TARGETED: A Deputy, Her Love Affairs, A Brutal Murder

by M. William Phelps

  “What is it, Mom? What’s wrong?” Tracy’s daughter, Elise, then 15, was particularly concerned and taken aback by the look on her mother’s face: Tracy looked as if she carried the weight of the world on her back, compounded by the worry she saw in Elise’s face.

  “My daughter,” Tracy explained, “looked like her world had just crumbled around her feet.”

  The relationship she had with Doug, Tracy later told me, was unlike any other relationship she’d ever had.

  “I am not necessarily a believer in ‘love at first sight,’ ” she recalled. “But I am truly a believer in the power of attraction. Attraction can be so overwhelmingly powerful that two people can be in a crowded room and still be drawn together like a magnet to steel. Yet, what begins as an overwhelming attraction to each other can swiftly turn to the same kind of overwhelming love. That is what Doug and I shared.”

  Being a cop and dating Doug, Tracy maintained, came with a cost.

  “I have been told, more than once, that being with Doug did not make me look good as a law enforcement officer. Maybe it didn’t. But when you really love someone, you look beyond their faults and try to help them. I admit that I didn’t know all the details of what Doug had been involved in before I met him, or what he continued to be involved in afterward, but I was convinced that he was making the effort to change and I loved him enough to give him a chance.”

  Now Tracy was being accused of murdering this same man. Still, being a cop, understanding the realities of small-town, southern living, not to mention the denigrating mentality of a woman in a sexist, man’s world, Tracy went on to note, she was never naive or ignorant as to what was going on during this time. Tracy said she knew that while sitting in her kitchen, the phone cradled back on the receiver after just having spoken to her attorney and now staring at her daughter, one thing became perfectly clear to her.

  “I would never see my family again outside of prison walls.”

  26.

  Jeffrey Smith attended University in Auckland, New Zealand, from 1979 to 1984, where he earned his doctorate in medicine. For six years after that, Dr. Smith practiced in several of New Zealand’s emergency and family medical facilities before returning to the United States to begin his career in the Atlanta area.

  Arriving in Georgia with a career ahead of him, Dr. Smith spent the next three years, 1992 to 1995, studying pathology. During that interim, he worked two years for the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office and wound up working for the GBI in Decatur, where he began working on all sorts of criminal cases under the State Medical Examiner.

  Before Smith began, Special Agent J.C. Maddox photographed the crudely painted galvanized watering trough, and how the CSSs had cut the bottom of the trough out so they could remove Doug’s body. Maddox documented several items within the concrete that were going to, at some point, play a vital role in the investigation. One was a “maroon in color plastic shower curtain,” Maddox noted in his report, along with “a clear shower curtain with blue, red and yellow designs”—sea shells and starfish—“and a beige in color floral print (bed) sheet.” No one could tell what color the bedsheet had been because of the massive amount of body fluids drained from Doug’s body, soaking the sheet through, changing its color.

  “There’s also a cord there, isn’t there?” one agent said as they hoisted case no. 2000-1021325 onto the gurney.

  Indeed, there was. It was tied around Doug’s waist. But there were also two thin ropes tied around Doug’s feet, with a piece of red and white plastic covering both. As Smith washed his hands and put on long rubber gloves, he thought about the idea of seeing a man murdered and set in concrete inside a galvanized horse/cattle-watering trough. It was surely a unique—perhaps unprecedented—way to try and hide and ultimately dispose of a body to cover up a murder. Here, in the case of Doug Benton, clearly, that plan had not worked.

  On Tuesday, June 20, somewhere just after the noon hour, Smith got to work on Doug’s body, which had been removed from the concrete and watering trough by CSS, placed on a gurney, and then wheeled into Smith’s autopsy suite at the GBI Division of Forensic Sciences in Decatur. From this point on, Douglas Benton would be referred to as case no. 2000-1021325.

