Murder in the Courthouse. Nancy Grace
the country.
Profiling often dealt with what was known but not spoken. In polite Savannah, the wealthy elite hobnob at the oldest country club in town, and “check in” regularly at offices set up by great-grandparents. The Julie Love Adams case had been one of their most salacious topics since Julie first went missing. But there was never mention nor, of course, understanding of the mind of a killer. No juicy conversations addressed warning signals before or clues left behind. It was all just gossip to get them through another bridge game, garden club, or round of golf.
But behavior like affairs, money problems, alcohol, gambling, domestic abuse . . . none of that would ever be discussed by clusters of ladies at the Savannah Country Club in the quiet carpeted areas off their powder rooms. Pink-faced matrons “glistening” delicately in their morning spin classes would remain silent on the issue, and forget about it coming up in the men’s locker room. No way.
The Adamses were third-generation members of “the Club.” Todd’s father and his grandfather before him had both sat on the board. Hardly a weekend passed without the parents meeting friends for cocktails and dinner there or the whole clan showing up in their Sunday best to man their usual table in the center of the club’s casual dining area near a huge stone fireplace for the predictable fare at Sunday brunch.
For a few weeks after Julie went missing, the Adams continued their regular club visits, but after a while, it was painfully obvious the place was buzzing with gossip about Todd and Julie, so Sunday brunches came to a halt. It was Burger King before 10:30 AM now for the Adamses, a small coffee and folded eggs.
And how they resented it.
Julie Love Adams was murdered, her body weighted down and dumped in deep, swirling, muddy waters. She managed to wash up ashore on Tybee Island along with a chunk of cement block. Her baby ultimately detached from her uterus in the salty ocean water and followed her mommy in the next tide.
The two were buried together in one grave, with Julie Love holding her baby’s remains in her arms inside the coffin.
Of course, the casket was closed because there was nothing but bones, hair, and soft tissue left of Julie. No one within Savannah’s upper crust discussed it openly.
But they would now.
It would be plastered across the airwaves.
Russo tried his best to convince Hailey that the “liberal media machine” would drown out the voices of the two victims with TV talking heads chanting “innocent till proven guilty” over and over. They’d be whining about the so-called power of the state and making the same old claims that police trumped up murder charges and planted evidence. Maybe pundits would even take potshots at the pregnant victim. Nothing was sacred when TV ratings were at stake . . . Hailey had learned that the hard way.
What if one juror listened?
But Hailey knew the truth. Julie and her unborn baby girl were brutally murdered. Extremely faint markings on what was left of neck tissue arguably suggested ligature strangulation. But it was only that . . . arguable.
Cause of death was officially ruled “undetermined” by the Chatham Medical Examiner because by the time her body washed ashore off Savannah’s South Channel, Julie Love was mostly just a skeleton.
But as fate would have it, a portion of the thick, protective layer of her uterus remained intact long enough to largely protect her unborn baby. The tiny fetus that would have been baby Lily washed up on the same sandy shore with the very next Atlantic tide, looking almost exactly like a bright and shiny, plastic and naked, store-bought baby doll.
The sight of little Lily brought homicide investigators to tears, and the photos taken that day would likely have the same impact on a jury. Not only that, there was plastic twine tangled around Julie’s ankles, and the cement block that washed ashore was the same type block found in Todd Adams’s garage.
Not entirely damning, in light of the fact it was also the same type of cement block found at every Lowe’s or Home Depot you cared to stop at, four of them in metro-Savannah alone. The twine was explained away as having tangled onto Julie’s dead body after being set free from some unwitting fisherman’s boat.
Hailey heard about the story when the pregnant twenty-eight-year-old first went missing. Julie was home alone decorating the Christmas tree when she reportedly took her little King Charles Spaniel for a walk to a local park. Then, the nine months pregnant mom just “disappeared.”
Her husband said he’d gone fishing off the tip of Tybee Island and was away all day. Months and months of investigation ensued and, predictably, a string of Todd Adams’s affairs came to light. But the cops didn’t find it on their own.
The tabloids beat the cops to the punch by digging up the truth about Todd Adams and his multiple sleazy affairs. Mike Walker with Snoop magazine and the even more ubiquitous Snoop.com, racked up two million clicks in the first thirty-six hours after posting. Walker actually ended up doing a lot of the police’s legwork for them.
Walker’s salacious headlines instantly translated into millions of dollars of sales. Gorgeous shots of Julie as a high school cheerleader appeared out of nowhere, wedding photos, photos of her in the baby’s soon-to-be nursery, of Julie at Christmas parties and at home in front of the couple’s Christmas tree, her tummy announcing the imminent birth of baby Lily.
The night before Julie Love went missing, she attended a neighborhood Christmas party by herself, then decorated the family tree all alone. It was later revealed her husband went to a Christmas party of his own . . . with a bleached-blonde girlfriend poured into a tight, red satin strapless cocktail dress. To top it all off, Todd Adams had his left hand planted on the blonde’s backside in the picture.
Only after Snoop dug up the Christmas party photo were police pushed to name a suspect. And they did. Amid press conferences, interviews, and banner headlines, Todd Adams was finally arrested on two counts of murder one. Now, he faced the Georgia death penalty and Old Sparky, Georgia’s fabled, and notorious, electric chair.
That one scandalous tidbit, the photo of Todd Adams posed with his hand on another woman’s rear end in front of a Christmas tree, juxtaposed with a shot of Julie Love pregnant and alone the very same night, galvanized women across the country. For that reason, the jury had to be handpicked in another county, then bused into Savannah for the trial.
Why is the plane still just sitting here? Hailey had already taken off her jacket and opened a newspaper she found in the seat pouch in front of her. The pilot of the commuter plane, a cramped regional jet, cut the AC for some barbaric reason. It was stifling hot. Sitting in her seat out on a hot tarmac, Hailey felt perspiration on her chest melting down into her bra.
Looking out the tiny window of her puddle jumper from Atlanta, waves of heat radiating up off the runway and in the distance, she spotted palm trees intermixed with live oaks planted around the airport. Over decades they’d grown into enormous giants, their branches hanging heavily with Spanish moss, giving them an eerie, almost supernatural, appearance.
Quite the contrast from New York’s LaGuardia, where she had taken off that morning. Trapped at 40,000 feet up in the air, Hailey read and reread articles about the double murder, making notes in the margins so she could use them later when testifying, provided the judge let her testimony in evidence. The state had to lay the proper legal and factual foundation first.
Prosecutors flew her down and were putting her up for the government rate at the Savannah Hyatt, on the Savannah River. Farther downtown was the Chatham County Courthouse.
Then, there was the possibility she’d discuss the trial on air following her testimony. She still wasn’t sure whether she would, but if it would help sway the public, and possibly even the jury, it was an opportunity she wasn’t sure she could pass up.
It would only be a few weeks. Hailey could manage her psych practice over the phone and via Skype. She told herself it would be great to be back home again, or at least a few hours’ drive away. She hadn’t been in Savannah in a while and the truth was, the Julie Love Adams case