Alice McQuillan of the Boston Herald that she gave Kasha so many names because she was her only child at the time. The mother and daughter were extremely close. When Phyllis went on vacation, Kasha slept in her mother's bed because she missed her so much. She also loved talking on the phone and called her mother several times a day, every day, even while at work, just to say hello. Kasha was an honor roll student at St. Gregory's High School when she graduated in 1988. She was also co-captain of the cheerleading squad and played on the volleyball team. She wanted a lot out of her life, and she intended to get it.

• 7:16Kylie Low?

  Her mother insisted that she didn't drink, she didn't use substances, and she didn't party, especially not while pregnant. Kasha had been seeing her boyfriend David on and off for about five years. According to multiple witness statements contained in the case file documents I have, Kasha identified David as the father of her child. She was very excited to become a mother. She kept up with her prenatal care, and at her last appointment on February 3, she had a normal blood pressure and heartbeat. Witnesses told police that she also had a shopping trip planned to pick out clothes and toys and maybe a stroller on the night she was last seen alive.

• 7:59Kylie Low?

  According to the case file documents I received from the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office, Kasha's case was treated as a sudden death, not a homicide, until evidence suggested otherwise. However, a report from detectives Paul McDonough and Donald Brown notes that while the medical examiner's ruling was still pending, detectives were interviewing people who might be helpful if the medical examiner later classified Kasha's death as a homicide. Phyllis told a detective that one of Kasha's friends told her Kasha talked about going shopping with David after work that Friday to buy things for the baby. Detectives spoke to the friend of Kasha's directly, and she said she saw Kasha around

• 8:42Kylie Low?

  1:30 or 2:00 PM on Friday, February 16, while Kasha was working at CWT, and that Kasha said she was going shopping with David after her shift. Kasha said she would call the friend when she got home, but that call never came. On or around February 28, detectives interviewed Kasha's coworkers. One coworker said that sometime before noon on February 16, Kasha received a phone call at work. The coworker initially answered it before handing the phone to Kasha and said the voice on the line was male. After Kasha hung up, she told the coworker it was David and that he was going to meet her after work so they could go to Child World to buy things for the baby.

• 9:26Kylie Low?

  The same coworker said that sometime around 5:15, Kasha finished work and left the store, but came back just a few minutes later saying she had forgotten her check. According to the report, coworkers asked if Kasha would miss her bus, but Kasha said that David was outside waiting for her. At the time, she was wearing light gray checked pants, a cream-colored sweater, a blue-and-white scarf, and a black, ankle-length leather coat. Now, Phyllis had also told police that when Kasha left her work on Friday morning, she was wearing a long, black leather coat, boots, and a black-and-brown purse. Phyllis hadn't actually seen Kasha leave that morning, though.

• 10:10Kylie Low?

  She later said she heard what sounded like Kasha's leather coat hitting the stairs as she walked down them. The black leather coat and purse were not among the items found with Kasha's body. This story repeated itself across other witness interviews documented in the case file. Witnesses kept saying Kasha was meeting up with David, and more than one witness said she was wearing her full-length, black leather coat that day. The February 26 report contained in the files I received from the District Attorney's Office shows detectives were trying to reach David in the earliest days of the case, too. The report notes that further investigation was being conducted, including, quote, "attempts

• 10:54Kylie Low?

  on making contact with victim's boyfriend, David James," end quote. In the records I have, though, it doesn't look like those early attempts were successful. Meanwhile, the scene back at Bernard Street had its own set of leads.

• 11:11Kylie Low?

  A witness told police that on the night of February 16th, the night Kasha was last seen alive, there was a 1978 or 1979 Plymouth or Dodge van on Bernard Street, sometime between 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. Newspaper reporting later described what seems to be a similar lead. The operator of a towing company near St. Mary's Cemetery reportedly saw a 78 or 79 van with a lot of bodywork primer pulled up along Bernard Street in the early morning hours of February 17. He thought whoever was inside might be dumping garbage, so he followed the van for about a mile before losing it. At some point, police took that witness to look at a van that may have matched the description.

• 11:56Kylie Low?

