The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  Mueller knew exactly what was hitting him.

  “You have met your match,” said the small woman, staring across the courtroom at him, a study in controlled ferocity. “I would have spent the rest of my life tracking you down. And I found you. Greg’s murderer. I brought you to justice.”

  Who Killed Euhommie Bond?

  Air Mail, December 2019

  Seven years before Ken Brennan took the case, before the heartbreak and the false accusations and suspicions split family and community in Jackson, Tennessee, it was a typically frantic night at Spanky’s Bar & Grill.

  It was actually very early morning, on Sunday, December 7, 2008, when Angela Bond, seeing her husband enter, shot him the evil eye.

  Together Angela and Euhommie Ollie Bond owned the place, housed in a square red-brick building with a windowed front at one end of a small strip mall. Spanky’s stayed open until three in the morning and often filled in the wee hours after other bars had closed. In the kitchen, Angela was working fryer baskets with both hands, trying to keep up with orders, when she saw her husband out by the bar. Euhommie Ollie Bond was a deputy with the Haywood County Sheriff’s Department. His duty shift had just ended, and he typically dropped in near closing time. He had left his uniform shirt, vest, and weapon in the car, and stripped down to a long-sleeved black undershirt.

  Euhommie Ollie Bond, known to his family as “Homie” and to those in the community as “Ollie”—or “Chief” since he had served as police chief in nearby Bradford—was a man people noticed. A competitive bodybuilder, he was striking; he had once won a silly TV contest on The Ricki Lake Show, attaining the title world’s most “desirable” man, which he enthusiastically embraced. He had a broad, square chin, a magnetic smile, and charm that he kept at full throttle. On each of his bulging deltoids was tattooed a big red rose.

  Much of Bond’s magnetism was directed at women, which had caused friction in his marriage, but on this night Angela’s ire concerned something else. One of Bond’s cousins, whom she had asked him to fire, had shown up again to work that night. It was too loud and too busy for her to raise the issue just then. The look said, You and I will talk later.

  It was a conversation they would never have.

  A fight started. Dustups were not unusual at Spanky’s. People were drinking and some were using drugs. It was a loud loose crowd at the frayed end of a long Saturday night. There were friends and enemies, lovers and haters, romantic rivals, near and distant cousins, straying husbands—a potentially volatile mix of Jackson intimacies. Some patrons were armed—Jackson was home to at least three violent street gangs. Bond bridged many of these divides and managed to keep trouble at a low boil. Both host and bouncer, he was known to all, mostly well liked, and unintimidated by the clientele. His police credentials lent weight to his imposing frame. When the fight started that night he leapt over the bar to break it up. Angela saw her husband wrap his big arm in a choke hold around one of the combatants, while another cracked him over the head with a bottle. Blood ran from a cut over his right eye. Bond shouted for everyone to stay calm as he half-pushed and half-carried the man he held out the front door.

  The brawl scattered the crowd. Some raced out to the parking lot, some retreated to back rooms and lavatories. Angela ordered the kitchen to halt work and, still holding two baskets dripping hot oil, raced to the cash register to protect the night’s earnings. Then came gunshots. Angela felt something whiz past her, close, and dropped to the oily floor. Someone shouted, panicked, “Chief’s been shot!”

  One of Spanky’s security guards, an old Bond family friend, Eric Cobb, raced in waving a handgun. He jumped on a table, bellowing—as Angela recalled it—“Where’s the motherfucker at?”

  Someone else shouted for her to call 911.

  She had misplaced her cell phone. She found the bar phone and momentarily froze. By the time she gathered herself and dialed, the dispatcher told her that others had already called. Responders were on their way.

  The shooting had stopped as suddenly as it started. The crowd was now mostly outside. Cars were pulling away, fleeing the scene. Angela found her husband in one of the empty parking spaces. Blood had pooled under him. One of her customers, Lawanda Williams, a nurse, had torn away his shirt and was working on him, trying to staunch the bleeding from his abdomen. He was unconscious.

