Bitter Remains

by Diane Fanning

  “Whatever,” the defense attorney responded. “If they want to look at the boat, we’ll look at the boat.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  THE fifth day of the trial opened on Monday, February 3, 2014, with Kim Oreskovich of the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office on the witness stand. She explained to the jurors what she had done for the investigation in and on the banks of Oyster Creek, including the collection of body parts. She introduced photographs and other evidence, including the four pair of women’s panties found in the khaki suitcase and a hair found in one of the coolers, though one that was never tied to Grant, Amanda or Laura.

  Defense attorney Johnny Gaskins retrieved the machete from the evidence trove, handed it to her and asked her to hold it up. When she lifted it in the air, he asked, “That’s not something you’d allow anyone to strike you with, is it?”

  Oreskovich flashed him an incredulous look and said, “No.”

  Gaskins then went into a rambling series of questions about blood testing that didn’t seem to go anywhere. When he finished, Assistant District Attorney Boz Zellinger clarified some possible points of confusion that Gaskins had stirred up with his queries.

  The state next called Detective Brad Wichard with the homicide and robbery division at Fort Bend County. He presented photographs of the johnboat and its contents, namely an old red coffee canister and a small pile of ropes and chains.

  The jury then took a field trip downstairs to parking level B1. They walked around the boat and looked at it, out of sight of the media cameras. In less than ten minutes, they returned to the courtroom.

  Wichard told the jury about how he aided the investigation in July, shipping Laura’s remains to North Carolina, and reported on the finding of a portion of a leg on August 11, 2011, during the cleaning of the water gates under a bridge.

  Gaskins said, “There isn’t room on that boat for four large coolers and two adults, is there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think there is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, as I’m looking at the boat, I see two seats . . . correct?”

  “Right.”

  “Between the two seats, how much space do we have?”

  “I’d give an estimate of three feet.”

  “In front of the first seat, how much room do you have?”

  “A little less, probably two and a half . . . from front to back. I’d have to measure to give you an exact number.”

  “What are the dimensions of a one-hundred-and-twenty-quart cooler, do you know?”

  “I would give you an estimate of approximately one and a half by three feet.”

  “Well . . . we have two one-hundred-and-twenty-quart coolers and two seventy-five-quart coolers, right?”

  Wichard quibbled over his knowledge of this fact, only admitting that he had been told that Amanda and Grant transported two of the coolers back to North Carolina. “I was not made aware of, nor do I have knowledge of, the size of those two coolers.”

  “Okay. My point was . . . was there room for those?”

  “Well, if there’s room for two, there’s room for four, ’cause you can stack one cooler on top of the other cooler.”

  Gaskins peppered him with queries trying to get the witness to tell the jurors that the boat would not be stable or that it would be too crowded. Wichard brought an end to that line of questioning when he said, “I can say this from my own experience. I’ve gone fishing on a boat that size with three grown men and one large cooler, with a motor on it and gas and with a battery for the motor for a long while. And I’ll say, yes, it can be done if you’re not on rough water. That’s what I’m basing my opinion on.”

  —

  FORENSIC chemist Timothy Suggs, who had tested soil samples from the hog pen, was the next witness for the prosecution. He determined that two of the samples were strongly acidic and demonstrated the presence of chloride—qualities consistent with muriatic acid.

  Houston Police Department dive team member Brian Davis repeated his testimony from the trial of the first defendant. He described the methodology used to search for and find additional body parts on the second day of the exploration of Oyster Creek.

  Another witness, Raymond Boyer of the Home Depot in Katy, Texas, recounted Grant’s trip to his store to purchase muriatic acid and Raymond’s attempts to dissuade him. The only difference from his earlier testimony occurred during the cross-examination, when Gaskins established that Grant had purchased only one pair of gloves.

  Forensic Odontologist Dr. Paul Stimson again told jurors about the examination of the skull and the dental records that provided a positive identification of the victim as Laura Ackerson.

  Galveston County forensic pathologist Dr. Nobby Mambo again delivered testimony of what he had done that contradicted what Dr. Deborah Radisch found when she received the remains of Laura Ackerson. Gaskins led the doctor to admit that the trauma on Laura’s skull could have been the result of a fall. Zellinger, on re-direct, made it clear that the injury to the skull was not fatal and Laura’s death was a homicide by undetermined means.

  A quick succession of reruns from Grant’s trial took the stand without offering any different or new information. Raleigh Police Officer Kevin Crocker and Detective Thomas Ouellette recounted their participation in the investigation; Mark Herbert, the truck driver for Waste Services testified about the trash pickup; and Raleigh Detective Brian Hall introduced the video of Amanda’s July 13, 2011, trip to Chick-fil-A. The state also used that last witness to emphasize the fact that the packaging for two pairs of kitchen gloves and two respirator masks had been found in the search, as well as two masks and two pairs of blue gloves.

  Gaskins followed up with a series of questions about financial transactions, videos and evidence that elicited nothing more from Hall than “I am not familiar with that,” “I was not involved in that process,” “I do not have an independent recollection of that” or “I did not testify to that.”

