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

by M. William Phelps

  “To my knowledge, yes, sir.”

  “There was never a search warrant obtained for Jeff Bennett’s home, was there?”

  It was the first time an alternative suspect—without calling him such—had been brought up.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “There was never a search warrant obtained for Jerry Alexander’s home, was there?”

  “Not that I am aware of, no sir.”

  “Are you aware of the fact that both of those people own pickup trucks?” Camp asked.

  “I don’t know what they drive, sir.”

  “You don’t even know what they drive?” Camp thundered, asking a few more questions about the video, before indicating he was finished his cross of Cross.

  42.

  MCSD Sheriff Bill Strickland took a seat in the witness box. After being asked, he explained to Bob Lavender his role in an investigation that seemed to have utilized every available investigator the county could spare.

  Above all, Strickland reiterated what Mike Smith had previously laid out: those dead birds, going into Doug’s house under that “welfare check” status, not seeing much of anything out of the ordinary, opening a missing person case.

  Leaving Doug’s, Strickland explained, he set out to talk to Tracy (that first time), but only under the pretext of her having “possible knowledge of Mr. Benton’s whereabouts.” The way he described this first contact with Tracy made it sound as though it was routine, which was certainly true.

  Lavender asked Strickland to give an overall assessment of the conversation with regards to Doug and Tracy’s relationship.

  Strickland said Tracy was open about their relationship being “rocky” and “on and off” again, mentioning the fact that they were separated.

  Then Tracy gave Strickland a date: June 4, the last time she saw Doug, according to Strickland. That date—which would change throughout the course of the case—was the starting point. It matched up to the date Larry Bridges and his girlfriend had given to the sheriff’s department.

  They moved on to Jeff Bennett and Jerry Alexander, both of whom Strickland interviewed, but failed to discuss what information Strickland was able to glean from those interviews.

  Lavender asked about going back into Doug’s home for a second time.

  Strickland said they smelled an intense odor of kerosene.

  The DA wanted to know if Strickland had been involved with impounding Tracy’s truck.

  “Yes,” Strickland said. He’d gone out to Tracy’s parents’ home to secure Tracy’s truck under a warrant. When he arrived, Strickland testified, “It had debris in the back: splatters. It had potting soil. Bags of potting soil in the back and it looked like quite a few scuff marks in the bed.”

  All incredibly condemning testimony.

  After discussing the couch Doug was likely lying on when he was murdered and how GBI SA Terry Cooper was called out to Doug’s house to process that scene, Lavender passed his witness.

  Camp didn’t have much. He asked about Tracy and that interview Strickland conducted, getting Strickland to agree Tracy had actually come down to the sheriff’s department under her own volition and “appeared to be cooperative in talking to you about what she knew.”

  “That is right,” Strickland agreed.

  “And she, in fact, talked to you about her relationship with Doug Benton, is that correct?” Camp asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And she actually, at times, got a little bit tearful about that—I mean, that is what it states here (in your report): ‘Tracy spoke of her relationship with him (Doug), which at times were tearful’?”

  “That is true.”

  Camp was done.

  Scottie Knowles came in next and spoke of how he helped Tracy choose a watering trough and the concrete mix and helped load it all into her truck.

  When Tom Camp took a crack at Knowles, he focused on Tracy’s demeanor that day, first asking if she appeared “nervous in any way.”

  “No, sir,” Knowles said.

  “She did not appear to be really upset about anything, did she?”

  “No, sir.”

  “She certainly wasn’t crying or anything of that nature, was she?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And she told you she was going to be building a pad, a concrete pad, for her dog pen, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They talked about how Tracy had asked for calculations and how to gauge how much concrete she’d need for the dog pen. Hearing this, Knowles and his boss called a big-building supply competitor and asked for help.

  Camp asked Knowles about several photos and how the bags of concrete mix Tracy bought were dusty with concrete residue all over the outside of them, same as the ones in the photos.

  To which Knowles agreed.

  Sherry Michael followed and gave the same basic narrative as Knowles. Only difference that came up, which might be deemed relevant, depending on which side you leaned, was that Sherry and Tracy knew each other.

  How, Camp asked Sherry.

  “We’ve ridden horses together on several occasions.”

  Camp keyed right in on that acquaintance, asking, “And she shopped in the store before?”

  “Countless times,” Sherry Michael said, adding soon after how Tracy did not seem at all unnerved or upset that day.

  One might wonder why Tracy Fortson, preparing to bury her boyfriend in concrete and entomb him inside a watering trough, would go to a store and purchase those items from a woman she knew personally?

  They then discussed how common it was for the store to sell watering troughs. People who owned horses and other farm animals often came in and bought the troughs. It was a common sale item.

  Smartly, Camp asked if Tracy had purchased any potting soil, rope or cable that day.

  “No, she did not.”

