The Champions

The Champions were a well-known family in Cadiz, a farming town in Trigg County, Kentucky. Joy Champion had taught for about thirty years, her husband, Lindsey, worked in farm lending, and their daughter, Emily, 31, was a veterinarian in Louisiana. Their son, Ryan, was 36.

On October 26, 2014, Lindsey, Joy, and Emily were shot to death at the family farmhouse. A fourth body belonged to Vito Riservato, 22, a stranger to the family. Ryan told police and reporters that Riservato had bound him and his sister with duct tape at gunpoint, that his parents came home from church in the middle of it, and that he had killed the intruder. Investigators did not believe him. They concluded Ryan had brought Riservato in to kill his family and then murdered him, and that Ryan’s longtime friend Ann Plotkin had introduced the two men weeks earlier.

Ryan was arrested on October 31, 2014. Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty. In January 2017 he pleaded guilty to murder, three counts of complicity to murder, and complicity to kidnapping, and was sentenced to life without parole. He never publicly explained why. Plotkin pleaded guilty in May 2017 to three counts of complicity to murder and received 22 years. She died in prison in February 2019.