23
Barbara Ann Roberts spent a sleepless night in the Rockdale County Jail on April 19, and by five o’clock the following morning, she began demanding to talk to an officer again. The investigators with whom she had spoken the previous night had been hard at work, long into the night, at the storage unit where the pickup truck had been located, and they had not yet reported in. Later that morning, after the jail staff was able to call in one of the investigating officers on the case, Barbara was taken to a room equipped with a video camera so that the interview could be taped this time.
The video gives a far better understanding of the mannerisms and body language of both Barbara and the interviewing officer. When it begins, it shows Barbara sitting alone at a table in the room, very still except for moments of fidgeting, twiddling her thumbs, and adjusting her glasses. The rest of the time, she waits motionless, staring straight ahead, wearing an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs, and leg shackles.
Investigator Mark Hicks, from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, was the officer who arrived to conduct the interview. Hicks was known for being respectful and low-key when conducting questioning sessions, and he wanted to put Barbara at ease. He entered the room and sat down at the table, saying, “Hey, Barbara.”
Barbara sat up straight in her chair, leaned forward, and said hello to Hicks, who then asked her how she was doing.
“Good,” she answered.
Hicks identified himself as one of the men who had questioned Barbara the previous evening, and she told him she remembered him, but couldn’t recall his name. Barbara began to tell Hicks how she had “remembered some other stuff” during the night and had asked to talk to someone at five o’clock that morning.
“Okay, hold on just a second,” Hicks told her. “I need to read you your rights again, every time we talk, and make sure you understand what your rights are. It’s the same form that we read to you last night.”
Barbara scooted her chair closer to the table to look at the form Hicks showed to her.
“It says you have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in court. You have the right to talk to an attorney and to have him with you, present with you, while you are being questioned. If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be appointed to you before any questioning, if you wish. You can decide at any time to exercise these rights and not answer any questions or make any statements. Do you still understand what your rights are?”
“Yes, sir,” Barbara answered, “but I never had a chance to call my lawyer.”
“Okay,” Hicks said, “if you want to talk to your attorney, that’s your choice.”
Barbara hesitated for a moment, then began speaking in a slow, very precise manner.
“You know, um, there’s just some questionable things, you know, after you lay back down and you start thinking, and you’re not so tired, and things start coming to you, and stuff—”
Hicks interrupted, reminding Barbara again that she would need to sign the rights form before he could talk with her any further.
“If you want to talk to your attorney now, you know, you’re telling me you want to do that, then we’re gonna have to stop and I can’t talk to you anymore, but if you want to continue, that’s your choice.”
“You mean I can’t keep talking to you and still have him represent me?” Barbara asked.
“Ma’am, that’s entirely up to you,” Hicks answered. “Yes, if you have an attorney and you want to stop until he’s here, that’s fine. If you want to talk to me now, that choice is yours. I can’t tell you to talk to me or not talk to me. If you want your attorney, that’s your choice.”
Barbara adjusted her glasses, then began to speak again in the same slow, deliberate manner.
“What I’m saying is, I don’t mind talking to you, but I’d still like the opportunity to talk to my attorney to let him know what’s going on so that he can ... you know what I’m trying to say ... so that he can follow through with me.”
Hicks continued trying, patiently and very politely, to be sure that Barbara understood that she had the right to have an attorney present during this questioning session and any others to follow, if she chose to do so.
“I think Brent explained all of it to you last night,” he said. “I don’t see a problem with you calling your attorney—if you want to do that before talking to me, that’s fine. The choice is yours, Ms. Roberts, I can’t tell you to talk to me. If you want your attorney, then we’ll have to stop right now—and then when you notify your attorney, and your attorney can come, then we’ll talk. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to talk to me now or not.”
Barbara adjusted her glasses again, then said, “Okay.”
“If you want to talk to me,” Hicks said again, “I need you to sign this form first. And if you want to wait until your attorney is present, then I’m gonna have to stop and leave.”
That was not what Barbara wanted.
“No, I just want to try to be able for him to represent me. You remember when you said, if I can’t afford one, then I would have to appoint one and—”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hicks said, “speaking with me has no bearing on your attorney being able to represent you or anything like that. [Signing the rights form] is not saying that you don’t want a lawyer to represent you sometime in the future. It’s just saying that you are willing to talk to me today with your lawyer not being present.”
Barbara was determined to continue with the interview.
“Right,” she answered, taking a pen from Hicks and signing the form. “Now you were the one in the kind-of-colory shirt last night,” she said to Hicks.
“This is the same color shirt I had on,” he said.
“I must have been dreaming or something,” Barbara said. “I could have sworn there was some guy that was not in a uniform that had just a colored shirt on.”
Barbara wanted to be taken to the Cherokee County Jail in Centre as soon as possible, but Hicks explained to her that in order to transfer her, she would need to sign extradition in the presence of a judge or magistrate that afternoon; then Cherokee County could have a car there to pick her up early the next morning.
“What I would like to do is sign the thing,” Barbara told him.
While she signed the extradition form, Barbara told Hicks, “I got hit in the head and lost my glasses, and I’m blind as a bat. They were some strong prescriptions, trifocals, and, you know, I can see you as a form, as a human being, but I can see color. I can tell you what you are wearing.”
“Sure,” Hicks said. Then the interview suddenly changed direction.
“Bob shot three shots,” Barbara said abruptly, holding up three fingers, “okay, and he said, ‘I bet that’ll scare the shit out of her.’ I did not see her move. I did not see no blood. I don’t know how many shells were found, but only three shots were fired.”
Barbara paused for a moment.
“I didn’t actually see the bullet hit her, you know what I’m saying? I didn’t see blood or nothing. Because when she was laying on the ground, like, um ... the drawing with him yesterday ...”
