Hey y’all, it’s Julie, and in this episode of Pushing Up Lilies, we’re diving into the tragic and shocking case of Kendy Howard. Kendy was the wife of Idaho State Trooper Dan Howard, a man sworn to protect, but instead, he became the ultimate betrayer. In 2023, while she was taking a bath, Dan shot Kendy in the head in what appears to be a calculated and cold-blooded crime. What led a man of the law to commit such a horrifying act? Was there more behind the scenes of their marriage than anyone realized? Join me as we walk through the details of the case, the investigation, and the tragic reality of domestic violence, even at the hands of those we trust the most. Listener discretion is advised.
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly True Crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 Hey guys, it's another week here on pushing up lilies.
0:35 I'm so glad that y'all decided to join us.
0:38 I've just been amazed at the number of subscribers.
0:41 I think I'm up to around 32,000.
0:45 Please share with your friends and have them subscribe.
0:50 It doesn't cost anything to get on Apple or Spotify or any of the podcast platforms that I use.
0:57 Just subscribe and also like my Facebook page and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
1:03 The only thing that costs is Patreon, a new platform for me.
1:07 But if you subscribe to Patreon, you can do it free, but there's also options to get added bonuses and those will give you additional sneak peek previews, video previews and then the ability to do online check that once a week, please share.
1:26 I'm just amazed at the number of subscribers that I've got now, and I really enjoy doing the podcast because we all love True Crime.
1:36 And everyone always wants to hear stories because I see it every day.
1:42 I can tell you kind of my perspective and what goes through the mind of a deaf investigator and why we do the things that we do.
1:53 This week, I did have a decomposed homeless man, and he was found in a ditch not far off the highway.
2:01 And when I spoke with his family, they kind of were like, why had no one seen him?
2:06 And how was it that he was missed, and he was under a tree.
2:11 It looked like he was trying to stay in shade, and he was very difficult to see because he was kind of in a ditch and he had on dark clothing.
2:21 He blended really well with the grass, and I think the police had checked on him a week prior.
2:27 He was in the same position, and he was fine.
2:31 He had no complaints.
2:32 He spoke with them.
2:34 I think there may have been some drugs involved, not 100% sure, but they thought that maybe he was high on meth at that time.
2:42 But when we found him, there were no drugs around him, there was no alcohol around him.
2:49 The weather has been fairly cool.
2:52 It hasn't been that hot here in Texas.
2:54 I mean, I'm lying.
2:56 I guess it depends.
2:58 That is hard to say during the day.
3:01 It can be 90 but it's not 110, like it was back in August.
3:06 We've had some cool afternoons in the eighties but very unlikely that it was related to the heat because of the time of year that it is.
3:17 I'm sure he had some underlying issues.
3:19 He had just been at a nearby hospital in those cases.
3:23 Again, we get copies of the medical records so that we can look back to see why he was there when his complaints were what he was diagnosed with and what testing might have been done.
3:34 It was very convenient that he still had his hospital b done, which I believe the hospitals are supposed to cut those off before they leave.
3:42 But it was really convenient for me because I knew where he had been.
3:47 So yeah, he was decomposed.
3:50 There was a lot of insect activity, let me say that and that's what happens when you're out in the weather and you're out amongst the bugs in the middle of a field.
3:58 Now, he was found by somebody who was going to mow the grass in this field.
4:02 You know, that was horrifying sight for them.
4:05 I'm sure that guy had to go home for the day.
4:07 But those are things we see every day.
4:11 And I thought it was really cute because our mortuary, you know, they always send a couple people to pick up the body, put them in the body bags and then transport them to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's office.
4:24 And this little girl, she was so cute, and she was new.
4:27 This was her first ever scene.
4:30 You can imagine hats off to all the transport crew at all the different medical examiners offices and even the funeral homes.
4:38 I mean, y'all work hard and y'all get dirty and y'all are amazing hats off to those people.