  According to the tow truck operator, it was not the same van, though. The records available to me so far do not establish whether the van had anything to do with Kasha. Another lead came from a nearby service station. A man who worked there told police that a tall, light-skinned black man, about 30 to 40 years old, wearing a red baseball cap and a stone-washed jacket, had come into the station and said he'd been looking for cans when he noticed a woman's body on Bernard Street. The man then walked up Talbot Avenue toward Codman Square. The service station worker said the man was with an unknown woman. He described her as black and wearing a dark-colored or black long coat,

• 12:41Kylie Low?

  and that she also said she had seen the body on Bernard Street. There's one more detail from the early investigation that stands out to me, although redactions make it hard to fully interpret. It comes from a report with the date redacted for some reason, but based on the details contained in the narrative itself, it was likely written on or around February 28. Detectives wrote that a witness described an encounter on the afternoon of February 21. According to that witness, a young man, described as a light-skinned black male, about 18 to 20 years old, asked whether police could get fingerprints off a blanket.

• 13:26Kylie Low?

  That was a very specific question, because Kasha had been found wrapped in a blanket. The report does not make it clear enough for me to say who asked it, why they asked it, or what police made of it at the time, but file that away for later. By the end of February, police had more than a few loose threads, and in my opinion, plenty of things that needed follow-up. What they did not have was a cause of death. That responsibility fell to the medical examiner's office.

• 14:03Kylie Low?

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• 14:47Kylie Low?

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• 15:07Kylie Low?

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• 15:50Kylie Low?

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• 16:25Kylie Low?

  Kasha's autopsy was conducted by Suffolk County Medical Examiner Dr. Gerald Feigen. The report itself was withheld from the records I received via public records request, but it's referenced in several places throughout the hundreds of pages I did receive. Now, in the earliest reports, first responders had described blood or fluid coming from Kasha's nose, a possible cut on her forehead, and bruising to her face, and what the DA's preliminary field report called "apparent multiple trauma to face." There are several documents that note this in the case file I have. However, Dr. Feigen's findings did not line up cleanly with that first impression.

• 17:08Kylie Low?

  Dr. Feigen found no evidence of external trauma on Kasha's body. Internally, he also found no abnormalities, no bone fractures, and no bruising under the skin. He did not find any evidence of trauma inside Kasha's mouth or in the muscles of her neck. Her hands and fingernails were clean, and there was no evidence of a struggle. However, a Boston Globe report based on a copy of the autopsy said the report did note, quote, "a scant amount of blood present over the upper forehead and left temple," end quote. Kasha's lungs were heavy with fluid or moisture. There were also small petechia, tiny pinpoint spots in her eyes,

• 17:51Kylie Low?

  and froth or pulmonary edema fluid from her nose and mouth. In Dr. Feigen's opinion, these findings could fit several different causes of death: heart or kidney failure, a heart attack, suffocation, drowning, or asphyxiation. But they weren't conclusive of anything. A toxicology screen might offer more insight into Kasha's death, so tissue and blood samples were sent for testing. And then Kasha's body was released to her mother for a funeral and cremation. According to reporting at the time, Dr. Stanton Kessler, who was then the head of the Boston Medical Examiner's Office, approved the cremation at Phyllis's request

• 18:33Kylie Low?

  before the office had received the toxicology results. Over a month later, on March 29, the toxicology screen came back negative for drugs, alcohol, and poison. Further testing for rare drugs and poisons also found none. Dr. Feigen reportedly planned to send for additional testing related to sickle cell anemia because Phyllis had said Kasha carried the sickle cell trait. But if that testing was ever completed, it's not included in the documents I have access to. According to the autopsy, there was no visible fatal injury, no overdose, no poisoning, and no organ abnormality. The findings could fit asphyxiation,

• 19:16Kylie Low?

  but Dr. Feigen also believed they could fit another noncriminal cause. By April, the case was caught in a figurative no-man's land between the Boston Police and the Medical Examiner's Office. Police had labeled Kasha's case a sudden death and were waiting for the Medical Examiner's Office to determine cause and manner of death. The Medical Examiner's Office, meanwhile, was waiting for police to produce additional evidence that could help explain the autopsy finding. No one had the piece the other side said it needed. Phyllis was left in the middle, grieving her daughter and trying to understand what had happened.

