by Mark Bowden
“Did you kill Mr. Bond?” his attorney asked.
“No, sir.”
Judge Blake Anderson did not even wait for the defense to sum up. He referred the charges against Thomas to the grand jury, and dismissed all charges against Robinson. Angela ran from the courtroom crying.
Detective Miller, who had put the case together, slipped out before the hearing concluded, leaving his younger associate, Chris Chestnut, who was working his first homicide, to face the Bond family. The blame for Bond’s death devolved into a family feud, the Bonds versus the Robinsons.
And then the case languished. Thomas, insisting that he had spent that entire evening at home with his girlfriend, was sent to jail after police found a weapon and drugs when they raided his apartment. But the weapon seized was not a 9 mm, and the witness accounts were too confused to support a charge. The strongest testimony against Thomas was from Robinson’s girlfriend, Natalie Allen, and even she had not seen him shoot. One witness had testified that he saw Thomas shooting in Bond’s direction from a distance, but this meant he could not have fired the killing shot. There had been stippling on Bond’s body, powder-burn marks left a by weapon fired at close range.
* * *
Tyreece Miller, who would eventually be promoted to deputy commissioner, dropped the question into Chestnut’s lap. The younger detective tried reinterviewing the witnesses, an exercise that got him nowhere. Perhaps fearing that they would be charged with perjury, since all of them could not have been telling the truth, most were uncooperative. Reeves ran whenever Chestnut approached him. The detective had Thomas transported back for further questioning, but the man just sat across the table and smirked at him. He knew he hadn’t killed Bond and that there was no evidence he had. He had no incentive to say a thing. The thick case file sat on a shelf over Chestnut’s desk like a bruise, a black mark on his career and on the entire department, but he could not see how to advance it.
An unsolved murder festers. The entire Bond clan was fed up with the Jackson police; just as they had spurned him in life, they were disrespecting him in death. It also sent an ugly message to the African American community. If the police wouldn’t aggressively investigate the murder of a fellow officer, what did that say about their efforts for other black victims?
Angela sold her businesses, collected her husband’s insurance and death benefits, and moved with their two sons to Atlanta.
“My husband took care of us in his life,” she says, “and he took care of us in his death.”
But that very windfall threw suspicion her way. There was plenty of motive, it was said, even beyond insurance money, pensions, and death benefits. Euhommie, after all, had not worked hard to hide his relationships with other women. Some believed he might have been killed by an angry husband or boyfriend.
“All the ugly stuff they’re saying, that I had him killed or that another guy killed my husband ’cause he was dating his baby mama, you know, it was just so hurtful for me,” Angela says. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying my husband was innocent, but at the end of the day . . . he took time and he took care of his family. And we saw eye to eye, and we were a team. He didn’t do anything so disrespectful to me to the point where he brought women to the house. And so there’s a lot of people looking at me and saying I’m stupid for not believing that that’s why he got killed. You know, talk among yourselves, because I’m still Mrs. Bond, I still have his kids, and that’s still the love of my life. So at the end of the day, that doesn’t move me. And you’re going to hear all that stuff too, and we were going through a divorce. I haven’t signed any papers, show me some papers I’ve signed. I never did, and I had no plans to do it.”
Debra Perry’s thoughts wandered down that path. She believed the couple was going to divorce and that Angela was not happy about it—and the payout after her nephew’s death had been considerable. She didn’t feel good about these suspicions, but she had always seen Angela as grasping.
“I think she’s a gold digger,” Perry had told Euhommie after he’d first introduced Angela to her.
“But I don’t have anything, Auntie,” he’d said.
“I know, but she’ll find a way to make money off of you.”
And, as Perry saw it, she had.
