Bitter Remains

by Diane Fanning

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  OFFICER Kevin Crocker and his Raleigh Police Department Fugitive Task Force returned to Grant and Patsy Hayes’s home in Kinston to keep watch—the news from Texas made Grant and Amanda likely murder suspects. Grant remained in the house most of the time, coming out occasionally for a cigarette. After the eleven o’clock news aired with news of the imminent arrest of him and his wife, Grant’s trips outside to smoke became more frequent and his behavior seemed more nervous and unsettled.

  In the early morning hours of July 25, detectives arrived and took the couple into custody. That evening Raleigh Detectives Thomas Ouellette and Zeke Morse conducted a search of Grant and Patsy’s home. In the master bedroom, Ouellette found a yellow envelope sitting upright in a chair. It contained $571 in currency and a personal check for $125 written on the account of Kandice Rowland to Amanda Hayes. In that room, he also found writing on a used envelope that appeared to be notes in preparation for a press conference. It read:

  1) Grant Hayes—introduce Amanda, Father of Laura Ackerson’s children Grant and Gentle Hayes

  2) Like I told my mom, I was supposed to meet her 7/15/11. I called my mom to get in touch with her and she couldn’t

  3) If anyone has seen Laura, please call the police department and Laura: Grant and Gentle ask for you. If you’re listening to this broadcast, please call us.

  4) I’ve spoken to Detective as soon as I learned of this situation

  The detective also took possession of a men’s chain necklace, a small necklace with a palm tree pendant, a pair of pearl earrings, a bracelet, matching diamond wedding rings, a woman’s watch, a small handwritten note, the two coolers Crocker had seen going into the house and an RBC Visa check card in Grant Hayes’s name with a Post-it note bearing the PIN adhered to it.

  In the home office, Morse gathered up the computer, its power cord and a notebook with a note about the children, dated July 24, 2011, that read:

  I, Grant Hayes, leave Gentle, Grant and Lily Hayes in the sole custody of Grant and Patsy Hayes.

  It was signed by both Grant and Amanda. Below that the name of a Raleigh pediatrics office was written along with two telephone numbers.

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  ON July 26, while divers were continuing their arduous task under the hot Texas sun, Grant and Amanda Hayes appeared before District Judge Jacqueline Brewer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Even though the body parts found halfway across the country had not yet been officially declared as the remains of Laura Ackerson, the judge ordered both held without bond on first degree murder charges and appointed public defenders to represent them. She set their next court appearance for August 16.

  Across town, CCBI Agent Michael Galloway and Raleigh Police Detective Amanda Salmon went to Glen Burney Trail in response to a report of possible drops of blood leading from the parking lot, down a sidewalk and a flight of stairs to the door of an apartment. When phenolphthalein was applied, the suspicious red drops did test positive for blood. Excitement over that find faded quickly when the innocent explanation was discovered—a man living in that unit had cut his hand and run inside to clean it up and bandage it.

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  IN Texas, John Schneider had run down the partial license plate for the vehicle seen dumping the muriatic acid at the end of Skinner Lane and had received two possible matches. One was for a much older truck registered to an address down in McAllen, more than three hundred miles away. The other was co-owned by Shelton Berry and Kandice Rowland, with an address on Skinner Lane.

  Having heard about the body parts found on the creek beside Skinner Lane on the news and recognizing the address in the story as the same one listed on the registration of the truck in question, John went online to do a little digging. He found the booking photo for Amanda Hayes and compared it to the pictures he’d retrieved from the deer camera. “The hair, the tank top, everything matched,” John said. He contacted Fort Bend County Detective Brad Wichard and turned copies over to him for use in the homicide investigation. Pursuit of the dumping offense went on hold awaiting the outcome of the murder trial.

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  DETECTIVE Robert Latour returned to the Galveston County Medical Examiner’s Office that day to observe the autopsy on the newly discovered head. Its condition was deeply disturbing. The skin from the face had slid down, collecting near the jaw, exposing huge portions of the facial bones.

