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

by M. William Phelps

  “(When) I was asked to come to the Madison County Sheriff’s Department for an interview, I talked with … Scoggins and … Bill Strickland,” Tracy explained to me. “I had known Bill Strickland for approximately 15 years. I told them everything I could think as to where Doug could have gone, his friends, family, the last weekend we spent together, including the argument we’d had. When asked if Doug had enemies, I told them about (Painkiller, who) … Doug had worked for years ago. When Doug decided to make a change in his life, he helped prosecute (Painkiller). Doug had also told me that (Painkiller) had threatened to kill him when he got out of prison.”

  Nowhere in any of the reports had I seen where a law enforcement investigator mentioned that Tracy had given them this information during any of her interviews while Doug was considered missing.

  By 12:20 p.m., Chief Deputy Bill Strickland arrived at Tracy’s residence.

  “I’ve got an indication from the DA there is probable cause here to detain and tow Miss Fortson’s black 4x4 truck. Is it here?” Strickland wanted to know after getting out of his vehicle and approaching the team.

  It wasn’t, someone told him. But they knew Tracy was at her mother’s house, where the truck was likely parked. Tracy’s mother lived on Arnoldsville-Winterville Road, not too far away.

  “Williams, you come with me,” Strickland said. “Let’s head over there.” Strickland had the actual search warrant for Tracy’s house in hand. “Smith, Cross, Scoggins, here,” he added, handing the warrant over. “I’m leaving this with you.”

  MCSD investigator Cody Cross had done only basic work in Doug’s disappearance up until this point. At Tracy’s house, Cross took out the MCSD’s video camera and made sure there was a fresh tape in the deck. His job—beyond helping in the search—was to videotape the process.

  Good thing, too, because the MCSD was about to uncover the mother lode of evidence collection.

  The first thing Cross and the team noticed was Tracy’s mailbox—and the fact that it was painted in a camouflage, leafy green pattern.

  Same as the watering trough?

  Could be.

  Inside the house, investigators found a litany of additional items that seemed, in nothing else, suspect—if not entirely related to the murder of Doug Benton: the arrest warrant indicated an open box of “small gloves, rubber micro flex,” “CCI brand .22 LR ammo” (in Tracy’s bedroom), “1 22 cal. Stevens model 15 bolt action” rifle (in a second bedroom), “1 22 cal. Stinger ammo” (in the kitchen), “3 spray paint cans, blk, grn, khaki” in the “small building” (garage), “a spent 22 cal. round in the yard beside carport,” “2 towels from bathroom w/stains consistent w/blood,” “2 22 cal. bullets from back bedroom dresser,” “rolls of white tape from 1rst bedroom beside desk,” and a host of other items, many of which could be considered incriminating.

  Cross found the door into the bathroom and videotaped the room before stepping inside. What he noticed was the odd smell. But then again, in the totality of what they were uncovering, the smell fit in with everything else. There is nothing more potent, prominent and maybe synthetic smelling than that of a brand-new plastic shower curtain inside a small bathroom.

  “All the creases were still in it, like it had been freshly unwrapped and more recently unwrapped and it still had that, I guess I would say, plastic odor,” Cross mentioned later.

  Another interesting find came from GBI SA Terry Cooper, when he came across “some … surgical-type tape and a white, possibly 2-inch wide paper-type tape present in the first bedroom to the right when coming down the hallway.”

  Cooper requested all of it “seized and secured.”

  Someone asked about the significance.

  “For comparison to the tape which had been discovered on the body,” Cooper remarked.

  In other words, was this the same tape used to secure the shower curtain to Doug’s body and the plastic around his feet?

  OCSD Deputy Charles Morgan was also on scene at Tracy’s house. As he helped participate in the search, Morgan came upon Tracy’s duty belt, that black leather, bulky belt cops fasten around the waist to hold the tools of the trade: weapon, handcuffs, flashlight. Morgan knew Tracy fairly well. He’d once worked with her. Morgan later said that Tracy, unlike other deputies he knew, had an extra leather pouch on her belt where she kept a knife.

