Blood Ambush (3 page)

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Authors: Sheila Johnson

BOOK: Blood Ambush
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7
After confirming that his wife’s name was Martha Darlene Roberts, Vernon answered the officers’ questions with mostly the same information he had already given in his written statement. A few additional things came to light as he recalled details, such as a white convertible that came past his house while he was working on his chores, sometime between 6:00 and 7:00
P.M.
, turning around in the driveway of a house up the road, then driving back past the house, and a couple of shots he’d heard coming from the direction of the pond while he was outside the house, working on the pool. He believed, he said, that he’d possibly heard the shots after Darlene had called him for the last time, from Wal-Mart.
“I didn’t give it a thought,” he said of the gunshots. “That area is just covered up with deer and turkey, and she wasn’t late yet, so I didn’t think anything about it.”
Vernon also remembered seeing Williams and Sammons on the Gator.
“I saw the two guys on the Gator, and I thought they were down there weedeating around the pond so people could fish better,” he said, adding that Darlene’s son, Benji, had talked about doing that same thing on one occasion, because the grass and weeds were very tall around parts of the pond.
“That’s what I thought those guys were doing. I didn’t care if they fished in that pond. It’s not mine, so go ahead.”
Vernon said that when he was stopped by the officers on his way home, “I knew there was something bad, wrong.
“Heidi called, and I said, ‘Something’s wrong, there [are] police cars all over, the ambulance ...’
“Heidi is going to panic,” Vernon said. “She was very nervous about her mother, when she wasn’t able to get in touch with her. I went home thinking she’d probably be there already, but I got stopped. You said she’d been injured, but what happened? Did somebody shoot her?”
One of the officers said later that he had found it very odd that Vernon had not been more upset. He had not, at that point, been told whether or not his wife was dead, injured, or just exactly what it was that had happened to her, or why he was being interrogated.
“I just said to him that all I knew was that she was hurt bad,” the officer said.
Heidi called Vernon’s cell phone during the interview, and Vernon handed the phone to the deputy, who told her that she needed to come on over from Georgia, and the officers who would be there at her mother’s home would explain to her what had happened when she arrived.
During the course of the questioning, Vernon had been becoming increasingly agitated, and as the questions grew more personal, tempers began to flare.
“What about another woman in your life?”
“Never!” Vernon answered emphatically.
“Never!”
“Have you ever been in any trouble, or hit an ex-wife or anything?”
Vernon said the only trouble he’d ever been in was a charge of driving under the influence years earlier in Texas, and he’d never hit any of his wives. He had earlier reported his first wife as being Janice Dunaway, the mother of his two daughters, and his second wife was Barbara Ann Comeaux, who lived near Atlanta, he said. He and Darlene had been married for about four years.
“Who’s mad at your wife?” Lieutenant DeBerry asked.
“Nobody,” Vernon replied.
“Who’s mad at your wife?”
DeBerry shouted.
“Nobody!”
Vernon shouted back.
“Somebody was mad at her and knocked her in the head! Did you knock her in the head?”
“No!”
Vernon shouted. “I would never, ever hurt her, I cherished her with all my heart. We adored each other!”
Vernon claimed he would never be unfaithful to Darlene, no matter what.
“That’s what makes me think that something’s wrong,” Clifton said. “Something might have happened today between you and her that might have caused you so much anguish.... There’s no way, if you hurt this woman, that we’re not going to find out.”
“I told you on the way over here,” Vernon said, “I worshiped that woman.” He told the officers to have his hands tested for gunshot residue for having shot a gun that day. He and the officers then argued at length about whether he would get jealous if somebody hugged his wife, with DeBerry asking repeatedly if it would make him mad if a coworker or friend hugged his wife in front of him.
Vernon yelled, “My wife is injured and I’m sitting here listening to
this
?
This is crap!
I love my wife!”
Vernon was then asked if he’d found his wife with somebody else. He replied that Darlene had been taking antibiotics for a serious yeast infection.
“Do you think she’d try to be with anybody else like that?” he asked the officers, infuriated by their questions.
“There’s no two people on God’s earth that gets along all the time, never has a disagreement, never gets pissed with each other—it don’t happen,” DeBerry said. Vernon immediately disagreed, and said he and Darlene always got along.
“Now, if she’s going to be okay and I ask her, will she say you never disagreed over anything? If there’s something you need to tell us, tonight’s the night. Extenuating circumstances could cause a man to do something he’d never do otherwise in a million years. We’re offering you a chance to tell us now. Right now the district attorney will take everything into consideration—tomorrow’ll be different. Right now, whoever hurt your wife is behind the event. They need to be out front of it.”
