Low-Life Jailer Deputy Davis on Trial For Murdering Officer Tony Hayes
Trial began yesterday for the former Memphis Deputy Monique Davis who murdered Memphis Officer Hayes, father and husband gang bang style. She's claiming it was self defense. It was more of a jealous rage from a woman scorned. He had taken out an order of protection just before he was murdered. In a bizarre twist, her son was also charged as an accomplice in the murder.
Former deputy jailer Monique Johnson pumped six bullets into Memphis police officer Tony Hayes two years ago because she was either an uncontrollably jealous woman or a victim of domestic abuse desperately trying to defend herself. http://www.amazon.com/Defending-Our-Lives-Domestic-Violence/dp/0385484410/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208150645&sr=8-1
A Criminal Court jury was given those two theories Tuesday on how Hayes, a 37-year-old undercover officer, ended up stuffed into the trunk of his pearl-white 1999 Lexus, which was left for four days in the parking lot of the Lynnfield Place Apartments.
"It was an execution and evasion," state prosecutor Dean DeCandia told the Criminal Court jury of nine women and five men. "It was because of her uncontrollable anger, jealousy and suspicion of him seeing other women. Then she made phony phone calls of concern and sent police on false leads and wild goose chases."
While sitting in a police interview room several days after Hayes' disappearance, Johnson text messaged her teenage son to "get rid of the guns," authorities said.
Later that day Johnson took police to the body in East Memphis. Her son took police to the discarded guns in a Hickory Hill dumpster the following day.
Johnson, 39, is charged with first-degree murder and faces life in prison if convicted as charged. She is jailed without bond.
Her defense is that she killed Hayes on Sept. 4, 2006, in the bathroom of her Cordova apartment on Afton Grove to get him to stop beating her.
In his opening statement, defense attorney Arthur Horne pulled a chair in front of the jury box, sat down and assumed the persona of his client.
"My name is Monique Johnson," Horne told jurors. "I'm a mother of two and a grandmother of one. I'm a victim of domestic abuse. ... I shot him defending myself. For the first time, I stood up to him. I was scared. I didn't know what to do."
Johnson, who was hired in 2001, worked in the men's jail at 201 Poplar. She resigned after she was charged with Hayes' murder.
Her son, Donald Wallace, then 16, pleaded guilty last year to accessory to murder after the fact and was placed on judicial diversion until January 2011. If he avoids new arrests his record then will be cleared.
Hayes, who was estranged from his third wife, was a ladies man, but was a caring, punctual father and never an abusive husband, according to one of the wives who quickly suspected Johnson when Hayes disappeared.
"It was just too far out of the norm for me," said L'Tonya Reid, a flight attendant who now lives in Los Angeles. "I told her (Johnson) 'I think he's dead and that you had something to do with it.' Then I hung up."
The trial before Judge Paula Skahan resumes Thursday.
(source: By Lawrence Buser (Contact)
MEMPHIS, TN -- The murder trial for a woman accused in the 2006 murder of a Memphis Police Officer began Tuesday morning, February 12, 2008.
Former Shelby County deputy jailer Monique Johnson is accused of killing Officer Tony Hayes in September 2006, then putting his body in the trunk of his car. Investigators found the body at Lynnfield Place Apartments in East Memphis, after Hayes had been missing for about a week.
Investigators say Johnson and Hayes had been in a relationship, but Hayes ended it and filed a restraining order against Johnson shortly before he was killed. Johnson's son, 16 year-old Donald Wallace, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the murder. He also pleaded guilty to three counts of facilitation to commit aggravated robbery for a separate, unrelated incident.
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