New Theory Emerges on Circumstances Surrounding Teen’s Tragic Death

A former prosecutor has opened up about his reasons for persistently advocating his theory regarding the mysterious death of a teenager on a remote highway.

Bill Healy, 66, has faced accusations of being a paid provocateur due to his unwavering insistence on his belief about how Noah Presgrove met his end.

Nineteen-year-old Presgrove was found on an isolated section of US-81 near Terral, Oklahoma, on September 4, 2023, mere hours after attending a friend’s 22nd birthday celebration just a mile away.

He succumbed to severe head and upper-body injuries, leading to his death from internal bleeding. However, the origin of these injuries remains unresolved two years on.

Despite the Oklahoma Highway Patrol (OHP) not treating his death as a homicide, Presgrove’s family has long stood by their belief that he was assaulted and his body subsequently discarded on the roadway.

Presgrove’s sister Maddison Rawlings even sued four of his friends and three parents for wrongful death last June claiming as such.

The members of three Facebook groups that endlessly debate other aspects of the case also broadly agree with this prevailing theory – but not Healy.

‘I don’t think that there’s ever gonna be a way to know exactly what went down, but I can’t find one piece of evidence that when I was a prosecutor I could have used to prosecute somebody for murder or manslaughter,’ he told the Daily Mail.

Noah Presgrove, 19, was wearing only his shoes when his body was discovered on a desolate stretch of US-81 in Terral, Oklahoma, on September 4, 2023

Instead, he believes Presgrove was hit by a vehicle speeding down the highway in the early hours of the morning, and died at the scene.

Healy was a prosecutor in Chicago for decades before joining trial consultant firm DecisionQuest in 2001 until he struck out on his own in 2015.

His background led to accusations by some of the thousands of people who obsessively discuss the case online that he was hired by the defendants in the Presgrove family’s lawsuit.

They claimed his frequent insistence that Presgrove wasn’t a victim of foul play was an attempt to sway a potential jury pool.

But Healy told the Daily Mail he wasn’t paid by anyone and hadn’t even worked in three-and-a-half years as he was battling stage four colon cancer.

Instead, he began posting about the case in Facebook groups as a way to cure the boredom of cancer treatments and having too much time on his hands.

‘I have been pretty much in the thick of it, I thought I was gonna die,’ he said. ‘Thankfully I’m gonna live.

‘I live in Chicago. I know none of these people, I’m not friends with anybody [involved], and I am currently not working.

Bill Healy, 66, has been accused of being a paid agitator because he wouldn’t stop talking about how he thinks Noah Presgrove was killed

But Healy told the Daily Mail he wasn’t paid by anyone and hadn’t even worked in three-and-a-half years as he was battling stage four colon cancer

‘I have no personal interest in the case, although in some ways I feel emotional about Noah, having gotten to read about him and get to know who he was as a young man, and how sad it was.’

Several of the lawsuit defendants reached out to him, he said, but he refused to give them advice as he could be liable if it backfired. 

Healy began posting on Facebook in May 2024, not long after the Daily Mail’s initial investigations into the case sparked massive interest around the US – and a year before the lawsuit was filed.

He was drawn into a community of obsessive true crime buffs, grieving family and friends, and supporters of the lawsuit defendants.

Battle lines were drawn between opposing camps, and bitter rivalries occasionally spilled out into the real world.

Healy’s views have stayed consistent since Presgrove’s autopsy report was released that month, and he vigorously defends them at every opportunity.

‘My main interest was to try and help the family get some peace, and it’s online, so people get very excited and very emotional and call me names and I call them names back,’ he explained.

Healy’s theory differs from a usual hit-and-run – which was ruled out by police early in the investigation – in that he believes Presgrove was lying down.

Instead, he argued Presgrove was much more injured than everyone thought he had been from an ATV accident earlier in the evening.

Healy (pictured in an old photo on his professional pages) was a prosecutor in Chicago for decades before joining trial consultant firm DecisionQuest in 2001 until he went out on his own in 2015

Obsessive members of Presgrove case discussion groups on Facebook noted the similarities between photos on Healy’s social media and the professional images. The Daily Mail confirmed they are the same person

Presgrove (left) poses with his best friend Jack Newton during the party. Newton has since become a favorite target of those who believe Presgrove was murdered

Presgrove’s close friends all told police that the teenager flipped his best friend’s ATV in a drunken jaunt not long before he disappeared.

He didn’t appear to be injured after helping right the vehicle, they alleged, but was dirty enough from hitting the mud that two of the girls helped him take a shower. 