  “Baby, I’ve done all I can do,” Williams told Angela. “Only God can pull him through from here.”

  The rest was a blur. When the police arrived, they stopped Angela and Euhommie’s uncle, Wilbert Bond, from lifting him to a car and taking him to the hospital, which was just two miles away. The cops told her to calm down. Then the ambulance came.

  Bond was still breathing when they took him away. He died in the emergency room a short while later. The round had severed a major blood vessel.

  Debra Bond Perry, the victim’s aunt, had always been partial to him. Even as a boy his personality was outsized. One of her older sister’s seven children, he had, to Debra, stood out. His cheerful bravado and playful sense of humor matched her own, and he had a soft side that melted her heart. Not much older than her nephew, Debra had been like a teenage sister to Euhommie when he was a boy, but as her sister fell victim to Alzheimer’s and was increasingly lost to them, the attachment became more maternal. If she had had children, Perry says, she would have wanted a son like Euhommie. She loved him, and she admired what he had made of himself, a husband, father, military officer, policeman, business owner. She was enormously proud of her nephew.

  His peculiar name had been his mother’s attempt at christening him after Muhammed Ali, and like the boxer, Bond was not shy about his gifts. Spanky’s was just another stage for him; he would wade in late and take charge. Even though he never drank or used drugs himself, he loved to entertain those who did. He would invite a crowd over to his house for a football game, furnish drinks and snacks, and then fall asleep in his recliner as everyone else drank, ate, and watched the game. He was so assertively friendly that some found it off-putting.

  “People either loved him or hated him,” said Gwen Sanders, one of his sisters.

  He showered compliments on women indiscriminately—old, young, fat, slender, pretty, and plain. At the drive-through window of a McDonald’s, waited on by a young woman with bright blue hair—“She looked a hot mess,” recalled Sanders—Bond had proclaimed, “You know, not everybody could do blue hair, but blue hair looks good on you.” Beneath the come-on was genuine sweetness. When Perry’s husband died, her nephew presented her with a video piecing together memories of his uncle with photos and music. He recorded an introduction while sitting on a bench in his weight room, shoulders and arms bare and tumid. Staring into the camera, he said, “Auntie Debra, I know that someone else should be doing this, not me, because this is for someone soft.” The rest was unabashedly sentimental. She cherished it. Perry had been distressed when Euhommie and Angela bought Spanky’s. “Nothing good will come of people drinking after midnight,” she warned him. But it had proved to be a moneymaker, and Bond enjoyed it. He served drinks, flirted, held forth, and kept the peace. If Angela, backstage in the kitchen, was Spanky’s producer, her husband was its star.

  Bond’s violent death was shattering for his family and for many in Jackson’s African American community, a pain prolonged, year after year, by the police department’s failure to catch his killer. Seven years on, his family’s sadness had turned bitter.

  “We were still grieving in a really bad way,” said Perry.

  She and Sanders had put up a $10,000 reward, half each, hoping to turn up some answers. Angela put up another $5,000. They had posters placed on city buses advertising the reward. It hadn’t helped.

  “I’m a forensic person,” says Perry. She’s a forward woman of fifty-three with certain opinions and a barbed sense of humor. She admits to, with a trace of wicked delight, “a reputation in my family for speaking my mind and saying exactly what I think, which is, you know, not always a good th
ing.” A retired postal worker—she says, without a trace of sarcasm, “the greatest job in the world; I loved that job”—she spends a lot of time these days doing church work (“I’m one of Jehovah’s Witnesses”) and is a devotee of true-crime programs on TV, marveling at the tactics and techniques of modern law enforcement. She couldn’t fathom why the Jackson police hadn’t solved her nephew’s murder. The only answer, it seemed to her, was that the department didn’t care enough to really try—a suspicion, for Southern black folks, that is not without historical foundation.