4:47 Again, another job that we really forget exists, you know, unless you're working in my field and you see them at work every day, they get dirty.
4:58 I mean, that is like one of the dirtiest jobs ever because I mean, they step in stuff, people that are decomposed and bloated, you know, whenever they have the fluid under the skin and it bubbles up and it bursts, that gets all over them.
5:16 These guys do not go home smelling good and they can't wear their best clothing because it's going to get ruined.
5:25 Let's don't forget the transport crew because they do work hard.
5:30 They put a lot of long hours in, they workday and night, they're on call 24/7 because unfortunately we can't just make people die during the day.
5:40 That'd be great.
5:41 But they're always there for us and they do an amazing job anyway in this week.
5:47 Other than that, I think we've had a couple of car accidents last week on my days off.
5:54 But other than that, it stays relatively busy.
5:57 We get a lot of hospice calls throughout the day.
6:00 A lot of hospice calls, I feel like a majority of them are related to cancers and dementia.
6:09 I feel like a lot of them.
6:11 But, you know, another misnomer.
6:13 A lot of people think that you have to be old to be on hospice and that's not particularly true.
6:20 We've had newborns on hospice.
6:22 We've had teenagers on hospice, people in their twenties with cancer on hospice.
6:28 That's a misnomer as well.
6:29 And we've had a lot of young people on hospice here lately due to different medical issues.
6:36 It's been kind of a crazy busy week, but such is the nature of the job we knew of the potential when we took this job on and again, you know, if anybody's interested in forensic nursing, please reach out to me and I have had a lot of people reach out, I'm going to put together a list of some trainings.
6:57 Most of them are free, which is nice.
7:00 And if you, you can get those trainings under your belt and just keep those little certificates that you get when they're completed, you can always add those to your resume or your CV.
7:12 And if you find a job that you're interested in, in the field of death investigation or forensics in general, it always helps to let people know that you have that extra knowledge and that you've taken the effort to try to get some training outside of your regular job.
7:29 Or your regular wheelhouse, whatever that may be.
7:32 I mean, we have people that have applied for jobs and gotten hired at our office who have worked in nutrition or, you know, different fields, people always say, oh, I wish I would have done that.
7:44 It's not too late, you know, I mean, if you really want to do it and you really want to learn, maybe in some aspect you can participate in some form of investigations, just get that training and get that knowledge and really put your foot forward to try and push into it.
8:02 I mean, that's what I did.
8:03 It is a hard career field to get into.
8:06 Everybody thinks they want to do it.
8:08 But again, once they're exposed to the bugs and the smells and the hours they don't always love it, it does have its challenges.
8:18 But if you love it, you love it.
8:20 And then that's why it's so hard to find a job.
8:22I feel like there are enough of us that love it that we don't leave.
8:26I wanted to talk to y'all about a story that I found super interesting.
8:32 At first, I want to tell y'all about something that I got.
8:34 It's kind of a new toy and I'm not good at electronics, but this is a paper tablet called Remarkable.
8:43 And I was on a crime scene last week and a couple of the detectives in Denton had one and they were riding on it and it was like a really thin digital notebook.
8:53 I was like, what is that?
8:55 And they were like, oh, it's just this new remarkable notepad.
9:00 And I was like, what is it?
9:03 They were like, it's amazing.
9:05 I don't have to use paper anymore.
9:07 I can save all my files.
9:09 I can email them to myself.
9:11 I can put all my notes on it.
9:14 I'm not always looking for a notebook.
9:16 I mean, people used to laugh at me because if I would get a call when I was on call and I didn't have paper, I would write on anything like the back of a piece of mail.
9:28 I would write on a box.
9:29 I would, anything that was handy.
9:31 I think I've even written on a napkin or a piece of toilet paper before, you know, you can lose, it can get wet and there's a lot of bad things that can happen.
9:41 This notepad is amazing.