  Picking up the belt, Morgan opened the pouch.

  The knife was gone.

  29.

  THe following day, June 22, first thing in the morning, Cody Cross and Bill Strickland, Sheriff Ray Sanders, Terry Cooper and Ben Williams headed out to the farm where Doug’s body had been recovered. There had to be evidence on the farm of maybe a vehicle transporting the watering trough out to the farm. Doug’s killer had to have used a truck to transport the trough. Moreover, how had Doug’s killer gotten that trough off of the truck bed and onto the ground? If the killer acted alone, which had not yet been ruled out, and committed the crime him- or herself, there could be evidence on the farm of how the trough was removed from the vehicle.

  They had a look around.

  Cross estimated what he referred to as “the scene” to be about two to three miles from the main road. They stood at that exact area of the farm where Rob Poston and his wife had come upon the trough.

  Cross took out the video camera and started recording.

  “Upon walking up to the scene,” Cross wrote in his report, “I detected a foul odor which was emanating from a pile of what appeared to be potting soil—I noticed bugs, maggots, and flies in the pile of potting soil.”

  They collected a sample of the soil. A bag of potting soil had been recovered from Tracy’s carport garage.

  Would the soils match?

  The fact that Doug’s body and the watering trough were now gone from the location for several days and the smell stayed around told them Doug had been encased in the concrete for an extended period of time.

  Next, Cross and the others noticed a nearby tree with markings on its outer skin, or bark, some of those nicks and scrapes about waist-high, others a bit lower.

  “The markings [indicated that] something had been tied to it and pressured exerted,” Cross said later.

  It appeared as though someone had tied a rope or some type of cable to the tree and pulled on it tight enough to leave a marking (indentation) in the bark around the circumference of the tree. As they stood and thought about it, an image emerged: Doug’s killer tying one end of a rope or wire to the trough, positioned on the back of a truck, the other end to the tree, and then driving away, using the tree as leverage to pull the trough off the bed of the truck and onto the ground.

  Another, small tree, according to law enforcement, “show(ed) skinned marks on it.”

  What Cross and the others established with both markings was that on this particular limb of the smaller tree, there was “a skint mark and it looks like something either pushed it down and scraped it going in or vice versa, scraped it coming out.”

  The bumper or fender of a truck, perhaps? Or maybe the tractor used to hoist the trough off the ground and move it around?

  A CSS started up a chainsaw. The buzzing noise was loud and obstructive. As he cut into the two trees, carving out those chunks to tag as evidence, it appeared everything they were uncovering led to one conclusion: Tracy Fortson killing Doug Benton, using her truck to transport a watering trough with his body in it onto a portion of farming/hunting land she knew very well and had hunted on herself.

  Looking at it all, it was almost too obvious. Like breadcrumbs leading investigators not only to what had happened to Doug, but who had done it and how it all had been carried out. As if someone had left behind such a trail of evidence it was going to be impossible for law enforcement not to figure it all out. And to think a cop—experienced in how investigations are conducted— had done this?

  Still, if you’re an investigator looking into Doug’s murder, all you can do is follow the evidence.

  The situation became wo
rse for Tracy from there. Her 1998 Ford F-150 truck was brought into Madison County for a full forensic examination. Cody Cross began by a visual inspection.

  “Cement splatters were visible in the bed of the truck.” As if somebody had been mixing concrete in back of Tracy’s truck and splashed splotches of it. “Also in the bed of the truck were several bags of potting soil.” The rear driver’s side taillight was broken. There were several cans of spray paint—those camo colors—found inside the cab.

  Slam dunk.

  Slam dunk.

  Slam dunk.

  All of the reports referred to the findings in and out of Tracy’s truck as, oddly, “significant items of evidence.”

  How could one know a piece of evidence was significant without having the entire case at your disposal?

