Her mother smiled.
“Doug was right,” Tracy later recalled, “it was a God thing.”
If there was one characteristic about Doug she adored, Tracy later explained, it was that he never tired of being around her. They saw each other every day. He brought her flowers at work. Took her shopping. They rode those steel horses together whenever weather permitted.
“I will even learn to ride a horse,” Doug said one day, kissing Tracy, speaking softly. “Just to be able to ride with you.”
Doug seemed to be interested in anything Tracy wanted to do.
When Tracy worked at the sheriff’s department, Doug liked to pop in to say hello or take her out to lunch. On one afternoon, as they often did, Doug and Tracy met at Papa’s Pizza in Crawford, just a few miles from the OCSD on Athens Road where Tracy worked. Most of the deputies ate at the restaurant. It was one of those local joints in the area law enforcement frequented.
Tracy waited inside her patrol car. Doug had said he’d meet her in the parking lot. He gave specific instructions to wait there in her car until he arrived. As she stared out the window, Doug not anywhere in sight, on the driver’s side, in the window, Doug popped up. He had a dozen red roses in his hand. A smile on his face.
According to Tracy, it was somewhere “along this timeframe when some of my coworkers started making comments about Doug coming around so much.”
This bothered Tracy. For one, there were other employees whose spouses and boyfriends were periodically stopping by the department. One in particular had her boyfriend there most of the day. But Tracy thought since the woman was in her 60s, it was never an issue.
There had always been “talk,” as Tracy termed it, within the workplace, as there is in any corporate or private office environment. She expected as much. She especially pointed out how if someone came around the department and wasn’t “one of us” (not a cop, in other words), “smart remarks” were made by some. In one example, Tracy explained how a Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) agent came in one day. Two of her colleagues and Tracy were looking out the window as he walked up to the front door. Turned out the deputy he was looking for was in the office next door, so they sent the agent across the parking lot to the other building. As he left and walked out of earshot, according to Tracy, one of the men she was with said, “Well, that sawed-off son of a bitch is so short he’d have to have a stepstool just to take a piss in the toilet.”
They all laughed—including Tracy.
“That was just how (things were),” Tracy added. “Everyone was short compared to (this guy). He stood about 6 feet 2 inches. It was funny.”
But then the comments turned toward Doug, which were, of course, not as funny to Tracy.
After the first time Doug came into the office for a visit, Tracy explained, one of her coworkers said, “Well … damn … Squirrely (Tracy’s OCSD nickname), he’s so short, you’d lose him in the grass.”
When Tracy told Doug about it, something she later reckoned she should have never done, he became angry. He couldn’t see it for what it was: a joke. A way cops like to rip each other and make fun of people and certain situations. Humor, however insulting to others, is part of being on the job and dealing with the horrors cops see every day. Their sense of humor is generally twisted and arcane to the average person—and can sometimes hurt others.
Still, Doug was livid. He had a look in his eyes. He wasn’t going to take it again, Tracy knew.
Doug got into a pretty bad bike accident one day and spent some time in the hospital. He decided, after talking it over with Tracy, that maybe they should ditch the bikes. It was dangerous, after all.
“Doug had a fractured ankle and a severely bruised arm and shoulder, along with his bruised ego,” Tracy said.
Tracy was the one who brought Doug into the hospital because the accident had occurred not far from the department after Doug visited one day. Even this—an accident—Tracy said had caused problems between her and Jeff Bennett—a situation she thought had resolved itself after she and Doug talked about it and Doug decided that Jeff would have to understand he was in love with Tracy. That she came first now.
Jeff showed up at the accident.
“You need to go to the hospital,” Tracy told Doug. She had arrived in her patrol car, along with several EMTs. Doug had called Jeff and told him what happened.
“I’ll take him,” Jeff said.
“No. He can go in an ambulance or I’ll take him in my patrol car. I’m his girlfriend,” Tracy said. “I want to be with him.”
Why the hell is he even here? Tracy thought, looking at Jeff.
“I wasn’t sure who to call,” Doug said. He was pretty banged up. “So I called you both.”
Not long after, they decided they weren’t going to ride on the highways any longer. They couldn’t, in the end, give the bikes up all together.
Those comments about Doug bouncing around the OCSD, however, continued, Tracy claimed. Getting worse with time.
“Although I should have known better,” Tracy explained, “I made the mistake of telling Doug about the comments being made, and not only those about him, but also those that had been made to me the entire time I had worked there.”
This was something Tracy said she overlooked for a long time. Being a woman in a male-dominated environment, she expected some talk that would be uncomfortable and maybe even sexist. It was the way of the world, she came to understand and even accept to some extent.
“Doug was furious,” Tracy recalled. “It pissed him off to learn that my coworkers were talking about him, but he felt disrespected when he found out what they had said about me, as well as, to me.”
There was one morning, according to Tracy, while she was at the OCSD and someone in the office happened to answer the phone. An elderly couple in a nearby town was calling, worried about a cat that had been perched on top of their barn for several days. They believed the cat might be hurt and called to see what kind of help the OCSD could offer.
“I’ll send someone right over to have a look,” the man said.
