Larry heard a resounding no from everyone, he told Lutz. Nobody had seen Doug for quite some time.
Larry also worked construction. He and Doug would sometimes hang out together. After not hearing from Doug for several days, Larry started paging him. But Doug failed to respond to any of Larry’s pages, which was also very much unlike Doug’s usual behavior.
Larry’s said his job had called on that Saturday morning before he phoned the MCSD to let him know he didn’t need to come into work. So he and his girlfriend decided to take a walk over to Doug’s and have a look around. By now, Larry was growing increasingly concerned about his neighbor and friend.
“Let’s look in the windows to see what’s going on,” Larry told his girlfriend.
As soon as they got across the street and Larry noticed many of Doug’s birds dead inside their cages, he decided to call the sheriff. There was no way, Larry felt, Doug would ever allow his birds—an investment—to starve, wither and die. Moreover, Doug being the type of person he was, there wasn’t a chance that had one of the birds died, he would have left the thing to rot in its cage.
Several birds, Lutz noticed, were still alive, but they looked “poorly from lack of food and water.” This told Lutz nobody had been over to the house in quite some time.
The entire situation had a strange feel to it.
Lutz made arrangements with Larry Bridges to care for the birds that remained alive—until, that is, Doug could be located. Lutz didn’t share it with Larry Bridges, but he was going to make a call and get someone out here to do a wellness check on the inside of the house. The MCSD certainly had probable cause to force their way in.
2.
When sheriff Tom Lutz returned to the MCSD, he called the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD). If Doug’s girlfriend were a fellow sheriff, she’d want to help. Maybe she knew where Doug had run off to. If not, she was likely going to be more than willing to give Lutz a list of names he could call to begin trying to hunt Doug Benton down.
“Was looking for Tracy Fortson, a deputy,” Lutz said to a deputy who answered the phone.
“She no longer works here,” the deputy said.
“Oh?”
It was a long story, the deputy mentioned. “But I can reach out to her and let her know you’re looking for her.”
It was clear that the deputy had some sort of personal connection with Tracy. Maybe she’d gotten herself a promotion and moved on?
“Appreciate that, deputy.”
Lutz hung up and figured Doug was probably with his girlfriend and they had taken off somewhere. The guy lived by himself for the most part, according to the neighbors Lutz had spoken to while walking around the vicinity of Doug’s house. Doug had kids and they spent time with him once in a while, but he lived alone. He didn’t need to answer to anyone and could come and go as he pleased.
Still, as Lutz thought about it, there was a missing piece of the puzzle. The entire scenario did not feel right. Those dead birds spoke to the situation. Their deaths meant something.
3.
Twice divorced, Tracy Fortson was a pretty woman, however rough and rugged she might have come across. As some would later say, “Either you liked Tracy and understood her, or you didn’t.” There was no gray area with Tracy. She told you how it was in her own manner of speaking. You accepted her personality and put up with it, or you stayed the hell away. On those terms alone, one could say, Tracy and Doug were the perfect match.
At 36, with dark brown, curly and shoulder-length hair, bangs cut like ribbon across her forehead and around her ears, Tracy was not your typical girly-girl who did her nails on Saturday mornings and baked cookies on Sundays. She was 5 feet 6 inches tall and a solid and healthy 150 pounds. No slouch at the gym, Tracy and Doug dead-lifted heavy weight, a sport they shared an equal adoration for. She hunted. Fished. A crack shot with a pistol, Tracy once dreamed of becoming a game warden, but gave up on the dream to pursue a career in law enforcement. Although Tracy had been jaded by a major incident that had recently happened to her within the sheriff’s department, she adored what the job had offered and had personally given her.
“That ‘good ole boy system’ that has always been associated with Southern Justice is alive and well,” Tracy told me, bitter and cynical about her dealings with the OCSD during her final days behind the badge. “The police don’t always make arrests based on probable cause or evidence.”