• 19:55Kylie Low?

  On April 24th, 1990, Phyllis's attorney, Michael P. Doolin, wrote to Assistant District Attorney Francis O'Meara, asking for an update on the investigation. In the letter, Doolin said Phyllis was somewhat confused about what steps had been taken, who was working the case, and what the autopsy had revealed about Kasha's cause of death. After not receiving a response to the April letter, Doolin followed up on May 10. Around that same time, a journalist, just a few months into her job at The Boston Globe, started looking into Kasha's case. Her name is Toni Losi, and her reporting is the reason I know Kasha's name at all.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  The city editor came up to me, and he said that he'd gotten a call from a funeral director in Dorchester or Roxbury. And it was Mr. Williams, you know? And he gave me a phone number. He says, "Call him. He wants to talk about some case." And I said, "Sure." So I called him, and he told me about Kasha. And I just started looking into it.

• 20:58Kylie Low?

  Pastor Floyd A. Williams, undertaker and director of the Floyd A. Williams Funeral Home in Dorchester, was concerned that Kasha's body had been released for cremation while the cause of death was still pending. According to Toni's reporting, Williams said he asked Dr. Stanton Kessler at the medical examiner's office if he was sure Kasha should be cremated. Williams claimed Kessler responded that there was no problem, because the test results would probably come back showing drugs in her system anyway.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  He convinced me, they jumped to a conclusion. And he said, "There's something not right here." He said, "They just, they just wrote her off."

• 21:40Kylie Low?

  Kessler later told Toni he did not remember making that comment, but said, "I might have said that in another case. I talked to him about so many cases." End quote. The medical examiner's office defended releasing Kasha's body for cremation, saying it had preserved the tissue samples needed for testing. Phyllis believed assumptions had been made about her daughter from the beginning. She told Toni she felt police saw Kasha as, "Just another black child," and that "all black children are on drugs." End quote. Those fears landed in a city already raw from the Carol Stewart case.

• 22:22Kylie Low?

  Just months earlier, Charles Stewart had falsely claimed that a black man shot him and his pregnant wife, Carol. Police accepted that story and turned their attention toward black neighborhoods.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  What the police did, they went into the Mission Hill area of Boston, on horseback into minority neighborhoods, and, and they were bracing every young black man they saw. And it caused a lot of tension between-- Boston was ready to explode. It really was. When I got there, you could feel the tension. You could feel it.

• 22:59Kylie Low?

  Charles Stewart died by suicide as investigators discovered the truth. He killed Carol. Kasha was found dead less than a month later.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Phyllis deserved for someone to shake some trees and try to find out what happened to her daughter.

• 23:17Kylie Low?

  Toni zeroed in on the autopsy and possible causes of death. Dr. Feigen told her he had considered possibilities including drowning, an irregular heartbeat related to pregnancy, sickle cell trait, and amniotic fluid from the fetus entering Kasha's system. But according to Toni, who saw the autopsy report herself, none of those possibilities had been established by the findings. She then sought outside opinions. Dr. Werner Spitz, a forensic pathologist who had once trained Feigen, believed Kasha's death should have been ruled a homicide, and that she had probably been strangled.

• 23:59Kylie Low?

  Dr. Feigen disagreed, saying strangulation was not obvious from the evidence, and calling that conclusion a shot in the dark. Toni also consulted an OBGYN, who did not agree that sickle cell trait, irregular heartbeat, or amniotic fluid embolism explained Kasha's death. Toni's story hadn't even been published yet, but by late May, likely because of her digging into the case, the investigation was showing new signs of life. By the end of May, investigators were finally conducting new interviews. And one of the first people they sat down with was David, the person Kasha had told witnesses was the father of her unborn child.

• 24:43Kylie Low?

  From what I can tell, in all the documents I received from the Suffolk County DA's office, and the records are not comprehensive, this is the first clearly documented police interview or successful contact with David, more than three months after Kasha was found dead. The apparently brief conversation is summarized in a report dated May 30th, 1990. By then, detectives had multiple witnesses saying Kasha expected to meet David after work on February 16th. But David gave them a different version. He told police he had not seen Kasha since around Christmas, that she had only called him a few times from work since then, and that he was not the father of the baby.

