An area murder case is set to be the focus of an upcoming episode of Murder in the Heartland on Investigation Discovery. A man living in Ohio County was reported missing in 2016 and his body was later located inside a toolbox floating in Spring Fork Creek in Grayson County. Three people were charged in relation to the murder.
The episode will premiere at 8 p.m. Tuesday on Investigation Discovery and air again at 11 p.m. The episode description on tvguide.com reads, “Locals stay quiet to protect their own when a recent transplant to Hartford, Kentucky, is found tied up and floating in a toolbox in a creek. Detectives work to find out what happened to 29-year-old military vet Tromain Mackall.”
Murder in the Heartland will take an in-depth look at the details of the case and why it took so long to unfold. Portions of the episode were filmed in Daviess County, including a lengthy interview with former Owensboro Times reporter Katie Pickens in October 2021.
Tromain Mackall, who was 29 when he was killed, moved from Maryland to Ohio County in February 2016. He was reported missing to authorities on July 25, 2016. His body was found a week later. Three people were eventually sentenced in March 2019 for Mackall’s murder.
William Eugene Howard, Jr. (50 years old at the time of sentencing) of Falls of Rough, Kentucky, received 30 years for charges of complicity in the murder and kidnapping of Mackall.
Christopher S. Hill (50 years old at the time of sentencing) of Owensboro, received 15 years for facilitation in the murder and kidnapping of Mackall, and for tampering with physical evidence.
Melanie D. Howard (50 years old at the time of sentencing) of Falls of Rough, Kentucky, received 15 years for the facilitation of murder and kidnapping Mackall, as well as tampering with physical evidence and second-degree unlawful imprisonment.
William Howard must serve 85 percent of his sentence before being considered for parole, while Hill and Melanie Howard had to serve 20 percent of their sentences before being considered for parole eligibility.
Pickens wrote about the final sentencing, which included a heart-wrenching testimony from Mackall’s mother before she was carried out of the courtroom by family members. (That story can be found here.)
Before she was carried out, Mackall’s mother called the defendants “ruthless” in the way they killed her son, OT reported in 2019. She told them her son had been loved by many.
“Three hundred people came to his funeral. I loved him, and I’ll never be able to say those words again,” she screamed. “If you wanted to break someone, you broke me. I’m broken. You broke me. I couldn’t even bury him. There was nothing left to bury — there were only ashes.”
Pickens said participating in the true-crime documentary was a bittersweet experience because it brought back uncomfortable details of the case.
“I was interviewed for roughly four hours and we went over the entire case from beginning to end,” she said. “It was a great learning experience for me, but it was also difficult at times. Having to describe the murder in detail was hard enough when writing the story, but to explain it all on camera was even harder to do. As a reporter, I was so used to telling the story from behind the camera, so I was nervous to be the person being interviewed instead of the other way around.”
After it airs, the episode will be available to watch on the show’s web page.
