Cold case revisited

LIHUE — Nine years ago today, a pig hunter’s dogs found the remains of Amber Jackson in a remote, wooded area in Kilauea.

The murder remains unsolved, and until recently, the case had grown cold, but a surprising collaboration may have shed new light on the investigation.

Detectives with the Kauai Police Department spent a week collaborating on the cold case with the TV program “Breaking Homicide,” on Investigation Discovery.

“We laid all the cards on the table,” KPD Assistant Chief Bryson Ponce said in an interview Friday, describing the long hours he spent “basically analyzing the case from A to Z,” alongside Derrick Levasseur, the host of “Breaking Homicide.”

Levasseur’s initial attempts to convince Ponce and the KPD detectives to cooperate were unsuccessful.

“He turned me down at first,” Levasseur said, explaining Ponce’s reluctance to get involved with the media, especially considering the sensitive nature of the matter.

Levasseur said he just kept moving forward, hoping for a change of heart. He and his production crew got on a plane to Kauai, showed up at KPD headquarters, and talked with the detectives. Eventually, they reached a mutual understanding based on their shared experiences.

Before he became a TV host, Levasseur was a police officer. According to the profile on his website, Leveasseur was a sergeant with the Central Falls Police Department in Rhode Island, where he worked in the patrol and detective divisions, later moving to an assignment with the department’s special investigations unit as an undercover detective.

“He speaks the same language as I do, so I felt comfortable,” Ponce said, when asked how the collaboration came about, considering the KPD’s notoriously tight-lipped reputation, when dealing with the media.

Levasseur said that once they established a common ground and got to work, Ponce and the other detectives were on board all the way.

“They went as far as taking us up the mountain to where the crime scene was,” Levasseur said. “They’re really enthusiastic. They really care.”

According to Levasseur, Ponce would finish a shift at the police department, and go over to the hotel where the crew of “Breaking Homicide” were staying to meet with Amber Jackson’s friends and family. After everyone else left or went to sleep, the two men stayed up in the hotel lobby, shuffling through old documents in the case file.

“It was so dark sometimes in the lobby, he would have his flashlight out, shining it on the papers,” Levasseur said of Ponce. “It’s really refreshing to see the guys at the top of that organization go to those lengths.”

Both Levasseur and Ponce talked about the show and their recent work on the cold case but proved to be mostly tight-lipped about exactly what their reassessment of the investigation has produced.

When asked whether the process turned up new leads, Ponce said, “Yeah, definitely,” but declined to elaborate further.

“From the very beginning we felt that this case was one that could be solved,” he said. “We still have that feeling.”

Ponce added that, more than anything else, solving the case is about helping the loved ones of the victim.

“Our hearts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Amber Jackson,” he said, expressing a sentiment shared by Levasseur, who explained that he isn’t interested in his show’s ratings or media hype.

“I am a former police officer,” Levasseur said. “I bleed blue, but at the end of the day, I want to do what’s right for the family.”

Levasseur was slightly more candid than Ponce but is waiting until the episode debuts later this month to reveal all the details. He said his investigation and the show, “focused on two particular scenarios,” revolving around people of interest who knew Jackson and are unable to account for their whereabouts on the day she was killed.

He declined to name any names, but said, “In a homicide, you always want to look at the people closest to the victim.”

One of the closest to Jackson was her boyfriend, whose identity is being withheld from this article at the request of police, who asked TGI not to print the names of anyone potentially connected to the case.

The man was likely one of the last people to see Jackson alive, and a friend said there was tension in the relationship in the months leading up to her death.

“She was saying that she had had it,” one of Jackson’s friends said recently, describing their last conversation, which took place while the two women were hiking a few days before Jackson went missing.

According to Jackson’s friend, then-boyfriend had originally been a tenant at Jackson’s house, moving in about 2-and-a-half years before she died. The friend said the two eventually became ”so isolated” that Jackson’s friends started scheduling a regular dinner every week to make sure they could stay in touch. She first realized her friend was missing when Jackson didn’t show up at Kauai Pasta on the evening of June 23, 2010.

In a brief phone interview Friday, Jackson’s ex-boyfriend confirmed he had been interviewed for the television show but told TGI simply, “They said it was somebody else, and they’re looking into it.”

“I don’t wanna have anything more to do with it,” he said before ending the call abruptly. “It’s turned my life upside down enough.”

In 1989, at age 21, Jackson’s ex-boyfriend was convicted of robbery in Oregon and sentenced to ten years in jail, according to the state’s court records. Since that time, his criminal record appears entirely clean, other than a handful of driving violations.

The “Breaking Homicide” episode on the murder of Amber Jackson airs July 15 on Investigation Discovery.