9:43 I have been using it in the office.
9:45 I've been writing all of my scene notes on it.
9:49 It's very light weight, it's very thin.
9:52 And so I've been carrying it with me again.
9:55 It's called Remarkable.
9:57 And it's a little pricey.
9:59 I think I paid around $650 for it.
10:03 It's supposed to hold a charge for a couple of weeks.
10:06 But this little notepad is amazing.
10:08 So if you're one that's always looking for paper, you can't find your notes.
10:12 You don't remember what you wrote something on.
10:15 You're out in the weather and you're afraid that something's going to get wet, and your notes are going to smear or you're going to lose a phone number.
10:23 This is amazing, but it does not have the ability to take a photo.
10:27 You do not get interrupted by advertising pop ups because it's not connected to the internet.
10:34 Although it is connected to Wi Fi when you're wanting to send, it allows you to focus because you're not interrupted by all the pop ups and the emails and all the things that you would get on your iPad.
10:46 And I have an iPad too and it's great, but I use it for different things and it's very heavy.
10:51 This is just amazing.
10:54 It's perfect if you're in the field and you're taking notes.
10:58 Yeah.
10:58 So enough about that.
11:00 But I'm kind of excited about my new toy.
11:01 I've been using it at the office, and I've been writing my podcast notes on it.
11:05 It is pretty fun.
11:07 Ok, let's talk a little bit.
11:10 And I don't know if y'all have heard about this case.
11:13 This happened in Idaho about Kendy Howard.
11:16 Now she was a 48-year-old wife and mother, and she was found dead in her bathtub with a gunshot wound to the head.
11:26 Dan and Kendy Howard married in 1994 and Dan, her husband went from working as an Idaho State trooper to working three weeks at a time in the Alaskan oil field.
11:41 He was traveling, he was gone for three weeks before he would come home in 2021 on January 28th.
11:51 5 days before her death, Kendy had picked Dan up at the airport following one of his three-week stints in Alaska working and broke the news that she wanted a divorce as we know this usually does not go over.
12:07 Well, Dan's reaction was quote unquote, not good as she described it to one of her friends on February 2nd, 2021.
12:22 At 10:43, Dan called 911.
12:24 Now he was screaming and he said that candy shot herself and he told dispatchers she's in the bathtub, dad.
12:34 You know, because this call comes in, he's a former state trooper.
12:38 Dispatchers kind of treat this as a suicide initially.
12:43 Now we've always been taught in death investigation to treat everything as a homicide even if we think originally, it sounds natural.
12:52 It's a homicide until we can prove otherwise.
12:55 And that's just so that everyone tries their hardest to preserve any evidence that might be there because I can tell you I've been on the scene one time and I don't know if I've told you about this before, but it was a female.
13:10 It was icy outside.
13:12 Her back door was open, it appeared as if she had gone to step out the back door and slid on the ice sail backwards, hit her head.
13:22 Ok.
13:23 I got to the scene and there was a lot of blood more than you would see from someone who fell backwards and hit their head.
13:31 And I'm going to say, I can't remember, but I'm going to say she was in her forties.
13:35 She was young.
13:36 So hit her head.
13:38 I got there, and I was like, wow, that's a lot of blood.
13:42 And originally the police believed it to be an accident.
13:46 It looked like she had walked outside, slid, hit her head, she was home alone, all the things.
13:53 It appeared to be an accident to the police.
13:56 But when I saw the amount of blood, I was like, no way we rolled her over and she had a gunshot wound to the back of her head.
14:06 Now, when you kind of look at the scene and relive it, which I kind of do a lot.
14:11 And it's kind of eerie when I'm there, I could see that, you know, the water was on in the sink.
14:18 It looked like she was washing dishes, the coffee pot was making coffee and then the path from the sink to the door past the dishwasher.
14:31 The dishwasher door was open and then here she is lying on the ground.
