Missing boy, 7, found dead inside washing machine as family member is jailed for heinous crime
Jermaine Thomas, from Spring, Texas, was convicted of murder nearly three years after the horrific 2022 death of little Troy Koehler, according to the Harris County District Attorney's Office.
Troy was reported missing on July 28, 2022, when Jermaine told deputies he came home late and found the front door open and his son gone.
But police soon discovered Troy's body inside the washing machine in the garage.
Troy's body was found stuffed inside the top-loading machine just hours after Thomas called police claiming the boy had vanished in the middle of the night.
But investigators revealed that Troy had been abused leading up to his death.
An autopsy showed the child had suffered multiple injuries, both new and healing, with evidence of asphyxiation, blunt-force trauma, and possible drowning, according to KPRC.
Prosecutors say Troy's adoptive parents were enraged over missing snacks like oatmeal cream pies and donut sticks, and used them as justification for the abuse.
At one point, Troy's adoptive mother, Tiffany Thomas, allegedly threatened to put him in the oven until he confessed to eating her food.
Court records reveal the chilling message Jermaine sent to his wife: 'I need to get the [locks]. I'm going to end up [killing] him.'
During the sentencing hearing, Sheryl Reed, Troy's first-grade teacher, recalled the bright, book-loving boy who once dreamed of becoming a leader.
'Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. That was always Troy. He loved reading. If he finished early, he'd head straight to our class library.'
She recalled how Troy would rush to the classroom library and then happily share stories with classmates.
'Then he'd go right back to share those stories with classmates...always lifting others up with the joy he carried.'
'But Troy wasn't just leading his classmates-he led me, too. He led me to become a better teacher, a better mentor, and a better person,' she continued.
'His energy, his smile, and his love for learning reminded me daily why I chose this path.' It's unclear if the boy's mother ever faced charges.
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Daily Mail
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Eight years on, the undiagnosed condition that may explain why no one believed Chloe Ayling after she was snatched by a madman, injected with ketamine and held captive
She became one of the most famous – or infamous – kidnapping victims of our time. When British glamour model Chloe Ayling was abducted on a bogus photoshoot in Milan in 2017, her plight made global headlines and last year led to a gripping TV drama. Little wonder, because it was the real-life stuff of nightmares. Chloe, then only 20, was grabbed from behind and bundled into a suitcase. Injected with ketamine and chained to furniture, she was forced to sleep on the floor of a remote farmhouse. Pictures of her lying unconscious in skimpy clothing were sent to her manager in London, along with a demand for €300,000 (£260,000). If the ransom wasn't paid within a week, she would be auctioned off as a sex slave. She was also told she risked being fed to tigers when her 'buyers' tired of her. Although she was eventually released, it has been another ordeal for Chloe to rebuild her life. The reason? Many simply didn't believe her graphic and appalling story. So outlandish was the sequence of events she described – and crucially how odd her unemotional retelling of the story was – that to this day, eight years on, questions still abound about whether she was complicit in the kidnap and it was all an elaborate publicity stunt. Could the BBC documentary airing tonight finally silence the online commentators and conspiracy theorists? Including interviews with British and Italian police officers who were involved (and some of whom admit they too doubted Chloe's story at first), the three-part series offers an interesting new theory. It suggests Chloe's lack of emotion, both during the kidnap and in media interviews afterwards, was the result of immaturity and nervousness at finding herself in the public eye – but also of undiagnosed autism. Towards the end of the documentary, she actually receives a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, which she says explains so much – not just about her reactions during her kidnap ordeal, but about her life before and since. 'I had a lot of difficulties with communication,' she explains in the documentary, while poring over childhood pictures. 'I'd react in the wrong way. If I was being told off I would smile. I just had the wrong reactions to things. 'My mum would come with me on school trips because I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted or express how I was feeling. For ages I just said I'm not an emotional person, but now I realise that no matter now hard I try, I just can't [express emotion].' In hindsight this was never more apparent than Chloe's attempt to communicate what had happened to her when she returned home to the UK. What a catastrophe that was. She admits: 'The aftermath affected me more than the kidnap.' The defining moment for many was when Chloe emerged from her mother's house to face the world's press to deliver a statement that began: 'I feared for my life, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour.' The mountain house where Chloe was held for six days near Turin in Italy The smile on her face, her almost cheerily robotic delivery, and the way she was dressed – in a revealing vest top and tiny pair of shorts – seemed completely at odds with the seriousness of the situation. Public bafflement was quickly followed by judgment. These days we might call it victim blaming, although there looked to be inconsistencies in Chloe's story which contributed to the sheer disbelief that the situation happened the way she said it did. Why had she gone shopping with her kidnapper to buy shoes, for instance? Why hadn't she tried to run? Chloe, now 28, has spent the years since trying to convince others about what happened – even though in the eyes of the law there is no doubt whatsoever. Polish national Lukasz Herba was sentenced to 16 years and nine months (although this was later reduced to just over 11 years on appeal) after being convicted of her kidnapping. A career that went on to include a stint in the Big Brother house the following year – seen by many as evidence of Chloe's desire to be famous at all costs – hardly helped. 