He hung up the phone. Tracy was standing nearby. Then he stood, walked over to her and said, “Come on, Squirrely, let’s go get a little pussy.”
“Now, we all know that his statement had a little double meaning to it. But I didn’t let it faze me at all. So, I grabbed the keys to his car and drove him right up to the address given. The couple was glad to see us and while (he) chatted with them, getting a little politicking in for good measure, I had the not-so-glamorous duty of climbing on top of the barn, where said cat was curled up asleep. Well, that is, until I got within 10 feet of him, at which point he went airborne off the rooftop. Nothing wrong with that cat! The little old couple were quite happy and the (man) and I went on back to the office. Nothing else was said about the cat or the comment.”
That was the beginning of it, Tracy claimed. Another deputy got in on the commenting next. For whatever reason, this deputy wanted the guys in the department “to believe that I had been a stripper prior to becoming a deputy.”
Which was not true, Tracy said.
He would wait until there were at least three or four other deputies in the office and then he would make an announcement.
“Ya’ll know (Tracy here) used to be a stripper, don’t ya? Yeah, I got a picture of her with two men.”
From there, the conversation took on a more direct tone, pointed at Tracy. All with sexual undertones.
“Well, what color is your thong?” that same deputy asked one afternoon while several officers stood around.
Tracy turned red. She could tell him to fuck off, but she was more hurt than anything by it. It was insulting. It went back to her comment that if she were older, maybe less attractive, would they still be making such sexist, sexually explosive comments?
“The funny thing is I have never been a stripper at all, anywhere, so I never understood what got him started saying that. The comment about a picture of me with two men? He never prod
uced a photo of me at all.”
14.
The last time Tracy heard from Doug Benton, she later said, he left her a voicemail indicating he didn’t want to speak to her anymore. In addition, Doug had said he didn’t want to ever see her again. The tone of this message sounded final to Tracy.
As Tracy left the MCSD and thought about Doug being gone for so long, she went back to that voicemail. Doug had done this before, Tracy insisted. He’d get angry, snap and say don’t call or talk to him ever again.
Tracy called Doug’s mom, Carol Benton, the first time this happened. She asked about Doug. Told her what had happened.
“Just give him some space,” Carol suggested.
Doug needed to cool off. He needed to figure things out on his own. He needed time.
“That’s what I was doing,” Tracy said later, referring to those days in June 2000 when Doug was reportedly missing. “And that’s why I had not seen or heard from him since (that first weekend in June). I didn’t know he was missing.”
When she realized no one had seen Doug in so long, Tracy phoned his friend Jerry Alexander’s wife and asked what was going on. If they knew anything.
Not much, Tracy said the Alexanders told her.
Tracy never mentioned that Jerry knew of a note left on Doug’s truck. Why wouldn’t Jerry say anything to Tracy about this note?
Tracy phoned Doug’s brother.
“Haven’t heard from him,” he said. “Mom hasn’t, either.”
Tracy “thought” about calling Jeff Bennett, but decided against it because of their history.
“I just didn’t feel comfortable calling him.”
Tracy phoned a sheriff friend of hers on or about “that Saturday,” June 17, 2000. She knew him well. But then re-thinking it later, she couldn’t recall if it was actually that Sunday, June 18, when she phoned her friend.
“Do you need me to go over and help with Doug’s birds?” Tracy said she asked him.
“No, we’ve got someone doing that.”
“OK.”
Tracy explained to her sheriff friend how she had heard from Doug via voicemail. The sheriff said he already knew about the call.
“Listen, Tracy, if Doug told you not to go over to his house, it’s probably better that you don’t,” her law enforcement friend recommended, according to Tracy.
“OK,” she said and left it there.
15.
During the winter of 2000, as Doug Benton and Tracy Fortson’s relationship seemed to be moving in a positive direction, Tracy’s professional life in law enforcement began to unravel. The more time she spent around the OCSD, the more Tracy began to feel the banter around the officer was not something that made her feel at all comfortable or welcome.
As Tracy explained to Doug what was going on at work—those rude, potentially sexist comments, the put-downs and the highly sexually charged atmosphere—Tracy said Doug put pressure on her to leave the job.
Tracy had failed at becoming a game warden. She had joined the OCSD at 33 years of age in 1998. Here she was now, only 18 months into that job she so desperately saw as long-term career, and she was thinking about giving it up.
Sheriff Ray Sanders, in a published report, later commented on the accusations Tracy wound up lodging against the department: “(Tracy) said she always wanted to be in law enforcement, and thought she could add to the county, and she did. She was a good deputy.”
Sanders went on to note that Tracy was doing a great job for the department. She was an asset to the team—that is, until about December 1999, or two months before she would ultimately walk away. That was about the time, Ray Sanders claimed in that public report, that Tracy’s attitude took on a different tone.
“She changed her personality, her work and everything,” Sanders was quoted as saying.
The feeling around the OCSD as 1999 gave way to the year 2000 was in stark contrast to what Tracy would later say about her relationship with Doug at the time. Tracy and Doug were fighting, many of the deputies and the sheriff believed, and that volatile atmosphere in which Tracy was involved at home had a detrimental effect on her work ethic and overall approach, mood and demeanor while on the job.
