Bitter Remains

by Diane Fanning

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  DESPITE his desire to have Laura at home alone, however, Grant didn’t seem to be capable of being alone himself. Whenever Laura left little Grant in his care for even the shortest amount of time, she always found other people with him when she returned. Even with his child present, Grant invited anyone and everyone into his home, from other musicians and groupies to pimps and drug dealers. Most worrisome to Laura was how Grant would pass little Grant around to total strangers. He even offered one convicted felon “godfather status” in order to solidify a business transaction.

  One evening in the fall of 2008, Grant and Laura went out to dinner with their baby and eight of Grant’s friends. They sat outside at a table, but within the first thirty minutes, Grant disappeared inside the restaurant and stayed gone for quite some time.

  One of his friends went in to see what was up and found Grant in the men’s room snorting and selling cocaine. When the friend returned to the table, he turned to Laura and said, “You should leave Grant and take your son.” Knowing that Grant was an avid believer that immunizations caused autism, the friend added, “Get your boy immunized. He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

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  IN February 2009, Grant Hayes’s family staged what they called an “intervention” on Laura’s behalf at their house. With Grant’s mother, Patsy, and sister, Tina, gathered around, Grant’s father told Laura that his son had “a crazy world-takeover plan. He wants to have fifty kids with different women of all races in order to build his empire,” Grant Jr. said, adding that his son had told him he anticipated being about seventy years old before he achieved his goal. Her husband, they told her, believed this was the old way of building a business—like in the Bible.

  Her father-in-law also warned Laura that Grant III “is the type of man who will pimp you if he needed to.”

  Suddenly, she saw the truth behind one of her husband’s strange habits. He would always provide a “party favor” (aka a woman) to keep the host “company” at promotional parties for his new recordings or for a new artistic venture. Now she understood exactly what those phrases meant.

  Her in-laws gave her the phone number for Grant’s first wife, Emily. Emily’s advice to Laura was: “Run—run as fast as you can.”

  When Laura walked out of the Hayes’s home, she took little Grant and spent a couple of weeks with her friend Heidi Schumacher’s parents. When Laura returned to Kinston, Grant’s sister, Tina, took her to a magistrate to file assault charges against Grant. That same month, she contacted the Safe Alliance, an agency in Charlotte that ran a shelter for abused women and their children. She wanted to know if what she was experiencing was typical of abusive relationships. She wanted to know of any options she could use to correct the destructive path she traveled.

  But Laura never followed through with any of it, fearing her little family would never recover—and she so yearned to provide her son with the cohesive, intact unit that she never had growing up.

  She would come to deeply regret her naïveté at this point in her life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BY March 2009, life had grown ever scarier for Laura. Grant was spending more time with felons and drug abusers, and as a result his drinking and drug use escalated once again. One terrifying night, he ran into little Grant’s bedroom raging and swinging a baseball bat. He told Laura that “the aliens were fucking with him.” A hysterical, shrieking Laura threw herself between Grant and the baby to protect the little boy from his father. Then Grant rushed outside, still clutching the bat and running off crazed.

  Throughout the chaos of Laura’s disintegrating home life, Heidi and Laura managed to maintain their friendship, getting together as frequently as possible. One evening in late March, they were standing out in the parking lot of a Starbucks chatting when Grant pulled up and lit into Laura for continuing to see Heidi. Then he directed his comments to both women: “I am powerful enough and I have enough friends that I could have you both killed and no one will know what happened to you. So don’t fuck with me.”

  Soon after that incident, Heidi obtained a concealed-carry permit. She wanted Laura to carry a gun, too, but Laura was very uncomfortable with firearms and wouldn’t have one. Instead, Heidi bought her friend a knife with a rosewood handle, which Laura carried with her until she died.

