Bitter Remains

by Diane Fanning

  “During the time that you were around Amanda, did you see her get any preferential treatment from the COs?” Holt asked.

  “Sure. . . . They would talk to her separately. Like, if we were all locked down, she wouldn’t necessarily be locked down. They would visit her at her room and stuff like that. I mean, she had a good rapport with them.”

  “You said she used a certain tone or a certain approach with the COs that she didn’t use with the other prisoners.”

  “Sure. She was would be all smiles and ‘yes’ and—this is going to sound horrible—but sound innocent—can I just say that? Very sweet, very—like the other day, when she was up here and you pushed and pushed and she finally answered you, that’s the Amanda I knew in jail.”

  “And the sweet sounding voice is not the way she dealt with you, was it?”

  “That was not her normal everyday way, no.”

  Defense attorney Johnny Gaskins, on cross, accused Patricia of listening to the news media talking about Grant and Amanda’s case almost every day before she was arrested, and accused Patricia of trying to get her own sentence reduced by turning Amanda in to the authorities.

  “I didn’t use anything of this information to my advantage to cut my time at all,” Patricia replied. “I didn’t gain anything by letting Detective Faulk know any of this. It was never brought up at all. When I got in front of that judge, none of this was ever brought up in front of that judge.”

  “You knew that if you told the police that Amanda had told you that ‘this was an accident, that it was never intended to happen this way,’” Gaskins said, “you couldn’t use that to your advantage.”

  “I didn’t use any of this to my advantage.”

  He continued, “You knew to get any advantage, you had to embellish what you were told, didn’t you.”

  “I didn’t embellish anything. I know I did bad by what I did and I had to serve time, but I didn’t lie. I took what I did and I did my time for it.”

  Gaskins nevertheless tried to make it sound as if Patricia had received special treatment by getting credit for time served, even though that was standard procedure.

  On re-direct, Becky Holt asked if Patricia ever saw “Amanda show any remorse over Laura Ackerson’s death?”

  “I never saw Amanda show any kind of remorse, not any kind of that. I’ve only seen Amanda cry twice when I was there. Once when she got off the phone with [someone] who was—I believe—her mother-in-law, and once when she got into an argument with one of the COs. That was it, she got frustrated.”

  “And when she got off the phone with her mother-in-law, was she frustrated because they had stopped putting money in her account?”

  “I don’t know what the purpose of that conversation was but I know that they had stopped putting money in her account. Her niece [also] stopped putting money on her account. She was frustrated with that. You’ve got to understand, being in jail is very frustrating. So when you’re stuck behind them walls and you can’t get the help you need, it’s very frustrating,” Patricia explained, adding, “I would sometimes get her stuff from canteen because she didn’t have anything.”

  “You indicate to Mr. Gaskins that you didn’t use any of this information to your advantage.”

  She nodded and said, “Not once.”

  “Then why did you think it was important to bring this information out?”

  “Because, morally, I thought it was wrong. I just don’t see how somebody can do that to somebody. If it was an accident and it was caused by that one person you said you were afraid of, you could have gotten help. She wouldn’t have been sitting in there. She would have been with her babies if she had just called 911.”

  “She also told you that if it was an accident she couldn’t be convicted of murder, didn’t she?”

  “Correct.”

  “And she smiled.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  Gaskins covered the same territory. “Every time you talked to her, she told you it was an accident, didn’t she?”

  “She did. She was adamant that it was an accident.”

  “And that no one had ever intended that Laura die.”

  “No, she didn’t say that. She said it was an accident and wasn’t supposed to happen like that. That’s what she said. Whether the intent was there, I don’t know. But that’s what she said.”

  “And when you talked to the police, you went to a potential ten-year sentence to time served.”

  Patricia shook her head. “I didn’t use none of that to my advantage, again.”

  “And you got out of jail?”

  “I got it because I had time served. None of this was brought up in my case,” she said, wagging her finger back and forth. “When they judge me, none of this.”

  “So you didn’t get the old wink and nod.”

  “Did not.”

  Then Becky Holt asked one more question: “Did Amanda tell you that she hated Laura so much that she wanted to throw her from an airplane?”

  “She did say that once, yes.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  THE final witness of the trial stepped into the stand at 3:37 on the afternoon of Friday, February 14, 2014. Grant Hayes’s mother, Patsy Ann Hayes, clearly did not want to be there but realized that she was the only way the jury would hear of the letters Amanda Hayes sent to her to read to her son and she wanted to set the record straight.

  The prosecution played the voice message Grant left for his mother telling her they would be moving in with them on the weekend of July 16. “I know your house may not be ready for me but we have to be out of here right now.”

  Then Patsy Hayes was asked about the properties owned by her and her husband in Kinston. She testified that all the rentals were occupied at the time of Laura’s death and the remaining deeds were for vacant lots.

  She read into the record a letter from Amanda written in September 2011 thanking Patsy for sending photos of the children and chatting about her life in jail in very optimistic terms. She ended by writing: “Thank you both so much for caring for our children. Please tell my husband that I love him very much and think of him every day.” Amanda had also included a note addressed to “Chicken man and Lil Monkey,” the nicknames for little Grant and Gentle, sending them “big hugs and fishy kisses” and exhorting them to be good for their grandparents. She signed it, “Love, Daddy and Mama.”

