The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - Devil in the Ditch | 1. I Would've Remembered a Murder

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

It’s been nearly 20 years since host Larrison Campbell’s 85-year-old grandmother, Presh, was murdered. Detectives say it was probably someone who knew Presh. But in a small Mississippi town, that doesn't exactly narrow it down. Campbell starts at the scene of the crime. Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a town in Mississippi called Greenville. It's in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, and more than 85% of the homicides that happen here are unsolved. So many of the people who commit these murders aren't in jail. They're in a car driving past your house. You probably stroll by them in the supermarket or see them pumping gas. That also means the families of these victims have learned to live with not knowing. One of those unsolved murders happened almost 20 years ago. She was a grandmother, a major influence in Greenville and a bit eccentric. Beloved by her family, maybe even the whole town.

She drove an old Ford with a life-size papier-mâché man in her backseat. She was a big Democrat who hosted governors and organized dozens of charities. Didn't seem like anybody had a bad thing to say about her. Then she was murdered, and nobody ever solved it. You get the feeling that it never will be. That it's been so long, it doesn't matter. Well, it matters to me. Because that town, Greenville, Mississippi, is where I grew up. And that family is my family. And it was my grandmother who was found murdered in her sunroom. And I want some answers. This is a story about what happens when you don't know. Secrets and mysteries metastasize.

Questions demand answers. And if the police won't supply them, the mind will. Suspicions harden into belief. What's true becomes less important than what we believe. Eventually, it's hard to tell the difference. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Witnessed, Devil in the Ditch, Episode 1. I would have remembered a murder.

I'm Larison Campbell. Hey, Witness listeners. This is Josh Dean, your host of the season Fade to Black. And I'm here to tell you about a new mystery mobile game to give you something to do when you've finished the latest season of Witnessed. Everyone loves a good family mystery, especially one with as many twists and turns as June's journey. Step into the role of June Parker and engage your observation skills to quickly uncover

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out the whole northeastern power grid. I remember that night perfectly. We drank warm vodka sodas up on my roof and stared in awe at all the stars we could now see in the New York City sky. But my memory of the day my grandmother died is murkier. I know it was a summer Friday at my office, and the only people in were the lowliest workers, which I was. So the building was quiet when my phone rang. It was my dad. I can't remember the words he used to tell me she died, but I remember my response. I burst into tears.

Sobs, really, loud, full body, the kind where you can't catch your breath. You were really, you were falling apart. My dad. You just could not accept the fact that she was dead. She had always been so, so alive, and particularly the circumstances of her death. Yeah, about those circumstances. She'd been bludgeoned. Her sister had found her that afternoon lying on her back on the floor of her parlor. There was a dish towel covering her face. My dad, who's her son, called to tell me this from the car.

He was racing to Greenville, the Mississippi town where my grandmother had lived her entire life. Everyone called her Presh, short for Precious, which is how she described her grandkids. Later, we'd learn the murder weapon was likely a brass candlestick. And if this is sounding more like a Southern Gothic game of Clue than a real story, just hang on. In my family, you don't get tragedy without the absurd. At some point on the call, I realized it was Friday the 13th. That just made me cry harder. I'm thinking, look, Larison, I know this is upsetting,

but it's upsetting to me too, and I want you to get control of yourself. You had to start making some decisions about coming to Greenville. I wasn't sure if you were going to be emotionally able to do what it took to make those arrangements. My grandmother's been murdered, and my dad's concern is about my ability to book a flight. I get it. Falling apart is just not how we do in this family. I come from a long line of lawyers and Presbyterians. Stoicism and hard work runs deep. We're not the ones with messes. We're the ones other people call when they have messes. I was afraid in hindsight after I hung up. I remember thinking, gosh, I hope I wasn't too stern. I don't know.

I only remember three words from my conversation with him. You said blunt force trauma in that phone call. Well, I wanted you and your sisters to understand two things immediately. That she had died from an assault, but that she didn't suffer. I recently pulled out some old home videos of Prash. Like any VHS tape from the mid-'80s, they're grainy and the sound goes in and out. My favorite clip is from Christmas 1986.