Doug and Tracy met in September 1997. Not in the least bit attracted to him on that day, if you ask Tracy, Doug was not the type of man she ever envisioned herself being with—at least not then.
“Although he was nice looking, he just didn’t seem like the type of guy I would be interested in.”
Doug wore an earring and tight-fitting, Spandex workout pants “that guys shouldn’t wear!” Tracy commented, a bit of haughty amusement in her tone. Doug had an attitude back then, Tracy recalled. He came across as having this “I-know-I’m-good-looking” swagger and it turned her off. Tracy was thinking of getting into the sheriff’s department at the time, while earning a living behind the counter of Ultimate Tan in Athens. Doug worked out next door at Gold’s Gym.
“It was common for some of the guys that worked out at the gym to come in to tan,” Tracy said. “Doug happened to be one of them—although, I had never seen him in the salon until this particular day. I had only caught brief glimpses of him cruising by in his blue Corvette convertible.”
Checking him out on that day, Tracy figured Doug was a “power lifter,” as opposed to a body-builder. He didn’t have the “cut” look: gaunt facial, starving-himself-to-make-a-weight-class stare and withdrawn eyes the guys who train for competitions generally display. Doug’s thick mane of black hair was styled in a mullet, the look of the day, and he sported somewhat of a “beer belly,” Tracy recalled.
“Hey,” Doug said to Tracy after walking into the tanning salon. She stood behind the counter checking him in. Doug had an appointment for that afternoon.
“How are you?” Tracy said, business-like, uninterested.
“Was wondering,” Doug came out with, “you want to go out some night?”
Tracy was taken aback. She thought: In your dreams, buddy. Not a chance.
Something, however, then made Tracy lean over the counter to see if Doug was wearing a wedding ring. So she bent her body over the partition separating the two of them to look down toward Doug’s hand, which happened to be positioned over his crotch.
“And he thought I was checking out his package,” Tracy said later.
In doing this, Tracy had embarrassed Doug, she realized. He thought one thing while she another.
“The look on his face was priceless.”
Feeling sorry for Doug in that situation, Tracy took out a piece of paper and wrote down her pager number, still thinking there wasn’t a chance she’d ever go out with him.
4.
Tracy Fortson called Sheriff Lutz at some point. It’s unclear when, exactly. Lutz never noted the date or time in his report. Yet, Tracy told me during a series of interviews, there was no way the OCSD could have called her to let her know Lutz was looking for her because she had changed her telephone number to “unlisted” after the “incident” that had made her leave the sheriff’s office.
“Nowhere in (Lutz’s) report does it mention that Oglethorpe Deputy Walt Williams came to my house and told me that Madison County was trying to get hold of me and would I call them, which I did,” Tracy later explained.
According to Lutz’s version of that phone call, it was fairly standard. Tracy recalled Deputy Walt Williams coming by her house at about 10 a.m. She said she called MCSD not long after that. In fact, she said, she had to actually leave a call-back number for Lutz because he wasn’t there.
“We’re looking for Doug Benton—his neighbors have reported him missing—and wanted to know if you’ve seen him?”[1]
Tracy said Lutz told her here that “some of Doug’s birds had died.”
“We are brok
en up,” Tracy explained. “I haven’t seen him for the past couple of weeks.”
“Where might he have gone?” Lutz asked in a conversational tone.
Tracy claimed she gave Lutz contact info for Jerry Alexander and Jeff Bennett, because both were Doug’s closest friends.
“Doug’s mother lives in Michigan,” Tracy told Lutz. “Not long ago, he talked about going up there. He has a brother living there, too. But they don’t get along too well.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“June 4th.[2] You should call Jeff Bennett, Doug’s good friend. He will probably know where Doug is.”
As Lutz thought about it, June 4 seemed to be the last time anyone could place Doug in Oglethorpe County.
[1] The following conversation is based on a combination of my interviews with Tracy, Lutz’s report and trial testimony. Of note, much of what Tracy later recalls saying to the sheriff is not in his report.