• 25:28Kylie Low?

  David told detectives he learned about Kasha's death from someone at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he worked. He said he had heard stories that Kasha had been sexually assaulted, beaten to death, stabbed, and robbed. Now detectives had two versions of Kasha's final plans. Witnesses said she expected to see David after work. David said he hadn't seen her in months. But David's statements only got more complicated when a witness hand-delivered the items that were missing from Kasha's body when she was found. According to witnesses, Kasha had a long, black leather jacket and a black and brown Liz Claiborne pocketbook with her when she left work.

• 26:13Kylie Low?

  But neither item was listed among her belongings when she was found on Bernard Street. On May 31st, the day after police interviewed David, a young woman and her mother turned over a blue and brown Liz Claiborne pocketbook, a matching wallet, gold earrings found inside the pocketbook, and a full-length, black leather coat. From what I've gathered, the young woman was David's girlfriend. She told police that for Valentine's Day, David had given her a teddy bear and balloons, but had promised more gifts. She said that sometime around the weekend after Valentine's Day, she found the unwrapped coat and pocketbook on her bed. Inside the pocketbook, she found earrings and a matching wallet.

• 26:58Kylie Low?

  The obvious question here: How did David get Kasha's things if he said he hadn't seen her since Christmas?

• 27:06Speaker 00

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• 27:42Kylie Low?

  Every small town has a local legend. The house no one drives past after dark, or the woods that hold secrets. Every October, I like to add something a little more spooky to my playlist. Stories that blur the line between what's imagined and what might be waiting in the dark. Full Body Chills returns with more strange coincidences, unsettling confessions, and stories where danger may be closer than it seems. Listen to Full Body Chills all October long, wherever you get your podcasts. Toni Losi's story, "Inquiry Questioned in Unexplained Death," was published in The

• 28:26Kylie Low?

  Boston Globe on June 3rd, 1990. The next day, police executed a search warrant at the home of Lennox David James Jr. and his parents. The search warrant itself and the return were withheld from the records I received, so I don't know every item investigators were looking for. But according to later documents, police searched David's room and didn't find the items listed in the warrant. But during the search, detectives spoke with David again, and the black leather coat came up. David told the detective that he bought the black leather coat in question from another woman. But that story changed about 24 hours later. The day after the search, David called detectives and said he wanted to talk away from his

• 29:11Kylie Low?

  house. So they picked him up. I don't have a transcript of that June 5 interview, but the police report says David told detectives he lied the day before. He said he didn't actually buy the coat from another woman. Instead, he said he'd taken a cab to Kasha's house on Thursday, February 15th, because she owed him money. According to the report, David claimed Kasha first offered him a blue cloth coat, then swapped it for the leather coat she was wearing. He also said Kasha had given him the pocketbook earlier, sometime in January, and that he gave the purse and jacket to his current girlfriend on Friday, February 16th.

• 29:53Kylie Low?

  The report says David cried uncontrollably for 20 to 30 minutes during the interview, and told detectives he still loved Kasha and missed her, but insisted he did not see her on February 16th. A few weeks later, on June 23rd, David went to the police station again, this time with his mother, for a recorded interview. Detectives read him his Miranda rights, and according to the records, he agreed to continue speaking without a lawyer present. In that recorded interview, David again said he went to Kasha's house on February 15th because she owed him money. He said Kasha couldn't pay him back, so she gave him the leather coat instead. He said the pocketbook had come from Kasha separately about a week earlier, and he didn't

• 30:38Kylie Low?

  know anything about the earrings found inside it. Detectives pressed him on the timeline. Witnesses said Kasha was wearing a long, black leather coat and carrying her pocketbook when she left work on Friday, February 16th. If Kasha had given David those items before then, how could coworkers have seen her with them the next day? David pushed back. He did not accept the way detectives framed the contradiction. At different points, he seemed to suggest that they were mixing up what people had said, confusing the timing, or wording their questions in a way that made his answers sound inconsistent. He maintained that Kasha could not have been wearing the same coat on Friday if she had

• 31:23Kylie Low?