Vernon talked again about his last call from Darlene when she called to see if he needed anything from Wal-Mart.
“The last thing I told her was that I loved her,” he said.
“Is that what you said right before you shot her, looked her in the eye and told her you loved her? You told me you never let her out of your sight, that’s what you said. Jealousy will eat you up. Now’s the time to help yourself—”
“I told her that on the phone!” Vernon interrupted. “Look at the phone records! She called me on her cell phone from the Wal-Mart parking lot! I’m not worried about Darlene being unfaithful. I love my wife. I didn’t have to worry about not trusting her because we genuinely loved each other, not because I was jealous of her! You did say she was injured, didn’t you?”
“I’m going to say she was hurt bad,” the officer said, repeating his earlier statement.
Vernon showed Clifton and DeBerry how to bring up the last numbers on his cell phone to verify the calls he’d sent and received that day. Then, as tensions eased a bit, he said that he and Darlene had a good life, living out in the country.
“My second wife hated it and couldn’t handle it,” he said, “and she moved back to Texas.”
Vernon was asked if he’d noticed a hard-cover black Dodge pickup in the area that day, or if he knew anyone who owned one, and he said no. Then he was asked if he owned a shotgun. His wife’s son, Benji, had left one at their house when he moved out after living with them for a time, he said. Benji had taken the shotgun, which had belonged to Darlene’s father, and he’d had the barrel sawed off. Darlene took it away from him and hid it somewhere in the house, Vernon said, but he did not know where it was.
When he was asked if he and Darlene had ever had any trouble with Benji, he said Benji and his mother had argued over his continuing use of drugs, calling it a “knock-down, drag-out fight,” after which Benji had moved out of their house and gone to live with his girlfriend in Rockmart, Georgia.
When asked if Darlene had any problems with her ex-husbands, Vernon said she did not. He made several disparaging comments about the character of one ex-husband, but he went on to say that she had never had “an ounce of trouble” from him. Her other ex-husband was the father of her two children, Benji and Heidi. There were no current problems with him, either, according to Vernon.
When the questioning concluded, Vernon agreed to his home being searched, and he was returned to the scene. A thorough search of the house, however, turned up nothing that could help with the investigation. So far, Vernon Roberts had an air-tight alibi.
8
Investigators spent a late night at work at the pond off County Road 941, with Investigator Mark Hicks, Lieutenant Jimmy DeBerry, and Chief Deputy Tim Hays staying overnight in the rain to protect the scene. The following morning, Jolly and his team, along with a large number of other officers, reported to the pasture at first light to begin searching the area for evidence again, starting to comb through the tall weeds looking for anything they had not been able to see earlier. Quite a few items had been collected the previous night, before it grew too dark to do a detailed search, but the deep, stamped-down layer of grass surrounding the pond could be hiding many crucial pieces of evidence, which would be more easily uncovered in the light of day.
Among the first and most obvious items that had already been recovered at the scene the previous evening were three shotgun shell casings, two blue and one red, and their wadding, found lying in the mud at the edge of the pond. Each piece was carefully bagged and labeled, to be tested for evidence in the event that the murder weapon was recovered. Some long strips of white cotton gauze had also been found and collected, one lying near the side of the Murano and one farther away, out in the field.
Most of the green plastic stretch film had remained looped around Darlene’s neck when her body was removed from the pond, but a couple of additional smaller pieces were found floating in the water; those had rough, jagged edges and looked as if they could have been ripped away from the main piece of green film by the shotgun blasts. They were all recovered and bagged.
The Nissan Murano was processed for evidence at its impound location, Larry’s Tire & Towing, in Centre, Alabama, by Investigator Jolly on the morning of April 7, along with Vernon Roberts’s brown GMC 1500 pickup truck, which had also been impounded until it could be thoroughly checked for evidence. There was nothing inside the pickup other than some personal items, which included an umbrella, a jacket, and some papers. A couple of red-brown stains on the headliner and passenger-side doorpost proved to be inconsequential.
The Nissan Murano, however, yielded much more pertinent evidence, including Darlene’s bags of groceries in the rear cargo area containing a receipt from Wal-Mart in Rome, Georgia, dated 6:22
P.M.
on April 6, 2006. There was also a recoil pad for the butt stock of a shotgun lying on the floorboard on the driver’s side of the vehicle. A hair was adhered to the recoil pad, and it was carefully collected along with the pad.
There were several red-brown stains inside the Murano, and swabs were taken for analysis. They were located on the headliner, the door and steering wheel, and the passenger-side doorpost. Jolly also processed the Murano for latent prints, but none were recovered. Extensive photos were taken of both vehicles.