14:38 When you relive the scene in your head, you're like, ok, well, she was standing at the sink washing dishes.
14:43 Someone surprised her, she started running towards the back door and in an effort to stop them or slow them down, she pulled the dishwasher door open and then he shot her in the back of the head as she opened the back door, and she fell backwards.
15:00 I don't know if they ever found the suspect, but I believe it was a husband that she had filed for divorce.
15:07 I can't remember, I can't remember who it was.
15:09 Maybe a boyfriend she'd broken up with.
15:12 But they did this and then left out the garage door pretty much without a trace.
15:21 Things are not always as they seem and I know we have talked about that before, but dispatchers treated the call as a suicide.
15:29 In this case of Kendy Howard.
15:31 Deputy Miranda Thomas.
15:34 She was at the Kootenai County Sheriff's office.
15:37 She was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene and when she arrived, Kendy's husband Dan was screaming and gagging and crying.
15:49 Now, Deputy Thomas noticed and again, these are things that we all pay attention to at crime scenes.
15:56 She noticed a duffel bag packed with women's clothing at the bottom of the stairs in the Howard Home.
16:03 Detective Jerry Northrop actually found, and this is interesting y'all bathmats and towels in the dryer and they were warm.
16:14 They seem to have been recently dried.
16:18 Now, remember Kendy was in the bathtub?
16:21 These were out of the bathroom where Kendy was found.
16:26 Why?
16:27 I mean, even if they were just wet, why would he put them in the dryer when she's lying there dead?
16:33 Like that's not something that we would do in a distressing situation like that.
16:39 This is very important because those bathmats and towels, that is definitely a clue that leads to Dan doing this.
16:50 Dan's gun was found in the tub and there was also very little blood noticed.
16:56 And so you do expect more blood if you're alive when you're shot.
17:03 And the reason for this is, you know, we've always talked about lividity and how blood pools in those dependent areas when you're lying on your back, you're going to have redness, which is pooling blood on your back.
17:18 And we can tell many times how long someone's been dead.
17:21 If you push on that blood and it blanches and displaces or if it doesn't, if it doesn't, they've been there longer than if it does.
17:31 Anyway, the blood from all your organs pulls to those dependent areas after you've been dead for a while.
17:38 There is less blood in your organs and less bleeding.
17:44 If there is a postmortem injury or somebody is shot after they're dead.
17:50 You see less blood in those cases.
17:52 And in this case, if they're looking at it and thinking if this had been a suicide, there would have been way more blood when she shot herself than there was.
18:04 Dan called his stepdaughter Brooke Wilkins to tell her about Kendy's death and investigators could hear her over the phone accuse Dan of killing her mother.
18:16 But at that time, there was not enough evidence to arrest him when this case went to court, and he became a suspect.
18:26 Prosecutors built their case over a two-year period.
18:31 Dan wasn't arrested until July of 2023, and he was charged with Kendy's murder and his trial began this year on March the fourth.
18:43 The prosecution claimed that Dan killed Kendy by putting her in a carotid restraint hold.
18:51 And that's a maneuver that, you know, people in law enforcement learn in training.
18:57 The defense maintained that Kendy had killed herself.
19:03 The prosecution was like he put her in a restraint hold.
19:07 He asphyxiated her.
19:09 She stopped breathing, he put her in the bathtub, shot her, dropped the gun in the water, washed the bathmat and the towels that he used to clean up the mess.
19:20 But again, the defense was like, no, she killed herself.
19:24 This was a suicide.
19:25 After 10 days of testimony, 62 witnesses and eight hours of deliberations, Dan was found guilty of second-degree murder and domestic battery.
19:38 That was on March 19th of this year, Dan's hearing was in May.
19:44 This has not been that long ago and remember this happened back in 2021.
19:49 He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
19:54 Dan told police this is his story that he had been downstairs and heard something hitting the floor upstairs.
