AMANDA Hayes started out her cross-examination looking confident, her innocent face and sweet voice totally intact. She didn’t flinch when Assistant District Attorney Becky Holt asked, “Did you yourself take pieces of Laura Ackerson and start throwing them into the water?”
“Ma’am, I never saw anything.”
Amanda answered the state’s questions, telling the jury about the boat rocking and her exhortations to Grant to be still or he would capsize the boat. While all the while, Amanda said, she was paddling and bailing simultaneously.
“What were you doing out on that boat that night? What was your plan?” Holt asked.
“I didn’t have a plan. I was just doing whatever he told me to do.”
“Miss Hayes, isn’t it true when you were out on the boat, you were taking Laura Ackerson’s remains . . .”
“Ma’am, I never saw anything.”
“Wait till I finish the question before you start answering. Isn’t it true that you were taking Laura Ackerson’s remains, which included her torso and her head and parts of her leg, and throwing them over the side of the boat?”
“Again,” Amanda said in a sugary sweet voice, “I never saw anything that was going on behind me.”
“You’re saying you were in the back of the boat and you didn’t see anything going on behind you?”
“I was facing toward the water. That is correct.”
“Well, what could you hear? What could you smell?”
“I heard the animals and, honestly, I didn’t smell anything.”
“Don’t you remember saying on a previous occasion, it smelled so bad it was making your stomach roil?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t recall that.”
“You testified earlier that, that Monday night, Shelton had come home and you started talking with him about his business. You talked to him about wild pigs?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You talked with him about whether they would eat human remains?”
“Yes, ma’am, I did.”
“You talked with him about alligators?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You talked with him about whether alligators would eat human remains?”
“I don’t remember exactly the entire conversation but, yes, to generalize, yes, I was asking him different questions. I had just found out and he was my first source and I was just asking him because if anyone knew, he would, at this point.”
“So let me get this straight: you just found out according to your testimony . . . that Laura Ackerson was with you there in Texas . . . and you needed to dispose of her body?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s correct.”
“And your response to that is to wait until your nephew got there and ask him if wild pigs ate human remains, if alligators ate human remains? What did he tell you? Did he tell you whether or not wild pigs will eat human remains?”
“Yes, ma’am, he did say that wild pigs would eat anything. Yes, ma’am, he did.”
“Did he tell you that alligators would eat human remains?”
“I don’t really recall what he said about the alligators and remains, honestly. I know my sister told me before that they did go alligator hunting and I don’t really recall. But she said that they had gone over into that area.”
“You knew there were alligators in that area before you got in the Dodge Durango and traveled across the country to your sister’s house, didn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Amanda replied, but insisted “that is not at all why I was going to my sister’s.”
Becky Holt then switched over to Amanda’s conversation with her sister Karen Berry. “And your testimony is that on the morning of the nineteenth, you told your sister . . . that Laura was dead?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s correct.”
“At that time, you told her that you had done it.”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s correct.”
“And you asked for her help to help get rid of Laura’s remains?”
“Yes, ma’am. Can I explain?”
“Sure,” Holt answered.
“I was doing that because Grant told me we needed to tell her that. It was not my idea to tell her, it was his idea for me to tell her and what to tell her because he felt that was the only way she was going to help us. And at that point, that was the only solution that he had.”
“And did she help you?”
“Very basically.”
“And she helped at that point by showing you the hog pen?”
“She helped by keeping the children safe.”
Holt asked Amanda in an incredulous tone of voice about her story regarding the septic system, with Amanda painting herself as someone who was just following Grant and Karen around without a thought in her head.
Then Holt asked, “Okay, tell me how this happens. When you say, ‘We want to get rid of a body, how do we do it?’ How did you end up at the hog pen?”
“I honestly don’t have an answer for that question. I mean, I was just following them. We were just kind of brainstorming. I don’t think there was much rational thinking at this point at all, from anybody.”
“What I’m trying to understand, Ms. Hayes, and ask you about is, you’ve indicated that you go to your sister and say, ‘I have brought you the body of the mother of these two boys that I brought to your house. I need help disposing of this body,’ and you all being a brainstorming session to come up with solutions and ideas?”
“Well, first of all, I did not intentionally take a dead body to my sister’s house. It was a position I was put in involuntarily, totally against my will. I would have never, ever, ever in a gazillion years done such a thing—ever.”
“You would have never taken a body to your sister’s house to dispose of . . .”
“Never.”
“And yet, when you were asked to help get rid of a body, your response is to set down and, first of all, ask your nephew for ideas about alligators and wild pigs and then to talk to your sister about throwing her into a septic, going to a hog pen and doing something?”
“Honestly, ma’am, I wasn’t really asking, I was told . . .”
“Told what?”
“He told me I had to help him.”
“When you were going through the brainstorming session with your sister and Grant Hayes, at some point, you all settled on acid?”
“I think that Grant came up with that idea and we let him go with it. We weren’t going to argue, dispute with him or anything anymore.”
“And what was the acid idea?”
“Honestly, I don’t know one hundred percent.”
“What percent do you know?”