I'm seven years old here, playing with my cousin's new dollhouse. The crystal and silver are out on the table, and everyone's dressed like it's a formal event. My mom has on a triple strand of pearls, some powerful 80s shoulder pads, and a haircut she recently explained was, quote,

when we were all trying to look like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. And then there's Presh. Her black cardigan, slightly askew, perhaps a size too small. Her gray perm, a bit messy. As the turkey comes out of the oven, Presh walks over to it. Have you ever seen anything any more beautiful than that? Presh was big on superlatives, especially when food was involved. Things she liked were never good. They were marvelous, the best.

Presh often hit the verb hardest in these moments. Have you ever tasted? Have you seen? As though the magic weren't so much in the object itself as experiencing it. Like a lot of grandmothers, she was our family's default child care. But she didn't so much babysit as fold me into her life. If she had to visit a friend in the hospital, so did I. Meeting with the mayor? Sure, just let me get my coloring book.

And if the county Democratic Party needed volunteers to send out mailers for Jimmy Carter, then I licked envelopes, even though I was just two. We have all the great stories about her, the funny ones, the absurd ones. And I think for the longest time, I chose to think about that rather than to try to figure out the circumstances of her death and who was responsible, I didn't want to get engaged in, probably until you started working on this podcast. I also chose not to dwell on the circumstances of her death. But even if I'd wanted to, I couldn't, because I still didn't know exactly what they were. I think we all assumed it would be solved soon. But that usually doesn't happen in Greenville.

Over the last 20 years or so, police solved just under 15% of Greenville's homicides. Precious is not one of those. It's never been solved. And what's the point of debating why it happened when we didn't know what happened? So I went back to my life in New York. I was 24. It was a big, exciting time for me, full of late nights and a rotating cast of roommates. The apartment on 10th Street, well, it was a walk-up room and one kind of glorious room on one side and two very small rooms on the other side. Noah Levine, roommate number four, an ultimate Frisbee player with an eye for design.

Noah moved into one of those small rooms about six or seven months after my grandmother had died. I do remember you worked for, is it As the World Turns? Okay. Yeah. So my first job out of college was working for the daytime soap opera As the World Turns. It was as colorful and weird as it sounds. You were in the writer's room, is that correct? I was the writer's assistant. Which means doing everything the writers don't want to do, like ordering lunch and sending out scripts,

and telling actors they're going to have to reschedule their entire vacation because our head writer had decided at 3 a.m. to add them to an episode. I took three days off after the murder. When I got back to the office, a co-worker walked up to me and said, I am so sorry. I heard what happened to your grandmother. I was embarrassed. Maybe it didn't help that I worked on a soap opera. Our big story that summer was

actually a serial killer doctor running loose at the local hospital and killing off secondary characters. That's the kind of murder I was used to. It's like a device to drive story or get rid of a character who'd gotten boring. It wasn't something that happened in my real life. And for a long time, I acted like it didn't. I just don't know about the fidelity of my memory, but I feel like I would have remembered a murder in there. It feels like a pretty juicy bit of information. I sense that maybe you didn't tell us.

In fact, when I went to my college reunion this spring, none of our friends knew I had a grandmother who'd been murdered. I've talked to other friends from that time. None of them remembered it either. I was shocked. I guess I picked up some of that family stoicism. You know, I lost my brother tragically about 12 years ago. For me, it's the kind of thing that I wanted people to know when the topic came up,

but I didn't want them to feel uncomfortable about it. Maybe, you know, we just didn't want to go to that dark place, even though I feel like we had a lot of time together to talk about stuff. You know what's really funny? You know, we get to reunion, everyone's like, hey, great to see you for the first time in 20 years. Oh my God, like, what are you up to? I would immediately tell them exactly what I was working on. You know, my grandmother was murdered right after we graduated from college. It's kind of ripped our entire family apart. And so I'm going back and I'm trying to figure out what happened. The interesting thing about, you know,

the way that you're telling people now is it sounds very professional, but it's deeper than that, obviously. And this is something that is like, you know, deeply personal. And so it sounds a little bit like you've separated yourself from the kind of intense emotional aspects and it makes it easier to talk about, just something to think about. Do y'all know where you're going for dinner? We're going into town and then we're going to go see... Almost 20 years later, as the world turns has been canceled, I became a journalist, moved back to Mississippi, and then back to New York.

