Crocker was followed by Timothy Suggs, a forensic chemist with the North Carolina State Board of Investigations, who had tested soil samples from the hog pen in Texas. He determined that some of the samples he received were strongly acidic and tested positive for the presence of chloride—a key component of muriatic acid. While he explained the scientific evidence, Grant was busy writing, not seeming to be paying much attention to the witness at all.
Detective Thomas Ouellette was up next and told the court that he had been part of the search team at the senior Hayeses’ home on the evening of July 25, 2011. On cross, defense attorney Jeff Cutler asked about the handwritten document found in a spiral notebook that awarded custody of the three children to Grant’s parents. Ouellette said that he photographed that note in place but didn’t seize it. The detective who did was Zeke Morse, the next person on the stand.
Detective Morse had also confiscated the family computer and two blue coolers, and he told the jury that he was the one who had collected as evidence the copy of the psychological review for child custody found in the Durango. He’d also reviewed Facebook accounts, and he read aloud many of the messages to and from Grant into the trial record.
The jurors got a break from the long run of official witnesses with the arrival of Mark Herbert, a sanitation truck driver whose responsibilities included picking up, emptying and returning the Dumpsters from Amanda and Grant’s apartment complex and delivering them to the East Wake Transfer Station. He described how he emptied the contents next to an eight-foot-wide open pit, where the trash was pushed directly into a tractor trailer parked below and delivered to its final resting place at the South Wake Landfill. The defense had no questions for this witness.
Then it was back to law enforcement, as Sergeant Brian Hall, who’d obtained and served the arrest warrants on Grant and Amanda Hayes, submitted a large number of exhibits.
Raleigh/Wake City-County Bureau of Identification Senior Agent Shannon Quick was the final witness for the day. She’d become involved in the investigation with the discovery of Laura’s car. She processed that and also was a participant in two different searches of Grant and Amanda’s apartment. She presented a myriad of evidence, including the bedding from the bedroom closet and the chunks of bleached-out carpet she had cut from the floor. She wrapped up her testimony the following morning.
Agent Jennifer Remy, a hair-and-fiber analyst from the North Carolina State Crime Laboratory, took her place on the witness stand on September 10, 2013. She had identified all hairs submitted into evidence as either animal or human. Then she determined whether or not they had a portion of root or a skin tag that would be suitable for nuclear DNA analysis.
Two additional technical witnesses testified next. First, SBI body-fluid analyst Agent McKenzie Dehaan discussed the samples she’d tested for the presumption of blood and the positives she’d sent for further analysis. Then Sharon Hinton, a forensic DNA analyst for the North Carolina State Crime Lab, talked about the results of her testing. Hinton told the jurors that the genetic evidence on the blue latex gloves found in the trash was predominantly from Laura Ackerson. Although she found DNA from other contributors present, the samples were too small to determine whose it was.
Computer forensic analyst Courtney Last of the Raleigh Police Department then took the stand to testify about the contents of a number of computers, including Karen Berry’s computer, which Grant had used to access his e-mail while he was in Texas. She read several e-mail exchanges over the last year of Laura’s life, including those with friends, as well as messages between Laura and both Amanda and Grant. Last said that Grant stored all the e-mails from Laura in one of two folders, one labeled “Ljhaze,” the other “letters from a ho.”
When it was the defense’s turn to ask questions, they requested Last read other e-mails into the record that they felt either reflected badly on Laura Ackerson or positively on Grant. On re-direct, the state had even more e-mails read into the record.
Barbara Patty, Laura’s church friend and mentor, took the stand next. The white-haired older woman told the jury that Laura had attended Grace Fellowship Church and had participated in house church, a small group of fifteen to twenty-five people who met for Bible study, praise and worship, prayer and fellowship. Beginning in the late summer of 2010, Laura also came to her home on Monday nights, when the two women had dinner and a one-on-one Bible study session.
Barbara told the jury that in July of 2011, Laura was thankful to finally have the psychological report and was planning on attending Lenoir Community College to continue her education with a goal of teaching high school science. This surprised some others who had never known that Laura’s interests went in that direction. Laura was very focused on the upcoming hearing in August in which Barbara had agreed to testify on her behalf.
Attorney John Sargeant, Laura’s child custody lawyer, was the final witness on the eighth day of Grant’s trial. He went through his history with Laura and the court proceedings from the time he became involved on June 17, 2010. He refuted the defense allegation that Laura and Amanda were the two at odds. To the contrary, Sargeant told the jurors that Laura was grateful that Amanda was there watching over her boys when they were with Grant. He finished his testimony the following morning by saying that there were no requests by either party for child support—both Grant and Laura were focused only on the custody issue itself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE first new witness on September 11, the ninth day of Grant Hayes’s trial, was Dr. Ginger Calloway, the psychologist tasked with conducting the evaluation of the parties in the custody case. With her curly hair, prominent nose and wire-rim glasses, she looked ready to be typecast as an academic. The state presented her with state’s exhibit 406, the copy of her evaluation report that had been found wedged beside a seat in Grant’s vehicle.
