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

by M. William Phelps

  “An eruption,” Tracy recalled.

  “Let’s go to my treehouse,” Tracy said, explaining later how that treehouse was one of the places she went to “get away from the yelling.”

  They sat up in the treehouse for hours talking as the situation inside the house calmed. Eventually, Tracey explained, perhaps thinking that a fresh start in a new house would make the marriage better, her parents built their dream home.

  “But the fighting never slowed down … (and) things only got worse.”

  Tracy said she made her way through school “as if I didn’t have any parents. No one ever came to any of the events that I was involved in. No one came to parent/teacher conferences. They never knew I was in Student Council or the Beta Club. If I needed something signed, Mama would do that. … No one was able to help me with my homework. The only time either of them came to my school was to drop me off or pick me up.”

  While the fights between her parents got worse during Tracy’s teenage years, she began thinking of ways to leave home permanently. Her love of animals and the outdoors had Tracy daydreaming of going to college and becoming a veterinarian, but the dream dissolved when her parents said they couldn’t afford to send her to college.

  “So I contacted the Marine Corps recruiter. I knew that the Marine Corps would gladly have me and I could get a college degree. I came awfully close to signing up. Although I wasn’t afraid to become a soldier, it just wasn’t what I had in mind. Plus, who was going to protect Mama?”

  By the time she graduated high school, Tracy said, “I guess Mama had finally had enough. I was thinking that it sure did take a long time to realize it, but then again, she claimed that she was waiting for me to graduate.”

  When it came time for her mother to file for divorce, “Daddy wasn’t having it. I guess he didn’t think she would go through with it, but the divorce papers made it clear. Until it was final, Mama stayed in the house—and me too, of course. At first, my father refused to leave, but the law got involved and he finally relented.”

  But that did not last.

  “My daddy just changed tactics,” Tracy said.

  One particular afternoon that stood out to Tracy later was when her father brought the local preacher over to the house to speak with her mother. This was odd to Tracy and her mother because, she said, “We had never attended a church that I could recall, not together, anyway. I guess he thought she needed some spiritual intervention.”

  When that didn’t work, Tracy’s father came back, “with fire and hell in his eyes. He didn’t knock politely on the door this time; he pounded and demanded an audience with my mother.”

  Tracy’s cousin just happened to be staying with them at the time. She answered the door.

  “She’s got a headache and is lying down to rest.”

  Her father wasn’t having it. He pushed his way into the house, past the cousin, and went straight for the bedroom.

  “If the preacher couldn’t make her see reason by God, well, he was going to himself,” Tracy said.

  Tracy realized what was happening and jumped in front of the door into the bedroom. Her father tried to push past her. Tracy grabbed his arm and, with all her might, pulled him away.

  “The next thing I knew, Daddy had blood running down his arm where he had scraped it on the doorframe.”

  Rather than admit he had scraped it on the doorframe, he turned his rage toward his daughter, screaming, “You scratched me.”

  “I knew that I couldn’t have (done it) because I was a nail biter and didn’t have enough fingernails to scratch an itch.”

  Her father looked at his arm, then up at Tracy.

  “Look what you’ve done!”

  “I didn’t do that. You did.”

  “Daddy was in such a rage at that moment that he swiped his arm across my white shirt, smearing blood all down the front, then he turned around and ran for the kitchen.”

  Tracy followed. He could hear her cousin dialing the phone, calling the OCSD, so he ran over and grabbed the phone from her hand and started pulling at the wires, trying to jerk them out of the wall.

  Tracy approached, grabbed the phone out of his hand and tried to hit him with it.

  Daddy ran out the back door.

  Watching, Tracy knew from experience he was going for the outside wires, to pull them out of the house.

  So she ran out the side door and met him there.

  “I had taken as much of this as I could take and if my Mama wasn’t going to fight back, well, I was. I became tired of the arguing, the drinking, the fussing and fighting and my Mama getting her mouth busted or her eye blackened. I wasn’t scared of him! So when he reached for the wires on the side of the house, I swung (at him).”

  He tried blocking the punch.

  “I pushed him away.”

  Her father fell back and screamed, “You bitch.”

  Tracy stood, stunned. She’d stopped him.

  Her father wasn’t finished, however. He ran for his truck. Hopped in. Started it up and drove straight toward Tracy.

  “Well, it’s a good thing we had railroad ties in the yard, because that’s what he hit. He sat there for a second, I guess trying to decide what to do next. I just stood there looking at him. I think I was in shock that my own father had just come at me with his truck.”

  Ultimately, after a brief standoff, he left.

  “I went back into the house and locked all the doors. I knew he would be back—maybe not this night, but he would be back.”

  47.

  GBI agent Dawn Pierce testified next. As Tracy sat, she dialed out of that childhood memory and refocused on her case. Pierce worked for the GBI Crime Lab. Her specialty was bodily fluids: blood, semen, saliva. She’d been with the lab since 1997.

  In total, Pierce had conducted DNA comparison tests with the blood found on a closet door handle inside Doug’s residence to Tracy’s DNA.

  “What were you able to determine, if anything, from that analysis?” Lavender asked.

