State v. Caughron

• Decision Date: 10 May 1993
• Citation: 855 S.W.2d 526
• Parties: STATE of Tennessee, Appellee, v. Gary June CAUGHRON, Appellant.
• Court: Tennessee Supreme Court

Page 526

855 S.W.2d 526

STATE of Tennessee, Appellee, v. Gary June CAUGHRON, Appellant.

Supreme Court of Tennessee at Knoxville.

May 10, 1993.

Charles W. Burson, Atty. Gen. and Reporter, Merrilyn Feirman, Asst. Atty. Gen., Nashville, Al Schmutzer, Jr., Dist. Atty., Sevierville, for appellee.

Carl R. Ogle, Jr., Jefferson City, for appellant.

OPINION

DROWOTA, Justice.

The Defendant, Gary June Caughron, appeals directly to this Court his conviction of first degree premeditated murder and the sentence of death imposed by the jury, and his convictions of first degree burglary, and assault with intent to commit rape. He raises numerous issues in this appeal; but, after careful review of the entire record and the law, we find these issues to be without merit. The verdict and judgment are supported by material evidence, and the sentence of death is in no way arbitrary or disproportionate. We therefore affirm the convictions and the sentences.

THE FACTS

In the early afternoon of July 11, 1987, Christy Jones Scott, the daughter of the victim, 42-year-old Ann Robertson Jones, discovered her mother's partially clothed body lying facedown on a bed in her home in Pigeon Forge. Jones's legs and arms had been bound and tied to the bed with strips of blue terry cloth and pieces of sheer, off-white material like that used for table cloths and curtains. There was a gag tied across her mouth, and strips of the blue terry cloth had been wrapped tightly around her neck.

According to the state's forensic pathologist, Dr. Cleland Blake, Jones had suffered several "blunt traumatic contusions" to her head. These injuries were consistent with those caused by a blunt or rounded object and would have rendered Jones unconscious at some point. Her skull had been fractured and the cartilage in her nose displaced by the beating. She had bled extensively from her mouth and nose. There was a "patch" of "scraping type of injuries caused by some kind of slender linear object ... like whipping marks" on the left back side of her chest beneath her shoulder blades. On the right buttock were "three linear imprints, ... superficial bruises that fit perfectly with four fingers of a hand." Dr. Blake stated that these represented a "hard slap injury to the buttock" inflicted while the victim was still alive. The terry cloth strips around the victim's neck had been pulled so tightly that they had cut off the flow of blood to the victim's brain. The gag, bound so tightly that it cut a deep groove into the corners of the victim's mouth, combined with the hemorrhaging in the nasal passages, had caused her to suffocate. Dr. Blake concluded that Jones had died as a result of asphyxiation while unconscious.

Examination of the scene of the crime revealed that the door to the bedroom where the body was found had been forced open. A purse and its contents lay strewn in the hall. The phone lines to the house had been cut. Sometime within the following two or three weeks, Christy Jones Scott discovered a silver, turquoise and coral ring with a thunderbird design lying on the ground beside her mother's truck, which was still parked at her mother's house.

The key witness in this case was April Marie Ward, who was 14 years old at the time of the killing. Almost everything that the jury learned about Ann Jones's death, other than the description of the crime scene given by investigators, came from April's testimony. That testimony is summarized below.

In early summer 1987, according to April, she and the 27-year-old Defendant met and became romantically involved. April Ward's mother, Lettie Marie Cruze, worked at the Turquoise Jewelry Shop in Settler's Village, a group of shops in Pigeon Forge. Ann Jones ran the Wild Hare Tee Shirt Shop in this same shopping center. April and the Defendant, who was working on a nearby construction project, met on the covered portico (commonly referred to as "the porch") of Settler's Village almost every day.

One night, two or three weeks before the murder, Ann Jones made the Defendant Caughron, who had been drinking, leave her shop because he was acting in a disorderly manner. Jones instructed him to stay away. This upset Caughron, who told April Ward that he would like to catch Ann Jones "out one night" and "slice her throat." The Defendant suggested that April accompany Jones to her house after work and give him directions on how to get there. He also asked April to watch Jones as she closed her shop and see where she put her money, and to find out if Jones was married and had a telephone or pets.