  Around that same time, when little Grant was still less than a year old, Laura found him sitting with his father watching a movie while a very explicit and realistic rape scene filled the screen. Laura was appalled and wanted to take her son out of the room. Grant refused to let him go and told her that little Grant was his son and her opinion was irrelevant. He knew what was best for his boy.

  Shortly after those experiences, Laura suggested a temporary separation to Grant, saying she could go to her brother’s house for a while. Grant went ballistic. “If you go stay with your brother, I will hunt you down, or my goon squad will hunt you down, and kill you. And Jason, too.”

  Nonetheless, Laura did broach the subject with her brother. After talking it over, however, they decided it was too much risk to Jason’s young daughter, who lived with him part-time. Neither one of them wanted to put yet another person in danger.

  After that, Jason stopped calling his sister so as not to further strain her relationship with Grant. He just waited for her to call him. They still talked every month, but now it had the undertones of an espionage assignation.

  —

  AS time went by, Grant Hayes grew more frustrated with his trajectory as a professional musician in Raleigh. Some nights he played open-mike gigs, performing for hours for tips and coming home with no money after he paid his bar tab. He felt he needed a new audience to revitalize his foundering career.

  He’d been playing on the college circuit with other performers but had been pushed out of that group. He later claimed that the reason for his ejection was that someone was trying to kill him because of his knowledge of or involvement in a murder. He expressed a desire to escape the heat to an acquaintance in the United States Virgin Islands, Joseph “Jose” Hardin, a music promoter/agent in St. John.

  Jose thought Grant was a charismatic and creative musician who knew how to play a crowd. He smiled at individuals as he performed and had been described as a male Sade. Jose believed that getting an act like Grant’s to St. John would be a real coup. He assured Grant that he could line up five to six gigs a week for him. On top of that, Jose said, “It’s awesome here. No stress. No worries.”

  The smallest of the three main Caribbean islands—St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix—that make up the USVI, St. John encompasses only twenty square miles and about 60 percent of that is under the purview of the US National Park Service. After a flight to Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, reaching its smaller sister is easy on the Red Hook ferry. A fifteen-minute boat ride travels through breathtaking tiny cays, some lush and green, others covered with rocks, cactus and stunted trees.

  St. John remained a lush and unspoiled paradise with pristine beaches and magnificent vistas around every corner. Any snapshot of Trunk Bay, with its underwater snorkeling trail, would strike most Americans as a familiar sight.

  Grant thought about it and decided his folk-reggae music style would likely be popular in the islands—and it would be a way to get back at the guys who’d rejected him and prove himself. Little Grant was still small when Grant left him and Laura behind in Kinston while he went down to test the waters. In no time, he renamed himself Grant Haze and established a devoted following. Within one month, he had a girlfriend on St. John.

  Jose knew Grant had what it took as a performer but he was further impressed by the extent of Grant’s artistic abilities—“all he needed was a piece of paper and a pencil.” Grant knew, too, how to capitalize on it. Every month, he came up with a new awesome business idea.

  One successful plan was his souvenir T-shirts. Grant printed artwork he’d created on th
e shirts, then added the words “St. John, USVI” and they sold like crazy. Then, Jose said, Grant “manipulated other people to sell them for him, too,” creating another stream of revenue as well as an effective promotional tool.

  A crazier plan cooked up by Grant involved getting an elephant to give rides to tourists. Mark Gierth, a friend of Grant’s on St. John who joined him in “chasing girls and imbibing pot and cocaine,” said that he told Grant: “There are no elephants in the Caribbean; there must be a reason for that.”

  Still, Grant was enchanted with the idea until Mark reminded him, “Elephants poop—and it has to go somewhere. Do you want to shovel it?”

  Mark said he often felt bad for Grant, who always seemed “two steps behind the guy who got the prize.” For instance, Grant would become all teary-eyed when listening to “One Believer” by John Campbell. The song told the story of a man who dreamed of having his name in lights and prayed for someone who believed in him and opened the right door. Grant saw himself as that man—a lonely outcast whose career hadn’t gone the way he wanted it to go. Grant grew bitter when talking about the success of others; it “made his heart race and his face change.”