  After the procedure was complete, Latour waited for the arrival of Forensic Odontologist Paul Stimson. Latour provided a copy of Laura’s dental records to the doctor and remained there until he had the results.

  Stimson took x-rays of the skull with all the teeth in place. Then he examined it thoroughly, using Laura’s dental records and film. He compared the actual bone structure of the mouth, the alignment of the teeth and the pulp chambers. He applied iodine dye to make all the non-metallic fillings stand out readily. He prepared a report itemizing all of the similarities and explaining any dissimilarity caused by additional dental work or pre- or postmortem injury. In the end, he concluded, the skull did belong to Laura Ackerson. The stage was set to find justice for the mother of Grant Hayes’s two little boys.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  BEFORE Grant Hayes’s arrest, it seemed the only people who talked about his talent as a musician sang his praises. Now, the tide had turned. Writing for the Houston Press, Craig Malison said that serial killer Charles Manson had more musical talent. “Haze’s songs range from mediocre, inoffensive Starbucks fare to the kind of music occupying forces blare through tank-mounted PA systems to wear down ruthless dictators in order to get them to leave their surrounded palaces.”

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  SHA Elmer didn’t know what to think about the avalanching events when she went to her mother’s apartment after Amanda’s and Grant’s arrests. She picked up all of the children’s belongings so as to deliver them to the elder Hayeses’ home, where little Grant, Gentle and Lily were now staying. It was during that visit to the apartment that she first noticed the condition of the hallway bathroom.

  It was the only bath except for the en suite connected to the master bedroom. It was used by guests, and since it was the closest to the children’s room, it was also where they’d brushed their teeth and had their baths. Now, it was empty of everything but bare fixtures—no potty chairs, no bath toys. The shower curtains, liner and rod were gone, too. The toilet seat cover and the floor mats weren’t there either. Sha assumed the police had taken them and wondered why.

  She went through the stack of papers on the kitchen counter with no particular purpose in mind. When she found the manual for the reciprocating saw, she was aghast. She’d heard the news from Texas and now she suspected she knew the tool that had been used. She took the manual to the Raleigh police.

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  ON Wednesday, July 27, Detective Robert Latour picked up videos from the U-Haul and the Home Depot in Katy, talked with Dalton Berry and then drove to Skinner Lane to help Karen Berry hang “No Trespassing” signs around the property in an attempt to keep the media from trampling all over the place.

  The next day, Latour contacted Shelton Berry and asked for another meeting. Shelton, however, was away on a hunting trip, so he conducted that interview by phone.

  Detective Previtali and Detective Melissa Goodwin flew into Texas to help bring evidence back to North Carolina. On Friday, July 29, Latour visited Home Depot again, this time to try to get photographic identification from the employees there. He also purchased some dry ice to safely move the bone and tissue samples to North Carolina.

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  BACK in Raleigh, Detectives Michael Galloway and Brian Hall went to Raleigh Solid Waste Services Department on Corporation Parkway. In a cordoned-off, sheltered area, Galloway photographed the garbage that had been dumped from the apartment complex where Grant and Amanda lived. After getting big-picture shots, he stood by, photographing individual items that law enforcement pulled ou
t for further investigation.

  Hall dug into the mess and sorted through bag by bag, piece by piece. He saw the yellow-and-black vacuum that had belonged to Grant and Amanda as well as the black shower curtain with white liner from the hall bath. He also recovered a scrub brush found near the vacuum, the bath mats, a toilet brush, an empty gallon-and-a-half bleach container, several towels, gloves, a respirator, clothing, shoes and lots of packaging including some for a prepaid cell phone. He and Galloway collected and delivered those materials, and more, to CCI for latent print processing.