While Jolly photographed and collected evidence from the vehicles, the other officers continued to search the scene and found quite a few more items. Approximately ten feet from where Darlene’s body was found, a chewed piece of gum lay on the bank of the pond. The back of a watch was also found lying nearby, and a broken bracelet—silver with pink stones—was found near the gate at the pasture entrance. Several other items, which would later prove to be unrelated to the case, were found at the pond, likely dropped there by some of the many people who had come there regularly to fish. There were also many footprints in the mud at the edge of the pond, but the water content of the soil was so high after the rain that the prints had very little definition, and photographs of the prints show them very blurred and containing standing water.
Two other items, which investigators believed would prove to be evidence in the case, had been found thrown out on the side of the road near the scene. Two traffic barriers marked
Floyd Co
with highway signs attached, one reading
BE PREPARED TO STOP
and the other
MEN WORKING
, were obviously the property of the road department in Floyd County, Georgia, and had very likely been picked up off the highway and transported over the state line into Alabama by someone other than Floyd County Road Department employees. They were tested for latent prints, but the Department of Forensic Sciences was unable to recover anything from them.
News of the murder of Darlene Roberts spread quickly, both in Cherokee County and in Rome, Georgia, with the news media reporting in detail about the discovery of her body in the farm pond. Her coworkers at Temple-Inland were shocked to learn that Darlene had been killed only a short time after they had last seen her leaving work for the evening. Ralph Stagner, the Temple-Inland plant manager, told
Rome News-Tribune
and
Cherokee County Herald
staff writer Kathy Roe that Darlene had been liked and respected by both management and employees at the plant.
“She was a true professional,” he said. “We are all deeply saddened by this, and we will miss her. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family.”
Cherokee County sheriff Larry Wilson gave the press as many details about the slaying as he was able to disclose at that point in the investigation, saying that his officers knew the type of weapon used, but they had not recovered it.
“We’ll see if we can come up with a motive and a suspect,” he said. “We want to talk to anyone, neighbors, anyone who may have seen something.” Wilson said autopsy results were not expected for several days, and he was concerned that the heavy rain and severe weather, which was expected, might destroy crucial evidence.
On April 7 and 8, officers fanned out around the community, going house to house to talk with any of the area’s residents who might have information. Several had already come forward to report seeing a black pickup truck with a hard bed cover in the area at the time, and others reported having heard shots. Most of those who saw the black truck had been able to give a description of its occupants, a large gray-haired man and a smaller woman with brown hair. Some reported the two seemed to be fighting, and had seen the man hit the woman. Others reported that it looked as though the woman’s face was red and she was crying.
Three of the officers conducted a roadblock on the morning of April 8 at the intersection of County Road 182 and County Road 941 in an effort to contact more possible witnesses. While there, one of the men, David Storey, noticed a garbage collection can sitting nearby with a bag protruding from it. Storey saw a paper sticking out of the bag with the name
Roberts
on it, and he and the other officers decided to check the bag in case it contained more evidence. A stained brown straw purse was inside, along with a pair of blue jeans and some paper towels that appeared to be bloodstained. They also found some blue masking tape with tan paint and what they believed to be bloodstains on it, with some hair stuck to it.
Those items, as it turned out, had no value to the investigation, since they had come from Vernon Roberts’s home improvement projects on the day of the murder, but another item inside the bag did prove to be useful. It was the hangtag from a brown Rosetti viscose tote, a new purse Darlene had recently bought and had been carrying on the day of her murder. The straw purse found in the garbage can had evidently been discarded in favor of the new one that Darlene had bought during a shopping trip with Heidi a few days previously. Since the new Rosetti purse had not been recovered at the scene, officers now had a good description of exactly what kind of purse they needed to be looking for.
Later on the morning of April 8, the investigators at the scene decided to try to search for the murder weapon in the murky pond. They thought it might have been thrown in there after the shooting. It would require some special equipment, which was requested and was soon en route. While the officers waited for it to arrive, a partial pair of eyeglasses was spotted, almost completely hidden in the weeds and grass. The left arm, lens, and nosepiece of the glasses were collected by Investigator Mark Hicks and were turned over to the ABI for testing. This would soon prove to be the most important piece of evidence that would be found at the scene, and it provided the investigators with the break they needed to move forward very quickly with the case from that point. But until the analysis of the glasses was completed, there were still very many interviews to conduct and statements to be given.
Sheriff Wilson told the press that there were “some possibilities” for suspects in the murder, but he did not disclose any further details. The owner of the broken eyeglasses would soon be identified he knew, and then much more information on the suspects would be made public, and arrests in the case would soon follow.

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