Voices from Death Row
Page 4
He gave me the same information for my home state of Indiana, mentioning women by name (if he could remember it) any identifiable memories he still had. He told me he had admiration for my work with incarcerated women and that his heart pains for any woman in distress. The irony of this coming from a convicted murderer of women was not lost on me. I pondered if he was intentionally trying to give me a specific impression of him. Surely, he didn’t believe anyone would believe him at this point. Maybe it was unintentional, I wondered. Perhaps he’s delusional now.
Lastly, he wrote of his innocence. He said he was framed and did not commit the murders but offered to give me his side of the story. Later, he said, after I had answered a few of his questions and he felt he knew me better. This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this tactic played. Inmates are lonely people. Most of the people in their lives left them long ago. They will attempt to string along anyone who offers to spend time with them to keep them around longer. This works especially well against anyone who may want something from them.
The second letter was a bit more familiar and but still somewhat officious. He spoke of the cold prison winter and deaths inside from the effects of it. He elucidated on his favorite era, the 1950s, and how it was a paradise lost. The music, the movie stars and the culture is something he misses. He spoke of pen pals and his wife’s death just a few months before and how much he missed her. He said he had no other pen pals and knew no other writers, and yet I knew of another author, Chris Swinney, who was in the process of writing a book on his case, who had spoken to him, and a collector of historic crime memorabilia, had exchanged letters with him.
While Mr. Naso is courteous to a fault, his misogynistic tendencies were apparent to me early on. After we had exchanged a few letters, he made reference to the fact that I have six children and guessed my age between 50 and 60. I had already told him I was 47. He was concerned about me, he said, being a single woman, on my own, although I had also told him I was engaged and in a long-term relationship. Did he just miss those facts in my previous letters? It seemed unlikely when he remembered other details such as where I was born and how many children I had.
“Before I start, I’m worried about you, Kelly... Do you have a regular job that provides you a steady income or are you on S.S.I with a disability? Is your health o.k.?”
He assumed and insinuated my writing did not make me a steady income. Surely I must be disabled and draw a Social Security check. In closing, he asked for a little help since the letter had come the week of his birthday.
“If you can afford it, and want to gift me a book of forever stamps, I can always use. But if you are poor, I’ll understand.”
This letter was inside a New Year's card with a post-it stuck to it which read:
P.S. In my next letter I’ll tell you how the corrupt prosecution got the jury to find me guilty and wrongfully convicted.
The card said Season’s Greetings on the outside in silvery cursive text. Inside the card was a black and white photo of a much younger Joseph Naso posed with his camera glued to the left side. The other side had a drawing of a rose glued to it and the sentiment:
My best wishes to Kelly for a very good New Year.
In my return letters, I asked Mr. Naso about the other author he was working with and the murderabilia collector. I did not get another letter from him. A few weeks before this book went to print, the other author Naso was working with contacted me. He had lost contact with Naso as well. We surmised he had been concocting some scheme between the three of us and gave up upon being discovered. Or maybe he just got bored.
For more detail on this case, check out the book from C.L. Swinney, List of 10.
LeMaricus Devall Davidson
The crimes of LeMaricus Davidson brought the entire city of Knoxville and the whole state of Tennessee to its collective knees. Vile, despicable and shocking, the carjacking, kidnapping, rape, torture and murder of a young couple crossed the lines of malevolence so blatantly, it never fails to elicit a wincing gasp from all who hear of it.
It was the evening of January 6, 2007, when pure evil wreaked havoc in Knoxville, Tennessee. Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, 21 and 23, were leaving a friend’s apartment and headed across town to another friend’s home. It was date night. They had only been dating a few months and the two had dinner and fun planned. They hopped into Channon’s Toyota 4Runner, but before they could leave the parking lot, they were carjacked.
The pair had both graduated high school and were on their way to a successful adult life. Channon was a Farragut High School graduate and sociology major in her senior year at the University of Tennessee. Christopher graduated from Halls High in 2002 and was playing baseball for the Red Devils. They each lived at home with their parents and lived very average and yet exceptional lives. Moving on with high school and through college, they had just found each other and were perhaps experiencing the magic of true love for the first time.
According to the court testimony of one of the defendants, the brother of LeMaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, the night for those men started as a reunion party for two long-lost brothers. They had been separated for years as Davidson served prison time for various carjacking, theft and burglary charges and Cobbins became a teenager. The first week of 2007 had been slated as their reunion, so Cobbins, his girlfriend Vanessa Coleman, George “G” Geovonni Thomas and his girlfriend, Stacy Lawson, travelled to Knoxville to get the party started. They partied the new year in, after which Stacy Lawson left. Cobbins, Coleman and Thomas remained.[xviii]
On the night of the 6th, LeMaricus Davidson, Eric DeWayne "E" Boyd, a friend of Davidson’s, and Letalvis Cobbins left the house on Chipman Street and went the few blocks to the Washington Ridge apartment complex. Davidson knew a woman who lived there and had been there before. He may have noticed the cars parked there were usually fairly new and worth stealing. Vanessa Coleman stayed behind. On the way, they smoked a wet blunt, marijuana soaked in embalming fluid and allowed to dry before wrapping it in a cigar leaf, according to testimony from Cobbins. They arrived at the apartment complex and circled the parking lot several times before parking in front of Channon Christian in her white Toyota 4Runner. She sat in the driver’s seat with Christopher Newsom standing in the open doorway. The couple were in an embrace when two of the men approached.
