17-07-2026, 10:51 AM
And what we were left with was the certainty that he had driven from his home in Ocala at night after his mostly elderly neighbors turned in, met with his soon-to-be ex, overpowered her, taken her into the deserted dunes, and beaten her and his unborn son to death.
But we couldn’t prove it. There was no physical evidence. No one had seen the two of them together. No one could swear that he had even left his mother’s home.
He could have reached Jacksonville in a couple of hours on the Interstate, killed her, and gotten back in five or six hours tops. But we had no proof he’d done so.
And his mother was a rock, swearing very believably that she had been up and down with an upset stomach all night the night that Sheila was murdered. And she had spoken to and seen her son sleeping in his bed four or five times during the night. She said it was impossible that he had left her home.
For nearly seven months we had investigated, we had questioned, we had probed, we had interrogated Sutton a half dozen times here and there and couldn’t develop a crack in his story. It was driving me crazy.
I was picking up the phone to call Ned Colman, the homicide detective with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office to check in with him when Cheryl buzzed me.
“He came back into town two days ago and called us this morning. I went out to talk to him and I think we have the son-of-a-bitch. Wilbur left town the week after Sheila was murdered and didn’t hear anything about it until he got back into town. He hates Sutton’s mom because of some boundary dispute they’ve been squabbling about for years. And he hates Sutton.
“But he’s clear as a bell. He was up at midnight the night Sheila was killed. He remembers very distinctly Sutton’s MOTHER’s car pulling down the road,
slowly, with its LIGHTS OFF. He thought that was very weird. The old lady never goes anywhere at night.
“At 6 a.m. the next morning the sun was just rising, but it still wasn’t full light. He had gotten up to catch the early morning news when he looked out his window and saw the old lady’s car pulling back down the road and into her driveway. The lights were off and it was going slowly and quietly.
“He says he was looking at the car when he saw Sutton get out, walk over to a burn barrel in their back yard and dump something that might have been clothes into it. Then he went inside his mother’s home. Wilbur thought that was weird but didn’t think much of it.
“He left on a tour of the Canadian Rockies the next week and didn’t know anything until he got back and heard all the news. He called my office five minutes later and I’ve got his entire statement.”
“Damn. You believe him? He’s not just some disgruntled angry neighbor trying to get back at the old lady?”
“He could be lying, but I doubt it. The story rings true. And he says he’ll take a lie detector test. He could have been where he said he was and seen what he said he’d seen. I made it very clear to him that if we go ahead on his story, and prosecute Sutton on his testimony, and we find out he’s lying, we’ll nail his ass for perjury and he won’t ever be going on any jaunts ever again.”
I just sat there silently for a few minutes.
“Alright, you’ve got to get his testimony. Video tape it. I want a clear chain of evidence if he drops dead tomorrow. Something we can still introduce. Have him take a lie detector test.
“Then I want you to convince him to move out of his house and contact us so we can put him someplace up in Jacksonville at our expense where he can vacation. I’ll assign security for him up here. If he balks, tell him I’ll arrest him, hold him as a material witness and he can spend the next few months sitting in a comfortable jail cell instead of a condo somewhere.
“Then I want you to get your Sheriff to assign someone on a regular basis to keep an eye on Sutton. I don’t want him leaving town without us knowing about it. And where he winds up. Tell him we’ll help with funding if you need overtime.”
“You think he’d go after Bell?”
“You think a guy who’d beat his own wife and son to death would hesitate to kill or arrange an accident for an old man trying to send him to the death chamber? Anyway, get him up here so I can interrogate him. If this works out, we have to decide whether to go ahead now while the old man is alive and healthy. Is he?
“He’s alive. He’s 79. Got a bad heart, diabetes, a pacemaker. I wouldn’t place a large bet that he’ll be around if Sutton doesn’t go to trial for another year or so.”
“Alright, we need to move on it.”
After I’d thanked Colman again I tried to decide if it was worth rolling the dice. We still had no hard evidence. There had been no bloody clothes recovered after Sutton’s house was searched, no other evidence of murder, no murder weapon. He or his mother’s car hadn’t been spotted in Jacksonville.
