Bitter Remains

by Diane Fanning

  “Ladies and gentlemen, don’t fall for it. It’s a trick. We’re asking that you find her not guilty on both charges.” As far as the charge of accessory after the murder, the defense contended that Amanda acted “under duress, coercion and the threats that Grant made to her while they were in Texas.”

  The issues that Gaskins suggested the jury focus on were whether Amanda was “in fear of her own safety and the safety of her children? . . . You have to decide: did she act under duress? If she did, then she’s not guilty.”

  —

  ADA Boz Zellinger stood to present that first half of the closing for the state. His first words were: “‘Laura’s dead. I did it.’ Those are the words of Amanda Hayes. Those aren’t the words of Amanda Hayes to a foe or to someone who had an agenda on her. Those were the words to her own sister.”

  Zellinger introduced what he called the three principles of the case: that Amanda Hayes and Grant Hayes did this together; that the murder was premeditated; and that Amanda’s story fell apart when all the evidence was examined. “It’s hard to focus on those elements, because the defendant’s story is so ridiculous. It’s hard to pay attention to what the state’s argument is when the defendant is stretching every little thing past where the truth was.

  “You just heard the defense say . . . that there is no evidence that Amanda participated in this murder. Yet you also heard from Karen Berry that Amanda said, ‘Laura’s dead. I did it.’ That’s a bell you can’t unring.”

  Zellinger continued on, highlighting the witnesses and evidence presented by the state. First, he pointed the jury’s attention to the number of coincidences they’d have to accept to believe Amanda’s story: that the bleach stain was caused by the little boys immediately after Laura’s death; the frenetic cleanup of the scene that required her to insist that Sha take little Grant and Gentle out of the home immediately; that the electrical tape (most likely used to tape up tarps and plastic in the bathroom) just happened to be purchased in the immediate aftermath of the crime for use with Amanda’s artwork; that Amanda was always facing the wrong way when Grant did anything suspicious; that although she was the one who disposed of the acid, she had nothing to do with it.

  Zellinger later mentioned yet another fortuitous coincidence. “In the bathroom where Laura was dismembered, they coincidentally clean that. Grant and Amanda Hayes say that it was Gentle’s fault—that feces had gotten in there. . . . It’s a comical assertion that Amanda didn’t know what was going on in this apartment.”

  He disparaged the defense arguments and said, “What we didn’t do is claim things that there was no basis for. You heard the defendant say, ‘Yeah, her body was dismembered in Kinston.’ There’s zero evidence of that at all.” He played the video of Amanda unloading the heavy boxes containing the acid bottles, mocking the defense contention that Amanda couldn’t do any heavy lifting because she’d just had a C-section.

  Regarding prior intent, he said, “One of the biggest keys to the premeditation is this note that’s found in the apartment,” going on to wonder, “What happened with this note? Was there some sort of duress that made Laura sign this? . . . Most importantly about this note, I’d ask you: Why do we find this note? Why is it still in that apartment? Everything else that has Laura’s blood on it, like those gloves, is gone. They throw everything else out. Why do we find it there? And I offer to you: The reason we find this at that apartment is because it makes it look like Laura fled. It makes it look like Laura Ackerson got the twenty-five thousand dollars and she’s gone—she took the money and she ran.”

  He then suggested to the jury that from the moment that the note was drafted, premeditation existed. “I want to focus on some of the assertions of the defense because they’re so ridiculous and farcical. Just because a question was asked of a witness doesn’t mean it’s evidence in this case. You heard some of those questions: ‘Oh, was it a wink and a nod—is that why this plea deal was done?’ Or ‘Did you find the chain saw in the house?’ This is a reciprocal saw. The reason the chain saw is thrown out is to get in your mind that it was a loud noise.”

  He reminded the jury that Patsy Hayes had told them that the rental properties were all occupied at the time of Laura’s death, and the remaining pieces of real estate were vacant lots. “The defense, after getting their idea that the dismemberment of the body was done in Kinston blown up, they say maybe it was done . . . outside on one of those vacant lots, which is ridiculous, because that saw does not have a battery in it, so you’d need a really big extension cord.”