Sanders was further quoted saying that at first, Tracy started to “complain about working conditions within the department.”
Then she told him “she needed more money.”
Note that none of the deputies or the sheriff indicated Tracy was complaining about harassment of any type. It was money and “working conditions,” which meant different things, realistically.
Then, without warning, one day in February 2000, Tracy walked out of the department “without working out a two-week notice” with the sheriff. She then went to work for Doug, making what Ray Sanders claimed was “$300 a week in cash helping with (Doug’s) welding business and a side job raising exotic birds.”
While Tracy worked for Doug during this period, she started to tell her boyfriend what had been going on in the office. After hearing about it all in more detail, Tracy claimed Doug spearheaded the idea of filing a lawsuit against the department.
“You’re sitting on a gold mine,” Doug said to her one day.
This comment got her thinking.
“I went along with this idea,” Tracy told me in 2016. “It never crossed my mind (until then) that anything so extreme (as what was about to happen) would result from it. … I never considered the consequences or repercussions of filing the claim. If I had thought that something like (what would take place next) would happen because of filing that claim, I never would have considered it.”
In April 2000, Tracy went to the Department of Labor and applied for unemployment compensation. Her claim was that she had been sexually harassed while working at the OCSD. It was all that talk around the office she now was certain had been directed at her, along with inappropriate language used around her. According to Tracy, she had been “made to feel uncomfortable by rough language used by deputies and inappropriate joking in the office.”
Ray Sanders vehemently denied the charges (as he does to this day) and appealed the unemployment claim.
“I filed a sexual harassment/discrimination case against Sheriff Ray Sanders and the Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s Department,” Tracy told me in 2016. “I went to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Atlanta, Georgia, to file this claim. I hired Attorney Margaret Dyal to represent me. I had audiotapes of the sheriff making lewd, sexual comments to me on the job. [1] Doug notified the newspaper and made it public. This was highly embarrassing to the sheriff. He is a very proud man. He never took embarrassment well and he had a notorious temper.”
According to Doug’s mother, “There was … a history between Doug and Ray Sanders. I believe it was (a friend of Doug’s) who told (her) that Doug wanted retribution for something that had happened between them (Sanders and Doug) in the past. I never found out what that was and wasn’t aware that Doug knew Sanders prior. Whatever happened between them is what caused Doug to want retribution. There are just too many gaps that haven’t been filled. Too many unanswered questions.”
Regardless what anyone thought—or if there ever was an issue between Doug and the sheriff—on June 12, a week after Doug went missing, Tracy and Ray Sanders met face-to-face at the Labor Department for a board hearing. The issue of compensation and whether Tracy was sexually harassed, of course, came up during this hearing, but it remained unresolved. The arbitrator determined then that it would take another hearing, maybe several more, with witnesses and possibly even evidence, before a resolution or judgment could be made.
So, as the search for Doug continued into Monday, June 19, 2000, Tracy was waiting to hear from the Department of Labor when she and Ray Sanders would square off again.
Neither could have known then, but that next hearing date would never take place. But maybe more than that: one aspect of the case the MCSD was interested in, as Doug Benton’s whereabouts became a central focus of the investigative team, became that note D
oug had supposedly left on his truck in Jerry Alexander’s driveway. After a careful examination of Doug’s handwriting, several investigators believed there was no way Doug Benton could have written the note. In fact, Madison County sheriff Clayton Lowe came out and said publicly: “Somebody else wrote it.”
[1] I have never heard these tapes.
Part II
“I’ve crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I’ve come to a place I never thought I’d have to come to. And I don’t know how I got here. It’s a strange place. It’s a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories
16.
There’s an unrestrained curiosity, or maybe it can be explained as, say, a rubberneck mentality, we all exhibit when coming into contact with an object or person in a place where neither belongs. Take, for example, a man walking across a freeway during rush hour, not paying any mind to oncoming traffic. He’s not supposed to be there. Our brains take a moment to adjust to such an unusual image. Not that seeing the object—or the man on the freeway—sounds some sort of internal alarm system; quite contrarily, it’s the reason behind the man or object being there that becomes the mystery—not the action of which he is engaged, or who he actually is. Why is the man walking across a busy freeway without a care in the world? He must be “crazy,” right? Or certainly out of his mind? Maybe he’s on drugs. Yes, that’s it. Bath salts. THC. He does not know what the fuck he is doing.
Either way, whatever conclusion we come to internally, our curiosity sounds and we need an answer.
Which is what happened when Rob Poston and his wife were out among the 1,500 acres of cattle land Rob oversaw on that Sunday afternoon in June when everyone seemed to be looking for Doug Benton. Rob caught sight of an oblong, coffin-shaped metal container that, hitting just the right amount of sunlight at that particular hour, made him stop his ATV, turn the bike around, go back and check it out. Rob’s instincts told him to investigate. What’s more, as Rob and his wife hopped off the four-wheeler and started walking toward the object, curiosity pumping through their veins, there was something else. Something much more profound and alarming than seeing the object.
TARGETED: A Deputy, Her Love Affairs, A Brutal Murder Page 5
