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

by M. William Phelps

  37.

  Constructing a narrative is the smart DA’s principal way to deconstruct his investigation point by point so the jury can easily digest it. He might say: Fact A led to Fact B, which led to Fact C, and so on. So calling Larry Bridges first was Lavender’s way to begin getting that job done as efficiently and effectively as possible. Bridges had been the first person to realize something was amiss at Doug’s house when he stumbled upon the dead birds, thus sparking a missing person investigation.

  Larry sat and told his story with no big surprises. Doug’s neighbor and his girlfriend walked the 50 yards across the road to Doug’s modular home weeks after last seeing him, noticed the dead birds, and knew right away something was amiss. Doug would have never left his birds unattended or never left them for any length of time without having someone look after them.

  Maybe the only argumentative testimony Larry Bridges offered was the timeline he provided. Larry said the last time he saw Doug was on June 4, 2000. Somewhere close to 10 a.m., Doug took off on his loud motorcycle. Then, at 5 p.m. that same day, Larry said he saw Doug return. He added how he’d seen Tracy’s truck parked in Doug’s driveway around 3 p.m. that same afternoon, where it stayed until about, he guessed, 5 p.m.

  “But I never did see her leave,” Larry concluded.

  This timeline of Tracy being there between 3 and 5 p.m. would not juxtapose with other timelines, one of which had been given by the woman standing next to Larry on that same day.

  In cross-examining Larry Bridges, Tom Camp began right away on that timeline and how Larry supposedly saw Tracy’s truck parked at Doug’s.

  “That is right,” Larry said after being asked again if he could say for certain it was Tracy’s vehicle.

  “You do not recall seeing anything unusual in the back of her vehicle, correct?”

  “No.”

  Besides a few additional (inconsequential) questions, and maybe a missed opportunity to poke a hole in Larry’s memory, that was it. Camp cut him loose.

  MCSO Deputy Tom Lutz sat in the witness box next. Lutz was a cop who would bring to the trial its first taste of surprise and controversy, while simply laying out the facts as he uncovered them.

  Lutz first spoke about how his role in the investigation began by heading out to Doug’s on June 17 to conduct a welfare check—before coming upon all those dead birds.

  As Lutz spoke of interviewing Larry Bridges, who had sparked the inquiry Lutz had made, he brought up something Larry had said to him: How the last person Doug was with had been Tracy Fortson. Larry had recalled this fact because he remembered them having an argument, Lutz explained, a fairly common point of theatrics over at Doug’s for them during those last days he had seen Doug around.

  After being told of the argument from Larry Bridges, Lutz said, and learning Tracy had been a sheriff, Lutz sought to speak with her. Maybe she knew where Doug had run off to? The way he framed it was that he had simply wanted to talk to Tracy to see if she knew Doug’s whereabouts, nothing more. A routine inquiry any cop would have made with regards to a missing person and the information he was gathering.

  “Did she contact you?” DA Lavender asked.

  “Yes, sir, she did.”

  “Did you query her as to where Mr. Benton might be?”

  “Yes, sir. I did.”

  “What, if anything, did she indicate?”

  “She said she had broken up with Mr. Benton.”

  “Did she indicate the last day she had seen him?”

  “The fourth day of June.”

  Lutz went on to note how it was Tracy who had given him Jeff Bennett’s name and phone number, pointing the deputy in Jeff’s direction. And after he called and spoke to Jeff Bennett, Lutz heard, for a second time, about an argument Tracy and Doug had most recently.

  So Lutz called Tracy back.

  “What did you ask her about?” Lavender queried.

  “I asked her about an argument between her and her boyfriend …”

  As he was speaking, Tom Camp objected under hearsay.

  The judge overruled and Lutz was told to continue.

  “What was her response, if anything?” Lavender asked again.

  Lutz sat up straight, cleared his throat: “Her demeanor was changed all of a sudden. And she wouldn’t answer any further questions and therefore, the phone call immediately came to an end.”