  But according to Mark, Grant “was always a little short of what he needed,” even though “he was always striving for success.” Jose, on the other hand, came to believe that Grant’s real problem was that he was very lazy and would back away from any real work.

  Grant, however, could be very charming—so charming, Jose said, that “I knew he was manipulating me. . . . He’d say, ‘I need you—only you can do this—you are special—you are awesome’ . . . and I’d fall for it again and again.”

  —

  WHILE Grant was in the islands, Laura told Heidi she wanted to leave him. She and little Grant again moved in with Heidi’s parents. Heidi had long been dismayed by Grant’s controlling behavior and was quick with encouragement and an offer to help in any way she could.

  Laura decided she wanted to take her son and stay up in Michigan with her father, Rodger Ackerson. Together, the two friends planned Laura’s road trip, including an overnight stay at Heidi’s grandparents’ place in Ohio.

  But just before it was time for Laura and little Grant to head north, Laura started feeling ill. Heidi took her to Planned Parenthood in Wake Forest, and Laura discovered that she was twelve weeks pregnant with a second child.

  Laura shifted gears and decided not to leave Grant after all. Instead, she decided that she was going to tell him about their new baby and move down to the Virgin Islands to be with him, and to give their relationship one more chance.

  Before leaving for the Caribbean, Laura told her brother Jason that she knew that Grant had begun another relationship on the island, but she added that he’d promised to stop seeing that woman immediately.

  Their second son was born two months premature on St. Thomas on August 3, 2009. They named him Gentle Reign. Grant explained the name in a promotional interview for his website with Los Angeles publicist Hollace Dowdy. “In my maturity, I’m understanding what masculinity is. And it’s gentle.”

  Not only did that line contradict his behavior, the interview was filled with information about an idyllic childhood complete with a gospel-music-star mother and a father who was a minister in a big Los Angeles church. It was all in direct contrast with previous statements he’d made onstage about abuse and alcoholism in his family life. Listening to Grant, it was impossible to know where truth ended and fantasy began.

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  UNFORTUNATELY, blissful island life on St. John did not seem to be in the cards for Laura Ackerson. She had to care for two little guys under the age of two, and the youngest one had been born with a serious health problem involving his kidney.

  Mark Gierth, who lived with the couple on St. John for a while, said that Laura and Grant Hayes had frequent verbal squabbles, often over money issues and child care. Now that Laura was the mother of two, she wanted more financial stability and grew frustrated that Grant was hanging on to an empty dream. She still believed in Grant’s talent but he wasn’t making headway toward turning it into a reliable source of income. She wanted him to come back to reality and accept financial and emotional responsibility for their two children.

  Even though Grant tried to hide it, Laura also knew that he was seeing another woman, but she didn’t know if it was the same one he’d promised to give up when she came to the islands or if it was another woman altogether. She simply knew there was someone else, and she felt him slipping away. Grant blew off her concerns, telling her that it was part of his job to make women want to have sex with him so that he could pass them to the guys who tagged along as his unofficial entourage. He said that was why he was treated like a celebrity and why everyone wanted to pay for his expenses, from limos to dinners to clothing.

  To make matters worse, Grant partied all the time, developed a heavy cocaine habit, and showed no signs of awareness or concern about any of Laura’s needs. His daily drug and alcohol use made him incapable of caring for the children. That left all of the childhood duties and household tasks in Laura’s hands—with one exception: he still managed to take out the trash. Typically, he was up most of the night, then slept into the afternoon. When he rose, he’d occasionally make a needed grocery store run. Then he’d eat dinner and go out to work and the pattern started again.

  Whenever Grant was out doing drugs, he always told Laura he was with Jose, because Laura knew that Jose didn’t like blow and wouldn’t be around others who were using it. Many times, to reinforce his stories, Grant would trap Jose in a corner, pushing for confirmation, until Jose felt he had no choice but to lie for him.