“I just know that he said he wanted some—was going to get some acid. What or how he intended to use it, I don’t know. He didn’t share that information with me.”
Holt questioned her about the purchase of the acid and again, Amanda played the innocent empty-headed blonde who had no idea of what was happening, claiming she wasn’t looking the right direction when Grant loaded the acid into the truck.
“When did you realize there was acid in the truck?” Holt asked.
“Whenever he asked me to get rid of it the next day.”
Amanda then responded to questions about her activities on Friday morning after they’d left the hotel. She said they went to attorney Ford Coley’s office in Kinston and spent a long time there before going to Grant’s parents’ house.
At that point, court adjourned for the day. But Becky Holt wasn’t done with Amanda Hayes yet.
—
THE next morning, Holt questioned Amanda about the time when little Grant was with them in New York. “At some point, you and Grant decided you weren’t going to send little Grant back, is that right?”
“It was Grant’s decision.”
“Do you recall telling Dr. Calloway that you and Grant didn’t want to return Grant IV to Laura?”
Amanda answered that they had had a discussion about it and that she had told Dr. Calloway that Laura was untrustworthy and had “done several things that were not on the up and up, it appeared to me.” She then denied that the plane ticket she bought for Laura to fly up to New York was in exchange for dropping the lawsuit.
Holt continued on to the move down to North Carolina, which Amanda had said on direct was only supposed to be for three months. If so, Holt asked, why did Amanda sign “a lease for a year?”
“Yes, ma’am, ’cause once I got there I realized it was definitely going to take longer than three months.” She added that she had intended to sublet or wiggle out of the lease in some other way.
Amanda continued on, painting herself as the peacekeeper who urged her husband to let Laura have the boys. She said she told him that if all Laura wanted was money, then she’d give the boys back as soon as she realized how difficult it was to work, go to school and be a single mom.
Amanda then launched again into her story of what happened on July 13, 2011, adding a few details to her earlier testimony.
Once more, she placed herself in the bedroom with the three children watching the animated movie Cars at Grant’s instruction. Amanda said she emerged to take Lily to the changing table and saw Grant and Laura sitting at a table looking over a document. She read over Grant’s shoulder and became very upset because they had discussed Laura keeping the kids and now he was offering her twenty-five thousand dollars that they didn’t have.
“I was upset at both of them. I just turned around and walked off. I didn’t want to be around either of them. That’s when Laura asked to hold the baby and I just ignored her. I didn’t want her to hold the baby. I didn’t want to be around either one of them. And it upset her, ’cause she said, ‘You have my kids and you won’t even let me hold yours?’” Amanda said then that Laura “approached me, I guess she tripped over the rug. She bumped into me. But Grant saw the whole thing and he came to her and he just grabbed her to pull her back.”
Amanda said she just huddled around the baby as Grant and Laura were struggling and Laura yelled, “Get your hands off of me!”
Amanda then reiterated the same tale as before, about Grant sending her and the kids out, but now added that she first went and got a pack of cigarettes for herself and slushies for the boys. She said that little Grant needed to go to the bathroom but she took him over to the far side of the drive and let him “pee-pee in the grass.”
Next, she said, she stopped at Wendy’s and got a soda for herself. After that, she drove to the mall and drove around the parking lot. She had planned to take them inside to walk a bit but they had all fallen asleep, so she just kept driving. “When I returned home, Laura’s car was still there. When I started to get out of the car, little Grant was hungry and I knew Grant hadn’t gotten to the grocery store to get something for dinner so I took them to get something to eat.”
Amanda interjected that when she saw Laura’s car was still there, she assumed that “the ambulance had already come and Grant rode with Laura to the hospital. When I left the Chick-fil-A, Lily was crying really hard, so I drove around to try to calm her down but she kept screaming.”
After a stop to console her, Amanda said, she went home and Grant told her Laura was fine. In the next series of questions, Holt talked to Amanda about her family. Amanda mentioned that she was upset with her siblings for disposing of their mother’s ashes without speaking to her about it.
She contradicted her nephew’s testimony about moving the piece of furniture, and said both of her nephews and her sister were mistaken about the time when it was unloaded from the trailer.
Becky Holt then asked, “You testified that Laura called twice a day, every day, to talk to those boys.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did she call Thursday?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Did she call Friday?”
“Again, not to my knowledge.”
“Did you have your phone on Thursday?”
“Yes, the phone was always on.”
Holt next asked about Randy Miller and Amanda admitted that he was her private investigator. “Were you aware in August [2011] that he went to the Wal-Mart inquiring about the saw purchase?”
“It’s possible.”
“And that was prior to getting any discovery, prior to the police department even knowing about the saw?”
“It was before I got any discovery, that’s correct.”
Holt then wanted to know if Amanda had been in communication with Grant at that time and, if so, how they’d communicated. Amanda said, “Several different ways. Whenever I was incarcerated, he contacted me through the pod telephone system, if you will, and he told me that I needed to keep my mouth shut and not trust anybody—that there were a lot of crooked people in the system.”
When Holt asked for an explanation, Amanda said, “You actually speak with people through the sink. . . . There’s several floors, I believe ten floors. And I believe if you blow water out of your sink, you can communicate on difference floors. . . . One of the girls told me to go to my room and that he was trying to speak to me.”