  This sent up a red flag, Lutz seemed to suggest. However, if one is to look at this objectively, within the situation, Tracy Fortson could have been only reacting in kind because of her days as a police officer. Once she felt the “conversation” about Doug and his whereabouts had gone from merely talking to accusatory, Tracy decided to terminate it. She knew her rights, far better than any civilian. If she felt threatened, why not end the call? If they were beginning to use an accusatory tone toward her, why would she want to continue to talk to them?

  The way Lutz explained it on the stand sounded as though Tracy had something to hide; that once she felt a finger being pointed at her, she decided not to help. Lutz never mentioned if Tracy sounded concerned for her former boyfriend who, at that time, would have been gone, and not heard from, for almost two weeks.

  Lutz told jurors he went over to Jerry Alexander’s and uncovered the now questionable note Doug had allegedly left on his window.

  Lavender produced the note inside a plastic evidence bag, asking Lutz if it was the same note Jerry Alexander handed him on that day.

  Lutz said it was.

  From there, the sheriff explained how he called a towing company to impound Doug’s truck, which, Lutz noted, was where his role in the investigation ended.

  Tom Camp began his cross-examination by asking Lutz about the first time he spoke to Tracy. It was cordial and Tracy was polite, providing information she hadn’t even been asked for, Lutz agreed. But during that second call she became “upset,” Camp noted, giving the tone of the conversation a different feel (upset and angry being two different ways one can respond to a situation), after being asked about the break-up and an argument she’d had with Doug.

  “And it would be natural for somebody to be upset about breaking up with their boyfriend, correct?” Camp asked Lutz.

  “Generally.”

  Camp broke the subject there and moved on to Jerry Alexander’s house.

  After being asked, Lutz agreed that yes, Jerry Alexander was extremely mad after he realized the MCSO was going to impound Doug’s truck.

  Another important point Camp made during his cross was that Lutz had not actually found the note on Doug’s truck. It was Jerry Alexander who claimed to have found the note and brought it into his house.

  Lutz told jurors, after Camp pressed him, that the truck, according to Jerry, showed up in his driveway somewhere around June 4, 5 or 6. He just couldn’t be certain of an exact date.

  Pressed further, Lutz testified, “(Jerry) said the middle of the night on Sunday. I don’t remember what date that was.”

  It would have been the 4th.

  Later, on re-cross, Camp asked Lutz if he was an investigator. Just because you’re a sheriff’s deputy, it did not mean you were part of the investigatory division of the sheriff’s office, or that you knew and understood how to investigate crimes.

  “No, I’m not,” Lutz clarified.

  Then they got into how the note had supposedly been attached to Doug’s vehicle—with law enforcement fingerprint tape.

  “And is it not formal for you to carry fingerprint tape around with you in your vehicle?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You do carry it?”

  “Yes.” Lutz seemed a bit perturbed by the question, as though Camp was suggesting something nefarious went on.

  “Can you say for sure with 100 percent certainty that is what that is (fingerprint tape)?”

  “Yes, 100 percent!”

  Camp was done.

  38.

  After a short break, the State of Georgia called Lisa Watson, Larry Bridges’ live-in girl
friend.

  Lisa was in court for one purpose: to establish how Tracy was at Doug’s house on the evening of June 4. Bob Lavender wasted little time getting into that moment.

  Lisa said she saw Tracy’s vehicle parked in front of Doug’s garage around “3:30 that afternoon.” Later on that same day, Lisa testified, she actually saw Tracy herself in the yard.

  Then: “I saw her at Doug Benton’s house leaving,” Lisa recalled.

  Lisa Watson could be considered an impartial witness; someone without any skin in the game, per se, if the frame-up angle is where you are heading with your opinion of the case. Lisa had no reason to lie, to embellish or to recall things that weren’t so.

  Lavender asked Lisa to think about what time, exactly, she’d seen Tracy leaving Doug’s house that evening.