20:01 He waited about an hour, went upstairs and then found Kendy in a bathtub full of water nude with a gunshot wound to her head.
20:12 Now, when police got to the scene and began their investigation, they did notice what looked like a struggle in the master bedroom, broken glass.
20:24 And then Kendy's clothing was kind of thrown on the floor.
20:27 And then don't forget there's the duffel bag that's packed at the door.
20:32 We already know that she had told him that she wanted a divorce fresh deodorant stains apparently were also noticed on Dan's shirt.
20:43 I guess that would be significant if he had been sweating and had reapplied deodorant or what not.
20:49 But that was something that the police also noticed in the investigation.
20:54 Now the load of laundry, the bathmat and the towels were mid cycle, and a normal dryer might run for about an hour and there were only six minutes left on the dryer cycle.
21:10 It was determined that the dryer cycle would have started at 10:42 when they did the math and kind of counted backwards.
21:20 And the 911 call came in at 10:43.
21:24 It was like, ok, let's get all this in the dryer and start it.
21:29 And then call 911.
21:31 Kendy was a Kamiah native who graduated from Kamiah High school in 1991, and she was described as outgoing happy and someone who loved life.
21:46 This lady I'm sure is greatly missed another clue though that they had found is the trajectory of the bullet pointed downward, which is not really consistent with suicides.
22:00 Abrasions were also on her body that were indicative of a struggle.
22:05 And then I found this interesting, a review of blood loss in her tongue was what indicated that she was not alive when she was shot.
22:16 The intramuscular bleeding of the tongue is, it’s a postmortem finding that can indicate a lot of causes of death.
22:25 And one of them would be asphyxiation, particularly strangulation and also tongue bleeding is commonly found in fire victims.
22:37 It can be a sign of asphyxia caused by neck pressure and drownings.
22:42 It is common for there to be bleeding of the tongue in cases of drownings also in strangulation.
22:51 It's possible cause of that could be the hyoid bone fracture, which is a bone that is commonly broken in cases when people have been strangled.
23:01 It is associated with causes of death that include asphyxiation.
23:07 It's not specific to any cause or manner, but it is something that they notice in people who have been asphyxiated.
23:15 And so that is one reason why they looked at blood in the tongue specifically in her case because they felt as if she had asphyxiated.
23:25 Now, I looked for her autopsy report and I couldn't find it online many times.
23:31 I think it's mostly in the cases of celebrities, you can find their autopsy reports online and actually read through them or in some of the more popular cases.
23:41 This one's pretty new.
23:43 I wasn't able to see Kendy's autopsy report online.
23:47 But I can bet there's a good possibility that her hyoid bone was fractured, and the hyoid bone is like a horseshoe shaped bone.
23:56 And it's kind of in the front, middle of the neck between the chin and the thyroid.
24:03 And this bone is important to a lot of functions like swallowing, breathing and speech.
24:10 And it also keeps the upper airway open during sleep.
24:15 Now, because of where it's at, it's not easily susceptible to fracture.
24:21 In a lot of cases where we suspect asphyxiation, a fractured hyoid bone strongly indicates strangulation.
24:29 This is an important little bone as small as it may be that many people don't even know they have, and it serves very important functions and is very important that it be present and not fractured.
24:44 In this case, I can bet her hyoid bone was fractured.
24:47 But again, I wasn't able to get a hold of the autopsy report.
24:51 Maybe later, I'll be able to view that, but I could not find it anyway.
24:56 This is another case of a former officer or state trooper.
25:02 Probably thought he was pretty good at hiding evidence.
25:05 Probably thought he had enough experience in law enforcement that he could hide the truth and trick all of his previous coworker’s slash friends into thinking that she committed suicide.
25:19 But you know, when everyone finds out that she had asked for a divorce that he's the first person that's going to be looked at and he had to have known that too.
25:30 And so to do things like wash the bathmats and put them in the dryer.
