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"I’m here because she mattered. Her life mattered. My daughter mattered," Cindy Caswell said on the eight-year anniversary of the death of her daughter, Libby Caswell.
Cindy has never stopped fighting for Libby, who died in an Independence motel on Dec. 11, 2017.
The Independence Police Department maintains Libby ended her life.
Cindy and a group of experts continue their calls for a new investigation from the beginning. They say police didn't take a hard enough look at what they call red flags in Libby's case. Those red flags include a documented history of violence in Libby's relationship and witness stories that don't match up.
I-Team reporter Sarah Plake has been covering Libby's case for years — filing numerous records requests, interviewing a witness the police have never talked to, and talking to the people who knew Libby best.
We are sharing the information we've uncovered, including details we've never reported until now.
The 911 call
For eight years, the narrative of Libby's unexpected and suspicious death has centered on a 911 call that came in around 8 p.m. on December 11, 2017.
"My girlfriend, she hung herself in the bathroom with my belt and I just woke up and I don’t know what to do and I’m freaking out, someone please help me," the caller said.
It was Libby's on-and-off again boyfriend, who we're calling 'Kevin' because he's never been charged in the case. Kevin sounded hysterical on the phone.
The dispatcher asked him if Libby was breathing.
"No, ma'am, I don't think so," Kevin said. "I was asleep and I had woke up and found her. I don’t know how long she’s been there."
Kevin told the dispatcher he was asleep in room 319 at the Sports Stadium Motel on U.S. 40 Highway in Independence, and woke up to find Libby dead in the bathroom with his belt around her neck.
"Okay, are you able to undo the belt?" the dispatcher asked.
"No, I don’t want to touch her. Are you serious?!" Kevin shouted on the other line.
"Yes, I am serious," the dispatcher said.
"Oh my god, you want me to go in and touch her?" Kevin said. "Okay, hold on, I'm not even in my room, ma'am."
He told the dispatcher he somehow got locked out of his room.
Less than 5 minutes into the call, the line disconnected.
According to the police report, a witness said Kevin drove away from the motel while on the phone with 911. He was gone before first responders arrived.
By the end of the night, Libby’s mom, Cindy Caswell, said detectives were at her door.
"When they came to me and told me she committed suicide, [they] didn’t ask me any questions about domestic violence," Cindy said. "They didn't ask me any questions about the history between her and the people she was with at the time of her death."
Cindy has always believed – and a group of experts working pro bono have also come to believe – critical missteps prevented her daughter from getting a comprehensive, exhaustive investigation.
"There's little question that the entire history of violence and abuse against Libby Caswell was completely mishandled from the beginning to this very moment," said Casey Gwinn, the co-founder of Alliance for HOPE International, a domestic violence advocacy group that supports Cindy.
The loss of a young mother
Libby's family and friends describe her as bright, bubbly, non-judgmental, loving, and dedicated.
She was also a mother.
Short video clips, brief moments of Libby's life, show tender interactions with her son, Alexavier, called Zave for short.
Zave sitting on her lap at the doctor's office, Libby giving Zave a kiss on the head and smiling contentedly at the camera. Libby singing "Happy Birthday" as Zave yells excitedly about the birthday cake in front of him.
Another video shows Zave behind an astronaut filter on the screen.
"You're my handsome astronaut," Libby says, kissing his face.
Libby had been through a lot by the time she reached 21. But loved ones say her dedication was always to Zave.
"He was her everything and she was doing everything for him," Cindy said. "She’s missed out on a ton of things. She’d be so proud of him."
Zave was four when Libby died.
The scene
Police broke in the door to room 319 at the Sports Stadium Motel that night. All the lights were off except for the TV.
The small room was a mess with clothes and personal belongings strewn on the floor.
The door to the bathroom was closed and the light was off.
That's where police found Libby, "wedged between the toilet and the bathtub" with a camouflage belt wrapped "loosely" around her neck. The police report says her feet were propped up on the wall next to the door, the officer noting it looked like they were placed that way so the door would open and close. Investigators said she’d been dead for “an extended period of time.”
As Room 319 became a crime scene, Kevin showed up at Independence Police Headquarters that night around 11p.m., about three hours after he called 911.
"Obviously, you know why we’re here," Detective Steve Schmidli, now retired, is heard telling Kevin in the recorded police interview.
Kevin told investigators that he, Libby, and a friend checked into the motel around 7 a.m. that day. The friend, who we'll call Rick, left about an hour later.
Then, Kevin told police, he and Libby got into an argument.