  “I was able to determine that the DNA from that swabbing, which was collected on the hall closet door, excluded Tracy Fortson as a donor. And I was unable to determine if that did match Mr. Douglas Benton due to the known blood sample that was taken at the time of autopsy. That particular sample was very decomposed and I was unable to get a known DNA type from that particular item and was unable to match that back to that particular DNA.”

  “I have no further questions,” Lavender said.

  Tom Camp asked Pierce if she had conducted any tests on the blood saturated into the couch cushion underneath Doug’s body.

  “No,” she said. “The only item that I did perform DNA testing on was the sample from the hall closet door.”

  Why would GBI not test the couch cushion blood against Tracy’s DNA? It seemed almost a given that they would want to know if by stabbing someone so many times—as purported by the prosecution—Doug’s accused killer nicked herself during the process and maybe left DNA, placing her directly at the scene of the murder.

  Camp reiterated the fact that the blood on the hall closet door did not match Tracy’s DNA.

  Pierce agreed.

  Then Camp asked: “And you did not ever receive any donated blood from an individual by the name of Jeff Bennett to your knowledge, did you?”

  Smart question. Ringing that reasonable doubt bell once again.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “And to your knowledge, you did not ever receive any donated blood from an individual by the name of Jerry Alexander?”

  An even smarter follow-up.

  “To my knowledge, no, I did not.”

  The idea of there being blood found on the hall closet door was as equally baffling as it was significant to Tracy. It seemed to her to be an important clue—like, for example, maybe the killer had left it there unknowingly?

  “I never knew there was blood on a closet door at Doug’s house until they came to the county jail with a search warrant to obtain mine,” Trac
y explained. “So why didn’t the prosecution test the identity of the DNA when they found out it wasn’t mine?”

  Was that blood DNA put into CODIS, the national database? Was it tested against any other person besides Tracy and Doug?

  Tracy said the answer to both is no.

  With Dawn Pierce released, yet another forensic scientist walked in, held up her right hand and swore to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. This particular scientist had 20 years’ GBI experience. Terri Santamaria had performed tests on a piece of cord—soaked in decomposition fluid and marked as a biohazard—recovered from Doug’s body and another piece of cord found on a different section of Doug’s body. Those two pieces of cord were tested against a roll of “cordage” found inside what both Lavender and Santamaria described as “a hall closet.”

  In the end, Santamaria testified, she was able to determine that one piece of cord on Doug’s body was a match to the hall closet cordage, but the other was not.

  Then the scientist was asked about pieces of cord found attached to a tarp found with Doug’s body inside the watering trough.

  The cord on the tarp was, in fact, a match to a spool of cordage found (again they said) “in the hall closet.”

  Whose hall closet was never mentioned—was it Tracy’s or Doug’s? The insinuation, left there, was that the cordage in question had been recovered from Tracy’s house, yet no one had said as much.

  Tom Camp went straight at that information beginning his cross, wondering if the roll of cordage was taken “from the victim’s home?”

  “That is correct,” Santamaria said.

  Was it lazy prosecution work not to have made this clear during Santamaria’s direct exam? Or was it a slight-of-hand trick? By not mentioning which hall closet, was the jury supposed to think it was Tracy’s?

  With that cleared up, Camp went back to what was became a recurring theme of his cross-examination throughout the trial: “Were you ever submitted any cordage that had been identified to you as being from the home of either a Jeff Bennett or Jerry Alexander?”

  “No.”

  Through his cross-examination of certain witnesses, Tom Camp was showing that the investigation had been blindly focused—either intentionally or not—on one specific suspect, Tracy Fortson, and investigators never once thought to rule out anyone else.

  “Or they did not want to,” Tracy commented later.

  After a brief exchange between Lavender and another inconsequential forensic witness—Tom Camp passing on the opportunity to cross-examine—the gallery turned to see that Jerry Alexander was making his way toward the witness box.

  Tom Camp, surely ready to pounce on whatever Doug’s old friend was going to say, watched as Jerry sat down.

  48.

  Tracy made it through her high school years without any major bumps or bruises—or, rather, any that could be construed as emotionally beating her down. Yet the damage to the family unit had been done, according to Tracy’s recollection. Her father’s unpredictable, dysfunctional behavior had wreaked havoc on the marriage and home. So when it came time for terminating the union, Tracy did not expect things to end without some blowback.

  “Mama and Daddy’s divorce was not just a fight, it was an ongoing battle,” Tracy recalled in 2016.

  Her father at first refused to sell the house or give her mother half when—and if—they did sell. He also refused, Tracy said, “To do anything that would have made things easier” for her and her mother. They were being punished, Tracy saw it, for not wanting him anymore.

  “Mama thought she had a good lawyer, but he never fought for her, so when they did finally divorce, she just gave up the fight and settled for a measly $10,000 just to get it over with.”

  House finally sold, divorce on track, one might think the chaos was over.