  Zellinger rehabilitated his witness’s credibility and professionalism with a few questions. He gave Hall the opportunity to explain to the jurors that Detective Faulk, as the lead detective, was the person who received all the evidence; that bleach destroys biological fluids; and that although the canvas found no one who had heard a reciprocating saw, it also did not find anyone who saw a body carried out of the building.

  —

  AMANDA’S sister Karen Berry walked up to the front of the courtroom, slid a back support into the chair in the witness stand, and settled down to tell her story again. The prosecutor brought her quickly to the words Amanda had spoken to her: “She told me Laura was dead and she had done it.”

  The defense tried to paint a more positive portrait of their client, to the point of trying to put words in her mouth on several occasions. When Gaskins asked her why Amanda was always the one driving the Berry’s vehicles, Karen said, “I wouldn’t let Grant drive my car if he’d asked. Amanda was like a daughter to me. She didn’t need to ask.”

  After a series of questions that raised objections from the state that were sustained by the judge, Gaskins asked, “Were you concerned that Amanda was in danger on the trip back to Raleigh?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Explain that, if you will.”

  The judge interrupted, “You can ask her another question.”

  With a nod, Gaskins tried again. “Were you concerned about Amanda’s welfare because you were concerned that Grant was the one who killed Laura?”

  A voice raised in objection rang out, loud and clear, from the other side of the courtroom. The judge agreed with the state. “Sustained as to the form of that question . . .”

  Gaskins plunged ahead. “Were you concerned . . .”

  Judge Stephens cut him off again. “You can ask her why she was concerned.”

  “Okay.”

  �
�Don’t tell her why she’s concerned.”

  “Okay,” Gaskins said and turned back to the witness. “Why were you concerned?”

  In response, Karen explained her fear that Amanda and the children would be found dead somewhere between her house and North Carolina.

  On re-direct, Boz Zellinger brought the jury’s attention back to one important moment: the time when Amanda told Karen that Laura was dead, and she was responsible. He also elicited a new nugget. Karen said that while they were sitting together on the swing, Amanda told her, “I will do anything to protect my family. Lily needs her dad.”

  Gaskins was not ready to give up on this witness yet. “Is Amanda someone who is easily controlled by men?”

  “Objection,” Zellinger bellowed.

  The judge sustained and Gaskins asked a different question. “Do you recall telling the detectives that Amanda’s husband Nicky Smith had been a controlling man?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And do you recall telling the detectives that Amanda was someone who was easily controlled by men?”

  The state objected but the judge overruled. “You can answer.”

  “I don’t know that I said it that exact way. I think that she . . .” Karen paused to reorganize her thoughts. “I think, at times, that she was controlled by men.”

  The state followed Karen’s testimony with that of her daughter, Amanda’s niece, Kandice Rowland. She told the sea of expectant faces about her abbreviated visit with Amanda on the evening of July 19. She explained that the money she gave to her aunt that night was repayment of a loan Amanda had provided to Kandice to help pay off her student debt after graduating from college.

  With disappointment etched in her face, Kandice told the jurors that Amanda was supposed to call before she left Karen’s, but she hadn’t. “I called her around lunchtime but didn’t get an answer.”

  Kandice was permitted to step down without any follow-up questions from the defense.

  —

  DR. Deborah Radisch, chief medical examiner for the State of North Carolina, as always a most formidable witness, pointed out a number of inconsistencies in the testimony from her counterpart in Texas, including the fact that the cut size was actually at the C5 vertebrae—not at C6, as Dr. Nobby Mambo testified.

  Radisch told the jurors about the three false starts on the leg during the dismemberment, and the intentional and violent puncture wound in the fourth cervical vertebrae, which could have been fatal. She explained the crushed cartilage in the throat was the result of another “intentional and violent” act—possibly caused by blunt force trauma or by strangulation or by stepping on a person’s neck. She then repeated her ruling that Laura Ackerson had died of an undetermined homicide.

  On cross, Johnny Gaskins tried to get her to establish the chronological order of the injuries but Dr. Radisch resisted, saying it was not possible. Then the defense attorney asked, “Do you have any idea of how difficult it would be to dismember a body with a reciprocating skill saw?”

  The medical examiner gave him a look of amusement that spoke of her many years of sparring with defendants’ lawyers. “I don’t have any personal knowledge of that,” she said, then continued in a more somber tone, “but I know that some of the difficult factors are actually getting to the bone through the tissue, [because] a lot of saws don’t cut through tissue very well. Once you get to the bone, that’s where the saw is better—on the bone, not the soft tissue. And of course, it’s going to depend on which bone and where on the bone—that sort of thing.”

  “Would it be fair to say that using a reciprocating skill saw to dismember an individual’s body would require a great deal of damage to the flesh and to the bone?”

  “I think if you’re only using the saw and you’re trying to go through the flesh, that would leave more damage than if you first cut through the flesh and soft tissues to get to the bone.”

  “Say that again, please.”

