A glove on Park Boulevard
The murder of Kassie Lynn Federer
Someone kicked in Kassie Federer’s door at three in the afternoon on a Monday, and whoever did it has never stood trial.
That fact alone should bother us all.
Kassie Lynn Federer was nineteen years old, a psychology major at Louisiana State University. A Ponchatoula girl who hauled her blue book sack to class every day at LSU and came home to a deadbolted apartment on Park Boulevard in Baton Rouge.
On September 13, 1999, she walked in from class, set down her things, and sometime before three that afternoon, somebody kicked her deadbolt off the frame.
Investigators believe Kassie then ran for the kitchen as her killer fired shots behind her. One bullet pierced both lungs. Another caught her heart.
Kassie died before she hit the floor.
Her neighbor came home hours later, noticed the door ajar, and called the apartment manager. They found Kassie’s body inside, fully clothed, phone in her hand, the apartment otherwise undisturbed.
Nothing was missing.
Nothing except her blue book sack.
No robbery. No sexual assault. No apparent motive. Just a kicked-in door, a lifeless nineteen-year-old, and a missing book bag full of class notes.
Decades passed.
No suspect. No blue book sack.
Then, in 2018, the Baton Rouge Police Department announced a break. DNA pulled from a single glove left at the crime scene, they said, matched a man named Travis Dwight Green, 49, a death row inmate sitting in the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. BRPD issued a warrant.
Case closed, the department seemed to suggest. Mystery solved.
However, the Polunsky Unit is no ordinary jail. It is what Polk County, Texas calls its “concrete tomb” where inmates stay locked down twenty-two hours a day, no phones, no media, no contact with the outside world.
Travis Green may not have known Louisiana charged him with anything. And because he sits on Texas death row, the district attorney’s office cannot extradite him. He will never stand trial for Kassie’s murder. Not unless Texas overturns his sentence first.
Travis Green is presumed guilty. Case closed.
But Defense Attorney Johnny Cochran had a saying: if the story doesn’t make sense, you must find for the defense. If the glove doesn’t fit…
Let me prove now that this “airtight” case doesn’t hold water.
Start with the lab that tested the original DNA sample.
The Louisiana State Police Crime Lab has an impeccable reputation and a solid record. But Green’s original DNA markers were not collected by the LSP.
They were collected by the Houston Crime Lab, then entered into CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Indexing System, where Louisiana eventually found the match. That distinction matters, because the Houston Crime Lab’s record reads like a criminal indictment of itself.
In 2002 — just three years after Kassie’s murder—an independent audit shut the Houston lab down after finding hundreds of convictions based on flawed or incomplete testing.
In 2003, Josiah Sutton walked out of prison after an independent DNA retest — he’d served four years for a sexual assault he did not commit.
In 2004, investigators found 280 boxes of lost evidence in the building, including body parts and a fetus, tied to eight thousand cases going back to 1979.
In 2005, analysts were caught faking tests and hiding evidence.
In 2006, the Houston Cold Case Squad used Houston lab DNA to charge Travis Green himself with the 1988 rape of an 82-year-old woman — then discovered Green was behind bars when the attack happened.
That is the same lab that first put Travis Green in CODIS.
Despite their shoddy reputation, only their work says Travis Green killed Kassie Federer.
Fortunately, BRPD Sergeant Don Copolla, Jr. did not simply accept the Houston match. His detectives drove to Livingston, Texas, sat across from Green in the Polunsky Unit, and collected a fresh swab. And Copolla refused to send that sample to Houston. That sample went to the LSP Crime Lab, and Louisiana State Police confirmed a DNA match to the glove.
So the DNA is real. Green did kill Kassie?
Not so fast.
DNA on a glove only tells us who touched the glove. It says nothing about when or how or why.
The timeline is where the LSP case falls apart.
On September 2, 1999, Travis Green raped, strangled, and beat nineteen-year-old Kristin Loesch in Houston while her boyfriend slept on her couch.
On September 10, Houston detectives called Green in for an interview about Loesch’s murder.
Three days later — September 13 — Green allegedly drove four hours east to Baton Rouge, kicked in Kassie Federer’s apartment door, shot her to death, stole a book bag, and drove four hours back to Houston.
On September 16, Houston detectives arrested him at his residence. Four days after that, Green stood before a judge and pleaded guilty to killing Kristin Loesch.
Think about that sequence. A man under active murder investigation in one city detours to commit a second, apparently random murder in another city four hours away, then returns home and turns himself in.
He used a gun on Kassie. He strangled Kristin Loesch with his hands. Two completely different methods, two completely different victim profiles, no apparent connection between the victims.
Oh, and don’t forget, Green stole a college student’s book bag.
Why?
Green’s record runs long — two stretches in prison, first for receiving stolen property, then for aggravated assault. The state of Texas cut him loose from parole four months before he killed Kristin Loesch.
But armed home invasion followed by a single gunshot and a stolen book sack doesn’t fit the pattern.
I am not arguing Travis Green is innocent. His record says otherwise, and the LSP Crime Lab doesn’t make many mistakes.
But Kassie Federer’s family deserves more than presumptions. They deserve certainty. They deserve a trial, testimony, cross-examination — everything the justice system is supposed to provide before it closes a case file and moves on.
Instead, they got a warrant served on a man in a concrete box who will never see a Louisiana courtroom, and a case quietly marked resolved.
Johnny Cochran would have had questions.
As do I.
If the glove left on Kassie’s apartment floor belonged to a 230-pound, six-foot-two man under active homicide investigation in Texas, why did he drive to Baton Rouge to shoot an LSU student he had no known connection to?
And what did he want with Kassie’s book sack?
If you know something about what happened on Park Boulevard on September 13, 1999 — anything at all — please call me or someone in the Baton Rouge Police Department’s cold case unit.
When Kassie Federer came home from class that Monday afternoon, she had the rest of the day ahead of her. She deserved the rest of her life.
Somebody took that away from her.
Her case file says we know who.
I’m not so sure.