Bluegrass Betrayal

A murder unsolved. A summons revived. A decade of silence broken. When Lexington businesswoman Deborah Wardlaw was found shot to death in her apartment in 1999, police called it a mystery. To Christopher Hignite, it was a warning. Just days earlier, Wardlaw had phoned him in fear for her life, naming the officers who had threatened her. The case was never solved. Years later, Hignite's own name reappeared on a decade-old child-support summons that had never been served-a file revived without explanation, long after the child's mother had married another man and moved out of state. What followed was a spiral of false arrests, vanished paperwork, and intimidation that exposed how power and bureaucracy intertwine in the Bluegrass State. Drawing on thousands of pages of verified court records, open-records requests, and correspondence, Bluegrass Betrayal is both memoir and investigation-a forensic reconstruction of how institutions use procedure as punishment and silence as protection. From the unsolved murder of Deborah Wardlaw to Kentucky's landmark Ricketts v. Rhoades ruling that denied paternity rights despite DNA proof, Hignite connects the dots between personal ordeal and public pattern. The result is a haunting portrait of how justice bends to convenience-and how one citizen turned documentation into resistance. When law becomes self-protection, who protects the truth? Bluegrass Betrayal is a chilling true story for readers of Erin Brockovich, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, and Just Mercy-a testament to perseverance, record-keeping, and the cost of silence.