The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  Brennan made six trips to Jackson over the next year and a half. Most of his time there was spent in the company of either Chestnut, Stanfill, or Donald. He tracked down dozens of witnesses and sought out Bond’s relatives and friends, including cops who had served alongside him. He met Angela Bond at the airport in Atlanta, where they had a long conversation. She replayed for him her memory of that chaotic, tragic morning.

  He developed a deeper feel for the victim. He got that Bond had been a ladies’ man and that he loved attention, and he heard the suspicions about his ties with criminals and drug dealers, but his own impression of the man ran deeper. Bond had clearly loved being a cop, and his race and upbringing made him a uniquely valuable one, even if his hometown force hadn’t recognized it. He was able to bridge the wall of hostility and suspicion between cops and community. Bond had disliked wearing his gun, often leaving it in his patrol car, where it was found the night of his death. He could hold his own physically with anyone, and he did not hesitate to show this off. Once, while reporting a robbery in progress, he said the suspect was fleeing on foot. “Give me thirty seconds,” he said. Sure enough, thirty seconds later, winded, he returned with the suspect in cuffs. He believed, as his sister said, in giving people the benefit of the doubt. He was a peacemaker. His instinct was not to confront people but to calm them, to reason with them. It was the role he played at Spanky’s when things got out of hand. Brennan could picture him jumping over the bar to break up a fight, absorbing some punishment yet shouting for everyone to calm down, and then steering the troublemaker out the door.

  Only in this case, tragically, the confrontation had not been defused.

  Brennan didn’t just interview witnesses, he brought them back to the parking lot of Hollywood Plaza to walk him through their memory of the night. This would prove, to Chestnut, the most useful of his tactics, because being at the crime scene not only helped them remember more clearly, it corrected what they misremembered. They could see, for instance, that only certain things could have been seen or heard from where they had been standing. It also allowed Brennan to more confidently fit their stories to the physical evidence.

  It helped that Brennan was not a cop, but it also helped that he approached everyone calmly and respectfully. He was fact-finding, not cross-examining. If someone’s story didn’t make sense, he didn’t accuse them of lying or lean on them or threaten; instead, he showed them how they had to be wrong.

  The best example was Charlie Reeves, who had testified with such certainty against Michael Robinson. He’d done his best since to avoid Chestnut. So when Brennan and the detective went to Reeves’s house, they stayed in the back seat of Brennan’s rented black Cadillac and sent the PI’s assistant, a woman, to the door.

  A jittery, hyper-expressive man with a history of cocaine troubles, Reeves didn’t answer the door. When Brennan’s assistant walked back out to the Caddy and leaned in to talk to him and Chestnut, Reeves stepped out, eyeing them nervously. Chestnut felt certain he was about to bolt, especially when he and Brennan stepped out of the car. Reeves was subject to court-ordered regular urine tests, and to the sergeant it looked like he had reason to worry. But in the struggle between flight and curiosity, curiosity prevailed.

  “Holy shit, man, they told me my uncle won the lottery!” he explained when Brennan and Chestnut approached. “I seen a brand-new Cadillac and a white lady at my door, so I figure it must be my uncle. That’s the only reason I answered the door.”

  Once he started talking, he couldn’t stop. Right there in the yard, he threw himself into a dramatic reenactment of the night Bond was shot, moving around his yard, crouching, throwing imaginary punches. At one point he dropped to the ground and kicked up his legs. Chestnut noticed an old woman walking nearby, carrying grocery bags. She slowed and stared. The detective could only wonder what she thought. Here was her neighbor, throwing a seeming fit, surrounded by two white men and a white woman. Chestnut waved to her, and she walked on hastily without looking back.

  Reeves had said all along that he had been standing right next to Bond when he was shot, so close that one of the bullets had passed right through his jacket. He had holes in his jacket to prove it. But when they took him to the parking lot, Brennan contradicted him.