Davidson and Thomas forced Newsom into the car and jumped in with them. They took them back to Davidson’s house on Chipman Street as Cobbins drove their vehicle back behind them. Who the vehicle belonged to and where it came from would later be an important point. They brought the blindfolded and bound couple into the home where Vanessa Coleman and George Thomas were waiting. Thus began their last painful and degrading days on this earth.
Both Channon and Chris were raped time and again by both the men present as well as foreign objects. Every orifice in their bodies had been violently penetrated and virtually shredded. Hour upon hour passed while the five people inside that house committed every vile assault imaginable upon the young couple. Both were sadistically beaten and tortured.
Sometime after midnight, Chris was taken nude from the waist down outside to some nearby railroad tracks. He was blindfolded with a cloth strip ripped from Davidson’s own bedspread tying his hands together. He was shot in the head, neck, back and then set on fire. Evidence suggests he was sodomized before or as he was shot.
Channon was raped and beaten and tortured for many hours before having bleach poured all over her and down her throat in an attempt to obliterate DNA evidence. Trial testimony and DNA evidence revealed she was brought into the house and placed in a side bedroom. Letalvis Cobbins forced her to perform oral sex on him. LeMaricus Davidson penetrated her, leaving DNA. Medical examiner reports show she had grave damage done to her head and face as well as her mouth, vagina and anus. Cobbins and Coleman testified to hearing Channon crying from behind that bedroom door later, after Boyd had returned from Chris’s murder and he and Davidson were in the room alone w
ith her. She was saying “No, don’t do that.” It is believed this was when she was penetrated with a table leg.
Hours passed during which Cobbins and Coleman claim they had left in an attempt to flee to Kentucky, but his own later testimony makes it hard to believe they went anywhere. It is more likely they stayed throughout the entire debacle. Channon was forced to make a call home somewhere shortly after midnight on Saturday night. Cobbins was able to tell police how this was done despite claiming not to have been there. “That’s all good and fine,” he told investigators, “the thing about if someone’s got you at gunpoint,” he said when asked about the call.
Davidson attempted to kill Channon sometime early Sunday morning by breaking her neck with a sharp snapping motion but was unable to do so. At that point, while naked from the waist down, her legs were strapped to her chest using the same torn up bedspread that was used to make Chris’s leash. It extended around her back where it connected to her hands, bound behind her. Her feet were tied together and a plastic bag placed over her head. She was placed inside five plastic garbage bags while still alive and then smashed into a large plastic garbage can. She died there. An autopsy suggested she could have been alive for days before finally expiring. [xix]
LeMaricus and Eric Boyd immediately went into hiding. Letalvis Cobbins, Vanessa Coleman and George Thomas fled back to Kentucky.
The doomed couple were missed almost instantly as they were expected to show up at a friend’s birthday party that night. When Channon and Christopher did not arrive home when expected, their parents began to worry. They called around to friends and family, but no one had seen them. When Channon did not show up for work the next day, her parents contacted police who at first would take no action as both persons were adult and had not been missing long. It was shortly after noon when an engineer from the railroad spotted Christopher’s still smoldering body on the railroad tracks.
Channon’s family had become frantic. They were searching on their own and persuaded her cell phone company to use data to locate her last call, the one she made from the Chipman Street house. Two days after her disappearance, the company pinpointed the cell phone tower she had last accessed. It was on Cherry Street, a major road close to Chipman. Channon’s father, Gary, and brother, Chase, set out searching and located her Toyota parked in the general area of the Chipman Street home at approximately 1:30 a.m. on January 8th, a Sunday.
The police joined the search at that point and an investigation officially began. It was during the search of Channon Christian’s Toyota 4Runner that an ATM receipt was found that had LeMaricus Davidson’s fingerprints on it. Once they identified the prints and got an address for Davidson, they searched the house and Channon’s body was found. It was 48 hours after Chris’s smoking remains were found.
Police pulled Davidson’s cell phone records where they discovered several calls to Boyd and set up surveillance at his mother’s home. The Knoxville police and the United States Marshal’s Office joined forces and waited for him to appear. The feds showed up too. Carjacking was suspected and it is a federal crime. Before it was over, the Eastern District of Tennessee Attorney’s Office, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Knox County Sheriff’s Department were all involved. [xx]
He showed up on January 11th and was arrested for driving on a suspended license. When questioned about Davidson, he denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. It didn’t take long before he gave him up, however, and led them to an abandoned house the two had broken into. Davidson was arrested without incident just after 3 p.m. He was wearing Christopher Newsom’s tennis shoes.
