Our card this week is Kyle Seidel, the 5 of Diamonds from Connecticut. Kyle Seidel was a 34-year-old dad to three young kids when he went to pick up Chinese takeout the Friday night before Christmas in 2012. His wife expected him to be gone for only about 20 minutes… but Kyle never came home again. A violent encounter on his way to the restaurant cut his life short. For 12 years, Kyle’s family has been left to wonder why Kyle pulled into a bowling alley parking lot on the way to the restaurant, who he encountered there, and why they shot him. Investigators think they know who pulled the trigger, but they don’t know the why… they’re hoping that just one new piece of evidence could help them find answers and bring his killer, or killers, to justice. If you or anyone you know has information about Kyle Seidel’s murder, please call the Waterford Police Department tip line at 860-437-8080 or call Waterford detectives directly at 860-442-0645 or 860-442-9451.View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/kyle-seidel Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
Chapter 1: What happened to Kyle Seidel on the night of his murder?
Our card this week is Kyle Seidel, the Five of Diamonds from Connecticut. Kyle Zeidel should have only been gone for about 20 minutes when he went to pick up Chinese takeout for his wife and their kids just a few days before Christmas in 2012. But something happened that night that changed the course of his fate.
Instead of the Chinese restaurant, Kyle was found in the parking lot of a local bowling alley, shot by a mystery assailant with an even more mysterious motive. And detectives are hoping that you can help them crack this case. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It was the Friday night before Christmas in 2012, and 34-year-old Kyle Seidel was a little late getting home from work.
He'd been to his company holiday party and then stopped off at a dive bar with a friend. But the minute he walked through the door of his Waterford, Connecticut home at about 7.30 p.m., he switched into dad mode, greeting his wife Kate and their three young kids and agreeing to go pick up Chinese food for dinner.
Kyle had just gotten his holiday bonus from his job as a laborer building docks at the Essex Island Marina. It was about $600 added to his paycheck, and he usually handed his checks right over to Kate to pay the bills. While at the party, Kyle's bosses usually also handed out some extra cash for the holidays.
And I don't know exactly how much more Kyle got in cash, but on this particular night, he held on to at least $40 to pay for takeout from their regular spot, the Lucky Inn. Now, this should have been a quick trip. The restaurant was only about 10 minutes away. So as time started to tick by, Kate started to wonder what was taking him so long.
Now, she pushed aside her concern at first, telling herself maybe the restaurant was just really busy on a Friday night before the holidays. But then her phone buzzed with a text from her sister sharing news that was spreading fast through the small town. Someone had been shot at the local bowling alley.
Now, Kyle never really went to the bowling alley or the bar connected to it, but Kate knew that he would have driven right past it on his way to pick up the food. And she instantly just felt sick to her stomach. So right away, she started trying to call Kyle, but his phone just rang and rang and rang until it went to voicemail.
And phones were ringing over at the Waterford's 911 dispatch center around that time, too. It was about 8.20 p.m. when 911 dispatchers got back-to-back calls from people at the bowling alley saying a man was lying on the ground in the parking lot, bleeding from his chest. Here's Waterford detective Ray Carroll.
The third caller, a male who identified himself as a corrections officer, stated, looks like he's got a bullet hole to his chest. He moved his head for a second. His car is running. The door is open. He's on the ground. Looks like he might have gotten into an altercation and got shot.
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Chapter 2: Why was Kyle Seidel in the bowling alley parking lot?
He basically came in the room, sat down. As soon as we started talking to him, he said, I'm all set, I don't want to talk, and left.
So detectives kept looking for more evidence to connect these guys to the scene. First, they turned back to cell phone records. A court had denied their first request for a cell tower dump, but a second request was approved. The data from that tower dump showed that Mike and Ron were in the area of the shooting at the time it happened.
But unfortunately, cell tower data doesn't provide an exact location. It just identifies the tower particular phones are pulling their data from at any given point. And it turned out that Mike and Ron both lived near the same cell tower that serviced the bowling alley. So both men could have just been at home. The interesting thing that they did get from the records, though, was activity.
Along with location, the records also showed the numbers of phone calls that both Mike and Ron made immediately after Kyle was shot. And there was a flurry of them, including a few calls that seemed really suspicious.
Yeah, so the tower dump that we executed came back with a lot of information. We got a lot of phone calls from Mike to his girlfriend, other family members, other friends. We also got Ron's information. He made several phone calls. Notably, he called the hospital emergency room.
Ron's calls to the Baltimore emergency room seemed like something you would do to cover your tracks or to see what the status is of Kyle, to see if he had died or if he was still alive.
The combination of tips about Mike and Ron and their cell phone activity certainly made detectives feel that they were on the path to arresting the men for Kyle's murder. But they still needed more evidence to clinch the charges. The weapon, a witness, anything. And in 2018, it seemed like they got exactly what they needed.
Someone claiming to be an eyewitness to the murder who was willing to talk to them. The tip that came in was from a woman named Amanda, who said that she knew Ron and Mike.
Amanda said that she was actually with Mike and Ron the night that Kyle Seidel was shot. Amanda says they pulled into the family bowl. She wasn't sure what was going on, why they were there. But Mike and Ron both got out of the car, which in her experience meant that they were probably going to rob somebody. Because if it was just a drug deal, then only one of them would have got out of the car.
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