I have kids now. And just as Bennifer rekindled their unfinished business from 2003, I'm going back to that same year to understand what happened to my grandmother and our family. I wanted to learn what not knowing had done to us, because this is every bit of family murder story, from the victim to who called the police, even who a lot of people say might have killed her. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror.

But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Jesse Tyler Ferguson, host of the podcast, Dinners on Me. And whether you're a first-time wine drinker or a wine aficionado, you're guaranteed to like America's number one luxury Cabernet. Since 1981, Justin's Vineyards and Winery has been producing world-class Bordeaux-style wines from Paso Robles on California's central coast, and are what put the Paso Robles region on the winemaking map. They recently sent me some of their wines, including their Cabernet Sauvignon

and their flagship wine, Isosleys. I cannot wait to enjoy these with friends and family, especially with the holidays coming up. Speaking of, Justin Wine makes great gifts for friends, family, or colleagues. They have curated gift sets and even custom etched bottles, which you could add a message or logo to. It's very fancy. Shop all of Justin's exceptional wines at justinwine.com and be sure to use promo code JESSE20 to receive 20% off your order today. That's JESSE20 for 20% off. I visited Prash in Greenville a few weeks before she was murdered.

It was the last time I saw her. My grandfather had died a few years earlier, so for the first time ever, it was just the two of us in that big old house. Presh never rolled out the red carpet for guests. You were lucky if she changed the sheets in the guest room. But she was thrilled I was there. And once again, she folded me into her life. We went to the bank and the grocery store where she picked up a carton of caramel caribou.

She could polish off a whole pint in one sitting. It was, after all, the best ice cream you've ever tasted. Presh had no time for rules or conventions. She drove with her legs crossed, left foot on the gas. And I never saw her wear a seatbelt. In her backseat was, of course, Roger. Roger was the life-sized man I'd made out of paper mache in seventh grade. He rode everywhere with her.

She called him her boyfriend. But for the most part, we sat on the couch in her sunroom during crosswords. And then, as the sun started to set, drinking the boxed wine she kept in a glass carafe in her fridge. So when we talk about the crime scene, especially the sun room where her body was found, I can picture everything as it was that visit. I decided to start there, in that room. Presha's body lay there until 12.01 a.m. when she was moved to Jackson for the autopsy. The first time I got a copy of the report was this spring. It's a tough read. Not so much for what it says, but for where it sends my mind.

In between descriptions of her head wounds and the weight of each internal organ, it lists her clothes. A white button-up blouse. Khaki pants. between descriptions of her head wounds and the weight of each internal organ, it lists her clothes. A white button-up blouse, khaki pants, white ankle socks. I remember those khaki pants, their elasticized waistband. I can picture her white keds on her feet. I remember seeing them lined up beside her couch on that last visit. Under type of death, there's a little X beside violent or unnatural. The medical examiner noted one blow to the back of the head, possibly from it hitting the floor. One or two more blows to her face, this with a heavy object, maybe wood or metal. The detectives wrote in their notes that she had a single black bobby pin in her hair.

And all I picture is her that morning, standing in the bathroom mirror, sliding it into place. And I wonder what she was thinking about. That kills me. These are images that I'm creating. I never went to the crime scene. We didn't have an open casket. The last time I saw Prash with my eyes, I was giving her a hug in her driveway. My great aunt's experience was very different.

She was at the crime scene. Do you remember the last time you saw her? The day she was killed. In fact, she found her sister's body. She and Presh were close, especially in terms of geography. They lived on the same street, just a couple of blocks apart. They spoke on the phone daily and saw each other almost as often.

That day they had plans. They were going to see this beauty parlor operator, a hairdresser at the salon whose husband had just died. My great-aunt says she had been expecting Presh to pick her up around 3.30 that afternoon.

