Chasing Gideon (31 page)

“And after these phone calls and letters, y'all would reconcile again?” Bell asks.

“Yes.”

“That pattern existed throughout your relationship with Rodney?”

“Yes.”

“Would he get you back with those nice gestures?”

“Yes.”

“And then it would deteriorate again?”

“Yes.”

“Then, in November 2007, did the defendant come see you [in Georgia]?”

“Yes.”

“You aware he was coming?”

“Yes.”

“Did anything out of the ordinary happen during that November 2007 visit?”

“Yes, he proposed to me. Everyone knew [he was going to do it] but me. We were all at my sister's house. He came in and got on his knees and proposed to me.”

“Did you think the relationship was going to improve when you married?”

“Yes.”

Doris agreed to move in with him after that. But she had to deal with her job. When she left New Jersey, Doris had taken a job in Georgia assisting mental health patients in supervised living apartments with grocery shopping and other chores. After Rodney proposed to her, she went back to New Jersey and was able to get her old job back. But Rodney did not seem happy to see her when she returned, and they fought immediately and repeatedly. In January 2008, she says, she left him for good, clearing out so quickly she
came with only the clothes on her back and returned to Covington, Georgia, where she moved in with her son, Gary Jones.

Rodney, she says, begged her to come back and sent her multiple letters. Beneath the bright fluorescent lights of the courtroom, the prosecutor places a handwritten letter—carefully printed but rife with errors—dated September 6, 2007, onto an overhead projector and reads it aloud.

The prosecutor removes this letter from the overhead projector and puts down another one. And another one. And another one.
Alternately threatening and cajoling, the letters paint a picture of a severely dysfunctional relationship, one that bears many of the telltale signs of a classic case of domestic violence. (Indeed, later in the trial it would come out that Rodney had twice punched Doris.) On the heels of this is a display of raw sexual or emotional need. “Please come back, I'm sorry,” he writes in another undated letter. “I just want you to show me love Doris meaning give me Sex and I will try to cover everything until you get back on your feet.” The correspondence, seen together, is full of the wild mood swings in their troubled and confusing relationship. Throughout the reading of the letters, Rodney stares down at the floral carpet, absorbed in the endlessly repeating pattern of beige and green petals, flowers unfolding in orderly, predictable rows.

Moving forward in time, the prosecutors direct Doris's attention to the week before the murder. In what has to be the most curious aspect of this murder, she tells the jury that she discovered signs of breaking and entering through the laundry room window several days before Gary was killed. Prosecutors return to this somewhat bizarre fact several times over the course of the trial, first while questioning Doris. Gary was killed on a Sunday, after returning from church, but Doris says that a strange thing happened on the Friday night before when she got home from work. “I washed some clothes and went to bed,” she says.

“And you woke up on Saturday?” Bell asks.

“Yes.”

“Anything unusual?”

“My laundry was all folded up and set on the couch in the living room.”

Someone switched the loads, waited for the dryer to finish, folded the garments. Gary had spent the night at his girlfriend's, so it couldn't have been him. Doris was puzzled the next morning. She went into the laundry room. That's when she discovered the window had been tampered with and alerted Gary that it looked like there had been a break-in. Someone had broken into the house, she believed, but they had merely switched the loads and folded the batch in the dryer.

“Did you see Gary that day?”

“Yes.”

“Any more conversation regarding the broken window?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“The screen was out to the woods,” Doris says, explaining that it looked like it had been thrown there near the edge of their property. “Around the window it looked like someone chopped away at the wood and the hole was a big one.” She told Gary, “Let's get that fixed and fix the alarm.” They had a security system in the house, but it wasn't activated at the time.

Two days later, someone broke in and murdered Gary.

“At the time period when Gary was killed, would you say the defendant was angry with you?” Bell asks.

“Yes.”

“Did you think of that at the time?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because he was in New Jersey and I was in Georgia.”

The prosecutor returns to questions about the night of the murder. “Did you notice anything of yours missing?”

“My social security card.”

“Anything of Gary's missing?”

“Gary's cell phone.”

When it was time for the defense to cross-examine her, Romond stood up, buttoning his beige suit jacket as he walked around the defense table to stand closer to the wood-paneled witness box. “Miss Jones,” he said. “We are very, very sorry for your loss.”

He had no further comment.

Over the next few hours and days, the prosecution continues to build its case against Rodney Young. A handwriting specialist testifies that the letter writer who penned the love notes to Doris—“I got my hope up high being with you so let that happen lets me, you and Aaliyah be the family were proposed to be”—is the same (semiliterate) person who scrawled threats in marker on the walls of Gary Jones's house the night of the murder—“Wes know what you look like.”

Another witness, like a character straight out of the old TV hit
Heat of the Night
, happened to be passing the time on the tailgate of his truck in the Covington town square at 7
P.M.
a few nights before the murder. A guy fitting Rodney Young's description pulled up next to him in a car with Jersey plates and asked for directions to Salem Road, the turn-off before Gary and Doris Jones's street.

A local gang investigator from the Newton County sheriff's office, James Fountain, offers his expert testimony regarding the writing on the wall at Gary Jones's home the night of the murder. “Do you know anything about ‘ATL mob'?” Zon asks him, referring to the graffiti scrawls that were scribbled around the various rooms.