  already given it to him on Thursday. Detectives also asked whether David knew Kasha was identifying him as the father of her baby. He said he didn't. Then, they brought up something that, in the records I have, first appears in this June 23 interview but had clearly come from earlier in the investigation. A reported three-way phone call involving Kasha, David, and another young woman. Detectives would not have been able to confront David with that call unless someone had already told them about it. And if the account was true, it gave investigators a possible motive: that David didn't want

• 32:03Kylie Low?

  his mother to know Kasha was pregnant, or that Kasha was saying the baby was his. The way the detective described it, Kasha supposedly said during this call that if David did not have the "gumption" to tell his mother, she would do it herself. The detective said David responded that he would "kick Kasha's ass" if she did that, then hung up. David denied that was true, but he told detectives Kasha would sometimes say the baby was his, then say it wasn't, and that it was all, in his words, "a good joke." Near the end of the interview, detectives asked about something else that had surfaced

• 32:44Kylie Low?

  earlier: whether David had ever asked if police could get fingerprints off something connected to Kasha's case. Remember I said to file away the "blanket fingerprint detail" for later? Well, David acknowledged talking about fingerprints one night, but said it was more like, quote, "is there any fingerprints? Don't they have anything?" End quote. Then the detective asked where David thought the fingerprints would be. The following is verbatim from the transcript. David said, "On the blanket." The detective asked, "On the blanket? What blanket?" David answered, "I don't know. People said she was wrapped in a blanket."

• 33:28Kylie Low?

  Then the detective asked, "Is that what you transported her in?" David denied it. He said, "I don't know how you think I did something. No." By the end of that June 23 interview, the circumstantial case was getting stronger, but Kasha's cause and manner of death were still officially undetermined, so investigators and prosecutors turned to a process designed for exactly that kind of uncertainty: an inquest. The inquest was held at Dorchester District Court over three days in October of 1990. Reporter Tony Losi remembers being at the courthouse, but not "inside the courtroom" because inquests are secret proceedings.

• 34:11Kylie Low?

  Phyllis, however, was allowed to hear the testimony.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Phyllis was a nervous wreck, and I worried about how she was going to be able to sit there and listen to that kind of testimony, especially when they were talking about the autopsy. And so I gave her a legal tablet, and I said, "Phyllis," I said, "I need you to take notes for me." You know? I gave her something to do, you know? And she was all into it.

• 34:38Kylie Low?

  According to Tony Losi's reporting of the inquest, based on Phyllis's notes, three police officers testified that they saw injuries on Kasha's face when her body was found. Those injuries did not appear in Dr. Feigen's autopsy findings in the same way. Dr. Feigen testified that he had narrowed his possible cause of death theories to three: a blow to the back of Kasha's neck, squeezing of her neck just below her jaw, or a chokehold from behind. But those were still possibilities, not a definitive ruling. The inquest also brought the coat and pocketbook to the very center of the case.

• 35:19Kylie Low?

  David's current girlfriend testified that he gave her a coat on February 16th, the same day Kasha disappeared, and that the coat belonged to Kasha, the same coat Kasha was reportedly wearing when she left work. David himself was also called to testify but invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The inquest did not solve Kasha's case. It did not explain why she was on Bernard Street, or how David came to have her belongings. But it put the case on a different track. Prosecutors now had to decide whether the circumstantial evidence was strong enough to move forward without the medical certainty everyone had been waiting for.

• 36:03Kylie Low?

  In May of 1991, more than a year after Kasha Blunt was found on Bernard Street, a Suffolk County grand jury returned two murder indictments against Lennox David James Jr., one for Kasha's death, and one for the death of her unborn child. David turned himself in after the indictment and pleaded not guilty. But even as the case moved toward trial, the prosecution's theory remained difficult to pin down. In a bill of particulars, the Commonwealth said the "offense happened on or about February 16th, sometime between 5:00 PM and 7:00 AM the next morning." Prosecutors said the assault happened somewhere in Dorchester, but they could not be more specific.

• 36:48Kylie Low?

