Bitter Remains

by Diane Fanning

  “That night, he started cleaning everything up. I was trying to keep the kids calm and my sister was freaked out. I could tell she wanted me to go and I couldn’t blame her,” Amanda said. She went to get some provisions for the drive home, and Grant told her to toss the acid while she was out. “I was afraid to throw it out at the apartment Dumpster ’cause I didn’t know if it was flammable or explosive. So I got the idea to throw it in the bushes.”

  Talking about Grant, she apparently had forgotten that law enforcement found Grant’s machete in Texas because she said, “He was really paranoid driving to Raleigh. He had the machete with him the whole time and he had the other knife that he always took with him to the club. . . . One time on the road, when Lily was crying, he told me, ‘If you don’t shut her up. I’m going to throw her out of the car.’ . . . And when we hit the North Carolina state line, he was crazy. He wouldn’t get out anywhere. He wore one of the kids’ hats and sunglasses.

  “I prayed to God to keep us safe the whole way. He wouldn’t let me talk to Sha. When she called, he answered and said it was against his better judgment but he’d let us talk for a minute. Sha was mad because I wasn’t telling her what was going on but I wanted to protect her.

  “When we got near Kinston, we got a hotel room. Grant asked where the meds were from my C-section and I told him I’d left them at my sister’s and he got mad. He said, ‘We could have all just gone to sleep.’ . . . He was afraid to go to his parents’ house because he had an aunt next door and he didn’t trust her.”

  Amanda said that she kept trying to be normal, because “I didn’t want to scare the boys. I knew it was closing in and I was scared. Once we got to Grant’s parents’ house, I wanted Sha to come to me because I wanted her to take Lily. But she wouldn’t come because I wouldn’t tell her anything—I couldn’t.

  “Friday, I asked him if he trusted his dad enough to tell him. Grant said, ‘No. If you tell anyone, I’ll slit your throat.’”

  Gaskins asked his client, “Did Grant write you a letter from the Wake County Detention Center after he was arrested?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gaskins handed her the letter and the envelope. In the return-address portion, he had written the name “Sharon Clay” but Amanda recognized his handwriting. Gaskins asked her to read it to the jury.

  Amanda opened the letter and read. It started with a dense joke and then referenced “her love child” in a way that did not make it clear if he was referring to Sha or Lily. He told her she had some homework and that she needed to write everything down. Then he wrote another disjointed comment: “You and your beau are getting raped right now. Hell what do I know—I’m just saying what it looks like but for all I know GrantHaze.com is taking in millions of ninety-nine cent downloads and y’all will come out of this shit rich as fuck. Yo, stranger things have happened in these here Americas—from a nude beach in Jamaica with Nicky to strip searches in North Carolina with Haze. . . . Remember your friends, bitch, or else I’m coming after your ass sideways, karate style.” After mentioning the hive mentality of bees and ants, he wrote: “It’s all the same for us big birds—consciousness is all connected—bowling balls in a trampoline, we are the lens of self.”

  He rambled on with that point and wrote, “You’re good people, Mama and the good thing about it is the seeds you planted in the rain will see to the fruit. Always does. So chillax.” He continued on urging her to keep writing in her journal and then wrapped up with another comment from out of the blue. “Fucking Obama health care, my ass, just make it rain, niggah. Peace and I’m out. I’m thinking about psycho-cybernetics for Grant. I know you have the book in your collection, do you recommend it?”

  When she finished, Gaskins asked a few more questions about finances and the property owned by Grant’s family. Then it was time for Amanda to face prosecutor Becky Holt.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  AMANDA Hayes started out her cross-examination looking confident, her innocent face and sweet voice totally intact. She didn’t flinch when Assistant District Attorney Becky Holt asked, “Did you yourself take pieces of Laura Ackerson and start throwing them into the water?”

  “Ma’am, I never saw anything.”

  Amanda answered the state’s questions, telling the jury about the boat rocking and her exhortations to Grant to be still or he would capsize the boat. While all the while, Amanda said, she was paddling and bailing simultaneously.

  “What were you doing out on that boat that night? What was your plan?” Holt asked.

  “I didn’t have a plan. I was just doing whatever he told me to do.”

  “Miss Hayes, isn’t it true when you were out on the boat, you were taking Laura Ackerson’s remains . . .”

  “Ma’am, I never saw anything.”

  “Wait till I finish the question before you start answering. Isn’t it true that you were taking Laura Ackerson’s remains, which included her torso and her head and parts of her leg, and throwing them over the side of the boat?”

  “Again,” Amanda said in a sugary sweet voice, “I never saw anything that was going on behind me.”

  “You’re saying you were in the back of the boat and you didn’t see anything going on behind you?”

  “I was facing toward the water. That is correct.”

  “Well, what could you hear? What could you smell?”

  “I heard the animals and, honestly, I didn’t smell anything.”