Hicks nodded and said, “Um-hm.”
Barbara became more animated, gesturing as she went on with her story.
“She kept telling him, ‘Let me go. I live about nine miles from here,’ which I knew better than that, but I wouldn’t say anything. ‘I don’t know who you are from Adam, you have plenty of time to get away.’”
“She was telling Bob this?” Hicks asked.
“I never said a word at any time or point of time or anything, because I knew she would have recognized my voice.”
“Okay,” Hicks said, “you don’t think she recognized you when she saw you?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Barbara told him, “because she would not have been so cooperative as she was. She would have been ... I know she would have been very more threatened because in other situations that come up that really had nothing to do [with this situation] she was, you know, ‘I want you dead’ type, okay?”
“Were you dressed like you normally dress?” Hicks asked. When Barbara said she was not, he asked, “How were you dressed that made you look different?”
Barbara told him she had on black pants, tan tennis shoes, a blue hooded Hilfiger sweater, a baseball cap, with her hair tucked underneath, and the hood pulled up over the cap. She also said she was wearing wraparound sunglasses and a face mask. “You know, like people wear when they’re doctors or like if they’re mowing the grass or something like that, you know what I’m saying, that covers both their nose and mouth.”
Barbara was beginning to talk faster and gesture more often with her hands, demonstrating what area of her face the mask had covered.
“You mean like a filter?” Hicks asked.
“Yeah, yeah, like that. So it wasn’t ... first off, she wouldn’t have got out of the car. She would have ran my ass down.” She leaned forward toward Hicks. “You know what I’m saying?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Because, I’m sure you’ve heard, just like he heard, you know, which has been said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, go get Barbara.’”
Barbara was leaning back and forth in her chair by this time, gesturing with both hands and waving her arms as she spoke. She was becoming increasingly excited.
“But I never ... I don’t know how many gun shells, that is what’s questioning [
sic
] me because, after we left, when we were leaving. And then—also something he told me last night—was how they recognized him was him taking off his shirt and he waved at a car. Now who has just shot somebody gonna wave at somebody? I don’t know. I—I just think that he is saying and I’m thinking, ‘I’m just going.’ I didn’t see blood. You know when I found out that she was dead? When my little sister called me, uh, the day before my momma died.”
“Okay,” Hicks said. “Did you think in the back of your mind that Bob had just maybe shot and scared Darlene?”
“That’s what I really thought he had done,” Barbara said. “And there were three shells, that’s why I’m wondering how many shells were found, because we were hearing shots and we saw turkeys on the side of the road, and we thought that maybe somebody was turkey shooting.”
“They could have been. I don’t know,” Hicks said.
“I don’t know, either,” Barbara told him. “I’m not gonna say they were or they weren’t, I don’t know what they was doing. I’m sitting there, laying, last night. I was thinking, you know, ‘Yeah, he’s got a bad temper and he’s ... he has temper problems, this and that and whatever,’ and all this has to do with the fact that me and Vernon were having an affair, and me coming up honest with Bob about it.”
“You had told Bob about the affair?” Hicks asked.
“That’s correct,” Barbara said.
“Okay, do you think that’s why Bob went there that day?” Hicks asked.
“He went there to confront her,” Barbara told him, “to tell her, and [the other officer] should have that on notes from yesterday.”
“Bob was gonna tell Darlene about the affair?”
“Right, ’cause I had promised Vernon from the bottom of my heart that even if he died before she did, I would never tell her anything.” Barbara began to cry and shook her head. “And I wasn’t going to tell her anything.”
“Okay, and you had told Bob about it, and Bob decided to go tell her?”
“Yes, and I think he was gonna do, like this”—Barbara motioned with her hands as if a mask was being removed from her face—“and she was gonna recognize who I was, and she would have been all upset and pissed off and run to Vernon, and shit would have been happening—things that were happening with us.”
Barbara started to cry and got more excited, moving around in her chair and gesturing frequently as she spoke.
“It’s all my fault. Vernon and me stayed in touch quite a bit. We talked back and forth two or three times a week and e-mailed each other. I never tried to call him at home—that was her house, you know what I mean, and I respected it.”
Hicks, who had been listening without comment for a while, said, “I understand.”
“And I never went over until he invited me over there. It was when he was on vacation, they were supposed to go to Florida but they weren’t able to because she had some kind of meeting or something, and his brother was in town from Louisiana. And I actually came up the day before. And I rode along the side of the road and I saw them in the golf cart coming up, so I tried to hurry up and turn around, and the next thing I know, there they were, right there, and I put my hand up over my face. Me and Vernon made eye-to-eye contact. He knew who I was, and he mentioned later that his brother asked if it was me.”
“Do you think that his brother might have recognized you, too?” Hicks asked.
“I think he might have,” Barbara said. “And the following day, we got together and I thought we were just gonna talk, and he said he wanted to show me all the new stuff he had done around the house, this and that and all that kind of stuff. And I honest to God thought that was what we were gonna do. Well, before I get to the front door, we’re already passionately kissing like this, you know, and next thing we’re upstairs—this, that, and whatever, and this kind of stuff, you know, and all of a sudden the phone rings and it’s his brother. He’s calling, he’s gonna come back. He’s in Centre, he’s coming back because he’s forgot something. I don’t remember what he forgot, he forgot something. So, and in order for ... we didn’t sleep in their bed, okay? We slept in the bed that we used to call the ‘Angel Room.’ He pulled the comforters and everything back, because he didn’t want my makeup or my scent or anything like that on, that Darlene could recognize. I will be this explicit: he came so hard, he shit in the bed.”