[2] Tracy would later say “June 5.”
5.
She’d forgotten about Doug Benton after they met that afternoon in 1997 at the tanning salon. Tracy had viewed Doug, in a way, as a stuck-up weightlifter with a hubristic chip on his shoulder. Meeting him while manning the tanning salon counter spoke of something to Tracy: Doug’s vanity. She wanted nothing to do with a man like that.
She had given Doug her pager number, however. After waiting the new relationship grace period of two days, Doug paged Tracy.
So she called him. Would it hurt to have a phone conversation with the guy?
Tracy thought not.
While Doug awkwardly began speaking, Tracy could hear a small child in the background.
He’s married, she thought. Sonofabitch. He’s one of those guys.
“That’s my son,” Doug said. “I have him while my ex-wife is at work.”
Yeah, right.
Tracy considered that Doug was lying, that he was married and had called while his wife was at work. So she cautiously went about the conversation, having no interest in taking things any farther than this one call.
As they spoke, Tracy was turned off by the fact that Doug, she said, “Talked about himself a lot and didn’t seem interested in what I had to say.”
Tracy pressed him on being married. Doug “assured” her he was divorced.
She considered it.
“So,” Doug said at one point, “you want to go out?”
Thinking seriously about turning him down, “Um, I guess,” Tracy said. Even though she wasn’t interested, Tracy didn’t have the nerve to tell him no.
“This Friday?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
As the days passed and the weekend approached, the more she thought about dating a divorced father, a guy who liked to talk about himself more than anything else, Tracy decided Doug was not the type of man she wanted to be with. There was nothing Doug had that Tracy wanted. She’d been down this road with married men before. So she decided to turn him down.
“I didn’t want to get involved with someone who was all about self and was divorced and had a small child,” Tracy recalled. “Plus, I had this nagging feeling that things were not as they seemed.”
By then, Tracy had pulled herself out from underneath a second divorce, healed, was on the road toward bettering her life and was not about step back into a serious relationship. Two failures were enough—at least for the moment. A divorced guy with kids just didn’t sound tempting. Too much baggage. Too much drama.
“Hey, listen,” Tracy said, calling Doug back a day later, “you’re a nice guy, but I need to cancel our date.”
Doug didn’t seem to care much. “OK,” he said. Then hung up.
“And Doug Benton,” Tracy said later, “never called me again.”
6.
Sheriff Tom Lutz had a sense that foul play was involved in Doug’s sudden disappearance. A guy like Doug Benton—Lutz understood from talking to Doug’s friends, neighbors and even Tracy Fortson—didn’t just step off the grid without any sign. It wasn’t in Doug’s character to leave and not say anything to anyone about where he was going. Whenever he left on an extended trip, Doug usually told someone where he was going and when he was coming back. Lutz had called Jeff Bennett, as Tracy suggested. Jeff and Doug had known each other for years. Jeff told Lutz to phone Jerry Alexander, another mutual friend. Jerry might know where Doug went off to.
“I saw Doug’s truck at Jerry’s house,” Jeff Bennett explained to Lutz. It was just recently, he added, within the past week.
But when he took a drive by Jerry’s again just a day or so ago, the truck was gone.
Had Doug come by and picked up his truck?
“Listen,” Lutz asked, “do you know of any problems between Doug and Tracy?” Lutz gave no prologue as to why he wanted this information, or what made him ask. There had been no indication from anyone thus far that Tracy would have any reason to want Doug gone. There was no reason to suspect animosity between Doug and his girlfriend, other than maybe Larry Bridges saying they fought from time to time. If you read Lutz’s report, it seems as if the question came out of the blue. Yet, in the totality of the investigation, Lutz was more or less being thorough. Trying to cover every base. By all accounts, Doug Benton had not been seen or heard from in two weeks. That is significant. Add the dead birds to the equation and here you have a cop simply doing his job, following his gut, asking questions, and digging for information.