"My drug use is what we argued about," Kevin said in the interview.
After that argument, Kevin said he fell asleep around 10 or 11 a.m. while Libby was getting ready to take a shower.
"And then at that point you remained asleep the entire time until you woke up this evening," Det. Schmidli said.
"Yes, sir," Kevin responded.
Kevin said he woke up around 8 p.m., which means he would have been asleep for about nine or 10 hours.
Then he repeated the story he told the 911 dispatcher.
"My belt, the top of it, I could see my belt sticking out of the top of the door and when I opened the door, she fell forward," Kevin said.
Kevin said Libby was cold to the touch and he tried to loosen the belt but he "freaked out." He said he drove off in her car.
"I went into shock and I got in the car and went to my dad's," Kevin said.
Another detective, Kevin Young, was in the interview room, but was off-camera.
"Do you see how this looks suspicious?" Young said. "Just by you leaving?"
Kevin insisted he had nothing to do with Libby's death.
"I promise you, I would not ever do anything to harm her physically," Kevin said.
Young sounded skeptical.
"I've investigated a lot of deaths, but I've never seen anyone be able to choke themselves out and kill themselves," Young said.
"That's what I'm saying," Kevin responded.
Back at the motel, a crime scene technician found a mark on the inside of the bathroom door they said was about the same width as the belt around Libby’s neck.
Investigators wrote in their report this indicated the door "was used to assist Ms. Caswell in hanging herself."
Shortly after is when Cindy said she received that knock at the door.
"I know she did not take her own life in that bathroom that day," Cindy said. "She was a victim of abuse."
History of domestic violence
Libby's family and friends have told me about a toxic relationship with Kevin that included physical violence.
The violence is also documented in IPD files the I-Team obtained.
One of those police reports say one of Kevin's family members told officers he saw Kevin “on top of [Libby] with his hands around her throat, strangling her” one week before her death.
Later that morning, Libby went to her supervised parent visit with Zave. She was working to get full custody after working through a drug addiction.
She told the parent aid, Colleen Huff, what happened.
"She said that Zave’s dad had just gotten out of jail and that he choked her," Huff said. "And she was afraid. She was afraid of him."
Huff wrote about it in her report from that day. Huff said she secured a spot at a domestic violence shelter, but at the last second, Libby changed her mind.
"And that's the last time I saw her," Huff said.
The family member who witnessed the alleged strangling did not report it to the police until a day after Libby's death.
It's not the only incident of violence in Libby and Kevin's relationship.
The I-Team uncovered at least a dozen domestic disturbance calls to Independence police, starting in 2013.
"We had called so many times to the police for his threats and stalking her, threatening us, that they deemed us a nuisance," Cindy said.
Police records we obtained show Cindy had to go to court and pay a fine because she called police to her house in Independence numerous times.
The police cited Cindy for "maintaining a nuisance property."
Police records show Cindy's house was "flagged as a disorderly house on 8-12-13, following numerous domestic disturbances" and Cindy was served "a written nuisance abatement notice on 8-12-13, following a subsequent disturbance."
Nearly every time she called the police, Kevin would run off before officers got there.
In Jan. 2014, a police report says Cindy called the police when Kevin refused to leave her house after he and Libby got into an argument. The officer who responded threatened that Cindy and Libby could be arrested if the police had to keep coming to the house.
"So, we decided we just wouldn't call them anymore; we would handle it ourselves and that totally devastated her," Cindy said.
The calls continued when Libby moved into a duplex and then an apartment. Those calls were from neighbors, the landlord, and friends. The records we obtained show the police were called because of screaming and fighting. One caller asked for a welfare check, saying Libby told the caller she was afraid to call the police and was in an abusive relationship.
At the time of her death, Libby’s loved ones say she was trying to leave Kevin for good.
"I think that’s where she was that last few weeks, just kind of complying to keep peace," Cindy said. "She was trying to, I think, figure out a way to get out of it and just became too late."
The Independence Police Department told us they did consider this history when Libby died.
"With the domestic violence history, we never looked at him any other way than as a suspect," Major Mike Onka said in a phone interview when we first reported on Libby's death in 2021.
The Independence Police Department has denied our interview requests since then.
At first, Onka said, they thought Kevin might have strangled Libby.
"We came out working it like a homicide," Onka said.
If that’s true, Cindy wonders why IPD seemingly made up their mind that night Libby died that it was a suicide. Cindy said police told her that night that Libby took her own life.
Even when Libby’s autopsy came back at the end of February 2017, with the manner of death ruled “undetermined," IPD closed the case as a suicide.
