Watch: "Who Killed Kent Heitholt: The Mike Boyd Theory"

On November 12, 2013 Ryan Ferguson walked free from prison after spending nearly a decade behind bars for the murder of Columbia, MO sports editor Kent Heitholt. 

Ryan's conviction was overturned by a Missouri appeals court after the only witnesses to implicate him in the murder recanted their stories, claiming prosecutors had encouraged them to provide false testimony during the October 2005 trial. 

In their ruling, the Missouri Western District Court of Appeals found that the prosecutors office concealed evidence that clearly pointed to Ryan's innocence. 

It has been long suspected that a co-worker named Mike Boyd may have been responsible for the gruesome killing. Over the course of his 6 statements to investigators, Boyd's story changed dramatically, and he struggled keeping simple details consistent.. 

In some statements Boyd said he was driving a blue car the night of the murder, in other statements the car was red. His claims that he encountered two men in the alley as he was driving off the lot didn't appear in any of his statements until Ryan and his co-defendant Charles Erickson were arrested more than 2 years after the murder. 

Boyd also offered conflicting statements about the race of the two men: initially claiming they were white, before later testifying under oath that he was unable to determine their race. 

Throughout his statements however, one thing remained consistent; Mike Boyd was the last known person to see Kent Heitholt alive. 

At approximately 2:24 am, a member of the building's janitorial named Shawna Ornt got an uneasy feeling when she entered the parking lot for a smoke break but saw and heard nothing out of the ordinary. After retrieving a co-worker from the building, the two encountered two men in the lot who alerted them to the injured Heitholt. After a brief exchange, dispatch records show they placed a 911 call at 2:26 am.

Investigators determined Heitholt was struck 11 times with a blunt object before being strangled with his own belt, an encounter experts say would have taken 6-8 minutes. 

Boyd told investigators in an official statement that he left the parking lot at approximately 2:20 am, placing him in the parking lot at the time of the murder. 

Despite all of this, Boyd was NEVER considered a suspect in the murder 

The case was profiled in the Netflix documentary Dream/Killer: https://www.netflix.com/title/80081990

The public is asking the Missouri Attorney General’s Office to officially open an investigation into Mike Boyd as suspect in the murder of Kent Heitholt.