2
Jason Alan Sammons and his friend Ellis McNeill Williams were enjoying the spring afternoon. The two were at Sammons’s house on County Road 182, having a beer out in the yard while they talked and put away some tools Sammons had been using on the job that day. Both young men worked hard, and they liked to relax after work and spend a little time together enjoying a “cold one.”
When they heard a gunshot that seemed to come from the pastures down the road, they didn’t pay much attention. In such a rural area, an occasional gunshot was nothing unusual. The vast majority of people who lived in the area were hunters, and still more people fished regularly, either at the lake or in the many ponds. And those who fished were likely to take a gun along on their fishing trips; snakes were very fond of the water, especially the farm ponds, where there were plenty of frogs and big tadpoles to attract them. When the two young men heard a couple more shots a short time later, they were still unconcerned.
About half an hour passed, and after the tools had all been cleaned and stored back in place, ready for the next day’s work, the two friends decided to take Sammons’s John Deere Gator all-terrain vehicle (ATV) and ride around the neighborhood for a while. Sammons grabbed Williams a beer out of the cooler and they started up the Gator and rode around over Sammons’s farm; then they went across the highway and turned onto County Road 941.
When the two men saw a late-model white SUV sitting partially hidden in some willow bushes in the pasture beside the road, their first thought was that it might have been stolen or wrecked, so they rode down into the pasture to check it out. Car thieves often abandoned stolen vehicles off the road after they had been stripped. But this SUV seemed not to have been tampered with, so the men looked to see if its driver was in the pasture. When they found that no one seemed to be around, they pulled back out of the pasture and continued with their ride.
When Sammons and Williams turned around and started back down the road a short time later, they were still curious about the nice late-model abandoned vehicle sitting out in the pasture. They drove the Gator through the field down to the SUV again to have another look. This time they looked more closely and saw that there was, after all, some damage to the underside of the front of the vehicle, and it looked as though it might have been driven down and gotten stuck in the field. It just didn’t look like the type of car someone would take down into a rough pasture like that, too nice and new to be driving around through the high grass and over the rough ground. Besides, it was sitting there with several bags of groceries in the back. They might need to call somebody, they decided, and report it, just in case there had been some kind of problem.
As they started to leave the pasture, Sammons glanced over toward the small pond a short distance away and noticed that something at the water’s edge didn’t look quite right.
“Man, what’s that down there in the pond?” he asked Williams. “Do you see it?”
Sammons steered the Gator down toward the pond to a place where he could get a better look at what he saw floating in the shallow water. He started driving slowly, but slammed on the brakes, his heart pounding, when he saw what looked like a body lying at the edge of the pond. As he and Williams pulled up, got off the Gator, and carefully stepped a few feet closer, they could see that it was the corpse of a woman, floating facedown in the brackish water. From a short distance, it looked like she had suffered some horrific injuries to the head and back, and there could be absolutely no question that the woman was dead.
As the two men stood there, hardly believing they had stumbled onto such a nightmarish scene, Sammons noticed that some shotgun shells were lying nearby on the ground, two blue and one red, looking fresh and clean, as if they hadn’t been lying there very long. He recalled hearing several gunshots while he and his friend were standing outside at his home, and he realized that what he and Williams had heard was more than likely the firing of the shots that had killed the woman in the pond.
3
At first, Sammons and Williams stood and stared, frozen in place, horrified by their discovery. Then they realized that they had to snap out of it, get moving quickly and call someone for help as soon as possible. Sammons couldn’t get service on his cell phone in the low-lying area around the pond, and he knew that he was going to have to go back up to the road before he could make a call. The men backed away from the pond, jumped back onto the Gator, and carefully moved it away from the area so they wouldn’t damage any evidence or disturb the scene. They were anxious to get some officers there as quickly as they could, but they took pains not to disturb a few patches of grass and weeds that looked as if they might have been recently walked through and flattened.
As they were hurrying out of the pasture, shaken by what they had found at the pond, a gold extended-cab Chevy pickup drove by the pasture on the dirt road at a higher-than-normal rate of speed, headed for the main highway. By the time Sammons and Williams got the Gator back onto the road, the speeding pickup had already disappeared out of sight down County Road 941.
Sammons pulled the Gator to a point on the road that was slightly higher uphill, to a place where he could get cell phone service, and he hurriedly called Cherokee County 911. After he told the dispatcher what he and his friend had found in the pond and gave the operator directions to the scene, the two men drove the Gator back to the pasture gate to wait beside the road for the authorities to arrive. It would be getting dark soon, and the coming storm was making the evening air unseasonably warm and muggy. It was not cold at all, but Sammons and Williams were shivering.
Todd Waits and his wife were going out that evening to the nearby town of Cedar Bluff, Alabama. They left home at 5:30
P.M.
, and as they returned home at around 7:00
P.M.
