Natasha had been moved from Fraley’s office to the interrogation room while we searched her house. Sam Boyer had been taken to the county jail in Jonesborough, while Levi Barnett was transported to the juvenile detention center in Johnson City. We could see Natasha on a video monitor, rocking slowly back and forth in her chair.
The agents had removed the mirror from Natasha’s room and the print of the eye of providence from the den, and searched every inch of the house. We bagged the literature. We found some prescription drugs in a dresser upstairs in Marie’s bedroom, but we hadn’t found an ice pick or any shoes that matched the smaller footprints found near the tree where Norman Brockwell was found. Outside of the symbols, we had nothing concrete to tie Natasha to the murders. There was some circumstantial evidence-the fact that “ah Satan” was Natasha spelled backwards and the inverted-cross tattoo on her neck-but I still had no way of proving Natasha was at either of the crime scenes.
“It looks like our only hope is if she confesses or if one of the others turns on her,” I said to Fraley.
“She’s not going to confess,” Fraley said.“She wouldn’t say a damned word to me.”
“Maybe you should take another crack at her,” I said.
I sat down at the video monitor and watched while Fraley made another futile attempt to question Natasha. She refused to speak or acknowledge him in any way. She simply stared down at the table, unblinking, the hood of the robe pulled over her head. Fraley cajoled her and pleaded with her, then threatened her. Finally, he resorted to insults. He tried every tactic he knew, but he might as well have been talking to a flat rock. She didn’t even look at him.
After nearly an hour of talking to himself, Fraley stood and walked out of the room. Natasha remained frozen.
“What the hell are we going to do with her?” Fraley said, a look of defeat and disgust on his face.
“We don’t have a choice,” I said. “We don’t have enough to hold her. We have to let her go.”
There was an outrage in the community I’d never encountered. Word quickly got out that arrests had been made. By the time Fraley’s agents took Sam Boyer to the county jail for booking, an angry mob had formed near the sally port. I watched the report on the news that night as they chanted, “Baby killer,” at him and screamed insults. Some of them threw objects-the reporters said they were throwing baby rattles and teddy bears-as the agents took Boyer out of the van, covered him with their bodies to protect him, and shuffled him quickly into the jail.
Everywhere I went, I was accosted by people I didn’t know. At the grocery store, at the post office, in the hallways at the courthouse, people would thank me for helping to finally arrest those who had been terrorizing the community. “Kill the bastards,” they would whisper. “Fry their asses.” They thirsted for blood, for vicarious satisfaction, and I was the designated henchman.
I couldn’t help wondering how Boyer felt, and whether the mob mentality might work to our advantage somehow. The other suspect, Levi Barnett, was transported to the juvenile detention center and was spared the mob scene. Natasha was released, though she was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, leaving Boyer the focal point of the hatred of an entire community.
We convened a special session of the county grand jury, and based on the evidence I presented, they indicted Boyer and Barnett for six counts of first-degree murder, five counts of especially aggravated kidnapping-one each for the Becks and Norman Brockwell-one count of felony theft for stealing the Becks’ van, and one count of burglary for breaking into the Brockwells’ home. I drafted the statutory notice that informed Boyer and his lawyers that the state was seeking the death penalty. I had plenty of evidence against the boys-Fraley and his companions had done an excellent job-but I was still uneasy about whether the arrest and search warrants would hold up once the defense lawyers found out about Alisha. I didn’t offer to present her as a witness in front of the grand jury; I simply referred to her as a confidential informant. She was still nowhere to be found.
Since Levi Barnett was a juvenile, we couldn’t seek the death penalty against him. Tennessee’s death penalty statute was indiscriminate when it came to matters of race, creed, or religion, but it drew the line at killing children. In Tennessee, you had to be eighteen years old to vote, to buy cigarettes, and to get yourself killed by the state.
Boyer was arraigned via satellite three days after his arrest and interrogation. Judge Ivan Glass appeared on a television screen at the jail and informed Boyer of the charges against him and his rights. He also appointed James T. Beaumont III to represent him, the same lawyer who had represented Billy Dockery a couple of months earlier.
Levi Barnett was a little more complicated. Before we could get him into court to try him as an adult, we had to convince the juvenile court judge to transfer him to the jurisdiction of the adult criminal court. It wasn’t much more than a formality, but the judge was vacationing in Italy and couldn’t conduct the hearing for three weeks. We reached the judge by phone at his motel in Venice and asked permission to bring in a substitute judge, but true to form, he refused to give up his fifteen minutes of fame.
I spent the next week fending off the media, organizing as much evidence as I could, and preparing for the William Trent trial. Despite the fact that both Fraley and I told Lee Mooney we believed Natasha Davis was directly involved in the Beck and Brockwell murders, the extra TBI agents had been ordered to return to their respective assignments around the state. That left Fraley shorthanded, and after a week of men staring at the house on Red Row and seeing nothing, the surveillance on Natasha had been discontinued.
On Tuesday morning, the fourteenth of October, I got to the office at six and went back over my notes and strategy for the Trent trial. At eight, I looked up to see Lee Mooney standing in my doorway, sipping a cup of tea.
“Are you ready for this?” Mooney asked.
“As ready as I can be.”
“Are you going to win?”
“Who knows? Depends on the jury; you know that.”
“Why haven’t you made a deal?”
“Because the only deal Snodgrass will accept is a slap on the wrist. No jail time, expungement, no supervised probation. Hell, I’m surprised he didn’t ask for a public apology from the DA’s office.”
“This is important, Joe. Don’t screw it up.”
He turned and disappeared without saying another word, and I sat there wondering what would happen if my plan backfired and I lost the case. About fifteen minutes later, Cody Masters showed up, accompanied by our two star witnesses, Alice Dickson and Rosalie Harbin.
Alice Dickson was an attractive, introverted nineteen-year-old who’d grown up in a small trailer that perched precariously on a Washington County hillside in the Lamar community. I’d visited the trailer and spoken to Alice’s aunt while preparing for the trial. Alice had been born to a teenager named Tara Dickson back in the late eighties. Her mother was neither willing nor able to care for an infant, and when Alice was three months old, she was wrapped in a blanket, put in a bushel basket, and left on Jeanine Taylor’s tiny front porch in the middle of the night. Jeanine was Tara’s older sister. No one had seen or heard from Tara since. When I asked about Alice’s father, Jeanine just shook her head. She had no idea who the father was.
Jeanine already had two small children of her own. Her husband worked at a factory in Johnson City for just above the minimum wage, and Jeanine worked at a convenience store. They barely got by. When Alice was thirteen, Jeanine’s husband, a hard drinker named Rocky Taylor, began to molest her. Alice immediately told Jeanine, who refused to believe her. But within a week, the molestation escalated to rape. When Rocky, in a drunken stupor, followed Alice into the bathroom late one Friday night, Jeanine caught him in the act. She gave him a choice of hitting the road or going to jail. Rocky chose the road, leaving Jeanine to raise three children alone.
The other girl, Rosalie Harbin, was nothing short of a hellion. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and flirty, and had been raised by her Mexican mother and marijuana-dealing father about two miles from where Alice grew up. She’d been in trouble for various petty offenses-mostly thefts-since she was twelve. By the time she turned eighteen, she’d added forgery to her growing repertoire of illegal skills.
The girls had met on the school bus, and though they were polar opposites, they’d been friends since they were six years old. It was Rosalie who’d heard from one of her other friends about the unusual circumstances at William Trent’s pizza place, and it had been Rosalie who’d encouraged her friend Alice to go with her and apply for a job. Alice, who was desperately poor and barely over fifteen, had traded in her morals for the opportunity to make