  Yale alumnus Paul Schroeder, a geologist, sat in the witness box next and gave the State of Georgia its scientific link to the concrete. Schroeder explained to jurors how GBI SA Ben Williams brought him several samples of concrete to analyze. After schooling the courtroom with regards to how geologists examine concrete and stone to determine their origins, Lavender asked the most important question of his witness: “Did you compare … scrapings and what was taken out of the bed of the truck?”

  “Yes. The observation that I made was that the scale and size and texture of the fragments from the truck (Tracy’s) and the concrete block (where Doug’s body was recovered) were similar.”

  After a long, tedious and, quite honestly, boring discussion about something called X-ray powder defraction (XRD),[1] which Schroeder admitted “involves a lot of theory,” Lavender and Schroeder gave a second geology class to jurors, banging on and on about ridges and hardness and textures in stone and rock.

  In the end, Schroeder said it was the same stone in both Tracy’s truck and the sample he’d been given by SA Williams from the concrete block in the watering trough—the sole reason the DA had put the respected scientist on the stand to begin with.

  During the cross-examination portion of his testimony, Tom Camp and Schroeder agreed to disagree, mostly, with Camp pointing out somewhat obviously that all of this so-called “science” was actually based part and partial on opinion.

  Schroeder agreed.

  Then there was a brief re-direct and an even briefer re-cross. All this back and forth did was tell the jury that the information Schroeder provided was probably more important than it was, simply because of the amount of time they gave to it. The more the attorneys argued their respected points, the more the jury sat up and paid attention. What it came down to was rather simple: would a guy with Schroeder’s reputation and standing at Yale University give an opinion the DA needed? Or was he simply banking on his experience to dictate the facts as he saw them?

  The jury would have to decide.

  Jeffrey Smith sat down next and took a deep breath. Forensic pathologist, Dr. Smith, a licensed physician, hailed fro
m the State Medical Examiner’s Office at GBI headquarters in Decatur. Smith had performed the autopsy on Doug Benton.

  This name was a problem for Tracy Fortson as we talked through her case. Tracy truly feels Smith got it wrong—if not purposely, incompetently. At least that was the impression Tracy gave me as we went back and forth about Smith’s findings.

  “The medical examiner’s report stated that the cause of death was a combination of a gunshot wound to the head and 10 potentially fatal stab wounds,” Tracy told me. “Those stab wounds were found to be made by the hayforks used to move the trough as well as the screwdriver and mallet used to open the trough (there was never any solid proof offered to prove or disprove this outright). You would think that a medical examiner who is considered an expert would be able to distinguish between postmortem wounds and wounds made at the time death occurred. Look at the testimony of Dr. Jeffrey Smith.”

  And so, here you have it—that testimony Tracy asked me to review.

  Right out of the gate, Dr. Smith explained how unusual the case was as compared to those he normally looked into, mainly because of how the body had arrived at the M.E.’s office encased in concrete, inside a watering trough. Then, after being asked by Bob Lavender, Smith called his job a “puzzle-solving process.” Most importantly, Smith restated, part of his job was to work “in conjunction with the information I get from investigators.”

  They discussed Doug’s height and weight, as Lavender introduced a series of autopsy and crime-scene photographs they’d be referring to during the course of Smith’s testimony.

  Lavender asked about Doug’s wounds.

  “Specifically, I found a total of 10 stab wounds on the body and a single gunshot wound to the head,” Smith said.

  The DA then wanted Smith to look at a photo of the gunshot wound. He asked if there was anything “significant” about the “area around the wound.”

  Smith gave an opinion of the wound being “inflicted at a very close range” because he had found “blackening of its edges.”

  The next photo Lavender brought up on the screen was a picture of Doug’s underwear.

  Smith talked about the “back of the underwear” and “defects” in the material he’d reviewed. The defects had actually “corresponded” with two stab wounds he found on Doug’s body.

  This was interesting, because if Doug was lying face up in the trough and he had stab wounds to his buttocks and Rob Poston had picked up the trough from the bottom and penetrated it with those pointed pitchfork-like tongs on his tractor, well, this was evidence that those two stab wounds, at least, could have been made by the forks.

  Lavender moved onto the stab wounds around Doug’s belly, which had likely not been made by the forks of the tractor, hence Doug’s stomach facing up while inside the trough.

  “Could you determine what made those stab wounds?” Lavender asked the pathologist at one point.

  “A sharp object, such as a knife.”

  Lavender countered with when the wounds might have occurred.

  “Well, because of the postmortemental number of the injuries, they are different from what they would be in a freshly deceased individual,” Smith said. He added how “a number of the injuries had somewhat was apparently some older blood corresponding to the wound track. It is my opinion that these injuries occurred after about the time the deceased died.”

  That was very vague, however, not to mention oddly worded: Somewhat was apparently some older blood. Still, he admitted several of the wounds had been likely made afterward.

  “Is it possible that the wounds occurred as a result of removing him from the trough?”

  Smith was specific here, contradicting himself: “No.”

  Lavender asked about the bullet wound and Smith’s opinion of it.