  “There’s no way you could have been right next to Euhommie,” he said. He showed him a photo from the crime scene, indicating where Reeves had dropped his sunglasses and bandana, asking, “Whose shit was this?”

  “That was mine!”

  The objects were up next to the front wall of the bar, about ten feet or more from the victim. Brennan knew that one of the .40 caliber rounds, likely fired by Thomas, had ricocheted off the front door frame and shattered the window alongside it before coming to rest on the pavement nearby. Given where Reeves’s things had been found against the wall, it made sense that this was the round that had passed through his jacket.

  “We know you had to be by the fuckin’ window,” Brennan said.

  Reeves admitted that this made sense and altered his recollection. He now said that the only person close to his nephew had been Eric Cobb.

  Brennan tried to talk to Steve Thomas, who in the ensuing years had been released from prison. After arranging to meet the investigators at his place, Thomas wasn’t there when they showed up. Thomas’s brother phoned him and put him on speakerphone.

  “You were supposed to meet us here,” said Donald.

  Thomas made an excuse.

  “What are you, a pussy?” erupted Brennan. “Get your ass over here like you promised and look me in the fuckin’ eye like a man.”

  There was silence on Thomas’s end, and then he complained to Donald, “Why is he talking to me like that?”

  “I’m from New York,” said Brennan. “I talk like that to everybody.”

  Thomas stayed away.

  Brennan traveled with Donald to interview another witness, Daniel Cole, who was serving a prison term. They encountered a sour, unhelpful man. Cole told them that his father had been murdered when he was a child, and the police had done nothing about it. He said, “Why the fuck should I help you?” He then refused to answer Brennan’s questions. When Cole did speak, it was to offer a snide comment about the other witnesses Brennan mentioned.

  As the two detectives drove away from the prison, Donald remarked, “That was a complete waste of time.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Brennan.

  “He didn’t tell us a thing!”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “What?”

  “Remember when I brought up Eric Cobb and said that some people remembered that he had a gun that night? Cole said, ‘If fuckin’ Cobb had a gun, he was shooting it.’ Meaning, Cobb is a trigger-happy son of a bitch.”

  Angela Bond had told of Cobb on a table in the bar, waving a handgun, shouting “Where’s the motherfucker at?” or words to that effect. Others had also remembered this. If Cobb had been the only one standing close to Bond, could he have fired the mortal round?

  Cobb didn’t know he had become Brennan’s prime suspect when he was asked to pay a visit back to the crime scene. A stocky, middle-aged man, he had been a friend of the Bond family for years. Euhommie had overlooked his felony conviction to employ him as a security guard. Cobb appeared wary about answering questions, but he agreed to come along. As he paced through his movements that night, he confirmed the account he had given to police right after the shooting, placing himself just two feet from Bond when he fell. But he insisted that he had been unarmed. As a convicted felon, he was not allowed to possess a handgun.

  “What are you talkin’ about?” said Brennan. “There’s people who saw a gun in your hand!”

  Cobb had an explanation. He did have a gun that night, he said, but only later, after Bond had been shot. He said he had called his wife to tell her there was shooting at the bar, and that she had driven over immediately to bring him the gun.

  Brennan left Cobb with the other detectives, walked across the parking lo
t, and phoned Cobb’s wife. When she rolled up a few minutes later, he hustled out to the car to greet her first and asked if she had brought her husband a gun that night.

  She said she had not.

  On the evening of Tuesday, July 18, 2016, on his last visit to Jackson, Brennan delivered his answer to his clients, Perry and Sanders, and other Bond family members in a conference room at the city’s DoubleTree Hotel. Chestnut, Stanfill, and Donald were there, as was Jody Pickens, the area’s district attorney. Angela Bond couldn’t make the trip from Atlanta. Cobb was invited, and while he initially said he planned to attend, he didn’t show up. Perhaps he saw where things were headed.

