‘Dateline’: Kentucky football player’s killing was unsolved until a confession led to a suspect
On a July night, a group of friends at the University of Kentucky celebrated a 21st birthday party at an off-campus house.
At the center of that low-key gathering was Trent DiGiuro. A rising senior at the school that summer in 1994, DiGiuro was a lifelong football player who decided to try his luck as a walk-on for the Kentucky Wildcats. After years of hard work, he earned a starting position.
“Everyone called him a big teddy bear,” childhood friend Peyton Turner recalled. “He was the great protector of all of our friends.”
That night, as the birthday party wound down, DiGiuro and a few friends gathered on the front porch. Suddenly, a loud noise rang out.
Antonio O’Ferral, DiGiuro’s roommate and the team’s quarterback at the time, had just gone to bed when he heard it.
“You started to hear the chaos outside,” he recalled later. “The screaming, the yelling, the crying.”
DiGiuro was slumped over in his chair and bleeding. He had been shot, and was pronounced dead at 3 a.m.
Don Evans, a Lexington police detective, arrived at the scene around the same time. Since there was a party that night, he figured there must be people who saw something.
“But with each and every person that I talked to, they didn’t see anything,” said Evans, who has since retired from the department.
Left with more questions than answers — and few credible leads — the case went cold for years. For Evans, a rookie detective, it was intensely personal: It was his first-ever case.
“You’re four years in, five years in, and really no closer to solving it than day one,” Evans said. “It will make you doubt yourself.”
Friends and family had begun to accept the hard truth that DiGiuro’s killing would remain unsolved. Then, five years after his death, a local newspaper published an article about him in which his father made a plea for information to the public: “Somebody knows what happened.”
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