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

by M. William Phelps

  The problem I have with this is that there is no objective, independent corroboration the tapes existed or were inside Tracy’s house at the time.

  “Number four, how could Doug’s truck be in two places at the same time on the same day? A neighbor saw it Monday morning, June 5 at 6 a.m. Jerry Alexander claimed he found the truck Monday morning at 6 a.m.”

  In defense of Jerry, he wasn’t all that sure of the timeframe regarding when Doug’s truck mysteriously appeared in his driveway.

  Furthermore, Tracy explained, two witnesses “changed their testimony as to the position of the truck seat” in Doug’s vehicle.

  One said it was farther back; the other said it was not.

  “Number six,” the most polarizing, substantial claim Tracy would make to me about her case: Two main witnesses, she said, “claim to have been coerced and forced to testify, but are afraid to (now) come forward (and state as much). I believe they both would talk if the right person went to them.”[1]

  “We have an audio recording of (one witness),” Tracy added, “that was submitted as evidence, but it has not been released to the public yet. I don’t want to do anything that will put him in danger.”

  This “secretly” recorded phone call between this witness and Tracy’s daughter supposedly tells a far different story from the narrative uncovered by law enforcement. If true, it puts the entire case made by the GBI, the MCSD and OCSD into a tailspin heading toward a fiery crash.

  Lastly, Tracy has an issue with, as she called it, “The alleged date of the crime,” noting how it has been referred to as “June 3rd,” a date I never came across, “or 4th,” which is the most likely day of Doug’s murder.

  “Now look at the incident report and interviews of June 17,” Tracy pointed out to me. “His neighbors saw him return on his motorcycle on Sunday, June 4. They also said they saw my truck at his house between 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. There was a Walmart receipt showing that I was checking out at Walmart during the time that they supposedly saw my truck at Doug’s.”

  That Walmart receipt, which indeed shows that Tracy was at the Athens Walmart, time stamps her checking out at 3:51 p.m. Thus, it proves nothing. It bears no proof of her not being at Doug’s when witnesses in the neighborhood claimed to have seen her and her truck near 5 and 6 p.m. At the most, Athens is a half-hour ride from Doug’s John Sharpe Road home.

  Tracy claimed later that when investigators first “went into Doug’s house on the 17th to do a wellness check after neighbors reported him missing, there was no evidence of a crime.” She said it was not until “the 19th or 20th, when officers returned to Doug’s home, that they found evidence that a crime had been committed and that someone had tried to burn the house.”

  All true.

  So there you have it: several of Tracy’s most important points to hold close and think about as we move into her trial.

  [1] I reached out to both. Never heard back.

  35.

  The Honorable Lindsey Tise, representing the Northern Judicial Circuit, convened his courtroom on July 9, 2001, well before that fall schedule some had claimed Tracy’s trial had been scheduled to start. Twelve jurors were seated to hear the State of Georgia v Tracy Lea Fortson. Bob Lavender and Marsha Cole were there to represent the state with Tom Camp and Deidra Schad fighting for Tracy’s life.

  Here now was Tracy’s opportunity to argue her case for a careless and close-minded investigation, targeting the wrong person. If Tracy had been set up and targeted, now was the time for her and her attorneys to lay out any evidence they might have developed and prove that theory to a jury. Pointing a finger and saying you were the victim of a frame-up was not the same as providing proof in a court of law.

  Tracy had not really changed much, appearance-wise, since her arrest the previous year. Nor would she change—save for hair color and length—throughout the years her case would take to be completely adjudicated. Generally, Tracy had just-past-her-shoulder line-length brown hair and thin eyebrows—all set against an almost flawless, southern-bleached complexion. She maintained the same weight range of about 140 to 160 pounds.

  As a sheriff’s deputy, she’d favored a more mullet-type haircut, short bangs, flat and straight edges across her forehead, well-defined around the ears, and that long, Billy Ray Cyrus tail made popular in the ’80s. Mostly, Tracy had what was a defining, stoic look of determination about her, almost military, drill-instructor-like.

