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

by M. William Phelps

  “I gave the baby your middle name,” Billy told her.

  “You what?”

  Billy explained how his wife had no idea that he’d given his child the middle name of his mistress.

  As the months peeled off the calendar, Tracy would ask when Billy was leaving his wife. He’d promised her that after the baby was born, he was checking out of the marriage to be with her.

  “After (my wife) is back on her feet,” Billy said. “I need to be there until she is totally recouped.”

  Always an excuse, Tracy thought.

  The entire thing blew up when a few friends of Billy’s family caught Tracy and Billy one day inside his car. They’d just happened to be walking down the street and came up to the window to say hi to Billy, who was kissing Tracy.

  They told Billy’s wife.

  Tracy put Billy on the spot. She explained how every time he said he was leaving his wife, he came up with an excuse. No more. What was it going to be?

  Billy said he needed more time. “I’ll figure it all out.”

  “I was so angry and frustrated I couldn’t think straight and certainly couldn’t make sense out of what had just happened.”

  When they got to Billy’s house later on that day after getting caught in Billy’s squad car, all of Billy’s clothes had been tossed into the front yard. So Billy gathered his things and decided to go home with Tracy.

  “I need a place to stay, baby.”

  A few days later, Billy’s mother called Tracy at work. “You’re a homewrecker and a bitch.”

  “She blames me for the adulterous relationship that I am having with her son,” Tracy recalled.

  Then came the hang-ups. Billy’s wife began calling Tracy at work, calling 15 times a day at one time.

  Then the mother and the wife began showing up at Tracy’s work. Calling her names.

  “These people were blaming me for everything and trying very hard to make my life miserable. And all Billy could say to me was: ‘Don’t worry about it, baby.’ ”

  Tracy and Billy took a weekend away. They had a blast, Tracy recalled. Just the two of them. Out and about as a couple. A weekend in the country to forget about everything that had happened.

  The fun quickly ended when they returned home on Sunday afternoon. Billy headed home to get a change of clothes. A while later, as Tracy waited at her house for him to return, he called.

  “She used the weekend to pack up everything she owned, including my baby,” Billy said. “She went home to her parents in Alabama. The only thing she left behind was the bed frame.”

  Billy was devastated.

  During the year Billy’s wife and child were gone, he turned into someone Tracy said she did not know.

  “Gone were the little notes, the flowers, the kind and passionate man I knew. Here was someone who didn’t seem to care about me at all. I was thinking that we would be able to get a place together, but he had other plans.”

  “We cannot live together,” Billy said. “I am in the middle of a divorce.”

  “What?” Tracy was confused. “All this time we’ve been practically out in the open, now this?”

  “Sorry, that’s the way it is.”

  Billy moved out of Tracy’s house and started living with a police buddy in an apartment complex on the west side of Athens, just down the street from the 5th Quarter.

  From that point forward, Billy started spending more time with his roommate. He became more aloof and secretive. Sometimes he wanted Tracy around, other times he didn’t. While she was over to the apartment, the phone would ring and he would answer it, but then disappear into another room to talk. Business, he would say. An informant calling to give him confidential information.

  “I was starting to get depressed. Just when our relationship should have been getting better, it wasn’t. I loved him. I thought he loved me. We had talked about our future together and now it seemed like that future was further away than ever.”

  “You need to find someone else,” Billy said one night not long after. “I cannot be with you.”

  “I don’t want anyone else. I want you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  “That’s not going to happen. I’m no good for you.”

  Tracy couldn’t imagine life without Billy.

  “After all I had been through with this man, all the love I had in my heart for him, and all the promises he had made that I had been clinging to. This was just too much.”

  Billy left. Tracy knew he was gone for good. She’d never see him again.

  “I laid there and thought about my life. I was hurt. I was tired. I couldn’t see past that moment. The man I loved more than life itself had just walked out the door, just like that. Gone. My dad was always drunk, constantly calling at all hours of the night and day, threatening to kill my mama. If it wasn’t him calling, it was my grandmother calling at 1 or 2 in the morning, always sick, always wanting to go to the hospital. If no one went over there, she would slit her wrist and call an ambulance. Then the hospital would call. We had to go get her. This had been going on for years. I was 19.”

  After Billy took off, Tracy thought: What do I have left?

  “You coming to church this morning?” her mother asked her that Sunday morning after Billy took off.

  “No, Mama.”

  Instead, with her mother gone, Tracy found 29 Valium pills and swallowed all of them.

  55.

  Before the next witness, there was a bit of legal business to take care of between the judge and lawyers, without the jury present. Tom Camp argued the legitimacy of the state’s next witness, Ralph Stone, a crime scene specialist. Camp referred to Stone as a “tea leaf reader,” explaining that he was against Stone’s proposed testimony: “I anticipate Mr. Stone to testify as to how this crime happened; and it is my belief that that is purely conjecture and speculation and that he has no foundation for doing it.”