She pointed to the place in the document where she’d written that Grant alleged Laura Ackerson was chatting online with other guys while he was out of town working. Next to that line was a handwritten notation, presumably made by Grant, that read: “Not alleged. I have proof.”
She directed attention to another spot where the report mentioned Grant, Amanda and Sha Elmer’s first meeting with Dr. Kristen Winns. Someone had circled Sha’s name and written “never” beside it.
At the instructions of the prosecutor, Dr. Calloway went through the steps of the process involved in doing an evaluation for the court in a custody case. In between reading passages from her report to the court, she followed the trail of questions, explaining her process and what she had learned. In addition to Laura and Grant, she said, “I spoke to Heidi [Schumacher], Amanda [Hayes], and Gentle’s surgeon.”
She said that the surgeon, Dr. Timothy Bukowski, felt that Laura was insecure and unsure with him. She added, “Laura is handicapped by her extreme anxiety and underdevelopment. . . . She also obviously has no family supports evidenced by the fact that no family members came to her assistance when she and Grant separated and terminated their union. She may have been intimidated by Grant and systematically isolated from others by some of his actions. . . . Although Grant portrayed her as a flight risk in the ex parte motion for temporary custody, she had many opportunities to flee and did not.”
“Dr. Bukowski noted that Grant seems to need to exalt himself by repeatedly mentioning the famous musicians for which he played,” Calloway said.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Jeff Cutler asked about Laura chatting online with other men while Grant was out of town working. Calloway said, “She and her attorney admit to poor judgment when she engaged in online sex talk with men she did not know—consistent with her immaturity and ineptness. There is no evidence that I am aware of that she actually met any of these men. What is most important for the purposes of this evaluation is that she did not expose the children to these men in any way.”
She also told the jury that Laura admitted to going onli
ne and posting pictures of herself and telling Grant about it. “I do not believe it involved the children in any way.”
When Cutler asked about Laura’s substance abuse, Calloway said, “Both Grant and Laura reported a period of alcohol and drug use.”
Then Cutler asked about her interview with Heidi Schumacher and the bias Laura’s friend displayed. Calloway said, “Heidi is unequivocal in her dislike for Grant.”
The prosecutor, on re-direct, asked about her recommendation for drug testing. Calloway answered, “My concern about drug use centered on Mr. Hayes.”
When asked about Laura’s need for a coach, the doctor said Laura needed one to “help her with job choice and supervisors that don’t repeat the patterns of abuse, control and domination she’d grown accustomed to.”
The state wanted to know about the depth of her investigation into the households of both parents in assessing their ability to care for the children. “I don’t look at anyone’s bank records,” she said, “but I do look in refrigerators to make sure that there is adequate food for the children.”
In contradiction to the impression the defense tried to make, Calloway said that in interviews she conducted, “No one spoke to me about Amanda and Grant moving to Kinston.”
—
FBI forensic document examiner Lindsey Dyn had examined the note in which Laura gave up custody of her boys in exchange for twenty-five thousand dollars. She determined that the top part was in Grant’s handwriting and the bottom part was in Laura’s handwriting. However, she could not determine who had written Laura’s signature. The defense tried to press her on the latter point, but she insisted that she could reach no conclusion about that signature.
—
FORENSIC anthropologist Dr. Ann Ross, from North Carolina State, first explained to the jury that people in her profession are called in to examine remains when they are badly decomposed or skeletonized. In this case, she was asked to determine what tool was used to inflict injuries on and dismember the body.
She received sections of bone and the skull for her analysis. On one end, the cuts she observed were smooth—consistent with those made by a Stryker saw, the tool used at autopsy to cut the bone portions for examination. However, there were striations in the cuts on the other end. She analyzed the cuts to determine the number of saw teeth per inch and to look for false starts and effort level.
Using pig leg bones as a proxy, she eliminated a long list of saws as the possible implement used. She concluded that the saw marks on Laura’s remains were consistent with and matched those made by a Skil reciprocating saw using a Skil wood/fast saw blade operated at speed five.
Dr. Ross also reported on a knife stab wound to the throat that was deeper, but not as long, as the cuts made to separate the limbs and torso. She determined that it could not be an antemortem wound (one inflicted sufficiently prior to death to allow for some healing); however, she could not state whether it was a perimortem injury (one occurring within a window around the time of death) or a postmortem stab, inflicted after Laura had already died.
On cross-examination, Ross said that there was no visible trauma on the skull itself, prompting the defense to ask, “Did you see anything that would suggest that acid was applied to the bones?”
“No, I did not.”
“Or to the teeth?”
“No, but I do believe there were some teeth missing, however.”
The defense tried to put the knife wound in the context of the severing of the body parts, but Ross insisted that the knife wound to the throat was not consistent with a dismemberment injury because it came from a thrust but had required less force to penetrate the surface of the spongier cervical vertebrae than was needed for a more dense leg bone.