  Yet, when she smiled, her pudgy cheeks puffed up and out, displaying a bit of girlish charm. As court proceedings began on this first day of her trial, Tracy came across as determined: ready and willing to face those she believed had set up this entire murder, literally planting evidence in her home and fabricating forensic evidence collected, simply to get back at her for the sexual harassment case she’d lodged against the OCSD and Ray Sanders.

  I wondered about this. In presenting this narrative, Tracy is asking us to believe the unbelievable, essentially. Although we live in a day an age where—if one were to believe there are no bad cops who do this sort of thing in the world—he or she would be ill-informed and close-minded.

  Tracy insisted it wasn’t solely about an unassuming harassment case and a sheriff maybe losing his job and pension; there was far more at play here. The basic substance of the case went to character and id, a man’s dignity and severely bruised male ego—and maybe even an undercover case against a drug dealer. Tracy believed Ray Sanders had become so angry with her for lodging the complaint that it had hurt his reputation and standing in the community. Whether he was guilty or innocent, he was about to show her that she could not fuck with a man in a position of power like him. And if she did, there would be a price to pay.

  I still wasn’t convinced. It seemed beyond a stretch, even if Ray Sanders had an ego as large and fragile as Tracy had explained. To believe all of this was the result of an ostensible harassment case argued before courts every day in this country was pretentious and naïve.

  One has to go back to May 11, 2000, almost a month before Doug’s murder, to understand where the plot to murder Doug began, according to Tracy. Tracy explained to me that when The Oglethorpe Echo, a small local newspaper, ran a large headline on page 12—sheriff SANDERS SAYS HE WILL FIGHT SEXUAL DISCRIMINATION COMPLAINT—that was the day her fate was sealed.

  The headline and the accompanying article was the spark, Tracy insisted, lighting a fire that ultimately set her up for Doug’s brutal murder. The article named Tracy as the plaintiff, quoting Ray Sanders as saying: “There is nothing to it.” Further on in the same article, Sanders added how he had a “number of witnesses” lined up who were “willing to testify about the working conditions … and to Fortson’s behavior.”

  For the first time, on that day, Tracy’s complaints had been aired publicly. She had resigned in February 2000 because she claimed she “could no longer handle the working conditions and unfavorable wages.” She went on to accuse the department of subjecting her to “sexually explicit comments made by her supervisor and that she (had been) denied a pay raise.”

  “I was told,” the newspaper quoted Tracy’s complaint, “that females don’t need a raise and their pay has to be cut.”

  Incredibly, though, when you look at the facts, her comments and even the suit itself don’t gel. Tracy had received a raise one month before resigning. She had also been, according to the county’s attorney handling the matter, subjected to “discipline for violations and departmental rules.”

  What was the impetus for Tracy to be disciplined?

  She had been “cautioned about her speech and remarks while on duty.” There were, the attorney noted, shop talk “remarks in the Sheriff’s Department in which Miss Fortson willingly participated.”

  It seemed that Tracy herself was part of the actual problem she was accusing the sheriff of.

  Picking a jury is not the most exciting part of a murder trial—though it could be said to be the most important. As Tracy sat and watched the voir dire proces
s unfold before her, she didn’t have many issues with the proceedings until a woman named Sandra Banks (a pseudonym) was questioned by the lawyers. For one, Tracy recognized the name. The woman was Painkiller’s sister-in-law, that purported drug dealer Doug had allegedly helped law enforcement put away.