Because she knew that her mother would have disapproved of her relationship with the Defendant if she had known his true age, April had told her mother that the Defendant was 18. April then became upset with Ann Jones because of a conversation Jones had had with her mother that led to her mother's disapproval of the relationship. April testified that she hated Jones because she had tried to separate her and the Defendant by going to her mother. April also said that she had told the Defendant what Jones had done.

The week before the murder, according to April, she and the Defendant began talking about going to the victim's house. She said that the Defendant instructed her to bring a towel and a knife "to gut" Ann Jones. On the afternoon of Friday, July 10, around 3:00 or 4:00 p.m., the Defendant came by April's house in an older model green and white 442 Oldsmobile Cutlass that he had just purchased. He told April that he would return that night and that the two would go to the victim's house as planned.

April further testified that after her mother went to sleep, she cut a blue terry cloth towel into strips and waited for Caughron to arrive. He picked her up sometime after midnight. He had been drinking but, according to April was "not drunk." (Another witness, Vicky Worth, testified that she had seen the Defendant drinking beer and smoking marijuana at a restaurant around 10 or 11 o'clock that night.) On their way to Ann Jones's house April and the Defendant drank alcohol and took drugs. They walked to the victim's house from the parking lot of a nearby nursing home, where they had left the Oldsmobile. The Defendant carried with him the handle of a pool stick, around which he had placed gray duct tape, and pieces of the sheer material that he already had in his car. The Defendant gave April a survival knife.

April testified that Caughron entered the house by himself and then summoned her inside. As they went down the hall to Jones's bedroom, April could hear her calling, "Who is it? What are you doing?" She testified that the Defendant kicked in the bedroom door, which was locked. According to April, Jones cried and pleaded with them not to hurt her, but the two told her she was going to die. April later testified that after the Defendant hit Jones several times with the pool stick, Jones fell across her bed, became silent and stopped moaning. As April described the scene, the Defendant turned Jones on her stomach and tried unsuccessfully to have sex with her. Complaining that she had "tightened up on him," he then slapped the victim on the right buttock. Unable to complete the sex act with Jones, the Defendant suggested sex with April. She said that after the two of them undressed, Caughron rubbed the victim's blood on both their bodies as they engaged in sex on the floor beside the bed where Jones lay. Finally, April testified, Caughron insisted that they drink some of the victim's blood from shot glasses that he produced for the occasion.

Although April's testimony was confused as to exact chronology, it appears that at some point, Jones was gagged to stop her screaming and tied up with the strips of towel and sheer material. April said that the Defendant tightened the terry cloth strip around Jones's neck, causing the victim to gasp. April testified that she then hit the victim in the head two times. After drinking the blood, April said, she went to the bathroom to throw up, but did not. When she returned to the bedroom, she saw the Defendant striking Jones's back with the pool stick. According to April, the Defendant dumped out the contents of Jones's purse as they left and took what appeared to be a large amount of money. Outside, she said, the Defendant used the knife he had given her to cut the telephone lines to make it appear that whoever had killed Jones had not wanted her to use the telephone.

April testified that she and the Defendant tried to wash the blood off their bodies in the river behind a store in Pigeon Forge. They next drove to Dollywood, where they met several people, one of whom, Kevin Carver, threatened April with harm if she "got the Defendant in trouble."

Later that same morning, several witnesses saw the Defendant when he arrived at Settler's Village around 10:00-11:00 a.m. Caughron was wearing only cut-off jeans and tennis shoes; he had scratches on his back, stomach and face. Several witnesses saw what they described as dried blood on him. When April's mother commented that "he looked like some sort of wild woman got a hold of him the night before," he "sniggered" and said, "No, I just got in a fight over a beer in a bar in Newport." Caughron cleaned himself in the store's restroom. When Robert Yoakum, Cruze's boyfriend, teased the Defendant about the blood, Caughron told him that "a bitch had hit him in the head with a beer bottle." Caughron then took April aside and warned her not to tell what had happened. The two of them left the shops with Yoakum and went to April's mother's house, where the Defendant bathed. Later that day, Caughron spray-painted his car silver, as he told April, to prevent anyone who might have seen it the night before from identifying it.

Tom Bentley, who worked on the Defendant's car sometime after the killing, testified that he had used pieces of blue terry cloth towel from the trunk of the Defendant's car as grease rags. Bentley testified that the rags...