, they met a tan Chevrolet Stepside pickup truck going out toward the main road at a fairly high speed. Minutes later, after they turned onto County Road 941, they saw two men standing beside the road next to a John Deere Gator. The men, whom Waits recognized as Jason Sammons and Ellis Williams, began frantically waving for him to stop.
“Man, there’s a woman down there, dead in the pond,” Sammons shouted at Waits as he pulled up beside them. “I just called 911,” he continued, “and they ought to get here pretty quick.”
Waits could see that the two men were shaken, visibly upset by what they had discovered. He decided quickly what he should do.
“I’ll take my wife on to the house, then I’ll come right back down here,” Waits told them.
When he had dropped his wife off safely at their home, Waits hurried back down the road to the pasture gate to wait with his frightened neighbors until the authorities began to arrive.
The three men didn’t have a long wait; within a few minutes, the flashing blue lights of emergency vehicles lit up the darkening skies as law enforcement officers began coming up County Road 941 to the blue metal gate at the entrance of the pasture, and the cars of county deputies and investigators soon lined both sides of the road that stretched alongside the pasture.
4
When Cherokee County investigator Michael B. “Bo” Jolly was dispatched to the pond off County Road 941, he was one of a group of several officers who were the first to arrive at the scene. A 911 caller had reported finding a woman’s body floating in a farm pond, apparently shot and killed. This was a very uncommon occurrence in rural Cherokee County, Alabama. When such calls went out on the scanner, they quickly drew responses from every officer and agency in the vicinity.
At that time, Jolly had been an investigator for the sheriff’s office for three years, and had spent a total of seven years in law enforcement. He had served as the lead investigator on countless cases during that time, but this case would prove to be the main focus of his career for many months to come.
The 911 call had come in to the dispatcher just before seven o’clock, and by 7:10
P.M.
, Jolly and Deputies Kirk Blankenship and Kneely Pack had begun gathering at the scene, along with Drug Task Force officers Charles Clifton and Scott McGinnis. Clifton, commander of the task force, had arrived first, and had already started securing the scene. He had also identified the witnesses who had placed the initial 911 call, Sammons and Williams, and had gotten them and Waits started on writing their statements with details about how they had come to be at the pond that evening, and what they had found there.
When he arrived at the pasture, Jolly walked with Clifton down to the pond and looked at the body floating, facedown, not very far out in the murky water along the edge of the pond. It appeared to be the body of a Caucasian woman, probably in her mid-thirties, who had been shot several times at very close range, causing extensive damage to her head, back, and arms. The wounds appeared to Jolly to be consistent to those made with a shotgun. The victim was fully clothed in tan pants and a tan blouse, but a piece of light green plastic stretch wrap had been looped around her neck.
A short distance away from the pond, a late-model white Nissan Murano SUV had been driven into a clump of bushes in what looked to the officers like an attempt to conceal it from passersby on the road. The vehicle had not been wrecked, but there was damage to the lower front end, where it had been driven from the gate into the pasture, then through the mud and high weeds. When the Alabama license tag bearing the number
13BO341
was run, the SUV had not been reported stolen, and the name and address of its registered owner was determined. The address, the information revealed, was only a couple of miles farther down the road from the pasture. When they received that information, the officers knew that there was a strong likelihood that the driver of the SUV was, in all probability, the woman whose horribly mutilated body was now floating in the pond.
A short time later, Investigators Mark Hicks and Jimmy DeBerry and Cherokee County sheriff Larry Wilson arrived and joined Jolly and Clifton at the edge of the pond. Sheriff Wilson quickly decided that his department needed to call and request immediate assistance from the Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI), and the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences (ADFS) was also notified that they would need to be en route. In the meantime, the daylight was rapidly beginning to fade, so the investigators began placing evidence markers and photographing the scene while they waited for the ABI agents and forensics personnel to arrive.
5
Vernon Roberts couldn’t understand why his wife, Darlene, was not answering his repeated calls to her cell phone. She had called him earlier, around 4:45
P.M.
, to tell him she had just arrived at Wal-Mart in Rome, Georgia, to shop for groceries on her way home. She asked him if there was anything that he needed her to pick up for him, and said she’d be home soon. After they hung up, Vernon went back to the work he’d started as soon as he had gotten home, painting the upstairs hallway. When he finished, he worked on the faucet in the upstairs bathroom, then cleaned the bathroom in preparation for his brother’s arrival for a visit. His work done, Vernon took a shower, expecting his wife to be home before he was finished, but she still wasn’t there when he got out of the shower. He began to get concerned, and he called her to see if everything was okay.
There was no answer on her cell phone. Vernon called Darlene’s daughter, Heidi, to see what time her mother had dropped her off at home after work. He told Heidi he couldn’t get in contact with Darlene, and after trying unsuccessfully to call her mother’s cell phone, Heidi called Vernon back and told him she hadn’t been able to contact her mother, either.