  “I want to say it was between the hours of 5 and … no,” she stopped herself. Then took a moment of reflection, staring up at the ceiling.

  A brief pause.

  “I would have to say it was between 6 and 7 that evening.”

  This timeline entirely contradicted Larry Bridges’ testimony.

  Without having any knowledge of a Walmart receipt the state would soon produce (unless she was told about it before her testimony), Lisa Watson’s timeline fit into a timeline the investigation had constructed with hard, documented evidence of Tracy’s movements that day.

  Lavender asked if anything “unusual” occurred at Doug’s that evening while Tracy was around. Something that might have “caught your attention?”

  “Sometime that afternoon,” Lisa explained, “I want to say around 5 or 6, I heard a gunshot and I looked over (toward Doug’s) and I didn’t see anything.”

  “And about how long after that (gunshot) did Miss Fortson leave?” Lavender asked several questions later.

  “I am going to say it was about an hour.”

  Lisa Watson said she never saw Doug again after that.

  This was powerful testimony. It put a gun in Tracy’s hand and gave her enough time to clean up inside the home and prepare to get Doug’s body ready for the watering trough and his concrete burial.

  Tom Camp now had a big problem. A witness had just put a smoking gun and the sound of it firing coming from the victim’s house and his client leaving that house an hour later. This was as close to an eyewitness account of Tracy killing Doug as the state could produce, which Camp had promised in his opening to jurors they were not going to hear in this case.

  During his cross, all Camp could do was focus on Tracy’s truck. Where it was parked. What, if anything, Lisa saw inside the truck bed. He could have gone back to Larry’s testimony and asked about the contradiction in times, but he did not.

  Lisa said she never saw the truck drive around to the back of Doug’s house, adding that she did not see anything “unusual going on over there” that day. She never saw a watering trough or metal container in the back of Tracy’s truck and never saw any concrete being mixed. However, she added without being asked, “I couldn’t see the back of her pickup truck from my house.”

  The theory was that Tracy had backed her truck up to Doug’s deck, where law enforcement found tire tracks, heaved his body out of the house inside a shower curtain, and placed it into the metal tub. Then, using the hose Doug had left on to water his birds, poured the concrete, filled the trough with water and took off for the farm.

  Regarding that gunshot Lisa had supposedly heard, Tom Camp brought up an excellent point in that Lisa Watson never mentioned that gunshot—a significant piece of information, one might assume—when Lutz came out and spoke to her and Larry Bridges on that first day. It wasn’t until SA Ben Williams showed up on Sept. 12 (three months later) that Lisa recalled a gunshot going off in the vicinity of Doug’s yard and seeing Tracy leave an hour later.

  If one was to take a little detour down Conspiracy Road, heading toward Frame-up Avenue, well, this might feed into that idea.

  Lisa countered with an equally important fact, explaining that when Lutz came by to speak with them, there was no murder investigation going on. Nobody really knew of the facts or if Doug had simply taken off somewhere without telling anyone. Lutz was there to conduct a welfare check. Not to poke around and take statements about what may or may not have happened.

  “As far as talking about the gunshot,” Lisa told jurors, “no, I didn’t talk about it until the day of the investigation.”

  Day of the investigation? What did that mean?

  Camp didn’t go near it.

  “After that date,” Camp asked a few questions later, “that afternoon, June 4, when you said you heard a gunshot, you didn’t really think anything at all about that, did you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You didn’t call the police or anything, did you?”

  “No, sir. Because people around there shoot all the time.”

  “That is all the questions I have.”

  Rob Poston took to the stand and explained how he and his wife had come upon the watering trough in the cattle patch out on the farm while tooling around looking for another bike with a flat tire he had set out to fix that Sunday afternoon.

  What was interesting about Rob Poston’s memory of events was that Bob Lavender used Poston to explain to jurors how familiar Tracy Fortson was with the farmland where Doug’s body had been found. The DA asked: “If you see a strange vehicle on the premises, what would you do?”

