Jury selected in Crystal Rogers trial
Published 1:31 pm Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Jury selection was completed late Tuesday morning at the Warren County Justice Center for the first co-defedant to go on trial in the disappearance and presumed death of Crystal Rogers.
Steven Eugene Lawson, 54, of Chaplin, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder and tampering with physical evidence in a case that has attracted considerable publicity.
Rogers was a 35-year-old mother of five and living in Bardstown with her boyfriend, Brooks Houck, when she was last seen alive on July 3, 2015.
Her abandoned car was found parked with a flat tire along the Bluegrass Parkway, and her family reported her missing two days after she was last seen.
The case was moved from Nelson County to Warren County due to pretrial publicity and Nelson Circuit Judge Charles Simms issued an order earlier this month forbidding any cameras or other recording devices in the courtroom during trial.
A panel of 14 jurors, two of whom will be later designated as alternates, will hear evidence in the case, and five days have been set aside for the trial.
Special prosecutor Shane Young read a list of 13 people who are potential witnesses for the prosecution, and attorney Darren Wolff, leading Lawson’s defense team, named off six potential defense witnesses Tuesday to prospective jurors.
The jury was selected from a pool of several dozen prospective jurors, who took part with the attorneys in the jury selection process as media representatives and members of Rogers’ family watched the proceedings in a different courtroom over a closed-circuit TV feed.
Simms asked potential jurors about their familiarity with the case, first asking those with no familiarity to raise their hands after he gave a handful of broad details about the allegations.
Jurors who have heard of the case but were not familiar with any details were also questioned, as were potential jurors who were familiar with details of the case, to see whether or not they had formed an opinion.
About two dozen prospective jurors were dismissed during the jury selection process, many occurring during questioning about their familiarity with the case.
Authorities have found no trace of Rogers and she is presumed dead.
The Nelson County Sheriff’s Office has said that Houck was the last person to see her alive and there is evidence of a phone call that took place between Houck and Lawson the day before Rogers was reported missing.
Lawson was indicted by a grand jury in 2023.
Houck is charged with complicity to commit murder and tampering with physical evidence, and Lawson’s son, Joseph Lawson, is charged with criminal conspiracy to commit murder and tampering with physical evidence.
Their cases are set for trial next month in Warren County.
Before jurors arrived Tuesday, Wolff made a motion to continue the trial, arguing that he and the rest of his defense team needed more time to review the evidence provided to him by Young.
Wolff and Buckler were appointed to the case last year after a previous attorney representing Steven Lawson withdrew.
“As we stand here today, we are currently not prepared (to proceed) and we are not prepared because we did not have enough time,” Wolff said, adding that the evidence provided to him includes some 400,000 pages of written material and hundreds of interviews.
Simms also denied a motion brought by an attorney representing a number of media organizations to have one pool camera in the courtroom.
Simms said employees in his office have received several media inquiries over the pendency of the case, and his initial order banning electronic devices noted the “circus-like atmosphere” surrounding the case and the violation of earlier court orders concerning the streaming and documenting of earlier court proceedings.
“I’m exhausted and the trial hasn’t even started in this case,” Simms said.
