The officer opened it, looked inside, and immediately changed his demeanor.
“What’s in there?” he asked.
“Just stuff,” Wade replied.
The officer closed the cooler and told Wade to step outside. Once they were out of the apartment, he told Wade he was under arrest. Other officers began securing the scene and arranging for additional investigators to respond. Wade, now sitting in the back of a patrol car, seemed eager to talk, but the officers around him already understood that the welfare check had become something far more serious.
One officer summarized the situation bluntly to a colleague: he was sitting in a car with a man who had done something very bad. Yet even then, police did not know the full scope of what had happened inside the apartment.
Wade was taken to the station. Investigators tried to keep him calm while they waited for a detective, even offering him food. He accepted some cookies and spoke casually. When the formal interview began, detectives started with his relationship to KJ.
Wade initially had described KJ as someone he knew from a shelter and had not heard from in months. Now he acknowledged that the relationship went much deeper. He said he had known her for years, had been connected to her on Facebook since at least 2013, and at some point they had dated. More recently, he said, KJ had even lived with him in the apartment.
The detective asked the question that mattered most: “In your own words, what happened to Kelly Jean?”
Wade paused. “I know she’s went through a lot,” he said. “Really a lot.”
He began constructing an explanation around KJ’s health. Wade described her as hyperglycemic and said her eating patterns were important. According to him, one day in March, KJ had been making cereal when she fainted, struck her head, and remained unconscious for several minutes. After that, he claimed, she developed serious problems with her memory, speech, mobility, and ability to care for herself.
The detective asked how long she had been unconscious after the supposed fall. Wade estimated five to ten minutes, acknowledging that even he understood that was a long time. He said KJ did not remember what had happened and that in the days afterward she seemed increasingly unable to perform normal tasks.
Wade framed himself as her caretaker. He said he tried to feed her, help her drink water, and watch over her as her condition worsened. At one point, he claimed he found her sitting on the bathtub and tried to feed her a packaged meal, but she moved so slowly that it frightened him. He also described bladder-control problems and said he had discussed with a caseworker the possibility that KJ might need adult foster care.
The problem was that Wade’s version of events was already colliding with statements from other people.
Police interviewed Wade’s next-door neighbor, Sherry. She said she and Wade had a cordial relationship and occasionally watched television together. Sherry remembered Wade mentioning that KJ had suffered a serious fall, but the location was different from the one he gave detectives. Wade had told Sherry that KJ fell in the bathroom and might have fractured her skull.
Sherry said she urged him to take KJ to the emergency room. Wade’s response had been that he was taking care of her himself.
That contradiction mattered. To detectives, a severe head injury followed by a prolonged decline should have triggered immediate medical care. Instead, Wade admitted that he never took KJ to a hospital. His explanations for why became increasingly vague.
Sherry had also grown uneasy around Wade for another reason. At one point, she said, he admitted that he hit women. Sherry had personal experience with domestic violence and told him directly that he could go to jail for that. According to her, Wade replied that he knew and was “working on it.” After that conversation, Sherry remained friendly but became more guarded and stopped spending as much time with him.
Back in the interview room, Wade continued his story. Within roughly two weeks of the supposed fall, he said, KJ’s condition became so poor that he believed she needed help with nearly everything. Yet the next part of his account was difficult to reconcile with that claim.
Wade said that one day he started a bath for KJ because he thought she would be safer lying in a bathtub than standing. He then left her alone. When he later returned, he said, she was not breathing.
He claimed he did not know exactly how she died. Maybe the water had become too hot. Maybe she had tried to move and fallen. Maybe something else happened. He repeatedly said he wanted to know the official cause of death because he did not understand it himself.
The detective asked how KJ had been positioned when Wade left the bathroom. Wade said she had been lying in the tub. When asked what he did after finding her unresponsive, his story became even harder to accept.
He did not call 911.
Instead, Wade said he went to sleep.