Good Evening everyone! Welcome to a new episode of Love and Murder – the weekly true crime podcast discussing relationships gone terribly wrong. And when I say terribly wrong, how wrong do I mean [Dead wrong].
I am your host Ky along with my co-host Char.
Our show discusses true crime cases told in the form of a story with mystery, suspense, and just a little bit of humor sprinkled on top – but never at the expense of the victim.
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Tonight were’re back to our isosceles love triangle. In this triangle is a church going wife, her husband, and the pastor. What happens when you put that in a blender and hit mix.
But first, I’m gonna give you my weekly reminder to listen to our last episode – the Case of Marybeth Tinning. This case was about a mother whose maternal instinct is to cause pain, lies, and murder! This case is called Mommy Dearest and it’s episode 58.
And in our exclusive community I just dropped a ton of bonus episodes – updates on Johnny Depp and Amber Heard – her two part interview – I put the videos in the group so you didn’t have to search for it yourself. We also have our June Crazy Crime Round
A man who took drastic measures in an argument with his parents
Our justice system allowed a crazed killer to go free
A woman who couldn’t remember being pregnant
And a missing baby whose mother knew more than she was saying
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Now on to the show.
Today we are talking about Cindy Reese
No birthdate or place was mentioned for Cindy but, Cindy Kaye Henderson married her college boyfriend, but their marriage was tumultuous. After 12 years of marriage, he shot himself in the head with a shotgun in the basement of their home in 2007. She had discovered the body
About a year later, in Morris, Alabama, friends introduced her to Michael Reese. Their relationship was amazing and the friends liked them together.
On September 5, 2009 Cindy and Michael got married after only a year and a half of dating.
Went on a honey moon in Disneyland.
Cindy worked as an accountant with the Jefferson County Finance Department.
The couple were regular members of their local church. Things went well for the couple for a few years. They were genuinely happy and lived a peaceful life until 2013.
In 2013, Jeffrey David Brown became the senior pastor at their local church where Cindy was the minister of music.
Jeff was married and was very interactive with the church and its people, including Cindy’s husband.
Throughout 2014, the Brown family and the Reese family became close friends. The Reeses often babysat Brown’s two children.
Then, in the spring of 2014, Jeff and Cindy began having an affair – after 5 years of Cindy being married to Michael
Now, in a small town of only about 2000 people, they started gossiping. They were seen hanging out, always flirting, and giggling. Someone also spotted them having sex in Jeff’s truck
They were also caught having sex in her car in her job’s parking garage
The sexual nature of their relationship lasted until the fall of that year, when their actions were discovered by the other church leaders – you think? Having sex everywhere and acting like they weren’t married
Jeff had to step down from being the senior pastor before the news broke to the whole town and Cindy had to tell Michael about her affair.
Michael told her that he would work harder on their marriage and even surprised her with a trip to Disney World
Jeff’s wife, preganat with their third child, had a different approach than Michael. She told Jeff – you see this ass here? Yea pucker up and kiss it you cheating bastard and walked her pregnanat self down to the court house and filed for divorce.
Cindy and Michael, on the other hand, went on their trip to Disney World, had a romantic time, talked about having kids soon, and overall reconnected. Cindy said Jeff called her constantly throughout her trip. “Jeff wouldn’t leave me alone and let me enjoy my vacation.”
After their return, she continued talking to Jeff on a daily basis, and didn’t complete break up with him.
She admitted to having a savings account with Jeff, and having her name on his title of his vehicle and the lease to his apartment; however, she said she only let him use her credit, and she never paid any bills associated with the car or the apartment.
On February 18, 2015 Cindy said she went to lunch with Brown to help him with some of his divorce paperwork. After he dropped her back off at work, Michael picked her up. The couple went to her mother’s house and then to church. She and Michael went to Milo’s (a local fast food joint), and while on the way home, Reese told her husband that she needed a few groceries from Piggly Wiggly.
She said she helped her husband take the food inside, and she left to go to the grocery store.
Cindy said she met Brown at a gas station about 10 minutes away, where she gave him $15 for gas, and then went to Piggly Wiggly.
When Cindy returned home, she testified, the coffee table was turned on its side and the front room of the house was in disarray. She then picked up the house phone, backed outside the home, and called 911 at around 8pm. She said she never saw her husband She called out to her husband Michael Reese, but didn’t know where he was.
When the police arrived, they found Michael Reese shot dead, execution-style, in the kitchen in the rear of the home
Detectives also found no indication of forced entry and nothing was missing from their home
Police investigators said when they arrived on the scene later that night, there was a Piggly Wiggly bag containing ham and orange juice in the home.