  Zellinger then mocked the sympathy plays made by the defense when they talked about Amanda caring for Nicky and others, and the subliminal attempt to plant concern in the jury’s mind over the possibility of Amanda spending her life in prison. He replayed the message from Grant to his mother that the defense alleged to say that only Grant, Amanda and Lily were moving to the Hayes home in Kinston. However, a careful ear can pick up the words “and the boys” immediately after their half sister’s name.

  The prosecutor reviewed the telephone records for Grant and Amanda’s one functional phone that night—the one belonging to Amanda. He said that if someone used that phone to call a messaging service, wouldn’t it make sense for the person to access Amanda’s messages, not Grant’s? Sarcastically, Zellinger added, “I guess that somehow that makes her a drug dealer.”

  Laura’s cell phone, he contended, would have told who left that message and it would have had a recording of what actually happened it that apartment. However, he said, it is somewhere “that we will never find. Additionally, there’s no phone call to Amanda’s phone at the time Amanda alleged that Grant called her to tell her to pick up bleach at Target.”

  Moving back to the charges before the defendant, the state’s attorney said, “First degree murder is on the table. Mr. Gaskins told you it wasn’t on the table. The judge will tell you that first degree murder is on the table. . . . The biggest issue is this acting in concert. And you know this team of Amanda and Grant committed this murder.” He read the relevant passage from the judge’s instructions and added, “The state, in this case, relies on the legal theory which can infer that for a person to be guilty of a crime, it is not necessary that she, herself, personally, do all the acts necessary to constitute that crime. . . . This wasn’t a situation where Laura was killed and the body was just thrown in a lake or something along those lines. There was a deliberate effort to cut off her arms, cut off her legs, cut her torso in half and then, finally, to cut her head off so they would fit in these coolers. The kind of depraved mind for Amanda and Grant to do that shows this murder wasn’t just an accident. You don’t cut somebody’s body up and drive it halfway across the country if it was an accident.”

  Zellinger circled back around to that note. He contended that Laura could have signed the note and made a tape recording of what had transpired, then turned to them “and said, ‘Ha. I gotcha.’ And Grant and Amanda say, ‘Now we need to kill her.’” That, he alleged, was sufficient proof of premeditation. “It just has to be a short moment for Grant or Amanda to say, ‘We can’t let her go out that door.’ And maybe that’s why she’s killed by that front door. Why would Laura start this fight with Amanda when this custody dispute is finally going her way?”

  The prosecutor then ran through some of the other contentions made by the defense. He asked the jurors to consider that if Grant had been in Kinston dismembering the body, why didn’t he buy the duffel bags there? Then he moved to Gaskins’s insistence that the saw would leave marks on the tile floor. “You don’t know, with two people, if you would necessarily make indentations. . . . What you did hear was that Grant Hayes bought a huge plastic tarp and a whole bunch of plastic sheeting. You can construe that was put down in that apartment and that the electric tape was used to seal it off. There just wasn’t bleach at the front door, there’s bleach leaking out of the bath and that has not been explained, either. And the reason for th
is is that Grant and Amanda Hayes bought this bleach and they dumped that bleach all over that bathroom.

  “Mr. Gaskins gets up here and tells you luminol would still react to body fluids that were in there after they had bleach poured on them . . .” but the experts say that “bleach would have destroyed the body fluids that were in there and the only thing you’d find evidence of is bleach, and that’s what happened in this case.”

  He turned then to the defendant’s testimony. “How many times did Amanda Hayes say from the witness stand ‘honestly’? I can’t remember. ‘Honestly’ this and ‘honestly’ that. Focus in on those things ’cause that’s what your job is as a juror, to listen to the evidence and determine what is believable.”

  Bringing his portion of the state’s arguments to a close, Zellinger said, “You’ve seen a deliberate, orchestrated effort to avoid justice in this case by Amanda Hayes. From those eleven days in July 2011 to the past four weeks of this trial, Amanda Hayes has tried to duck justice.