So earlier that morning, she gets some errands done. She runs down to Dattles, a dress shop, to pick up a blouse, then swings by the grocery store next to it. It all takes about 45 minutes. When she gets home, she makes a few calls, then eats lunch with her son who lives with her. When she's done eating, she calls Presh, who doesn't answer, which my aunt thought was odd enough

that she tried Presh and some of Presh's friends several more times over the next three hours, trying to track her down. And what'd y'all do in between lunch and sitting on the couch around three? I got ready for her to come get me. And I waited and waited for her to pick me up. And she didn't come and didn't come.

She doesn't show. And I said, I think I'm going to go over to the house and see what's holding her up. So Presh's sister says she tells her son to wait to the house and see what's holding her up. So Presh's sister says she tells her son to wait at the house in case Presh happens to arrive while she's gone to check on her. So I went over there and she was lying on the floor with a rag over her face. She finds Presh's face is covered with a dish towel. For a minute, Presh's sister says she's confused. Is she doing some type of workout?

She's big on exercising, you know, if you're able to call it that. And I said, what in life are you doing on the floor? And I took the cloth off of her face. She was dead. I was so stunned. You can imagine. And I called the ambulance service and I said, my sister has been killed and she is on the floor. Come immediately. I know it was in the evening time and we were about to get off, and it was a Friday. Ricky Spratlin, now retired from the Greenville Police Department, then lieutenant chief of detectives, and one of the first officers on the scene. It was really stormy outside. It was terrible. When I pulled up, some of the guys that already got there before I did,

they had been roped off as much as they thought what the crime scene could be. And I saw all the cars and I saw the house. I didn't know who lived there right off the bat. Then I saw the car that had a mannequin in the back seat. And I had seen her riding around and that mannequin just kind of flopping around. And I said, oh, I know, I know this, I know this lady. Precious House sat on two corner lots right in the center of Greenville. Her driveway also ran the length of the property,

making it more or less a shortcut between the neighborhood and a busy four-lane street. We could sit at the kitchen table and watch cars cut through all the time. A thicket of iliagnos and hydrangeas made it easy to forget how centrally located you were. But from the outside, it was probably the most visible and accessible home in Greenville. They've been directing me out to the back of the house, showing what they first found. I noticed that there was a lawn chair with a newspaper and a coffee cup. Just laying there. Okay. So then they took me into the sunroom, which nothing was locked. And that's when I saw them. She was laying on the floor. She suffered a blunt force trauma right

on the front forehead area. The hole it left was bad enough that officers first thought she'd been shot. They began to examine her surroundings. Most of her house appeared in order. A few feet behind her body was the breakfast room where she displayed a lot of her silver and china. That room was totally undisturbed. The only sign of disarray was her purse. It was open on the table above her, its contents spilling onto a wooden chair below. Coins, an address book, an empty bank envelope. Investigators began to look for a murder weapon right away. Well, they looked everywhere, trying to find what the weapon might have been,

but she had a lot of stuff in that house. Presch wasn't much of a housekeeper, and she loved antiques. Every surface was covered with something glass or brass or silver. In a drawer in the kitchen, Ricky Spratlin finds a small hammer, the kind you'd use to hang a poster on the wall. He sends it to the state crime lab for DNA testing. I knew she had had a lot of candle holders and things around, and I looked at one.

I said, you know, it could have been used. And we went ahead and collected it and sent it off. That's on the table next to her purse. And scattered around her body on the terracotta tile floor, droplets of blood. The person walked through the blood splatters. In the kitchen, he finds a bloody shoe print on the floor right below the drawer where Presh kept her dish towels. That's where he begins looking for fingerprints. I especially would have been interested in the drawer where the dish towels were. Later, he'll dust that drawer for prints and the drawer where he found the small hammer. They turn their attention

to the yard. Detective Spratlin finds another shoe print in the garden. By that time, the sky is black and the air is humid and thick. He covers it with a shoe box to protect it from the rain. Later, they'll make a quick plaster mix at the scene and pour it into the print to make a cast. This, too, will go to the state crime lab to be compared against any potential suspect's shoes. So I was there for outdoors. Laurie Bridewell, now a circuit judge, but in 2003, she was a full-time city attorney. And why she matters here is she was also a part-time police officer and canine handler. She lived right across the river in Arkansas. The evening of