  Smith was certain the gunshot killed Doug. When compared to the stab wounds, Smith said he disagreed Doug might have died instantly from the gunshot wound. Instant unconsciousness, yes. But not immediate death. Only if the bullet went through the section of the brain controlling the heart and his breathing would death occur instantaneously, Smith explained. And there was no way they could tell because Doug’s brain had been dried out like a prune, most of it gone.

  Lavender’s next question was, perhaps, a bit of a stretch to ask a pathologist, though the polished DA was on a roll. Why not give it a go?

  “When you saw this bullet, did you have any comment about what kind of bullet it was, et cetera?”

  Smith called his knowledge of identifying bullets “rudimentary.” The ballistics descriptions he normally used in his reports came in the form of “small, medium or large caliber,” he said. So he was not the best expert to ask such a question. That being all said, Smith sat up straight, leaned into the microphone and gave his best analysis: “I felt confident this was a small caliber bullet,” he told jurors, referring to the moment he pulled it out of Doug’s head, briefly examining it before tossing into a plastic evidence bag.

  Part of Smith’s opinion regarding the caliber was based on the damage the bullet had caused to Doug’s skull. In a longwinded, run-on response, stumbling through his explanation, Smith said he considered the bullet to be more than your “normal size small .22 bullet and you don’t actually see this sort of damage to the head from a small .22 caliber bullets and I might have offered an opinion at the time that it could have been, but basically the understanding there is, I package it up, I label it, and send it to the experts up in firearms to make a definitive identification.”

  In his report dated June 20, 2000, Smith called that same bullet he took from Doug’s body “a greatly deformed small caliber bullet.” There was no ambiguity of it being a small caliber projectile.

  I guess, if one is keeping score, you’d have to look at Smith’s testimony here and call it what it is: backtracking. Smith was changing his opinion, which, now in court, did not include the words “greatly deformed.”

  Why?

  When asked by Lavender what had ultimately killed Doug Benton, Smith believed it was a “combination” of multiple stabs wounds and that gunshot wound to the head.

  The DA passed the witness.

  [1] According to serc.carleton.edu, XRD is “is a rapid analytical technique primarily used for phase identification of a crystalline material and can provide information on unit cell dimensions. … The analyzed material is finely ground, homogenized, and average bulk composition is determined.”

  43.

  That all-american look of Tom Camp gave him a rather comforting edge while inside a courtroom. Camp came across trustworthy and intelligent, and those who knew him well agreed the guy fell into both categories.

  No doubt about it, Tom Camp had some work to do with his cross-examination of Dr. Jeffrey Smith. The combination of a knife and gun attack worked well for the prosecution’s case, mainly because Doug was a massive man, in bulk and strength, and the DA’s killer, though quite tough herself, is female. The idea of knife and a gunshot wounds spoke of a tacit theory that one or the other had incapacitated Doug first, so the other could deliver the fatal blow. It was clear within the testimony thus far that while neither was an immediate killer, gunshot and stab wounds alone would have eventually caused Doug’s demise.

  Camp directed his cross-examination at those stab wounds, getting Smith to agree that all of them were “from about the midline of the torso down.”

  Tracy’s defense attorney stayed there for about five minutes, indicating quite early into his cross he was done, no more questions.

  Which felt odd.

  Why not question Smith about his opinion of the bullet?

  “In his testimony, Dr. Smith says he has no idea how long Doug had been dead,” Tracy explained to me. “(Then he says) he did not know that Doug had been removed from the trough (and) placed back in it. He did not know that the container had been speared with the hayforks of a tractor and slammed repeatedly on the ground. So some of his conclusions came from photos.”

  Tracy is co
rrect in her assessment. Smith, during a later court proceeding, testified on all those accounts and, he said, he relied mainly on photos to draw his conclusions. DA Bob Lavender had, in fact, pointed this out during his direct examination: pathologists sometimes depend on photos and reports, and speak with investigators, along with many other pieces of evidence they uncover themselves during autopsy, to evaluate a case.

  Problem I find with Tracy’s argument here is that it doesn’t matter if Smith’s testimony was flawed (which one could argue for or against), or if those wounds were made by the tractor forks or not. Fact is, it doesn’t clear Tracy from the murder.

  Still, the preponderance of evidence is purely overwhelming. I guess if one wants to claim innocence, which Tracy has, one would have to, in this situation, assert that it was a frame job. Because it’s truly the only way in which all of the evidence against Tracy could be disregarded. Otherwise, you’re left with one suspect. At the same time, when you dig deep, and truly take into account all of that same evidence, you have to question how perfect it all is and how magically it lines up to prove that Tracy Fortson killed Doug Benton. This became the lingering question that bothered me the more I looked at the entire picture.

  44.

  Bernadette Davy walked into the courtroom after Dr. Smith concluded his testimony. If Tracy Fortson had a true archnemesis in this trial, a villain to hang her core argument of incompetence and nefarious allegations on, Davy was that person.

  A State Crime Lab forensic examiner working out of Atlanta, Bernadette Davy had over 10 years’ worth of experience behind the microscope. She had been qualified as an expert in a court of law 450 times (many of those murder trials).