  There had been a strong fraternal display at Bond’s funeral. He had worked as a cop in Memphis and Murfreesboro before becoming chief in Bradford and then a deputy sheriff. He had served in the US Navy and then as a captain in the Army National Guard, deploying frequently, and had done tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. At forty-one, he had more than twenty years of service in various uniforms. The long line of official mourners stretched around the block, representing all his old units and others from throughout western Tennessee. Some police came from as far as Nashville to pay respects—but from Jackson, his hometown, the force Bond had most wanted to join, no one showed. The family noticed.

  And they thought they knew why. Over Bond’s head was a cloud he could not shake. He was known to have “ties” with known criminals, gang members, and drug dealers—it was why, despite his repeated applications, the Jackson police had declined to hire him. Spanky’s thrived partly by staying open so late, and it attracted some unsavory characters. Bond employed convicted felons. Some of his customers were gang-affiliated, and reports of gunfire at the location were common. The bar was considered by local cops to be a nuisance, an irritant to the public peace. And don’t think they hadn’t noticed Euhommie and Angela’s nice home and the expensive cars in its driveway. Weighing their own earnings, they found the math wanting. Bond getting killed in gunplay at three a.m. outside Spanky’s put him at a far cry from their definition of the “line of duty.”

  But to those who loved him, there was another way of seeing it. The Bonds were ambitious and exceptionally industrious. They were an attractive couple—Angela had the lean look of an athlete, although she was not inclined to work out like her husband, and wore her long black hair swept to one side and straight down to her shoulders. They glowed with health and were seemingly indefatigable. Angela owned and operated a beauty salon during the day and ran the busy bar and grill at night—most days she didn’t head home until four in the morning. Euhommie’s old Bradford police chief salary had been doubled by a grant from the NAACP because he’d been the first African American police chief in the town’s history. And the job in the sheriff’s office had been a step up. The impressive house and the cars also reflected Angela’s willingness to borrow.

  “I was guilty of having a lot of debt,” she told me. “That was my problem, and, yeah, it was stupid. That’s how we bought a lot of stuff.”

  And yes, Euhommie did have ties with known criminals, but so did everyone else in his large extended family—several members of which had themselves been in and out of jail. In his family and community, Euhommie was the exception. He employed a number of relatives with felony convictions at Spanky’s, including his uncles Wilbur Bond, Arthur Hunt, and Charlie Reeves, and also old family friends like Eric Cobb. Perhaps partly because he had chosen policework and the military, he seemed intent on preserving those ties, keeping close to those who, as Sanders put it, “had chosen a different path.”

  “He had this soft spot, like, ‘I can help them,’” she says. “‘I can point them in the right direction.’ He was always trying to give people feedback about ‘the street life that you’re living.’ As opposed to me—if I help you once, then you’re on your own—he always thought people deserved a second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth chance, thinking, ‘Eventually he’s gonna get it right.’ His thing was, ‘If I can’t help him, then who can?’”

  A more tangible reason for the department’s failure was the critical mistakes made in the beginning because the case had seemed so simple. A 9 mm round was recovered from Bond’s body. Two 9 mm shell casings were found on the pavement near where he had fallen, and another spent 9 mm round was found near the building’s front wall. One of the big front windows had been shattered, and a bullet had torn a hole in the metal frame of the bar’s front door. Clearly, a shooter between Bond and the street had blazed from close range. Witnesses named two shooters, Michael Robinson and Steve “Black” Thomas, two young men with criminal pasts and gang connections. Accounts differed slightly—some had heard two pops, some three, some five—but three witnesses placed the blame for the killing shot squarely on Robinson.

  Charlie Reeves, Bond’s uncle, who was working security, said that his nephew had been fighting with both men. “Michael Robinson shot Euhommie,” he told police, emphatically. “I saw his white shirt and dark gun. Black told me I was next.” Reeves said that Bond had named Robinson as his shooter as he lay bleeding. Reeves added that “Black” Thomas had threatened him, saying, “We should have got both of y’all.” Most of his story was backed by another uncle, Wilbert Bond.