Presh's murder, she happened to be in the neighborhood. I do remember it just like yesterday. I'm leaving my father's house, and when I drive out, I see people, you know, all of this commotion in front of her house, and I see Gaines, who is standing there in front of the house. Gaines, one of the many family lawyers. And I know something has happened, and I don't know what, and so I stop. I went up to Gaines, and that's how I found out what was going on. And I first told Gaines about my dog. Cole, her Belgian Shepherd.

So in true small-town fashion, Laurie offers to run across the bridge to Arkansas, grab her dog, and let him sniff the scene. The police, I guess, were fine with it. I got him, the scene. The police, I guess, were fine with it. I got him, came back. I arrived, I think, about maybe 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock, something like that. We had the disadvantage of having a thunderstorm had come through and left a lot of standing water.

In fact, a second muddy shoe print had been washed away before police could get a good photo or cast. But Laurie wasn't concerned with those prints. Cole's job was to zero in on objects the killer might have dropped. They can discern between something in the natural vegetation and something that's man-made. In that thick cluster of trees that separates her yard from Main Street, Cole alerts to a single silver key. You could tell that this key was a key to a car. Laurie drops a latex glove over it and alerts detectives. By this time, the state crime lab is on the scene,

and investigators add the key to the growing list of evidence they'll send off. Friends and neighbors had started gathering in the street outside Precious' house, and my family began making their way to Greenville. Well, my first reaction when I heard about Presha's murder was that your daddy would never be okay. My mom. She and my dad were living two hours away in Jackson when Presha was killed.

Pretty much a blur. My dad again. I can remember your mother saying, you loved her so much. So, at that point, I think we both decided we needed to pack a suitcase because we were going to be there for several days. I remember pulling up there, and there were lots of cars. And I got out, and somebody grabbed me. And told him Precious' sister was over at one of the neighbor's houses.

She wasn't doing well. It was pretty much a basket case. She was kind of shaking. She looked the most nervous I've ever seen her look. She had just found Presh dead. I mean, it flashes in your brain. I mean, there you are. And you keep seeing the body,

you know, whereas we just have, we just miss her. We don't have that grisly, horrifying image stuck in our brains. And the way her body was left was a big clue for detectives. She was placed where she wouldn't look so bad. Her feet were together and there was a dishrag over her face. That tells me right there whoever did it knew her and couldn't stand us there looking like that. That's some of the training I've had. If you see something like that, that's gonna be your first clue to keeping your notes in your mind. Our family wasn't alone in grieving crash at her funeral. One former governor attended, as did people she knew from the beauty salon and the supermarket checkout.

Sometimes it's easy to focus on the important people she befriended. But I think she just befriended a lot of people. Some of them were important. I'd guess at least 600 people attended the funeral. My mom said 700. I've even heard 1 thousand. Anyway, it was a lot. My memories of the service are short, impressionistic. It was held at the First Presbyterian Church right across the street from Precious House. That church was just as much a fixture of my childhood as she was. I know the smooth mahogany pews and their maroon velvet seat covers, the Tuscan columns and vaulted white ceilings.

It's nice, but as far as churches go, understated, which is sort of the Presbyterian vibe. I remember walking into the sanctuary and seeing rows of people against the back walls because there were no more seats. The minister making a joke about precious perpetual cup of coffee during the homily. And then when we left the service,

walking outside and seeing dozens more standing in the heavy midday heat. The kind where the air is so dense you can feel the next thunderstorm, even when the sky is clear. But I remember nothing about how I got to Greenville or when. Another one of those big gaps for me. What I do recall is a night a bunch of us spent getting very, very drunk with my cousin Cordelia.

Me, you, Little Claude, my sisters, all sitting around the table in Betty's kitchen. Oh, girl, yes. And then we went out to get some cigarettes real late at night. Yeah, we did. Oh, shit. My mother, we stayed up till like 3 o'clock in the morning. Yeah, we did. This is the night before the funeral.