‘He was hurt in the ATV accident in a way that maybe he did have internal bleeding…’ Healy theorized. ‘He stumbled out of those shorts, which were his friend’s oversized shorts, which were found nearby. Then, when he walked down the street, he eventually passed out.

‘And then I suspect that, based on the injuries, that he was then run over by a car that didn’t see him.

‘It’s the middle of the night, it’s an empty road, it’s dark. No one expects there’s gonna be a naked kid laying in the road.’

Healy justified the time lag using a friend whose sister fell off a bar during a night out in college and was knocked out.

‘When she came to, she refused to go to the hospital and kept partying, and the next day they found her dead in her bed,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘She had a brain bleed.’

Healy believed the pattern of Presgrove’s injuries – which included three skull fractures, and breaks including ten ribs, 13 vertebrae and both shoulder blades – showed he was lying down.

‘I suspected that Noah’s injuries, which are extensive, were because he got rolled over. He clearly wasn’t standing because he doesn’t have any long bone injuries, in other words, his legs aren’t injured,’ he added.

‘There’s also no car parts. And in a typical hit and run, there’s gonna be telltale signs.’

Presgrove’s body was found about a mile north along the highway from the small street where the party was held

Photos of police chalk outlines showed where his body (marked by the white line) and at least one of his teeth (marked by the circle) were found

Presgrove’s body was found between the two chalk lines, and teeth within the circles. In the background is a memorial set up for the teenager

Healy believed Presgrove suffered road rash because the force of the alleged impact also would have rolled his body until it ended up on the side of the street.

‘Somebody was speeding to work or speeding away from the casino or whatever, and they ran him over,’ he guessed. ‘And if you hit something like that fast enough, it causes your body to tumble.

‘I think he tumbled down the street which scraped him up.’

Healy is opposed to the theory that Presgrove was beaten to death in part due to the lack of defensive wounds on his arms.

He also rubbished a sinister theory that Presgrove was attacked with a golf club from a set supposedly missing from his friend’s house.

‘I’ve been asking people forever, where are the marks that would indicate the massive beating it would take to cause these injuries?’ Healy said.

‘How you get so many broken, fractured ribs and vertebrae and shoulder blades without having any corresponding beating marks from a baseball or a club?

‘It makes no sense to me.’

Jack Newton, 20, and his fiancée, Carter Combs, 21, are both named in the Presgrove family lawsuit. The couple announced they were expecting a baby in March

Logan Jernigan, one of the girls who was at the party whom Presgrove fell asleep with earlier in the weekend. She was there the night he died and is named as a defendant in the lawsuit

Healy brought up how he once, as a prosecutor, used marks on a victim’s skin to get a confession from her lover who beat her to death with a golf club.

‘I got it out of him in a confession [because] the marks on his dead lover’s body were consistent with being beaten with something approximately the size and shape of a golf club,’ he told the Daily Mail.

Healy also didn’t see how, or why, Presgrove’s closest friends would have it in them to viciously beat him to death. 

‘It’s a lot of effort to kill somebody… it’s a lot of effort for drunk kids to wanna beat their friend to death,’ he said.

‘Nobody has pointed to anything that would indicate to me that somebody would wanna viciously beat Noah to death.’

Presgrove’s cadre of close pals still raging well into that Sunday night consistently claimed they had no idea how he died. 

They also have conflicting stories about the series of events and other details during the party leading up to Presgrove going missing.

But Healy said that didn’t prove anything as witness statements often conflict and it would be more suspicious if they were exactly the same – the latter could indicate collusion.

Presgrove disappeared after allegedly arguing with Avery Jo Combs after he asked to sleep in her bed, but she refused. Avery was named in the lawsuit as she allegedly hosted the party

Carter Combs was also named in the lawsuit as one of the hosts of the party 

He also didn’t think they could keep what really happened a secret for years. 

‘I got a lot of murder confessions, they used to call me Father Bill – there’s just so many people confessed to me,’ he told the Daily Mail.

‘These kids, if they were hiding a story, man, I just can’t imagine they could hide it this long.’

Despite the drama raging in Facebook groups about his opinions, Healy extended an offer to Presgrove’s family.

‘If they wanted to call me and ask my opinion on something, I’d be happy to tell them,’ he said. 

‘I don’t have a dog in the hunt, I would love to see the family get some peace, because it, you know, it’s just awful to lose a person that way.’