  Radisch grinned. “Okay, just say you’re using the saw and it’s the only thing you have—you started from the skin and going to the bone,” she said. “The tissue will catch up in that saw and it will kind of muck it up and make it more difficult. But if you understand that is going to happen, then you go get a knife and cut through that tissue and kind of create a path so that the reciprocating saw doesn’t have to go through all that soft tissue, and get right to the bone.”

  “So if you used a knife, you wouldn’t have as much debris flying about.”

  “Yes, that is what I think.”

  “If the reciprocating skill saw was used and a knife wasn’t used . . . then would you . . . expect to have a great deal of bone and debris flying about, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, I don’t know about ‘flying about.’ I don’t know.”

  “But it’s causing a lot of damage to the flesh, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but whether that’s going to be flying about or whether it’s just going to get tangled up in this hole you’re trying to create, I don’t know.”

  “Would it be fair to say when that reciprocal saw hits on a blood vessel, there’s going to be a lot of blood spray?”

  “There would be blood spray, yes.”

  On re-direct, the state brought the focus back to the central points of the medical examiner’s testimony.

  Gaskins had a few more questions. “There are many ways to strangle—you can do it with your hands?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a rope?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a cord from an Apple computer?”

  “Could be.”

  —

  AGENT Mike Galloway, with the City/County Bureau of Identification, reprised his testimony from Grant Hayes’s trial, telling about his role shooting photographs, obtaining swabs and fingerprints, and testing for blood. The defense had him confirm that he found no blood evidence connected to this case.

  Raleigh Police Sergeant Robert Latour, a homicide detective at the time of the investigation of Laura Ackerson’s murder, related his actions and findings in North Carolina and Texas. Then Latour mentioned a bit of information that never arose in Grant’s trial. He said that when he contacted Wal-Mart to get information about the reciprocating saw, he learned that someone else had already requested that material: private investigator Randy Miller, who’d been hired by Amanda Hayes. That line of inquiry was shut down when the judge sustained the defense’s objection.

  Latour was followed in the witness stand by the environmental crimes investigator from Texas, John T. Schneider. He explained the placement and workings of the surveillance cameras set up in Fort Bend County to catch illegal dumpers. He told the jury about the one at the end of Skinner Lane and how he came to connect the photos shot there with the homicide case in Raleigh.

  Senior Agent Shannon Quick with the City/County Bureau of Identification repeated her testimony from the previous trial, only adding her examination of a pair of black women’s pants and a black-and-white shirt splotched with dirt and mildew that had been recovered from the Dumpster trash. Nothing of evidentiary value was found there.

  Defense attorney Gaskins took the witness back to the hall bathroom in Grant and Amanda’s apartment. She confirmed that the room was not totally empty. There were four bottles of shampoo and conditioner on the edge of the tub, a jar on the toilet seat lid, a roll of paper on the holder and a picture on the wall above the toilet. She admitted that she found no blood—not even in the sink or tub P traps.

  The prosecution negated that questioning when Quick told the jurors that there was no test for bleach and that is why it is used in the laboratory to clean up bodily fluids from their equipment. Bleach, she said, destroys hemoglobin and DNA. In response, Gaskins brought up the testing done behind the molding in the bathroom, prompting the state to get on the record that a plastic tarp could have prevented any blood from reaching th
at spot. Gaskins, referring to the reciprocating Skil saw, asked, “Would you expect to find blood spatter?”

  “I have never used a saw,” Quick said. “I have no idea.”

  —

  FBI document examiner Lindsey Dyn went through her process of determining that the two handwritings present on the twenty-five-thousand-dollar handwritten agreement were those of Grant Hayes and Laura Ackerson.

  Computer forensic examiner Courtney Last talked about her review of computers owned by Laura, Karen Berry and Grant Hayes’s parents, and the cell phones belonging to Grant and Amanda Hayes. During her testimony, the state played the audio of the confrontational October 29, 2010, encounter between Amanda and Laura that Laura uploaded onto her computer. It culminated with Amanda saying, “I would just as soon we would never speak again.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  MICROSCOPIC evidence was in the forefront at the start of the ninth day of Amanda Hayes’s trial on February 7, 2014. First, forensic biologist McKenzie DeHaan testified that a swab from the linen closet in the hall bathroom, the blue latex gloves found in the trash and the coffee can from the johnboat all tested positive for blood in the lab.

  Next, Jennifer Remy, a forensic examiner who had examined the trace evidence, detailed the process she employed to determine which hairs collected would be suitable for DNA analysis. Sharon Hinton, who received that evidence for further testing, found the genetic markers of Laura Ackerson intermingled with that of a male on one of the blue gloves, while others had Laura’s DNA on the outside surface only. On some gloves, she found the presence of two or three separate contributors; however, none of the unknown DNA was in sufficient quantity to compare to known samples. In the case of one of those gloves—but not the others—she was able to eliminate Amanda Hayes.

  Remy also described her attempt to get a DNA sample from a pair of blue jeans but ran into a typical complication. Very often, the dye used in making denim garments inhibits the amplification of the genetic material to the extent that extraction is impossible.