  The more Jose viewed Grant up close, the more troubled he became. He noticed that Grant’s lyrics all seemed angry, filled with words like “rage” and “hate.” He talked a lot onstage about his childhood with an alcoholic father who went to prison and beat him and his mother when he was at home. Jose wasn’t sure if it was all an act or if there were truth in the dark story.

  Grant told Jose that he was scared of black women because of past trauma and so was always with white women because he couldn’t stand to look at a black woman’s private parts. Jose never knew what to believe. He winced when he heard Grant threaten Laura and threaten to kill or take the children away from her. Jose saw Laura as a loving, caring woman who was supportive of Grant’s career and put up with a lot of BS in the process.

  Jose recognized that Grant’s worldview was excessively self-absorbed. “He was in his own little world—it belonged to him. Everyone else who was there existed for his use.”

  Often, Grant brought other people home with him, and woke Laura at two thirty or three in the morning. One night, he opened his computer and started composing music and woke up the whole household. Laura was sweet to everyone but her irritation at Grant rose off her like steam from a boiling kettle. Still, she settled the boys back in bed and then asked if anyone was hungry. Of course, they all were. She fixed food and went back to bed, still obviously mad. Jose felt sorry for her but felt helpless in the shadow of Grant’s overpowering, intolerant personality.

  Jose came to view Grant as a perfect psychopath who lied and used people without mercy. He believed that Grant had a delusional personality and blamed others for his failures and essentially was a coward and lazy about real work. He saw that Grant could recognize and zero in on people who were caring, who would listen to his tales of woe and help him.

  Gentle’s physical problems became frightening—he needed special health care, including a surgical procedure to put a stent between his bladder and kidney. So Laura left Grant on St. John and moved back to North Carolina with her sons. She moved into a rental property in Kinston owned by Grant’s parents that was located next door to their day care center. In exchange for her housing, she cleaned the center each night. Near the end of the year, to make additional money for expenses, Laura started a freelance bus
iness called GoFish Graphic Designs, creating logos, layouts and print publications for other businesses.

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  THOUGH a great distance now separated them, Grant and Laura kept in close touch. He told her about a woman named Amanda who was feeding him and doing his laundry in exchange for guitar lessons. Grant described her as an investor who wanted to back his career.

  When Grant met country music star Kenny Chesney on the island, he told Laura that Kenny had a huge crush on Amanda. “Maybe I should just pimp her—nah, I won’t.” Despite that denial, he detailed how if Kenny was in Amanda’s pocket and Amanda was in Grant’s, then “I’m as good as famous.”

  When Laura sensed there was something more going on in his relationship, Grant complained about Amanda’s “saggy breasts.” He claimed that he was involved with her “only for the betterment of our family’s situation.” He continued talking about his strategy to take advantage of the woman’s interest in him. “Amanda is generous as long as she doesn’t feel you are taking advantage of her,” Grant told Laura. In order to win her trust, he said, he sometimes ate ramen noodles for dinner rather than accept Amanda’s invitation to join her and her daughter Sha Elmer for meals “in order to come off in a humble manner.”

  On December 29, 2009, Laura sent Grant a desperate e-mail. “Baby I can’t go through this month of you with her. I feel like I’m dying on the inside just thinking about it and with you actually there, I think you may have a dead woman when you call—if not in body, in soul. This sharing has torn me from the inside out and I am here with your children and no family of my own. I’m sorry I took apart what you worked for. It was never intentional. I feel so up against a wall. I wish I could jump off a bridge sometimes and sometimes I wish I could just let you go. Either one would make the slaughter of my soul stop—how children complicate a situation incredibly. I can’t share you . . . I want to concede, let her have you . . . I want my family and my man to want to be faithful only to me. I want a smile all the time. I want a bounce in my step.”