  “I remember (the) woman … (as) being part of the jury pool,” Tracy said later in a letter to the FBI she wrote about her case. “Tom Camp asked (her) if she knew anyone by the name of (Painkiller. She) replied, ‘I have a brother-in-law by that name; his real name is …’ Tom planned to keep her, but Bob Lavender struck her from the pool immediately; the look on his face was priceless. … I recently found that (Painkiller) was prosecuted in 1987 and again sometime in the 90’s for cocaine possession and yes, he did go to prison. I have tried to locate a statement or transcript that would prove Doug’s involvement in his conviction, but have not been able to obtain it.” Tracy maintained that it was this incident—Doug acting as a confidential informant, helping law enforcement put a major dealer away—that could have led to his death. She claimed that when she did an open records request to Madison County Superior Court years after her case was adjudicated, she “could not get the information,” adding, “I believe … they are not going to give that to me. If I had had an investigator when all of this occurred, I believe I would have had a better chance. However, I have never had anything close to an investigator and no one made an effort to obtain any kind of evidence for my defense. I wonder why?”

  Painkiller’s sister-in-law was never chosen as a juror.

  After several legal matters were sorted out on July 10, 2001, a jury was finally chosen.

  Thus, with Tracy sitting in a Madison County courtroom next to her lawyers, thinking to herself she did not have a chance in hell at being acquitted, DA Bob Lavender stepped up to deliver his opening statement on behalf of the state.

  36.

  Bob Lavender was 51 and the county DA for six years. He had been inside of a courtroom, however, for more than two decades. He’d tried death penalty cases and argued dozens of similar and unrelated cases in front of the Georgia Court of Appeals. Lavender understood the process, that ebb and flow of a courtroom within the scope of a murder trial. He knew he had a rock solid case against a former deputy, but had to tread carefully. One can never be overconfident in a courtroom because anything can (and will) happen. After all, human beings are in charge of the process—and human beings, despite how often they get it right, can also get it wrong.

  Lavender was smooth and elegantly polished. In his opening statement, he stuck to the facts of his case developed by law enforcement. He mentioned how Larry Bridges had noticed Doug missing and walked over, consequently coming upon those dead birds. Realizing he had not seen Doug for a few weeks, Larry Bridges knew something was wrong.

  Next, the DA talked about how a routine “welfare check” by several law enforcement officers from different agencies turned into a missing person investigation. Jerry Alexander’s name came up next, as did Tracy’s and Jeff Bennett’s. Lavender spoke of how a note had been found on Doug’s truck, which experts were going to testify had not been written by Doug, and how a man out on his four-wheel ATV motorbike with his wife one Sunday afternoon came across a watering trough filled with concrete and that the two—Doug missing and this watering trough—were connected in an extremely violent, deadly manner.

  The plainspoken DA explained how the state was going to bring into the courtroom part of a tree to show evidence that Tracy’s truck had nicked the tree and left marks on the bark when it was used as a lever, effectively, to drop that watering trough on the farm.

  The gruesome discovery out on the farm and one of the deputies there recognizing a rather distinct tattoo Doug had on his arm led everyone back to Doug’s house for a second look. That was when, Lavender said, they discovered someone had gone back into Doug’s modular home to try and cover up the murder by burning the place down. Only the plan had not worked.

  He then described the scene at Doug’s and how Doug was murdered by a gun and sharp object.

  “You are going to find out that it was a .22 caliber bullet,” Lavender said, using a subtle tone, “and that in all probability it was a special .22 caliber bullet called a .22 stinger.”

  This was important, because Lavender then added sometime later the fact that the jury would hear from an expert how “the rifle that (came) from Mr. Benton’s house absolutely did not fire the bullet that killed him.”

  He promised, in addition, how they were going to prove that the rifle they recovered from Tracy’s house was, in fact, “consistent” with the same type of weapon that had fired the bullet that killed Doug. They couldn’t go so far as to say for certain, however, “because the bullet was so mangled.”

  As he began to lay out all of the evidence the state was prepared to present, it became apparent law enforcement had developed what could be considered an airtight case. Each piece of evidence pointed to one person.

  Tracy Fortson.

  Each witness would utter testimony that spoke of one person.