  “Don’t you remember saying on a previous occasion, it smelled so bad it was making your stomach roil?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t recall that.”

  “You testified earlier that, that Monday night, Shelton had come home and you started talking with him about his business. You talked to him about wild pigs?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You talked with him about whether they would eat human remains?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I did.”

  “You talked with him about alligators?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You talked with him about whether alligators would eat human remains?”

  “I don’t remember exactly the entire conversation but, yes, to generalize, yes, I was asking him different questions. I had just found out and he was my first source and I was just asking him because if anyone knew, he would, at this point.”

  “So let me get this straight: you just found out according to your testimony . . . that Laura Ackerson was with you there in Texas . . . and you needed to dispose of her body?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s correct.”

  “And your response to that is to wait until your nephew got there and ask him if wild pigs ate human remains, if alligators ate human remains? What did he tell you? Did he tell you whether or not wild pigs will eat human remains?”

  “Yes, ma’am, he did say that wild pigs would eat anything. Yes, ma’am, he did.”

  “Did he tell you that alligators would eat human remains?”

  “I don’t really recall what he said about the alligators and remains, honestly. I know my sister told me before that they did go alligator hunting and I don’t really recall. But she said that they had gone over into that area.”

  “You knew there were alligators in that area before you got in the Dodge Durango and traveled across the country to your sister’s house, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Amanda replied, but insisted “that is not at all why I was going to my sister’s.”

  Becky Holt then switched over to Amanda’s conversation with her sister Karen Berry. “And your testimony is that on the morning of the nineteenth, you told your sister . . . that Laura was dead?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s correct.”

  “At that time, you told her that you had done it.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s correct.”

  “And you asked for her help to help get rid o
f Laura’s remains?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Can I explain?”

  “Sure,” Holt answered.

  “I was doing that because Grant told me we needed to tell her that. It was not my idea to tell her, it was his idea for me to tell her and what to tell her because he felt that was the only way she was going to help us. And at that point, that was the only solution that he had.”

  “And did she help you?”

  “Very basically.”

  “And she helped at that point by showing you the hog pen?”

  “She helped by keeping the children safe.”

  Holt asked Amanda in an incredulous tone of voice about her story regarding the septic system, with Amanda painting herself as someone who was just following Grant and Karen around without a thought in her head.

  Then Holt asked, “Okay, tell me how this happens. When you say, ‘We want to get rid of a body, how do we do it?’ How did you end up at the hog pen?”

  “I honestly don’t have an answer for that question. I mean, I was just following them. We were just kind of brainstorming. I don’t think there was much rational thinking at this point at all, from anybody.”

  “What I’m trying to understand, Ms. Hayes, and ask you about is, you’ve indicated that you go to your sister and say, ‘I have brought you the body of the mother of these two boys that I brought to your house. I need help disposing of this body,’ and you all being a brainstorming session to come up with solutions and ideas?”

  “Well, first of all, I did not intentionally take a dead body to my sister’s house. It was a position I was put in involuntarily, totally against my will. I would have never, ever, ever in a gazillion years done such a thing—ever.”

  “You would have never taken a body to your sister’s house to dispose of . . .”

  “Never.”

  “And yet, when you were asked to help get rid of a body, your response is to set down and, first of all, ask your nephew for ideas about alligators and wild pigs and then to talk to your sister about throwing her into a septic, going to a hog pen and doing something?”

  “Honestly, ma’am, I wasn’t really asking, I was told . . .”

  “Told what?”

  “He told me I had to help him.”

  “When you were going through the brainstorming session with your sister and Grant Hayes, at some point, you all settled on acid?”

  “I think that Grant came up with that idea and we let him go with it. We weren’t going to argue, dispute with him or anything anymore.”

  “And what was the acid idea?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know one hundred percent.”

  “What percent do you know?”

  “I just know that he said he wanted some—was going to get some acid. What or how he intended to use it, I don’t know. He didn’t share that information with me.”

  Holt questioned her about the purchase of the acid and again, Amanda played the innocent empty-headed blonde who had no idea of what was happening, claiming she wasn’t looking the right direction when Grant loaded the acid into the truck.

  “When did you realize there was acid in the truck?” Holt asked.

  “Whenever he asked me to get rid of it the next day.”

  Amanda then responded to questions about her activities on Friday morning after they’d left the hotel. She said they went to attorney Ford Coley’s office in Kinston and spent a long time there before going to Grant’s parents’ house.

  At that point, court adjourned for the day. But Becky Holt wasn’t done with Amanda Hayes yet.

  —

  THE next morning, Holt questioned Amanda about the time when little Grant was with them in New York. “At some point, you and Grant decided you weren’t going to send little Grant back, is that right?”

  “It was Grant’s decision.”

  “Do you recall telling Dr. Calloway that you and Grant didn’t want to return Grant IV to Laura?”

