Nancy Grace - Murder in the Courthouse

They’d sat in the home’s little living room, Dana clutching a handkerchief, her husband’s arm around her shoulder… and they told her. A woman’s body had washed ashore Tybee Island. Hours later, a tiny baby girl who looked like a shiny pink baby doll in a store had followed her mommy in the next tide.

Dana Love’s voice was dead as she remembered the funeral. The two were buried together, with Julie Love gently cradling her baby’s remains in her own dead arms inside the coffin.

When her testimony ended, a silence fell on the courtroom like a spell. Even DelVecchio was not brazen enough to follow with cross. The judge sent the jury out and they had shuffled without a sound from their seats and into their adjoining room.

Out of the jury’s hearing, DelVecchio announced there would be no cross of Dana Love. Newbies in the audience may have believed his decision was out of respect for Dana Love. But Hailey knew better. He had to know that if he were perceived as attacking Julie’s mother, it would only work against his client. For once, DelVecchio voluntarily sat down and shut up without being ordered to. It was a first and, very likely, a last in Mikey DelVecchio’s career.

Dana Love was the state’s last witness. The defense responded with a string of experts to refute that Julie Love had been killed at all.

They relied on the fact that there was so little of Julie’s body left, cause of death could not be determined. They argued that plastic twine tied around the bones that had once been Julie Love’s ankles could have become entwined around her in the water… twine possibly from a commercial fishing boat.

Ignoring Adams’s multiple affairs during the marriage-including the one in which he was engaged at the time of Julie’s death-was the only way to address the appearance and testimony of Cynthia Gresham, just one of the so-called “other women.” The defense skillfully argued that a cheater does not a murderer make.

DelVecchio carefully avoided pressing too much with his assertion Julie was not murdered at all… that being, if she wasn’t murdered… how did she die and end up at the bottom of the Savannah River, washing up on nearby Tybee Island? When Dana had called Julie later on, there was no answer. That was highly unusual. After church the next day, Dana and Malcolm drove over to check on her. Julie’s car was there, but when Dana went in with her key she discovered Julie wasn’t home. Her dog, Daisy, was gone too, but her leash was still hanging by the front door where Julie kept it handy for walks.

They’d left a message on the front door, assuming she was out walking Daisy. It was only much later, suppertime, around 6 PM, that they’d circled back and called Todd on his cell and, still, no one would answer the home phone. Todd said he got home to find Julie and the dog gone.

At night? It was fast getting dark. Dana knew in her bones something was horribly wrong and it was she, Dana, who called the police, not Julie’s husband, Todd Adams. So if all this was true as Todd Adams claimed… then what happened?

A nine months pregnant woman was kidnapped from a park two blocks from her house by a stranger, an unknown assailant, and bound at the feet and likely the hands, and thrown into the river? A chunk of cement washing ashore along with her body? Discovered missing by her husband who never called police? Not likely. Statistically almost impossible.

Neither Dana nor Julie’s father ID’d the bodies. Police used DNA from Julie’s toothbrush to make the identification in order to spare them the pain. There wasn’t much left of Julie’s body after being underwater for so long.

The jury had to do the right thing. They had to convict Todd Adams. Next would be the death-penalty phase. When a death penalty was sought by the state, the trial was bifurcated, or tried in two halves. First was the guilt-innocence phase. Assuming a guilty verdict was returned, the same jury moved on to the sentencing phase during which the jury would decide his ultimate fate and sentence the defendant themselves. If they locked or mistried at that phase, the judge would either sentence the defendant himself or the state could re-try the sentencing portion of the trial.

Hailey replayed the closing arguments and the testimony of Dana Love again in her mind. There was no way this guy was going to walk.

Just then, a burst of whispers rippled across the courtroom when the calendar clerk went to sit briefly at her position near the judge. She would be present when any verdict was reached, as it signaled the disposition of an indictment assigned to her courtroom. But it was short-lived. She merely gathered a stack of papers pertaining to another plea and arraignment calendar and left by the same door through which she entered.

At this point, no one, reporters, families, press, or court watchers, dared leave the courtroom or its near vicinity for fear of missing the verdict.

There had to be at least twenty armed sheriffs around the courtroom’s perimeter. Stationed in front of every towering window, door, and in between, they kept stern faces, their service revolvers in plain view. Their presence and demeanor only added to the atmosphere.

And then, it buzzed. An electric surge coursed through Hailey’s body, lasting less than a second… a physical response to her immediate realization. This was it. It wasn’t a question, they didn’t want to halt deliberations for another day, they didn’t want another exhibit brought back to the courtroom, no read-backs of testimony, and no soft drink orders. They had reached a verdict. She knew it in her bones.

There was a moment when everyone and everything seemed to freeze, standing still in their places followed by a mini-pandemonium. Papers rustling, reporters sending frantic emails and texts, movement in general.

The door to the right of the judge’s bench that looked exactly like the paneled wall, blending in without so much as a doorknob to suggest it was in fact a door, opened from within. Out came Todd Adams in handcuffs with two armed sheriffs on either side of him. This was typically a time many defendants would make a run for it… just before a jury verdict that would likely send them to jail for life. Or in Todd Adams’s case, to a punishment-phase trial and about a decade on Georgia’s Death Row followed by the electric chair.

But as always, he looked undaunted. Head thrown back, shoulders wide in what looked to be a Gucci suit, he looked for all the world like a winning quarterback strutting across the field. A half smile was playing at one corner of his lips. What did he know?

He looked calm, cool, and confident. He didn’t seem worried about a thing! Not in the least, actually. Hailey’s eyebrows knitted together. How could this be?

Hailey stretched around the man in front of her to check on the Love family. They sat motionless with stricken looks on their faces. Dana Love couldn’t stand, draped forward and to the side, crying into a white handkerchief.

On the other side of the well, Tish Adams, clutching the top of her portable oxygen tank as if to bolster herself, steadily held the gaze of her son as he passed just feet from her, his dad’s arm around Tish’s shoulders. They stood rooted to their spot.

It took only a minute or so before the bailiff pounded loudly with the gavel. “Hear ye, hear ye! The Superior Court of Chatham County is now in session! The Honorable Luther Alverson on the bench! All rise!”

Everyone in the courtroom, without exception, stood as Alverson blew onto the bench, his long black robes billowing out behind him.

Dana Love had to be helped up in order to stand, her husband, Malcolm, keeping a firm arm supporting her waist on her left side, the other holding her at her right elbow. Her head had lolled slightly back, her face white. She looked as if she were reliving her daughter’s horrible death, being forced to remember the beautiful, pink, pristine baby girl who’d been set free from Julie Love’s uterus underwater.