  As Dr. Smith would later refer to it, the “puzzle-solving process”—or, rather, the “medical puzzle-solving process”—was now officially under way.

  “Body is morbidly decomposed,” Smith noted in 2002, having called Doug’s body “moderately decomposed” in his 2000 autopsy report, further stating that “skin slippage” had occurred, especially Doug’s hands, which Smith described as having been “de-gloved.”

  A terribly horrific image, if there ever was one.

  There was “bloating of the body cavities, greening, and intense odor of putrefaction,” Smith put in his report, which was what Rob Poston and his wife had smelled coming upon the watering trough out in back of the cattle ranch. Partially mummified (one might reckon because of the concrete), Smith reported Doug’s “underlying soft tissues” to be in “very good” shape.

  Doug measured in at average height: 71 inches, or 5 feet 9. His body, in the state it arrived, weighed a mere 113 pounds. Doug was twice that, easily. Being encased in the concrete, however, had vaporized most of the liquid from his body (sort of like using rice to dry something out), leaving just bones and decomposed tissue. All of the organs in Doug’s body had decomposed to the point of being nothing more than dried mush, allowing his body that great reduction in weight.

  Of added significance, Dr. Smith noted in his 2000 report (concurring later during his testimony in court), Doug’s body was wrapped in a shower curtain, a sheet and a second shower curtain—those same items Maddox and other CSSs had photographed and reported.

  Checking Doug’s underwear, one side—his right buttock—was riddled with slits from what was presumed to be the blade of a knife. Doug had been murdered while lying on his side.

  The location of the injuries told investigators they were probably correct in speculating Doug had been on his couch sleeping on his side, wearing only his underpants, when his killer snuck up from behind and surprised him. After all, there were no defensive wounds found on Doug’s body, information that posed several scenarios. For one, Doug trusted his killer and/or knew the person. Or perhaps the person blindsided Doug and he had no time to respond or react. If it were a sneak attack, one had to ask: was Doug’s killer weaker and smaller and concerned that Doug could somehow overpower him or her?

  A question not brought up here, though, might have been: were those “knife” wounds on Doug’s buttocks and the midsection area of his torso made when the concrete was chipped away with a screwdriver back at the cattle ranch? Or when the trough itself was hoisted off the ground with pointed pitch-fork-like levers placed on Rob Poston’s tractor?

  They certainly could have.

  As Dr. Smith began his general external examination, inspecting Doug’s entire body, the pathologist uncovered the manner of death almost immediately: “Specifically, I found a total of 10 stab wounds on the body and a single gunshot wound to the head.”

  Smith was certain of it.

  The gunshot wound to the top of Doug’s head showed a blackening of edges around the entrance hole, somewhat of a starfish-shaped pattern. Yet “no stippling,” Smith wrote in his 2000 report, “is seen on the surrounding scalp skin,” which was too far along into the decomposition process to obtain a good read on, anyway. Still, there was no question or disagreement about Doug being shot at very close range—possibly even with the barrel of the murder weapon butted directly up against the top of his skull.

  After studying the entrance wound, Smith dug into Doug’s skull with tweezers and searched for a possible bullet or fragment.

  “When I saw him, the brain had pretty much liquefied, so the bullet was within what remained,” Dr. Smith later testified.

  Landing on something, with a pair of forceps, Smith carefully removed the bullet, dropping it with a clank into a sta
inless-steel dish. Later, he placed it inside a sealed and labeled container. Smith called the fragment “a greatly deformed small caliber” bullet in his report, saying nothing more about it.

  Heading toward Doug’s midsection, Smith found “a couple of small puncture wounds” on the right side of Doug’s belly. A stab wound to his right buttock. Similar wounds to his right flank and on each side of his right buttock. Doug must have been sleeping on his left side.

  But why shoot and stab him?