  “I normally go find out who it is and what their desire is,” Poston said.

  “If you saw Miss Fortson’s vehicle on the premises, what would you do?”

  “Well, if I knew it was her vehicle, probably nothing.”

  Tracy knew this land, had hunted on it in the past and was on good terms, if not friends, with the man who owned the land.

  Under cross, Tom Camp established that it was quite possible for those pierced wounds in Doug’s body to have been made—hypothetically speaking—by the forks on the front of the John Deere tractor Rob Poston had used that day. Rob said he used the tractor, mainly, to try and hoist the metal trough up and out of the ground. Poston described the forks he had on the tractor that day as being “three feet long and … in the shape of a pen or a pencil,” Camp finishing for him, calling the forks “sharp and pointed at the end.”

  A motorized pitchfork on the front of a tractor was the image. You stick those forks into the bottom of a trough—which Poston had done—filled with concrete and a human body and it’s likely you’d poke a few holes into the corpse, especially around the midsection, or exactly where the puncture wounds had been found on Doug’s body.

  The point Camp made was that the forks could have made all of those puncture wounds found in Doug’s midsection, not a knife or other sharp object—even though a forensic examination would maintain that the wounds Doug sustained had not been made postmortem. And by most accounts, Doug’s body had been in that trough, on that farm, for nearly two weeks.

  OCSD Sheriff Mike Smith was up next. Smith basically reiterated what Poston had told jurors: the events as they unfolded out on the farm, how Doug’s body was located and then how it was handled from the time law enforcement arrived on the scene.

  The only question for Smith that truly mattered became: “Did you identify that person or have a good idea of who that person was?”

  “Yes,” Smith told Lavender. “I had a good idea who he was.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because of the tattoo on his arm. I had (seen) it before.”

  “Where had that been?”

  “At the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s …”

  When we discussed Mike Smith’s identification of Doug, Tracy questioned Smith’s veracity, which made me wonder if Tracy was sitting in the same courtroom when Smith testified.

  “As for the ID of Doug by his tattoo,” Tracy told me, “I find it (hard) to believe that someone like Mike Smith was able to identify Doug from a tattoo unless he knew him prior or knew he was in that container as well as how he got there.
It seems like a family member would have been called to give a positive visual identification.”

  There are many problems within this statement. For one, this was not a “positive” identification—it was informal, at the scene, yet enough for them to believe they had found Doug Benton. Second, Mike Smith had surely seen Doug around the OCSD. Tracy had been reprimanded at one time for having Doug hang around so often. Finally, law enforcement would never, under these circumstances, ask family members to come out to a crime scene to identify a victim.

  The guy saw the tattoo, recognized it, realized Doug Benton was missing two weeks by then, and put two and two together.

  Not a big leap there.

  concluding Mike Smith’s direct testimony, Lavender had the sheriff look over several documents with Tracy’s handwriting. Official stuff, from when she worked at the OCSD.

  “Do you recognize that writing?”

  “It looks like Tracy Fortson’s writing.”

  “How do you recognize that?”

  “By when I looked over her reports. It looks similar to her writing.”

  Not quite the scientific statement you’d like to have claiming a note written by a murder victim had been forged by the person who had taken his life.

  39.

  Before the first day of testimony ended, Tom Camp took a crack at Mike Smith. Camp needed to choose his jabs carefully and specifically—and know when the right moment to make contact revealed itself.

  “Afternoon, Mike,” Camp said first thing. “Where are you now?”

  “I am between jobs.”

  After establishing that Smith was working for the OCSD on June 19, 2000, Camp walked slowly into the fact that Mike Smith was, back then, the chief investigator.

  “That is right,” Smith agreed.

  They talked about crime scenes and Smith’s experience, Camp focusing on the policy of when the GBI was called in to look at scenes for the sheriff’s department. At one point, Camp mentioned how Smith had GBI SA Ben Williams with him when he went out to the farm after the call came in that day.