“They had a really bad fight,” Jeff Bennett explained, but gave no specific date as to when—though the impression was recently. “Tracy pulled a gun, pointed it at herself, then at Doug, and a physical fight occurred.” Jeff then made a point to say they “had fought many other times,” explaining how he had, in fact, stopped hanging out with Doug and stopped working out with him because he couldn’t stand to be around Tracy Fortson anymore. She was belligerent and loud and always butting into Doug’s business. She wouldn’t leave the guy alone. She pestered him about everything. “I told him, ‘You get rid of Tracy,’ ” Jeff Bennett concluded, “ ‘because I’m tired of it … and we’ll hang out again.’ ”
That day never came.
Lutz wondered about family.
Jeff said Doug’s immediate family lived in Michigan. He gave Lutz Doug’s mother’s phone number.
Lutz told Jeff he’d be back in touch. He wanted to call Doug’s family and see if maybe Doug had taken off north to get away from Tracy. Maybe he was staying in Michigan for a while for a change of pace. Let things back home cool down.
Doug’s brother was home when Lutz called. Doug’s mother, Carol Benton, was out. Doug’s brother said they had not heard from Doug “in a while, and that was not like him.” Meaning, he always called and said hello and stayed in touch.
So Doug had not gone to Michigan, after all. That would have been the most obvious answer. More than that, he had not even called home during any part of the two weeks he’d been gone.
Lutz asked where else Doug could have gone off to and his brother explained that he had been out of touch with Doug’s friends in Georgia. He couldn’t really help much there.
Lutz said he’d be calling back at some point.
Armed with this new information, Lutz felt he needed to speak with Tracy again. In his report, Lutz said, “I then called Tracy and asked her about the fight. Tracy avoided all questions about the fight, but said Doug called her and told her to stay away from him and his home.”
And so she did.
“Lutz talks to me via phone,” Tracy explained in one of our 2016 email exchanges. “Lutz claims I avoid all questions about a fight. There was no fight. I am the one who told him we had an argument on Saturday night that led to (a) message left by Doug on June sixth.”
June 6 would have been two days after Doug had last been seen.
“The argument Doug and I had on Saturday night,” Tracy continued, “June third, was during the movie ‘An Officer and a Gentleman.’ We were arguing over the part where the girl told the
guy she was pregnant, trying to get him to marry her. Doug got angry because (he claimed a woman had once done that to him) … Doug was paying a considerable amount of child support and attorney fees connected (to this).”
Tracy went on to explain that this “argument” was blown way out of proportion later on in these reports. Doug and Tracy had disagreements all the time, as couples often do.
“That argument was not a ‘fight.’ I was not avoiding questions (from Lutz) pertaining to a fight. And, that argument was not serious enough to keep Doug angry from Saturday until Tuesday, when I last heard from him.”
7.
It was September 1999, one month after Doug had been officially divorced for a second time. Nearly two years to the day when Tracy had last spoken to Doug, or, for that matter, had even thought about him. Tracy sat inside Ryan’s Steakhouse in Athens having lunch with her father. This was something they did “faithfully” every Friday afternoon, Tracy said. A daughter and her dad catching up.
As Tracy was finishing her meal, listening to her father talk, she happened to look toward the entrance into the restaurant.
“And in walks this gorgeous guy,” she said later.
He wore jeans and a “tight, white V-neck T-shirt and work boots.”
Unable to take her eyes off the dude, Tracy immediately thought that something about the man looked familiar. She kept staring at him, trying to figure out where she had seen him before.
“But also because he looked so good.”
“Excuse me, Dad,” Tracy said. She picked up her plate and walked over to the salad bar to get a better look at the guy.
As Tracy piled lettuce on her plate, she could hear another guy talking. He was sitting with the man she was infatuated with. He said: “She’s checking you out, dude.”
TARGETED: A Deputy, Her Love Affairs, A Brutal Murder Page 2