  Tracy Fortson.

  And each time law enforcement tried to exclude Tracy and focus on perhaps another suspect, Lavender articulated, the case went back to only one person.

  Tracy Fortson.

  Lavender did not spend a long time, maybe 15 minutes, laying everything of importance out in his opening. The seasoned DA knew that long openings or closings were subject to nodding out and disassociation by juries. You give the jury the summary, let them know what’s coming, and get on with the meat and potatoes of your case.

  “At the conclusion of this trial, we are going to come back and ask that you find the defendant guilty of the murder charge, malice murder, felony murder … (and) we are going to ask you for a verdict on two counts of aggravated assault, one for the gun, one for the knife or sharp object … and then also for attempted arson, the attempt to destroy the evidence there at the scene by burning Mr. Benton’s house.”

  There were a lot of charges at stake, any one of which could put Tracy in prison, if not for life, for many, many years.

  In the end, Lavender took a breath, played with a pen in his hand and resolved: “I think at the conclusion of the case, after you have heard all of the evidence, it will be clear that this defendant”—he looked over at Tracy, just stopping short of pointing at her—“is guilty of all of those charges. Thank you.”

  Tracy’s attorney, Tom Camp, was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1988. Camp worked for the U.S. District Court (Northern and Middle) until 1991, before breaking out on his own. A Mercer University, Walter F. George School of Law graduate, Camp had a Johnny Unitas, all-American look about him—that sharp and clean-cut image of wholesomeness. Yet make no mistake, when it pertained to fighting for his clients, Camp was a warrior inside a courtroom.

  After clearing his throat and staring at the ground a moment before looking up and addressing the jury with appreciation and humility, Camp said, “I want to tell you again that I feel that it is an honor and a privilege to stand before you in my representation of Miss Tracy Fortson, an innocent victim herself, who has been wrongly accused of these charges.”

  Right away, it was clear Camp was sticking to a carefully written script. Tracy wasn’t about to claim self-defense, battered women’s syndrome, or that some random nut job broke into Doug’s and killed him. She was stating right out of the box through her powerful and competent attorney that these were erroneous charges of murder and assault and arson. This was a crime she had had nothing to do with. She had been framed.

  Tom Camp stuck to the same defense attorney opening argument tact many use at some point, saying, “Open and closing statements are not evidence.”

  From there, the defense attorney outlined how the state goes about presenting its case with witnesses and evidence and gets to question all of those witnesses first, making it seem as though he and Tracy were fighting an uphill battle from the get-go. The “defendant,” Camp added he
re, “may or may not put up any witnesses depending how the state’s case goes.” And because of that, he said, Tracy Fortson was “somewhat at a disadvantage throughout … and the reason is because I always have to go second.”

  Excellent point.

  Camp explained they were not going to be disputing many of the facts as brought forth by the state. However, “you will not hear any witness say that they saw Miss Fortson come to Mr. Benton’s home, kill him, put him in a metal container, fill it up with concrete and drive him out to a farm … and we will suggest to you that it certainly did not happen. … I anticipate that it will all be circumstantial evidence.” Then an important, often understated disclosure: “Remember, it is not the quantity of the evidence; it is the quality of the evidence.”

  Camp then amplified the fact—a simple fact many defense attorneys ignore—that jurors needed to understand, that not only direct testimony mattered, but cross-examination of those same witnesses mattered just as much.

  He mentioned there was going to be “gaping holes” in the evidence.

  “Serious questions about what happened.”

  “There are some facts we are not going to deny.”

  He listed several.

  He talked about how Tracy and Doug had dissolved the relationship before the murder—a fact they would not dispute.

  How the investigation into Doug’s murder “was botched.”

  How the state “failed to follow some very obvious leads.”

  How the investigation “focused on Tracy.”

  Far shorter than Bob Lavender’s opening, Camp ended by encouraging jurors to acquit Tracy of all charges.