  After a bit of contentious back and forth debate, Lavender said, “Any expert’s opinion, I guess you could say, is conjecture.”

  For anyone who has spent even a minimal amount of time inside a courtroom, however, this was a great oversimplification. Trial experts generally come from a foundational position of fact and speak to those facts as they gathered them. Was there a person’s opinion involved in that process? Certainly. But the overall scope of expert testimony is driven by the expert’s qualifications and his or her interpretation of the evidence. A defense attorney, obviously, had every right to question the expert about his opinion.

  Still, if Stone were going to walk in and explain what he believed had happened inside Doug’s trailer on the day of the murder, there was no other way to put that besides it being an expert’s opinion of what might have happened. If you ask me, that sort of speculation does not belong inside a courtroom during a trial with so much at stake. But this is why we have discussions about witnesses and testimony during trials without the jury present, so the judge can decide relevance.

  Regardless, any defense attorney worth his weight is going to have a big problem with this.

  The judge ultimately agreed that Stone could keep his testimony to what the crime scene itself and any accompanying evidence indicated. Anything beyond that was going to be a gray area they would have to deal with on a question-by-question basis. Tom Camp had every right to object when he felt the need to.

  Onward.

  After the jury was re-seated and Stone was sworn, the crime scene expert explained that he was actually a crime scene reconstructionist. He took a crime scene and reconstructed it in a way that might speak to what happened. All evidence left behind by a killer had the potential to explain his or her crime. It was Stone’s job, he explained, to interpret that evidence and detail those findings based on his extensive experience and, of course, his opinions.

  Stone had learned part of his trade in Quantico, at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. He had been in law enforcement for 31 years. Both of these career qualifications, one might imagine,
gave his opinion that much more credibility.

  Lavender had Stone talk about how he looked at everything involved in the case pertaining to the crime scene: autopsy, evidence and police reports, DNA results, photographs, videos, interviews with witnesses, blood spatter and forensic analysis. It was through the meticulous study of that information that allowed him to come up with what he termed to be his professional “conclusion.”

  “And what was that?” Lavender lobbed.

  Stone said the first thing he looked at was the potential for there to have been “more than one offender,” because “two weapons had been used.” He added how, after reviewing more than 400 homicides throughout his career, it had been his experience in a majority of those cases where two weapons had been used, however, that “there is only one offender.” He explained the main reason for this being that if the offender found the first weapon did not work, he or she chose a second weapon.

  “So,” Stone clarified, “in my opinion, in this particular case, there was only one offender, although two weapons were used.”

  Was he saying that most killers brought a backup weapon with them to a homicide?

  If so, that is a ludicrous statement.

  Lavender asked about the gunshot wound Doug sustained to his head.

  Based on all the evidence, Stone told jurors, Doug was “likely” asleep at the time he was shot. He was also possibly “caught totally by surprise, or was caught by someone whom he felt comfortable with, whom he may have even let in the house.”

  For many, this was stretching that opinion vs. fact rubber band to its snapping point. Stone had given jurors a scenario that put Tracy Fortson at the center and none of it was based in actual eyewitness accounts or any other evidence besides what an expert thought had happened.

  Camp let it go and did not object.

  Lavender asked about an “order of events” Stone had come up with after studying all of the evidence.

  Stone said he believed, based on the injuries he found on Doug’s body, “The gunshot wound occurred first (and) there was a struggle.” He added how, after the gunshot, Doug was “incapacitated and then the 10 stab wounds were inflicted … right immediately after death, or while the individual was dying.”

  The DA wanted to know what Stone thought about the “location” of the body when it was later found. Did the way in which the body had been dumped and the location itself say anything about this crime and a potential perpetrator?

  Stone was firm here. How the body was found, where and by whom, had spoken to him. He began his argument by explaining the section of Doug’s house soaked with an accelerant. This told Stone the perp had tried to cover the crime up by torching the house. He called this part of the crime, along with Doug being found in the watering trough, “staging.” He said it was all done in this case “to mislead” police: to make it appear as if there were two or more offenders involved in the murder, when there was actually only one.

  Truly asking his expert to expand the speculation boundaries even farther, Lavender wanted to know if the “staging” in this case indicated to Stone any type of “relationship” between the offender and victim.

  Really?

  Shockingly, Camp sat idle. He did not object.

  “When staging occurs,” Stone said, “it has been my experience it is done by the offender because there is such a close connection either between the offender and the victim, or the offender and the place where it happens, and that if the police are able to discover what really happened here, well, that individual would be the first suspect that they would go to.”

  This was an incredible statement. It was as if GBI Stone had just handed the DA his entire case in a neatly wrapped package with a pretty little pink bow on top. Both scenarios Stone described—of which were absolutely speculative opinion, at best—fit perfectly (and rather congenially) into Tracy being the killer. In fact, Stone all but came out and said he believed Tracy to be the perpetrator. He gave the jury every possible reason to visualize Tracy as Doug’s killer.