Healy, while with DecisionQuest – now rebranded as TrialQuest – made news for helping as a jury consultant to defend corrupt former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Trial consulting was brought to the public eye by the TV series Bull, starring former NCIS actor Michael Weatherly, about a firm that helps lawyers pick juries and present evidence to appeal to them.

Healy began posting in May 2024, not long after the Daily Mail’s initial investigations into the case sparked massive interest around the US – and a year before the lawsuit was filed

Presgrove suffered fractures to nine vertebrae in his spine, mostly at the back of the bones in the knobs you can feel if you touch your spine with your hand. There were also fractures to ten ribs – all close to the spine and mostly in the upper back

Healy’s theory of how Presgrove died is at odds with that of Dr Stuart Fischer, who reviewed Presgrove’s autopsy report for the Daily Mail in 2024.

Fischer, an internist with extensive experience in emergency medicine, concluded the injuries Presgrove suffered were so catastrophic and varied that him being mortally wounded in a severe beating was the most likely cause.

OHP didn’t explicitly rule out manslaughter in its 2024 statement, and the lawsuit left open the possibility that the alleged beating wasn’t meant to kill him. It also included ‘unidentified individuals’ among the defendants.

‘Either intentionally or accidentally, the defendants killed [Presgrove],’ the lawsuit claimed.

‘Although the death may have been unintended, hosting the party and beating of [Presgrove] was intentionally malicious and in reckless disregard of [his] rights.’

The six-page complaint offered no evidence that Presgrove was beaten to death, let alone by anyone at the party, and none has emerged since his body was found – other than the nature of his injuries.

‘The party was a civil conspiracy… to furnish alcoholic beverages to underaged and intoxicated individuals, such as [Presgrove], over the course of several days,’ the lawsuit claimed.

Presgrove’s friends were accused of providing him with alcohol ‘even after he was already intoxicated’ and breaching their duty of care by doing so.

The partygoers named in the lawsuit were Presgrove’s best friend Jack Newton, and hosts Carter Combs, Avery Jo Combs and Logan Jernigan.

Presgrove’s autopsy report found he had a blood alcohol level of 0.14. 

Presgrove’s aunt Robyn Smith (center) and grandmother Deborah Smith (right) appealed for answers more than seven months after his death

Presgrove (center) with his father Victor (left) and mother Kasey (right)

A rough series of events emerged over the years since his death as the case was investigated: texts were leaked, and the details were intensely discussed online.

The generally accepted narrative includes Presgrove being dirty after the ATV accident and being helped to shower by Carter and another friend Jasmine Milan, because of how drunk he was.

Allegedly, Presgrove soon after argued with Avery – whom some friends claim he was romantically involved with at the time – after he asked to sleep in her bed and she refused, telling him he had to sleep on the floor.

‘She told him he couldn’t sleep in her bed because he messed with her friend the night before,’ Newton told a friend last year.

The argument upset Presgrove, and he wandered off into the night ‘to cool off’, never to be seen alive again.

Newton in Facebook messages explained to a friend his own argument with Presgrove. ‘We argued about girls for a second then ended up holding each other crying telling each other how much we meant to one another,’ the message read.

The lawsuit added that ‘at least some partygoers’ realized Presgrove was gone at 3.41am.

The 3.41am timing is a reference to a selfie Milan posted to Snapchat with the caption ‘well, Noah’s missing.’

Jasmine Milan posted this selfie to Snapchat at 3.41am with the caption ‘well, Noah’s missing,’ which continues to fuel condemnation a year later

Presgrove was found at 5.43am, according to both police and the lawsuit, naked and with some of his teeth scattered around his body.

He was spotted by an Oklahoma Petroleum Allies hauler driver and Gulfmark Energy field supervisor Tyler Hardy, both of whom called 911 minutes later.

Newton claimed he happened upon the scene about 6am as he left to go fishing with his father, Caleb Newton, whom he called at 6.05am.

‘I figured maybe he got a ride or something, Noah’s done that before – got mad and left,’ Caleb told the Daily Mail last year.

‘[Presgrove] was not one you usually worry about. I wasn’t really thinking about it.’

This timeline is disputed by another partygoer, Kaden Pressy, who claimed he was woken up at 5.15am by Newton bursting through he door.

‘Jack Newton bursts through the door saying, “Noah is dead.” Like, frantic, tearing up,’ he told detectives in a leaked recording of a June 21, 2024, interview.

Pressy also claimed when he followed Newton to the body, Presgrove had black shorts on, in contrast to being naked with a pair of white shorts on the road nearby.