  They alleged that David caused Kasha's death by assaulting her with his hands or feet, or with a weapon or other instrument, either alone or in combination with his hands or feet. That uncertainty became the defense's central argument in trying to get the charges dismissed before trial. David's attorneys argued that the Commonwealth had no confession, no murder weapon, no physical evidence placing David on Bernard Street, no medical ruling that Kasha had been murdered, and no determination of cause, manner, or time of death. The Commonwealth argued that an undetermined cause of death did not automatically prevent a murder prosecution. Prosecutors could still try to prove, through circumstantial evidence, that Kasha died

• 37:31Kylie Low?

  by violence and that David was criminally responsible. The charges were not dropped pre-trial, but part of the case narrowed. David's attorneys moved to suppress statements he made to police on May 30th, June 4th, June 5th, and June 23 of 1990, so all four of his interviews. And the defense was partially successful. A judge allowed the May 30 statement, but it suppressed the June 4th and June 5th statements because David had not been Mirandized. The June 23 recorded interview was not suppressed because David had gone to the station with his mother, was given Miranda warnings, and the court found he voluntarily spoke with police.

• 38:16Kylie Low?

  The court also separated the two indictments, ruling that trying both counts together would complicate the case. The murder charge involving Kasha would be tried first. Lennox David James went on trial for Kasha's murder in April of 1992. The Commonwealth had a suspicious timeline, disputed statements, a possible motive, and Kasha's belongings in the hands of David's girlfriend. The defense had the problem that had shadowed the case from the beginning. Dr. Feigen still could not say to a reasonable medical certainty how Kasha died. And if no one could prove that Kasha was murdered, how could the prosecution prove that someone murdered her?

• 39:01Kylie Low?

  It turns out, they couldn't. On May 5, 1992, the jury found Lennox David James Jr. not guilty. A Suffolk County District Attorney's Daily Report later summarized the outcome like this: "Medical examiner was unable to determine the cause of death. Evidence indicated that death was consistent with suffocation or strangulation. Strong circumstantial case that defendant killed the victim. However, jurors had a problem with the cause of death." Jurors may have had questions about David, the belongings, the pregnancy, and the timeline,

• 39:42Kylie Low?

  but questions are not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I attempted to locate Lennox David James Jr. for this episode. I was not able to track him down directly, though I contacted people who appeared to be connected to his family, and I didn't receive a response. To be clear, David was acquitted. Legally, David was found not guilty of Kasha Blunt's murder. I found no record of anyone else being charged or convicted in Kasha Blunt's death. The verdict ended the criminal case against David James, but it did not answer the question Phyllis Johnson had been asking since the day she identified her daughter: what happened

• 40:24Kylie Low?

  to Kasha?

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• 41:02Kylie Low?

  Every small town has a local legend. The house no one drives past after dark, or the woods that hold secrets. Every October, I like to add something a little more spooky to my playlist: stories that blur the line between what's imagined and what might be waiting in the dark. Full Body Chills returns with more strange coincidences, unsettling confessions, and stories where danger may be closer than it seems. Listen to Full Body Chills all October long, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 41:40Kylie Low?

  Phyllis believed the early handling of the case shaped everything that came after. In 1992, she told a reporter, quote, "If they would have come to my house and talked to me and seen how we live and know that she was not that kind of child, things might have been different," end quote. Dr. Gerald Fagan later said in response to Toni Lousi's reporting that he was misquoted and misrepresented. He told Globe reporter Robert L. Keurst that he spent more time on Kasha's case than any other because it's what the case needed, and he accused the reporter of trying to turn the case into a, quote, "racial issue," end quote. Toni Lousi maintained that she did not misquote anyone at any time and did not intend to

• 42:24Kylie Low?

  make the case a racial issue. In the years after Kasha's death, Dr. Fagan's work and testimony came under scrutiny in other cases. One of the most well-known was the 1997 Louise Woodard case, often called the Boston Nanny Case. Dr. Fagan performed the autopsy on eight-month-old Matthew Eppen. Woodard was convicted of second-degree murder, but the trial judge later reduced that conviction to involuntary manslaughter. Part of the controversy around Dr. Fagan's testimony in that case involved the amount of force necessary to cause Matthew's skull fracture.

• 43:05Kylie Low?