Former Jackson County Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Robert Pietak noted in his report he came to that conclusion because of the autopsy findings and the circumstances around her death.
The circumstances included a witness in the police file saying he heard fighting and a woman say, "Please stop hurting me" in room 319, the room Libby and Kevin rented.
"There are big missing pieces," Cindy said.
Hours of time are unaccounted for.
IPD didn’t collect the surveillance from the motel or surrounding businesses to corroborate Kevin’s story.
"We attempted to get the video," Onka said. "It was either operator error on the hotel staff. We do not have the video. Don't know whether that's because the system didn't recover it."
Onka said they recovered phones on the scene but it's unclear who the phones belonged to.
Nothing in the case file shows investigators tried to extract data from Libby's, Kevin's, or the friend Rick's phones.
Witness story contradicts alibi
In the last couple of years, a witness came forward to police with information Cindy thought would change everything.
"What [Kevin] is telling the police, the time frame is not correct. It's not correct," Tommy Basler, the witness, said.
Basler came forward with information that calls into question the entire timeline of the day Libby died.
"He knew she was dead that morning," Basler told I-Team reporter Sarah Plake.
Basler was friends with Kevin's dad. We'll call Kevin's dad 'Henry' as to not identify Kevin's real name because, again, he's not charged in the case.
Basler said he was at Henry's house the morning of Dec. 11, 2017, to give Henry's younger son a ride to school. He saw Kevin and his friend, Rick, pull up to the house.
"He said Libby had hung herself and she's back at the hotel, what should he do," Basler said. "His dad told him, 'I'll tell you what the **** to do, you call the ******* cops."
If what Basler is saying is true, that would mean Kevin was not asleep in the motel room the whole day like he told police.
It would also mean he knew Libby was dead hours before he called the police.
I’ve never been able to get a hold of Kevin to ask him about that day.
But Henry, Kevin's dad, says Kevin came to tell him Libby was dead in the morning, not the evening.
"It was around the time I was getting my kid up. I had to get my kid up to take him to school," Henry told us in a phone interview.
He said that time in his life is a little foggy because he was struggling with a drug addiction, but he remembers finding out about Libby's death in the morning.
"I do know that that is correct," Henry said.
While Henry can't account for the gap in time, if Kevin knew Libby was dead in the morning, but waited until 8 p.m. to call the police, he believes his son had nothing to do with her death.
"Absolutely not," Henry said. "It was really a sad deal for everybody. My son — that really changed his life."
Nothing in the case file shows IPD talked to Henry to corroborate Kevin’s story. Henry told us the same thing; police have never tried to talk to him.
Basler shared his account with IPD detectives, but it didn’t change anything.
"We’ve done everything and anything we can think of doing with this case," Onka said. "We don’t have enough to take to the prosecutor."
Case reopened and shut
We learned IPD reached out to the FBI in 2022. Through a records request, we found out the FBI sent agents to Room 319 to take measurements and pictures of the room. The FBI also consulted with an outside medical examiner named Dr. Vincent Tranchida.
We learned Tranchida looked at scene and autopsy pictures and the autopsy report.
Tranchida issued his opinion as "suicide" and IPD closed the case again in early 2023.
"I believe [the FBI was] only shown certain information and only requested to do certain things to confirm what the IPD had already done," Gwinn said. "That is not an independent investigation."
Cindy and the Alliance team — made up of former prosecutors, law enforcement, forensic experts, and social services workers — believe there is more to do.
"We need a fresh set of eyes, preferably a multidisciplinary team, to sit down and look at the case, look at everything," Gwinn said.
They say Libby's death was staged to look like a suicide.
The Alliance's strangulation expert's analysis of Libby's autopsy will be part of a special the I-Team is preparing on the case.
"I won't ever quit. Until my last breath," Cindy said. "I mean, she deserves that. We deserve that. A lot of young women deserve that."
Just this year, the Alliance reached out to Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson, asking her to request another agency to independently investigate Libby's case.
Johnson told the Alliance the FBI and the Missouri State Highway Patrol had already looked at Libby's case, but she is still open to being helpful in any way she can.
Johnson's office told the I-Team in a statement: "While we understand this outcome is difficult, Missouri law requires charging decisions be based on evidence we can legally support beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a strong burden."
We know the highway patrol's crime lab tested swabs from Libby's autopsy for DNA. But beyond that, a spokesperson with the Highway Patrol told the I-Team it hasn't had any role in investigating Libby's case.
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