  This was all more like a smoking gun in Tracy’s hand. The crime on video, for crying out loud. Was there nothing she hadn’t left behind? What’s more, Cross took out a tape measure and noted the height measurements of the broken taillight and the truck’s bumper. In addition, along the bed of the truck, Cross found scratches of paint consistent with metal against metal, watering trough verses the bed of the truck.

  “These measurements correspond to measurements of a damaged tree near where the body of the victim was located.”

  Yet another slam dunk.

  So, if there were any indication that all of this evidence seemed too good to be true—or, as Tracy would later suggest, put in place to frame her—Tracy would still have a hell of a lot of explaining to do.

  30.

  Tracy was formally arrested and taken to Jackson County Jail, only because Madison County did not house females. She was placed in protective custody, which she described as “the hole.” Solitary confinement, Tracy knew, was standard practice simply because Tracy had been a cop and there was no telling who she would run into in the general population—women she had arrested, maybe others who would want to settle a score, or those who just wanted a feather in the cap from beating the snot out of a cop.

  Either way, it was not a nice place. Tracy said that for 23 out of each 24-hour day she was in her “hole of a cell” with “no electricity, no hot water,” with the fluorescent lights constantly on, buzzing and flickering. “I learned to sleep that way.”

  She said there were many “nights she would wake up from a dream only to realize I was living a nightmare.”

  Tracy adapted rather quickly. Because she was only allowed to shower three days a week—if, that is, she claimed, the jailer allowed her to—she washed herself in the sink inside her cell. She heated up hot water in a plastic foam cup on the radiator attached to the wall.

  In her cell one night during those first days after her arrest, Tracy got to thinking: “It didn’t take me long to decide that I needed to drop my sexual harassment claim against (Ray) Sanders. I was able to contact (my sexual harassment suit attorney) and tell her what I wanted to do. She asked me several times if I was sure. I said yes! I thought that if I dropped the case, then Sheriff Sanders would back off.”

  Tracy made the decision to call Sanders and tell him about what she’d done. The implication she later gave me was that if she went along with the good ole boys’ club and dropped the suit, the avalanche of evidence against her in Doug’s murder would all soon be forgotten. She implied that dropping the suit would back the dogs off—that it was all some sort of elaborate set-up to scare her into dropping those charges.

  If Tracy is correct, it means there would have been four types of investigators—a state crime lab, the state medical examiner, countless officers and deputies, along with the DA and the assistant DA—involved at some level. Or, at the least, several investigatory cops doing it all and convincing the others. Tracy was alleging that they had put all of this evidence against her in play because of a sexual harassment charge.

  Either scenario seemed a bit far-fetched. Maybe even impossible, considering the logistics, set of circumstances that would have to line up, coincidences that would have to occur, and the information about Tracy’s life her framers would have to have known.

  For one, that she had gone out and bought a new shower curtain. Two, that she had purchased camouflage type paints and painted her mailbox. And three, that she and Doug were fighting.

  There is so much more.

  “Ray, listen,” Tracy said over the phone from jail (according to her recollection of the phone call), “I dropped the case—it wasn’t my idea to begin with.” According to Tracy, she then explained to Sanders that it had been Doug’s idea from the get-go—that “sitting on a gold mine” comment that initiated the entire sexual harassment suit.

  “I already knew that,” Tracy claimed Sanders told her over the phone. “No hard feelings. Call me anytime.”

  And that was the end of the call.

  31.

  SA Ben Williams was busy investigating what turned into a fluid, rapidly developing case of murder building against a former deputy sheriff. No one came out and directly said it, but an unspoken melody playing in the background had to be that the case would have to be well-defined, rock-solid and thoroughly investigated more so perhaps than your average suspect’s simply because Tracy Fortson had, in fact, been a cop. In that manner of speaking, one of two key witnesses so far, one of the men who had gotten the ball rolling for investigators in the direction of Tracy Fortson, Jerry Alexander, would have to be, himself, carefully vetted and excluded.

  One Friday, June 23, as Tracy sat in jail thinking about and preparing for her bond hearing, SA Ben Williams asked Jerry to come in for a polygraph.