It was in the midst of all this ugliness growing from the mystery of who shot Bond that Perry, watching one of her true-crime shows, saw Ken Brennan. A retired DEA agent and former Long Island cop, Brennan was a celebrated private investigator. On the program Perry watched, he had cleverly solved a mystery that had long stumped police in Florida. A muscular man with a shock of white hair, a gold chain around his thick neck, and rings on his fingers, Brennan looked the part of the hard-bitten detective. Sunglasses, leather jacket, motorcycle, and cigar enhanced his gruff, plainspoken style. “This is who I am supposed to use,” thought Perry. She found Brennan’s website online. Sanders made contact by e-mail and sent Brennan some information about Bond’s case. Then Perry called him and began to grill him about his background and experience.
“Look, lady,” he growled, “you reached out to me; I didn’t reach out to you.”
He said he would get back to her. The two women thought they’d never hear from him again. He called to say he’d take the case.
Brennan was expensive. Just to retain his services cost Perry and Sanders as much as they had spent for the reward and the posters. Perry had a comfortable nest egg; she had been the sole beneficiary when her husband, a veteran, died suddenly of a heart attack, and she had then sold their house. Sanders had a good state job. They sought help from the rest of the family, without success. One relative told Perry that Euhommie had once said that if anything ever happened to him, he didn’t want it investigated.
“That didn’t make sense,” she told me. “I’m telling you right now, if you ever hear anybody say that Debra Bond Perry said, ‘Don’t ever investigate if I come up missing,’ that’s not true.”
Another family member said she had already paid a private detective $24,000 and had learned nothing. Sanders asked for his name. They would contact him and pass along whatever he had learned to Brennan. “I don’t remember his name,” she was told. Perry scoffed. She told me, “Let me give you twenty-four thousand dollars and see if I ever forget your name.”
She and her niece put up the money. Perry saw Brennan’s acceptance of the case as nothing less than miraculous—as she put it, “A sign from God’s Holy Spirit.”
Brennan gets a lot of requests. Articles and TV reports of his successes, like the one seen by Perry, ensure a steady stream of random calls and referrals from law enforcement. Of necessity, he turns most away, either because they fail to sufficiently pique his interest or because he concludes, after a preliminary review, that he wouldn’t be able to help. Those he doesn’t take he refers to others—“I try to never leave a family hanging,” he says.
As he saw it, the Bond case, seven years old, was as cold as cold could be. One thing grabbed him about it, though. When he called Perry to take the case, he told her, “I can’t believe this guy was a police officer, and he was shot seven years ago, and nobody had been arrested for it.”
It bugged him. As he saw it, “Some asshole has been walking around the state of Tennessee for the last seven years bragging that he had shot a cop and got away with it.” That alone was enough to make him take the case. When he heard that Bond had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan—“This fucking guy served his country and his community,” he said—he was sold.
Brennan visited Jackson for the first time in April 2015. It is a nondescript city of about sixty-five thousand, roughly halfway between Memphis and Nashville, an old railroad junction and onetime cotton hub. Today it is home to a few big factories, two of the largest being an aluminum mill that is a subsidiary of Toyota and a Kellogg’s plant that produces Pringles. With lots of open ground, it feels more like a town than a city. It is mostly working class, split fairly even racially between whites and blacks. A significant portion o
f its population—15 percent—is considered poor. Much of Jackson is residential—neighborhoods of small one-story houses with tiny yards. Its main avenues, like Hollywood Drive, where Spanky’s was located, are lined with strip malls. North of the city, near Interstate 40, the east–west highway that connects Memphis and Nashville, are a Walmart, newer shopping centers, movie theaters, chain restaurants and hotels, and Union University, an evangelical Christian school.
Brennan’s first stop was to see Chris Chestnut, by then a sergeant in the department’s criminal investigation unit, and two of his colleagues, Lieutenant Phil Stanfill and a newcomer, Detective Nick Donald. For Brennan, their cooperation was crucial. When Debra Perry bad-mouthed the department to him, he stopped her. “Look, the police are our friends in this,” he said. “I can’t do anything here without their help.” His goal, he assured the detectives, was to help them, not to show them up.