  Brennan pieces together his findings painstakingly. He does his best thinking early in the morning when he can’t sleep. He ruminates about his cases, trying to complete the puzzles. He’s not happy unless everything fits, and then, when it does, he’s certain. His process is about more than physical evidence and memory; it involves everything he has learned about the people involved and what he knows about people in general. It had led him to understand how Eric Cobb had killed his good friend.

  There was a great deal of tension in the room. The family arrived with its long-standing resentment of the police. Pickens didn’t improve the mood by reminding everyone at the outset that seven years had elapsed, and that no matter what Brennan had found, his office would be bound by Tennessee’s statutes of limitations. This kicked off an exchange of grievances. Brennan lost his patience.

  “Hey, listen,” he shouted. “One thing I need all of you to do is be quiet and listen to what I have to say. I don’t want to be interrupted. Not once. I’m going to give you a presentation, and I’m going to tell you what happened to Euhommie. And after the end of it, you’re going to know exactly what happened. And then, when I’m done, you can ask me anything that you want.”

  The room quieted.

  Brennan then walked them through the scene step-by-step, digressing to point out how he had reached each of his conclusions. There was a fight inside the bar, which Bond had steered outside. Steve Thomas went to his car and retrieved a gun from under the hood—Brennan explained why he found this testimony believable. The .40 caliber shells found in a group on the lot about fifty feet away showed that shots had been fired from there, and a .40 caliber handgun was found at that site. The damaged front of the bar showed that a round had hit from that direction, and the round recovered from the front was consistent with that gun. The laser had shown how the angles of those shots lined up. Cobb had then stepped out the front door, to see Thomas either approaching with a gun or shooting. Despite his denial, Brennan was convinced that Cobb had a gun with him, a 9 mm. Standing near the building, he shot at Thomas, either returning fire or initiating it. Bond, the peacemaker, then tried to stop the shooting. Everything Brennan had learned about the victim suggested this is what the victim would have done. He reached for his friend’s gun—Reeves had said he heard his nephew say, “Give me the gun,” just before he was shot—and it went off. This explained the stippling around the death wound—Brennan had double-checked with the medical examiner to confirm the exact nature of the powder and burns.

  “The gun would have to have been fired from no more than two feet away,” Brennan said.

  This also explained the trajectory of the killing round. It had traveled downward through Bond’s torso. If Robinson or Thomas or anyone else had fired the shot from farther away, the trajectory of the bullet would have been upward, and there would have been no stippling. It also explained why one of the 9 mm shells was found below Bond’s feet where he lay on the pavement. It had been fired where Euhommie had been standing and then rolled downhill—the pavement sloped gently down. It was not clear that Cobb even realized in those moments that he had shot his friend. He had, according to Angela, run into the bar looking for the shooter. But Brennan was sure that Cobb eventually knew. He had questioned him in detail, and his evasive answers were revealing. He was not surprised that Cobb had not shown up.

  “It’s the only way it could have happened,” Brennan concluded. The room was silent. “OK,” he said, “Do you have any questions?”

  No one did. They all just looked at him. His explanation fit the facts and made sense. All of them had known both Euhommie and Eric.

  “I just want to know why that motherfucker never said anything!” one of Euhommie’s uncles complained.

  “Hey, listen,” Brennan said. “Be that as it may, this ultimately ends up being an accident. He thought he was doing his job. He was there for security, and he was trying to protect the club and protect Euhommie.”

  Pickens interrupted.

  “That’s a good theory,” he said, “but it’s just a theory.”

  “Hey, listen,” said Brennan, addressing the family. “I understand where the district attorney is coming from, but this ain’t no theory. This is exactly what happened.”

  And then something occurred that floored Chestnut. One by one, the family members present said that they had known it all along. Someone had heard that Cobb had told someone else that he knew who shot Euhommie. Another had heard that Eric had admitted it years earlier. There was agreement all around. Brennan had confirmed what they now said they had known all along.