  Arthur Hunt, a third uncle, who was also working security in the parking lot outside, said he saw his nephew and Robinson fighting and had placed himself between the two. Some in the crowd tried to pull Robinson back, but he broke free, and Bond stepped from behind Hunt to confront him. Then came three gunshots, Hunt said, “from behind Mike.” None hit Bond, who was still standing when Hunt heard a fourth shot, and his nephew fell. He said he saw both Robinson and Thomas running away, and that Robinson had a gun. He said the two left together in Thomas’s car.

  Another witness, Natalie Allen, said she was sitting in a car in the parking lot when the fight spilled outside. She saw Thomas run to his car, pop the hood, remove a handgun from underneath, and walk into the crowd around the fight, where she lost sight of him. She heard several gunshots and then saw Thomas run back with several others to his car and leave.

  The Bond family was convinced, before the preliminary arraignment, outside the courthouse Angela was speaking angrily to her father about Lala Long, Robinson’s mother.

  “She knows her son did it!” she said.

  “You don’t have the right to say that because you didn’t see anything,” said Long, who had been standing behind her.

  “You just keep on moving,” Angela snapped at her. “Right now I’ve lost everything. You haven’t lost anything.”

  The situation seemed clear enough. Within hours after Bond’s death, Jackson police arrested Robinson and charged him with murder. Days later they arrested Thomas, charging him with aggravated assault and being an accessory to murder. The story got a lot of play in the local press, and the police department appeared to have handled the case efficiently. The department’s chief told reporters confidently that the case, handled by one of its up-and-coming detectives, Tyreece Miller, had been wrapped up.

  But when the witnesses were grilled by defense lawyers at a preliminary hearing a few days later, with the other witnesses out of the courtroom, their stories collapsed into a jumble of contradictions.

  Reeves, who said he had been standing so close to his nephew that one of the rounds fired had passed through his own jacket, told the lawyers that he had seen Robinson fire the killing shot. He insisted he had seen Robinson and Thomas fleeing together, both armed, and that his dying nephew had fingered Robinson as the shooter.

  Wilbur Bond, who had also named Robinson as the killer, now admitted that he had never stepped outside the bar.

  Natalie Allen repeated her story: she’d seen Thomas pop the hood of his car, remove a gun, and then melt into the crowd before the gunshots began. But Allen said that Robinson was not one of the two men who had fled with Thomas. On cross-examination she also revealed that she was currently Robinson’s girlfriend, something she had not told the police. The revelation threw suspicion on her account, which, by omitting her relationship to Robinson, might have been an attempt to exo
nerate him.

  Arthur Hunt sat through a recitation of his criminal past before answering detailed questions about the night of the shooting. He now said that the first three shots he heard had come from behind him, not, as he had told police, from behind Robinson. He said Reeves had not been close to Bond, and that Robinson had been wearing a coat with a fur-lined hood, not the white T-shirt Reeves had described. He said that he saw Thomas fire, only to contradict himself seconds later, saying he’d seen Thomas pointing a gun but had not seen him shoot it. Hunt said he had stayed close to Bond as he lay on the pavement and that Bond, contrary to Reeves’s testimony, did not name his killer.

  “You sure about that?” asked Robinson’s attorney, Joe Byrd.

  “I’m positive. He didn’t say anything.”

  Defense lawyers then called their own eyewitnesses, three of whom testified that Thomas alone had been fighting with Bond, and that Robinson had been inside the bar when the gunfire started. Erica Woods, Robinson’s second cousin, described hiding behind a table with him when a man—who fit Angela Bond’s description of their security guard Eric Cobb—ran in waving a gun and shouting, “Where’s that nigger at! Y’all know what nigger I’m talking about!” She confirmed that Thomas left with two other men, neither of them Robinson, and that Thomas had been the one wearing a white T-shirt. Others then took the stand to corroborate these accounts. Robinson, they said, had not fled with Thomas; he had left in a separate vehicle driven by Wesley Cox, which Cox confirmed.

  Then Robinson testified. He acknowledged previous criminal convictions—“I done served my time and ain’t been in no trouble”—and gave his own version of events. He had come in with his cousin and friends. He had fought with neither Thomas nor Bond. He had not been armed. He was inside when the shooting occurred.