My mother was so pissed off at me. I mean, here I am, a grown woman with children at home. Well, I didn't have my children with me. That's probably why I was having such a good time. But we just, oh, God, we were telling so many stories and just laughing. She almost didn't wake me up for the funeral. Passive aggressive? Oh, yes. Yeah, we did have a good time. We did. That was, I mean, that's actually really, ironically, my clearest memory of the weekend. I initially told Cordelia I'd keep this part off the record because there was mention of cigarettes.

And even now, at age 43, I do not want my mom to find out I'd smoked back in the summer of 2003. But if you're going to dig around in the past, secrets are going to come out. And this one's as good a place to start as any. Like a lot of folks in the Mississippi Delta, my family's great at throwing down, laughing, telling stories, doing things that become stories. So that night was the one part of the weekend that made sense.

The sad moments got shoved into a box without a label and forgotten. What I don't know about that night is if or how we talked about the murder. But I do know that once benign details about Presh's life suddenly seemed very important. Like the fact that Presh rarely locked her doors. This had never struck me as a big deal before. Quirk of her forgetfulness more than anything.

And even if she did lock her doors, it didn't keep people out. During that last visit I had with Presh, there was a stream of visitors all day. To have a chat over coffee, to bring her something, to ask if she had work. And she'd invite anyone in. She was open and curious and knew everyone. We wondered if that openness was making it harder for detectives to nail down a suspect. Turns out, it did. I really think it's somebody that knew her.

I knew. Somebody who knew her. But who? Was it someone who knew her casually? Or was it someone who knew her well? Maybe that someone was here in the room, mourning among hundreds of others at the funeral. No one's ever been arrested for precious murder. I need to be

explicit about that. No one's been charged or even formally accused. But people still talk, still speculate. And when you have someone so well-liked, loved even, the number of people who had conflict with them gets very small. Who could get so angry or so desperate that they would commit murder? One other thing I remember from the funeral is where I sat. My dad was up front with his sisters and some of my cousins. I was in the middle of the second row, my mom and sisters to my left, and an assortment of other family to my right. One of Presh's favorite songs had always been This Little Light of Mine, so my dad and aunts included it in the service. And then in a move I never expected from the

pragmatic lawyers, asked everyone to hold hands while we sang it. For those of us who could picture Presh dancing in her kitchen to it, one finger up in the air, it was sweet and sad, maybe a little silly. But I think of it now, and the memory is darker. I was holding hands with my mother on my left and one of my cousins on the right. And as extreme and bizarre as this sounds, some of my family was already wondering, is it possible? Could he have something to do with Presha's death?

This is the story of my family and our family murder, in a corner of the Deep South where murders don't get solved. It's about jealousy and a century-old sibling rivalry. It's about what makes someone seem guilty and who you choose to believe. It's about secrets and even psychics. Where a town becomes its own criminal justice system. Their common reaction is like, I think he killed his aunt. Even the local reporter.

We knew he didn't mean to do it. He wouldn't do it. Who in the world do you talk to? No, my son was at home. You described yesterday your sort of research as an obsession. Mm-hmm. He did this. We don't really have any evidence.

He just had to look like he was just a... Say, yeah, I did it. What would have been my motive? The fingerprints weren't run until that summer, a year later. Did you ever have a moment where you thought, my gosh, what if he did do this? No. No.

They're not going to release the case? So why did you want to do this story? I want to have permission to ask these questions. Witnessed is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. Devil in the Ditch was reported and hosted by me, Larison Campbell. Lindsay Kilbride is the senior producer, and Sheba Joseph is the associate producer. The story editor is Sean Flynn. Studio recording by Iwen Lai-Tremuin and Sheba Joseph. Sound design, mixing, and original music by Garrett Tiedemann. Additional music by APM and Blue Dot Sessions.

Additional field recording by Johnny Kaufman and Ambriel Crutchfeld. Fact-checking by Ben Kalin. Special thanks to Emily Martinez and our operations team, Doug Slawin, Aaliyah Papes, Destiny Dingle, Ashley Warren, and Sabina Mara. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.