“No,” he says.

“And did you reach out to other experts to see if they had heard of this gang, ATL mob?”

“No intel anywhere that I could find of a gang going by the moniker of ATL mob.”

Then, AT&T mobility engineer David Walker takes the stand and produces Rodney Young's phone records. The itemized list reveals which cell towers his calls were bouncing off on the days before, during, and after the murder. Walker charts a damning path from Rodney's home in New Jersey on March 25, 2008, all the way south down Interstate 95 and on into Atlanta, Georgia. He talks the jury through records showing that Rodney Young made a few phone calls that bounced off the cell tower less than a mile from the Joneses' house on Friday, March 28, on Saturday, March 29, on Sunday, March 30—the night of the murder.

 A co-worker of Rodney's from the canning factory in New Jersey testifies that he loaned Rodney his TomTom (GPS) the week before the murder. The TomTom is in evidence and one of the recent trips is to Salem Road, the road that leads to Gary Jones's subdivision.

A detective tells the jury how he found duct tape (like that used to bind Gary Jones), magic markers (like the kind used to graffiti the walls in Gary Jones's home), and a cell phone (registered to Gary Jones) in Rodney Young's basement bedroom in New Jersey a few weeks after the murder.

Things look very, very bad for Rodney Young. It seems clear that he did, in fact, brutally murder Gary Jones. And, on the morning of February 16, the prosecutors begin the day by playing a tape of an interview cops conducted with Rodney Young several weeks after the murder. There is no lawyer present to advise Rodney as they push him to confess. Rodney admits he went to Georgia to visit his sister in Atlanta.

“I got these phone records that indicate you were down there,” a cop says.

“I hadn't done anything,” Rodney says.

“I understand you maybe didn't do anything, but were you down there that weekend?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you tell me the truth the first time?”

“Because I was scared. I didn't kill anybody. I didn't have nothing against him.”

“Yes, everybody loved Gary. . . . You need to understand where this evidence is going. We have you picked out of a photo lineup, asking directions to that road on that day. . . . At the time that Gary was killed, your cell phone was pinging to a tower a mile from that house. You were at that house when he was killed. . . . Rodney, you're down there and go inside that house—”

Rodney tries to interrupt to say something.

“Listen to me. Listen to me, Rodney. Give me a chance to talk, then . . . you go in the house to scare her and want her to come back. You don't expect him to come home till 4:00 or 4:30, and you're writing on the house and Gary comes in. . . . Or the only alternative I see is you went down there and murdered him. You waited for him to come home and murdered him in his church clothes. Either you didn't plan this and it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, or you thought about it.”

“I never kill him.”

“You were there.”

“No, I wasn't.”

“You were there,” he insists. He asks a few more questions, then returns to the crime scene. “It often happens that victims bring things on themselves by their lifestyle and the decisions they make.
Gary wasn't one of them. He was coming home from church. He was in his church clothes. A good-looking guy trying to do the right thing and murdered right in his house.” He mentions the writing on the wall. “‘Get out of town. Get out of the state.' No gang-banger writes that on the wall. I cringed when I read that on the wall. It was almost painful to look at how someone was trying to make it look like something it was not. Just tell us what happened.”

“I didn't kill him.”

“You lied about being there. It doesn't make sense.”

“I didn't have no beef with him. . . .”

“Why didn't you tell us you were down there?

“Because I was scared.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“I gave you a swab and everything,” Rodney says, referring to the DNA swab he'd agreed to. (No DNA evidence ultimately connected him to the crime.)

The two detectives questioning him circle around with their questions for several minutes, growing increasingly volatile, raising their voices, and then calming down to try and coax him into a confession. “You are responsible for a death. I'm not characterizing it as a murder. I don't know when he came in and what kind of misunderstandings might have taken place. . . . You, based upon everything we know, you are not going anywhere except to Georgia. Do you understand that?” he says. The specter of the death penalty—illegal in New Jersey, handed down with frequency in Georgia—hangs heavy in the room. “At this point, I want to know the truth. . . . You need to have your side of the story out because this is your opportunity. . . . You're a man, a big man. . . . I'll tell you what a jury's going to think. . . . A jury is going to say you were waiting for a moment to strike, and then you struck. It is you. The only thing left is for you to say to me, man, I didn't mean to do it.”

“I ain't kill nobody. I ain't kill nobody.”

“You did.”

“I didn't kill nobody.”

The detective, yelling now, interrupts him. “You killed him and you know you did. . . . You know he was a good person. You regret this ever happened, but you need to say it.”

“I didn't. . . .”

“You did it, and I just want to know why.”

“I didn't. Why you say I did it?”

“You!”
Bang on the table.
“Were!”
Bang.
“There!”
Bang.
Silence. “I feel sorry for you.”

“Why you feel sorry?”

“You are no less of a person or no less valuable in the eyes of God. I'm not a perfect person. I made a lot of mistakes. And honestly, this is bigger than you and I. You know there is a God and I know there is a God. And he is looking down on us right now.” He says he knows Rodney, after doing this, can't live with himself, can't sleep at night.