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

by M. William Phelps

  “I know you are skeptical,” Tracy said in one of her more humbling moments. “I would be, too. There was a time when I believed that everyone in prison was guilty of whatever crime they were convicted of and no one could have convinced me otherwise. But now that it has happened to me, and I’ve seen how Georgia’s justice system works from both sides, I’m not so quick to jump to conclusions. There was a time that I believed in the justice system. I believed that judges, lawyers and police officers were honest people. I don’t believe that anymore. It’s not about truth. It’s about winning. It’s about money. And everything is not what it appears to be.”

  For the record, I—like most people—do not believe everyone in prison is guilty of the crime in which they were convicted. That’d be naïve and ignorant. I would take it one step farther and say when speaking of females in prison, those numbers are far higher than when talking males. Lots of women are doing time for love and fear.

  Tracy has a point here in what she says. Yet it’s hard for me to come to the same conclusions she has. I don’t see tangible evidence—that proof I like to see in cases where the wrongly convicted are sprung from prison. I still have a hard time believing so many law enforcement could be involved in a conspiracy to frame a fellow cop for a motive I don’t see as being large enough in scope. I wish like hell those cops involved would have responded to my requests for interviews. The fact that across the board they did not raises a few red flags for me, but doesn’t negate the investigation (as it stands), or the results it produced.

  I could spend another 100 pages detailing more of Tracy’s arguments and countering each with the facts in the case as they are. What I tried to do was take Tracy’s core arguments and present them from her point of view and then share the facts of the case as they have been unearthed, and allow you—the all-important reader—to judge for yourself what happened and who is responsible. With the facts as they were presented in court, if I were a juror, honestly, I would have had to vote guilty. There was no other explanation offered, no other suspect, no counter argument—other than the frame-up theory—to some of the most damning evidence. You look at this case from the way in which it was presented in a court of law (twice) and Tracy Fortson appears to be guilty.

  But then the question has to become: Does Tracy look too guilty?

  Well, that’s a position we cannot take. Sometimes, the evidence is overwhelming; other times, it is not.

  What I will say is that the more I spoke to Tracy, the more I believe her. I hope someone can, at the least, take the case farther than I could and look into the notion that good ol’ boy justice, of which we know exists in this country, served up the first and only female sheriff the county had seen up until then for reasons anyone outside that bubble cannot fathom.

  In 2015, when she acted as her own lawyer and filed that extraordinary motion for a new trial, Tracy exhausted her final appeal. According to Northern Circuit District Attorney Parks White, Tracy’s “case is finalized and closed.”

  Tracy is serving her time at the Lee Arrendale State Prison in Alto, Georgia. She maintains that the murder charge against her was born from that sexual harassment claim she filed against former Oglethorpe Sheriff Ray Sanders, a suit she dropped after being arrested on the murder charge. One of the major problems Tracy faced was that she was unable to produce documentation that Doug was involved in Painkiller’s conviction, which would have been the beginning of a basis for arguing someone else could have been responsible for Doug’s murder.

  In the years following Fortson’s second conviction, former Oglethorpe County Sheriff Ray Sanders and his son-in-law faced assault charges for allegedly beating another man with a baseball bat at Sanders’ daughter’s home. Sanders, who was 71 at the time, and his son-in-law were charged with aggravated assault after a GBI investigation (with Mike Smith, Sanders’ old buddy, the sheriff, recusing himself, allowing the GBI to take over). In 2009, a grand jury failed to indict Ray Sanders for the crime, though his son-in-law was charged.

  “I’m just glad we had a good grand jury in there, and they saw fit to read through the lines,” Ray Sanders told the Florida Times-Union in December 2009. “I didn’t see no cause for me to be arrested in the first place, and if I hadn’t been a political sheriff for such a long time, probably nothing would have come of it.”

  It was 2000 when Ray Sanders ended his 16-year term as sheriff after not running for re-election.

  On Dec. 8, 2016, Tracy wrote: “My application to the Supreme Court of Georgia for Discretionary Appeal was DENIED, all Justices concur. Not sure of any other option at this point.”

  I could sense her dread and disappointment and frustration.

  Her legal battle was over. This, mind you, after 14 years. Save for an 11th-hour admission by a stranger, this left Tracy with no recourse whatsoever to pursue.

  She has exhausted every appeal.

  I asked Tracy to write a final appeal to you, the reader. Encouraging her to keep it sincere. All of her arguments were in the book itself. I wanted her to speak directly to you, person to person, convicted murderer to reader.

  Here is what she sent:

  I have tried my best to write a final plea to your readers, and yet I find myself at a loss for words. I suppose mere words cannot express how it feels to be locked away for a crime I did not commit. I mean, what can I tell them that has not been said already?

  The truth is, I am a convict, an inmate, a prisoner of the State of Georgia, and yet, I am not a murderer.

  I did not kill Doug Benton.

  Still, I remain behind bars.

  What else can I do to prove my innocence?

  I can’t hand you a piece of paper or tangible piece of evidence that proves it. I don’t have a fearless hero willing to stand up against my accusers and tell the truth. All I can do is tell you my side of the story, show you the documents I have, and point out the untruths and errors in my case. It’s up to you to decide what you believe.

  As far as I know, there are no other legal options for me. So I will wait for the five members of Georgia’s parole board to decide when, or if, I am ever set free.

  I will wait, but I will never give up! For I know that, if God is willing, the sun will rise tomorrow and with the new day there is renewed hope and a new opportunity for things to change. And until that day comes, I will remain always hopeful, always vigilant and always ready.

