Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:30 pm Posts: 57001 Location: Pomeroy's Wine Bar
Jury hears Coleman 2007 grand jury testimony about murders 9:41 PM, Nov 15, 2012
Until Thursday afternoon, most of the witnesses prosecutors have called to the stand in Vanessa Coleman's controversial retrial have been law enforcement officials, friends of Channon Christian and Coleman, and Christian's family members. As expected, that evidence set the stage for jurors to hear, in Coleman's words, what happened the day in January 2007 when Lemaricus Davidson's actions resulted in Christian's murder.
Coleman sat subdued in court as prosecutors played an audio recording of an interview Knox County Sheriff's officials did with her after they arrested her in Kentucky on January 11, 2007-- three days after Christian's death.
In that interview, Coleman told investigators she had been back in Kentucky since January 2. They told her she was lying & they knew she was in Knoxville the weekend of January 6-7, when Christian and her boyfriend, Chris Newsom, were kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered. ...snip...
Next, Knox County Assistant District Attorney Leland Price and, Cheryl Cox, an associate of Coleman's defense attorney Ted Lavit, read the transcript from Coleman's federal grand jury testimony taken in late January 2007, before Knoxville Police arrested Coleman. Coleman changed her story in this testimony. She admitted she was in Knoxville the weekend Christian was killed, that she saw Lemaricus Davidson bring Christian into the Chipman St. home on Saturday night, and that Christian was alive for hours before she saw Davidson start to kill Christian on Sunday afternoon
Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:30 pm Posts: 57001 Location: Pomeroy's Wine Bar
In Day 3 of testimony, Coleman's grand jury testimony is read Posted: Nov 16, 2012 6:01 AM Updated: Nov 16, 2012 12:20 PM
KNOXVILLE (WATE) - After more than 30 witness took the stand on Tuesday and Wednesday, testimony continued on Thursday in the case against Vanessa Coleman.
Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:30 pm Posts: 57001 Location: Pomeroy's Wine Bar
Witness: Vanessa Coleman declined trip home before Chipman Street slayings By Jamie Satterfield Posted November 15, 2012 at 11:40 a.m.
KNOXVILLE —Torture-slaying suspect Vanessa Coleman had a chance to leave Knoxville before the killings but refused, a witness said today.
Stacy Lawson told jurors she asked Coleman to return to Kentucky with her four days before Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, were kidnapped.
Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:30 pm Posts: 57001 Location: Pomeroy's Wine Bar
Day three of Coleman trial: jurors hear Coleman's own testimony
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) --Testimony continues in the retrial of Vanessa Coleman. Thursday the story got more real for jurors as they heard a transcript of Coleman's own testimony, along with testimony from her friends.
The first two days of the trial have focused on the details of the crime; now, prosecutors are focusing on telling the story through the people who were there. Thursday's testimony focused on the days before and after Channon Christian was raped and murder.
"I didn't think she was scared," said Stacey Lawson, a friend of Coleman's who knew her in Kentucky and traveled with her to Tennessee. Lawson stayed in the small Chipman Street house days before Channon was kidnapped.
Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:30 pm Posts: 57001 Location: Pomeroy's Wine Bar
Coleman retrial: Jurors hear one of defendant's many accounts of slayings By Jamie Satterfield Posted November 16, 2012 at 4 a.m.
MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL Special Judge Jon Kerry Blackwood looks at autopsy photos as defense attorney Russell Greene, left top, and Knox County Assistant District Attorney Generals Leland Price, far left, and TaKisha Fitzgerald, right, argue their points during the retrial of torture-slaying suspect Vanessa Coleman on Thursday.
Having listened to a torture-slaying suspect's detailed account of the horrors a young West Knox County woman suffered, a citizen turned federal grand juror had one question.
"Didn't anybody try to help her?"
The short answer — no. Not one person inside the Chipman Street house where Channon Christian, 21, was blindfolded, bound, repeatedly raped, beaten, hogtied and stuffed inside a trash can to die a slow death from suffocation in January 2007 did anything to intervene.
That chilling notion came Thursday as prosecutors recited for a jury in Knox County Criminal Court suspect Vanessa Coleman's account — which prosecutors contend is filled with lies and minimalizations — of what she said she knew about the kidnapping, rape, torture and slaying of Christian and boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23.
By Coleman's own account to a federal grand jury in January 2007, she saw alleged ringleader Lemaricus Davidson force a blindfolded Christian into his Chipman Street house, bind her hands above her head on an air mattress in his bedroom and then leave with fellow suspect George Thomas, leaving Coleman and boyfriend Letalvis Cobbins behind.
She also admitted she saw Thomas and Davidson return with blood on their shirts, presumably from killing Newsom, and spent the night knowing Christian was still being held captive in Davidson's bedroom. Coleman cooked breakfast for the trio of men the next day, by her own admission. She said she later sneaked into Davidson's bedroom to offer a still blindfolded and bound Christian water.
And, she said she watched Davidson's final assault on Christian, who, by then, was naked from the waist down and, according to an autopsy, was bleeding from "extensive" and deeply penetrating wounds to her vaginal and anal areas.
"He put bleach and stuff in her mouth," Coleman told the federal grand jury. "He tied her up in the fetal position."
Coleman insisted she pressed both Davidson and Cobbins about "what was going on," only to be told by Cobbins she didn't need to know and to be threatened by Davidson.
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