LAURA Jean Ackerson was born on April 30, 1984, to Rodger and Brenda Ackerson in Hastings, Michigan, the only city in rural Barry County in the southwest corner of the state. There were six other children in the family, including her father’s son, Jason, who was three years older than Laura.
When Laura was a toddler, Rodger and Brenda separated. The battle of unsubstantiated allegations and contentious finger-pointing that lead to the divorce inflicted emotional scars on everyone, fracturing family relationships and leaving the children with conflicting loyalties. In Laura, the long-term emotional damage was apparent even after she reached adulthood.
In 1996, Laura and her mother moved to Iowa. Laura attended Lynnville-Sully High School in the tiny town of Sully and graduated in 2003 (a year later than she should have, due to the many disruptions in her home life).
Her half brother, Jason, left Michigan for North Carolina when he turned twenty-two, though he and Laura continued to keep in touch by phone a couple of times a month. Not long after Jason got a place in Youngsville, a half-hour drive northeast of Raleigh, Laura headed south to join him. Dead-end jobs, worse relationship choices, and frustrations with her home life had left Laura yearning for a new start. Although Youngsville was located in the prosperous and thriving Research Triangle area of North Carolina, it was still a small, rural town with a population under twelve hundred. It certainly wasn’t a hotbed of employment opportunities, nor was it full of the entertainments and activities a twenty-year-old woman would crave. Laura lived there with her brother for six months before setting out for the brighter life of the far more cosmopolitan city of Raleigh to find a job and a place of her own.
In 2004, Laura started working for an Applebee’s restaurant in Raleigh. She had the right stuff to be a good waitress: a cheerful, perky personality and girl-next-door good looks with an engaging smile and shoulder-length brown hair. There she met coworker Heidi Schumacher, a bright young woman with an equally sweet smile and longer hair that she sometimes wore up. The two women hit it off right away. After a short while, they both moved on to new jobs, initially together at the Front Row Sports Bar, though Heidi soon moved on to pursue an insurance career.
Laura had started taking online classes at Kirkwood Community College while living with her brother, and after earning her associate of arts degree from Kirkwood in 2005, she thought about a career in real estate, and took a seventy-five-hour prelicensing course at JY Monk Real Estate School that same year. Her natural talents and interests were stimulated, however, by two classes she took at the community college, one in graphic design and the other in marketing. She decided to focus on developing her graphic-arts skills and obtaining the necessary marketing acumen needed to start her own business. In her spare time, by using the Internet, the library and networking, Laura built on her academic introduction, absorbing all the knowledge she could to pave the path for her future. And to pay the bills in the meantime, she also worked for Bassett Furniture Direct in Raleigh doing retail sales and helping customers with decorating solutions.
Even though they were on different trajectories, the two friends continued to stay in contact through regular e-mail, live chat and phone calls along with occasional face-to-face meetings. From time to time, Heidi had Laura over to her parents’ house in Wake Forest, situated between Raleigh and Youngsville. Before long, Laura was like a part of their family. It filled a void in her life since, except for her brother Jason, the rest of her relatives were in the Midwest.
In mid-April 2007, Laura called Jason bubbling over with excitement because of the new romance in her life. She told him about Grant Hayes, a great new guy she was seeing. Jason hoped that his little sister was embarking on a good relationship but knew the odds weren’t in her favor. Her fractured family life and rocky high school experience had left her naïve, immature and vulnerable.
At the end of that month, Heidi returned from nearly two months of insurance training in Chicago. Laura greeted her friend with the news that she had a big surprise. When they got together at an Italian restaurant to celebrate Laura’s twenty-third birthday on April 30, Heidi could see immediately that her friend was very excited. It went far beyond her regular perkiness; Laura seemed to hum and vibrate with high emotion.
Laura quickly blurted out: “I got married! Surprise!” She explained that she and Grant had exchanged vows in front of the justice of the peace in Raleigh earlier that very day.
Heidi was knocked off balance over the news—she didn’t know Grant Hayes, and this all seemed so sudden, nearly surreal. She covered her shock with a smile and said, “Well, awesome.”
It turned out that Grant, Laura’s new husband, was a musician, who’d be performing at the restaurant that same night. Laura introduced Heidi to him out in the parking lot. Grant gave Heidi a hug, and she returned it while assessing the shorter, African-American man with a shaved head standing in front of her. Heidi thought that he looked familiar, but it took her a moment to realize that he was the same musician who’d been playing at the Blue Martini Bar and Lounge on South Wilmington Street, where she and Laura had gone together right before Heidi left for Chicago. She knew that Laura had spoken to Grant on his break between sets that night, but had no idea that there had been any further contact between the two of them.
She wasn’t impressed; in fact, she was certain Laura could do better. But while her misgivings were immediate, Heidi sincerely hoped that they were groundless and that her friend’s newfound happiness would never end.
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GRANT Ruffin Hayes III was born to Patsy and Grant Hayes Junior on April 30, 1979. He grew up with one sister, Grantina, whom everyone called Tina. According to his mother, Grant was a “sweet child—he was very docile.” In high school, she said, her son was so charming “that all the girls liked him.” Being able to play guitar added to his popularity, and even while still a teenager, he was good enough to perform on the Raleigh nightclub scene.
When he was eighteen, he married a ballerina named Emily Lubbers and moved down to Greenville, North Carolina. Grant said that she and her dancing were the inspiration for many of the songs he wrote. Emily attended school at East Carolina University and worked a job to support the couple. Grant was frustrated in his attempts to secure work that suited him. And that was a sticking point: Grant always seemed to think he was too good for any of the jobs he was qualified to get.
The relationship dissolved rather quickly. As it disintegrated, Grant fell into a deep funk and sought psychiatric treatment. He was prescribed medications for depression and bipolar disorder, including lithium. Then he moved back to Raleigh.
According to a close friend, the religious instruction Grant had received growing up remained apparent in his life. He regularly attended church, made prayer an essential part of every day and studied the Bible faithfully until 2003. But then, the friend said, Grant turned his religious fervor over to Tupac Shakur’s music, learning all the lyrics of Tupac songs just as he once learned Bible verses. Grant began to spend most of his time talking to others by relating tales from the life of Tupac.
Soon after, he started drinking, smoking marijuana and experimenting with cocaine and heroin. Through this period, Grant still worked hard, made money, took his medication as prescribed, and seemingly maintained control over his mental illness. But after someone gave him 2C-E, a synthetic hallucinogen, Grant couldn’t get enough of it. He was hooked on the intense visual hallucinations that many users said were more vivid than those experienced under the influence of LSD. Although the effects of each dose only lasted for six to ten hours, the drug tended to alter perception throughout the next day.
Grant snorted it regularly and, within weeks, his friend said, Grant was no longer capable of having a “normal, business-style conversation.” He was consumed by delusions of grandeur and often made no sense at all. “It seemed he’d started a habit of believing the first thing that popped into his head. He’d continue trains of thought to nowhere and then start a new one in a split second. He had lost something—something in his mind. A part of him wasn’t there anymore,” his friend said.
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ONE night in late 2006, as he performed at a venue, a twenty-two-year-old woman, Laura Ackerson, caught his eye. She attended a few more of his shows and once brought Heidi with her to a performance before her friend went out of town. Right after that, Grant and Laura started dating. Laura was taken by the fact that she and Grant shared a birthday—it made their coming together seem like fate.
It was on their next birthday, April 30, 2007, that they exchanged vows before a justice of the peace. Laura turned twenty-three that day, Grant twenty-eight.