'What is it about me and my story that makes this so unbelievable?' she asks at the start of this documentary. By the end, you get the impression she has as much of an answer as she is ever going to get: because she didn't behave in the way most victims would, her story was scrutinised and found lacking. And because no one asked whether her robotic telling of her story could have another explanation, she was dismissed as a money-grabber who wanted only to be famous. By rights she should be livid, although she doesn't appear to be. 'I can't really be mad at people for not understanding, when I didn't really understand it myself,' she concludes. Chloe's diagnosis is a development that makes complete sense to her former manager Phil Green, who appears in the documentary reliving the horror of having to deal with hostage demands. Phil, who had been a lawyer before setting up a modelling agency, met Chloe when she was 19 and told me this week while the attractive teenager was clearly ambitious ('her goal was to have 100,000 followers on Instagram'), she wasn't a typical model-about-town. 'She didn't seem to have many friends, and didn't hang about with the other models. She lived at home with her mum,' he says. Unusually, for someone starting off in modelling, she also had a baby son 'who would only have been about one at the time,' remembers Phil. The child lived with his father, Chloe's ex partner Conor Keyes. Phil had not been aware of any suggestion of autism until the documentary, but now wonders if Chloe's condition actually helped her maintain a facade of calmness during the ordeal. 'Her reaction to everything that happened was so unemotional, even at the time, but maybe that was a good thing because if she'd behaved in the way some other girls would have who knows what would have happened? Chloe smiles in a skimpy top and shorts as she spoke to the press outside her mother's house after leaving Italy 'Afterwards though it led to people just not believing her.' His inclusion in the documentary defending her is also interesting given the background. Although Phil was the one who always seemed most steadfastly in her corner, Chloe appears to have blamed him for not doing enough to help secure her freedom and perhaps for putting her in jeopardy in the first place by sending her to Milan for the assignment. She dumped him as her manager as soon as she returned from Italy and they haven't spoken since. 'It was brutal,' he says of his sacking. 'I think she blamed me for what happened and we've never been able to sit down and talk properly about it. 'She thought I'd abandoned her [to the kidnappers], but the reality is that my office, which was in my house, had been taken over by the police. 'They were replying to the kidnapper's emails on my behalf. I was out of my depth trying to deal with it all, and I still feel terrible about what happened. I think she has remained bitter. But I always knew she was telling the truth.' He feels Chloe was the victim of more than the kidnapping, angrily lashing out today at the Italian prosecutors who put her story in the public domain against Chloe's own wishes. They also forced her to stay in Italy for weeks after her release, effectively holding her captive all over again. 'If that had happened to an Italian girl in Britain, she would have been allowed to go home immediately to be with her family.' On top of that, the Italian authorities took Chloe back to the property where she had been held – ostensibly to help with their investigation. 'My feeling then was that they didn't believe her and wanted to see her reaction,' he says. The feeling that Chloe was badly let down is echoed by the detective superintendent who headed the British side of the operation, who admits on camera (on condition of anonymity) that the lowest point in his 30-year career was when he realised he had not been able to find or save Chloe. 'It was my job to get her back and I didn't,' he says. The astonishing thing about this case is that it was not the authorities in either Britain or Italy who did save her. She was found only because the man holding her – a man she knew as 'MD', but who was later identified as Polish national Lukasz Herba – walked her into the British Consulate in Milan. In court Herba was described as a 'narcissistic fantasist' who had become obsessed with Chloe. A computer programmer who was living in the West Midlands, Herba had been a Facebook friend of Chloe's (a fact she discovered only after the kidnapping). In order to kidnap her he concocted an elaborate plan, posing as a photographer called Andre Lazio to book her via her agent for a modelling job in Milan. With the help of his brother Michal, who was also jailed for his part, he then abducted Chloe when she arrived in Italy, drugging her and bundling her into a holdall, before taking her to a remote hideout where he kept her captive for six days. He convinced Chloe that he was a trained assassin working for a Mafia organisation called Black Death. 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Hollywood starlet Christa Helm was brutally murdered on a quiet West Hollywood street in the early hours of February 12, 1977. The B-list movie actress and famed party girl was stabbed 22 times with a butcher knife and attacked with a blunt object, with the sickening assault continuing even as she lay face down in her own blood.
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an hour ago
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