  According to reporting on the case, Dr. Fagan had previously described the force as equivalent to a fall from a much greater height, but at trial acknowledged that a fall of just a few feet could cause that kind of injury. There was also the case of David McHugh, a Massachusetts teacher and counselor who died after being kicked in the head while breaking up a school fight. Dr. Fagan ruled that death a homicide, which supported a murder charge against a 14-year-old boy. But later reporting says an independent pathologist found that Fagan had not performed a standard examination of McHugh's heart. After Fagan left the medical examiner's office, Dr. Kessler amended the manner of

• 43:48Kylie Low?

  death from homicide to undetermined, and the murder charge was dropped. None of that proves Dr. Fagan was wrong in Kasha's case. It does not prove bias. It does not prove negligence, but it does show that Kasha's autopsy was not the only case where questions were raised about Dr. Fagan's conclusions, his testimony, or the weight his medical findings carried in a criminal prosecution. I wanted to give Dr. Fagan the opportunity to speak for himself about Kasha's case specifically. When I reached him by phone more than three decades after Kasha's death, he remembered the case almost immediately.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  The reason I remember it is because it was very frustrating for me professionally. My job is to answer questions. My job is to tell a family how their loved one died and, if need be, to represent it in court. And just about every single time, I can do it. And when you can't, it's frustrating. That's why I have a very distinct memory of this case. You know, I thought it might be a homicide, but I could never figure it. There was no trauma on her whatsoever.

• 44:52Kylie Low?

  I asked him about the early reports from Bernard Street, the apparent cut, the possible bruising, the blood or fluid seen on Kasha's face.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  When people are lying on the ground, you're going to, by gravity, you're going to get certain things, but it doesn't mean there's trauma.

• 45:08Kylie Low?

  He also pushed back on the idea that strangulation should have been obvious.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  I did a full autopsy with neck, and there was no trauma to the neck, if I remember correctly. Obviously, I don't have a report with me. There's no evidence of strangulation. That's something I'm not going to miss, then or now.

• 45:26Kylie Low?

  I asked him directly about the suggestion that Kasha's race could have played a role in how her autopsy was handled. Dr. Fagan strongly denied that.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely not. You know, I teach medical students, and I am so offended by racism of every sort, and I won't go into presidential politics now, but people are all the same on the inside, and the only thing different on the outside is the size of the melanin granules, yet we make the biggest fuss about it. And I've warned my students that you treat everybody equally because we're all the same, and we all deserve equal treatment. And I repeat that almost every rotation, and I'm offended by even the thought of that. That's the way it is. Everybody's the same. We're all equal. I take government service very seriously.

• 46:22Speaker 04

  Anybody calls my office, I return every call as soon as I get into my office.

• 46:26Kylie Low?

  The environment at the time, that being 1990, in Boston, it was a tense time between law enforcement and the black community.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  I'm not law enforcement. I'm a doctor. Not only that, but I'm Jewish, and that's not how I was raised. I'm just really offended by that because, you know, it's not who I am, how I grew up, how I've always been my entire life. I've been raised to treat everybody the same. I treat everybody equally. I don't care about skin color. I don't care about sexual orientation. I don't care about any of that stuff. I mean, I'm heterosexual. My dance teacher is gay. We've competed internationally in same-sex ballroom dance competitions, where I'm the only straight male there. And I don't care because we're all people and we're all friends. My job is to answer questions.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  I work for the people who pay my salary, and that's every taxpayer. And my job is to answer the questions, and without fail, I try to do the best I can, what the science will allow. And just because somebody wants me to do it doesn't mean I can.

• 47:33Kylie Low?

  He's still frustrated by how Toni Lousi reported on him and the case. He told me that, at the time, he wanted to bring Toni on a TV show designed to let people air their grievances in unique ways.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  There used to be a show called Grudge Match, and I tried to go there. We liked to throw pies at each other, but they had canceled it because I was just annoyed the way she reported it.

• 47:58Kylie Low?

  But the most important thing Dr. Fagan told me was not about Toni Lousi, or criticism, or even his own career. It was about the limits of what he believed he could honestly say, and yet going to trial anyway.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  You don't lie under oath. You raise your right hand, and you swear to tell the truth. So you tell the truth. If the evidence isn't there, you can't lie and make stuff up. It doesn't work that way. I was pushed into testifying in that without a lot of evidence, and that, it really bothered me.

• 48:31Kylie Low?