  “That is all I have,” Lavender said with a cozy, confident smile off to the side of his face.

  Camp had a concerned, frustrated look about him. He needed to tear apart Stone’s “opinions.” Rip each one to shreds and point out that none of it was fact; it was only what the guy “thought,” and very little of the evidence presented thus far backed him up.

  “Stone never went to the crime scene,” Tracy told me in 2017. “He never went to Doug’s house or where his body was found. Instead, he formed his amazing scenario of one-person-committed-the-crime-but-staged-it-to-look-like-two all from photographs.”

  Reports and interviews, too, Tracy left out.

  “Again,” Tracy continued, “I believe Stone was the state’s storyteller. They used him to narrate their story of what they wanted the jury to believe. I don’t believe a person, expert or not, could ever depict what happened at a crime scene without actually going to the location. That is absurd. How could he say the crime was committed by one person, but staged to make it look like two? What evidence supported that? How could one person commit the crime and have enough time to stage a scene? If it looked like two people committed the crime, as was his opinion, then why didn’t investigators consider that two people may have committed the crime?”

  Good question.

  “I don’t know how someone could have killed Doug,” Tracy added, “and got him out of the house without being seen—that has always been my question. … Yet someone was able to go inside Doug’s house, shoot him, then remove his body, all 230-plus pounds of him, stage a scene, put him in concrete and leave. Nobody sees a thing. Really?”

  Another good question.

  It was up to Tom Camp now to speak for Tracy and try to dismantle that “one killer” image, along with a visual narrative of the murder that the jury certainly now had after Stone’s direct testimony.

  56.

  Tracy survived her suicide attempt. She managed to get over Billy Jackson—a relationship, she realized later, that was never going anywhere from the moment they met. She knew it, felt it, expected it, but went with it anyway, hoping the outcome would somehow be different. There is not a human being alive who hasn’t made the same mistake, however different the situation.

  Growing up, Tracy was particularly interested in a person close to her who worked for the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s Department. As a child, she looked up to the man. And as she began to think about joining law enforcement herself while into her early 20s, Tracy hoped that familial connection would help her out.

  “For as long as I can remember, he had a reputation when he was younger as a no-nonsense bull of a man who would just as soon smack someone upside the head with his Maglite or nightstick, whichever he had in his hand at the time, as look at him. He didn’t take any shit from anybody and he had his own way of dealing with folks that didn’t comply.”

  To a small extent, Tracy could relate, especially for a cop out in the world interacting with criminals every day. There was a certain smugness, a certain attitude one had to have in order to be a good, respected cop.

  But the crass and arrogance of this person, Tracy soon learned, overshadowed what might have been a street toughness needed for the job. It was the sort of brashness that “might have been acceptable back in the day,” she added, “but law enforcement had changed and (that person I knew) seemed to have trouble conforming to more modern-day techniques.”

  She began working as a deputy, which, alone, seemed to irritate this person. According to Tracy, he had worked his way higher up within the department. Now, he spent most of his time in the office behind a desk. One day, there was a call to the office about a small blue truck weaving as it headed down a local highway.

  “I’ll check it out myself,” Tracy heard over the radio. It was this person. He wanted the call.

  “I was thinking that this would be a hoot as I listened to the transmissions over the radio,” Tracy recalled, meaning her friend taki
ng this call himself.

  As the call continued, Tracy sat and listened.

  “(Dispatch),” he said over the radio, arriving and assessing the situation, “I got this little blue truck with a wheelchair tag on it and the man inside has got blood all over himself. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but he don’t know where he’s at and I can’t make much sense out of it.”

  Tracy decided to head out to the call; it sounded serious. Maybe she could help?

  “I knew (he) wouldn’t like my interference, but that’s tough—there was no telling what was going on and I wasn’t about to leave him alone with that call.”

  When she arrived, Tracy saw that man she knew standing beside the truck. So she pulled in behind his patrol car, got out and started toward him.

  When he spied her walking in his direction, “What the hell are you doing here?” he snapped.

  “I’ve come to help you.”

  “I don’t need your got damn help, Trace. You ain’t taking over my call.”

  “I’m not trying to take over your call, but I came to help, if you need me.”

  Meanwhile, more cops arrived at the scene—probably out of wanting to see the fireworks explode between Tracy and the man, rather than helping out with the call, Tracy later speculated.

  Turned out the guy driving the vehicle “must have had dementia or Alzheimer’s,” Tracy said. He had also soiled himself and the entire scene stunk of shit.

  As Tracy went back to her patrol car, she discovered the driver’s side door locked, the engine running, keys inside.

  She cupped a hand and peered through the window. Then stepped back, banged on the glass with a fist.

  “Darn it all!”

  That was all her friend needed to hear. He walked over, saw what she’d done, and went off on her right there in front of everyone.