  The one finding regarding those wounds Smith would later be certain of had to be when they occurred, thus casting aside any theories of a screwdriver or the tractor forks being responsible. According to Dr. Smith, there could be no doubt that each wound had been sustained at or near the time of Doug’s death. Post-mortem injuries are vastly different—for one, there would be no blood evidence left behind inside the wound itself—from those sustained after death. When death occurs, blood stops flowing.

  Simple science.

  This was important because Rob Poston, who had found the body, had indeed used a tractor with pitchforks to lift the watering trough out of the ground. He had also tried to bust up the concrete with the tractor and forks to some extent. In addition, investigators on scene went at the concrete with a screwdriver and mallet. Smith and the GBI had to determine if Poston or the others could have inadvertently caused the injuries with the forks on his tractor or a screwdriver. “Smith was certain of his findings: Not a chance the wounds were created post-mortem.” The wounds Doug sustained to his body were administered with a very sharp object, sans a knife, and had been made while blood was still flowing through Doug’s body. What’s more, the stab wounds were inflicted in areas of the body for one reason: to kill. Several penetrated deep into Doug’s stomach, one entering his colon. Another had nicked a bone near Doug’s midsection. These were violent injuries, perpetrated with careful precision and significant force—all meant to cause the most amount of damage as possible.

  In the end, Smith determined that Doug Benton “died of consequences of a contact range penetrating gunshot of the head and multiple stab wounds,” the cause of death the “combined effects of multiple stab wounds and gunshot of the head” and the manner of death “homicide.”

  While the autopsy was under way, SAs Ben Williams and Jesse Maddox sat down with a young neighbor of Doug’s. The 15-year-old girl lived next door.

  “Go ahead,” Williams encouraged.

  It was May 25 or 26, just a week before Doug went missing, she could not recall the exact date. Yet she knew she was at home that weekend. She was outside in the yard. She could hear Doug and Tracy. They were outside and yelling. It was as if the argument had started inside and spilled out into the yard.

  “You’re a slut!” Doug had said to Tracy, the neighbor remembered. Doug sounded angry, as if Tracy had done something terrible to him.

  “Yeah, you’re no man,” Tracy came back with, apparently going straight for the jugular. “Your dick cannot even please me.” She laughed.

  “And that was it?” Williams asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  27.

  On Tuesday, June 20, investigator Mike Smith got a tip about a guy who had painted an SUV with what Smith had been told was a “similar camo design” as to what had been painted on the watering trough Doug’s body had been recovered from. Smith and SA Ben Williams got hold of the man and had him come down to the OCSD for an interview.

  He seemed a bit fidgety, maybe more out of having to disrupt his life by answering questions regarding what everyone in town was talking about: the murder of Doug Benton.

  After they settled into an interview suite and sat down, Williams spoke first: “We have information that a camo design we’ve come across through our investigation is consistent with a design on a 1979 Chevy Blazer you own or owned.”

  The man looked at the two of them. “Yes, I have a Blazer. It is camouflaged and I painted it.” He also added that he had a friend who had once dated Tracy Fortson. He had broken up with her, however, prior to September 1999. That friend actually owned some property adjacent to the RSE Farms acreage, he explained. “Roddy Sturdivant,” who owned the farm where Doug’s body had been found, “thought I was hunting on his property and told me to stay off.”

  “You mind if we take a look at your Blazer?”

  “Not at all.”

  They headed out to the guy’s house where he kept the Blazer.

  Smith photographed the vehicle.

  “There were no visible signs of the design (I) had observed on the water trough as was on the 1979 Blazer,” Williams concluded in his report of the visit.

  28.

  Late that same afternoon, June 20, those investigators involved believed law enforcement now had enough probable cause for an arrest warrant issued in the name of a former fellow cop. As hard as it was to fathom, Tracy Fortson, a woman who had once professed a desire and will to uphold the law of the land, seemed to be the most likely suspect responsible for Doug Benton’s murder. Tracy had motive, means and opportunity, according to law enforcement at this very early stage of the investigation.