Chestnut, Stanfill, and Donald were at first a little starstruck and disbelieving. Brennan seemed over the top. He looked to Donald as if he had walked in off a Hollywood set, a little larger than life, with the tan, the muscles, the jewelry, the sunglasses. But his blunt, profane way of putting things appealed to them. He talked like a cop. Brennan took Chestnut to lunch and explained his method, his affection and respect for all cops, and his need for their help. He said he had “no fucking interest” in what had happened earlier with the case, in finding fault or assigning blame. He said, “I’m looking strictly forward on this.”
Policework had been Chestnut’s entire schooling; he’d joined the department right out of high school, working as an emergency dispatcher before doing patrol work and graduating to detective. He too looked the part, with his shaved head and sunglasses, muscled arms sleeved with colorful tattoos, and a shield and handgun clipped to the belt of his jeans. Ken Brennan struck him as cocky, in a good way. “It’s OK to be arrogant,” says Chestnut, “if you’ve got something to be arrogant about.” The private investigators (PIs) he’d encountered previously tended to be lazy, slippery, and ill-informed, more scammers than anything. They’d show up, glean what they could from the police, and then charge their clients for what they might have learned if they’d asked the cops themselves. Brennan was getting paid, but Chestnut could tell that he wasn’t in it just for the money. The Bond case was the worst thing that had happened on Chestnut’s watch. The case file haunted him daily. He had not only failed to solve it, he had been part of an effort to hang it on the wrong man.
Over lunch and then back at the department’s offices, a characterless bunker of a building in downtown Jackson with mud-brown cinder-block walls, Chestnut shared the file with Brennan—crime-scene photos, hand-drawn maps, physical evidence, and piles of witness statements. There were pictures of Bond, newly deceased, stretched out prone on the operating table, eyes open, clothing torn away, a powerful man who clearly shouldn’t have been dead. Other than a small cut over his right eye and single clean bullet wound in his upper right abdomen, he looked sturdy enough to compete in a decathlon. The killing round had left a small hole; it had a downward trajectory and had not exited, coming to rest in his iliac vein. He had bled out internally.
Chestnut presented his overview. A fight had broken out in the bar, and Bond had pushed it outside, where he’d tussled with either Robinson or Thomas—accounts varied. Shots were fired. One 9 mm round hit Bond; another ricocheted off the metal frame of the front door and was found on the pavement nearby. The big window to the right of the door was shattered. Three 9 mm shell casings were recovered on the pavement. He explained how witnesses had first named Robinson, but their accounts had not held up. Chestnut described his frustration in trying to reinterview them.
Brennan listened politely, taking it all in, admiring the stacks of reports, absorbing Chestnut’s understanding of the event. Then he told him to forget all of it.
“Let’s go take a look,” he said.
Brennan likes physical evidence. Witnesses are often more trouble than they are worth; as he puts it, “they’re a fuckin’ pain in the ass.” Memory is imprecise, even when people are trying to help. Witnesses claim to have seen things they did not see, and deny seeing things they did. Sometimes they are afraid to say what they did see, and sometimes they are too eager to describe things they did not. They exaggerate; they lie; they shade the truth; they even take advantage of situations to settle old scores. What doesn’t change, what is not subject to distortion or dissembling or forgetfulness, are the facts. So, as he explained to Chestnut and Stanfill, the right way to start is to empty your head of everything anyone has told you. Find out for yourself. Let the facts speak. The facts give you solid ground, the only point of reference you can trust. Only then do you start questioning witnesses, matching memories against what you can know for sure.
The building that had housed Spanky’s Bar & Grill was at the southeast end of a sad, nondescript strip mall inaptly named Hollywood Plaza. What Brennan saw was a line of unadorned storefronts—a beauty salon, a vacuum cleaner store, a consignment clothing shop. On the faded brown vertical siding above, there were dark patches where signs for now-defunct businesses had once hung. Across the street is a lumberyard. The old Spanky’s building, now home to a catering service, looked the same as it did in the old crime-scene photos. Fronting it was a battered parking lot.