—
THE final person on the stand for the day was Pablo Trinidad, a federal prisoner serving twenty-one years for conspiracy to traffic cocaine and possession of a firearm. In August of 2011, he was incarcerated in a processing unit in the Wake County Detention Center awaiting his transfer to the penitentiary. He told the jury that the areas of cells in that facility were labeled by floor number and a color. Pablo and Grant Hayes were housed together on the fifth floor in “five yellow pod” for about a week and a half. The two men had several conversations together during that time.
One morning at breakfast time, about ten men were in the dayroom watching the news. A story about Grant came up and one of the men pointed him out to Pablo. A few others made verbal comments about doing Grant harm, causing Grant to leave the room and go back to his cell. Pablo reminded the others that if they did anything, everyone would be put on lockdown.
Later that day, Grant approached Pablo and said he appreciated Pablo for standing up for him. Pablo shrugged it off, saying it was in his own best interests. Grant asked him where he was from and Pablo said, “Eastern North Carolina, near Greenville.”
“‘I went down to Greenville a lot to play music and have friends at ECU [Eastern Carolina University]. My mother lives near there—twenty miles away—in Kinston,’” Pablo said Grant told him. Grant went on to ask if he could relay a message through Pablo’s girlfriend to Patsy Hayes, asking his mother to set up a Pay-Tel phone account for him and to put some money in the commissary.
In another conversation, Pablo reported, “Grant said he wanted to speak to an attorney because it was impossible for him to do the crime because during years of playing a musical instrument, he developed some kind of handicap and could not use force, and it would not have been wise for him to do it either, because her vehicle was parked near his residence. He wanted to explain that to someone who would hear him out so that he could be released ASAP.
“At the time, he didn’t seem to get the seriousness of what he was being charged with. After that, he went to an attorney visit and when he came back, he was very down in spirits and I asked, ‘How did it go?’ Grant said, ‘Well, they’re telling me I’m going to have to be here for a while’ and his defense attorney told him when you have two codefendants in a case, a lot of times codefendants will turn on one another. It was a possibility that his wife would do that and he was upset about that.”
When the state asked what Grant had said to him about the case, Pablo answered, “He told me that Laura was the mother of his children. He said that she was an unfit mother and they’d been in a custody battle for years. She was soliciting herself on the Internet, doing drugs, continuously asking for money. He was tired of going back and forth with that. He placed a call to Laura and lured her to his apartment. He and his wife subdued her and strangled her and after that dismembered the body and took a road trip to a family member’s home. . . . His exact words about what he did with the body were: ‘I just got rid of it.’”
The prosecution was pleased. For the first time in trial they had presented evidence of a scenario of events the night Laura was murdered. “What did he say to you before talking about the case?”
“Grant said that Amanda was a good woman and he wished she was the mother of his kids instead of the victim. Amanda was a better person and a good wife.”
When asked more details about Grant’s physical limitations, Pablo said Grant told him that “it was a handicap with his hand—he could no longer grab anything with force.”
Pablo Trinidad faced cross-examination by the defense attorney the following morning. Jeff Cutler resurrected Pablo’s record, which included an escape from custody in 1996 and recapture in 1997. He reviewed the charges of conspiracy to distribute five kilograms of cocaine or more that had resulted in his current sentence. He also brought out that Pablo faced a mandatory minimum of fifteen years to life and could have gotten as much as one hundred years to life for the charges.
Then Cutler moved to the specifics of Pablo’s testimony, contradicting the time he was in the same pod with Grant, saying it was only five days, and Pablo agreed that was possible. “And you’re telling me that in fiv
e days you developed such a strong bond that he was telling you his deepest, darkest secrets? Is that right?”
“Yes, it’s correct.”
“Because you are both from about the same part of the state?”
“That’s correct.”
“And these are secrets that he didn’t tell anyone else in that pod?”
“I don’t know if he told anybody else. I know he told me.”
“So you’re testifying that you were sitting in the dayroom and Grant Hayes walked in and his case is playing on the TV, isn’t that right?”
“No, when we were let out for breakfast that morning, after breakfast, that’s when we were watching TV and one of the other inmates noticed that he was in the front of the crowd watching television.”
Cutler asked, “At some point, someone explained to you, the way it works with the feds, the way to make your situation better is if you can give evidence to the government on other people, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“And you made an agreement with the feds that you would give up names of people in exchange for getting a better deal, isn’t that right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Grant Hayes . . . was your meal ticket, wasn’t he? One of them, at least?”
“If you want to put it in those words—that’s your words, not mine,” Pablo said.
Cutler continued, “You testified yesterday that he also told you he lured Laura—that was the word wasn’t it—lured Laura to the house?”
“That’s correct.”
“That was a headline,” Cutler noted. “That’s where you stole that word from, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t—no.”
“And the press also reported, didn’t it, after the autopsy came out that strangulation was a possible cause of death, [you] heard that in the news, didn’t you?”
Bitter Remains Page 17