  “She’s tried to put you on the wrong path. She’s tried to hide from justice. She’s tried to deceive it. Justice screamed out when Laura was being dismembered and murdered in that apartment. You know it waited for days and days as Laura’s body was decomposing in that Texas creek, and you know that it covered its mouth when Amanda Hayes took the witness stand and swore to [tell] you the truth and told you what she told you.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, today justice arrives. It is before you today. And it demands, on the behalf of law, reason and in the inhumanity of what happened to Laura, that you find Amanda Hayes guilty of first degree murder.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  BECKY Holt stood to deliver the prosecution’s final argument. “Grant and Amanda Hayes acted together on July the thirteenth in 2011 because by July 2011, Grant and Amanda Hayes were desperate.”

  She went through the dire financial situation facing the couple and the final blow to their hopes found in the psychological evaluation. Amanda had called Dr. Calloway’s recommended two-three-two split “‘ridiculous.’ And what did that mean? It meant, not only were they not going to be free of Laura, not only were they not going to get custody and be able to move away and pursue their dreams . . . they were going to be stuck in Kinston.”

  Holt scoffed at Amanda’s attempts at trial to appear as the peacemaker, to distance herself from the custody battle. She reminded the jurors that Amanda got married for the custody battle, moved to North Carolina for it and spent tens of thousands of dollars on it. “What does your reason and common sense tell you about that?”

  Holt reread a few previously shared passages from Laura’s journal that outlined the contentious nature of Laura and Amanda’s relationship, before moving to the events of July 13. She alleged that the last phone call answered on Laura’s phone was from Amanda telling her to come to the apartment. “We know that because that’s what she told Patricia Barakat.”

  Holt referred to Grant and Amanda’s need to stretch time, because if Laura got there at five thirty, that’s four hours before Amanda is seen outside that apartment and that span did not fit with Amanda saying that she didn’t know what happened to Laura. She mocked the contention that Laura arrived much later because of the stop for food at Crabtree Valley Mall, telling the jurors that the defense only told them that so they wouldn’t question why Amanda was there so long with a dead body while claiming ignorance of the fact. She added that what actually happened in that apartment on that night will remain unknown, “because Laura is not here to tell us; because Grant has been convicted of first degree murder; and, we submit, because Amanda has not been truthful telling you about those events.

  “We know that what she did in that apartment before she was murdered was that she signed an agreement that she never, ever would have signed. . . . Laura Ackerson did not voluntarily sign that agreement or write that in there that said ‘I can get to see my children whenever [their] father says.’ You know that.”

  Holt also focused on the “stab wound to C4. Mr. Gaskins explains that to you by saying her neck must have been cut so the blood could have drained out. That’s not what Dr. Ross said. She said there was a stab wound.” Holt moved her arm through the air, pantomiming a knife thrusting into her own throat. “We know that Dr. Radisch testified that she witnessed injuries to the neck muscles and the crushing of the cartilage. We know that the damage to her head was like you would get from a concussion—it was not fatal. We know that she was either strangled or stabbed or some combination of those two. We know that she was murdered in that apartment.”

  Holt turned to Gaskins’s outline of Grant going out to stores and she asked, “What does that mean? It means that Amanda and the boys are home in that apartment with Laura’s body. And what would Amanda say? She would say, ‘No, I didn’t know Laura was dead. I didn’t know she was in that bathroom.’ She would have you believe that for four days that hall bath, the main bath, is out of use and shut off and that she didn’t know that Laura’s body was in there. What does your reason and common sense tell you about that?”

  Holt ran through Amanda’s actions over the time they were in Texas, from the disposal of the clothing they wore when Laura’s body parts were dumped in the creek to Amanda’s careful concealment of the boxes of acid behind some trees. “Where’s the duress? There isn’t any—because they’re in it together, from the beginning.”