  This is where Kasha's case still sits, in total uncertainty. What's left are the questions. If Kasha was killed, where did it happen? The Commonwealth alleged the assault happened somewhere in Dorchester, but even in the Bill of Particulars, prosecutors could not be more specific. How did Kasha get from work in Dedham to wherever she was after work, to Bernard Street? And what about the people connected to the discovery of her body? I can't stop thinking about the man who came into the service station saying there was a woman's body on Bernard Street. He was reportedly with an unknown woman in a long, dark-colored or black coat who also

• 49:16Kylie Low?

  said she saw the body. A long, dark-colored or black coat sounds a lot like Kasha's coat that ended up in the possession of David's girlfriend after Kasha's death. So who were those people? Were they simply passersby, or did they know more than they said? Of all the theories floated for Kasha's cause of death, criminal, intentional or not, there is another that stayed at the edges of the investigation. In an interview with a man who knew David, a Suffolk County DA investigator talked through different kinds of deaths, including murders, manslaughter's, and accidental deaths. The investigator specifically emphasized deaths between young men and women during,

• 50:01Kylie Low?

  quote-unquote, "lovers' embraces," and the panic that can set in afterward. He also explained that someone who was not involved in the death but helped afterward, for example, by carrying a body, was not necessarily committing a serious crime, and that immunity could be granted. If the investigator was hoping that framing would lead the witness to disclose something new, the records don't show that it did. According to the investigator, the witness said he understood, but repeated that he had no knowledge beyond what he had already said. That idea also echoes something detectives pressed David on during his June 23 interview.

• 50:43Kylie Low?

  A detective suggested that David knew what happened, got scared, and dumped Kasha's body. David denied that, too. So even while prosecutors ultimately pursued a murder case, another possibility hovered on the periphery. Something could have happened, perhaps accidental, maybe during a sex act, someone panicked, and the truth was never fully exposed. I should note, I don't see anything in the source material I have that references a sexual assault kit or any documented forensic follow-up around possible sexual assault or sexual activity in Kasha's case, despite the used condoms reported near the scene, the state of Kasha's clothing, and the DA's preliminary field report noting that the

• 51:28Kylie Low?

  area near Bernard Street was known for sex work. Because Kasha's body was cremated, no full reexamination of her body is possible now. The records do show that some tissue samples and slides were preserved. That's not the same as having Kasha's body available for further examination. It will always bother Toni Lousi.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  They'd blown it. The fact that they had released the body for cremation, and Phyllis didn't know, she didn't know, you know, and she wanted to have the service for her daughter. She wanted to do that, as anybody would, but they never explained to her, well, maybe we should wait. Maybe we should wait until we get those test results back. But nobody said anything to her because they just didn't give a damn. To me, you know, that's the heartbreaking part of this story, is that they should have done their jobs, and they should have done them better. I just wish that we had found out about it before Kasha had been cremated, you know,

• 52:31Speaker 02

  and maybe there would have been, there could have been another, you know, more evidence they could have been gathered than there was. But by the time we got to it, it was too late.

• 52:46Kylie Low?

  When I think about Kasha, I keep coming back to one small detail. She had more than a hundred stuffed animals in her room. It's such a tender, innocent image, a young woman preparing for motherhood, still surrounded by the childhood things she collected and loved. Kasha Blunt's story doesn't come up often, if at all, in conversations about unresolved or disputed deaths in Boston. I think part of that is because of where the case ended. There was no conviction to anchor the story in public memory, but there was also no answer that allowed the people who loved her to let it rest. That is why I wanted to bring Kasha's story forward. Kasha Blunt should not be left in uncertainty.

• 53:30Kylie Low?

  She was loved. She was expected home. She was preparing for a future she never got to live. More than 35 years later, saying her name with care is one small way to give her back some of what the record never did: attention, dignity, and the reminder that she was never just a question no one could answer. If you have information about Kasha or her case, email me at [email protected].

• 54:07Kylie Low?

  Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram, @darkdowneast. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Low, and this is Dark Down East.

• 54:39Kylie Low?

  Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and AudioChuck. I think Chuck would approve.

• 54:51Speaker 05

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff, and they said, "Maybe she'll find out where this girl is." I saw him violent. Backhanded her. Pow!

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.