  In the January 2012 letter, Patsy read more appreciative comments addressed to her and her husband and then Amanda gave her information on her clothing sizes and measurements and asked for a pants suit in white or off-white and “a baby pink shirt, something I can take the jacket off if I want.”

  She also sent another piece of paper. On the side margin, she had written: “To Grant, please read it to him.” It began, “Hello, my baby. I love you so very much and I hope you’re doing good. Please take good care of yourself. I miss everything about you and can’t wait to give you a big hug and kiss.” It ended with: “I love you with all my heart, your wife.”

  In the letter from February 2012, Patsy read, “I just wanted to send this note so you could read it to Grant.” She followed that with a request for more photographs. In the portion to her imprisoned husband, Amanda wrote that she wanted to set up a time that they could meditate simultaneously. She advised him to “get a pair of ear plugs if it’s too noisy.” She wrapped up with a message of love. “Please take good care of yourself and know that I love you and miss you.”

  Then, for the first time in the trial, defense attorney Johnny Gaskins did not conduct the cross-examination. Instead, his cocounsel, Rosemary Godwin, asked the questions. “When Amanda was writing to you and talking to you on the phone, she never talked to you about any difficulties she was having with Grant, did she?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “It was only after hearing that when Amanda testified in court
about being fearful of Grant, and that, he, in fact, threatened her in a letter while she was in jail that it prompted you to contact the district attorney’s office?”

  “My husband called.”

  Godwin asked if she’d been aware before of any problems between her son and Amanda, and Patsy replied, “No, she always said that she loved him and to tell him she missed him. She always spoke well of Grant.”

  “And you love your son very much, I’m sure.”

  “I love my son and I love Amanda very much.”

  “And you have stood by Grant throughout these difficult times?”

  “I send him pictures just like I do Amanda.”

  Godwin established that Patsy had not testified at her son’s trial or even come to her son’s trial, then she asked, “Would it be fair to say, Mrs. Hayes, that when Grant was a teenager and in his younger years, Grant exhibited behavior that caused you and his father to have some concerns about the stability of his emotions or mental state?”

  “Grant was a sweet child,” Patsy said. “He was very docile and he was charming.”

  “Do you recall a time in the home when there was an altercation between Grant and Grantina? And Grantina became so concerned that your husband took Grant and left for a little while so that everyone could calm down?”

  “I think I do recall some of that.”

  “And when he was involved with his first wife, Emily Lubbers, they, I believe, lived in Greenville . . . And she was in school and also working while she was in school. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes, I do remember her working and going to school some.”

  “And do you remember that at that time Grant was having difficulty finding work that suited him? . . . And were you aware, that at one time, he did seek psychiatric treatment for depression and mood swings?”

  “He was—I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t think I recall that because, like I say, I try to stay out of their affairs.”

  When neither side had any more questions, Patsy turned to the judge. “Can I say something before I leave?”

  “I don’t know because I don’t know what you’re going to say,” Judge Stephens replied.

  “I want to go back to that last question.”

  “No, no. I don’t want you saying anything in front of the jury, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “If you need to tell somebody, you can tell them later.”

  With that, the parts of the trial remaining were closing arguments, jury instruction and deliberations. Now, however, it was late on a Friday afternoon. The judge excused the jurors for the weekend. When they returned on Monday, the fiery rhetoric would keep them on their toes.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  AMANDA Hayes’s lawyer Johnny Gaskins began his closing remarks on Monday, February 17, 2014, by discussing the presumption of innocence and reasonable doubt. He claimed that there was no proof that Amanda was complicit in the crime committed by the convicted Grant Hayes and that the only decision the jury had to make was whether or not Amanda was guilty of being an accessory after the fact.

  “I told you that this was a case of a sociopath and his two victims,” Gaskins continued. “Grant Hayes is a classic example of a sociopath. One the one hand, he is a talented musician; he’s witty, charming, charismatic. But on the other hand, he’s controlling, manipulative and domineering and, worst of all, he’s dangerous. I’ll talk more about Grant Hayes, but first I want to talk to you about his two victims.

  “First, I want to talk to you about Laura. We know that Laura had become involved with Grant and had become enamored, involved in a romantic relationship with him and the two of them had two children: little Grant and Gentle. Laura had some problems early in her life that led her to believe that it was in the best interest of the boys that they stay with him during the week and they stay with her on the weekends. But her life improved; and it improved once she became separate and apart from Grant. She got a job working, very much involved with the church—things for Laura were looking very good.” He said that was why she challenged the custody agreement that turned into a bitter fight between the two of them and in which Amanda was not involved.

  Turning to his client, he said “Amanda was a woman who had spent her entire life looking out for and caring for other people,” and listed how she’d “looked out for her mother when her mother was sick,” how she’d cared for her paralyzed husband, Nicky Smith, until his death, how she looked after her daughter, Sha, and her family. “When she became involved with Grant, she was the person who looked after little Grant and Gentle [while] Grant was off traveling around the world, doing either—doing musical gigs or pretending to do musical gigs—we don’t know which.”