Vernon told Heidi he was going to go out looking for Darlene, thinking that she might have had car trouble or a flat tire in an area where there wasn’t a good cell phone signal. He got into his pickup truck and hurried down County Road 941, and as he drove, he tried again several times to call as he headed toward Rome. The calls continued to be unanswered; he still could only get Darlene’s voice mail.
Vernon drove all the way to Wal-Mart and rode up and down all the rows in the parking lot looking for Darlene’s vehicle. When he didn’t find it, he turned around and started back toward home, expecting that they could easily have missed each other en route. He hoped that Darlene would be at the house waiting for him when he arrived.
Vernon was talking to Heidi again, telling her he was nearly home and would let her know if her mother was there, when he saw a large crowd of emergency vehicles at the pasture entrance and down at the pond, with their flashing lights, blue and red, lighting up the dusk. He told Heidi what he could see up ahead, only a couple of miles from their house, and he told her, “I think Darlene’s been hurt.”
He didn’t have time to give Heidi any further information; when the officers saw Vernon’s pickup coming up the road, they stopped him and checked his identification. They immediately knew that he was the husband of the victim in the pond, and they detained him, loaded him into a patrol car, and transported him to the Cherokee County Narcotics Office on the other side of the county, in Leesburg, Alabama, for questioning. They did not give him any information other than to tell him that his wife had been hurt and they needed him to come with them so they could talk.
6
At around 10:00
P.M.
, ABI agents Jason W. Brown, Brent Thomas, and Wayne Green arrived at the crime scene where the Cherokee County officials waited for them. They all immediately began collecting evidence and taking additional photographs with the help of ADFS investigator Mark Hopwood. Cherokee County coroner Bobby Don Rogers pronounced Martha Darlene Roberts dead at the scene, and her body was transported to Cherokee Medical Center, to remain until it could be turned over to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences for autopsy.
Severe weather was on the way for the overnight hours, and the officers tried to work as quickly as possible before the coming storms moved into the area. There would be much additional work to do during daylight hours on the following day if weather permitted at all, but the scene would need to be carefully preserved during the night. It was decided that several officers would spend the night at the pasture to keep the crime scene secure, and the work of searching for evidence would resume as early as possible, on the next morning. In the meantime, Vernon Roberts was being held a distance away, in law enforcement offices in the Leesburg City Hall, being questioned by two deputies, who had not yet told him exactly what had happened to Darlene. Vernon was not at all pleased at being detained, and he was getting more and more disturbed at being held without an explanation and interrogated. However, the officers were determined to uncover any inconsistencies there might be in his account of his whereabouts during the time before his wife’s body was discovered.
Lieutenant Jimmy DeBerry and Cherokee County Drug Task Force commander Charles Clifton knew, like all law enforcement personnel, that the spouse is almost always the first person who falls under suspicion when a husband or wife has been murdered. They left no doubt that they expected not only cooperation, but a complete and detailed account of Vernon’s activities for the entire day.
The handwritten statement, given by Vernon Roberts at 8:45
P.M.
, said that he and Darlene had gotten up that morning at six o’clock as usual, and Darlene left around 7:00
A.M.
to pick up Heidi and give her a ride to work. Vernon left home around 7:10
A.M.
on the way to Temple-Inland Paperboard and Packaging, Inc., in Rome, Georgia, where he and Darlene both worked in the same building and were scheduled on the same shift.
Vernon said that he left his office around 10:00
A.M.
for a doctor’s appointment and returned at noon in time to have lunch at the mill with Darlene and their friends Leesa Norton, Danny Alexander, and Lynn Willoughby. Vernon said that he returned to his office around twelve-thirty, and Darlene called him at four-thirty to let him know she was leaving work and planned to pick up Heidi, give her a ride back to her home, and then stop to get some groceries at Wal-Mart on the way.
Vernon said that he went home from work and started the chores he had planned to get completed on that afternoon before his brother arrived for the weekend, and he said that Darlene called him to see if he needed anything from Wal-Mart while she was there. After finishing his work and taking a shower, Vernon said, he was surprised that Darlene hadn’t come home yet, and he grew concerned that Darlene didn’t answer her cell phone. He called Heidi to see exactly what time her mother had dropped her off at home. He claimed that he told Heidi he was getting worried because he couldn’t contact Darlene after repeatedly calling her, and he said that Heidi also had tried to call her mother and had no luck, either.
Vernon stated that he told Heidi he was going to look for Darlene; then he went to Wal-Mart, didn’t find her there or anywhere else on the way back from Rome, and headed home, only to be stopped on the road, detained by the officers, and brought to the Leesburg office for questioning.
Vernon then signed a waiver of rights, and the interrogation began in earnest.