When asked if she shared information with others in the jail, Amanda claimed it was very minimal. “My attorney advised me from the get-go not to speak about my case,” she said.
“Do you know an individual named Michaela Haywood?”
“I met her one time when I first came but I did not have a conversation with her in regards to my case—no, I did not.”
“Do you recall telling her that when Laura came over to your house on July 13 that she fell and she didn’t seem to be moving?”
“No, I don’t recall that.”
“Do you recall telling her that you and Grant tried to wake her up by putting a wet towel on her face?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Do you recall telling Ms. Haywood that you had taken Laura’s body out to the boat to dump in the creek in hopes that the alligators would eat it and that the alligators were at the other end?”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t tell her that.”
“Do you recall telling her that your sister called the police?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You believed for a time that your sister called the police, didn’t you?”
“I was upset at my sister . . . because I lost my baby and I felt my sister had something to do with me losing my baby.”
“Did you believe your sister called the police?”
“I believed my sister had spoke to the police, that’s correct.”
“And you were upset with her for doing that, weren’t you?”
“I was upset—yes, I was.”
“You were also upset at Sha for turning over ‘Broomstick Rider,’ weren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t say I was upset with her over that. I was upset because I wanted her to try to stay out of it. I was just trying to protect her.”
Holt then brought up another inmate, Michelle Clark, and Amanda also denied speaking to her about the events, too. “So it’s your testimony today that you never told Michelle Clark that Grant Hayes stabbed Laura to death and cut her up and put her into coolers?”
“No, ma’am, I did not.”
“And it’s your testimony here today that they—meaning you and Grant—loaded up the coolers and went to Texas?”
“I never told her that—ever.”
“And finally, you don’t recall telling her that you were there when Grant did the dumping and it was stinking, it made your stomach roll and you were wearing gloves when you did it?”
“Again, I never had a conversation with Michelle Clark about my case in any shape, form or fashion,” Amanda insisted.
Holt went through questions about what the two other inmates said Amanda told them, and got denials on each detail. Then Holt asked, “Miss Hayes, you loved little Grant and Gentle, didn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. I still do.”
“And you wanted them as part of your life. You wanted them as a family so you could travel the world.”
“I loved to travel. I traveled all my entire life since I was a little kid so, yes, I loved to travel. I married Grant Hayes and so I knew that Grant and Gentle would be part of my life,” she said, adding that, “Yes, so I would like them to be able to travel, too. That doesn’t mean I was trying to eliminate or take them away from their mother in any shape, form or fashion.”
On re-direct, Amanda’s lawyer Johnny Gaskins asked about Grant’s variety show in New York and then jumped to asking about Grant telling Amanda that Laura did not want to go to the hospital, then delved into the origin of the bleach stain. Amanda said that the kids had knocked over the bucket that Grant used to clean the carpet and caused that discoloration by the door.
Gaskins then covered much of the same territory that he had during direct, over the objections of the prosecution, and wrapped up with a few repetitive questions about the boat.
Holt plunged into that topic herself. “Mr. Gaskins just asked you about the boat and what was happening on the boat. What you testified was, ‘I knew what Grant was doing’?”
“That’s correct.”
“But that’s not what you said yesterday. You said you were in your own little world, listening to the animals and looking towards the back of the boat, bailing out or having no idea what was in the boat and having no idea what Grant was doing?”
A hard expression crept across Amanda’s face. “I knew what he was doing—that is correct.”
“Tell the jury what he was doing right now.”
Amanda’s voice turned harsh and sounded angry. “I’m sure that they just heard me. I knew what he was doing.”
“I didn’t,” Holt pushed. “What was he doing?”
“He was getting rid of Laura’s body,” Amanda said, her voice strained as she struggled to control her features.
“Okay. How was he doing that?”
“I am assuming he was putting it in the water.”
“Okay. Could you hear the splash as her head went into the water?”
“Again, I heard lots of things. I heard splashing noises. I heard animals. I heard lots of animals.”
“What kind of animals did you hear?”
“I don’t know what kind of animals they were. I have no idea.”
“So, what you recall about the boat trip is that there were splashing noises and there were animals and you were bailing out the boat.”
“Yes, that’s correct, and I was trying to keep the boat from going into the grassy areas.”
“And why was that?”
“Because I didn’t know what was in those grassy areas.”
“So during the time you were out in the boat, knowing that Grant Hayes is taking Laura Ackerson—the pieces of her body—and throwing them into the water, what you’re concerned about is your personal safety and the animals that are in the water?”
Amanda regained control of her demeanor and again spoke in the voice of a little, innocent girl. “I am concerned about my safety. I am afraid he’s going to tip the boat over, we’re going into the water—I’m afraid of a lot of things. I don’t think you can imagine the kind of fear I was under. I honestly don’t think you can imagine.”
“The fear that you were under was that the boat would tip over and the animals would . . .”
“I had lots and lots of fear.”
“Thank you,” Holt said with disgust dripping off each word. “I don’t have any more questions.”