  He turned to the testimony of Heidi Schumacher, who described Grant as the personification of evil. “She told you that Laura had told her that ‘if anything ever happens to me—if it’s thought that I had committed suicide or that I had disappeared—go look for Grant because Grant is the one who did it.’”

  Then the defense attorney revisited some of the remarks from Laura’s parental history about Grant, and about the anonymous Crime Stoppers tip. He moved on to the video of Grant’s calm demeanor in Wal-Mart shopping for the reciprocating saw just hours after Laura’s death. Then Gaskins brought up the many places Grant had visited as a musician and leaped to an incredible conclusion: “How many women do you think simply disappeared in those cities where Grant Hayes was there either doing gigs or pretending to do gigs? Did his demeanor walking down the aisles remind you of a man who’d made this same shopping trip before? I suggest to you that he knew exactly what he wanted, and he knew exactly what he wanted because he’d done it before.”

  He talked about Grant and Amanda meeting in St. John as a predator/prey relationship. He said that when they met, “Amanda had $188,000 in an investment account. By the end of July 2011, Grant Hayes had gotten all of that money. He had sold all of her jewelry. They were being evicted from her apartment. Grant Hayes had taken her for everything that she was worth.”

  He went on to read some of the testimony from John Sargeant, Laura’s custody attorney, that pointed to Laura’s lack of animosity toward Amanda.

  He went through the events of July 13, 2011, tossing in a few assumptions not previously mentioned in court, such as the groundless theory that Laura stopped at Crabtree Valley Mall before coming to the apartment that night. Then he ran down the phone calls Grant made that evening after Laura’s call and then segued into Amanda’s version of events. During that portion, he insisted that Grant was using his answering service to cloak the identity of a person whom the defense alleged he communicated with that night and later met at the Black Flower. However, no evidence had been produced during the trial to confirm the existence of the alleged accomplice or to prove the defense team’s shadowy theory.

  The hall bathroom was the next focus of Gaskins’s attention. He claimed that the lack of blood in the room and the absence of saw nicks on the floor proved that Laura was not killed or cut up there. “The point that I’m making is that Grant Hayes and Grant Hayes alone killed Laura. Amanda didn’t help him. She’s looking after two little boys and her baby. But when you track Grant and you recognize the pattern of his purchases, you can tell exactly what he’s done and how he did it.”

  He spoke next of the large rug under the dining room table that went missing, the one Amanda said the boys had made too dirty to salvage. “I suggest to you that the way that Grant has gotten her body out of the bathroom . . . is by using the rug to go down the stairwell. . . . Right next to the apartment door . . . the stairs go down one level; they turn and go down another level, directly to the parking lot. Grant Hayes, either by himself or through the help of a friend, could have taken her body out of that apartment in probably less than sixty seconds by rolling her up in that rug.”

  Grant’s habit of using credit cards for innocuous purc
hases like gas and using cash to pay for suspicious purchases like the reciprocating saw, Gaskins said, proved that the Apple power adapter cord purchase was made for nefarious reasons associated with the death of Laura Ackerson. “Here is what I suggest to you has happened: He’s sent Amanda out—she’s gone to the Chick-fil-A. By the time she gets back, Grant Hayes has strangled Laura with the Apple adapter cord and disposed of [the cord] someplace, probably Kinston, which is why they can’t find it. . . . There is absolutely no evidence that Amanda participated in his strangulation of Laura—the evidence is to the contrary.”

  Gaskins reminded the jurors that the dirty shirts, dirty underwear and goggles found in the Dumpster trash had no blood on them, and through a convoluted stretch of logic, he claimed that somehow proved that Amanda was not involved in the dismemberment. He then talked about the injury toward the back of Laura’s neck and described it in a way no forensic pathologist ever would: “The reason for the knife wound is that he has cut Laura’s throat and drained the blood from her body” before the dismemberment.

  He disparaged the state’s case over the credibility of Patricia Barakat as a rebuttal witness and attacked the testimony of Patsy Hayes. He explained that the only reason Amanda sent love letters to Grant via Patsy Hayes was so that she could maintain a conduit for information about her daughter Lily. He then voiced the defense’s paranoia about the motivations of Grant’s mother. “She came here to deliver the message: ‘Amanda, you’re right—you will never see Lily again. I have Lily. You have badmouthed Grant. Don’t think for a second that you or anyone in your family will ever see her again.’”

  Gaskins wrapped up by saying, “The state has absolutely failed to prove to you . . . beyond reasonable doubt or any other doubt in the world that Amanda participated in killing Laura—that just didn’t happen. . . . That isn’t even on the table. The only issue for you is whether she participated willingly in the disposal of Laura’s body. . . . The state is looking for a . . . compromise verdict. They know you’re not going to find her guilty of first degree murder. They know that that was never on the table. But by charging her with the more serious offense, what they’re hoping is that you will compromise and give them something.