Chestnut set the scene. Bond had fallen in an empty parking space just outside the front door. Beside him had been a parked car. The detective noted where each of the 9 mm shell casings had been found, one close to the front door, the other downhill from Bond’s feet. The metal frame on the left side of the front door still had the hole made by the round they’d found on the pavement a few feet away.
Brennan paced around and around, trying to picture the scene. Across the lot, about fifty feet away, the crime-scene photographer had snapped pictures of spent .40 caliber shells, some of them bent and scuffed. They had been duly collected but not considered important. It was not uncommon for Spanky’s customers to discharge their weapons, often at the sky—the department often responded to reports of such shooting—and given the appearance of the shells, it was assumed they were old. Bond had, after all, been hit by a 9 mm round.
Brennan believes everything the police note at a crime scene is important. The trampled shells had made at least one cop on the scene curious enough to photograph and bag them. That was enough.
These .40 caliber shell casings had all been found within a dozen feet of each other, about fifty feet from the victim. Brennan stood at that spot and looked across the lot at the building. An unskilled right-handed shooter would find that the kick, unless actively corrected, would pull his aim to the right. They had found a round that hit the door frame. To its right was the shattered window. Beyond that was just a patch of woods where other spent rounds would likely have landed—they had not been found.
Brennan walked around the lot and around the building and over to the patch of woods, thinking. Chestnut and Stanfill watched him curiously.
“Something ain’t sitting right with me here,” he told them. He said he wanted to go back and read through the reports.
Later that day, reviewing the files, Brennan came across Natalie Allen’s statement. She had seen Thomas retrieve a gun from under the hood of his car and then run to a spot in the crowd near where the .40 shells were found. It confirmed Brennan’s hunch.
Chestnut pointed out that Allen had been Robinson’s girlfriend, and that her story had been considered nothing more than an effort to shift the blame from him to Thomas, but Brennan disagreed.
“She says here that he got the gun from under the car hood,” he explained. “I think she’s telling the truth. She’s very specific about where the gun came from. She doesn’t say that he gets a gun from underneath his car or from the back seat or the trunk, she says he pops the hood. Somebody who has been arrested, he knows that if cops pull him over they might toss his car, but they’re not going to bother pulling the fucking hood up and taking a loo
k under there. That’s something a gang member would do. She ain’t making that up.”
They went back out to the crime scene a day later, pulling out all the stops to oblige Brennan. Chestnut got the fire department to bring out a ladder truck so they could search surrounding rooftops for spent rounds. They used a laser pointer to confirm the shooting angles from where the .40 caliber shell casings had been found to the damage on the building’s front. The day was sweltering, and it took hours, and in the end, while they didn’t find any other rounds, Brennan was certain.
“I think there was a shootout here,” he said, standing where the .40 caliber shells had been found. “I think there were two guys shooting. Chris, you know that round you recovered that hit the door frame? Do you still have it?”
They did.
“What caliber is it?”
“Nine millimeter.”
“Listen, do you mind going back there with me? Let’s just check. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that it’s a nine millimeter; I think it’s a forty. I know the property clerk is going to be pissed off, digging this shit up from seven years ago. It’s a pain in the ass, but let’s just do it. Humor me.”
It was a .40 caliber round.
When Chestnut had inherited the case from Miller, he’d been told that the round recovered from the pavement in front of the bar was 9 mm. He had never checked for himself. When he looked back at the file, he saw that even the old evidence sheet had noted that the round had been .40 caliber. He hadn’t checked it. He felt foolish and said so.
“It wasn’t even your fucking case to begin with,” Brennan reassured him. “But one thing I learned a long time ago: Don’t rely on what some cop told you somebody said, or what somebody says they did. Find out for yourself. Then you know it’s done, because you did it.”
So the scene was not as it had been envisioned. Bond had not simply been shot at close range by a single gunman. There had been two shooters: one near the victim, the other across the lot. Since there was no evidence of another 9 mm round in or around the building, even though one had been fired several times, it led Brennan to suspect that whoever was firing that gun had been primarily aiming, not at Bond, but at someone else. The two gunmen had been shooting at each other.