  “Except, it wasn’t. The day the divorce was final, Mama had until 6 p.m. to get everything she had out of the house. My aunt and uncle came to help. We had their truck and my mother’s car loaded down. Mama had rented some land within two miles of Daddy, which was the dumbest thing I had ever heard of. And then she bought a small mobile home for us to live in. At 5:45 p.m. that day, Daddy came driving up in the yard to, as he put it, ‘stake his claim.’ ”

  He said he wanted them out of the house at 6, no excuses. They had 15 minutes and that was it. Whatever was left behind was not theirs any longer.

  Tracy claimed her father made no secret of packing a .45 caliber pistol in a holster on his hip and another in a shoulder holster.

  “He was there to intimidate and scare the living hell out of everybody.”

  He approached them as they packed up the car.

  “You have just a few minutes to get your shit and get the hell out of here,” he said, making sure to place a hand on his holster to show he was armed.

  Then, without saying much else, he unholstered one of the weapons and shot several rounds into the trees to make a point that he was not messing around on this day.

  After that, he walked up to the four of them, all of whom were standing, staring in shock at what had just happened. Then pointed the gun at himself.

  “Go ahead, pull the fucking trigger,” he said, staring into their eyes, standing in front of each, saying it over and over, daring any of them to have the guts to do it.

  When he got to Tracy, she immediately reached for the weapon. Her plan was to take the gun away from her father. But with the sort of unbridled relationship they’d had the past five or so years, he must have thought she just might pull the trigger, so he backed away.

  “I knew my father,” Tracy recalled. “I knew he was putting on a show, but the others didn’t know it and his show was having the desired effect.”

  Tracy’s uncle, there to help with the move, walked over to the truck, sat down and froze, not sure what was happening.

  Tracy told her father: “I’m not scared of you.”

  “The others were convinced that he would shoot each and every one of us if we didn’t get the hell out of there. I felt like I was in a nightmare. I was embarrassed for him. He was making a complete fool of himself and I was just wishing that I wasn’t a part of it. Why couldn’t I have a normal family: loving, kind, caring?”

  Eventually, they were able to leave without any additional trouble. Tracy said her father was “left to do whatever it was he wanted to do” in that house.

  Only the chaos wasn’t finished.

  “Mama wasn’t used to being alone and she was having a very hard time. She just wanted someone to love her and care for her without the drinking and arguing. She began seeing a very nice man who was also divorced. Knowing that my father was still wreaking havoc, they tried to keep their relationship as discreet as possible. But my father was always lurking around. He knew everything.”

  Tracy was certain her father was plotting and planning something. By that time in her life, Tracy was working at Georgia Square Mall in Athens and the job kept her away from home on most evenings. She’d leave about 6 and come home late, after her mother was asleep. She said her father’s drinking had escalated. At one time, he could ride the roads drunk and never get caught, but those days were over.

  “I found out he had spent quite a few nights in jail.”

  Tracy left for work one afternoon. Her mother and her new boyfriend had a nice evening planned. Tracy’s father had a habit of calling in the middle of the night when he was drunk, saying things like, “I’m gonna kill that bitch,” accusing Tracy’s mother of all sorts of infidelity and other nefarious activities, even bringing up things from their past. Tracy would tell him she didn’t want to hear about it. The marriage was over. Let it go.

  “You’re talking about my mama,” Tracy would snap back on the phone when he went off into a tirade, calling her mother names.

  “It didn’t do any good. He kept threatening.”

  On this particular evening, while she was at work, Tracy took a call from her mother. Her mother didn’t sound good. She was scared, Tracy
could tell.

  “What is it, Mama?”

  “Your father came over to the house drunk, threatening to kill us.”

  Tracy rushed home.

  “When I got there, Mama had a black eye, a busted lip and her shirt was torn halfway off. The sheriff’s office came by and took a report, but did not make an arrest.” Tracy later told me her father was on good terms with the sheriff and because of that friendship, they left him alone. “Mama was a mess. The busted lip came from Daddy, the black eye from the .44 Magnum Super Blackhawk pistol I kept on the headboard of my bed.”

  In a burst of courage after her ex hit her in the mouth, Tracy’s mother had run into the house and grabbed Tracy’s .44 Magnum. Tracy kept the gun, she said, because they were two women living alone on a dark dirt road with a madman for a father. Tracy’s mother ran back outside with the weapon and fired a round into the air.

  The shot scared her ex off.

  “The blow she took to the face from Daddy had knocked her glasses off her face and she couldn’t see,” Tracy remembered. “But she had already pulled the hammer back on the gun for a second warning shot. Well, when she bent over to pick up her glasses as he was leaving, she accidentally pulled the trigger. The gun went off and the recoil caused it to hit her in the eye.”

  The new boyfriend had seen enough. He disappeared after that. Too much dysfunction and chaos, Tracy surmised.

  “Daddy had gotten just what he wanted,” Tracy explained. “Mama was heartbroken. Daddy’s claim had always been, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody will.’ I don’t know why he wanted her so bad. All they did was fuss and fight.”

  By now Tracy was “hating my Daddy.” “He had made my life a living hell and I blamed him for everything wrong in it. I didn’t feel loved and I didn’t feel wanted. I always felt like I was in the way. Nothing was like it was supposed to be. I shouldn’t have to answer the phone in the middle of the night and listen to a drunk man telling me that he was going to kill Mama.”