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  VERY early on Saturday July 30, Detective Robert Latour and Dexter Gill hitched the U-Haul trailer to the back of their police car. Previtali and Goodwin climbed into a rented truck packed with other pieces of evidence. The four detectives set off in their mini-caravan for the long journey back to North Carolina at five forty-five A.M. They finally reached their destination on July 31 at one forty-five in the morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ON Tuesday, August 2, 2011, Senior Agent Shannon Quick returned to Grant and Amanda Hayes’s apartment. She took additional photographs and cut out the bleached section of carpeting in the foyer and hall.

  In the bathroom, she removed the quarter round at the base of the molding on the floor, and applied luminol to check for blood again. She got a positive purple area and used cotton-swabbed samples to test again with phenolphthalein, but got a negative result. She also found the telltale color on a small spot in the linen closet that was too small to risk further testing. She took a sample of the stain and packaged the swab to take to the lab.

  She collected the shower head, the sink and bath faucets and the caulk behind them, as well as the plugs, drains and overflows with hair and debris caught inside them. To get the P trap, she went to the apartment in the floor below, cut a hole through the ceiling and collected it along with four vials of water from it.

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  THREE days later, a grand jury delivered indictments against both Grant and Amanda Hayes for the first degree murder of Laura Jean Ackerson.

  Outside of the courtroom, Detective Robert Latour consulted with an anthropologist in Texas who had examined Laura’s teeth for possible acid damage. That professional believed that acid had at some time eroded the enamel. The medical examiner had already requested Forensic Odontologist Stimson to examine the tooth in question and offer his opinion to confirm or discredit that possibility. Stimson was in the area on Tuesday, August 9, and paid them a visit.

  “This is one of the teeth in question that I want you to look at,” the medical examiner said, handing Stimson the maxillary left incisor and a small 100X magnifying glass. Stimson stepped over to the window for better light. He noticed that the natural protective barrier produced by saliva on teeth—the slime layer—was missing, and discovered an area of slight erosion. Although there was no way to identify the precise substance in question, the damage could have been caused by muriatic acid.

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  ON Thursday, August 11, the Gulf Coast Water Authority in Texas was performing routine cleaning of the water gates under bridges to keep the water flowing. At the gate located three-tenths of a mile from the Berry property, they found what looked like part of a human body in the midst of fallen brush and trash. The Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office arrived on the scene and verified that it was a portion of a leg, and secured it. Another piece of Laura’s remains joined the rest.

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  WITH all the necessary steps taken, Detective Latour called Laura’s brother Jason and her father, Rodger Ackerson, about bringing her body back to North Carolina. Once all the arrangements were made, Fort Bend County Detective Brad Wichard went to the medical examiner’s office and observed as the body parts were placed in a Ziegler case and the top screwed down. He followed behind the official vehicle that carried the metal transport casket to the airport in Houston. Wichard watched the remains of Laura Ackerson being loaded onto a Continental jet for the return trip home to North Carolina.

  Latour went to the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, where he was escorted down to the tarmac. From that post, he watched the jet land and taxi. He took custody of Laura’s body at 4:56 P.M., when he signed the paperwork with Continental Airlines. Assisted by a company employee, he checked to make sure that the evidence seals were still intact and that no one had tampered with the Ziegler case. He kept a close eye as the wooden box holding the casket was transferred from the plane to a Brown-Wynne Funeral Home van. He made certain that the vehicle remained in his sight all the way to the medical examiner’s office in Chapel Hill. There he found a note written sideways across lined paper: “Please place remains of Ackerson in this cooler. Lock when done.”

  Laura Ackerson was back in the area where she’d lived, loved and died.

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  THE next morning, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Deborah Radisch slid out the metal shipping box containing Laura Ackerson’s remains. Inside she found another box sealed with evidence tape. Opening that, she saw a black body bag, which held several white bags of body parts.