  Holding up a photograph taken at the motel near Kinston on their arrival back in North Carolina, Holt said, “Mr. Gaskins argues that she’s haggard, that she’s not happy. I’ll tell you what this is—this is a celebration. This family is going to be together and Laura has finally, in their view, been erased. They’ve taken her halfway across the country. They chopped her up. They poured acid on her. And they fed her to the alligators in the creek. [Amanda] thinks they’re home free. This isn’t the face of someone,” she said pointing to Amanda in the photo, “who’s frightened of this man,” she said as she shifted her finger over to Grant.

  She directed her attention to the fact that Grant and Amanda were in separate cars with police officers when they were taken downtown. “That’s important because if things had happened the way she told you they happened, don’t you know that she would have told the police officers? She said she was scared. She was afraid. How much safer does it get? He’s in a police car. She’s in a police car with officers. She doesn’t say a word about that.”

  Holt defended the testimony of Patricia Barakat and the state decision to call her. She said that the woman was a valuable witness because Amanda told her that she and Grant “both hated Laura.

  “You also know that a year after they were arrested, Amanda doesn’t say, ‘I was afraid of Grant.’ No. Patricia Barakat said she loved him. When Amanda could not adequately explain why she didn’t call 911 or why they had to cut up Laura’s body to Patricia, that’s when Amanda changed her story and testified that she didn’t know Laura was dead until that Monday night in Texas.”

  Holt reminded the jury of Patricia Barakat’s observations about Amanda in the courtroom when she was pressed, “and suddenly that little innocent-sounding, singsong voice was gone: ‘that’s how it was when we talked.’” The prosecutor noted that Patricia said Amanda’s “little singsong voice” only appeared when she was trying to manipulate others.

  Just like Zellinger, Holt disparaged the defense’s groundless contention that the dismemberment occurred in Kinston and said that it was only common sense that Amanda was involved.

  “Grant Hayes is a horrible person who did a horrible thing but he didn’t act alone. Amanda Hayes and Grant Hayes decided that they were going to kill her and erase her. That she was going to stop being the barrier and the anchor them here and kept them from going forward. It’s selfish. It’s horrible. . . . What you have experienced through this court and through Amanda Hayes is a fine acting job. Amanda Hayes has come before you and tried to sell you on a role. She’s tried to
play a role in which she didn’t know what was going on, in which she was controlled and manipulated by another person. And your reason and common sense says that’s not what the evidence shows.

  “She was not afraid then of Grant Hayes. She was not afraid a year later of Grant Hayes. She has given the performance of her life. . . . She has come here and constructed something that she thinks answers all the questions. And she’s come concerned about her wardrobe. She asked Patsy Hayes for a baby pink blouse. . . . She’s used a voice trying to manipulate you which is not her regular voice but one she uses when she wants to get something. Don’t fall for it.

  “Tell her that there will be justice for Laura Ackerson today—that it’s not going to stop with Grant Hayes being held responsible for his actions. Tell her that she is going to answer for her part in the murder of Laura Ackerson. Tell her like you told all of us in jury selection that the law applies to her just like it applies to Grant Hayes—that the fact that she’s a woman, the part of us that doesn’t want to believe anyone could do this, especially a woman, is not going to get her out of this—that you’re going to hold her responsible for her actions—that you’re not buying this act she put on. Tell Amanda Hayes by your verdict that she is guilty of first degree premeditated murder.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  AFTER forty-nine witnesses over thirteen days, the three-man, nine-woman jury received the case that same day at four P.M. on February 17, 2014. They deliberated for seventy-five minutes before adjourning. They were behind closed doors for another six hours a day on Tuesday and Wednesday. They requested Laura’s diary and notebooks and the letter in which she purportedly relinquished custody in exchange for twenty-five thousand dollars. They also asked for the reciprocating saw that law enforcement purchased for scientific analysis of the tool markings and for dramatic demonstration during trial. Judge Stephens allowed them to view it in the courtroom from the jury box but would not allow it to be turned on, since neither side had done so during the trial.