25:36 I mean, even if you're going to hide it, like clean up the signs of struggle and the broken glass, you know, it's weird because he went out of his way to do some things, like put the stuff in the dryer yet.
25:50 He didn't clean up the clothes that were strewn all over the room and the broken glass indicating the signs of struggle.
25:58 And he may have told them that they argued.
26:00 But the report that I read said that he was downstairs, and he apparently heard the bang and then an hour later went upstairs to check on her and if her bag was packed at the bottom of the stairs, it's highly unlikely that she was going to stop and take a bath before she left.
26:18 Anyway, he is in prison for life.
26:22 Now, reports are saying that he is on hunger strike for whatever reason.
26:26 I don't know what good that does you and in poor physical condition.
26:30 He is 58 and participating in a voluntary hunger strike.
26:37 Apparently.
26:38 Now this was back in May eating or drinking very little if any food.
26:43 After he was originally arrested, he had lost, I guess 50 pounds between March 15th and April 29th.
26:51 He went from 2, 10 to 160 prosecutors believe that he's been flushing food and fluids down the toilet to make the staff think that he was eating.
27:01 They did a blood sample back in April and he was actually an acute renal failure, early-stage organ failure and possibly liver failure.
27:10 This is what happens if you don't eat, he refused medication, he refused protein shakes.
27:18 And I believe all that may have happened before he was sentenced, but I'm sure at some point he's been on suicide watch.
27:23 It sounds like his mental health capacity is not good.
27:27 I'm sure that they've done mental health evaluations.
27:30 But anyway, yeah, he's in prison for life again.
27:35 A lot of people who think they know how to cover things up aren't really very good at it or they don't do it very well.
27:42 We always laugh to say, you know, death investigators, like we could create the perfect murder.
27:48 We know how to make a crime scene look like a suicide.
27:51 You know, it's always a joke.
27:52 It is kind of funny because if you do it right.
27:55 I mean, this guy obviously didn't really put all of his thought into it.
27:58 He put some of his thought into it.
28:00 He obviously thought the detectives were going to be stupid and not think to look in the dryer and notice that the bathmat was missing in the bathroom where Kendy was found dead.
28:09 I'm surprised that he didn't just make it look like she drowned herself in the bathtub instead of even involving a gun.
28:17 But, you know, these police officers, these death investigators and these pathologists are not stupid.
28:26 We look into everything and that's part of our job.
28:29 We want to find answers for the family.
28:31 I'm so glad that answers were found for Kendy's daughter.
28:35 That's part of our job.
28:37 We try not to leave any stone unturned anyway.
28:41 I hope that everyone's having an amazing week.
28:45 I am headed to work this morning and I'm hoping that the county is good to me.
28:51 It is not Monday.
28:52 Thank goodness, Mondays are always Mondays, and I don't know why.
28:56 But the worst day of the week we all hate Mondays.
29:00 We never look forward to it and maybe it's just because it's the first day of the week.
29:03 Most people who work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday have a whole week to go, and I only work three days a week.
29:11 I work three, well, kind of 3, 13-hour days, but I'm not always out and about, I'm not always in the field many times.
29:20 I'm at my dad's taking phone calls and those kinds of things.
29:22 It's not like I am balls to the wall running from the time I get to the office.
29:27 Thank goodness, I would not like it that way.
29:30 Anyway, have an amazing week again.
29:32 Don't forget to go on and subscribe to my YouTube channel Brains, Body Bags and Bedside Manner and don't forget to tell your friends Pushing Up Lilies and also shoot me an email.
29:45 If you have an idea or also on my website, there is an option to go on and ask to be interviewed.
29:51 I would love to interview you for the show.
29:53 If you know of a story that you'd like to talk about and discuss, we can research it and then we can talk about it.
30:00 PushingUpLilies.com.
30:01 Y'all have a great week.
30:02 See you next week.
30:03 Bye.
30:05 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
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30:19 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at PushingUpLilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.