  The remaining tissue on the bones was decomposed—soft, gray and discolored. First, she and her staff x-rayed all of the material. Then she examined each piece she had received, noting: “Two pieces of torso show relatively shallow cuts, many of them with a rectangular shape and indented sides. . . . Postmortem radiographs . . . of bones with soft tissue show no foreign materials. However, cartilage is detected in a mass of moderately to severely decomposed soft tissue and muscle and gentle removal of this following thawing of the tissue yields the hyoid bone and the crushed, partially ossified thyroid cartilage.” (That ossification was considered a natural part of the aging process.)

  She added that strangulation could have possibly caused the damage to Laura’s throat tissues, but “decomposition makes determination of what happened more difficult than making the determination on the dismemberment.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE week after Thanksgiving 2011, Jim Freeman, Grant Hayes’s court-appointed attorney, presented the court with a motion and a letter handwritten by his client. In it, Grant asked Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens to appoint him a new public defender. Freeman told the court that there was “good cause” for this action but, ethically, he could not reveal anything more. He was replaced by Mike Klinkosum.

  The state requested handwriting exemplars from both Grant and Amanda Hayes. In North Carolina, they could not be legally compelled to do so; nonetheless, both separately agreed to comply.

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  SHORTLY after her mother’s arrest, Sha Elmer went to Farmville, New Mexico, to live with her father. It was a rough, chaotic time for her. Her whole world had disintegrated almost overnight. After a few months, she got her thoughts and emotions under enough control that she recognized an obligation and responsibility to her half sister, Lily, and returned to North Carolina.

  Thinking that it would help her to get custody of Lily, Sha jumped into a marriage with Matt Guddat on April 20, 2012. In many ways, Sha was cut adrift by her mother’s arrest. She had spent her life looking up to her mother. She had seen Amanda as “an invincible war goddess who made something of her life despite lousy beginnings.” Sha had wanted to be just like her. Now, when she tried to get custody of her half sister, Grant Hayes wrote to family services and told them that Sha was crazy and addicted to drugs. To make matters worse, Sha’s connection to the crime made getting employment difficult—she was damaged goods by association. When she went to the grocery store, she was hounded by people who told her that she should be ashamed. Before long, she gave up, leaving her inappropriate marriage and returning to her father’s home.

  Sha wasn’t the only one harassed in the aftermath of Grant and Amanda’s brutal crime. Grant’s mother, Patsy, had run a day care for many years, but after her son’s arrest, two-thirds of the children stopped coming. In a short time, the endeavor was no l
onger viable. She lost her business and was now the caregiver for her three grandchildren, a challenging responsibility under the chaotic circumstances.

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  ON July 3, 2012, thirteen lounge chairs were donated by one of Laura’s friends to the Fairfield Sprayground in Kinston in memory of Laura and in honor of little Grant and Gentle. It is a spot where Laura brought little Grant and Gentle quite often, and Grant’s parents continue to make regular trips there with the children to play.

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  DR. Deborah Radisch, the chief medical examiner for the state of North Carolina, released the final autopsy report on September 6, 2012. Although it was clear that Laura had a sharp-instrument injury to her neck as well as other damage that suggested strangulation, exactly how Laura died was uncertain. “The cause of death is best described as undetermined, homicidal violence.”

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  GRANT Hayes requested a new attorney again in November 2012. He claimed that Mike Klinkosum, his attorney at the time, had not done what he had asked. Klinkosum reported that he had an ethical conflict. Grant told the judge that he wanted a black attorney from Durham. Judge Stephens granted his wish for new counsel, but told him it was the last time he would do so. He appointed Jeff Cutler, a white attorney from Raleigh, to the case.

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  ON March 1, 2013, Grant and Amanda Hayes sat at the same table with their separate attorneys for an appearance before Judge Donald Stephens. Both of them appeared paler from their time in lockup, but aside from that the differences were striking. Grant seemed to have put on some weight, his demeanor was relaxed and at times he looked indifferent to the proceedings. Amanda, on the other hand, appeared gaunt and maintained a tense, rigid posture throughout. The state requested that the two defendants be tried together, citing efficiency and cost savings for the taxpayers.