  Later, Jerry said, “I never would want to try to put something this serious”—Doug’s murder—“on anybody … I didn’t want to put this on Tracy, saying she had something to do with (it. Even though) I might have thought she did.”

  In the totality of the investigation, despite the amount of evidence seemingly piling up against Tracy, those who accused her had to be considered suspects themselves. This was one reason why Jerry Alexander sat down in the polygraphist’s chair on that Friday morning and agreed to prove he was not lying.

  Thus, GBI polygraphist David Rush came out with it right away and asked Jerry if he’d had anything to do with Doug’s murder.

  “No,” Jerry said emphatically.

  Rush, after concluding his examination, was “in the opinion … that Alexander was truthful in the questions about the death of Doug Benton and that Alexander was not involved.”

  Jerry Alexander had passed a polygraph test.

  In Athens, Georgia, GBI SA Jesse Maddox stood in the manager’s office of The Home Depot on Epps Bridge Road. A friend of Doug’s worked at the popular home improvement center and Maddox had a hunch that perhaps Doug’s friend might have some insight to offer. There was an indication that Doug had recently poured some sort of concrete patio or foundation. Maddox was there asking how recent that weekend project had been and if Doug’s Home Depot friend had known anything about it or even sold him the concrete.

  Patrick Longfellow (a pseudonym) not only worked at the Home Depot, he was also one of Doug’s neighbors from the John Sharpe Road neighborhood.

  “Six years,” Longfellow said after Maddox asked how long he and Doug had been neighbors. “Tracy and Doug came into this store often to buy items.”

  “Have you seen Tracy come in recently and purchase any concrete?” Maddox wondered.

  “No, not her,” Longfellow said. “But Doug did. He purchased several bags of mix to lay a concrete slab in front of his house. I do not know where those bags were purchased.” Longfellow made it clear he wasn’t speaking as a Home Depot employee here, selling Doug the bags of cement. He was speaking as a neighbor who watched Doug work on his house, adding, “I do know he had several of those bags left over after he poured the foundation. To the best of my recollection, approximately six or seven bags (were) left on a pallet.”

  Maddox asked about Longfellow’s relationship with Doug. How they fared as friends. Did t
hey hang out a lot? Coffee? Shoot the shit on the front porch on a cool summer night over iced tea?

  “I have not really been associated with Doug for quite some time,” Longfellow explained.

  Maddox wanted to know if Longfellow had ever seen Doug and Tracy together in The Home Depot.

  “The last time I would have seen Doug and Tracy in this store,” Longfellow explained, “would have been on the last Tuesday or Wednesday of May. They bought small walkie-talkie handset-type radios.” He remembered seeing them because “Doug asked me at that time if his exotic birds had been bothering me any. I told him they had not.”

  Maddox asked about Tracy next. Had Longfellow interacted with her at all while she was over at Doug’s? Seemed some neighbors in that John Sharpe Road neighborhood law enforcement had spoken to thus far had a story to tell about Tracy Fortson.

  “She’s a fairly sizable female,” Longfellow said. “When I say sizable, I mean she is very strong. I believe she’s a weightlifter. In fact, I’ve seen Doug and Tracy horse-playing, you know, around Doug’s yard. Tracy once picked Doug up over her shoulder.”

  Indeed, that would make Tracy Fortson an incredibly strong woman. Doug had Tracy by about 75 to 80 pounds.

  Longfellow had a look on his face. Something was bothering him.

  Maddox wondered what.

  Longfellow indicated that he was scared of Tracy. “Look,” he said, “she threatened to shoot my dogs. She told me that if the dogs came near her, she would shoot them.”

  Maddox gave Longfellow his card and told him to call if he remembered anything else.

  Maddox left The Home Depot and drove to the Southern States Lawn and Feed Store in Athens on Atlanta Highway. The GBI had just determined that an employee by the name of Scott Knowles had waited on Tracy on June 4, 2000. Another Southern States employee, Sherry Michael, called into the MCSD and said she remembered Tracy coming into the store on that day to purchase several items.