  Amanda answered that they had had a discussion about it and that she had told Dr. Calloway that Laura was untrustworthy and had “done several things that were not on the up and up, it appeared to me.” She then denied that the plane ticket she bought for Laura to fly up to New York was in exchange for dropping the lawsuit.

  Holt continued on to the move down to North Carolina, which Amanda had said on direct was only supposed to be for three months. If so, Holt asked, why did Amanda sign “a lease for a year?”

  “Yes, ma’am, ’cause once I got there I realized it was definitely going to take longer than three months.” She added that she had intended to sublet or wiggle out of the lease in some other way.

  Amanda continued on, painting herself as the peacekeeper who urged her husband to let Laura have the boys. She said she told him that if all Laura wanted was money, then she’d give the boys back as soon as she realized how difficult it was to work, go to school and be a single mom.

  Amanda then launched again into her story of what happened on July 13, 2011, adding a few details to her earlier testimony.

  Once more, she placed herself in the bedroom with the three children watching the animated movie Cars at Grant’s instruction. Amanda said she emerged to take Lily to the changing table and saw Grant and Laura sitting at a table looking over a document. She read over Grant’s shoulder and became very upset because they had discussed Laura keeping the kids and now he was offering her twenty-five thousand dollars that they didn’t have.

  “I was upset at both of them. I just turned around and walked off. I didn’t want to be around either of them. That’s when Laura asked to hold the baby and I just ignored her. I didn’t want her to hold the baby. I didn’t want to be around either one of them. And it upset her, ’cause she said, ‘You have my kids and you won’t even let me hold yours?’” Amanda said then that Laura “approached me, I guess she tripped over the rug. She bumped into me. But Grant saw the whole thing and he came to her and he just grabbed her to pull her back.”

  Amanda said she just huddled around the baby as Grant and Laura were struggling and Laura yelled, “Get your hands off of me!”

  Amanda then reiterated the same tale as before, about Grant sending her and the kids out, but now added that she first went and got a pack of cigarettes for herself and slushies for the boys. She said that little Grant needed to go to the bathroom but she took him over to the far side of the drive and let him “pee-pee in the grass.”

  Next, she said, she stopped at Wendy’s and got a soda for herself. After that, she drove to the mall and drove around the parking lot. She had planned to take them inside to walk a bit but they had all fallen asleep, so she just kept driving. “When I returned home, Laura’s car was still there. When I started to get out of the car, little Grant was hungry and I knew Grant hadn’t gotten to the grocery store to get something for dinner so I took them to get something to eat.”

  Amanda interjected that when she saw Laura’s car was still there, she assumed that “the ambulance had already come and Grant rode with Laura to the hospital. When I left the Chick-fil-A, Lily was crying really hard, so I drove around to try to calm her down but she kept screaming.”

  After a stop to console her, Amanda said, she went home and Grant told her Laura was fine. In the next series of questions, Holt talked to Amanda about her family. Amanda mentioned that she was upset with her siblings for disposing of their mother’s ashes without speaking to her about it.

  She contradicted her nephew’s testimony about moving the piece of furniture, and said both of her nephews and her sister were mistaken about the time when it was unloaded from the trailer.

  Becky Holt then asked, “You testified that Laura called twice a day, every day, to talk to those boys.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did she call Thursday?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Did she call Friday?”


  “Again, not to my knowledge.”

  “Did you have your phone on Thursday?”

  “Yes, the phone was always on.”

  Holt next asked about Randy Miller and Amanda admitted that he was her private investigator. “Were you aware in August [2011] that he went to the Wal-Mart inquiring about the saw purchase?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “And that was prior to getting any discovery, prior to the police department even knowing about the saw?”

  “It was before I got any discovery, that’s correct.”

  Holt then wanted to know if Amanda had been in communication with Grant at that time and, if so, how they’d communicated. Amanda said, “Several different ways. Whenever I was incarcerated, he contacted me through the pod telephone system, if you will, and he told me that I needed to keep my mouth shut and not trust anybody—that there were a lot of crooked people in the system.”

  When Holt asked for an explanation, Amanda said, “You actually speak with people through the sink. . . . There’s several floors, I believe ten floors. And I believe if you blow water out of your sink, you can communicate on difference floors. . . . One of the girls told me to go to my room and that he was trying to speak to me.”

  When asked if she shared information with others in the jail, Amanda claimed it was very minimal. “My attorney advised me from the get-go not to speak about my case,” she said.

  “Do you know an individual named Michaela Haywood?”

  “I met her one time when I first came but I did not have a conversation with her in regards to my case—no, I did not.”

  “Do you recall telling her that when Laura came over to your house on July 13 that she fell and she didn’t seem to be moving?”

  “No, I don’t recall that.”

  “Do you recall telling her that you and Grant tried to wake her up by putting a wet towel on her face?”