  If you would like to help, letters of support for my release are always welcome.

  Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole

  2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive S.E.

  Balcony Level, East Tower

  Atlanta, Georgia 30334-4909

  To write to Tracy in prison:

  Tracy Fortson – GDC ID: 0000621875

  Arrendale State Prison

  2023 Gainesville Hwy.

  Alto, GA 30510

  PHOTOS

  A single bullet wound to the top of his skull was found to have killed Doug Benton after his decomposed body was found and extracted from a cement tomb.

  Doug Benton was 38 years old when he went missing in early June 2000.

  An amateur bodybuilder, some claimed Doug Benton was heavily into steroids and, at one time, other illegal drugs—which might have been the motive behind his murder.

  Tracy Fortson was the first and only female deputy sheriff in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, at the time the law took a turn in her life and she found herself facing a murder charge.

  With her strong personality and aggressive way of dealing with others, Tracy Fortson made an excellent sheriff’s deputy. She had not one blemish to her career at the time of her arrest.

  Married and divorced twice, when Tracy first met Doug Benton she wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of dating him and soon shunned his advances.

  Tracy lived with her daughter just a few miles from Doug Benton’s modular trailer home. She claimed that the concrete and horse watering trough she purchased near the time Doug Benton went missing had been stole
n from a carport attached to her home.

  Tracy Fortson owned her own horse, which she kept on a spread of land just down the road from her house—hence the reason why she bought the watering trough and mineral block near the time Doug Benton went missing.

  Doug Benton had been heavily involved with drugs and, according to several people who knew him well, had worked as a confidential informant for law enforcement to bust a local drug dealer—which was, those same sources claim, why he was later murdered.

  The horse watering trough, with Doug Benton’s body encased in cement, as it sat in the middle of the same cattle field where Tracy Fortson hunted.

  As a point of contention throughout the case: Did these holes on the bottom of the cattle trough, made by the pitch forks of a tractor, also make the wounds on the lower-mid portion of Doug Benton’s torso?

  Crime scene experts later busted up the concrete inside the trough with pick-axes and hammers. A portion of the concrete was then doused with Clorox bleach.

  Was this scuff mark on the bark of a tree near the watering trough made by Tracy Fortson’s truck or the tractor used to hoist the watering trough from the ground?

  Was this note allegedly found on the window of Doug Benton’s truck actually written by Doug, or had his killer forged his handwriting?

  Years after her arrest, being found guilty twice, Tracy Fortson continues to fight for her innocence.

  She’s been in prison nearly two decades, but Tracy will never, she says, stop trying to convince the world she did not kill Doug Benton.

  At 52 years of age, in 2017, Tracy Fortson sent me this photo. As we corresponded over the course of nearly a year, Tracy and I butted heads and fought like enemies. The one thing that never changed was Tracy’s narrative. I never caught her lying to me.

  About The Author

  Serial-killer expert, lecturer, and acclaimed investigative journalist M. William Phelps is the New York Times best-selling and award-winning author of 34 nonfiction books. Winner of 2008 New England Book Festival Award for I’ll Be Watching You, and the Excellence in (Investigative) Journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists (2013) for his Connecticut Magazine article “Blonde, Blue-eyed & Gone,” Phelps has appeared on CBS’s Early Show, The Discovery Channel, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today show, The View, TLC, BIO, History Channel, Oxygen’s Snapped, Killer Couples, and Captured, USA Radio Network, Catholic Radio, ABC News Radio, and Radio America, which calls him “the nation’s leading authority on the mind of the female murderer.”

  Currently, he is associate producer, consultant and expert for Piers Morgan on his yet-to-be-titled serial-killer series for ITV in Great Britain.

  Phelps has written for the Providence Journal, Hartford Courant, Connecticut Magazine, and the New London Day. He has been profiled in such noted publications as Writer’s Digest, the New York Daily News, Newsday, Albany Times-Union, Hartford Courant, and the New York Post. He has also consulted for the Showtime cable television series Dexter. He is a member of the Multidisciplinary Collaborative on Sexual Crime and Violence (MCSCV), also known as the Atypical Homicide Research Group (AHRG) at Northeastern University. He lives in a small Connecticut farming community and can be reached at his author website:

  www.mwilliamphelps.com.

  Look for M. William Phelps on Investigation Discovery in reruns of his series, Dark Minds, focusing on his travels investigating unsolved serial-killer cases, and in his longtime recurring role as a leading crime expert on the long-running series Deadly Women. In addition, Phelps annually films about 20 different guest spots on various crime series all over the cable dial. You can write to him via his website or by snail mail at P.O. Box 3215, Vernon, CT, 06066.

  OTHER BOOKS BY M. WILLIAM PHELPS

  Perfect Poison

  Lethal Guardian

  Every Move You Make

  Sleep in Heavenly Peace

  Murder in the Heartland

  Because You Loved Me

  If Looks Could Kill

  I’ll Be Watching You

  Deadly Secrets

  Cruel Death

  Death Trap

  Kill For Me

  Love Her to Death

  Too Young to Kill

  Never See Them Again

  Kiss of the She-Devil

  Bad Girls

  Obsessed

  The Killing Kind

  She Survived: Melissa

  (e-book)

  She Survived: Jane

  (e-book)

  I’d Kill For You

  To Love and To Kill

  One Breath Away

  If You Only Knew

  Don’t Tell a Soul

  Dangerous Ground

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