  “I was so taken aback,” said the detective. “Jody Pickens, he about fell out of his chair. Like, ‘Wait a minute, you’ve known about this the whole time?’”

  They hadn’t. The story about Cobb’s “confession” had been nothing more than a rumor until Brennan’s careful reconstruction. He had congealed it into a certainty. If they had all known, why would Perry, Sanders, and Angela Bond have put up a $15,000 reward for tips and paid for posters on city buses? Why would Perry and Sanders have hired Brennan?

  “I told Ken at the beginning, I didn’t know what happened,” Perry told me. “He took our case, and he didn’t have to. He took a little hick town, Jackson, Tennessee, and came to check on us little people down here.” When Brennan finished, her opinion of the police, of Chris Chestnut in particular, and of Pickens had improved, and they were more attentive to her. “They saw that I hadn’t just been sitting on my thong,” she says. “I got all these people involved. I felt totally relieved when Ken was finished with my case.”

  The truth rarely pleases everyone. Brennan tells all of his clients that whatever their motive in hiring him, and whatever outcome they desire, he will attempt only one thing, to tell them exactly what happened. The rest he cannot control.

  No one in the Bond family or on the Jackson police force doubts that Brennan delivered in this case. Perry said she and Sanders feel Brennan did everything he promised he would. Angela told me that she had heard the rumor about Cobb but had never believed it. Knowing has not resolved all of the pain, bitterness, and division. Some in the family left the DoubleTree meeting disgruntled, especially after Pickens reiterated that it was too late to prosecute Cobb for either involuntary manslaughter, the most appropriate charge, or illegal gun possession. There was nothing his office could do.

  Cobb has never admitted to the charge, despite heroic efforts to persuade him.

  “I texted him, and he said he would meet me, and he didn’t,” says Perry. “We’re not vengeful. I wouldn’t do anything to him. But he won’t meet with us because he knows that we know.”

  Perry regrets her early suspicions of Euhommie’s wife, Angela. “It is not something I’m proud of,” she says. They have patched things up, somewhat.

  For her part, Angela regrets confronting Michael Robinson’s mother at the preliminary hearing. “You know, probably naturally I’m going to say ugly things because that’s my husband, but I probably shouldn’t have said what I said.” She remains angry at Brennan for, she says, refusing to lay the case out completely for her. She says he told her that she was not his client. Brennan says he did explain his finding to her.

  Chris Chestnut, now a lieutenant, is simply amazed by what Brennan accomplished. He calls it “magic.”

  “It was a
n absolute pleasure working with him. I’ll be honest with you; I wish I could afford to hire him on some other cold cases that I have right now, because I’m pretty confident that with his efforts and mine, I think we could get a lot of things solved.” He and Phil Stanfill said they learned things working with Brennan that they now routinely apply to their own cases.

  The Bond case will continue to stare down at Chestnut from his shelf until Cobb admits what happened. Chestnut recruited a prominent African American judge to reach out to Cobb in an effort to reassure him that there will be no criminal consequences for telling his story, to no avail.

  The detective has his own suspicions about why the family never told him what they had heard about Cobb: “The only mention of Eric Cobb is he’s on the other end of the parking lot working security and hears gunfire. None of the other witnesses put him anywhere around the shooting. I think it’s because they knew. I think the whole reason they came up with the Michael Robinson story was to protect Cobb. He’s known the family for years.”

  One of the uncles, Wilbur Bond, who positively identified Robinson as the shooter, had reason to hold a grudge against him—Robinson had punched him in the face several years earlier and knocked out some of his teeth.

  It is more likely that, with only a vague suspicion about Cobb, the family was reluctant to share the idea with police. He had been, after all, a friend.

  There will be no legal reckoning for the shooting of Euhommie Bond. The cop, the veteran, the celebrated ladies’ man, the brother, nephew, husband, and father, the determined peacemaker, trying to stop a gunfight outside his bar, was killed by a friend, victim of a violent world that he didn’t have the heart to leave.