Local detectives suspected something was wrong when they saw that the couple’s French fries from Milo’s had not been eaten. Why would Cindy go to the store before eating her hot French Fries was a serious question during the investigation.
Within a month, both Cindy and Jeffrey were arrested for the murder of Michael
Brown pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2016 to reduce his sentence to 20 years in prison and avoid trial. He also agreed to testify against Cindy during her trial. He said Cindy Reese gave him cash for his car and apartment after the affair ended
Jeff came out of the gate with “first and foremost, I was with Cindy in an affair but – and here me out here – I never had sexual relations with that woman.”
He denied being in a sexual relationship with Cindy – just an emotional affair
Do you think an emotional affair is cheating?
He also said that, Cindy frequently spoke about wanting her husband dead and once asked him to hire a hitman. Jeffrey said that he tried to hire two hitman but they turned him down. He also said that Cindy brought up the idea of poisoning her husband. He also stated that Cindy had given him the murder weapon to dispose of, along with some of her jewelry she had taken from their home to stage the robbery. Jeffrey said that he dumped the .38 revolver on Highway 75 in Pinson and gave the accessories to another woman.
However, Cindy said that she loved her husband and didn’t want him to die. She admitted to having an affair with Jeffrey and said it was a sexual one. She also testified that Jeffrey became angry that she wouldn’t divorce her husband so Jeffrey plot the murder and killed Michael after hiding in the back of their home and ambushing him. Additionally, according to the prosecution and the phone company records, Cindy was talking to Jeffrey, he called her 7 times the morning after the murder.
911 tapes revealed Cindy was talking to another person when the line connected and telling the other person her phone was about to die. According to the prosecution and cell phone records, she was talking to Brown.
During Reese’s trial, as reported by AL.com, the prosecution argued that when the couple returned home from church, she shot her husband in the back of his head, described by Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr as an “execution-style killing.” Reese then went to Piggly Wiggly, bought groceries and returned home, where she staged the place to look like a burglary before calling 911, prosecutors said.
Cindy never confessed in killing her husband and claimed that she suffered PTSD after the death of her first husband who took his own life.
In December 2016, Reese was found guilty of her husband’s murder after 90 minutes of jury deliberation, the outlet reported.
Reese was sentenced to 40 years on January 11, 2017. She is not eligible for parole until 2030 and is serving her sentence at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, a facility in Wetumpka, Alabama, that has the capacity to hold 975 inmates.
Reese filed an appeal shortly after her sentencing and claimed that she should have been acquitted due to a lack of evidence that she killed her husband, AL.com reported. She also indicated that the court should have instructed the jury to consider a manslaughter charge. On August 11, 2017, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied her appeal and upheld her sentence, writing that “the State presented sufficient evidence from which the jury could conclude that Reese murdered Michael,” according to AL.com.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Brown is still in prison, incarcerated at the Staton Correctional Facility in Elmore, Alabama. According to the state records, Jeffrey can be considered for parole as early as July 2023, but if denied, he will only be released once his sentence is served in full.
In April of 2019, less than three years into Cindy’s 4-decade-long sentence, she was moved from Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women to a work-release program in Birmingham, Alabama. Based on her state-records, she was classified as a “minimum-out” inmate. This means that she is found by the authorities to not pose a public risk and can be assigned off-property work details that aren’t supervised by correctional officers. How this happened remains unclear though.
the work-release center is close to not only those who investigated and prosecuted the case against Reese but also Michael Reese’s family.
This sparked outrage from her late husband’s family and the law enforcement officers and prosecutors who worked the case. His father, Earl Reese, said, “It makes me sick, to be honest with you.”
Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr also criticized the decision:
The jury and judge heard evidence of this woman planning a murder of her husband and then she carried out the plan in an execution-style killing. … It’s a travesty of justice that this woman would be allowed to serve the remainder of her sentence outside a prison and in a work center as DOC has allowed. It’s a disgrace that our state would consider this new placement after only serving less than three years of her sentence.
At the time, an Alabama Department of Corrections spokesperson told AL.com that Reese hadn’t received an assignment in the community and she was there temporarily. Since then, Reese was transferred back to Tutwiler, although her custody status still indicates “Minimum-out.”
A spokesperson with the Alabama Department of Corrections told Heavy in an emailed statement that despite Reese’s custody status, she “does not leave the property for off-site job assignments,” nor do any other inmates at Tutwiler. The spokesperson also clarified that “a minimum custody level classification does not necessarily mean that the inmate in question will be housed in a minimum-security facility. In some cases, minimum custody level inmates are housed in maximum-security facilities.”
Her parole consideration date is in 2030.
And that is the story of Cindy Reese. Cindy is still in prison – although it may not be as locked down as she should be. Jeff is in prison but has a possibility of getting out next month. And Michael is dead.
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