  Scoggins had spoken to the assistant district attorney, Marsha Cole, and everyone was on the same page regarding enough probable cause not only to obtain that arrest warrant, but a search warrant for Tracy’s house. After all, it was clear the cover-up behind Doug’s murder had been an elaborately planned, carefully thought-out set of circumstances: wrapping Doug’s body in a shower curtain and tying his feet with rope, moving Doug’s body from his house into the trough, pouring and mixing the concrete, cleaning up inside Doug’s house, realizing there was an investigation going on and going back into Doug’s house to pour kerosene all over the carpet and light candles to burn any forensic evidence left behind and, finally, getting that watering trough full of concrete with a dead human being inside out to the RSE Farms and dumping it.

  Tracy and her team were tipped off from someone on the inside as to what was going on. As Scoggins later reported, “Prior to the issuance of the arrest warrant, a fax was received from the office of” Tracy’s attorney, Tom Camp, who indicated he “was the attorney on record for” Tracy and she would arrange to surrender herself.

  What did that fax mean, however, in the scope of the investigation?

  Tracy had lawyered up, as they say, and was not going to willfully submit to any sort of interview with cops. She knew better. Guilty or innocent, the last thing you ever want to do is open your mouth to a cop. No matter how much you want to say, how much you want to stand on top of a table in a packed room and announce your complete innocence, you should never, ever speak to the police, whether they believe you are responsible for a crime or not. Everything you say, as the Miranda warning spells out, will be used against you. You might even be lied to. You might even be tricked. You might be bullied. And you might even get the idea that someone else is fingering you for the crime.

  Early Wednesday morning, June 21, that signed search warrant came in. By 11:30 a.m., the troops had rallied at Tracy’s Smithonia Road home in Winterville. A quiet, rural street with small, clap-boarded ranches, hidden behind thick Georgia foliage, dense shrubs and trees.

  After a few knocks on the front door, the team determined nobody was home.

  Ben Williams and Mike Smith led the search. Smith had interviewed Tracy four days prior. He’d also interviewed Jeff Bennett and Jerry Alexander, two of Tracy’s most ardent opponents, both of whom had decried how volatile and even violent Tracy and Doug’s relationship had been. Bennett and Alexander had told police on more than one occasion that if there were someone out in the world who would want to take revenge on Doug, that person was Tracy Fortson. She was a menace. Had always been a problem and was extremely insecure.

  Something wasn’t adding up within it all for law enforcement. The more they looked into Tracy’s life, the more they thought maybe that violent streak they had heard about manifested into murder.

  Mike Smith had been out
to Doug’s house two times, June 17 and 20. Noticeably, Smith said later, there was no odor inside Doug’s beyond that bird smell the first time they went in (on the 17th). In fact, Smith later recalled, “It was warm and hot and we enjoyed all the air that we could get.” But when they went out that second time (the 20th) and discovered the bloody couch and candles, “As we entered,” Smith added, “(there) was a very strong smell of kerosene.”

  It almost felt as if somebody had gone inside in between both times the MCSD, GBI and OCSD had gone out there. Had Doug’s killer been watching the situation unfold from behind the scenes, seen that law enforcement went into his house, and then before they could come back and search it, try to clean up? But when that plan failed, he or she decided to torch the place in hopes of getting rid of all the evidence at once.

  It seemed, without much evidence of it being a fact, that only someone privy to how the investigation into Doug’s disappearance was unfolding could plan such an event so timely and perfectly.

  Then there was that CSS fingerprint tape used to secure the note to Doug’s truck.

  Another sure giveaway?

  Was it all fitting together and pointing to one suspect—someone either involved with or close to law enforcement?

  Still, Tracy would later say, she had given investigators Bill Strickland and Mike Smith plenty of information when they interviewed her that Sunday, June 18—two days, incidentally, before they went back into Doug’s house, one day after they had first spoken to her—about a possible suspect in Doug’s disappearance: Painkiller, that drug dealer Doug had, working as a confidential informant, allegedly help put behind bars.