Boyd’s statements to police that day had Davidson first hiding out at a friend of his girlfriend, Daphne Sutton. When word of his crimes got out, he was thrown out. He called Boyd and the two of them stayed at a female friend’s apartment until she too heard of the crimes and tossed them out. It was then that they broke into an abandoned house on Reynolds Street in Knoxville. Boyd claimed that it was during this time on the lam with Davidson that he first heard about the carjacking, rape and murders. He vigilantly claimed he had no part nor knowledge of the crimes as they happened. He said he had only been to the Chipman house on Sunday briefly. He claimed his knowledge of how the carjacking happened was only second-hand from Davidson, but it was incredibly accurately detailed. He was released from custody after giving his statements.
After LeMaricus Davidson was taken into custody, his first statements were of denial. He claimed no knowledge of anything that happened. “I don’t even know what the fuck happened in my house, though, man… I don’t even know what happened in my house.” On and on he kept up his denials. “I hadn’t been back to my house since like Friday night. I ain't no reason to run if I ain't done shit… I don’t know them at all. I don’t. I had never saw them before in my life.” These were his words upon arrest, although later he tried to say Channon and Christopher were drug customers of his.
About midway through the interview, he wears down. He begins to crumble under the pressure of the investigators and admits to knowing what happened and claims to be only an accessory after the fact.
He explained that Letalvis, his brother, was coming from Kentucky that crucial weekend to get a resupply from the big Knoxville drug dealers. He did this often, according to Davidson. It was a family gathering of sorts. He would stay and visit until the deal was done and then return home to sell. This visit had turned sour when Letalvis stayed longer than usual. It was even more bothersome to Davidson that he’d brought two unwanted extra visitors, Coleman and Thomas. To remedy this, Davidson pushed hard for Letalvis to contribute to the household by whatever means available. A carjacking would do. Again, out of his own mouth, he says the night began as a carjacking, not a drug deal.
Davidson went on to say that it was Saturday night that Cobbins showed up in the 4Runner with Channon and Chris with George Thomas in tow. “G did that,” he told investigators when questioned about the shooting of Christopher. “I’m assuming my gun was used because the bullet was missing out of it.” He claimed they left again and came back with only Channon and he knew she would be killed because her eyes were uncovered. He said she looked at him and said she didn’t want to die. He denied killing her saying he couldn’t stand what was happening so he left in her car to sell drugs to his customers. DNA belonging to LeMaricus Davidson was found in Channon’s vagina and anus.
Statements from Davidson and his girlfriend, Daphne Sutton, and a DVD rental left in the Chipman house from a Kentucky library led police to a home where Letalvis, Vanessa and George were hiding. Letalvis Cobbins and George Thomas were arrested immediately. Coleman was brought in for questioning and released. She would later be arrested on the 31st of January. Inside the home where they were hiding, police found a red purse containing some of Channon’s personal items. They also found a journal with entries by Coleman noting details of her last few days. [xxi]
Much like his brother, Letalvis Cobbins began his statement with utter denial and ended up admitting only partial participation. He, however, claimed that he did not visit Knoxville often and had come for the first time on the weekend in question. He further stated he wasn’t even at the Chipman house when the murders occurred because he and Davidson had argued over doing a carjacking that night and he went to stay at a mutual friend, Vince’s, house with Thomas and Coleman. He said he only returned to the house on Sunday when he saw the 4Runner which Davidson told him he had on loan.
That story soon fell apart, however, when he learned both the landlord and Daphne Sutton, Davidson’s girlfriend, had placed him at the house on Saturday. That is when his story changed to being a part of the carjacking because he was basically forced by his brother. It is believed that Eric Boyd comes into the picture as the ride to the carjacking although he is never prosecuted for it. The three visitors from Kentucky had no car as their ride had gone back without them. Davidson had no car either. The carjacking took place 3.5 miles from the Chipman house.
George Thomas gave a statement upon his arrest much the same as Cobbins, but he dallied less with the truth. He claimed when they arrived from Kentucky, Davidson was ready to pull a carjacking and pressuring those at his house to help. He said when Boyd showed up, the two brothers left with him to find a car to jack and returned shortly with the 4Runner and their two hostages bound, gagged and blindfolded. He claims it was Davidson and Boyd who left with Christopher to rape and murder him on the tracks and they were back in 30 minutes. He claims never to have touched either of the victims. He did acknowledge seeing Daphne Sutton at the house, a point which Letalvis Cobbins vehemently denied.
Vanessa made her statement and, like the brothers, she stonewalled at first. She denied being in Knoxville at the time of the murders, saying they had already returned to Kentucky by that time. Authorities had been treating her rather nonchalantly, more like a witness than a defendant. She no doubt felt a bit comforted and did not rush to obtain counsel. When she testified in front of the Grand Jury on January 17th, things got really interesting for Ms. Coleman. She had no legal representation but had agreed to an immunity deal to testify against the brothers. When she appeared before the Grand Jury, she was required to say, when asked her first questions, that she invoked her rights under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution and refused to answer on grounds that it may incriminate her. She did not say this. Instead she answered, “yes, sir” to the question of “you said you’re from Kentucky, right?” Because she did this, the immunity documents that had been drawn up for her were never signed and she never received the immunity promised to her. Had she had counsel, she would have been advised of what she had to do. Regardless, she testified to the Grand Jury and it was not the denial she started out with.