We now had what would probably be a strong eye-witness to testify against him, but he had a mother to testify for him. Who would the jury believe? This was a much bigger crapshoot than the Killer Granny.
And I could never forget, we’d get only one bite of the apple. If I brought him to trial and he walked and we later got the goods on him, he’d be free forever. We could never try him again for the murder. And trying him for violating her civil rights only worked for the Feds.
But we had to at least get ready. I was on the phone for the next three hours and it was 2 p.m. before I came up for air and realized I was hungry. I was going to ask Susie to call in something when I changed my mind and decided I wanted to get out and stretch my legs.
I walked across the street to a little sandwich shop that strangely enough served pretty good salads and I ordered one with broiled chicken. There was a day my stomach would have rebelled at the very idea of broiled chicken, but I had changed. I had changed.
I was sitting at a counter running along the plate glass window at the front when I realized someone was standing behind me.
I turned and looked into the eyes of a black cop standing there with his hand on his holster.
“Officer Smith. What can I do for you?”
He was about 5-foot-10, slender but muscular. He was one of those black guys so black his skin was almost blue. Good looking. Hair cropped short and tight to the skull. He had that typical cop stare. He was looking straight at me, but his eyes shifted almost constantly so that he was aware of everything going on around us.
“Could I talk to you for a minute, Maitland?”
“I think your sheriff would say that’s Mr. Maitland.”
“No one died and appointed you God. It’s Mr. Edwards, but you’re just an Assistant.”
“No one ever gave you the lecture on how to make friends and influence people? How to deal with prosecutors”
“I deal with them fine, except when they’re screwing me over.”
“I see you’re back in uniform. What’s your beef?”
“I’m back in uniform, but that possible homicide charge is still hanging over my head. You’ve never come back with a finding on my case, just told the Sheriff the resolution was still waiting on a final decision. You gave me back my street job, but the cloud’s still over my head. Those rednecks’ family has filed a lawsuit for $ 1 million against me and I can’t shut it down while you’re holding the criminal case open.”
He stepped closer and lower his voice so only I could hear him.
“Melanie left me. She couldn’t deal with the pressure of never knowing if I was going to be charged. And her family said she was a nigger lover for hanging with the man that had killed her husband and two brothers.
“She couldn’t defend me, couldn’t say I was defending myself because your office won’t clear the case. And one day she just told me she couldn’t take the pressure and the looks and walked out of me.”
He leaned in closer and gave me a contemptuous look.
“Is that what it was, Maitland? You couldn’t hold that whore of yours with your tiny dick so you get a kick out of costing me my woman?”
I leaned back and looked at his quiet, tense face.
“I would never accuse one of Jacksonville’s finest of being stupid, but did you really think you were going to come in here, insult me, get me to swing on you or so something equally stupid that would get me tossed off your case? You figured another SA would yield to the pressure and just give you a clearance on a fatal triple shooting?”
“My woman didn’t have to go off and suck another man’s cock to get her jollies. She liked what I had, a lot more than that pencil-dicked husband of hers.”
I just shrugged.
“I’m sorry your woman left you. I’m sorry three men are dead that didn’t have to be dead. I’m sorry your career has been in limbo for more than a half year. I’m sorry you might wind up before a grand jury. I’m sorry you might close out a pretty good career in law enforcement behind bars yourself.
“But, that’s out of my hands. If I send this to a grand jury, it’s up to a bunch of strangers how your life works out.
“But,” I said, straightening up and staring into his eyes, “It’s all on you, Shawn. You pulled out a department Glock and killed two men. One of them was your girlfriend’s husband. Granted, they broke into your house, but they were pinheads from everything I’ve heard.
“You’re a veteran cop. You’ve been in shooting incidents. You’ve won a couple of awards for heroism and public service. You weren’t panicked. Most men would have been but I don’t think you were. You could have shot one or two of them and let the other one go and likely you would have skated.
“I don’t think you were panicked, but with the Sheriff’s Office and the NAACP backing you, I don’t think I could have gotten any traction. There would have been a hearing in a couple of weeks or a month, you’d have been exonerated. You’d have had your career and your woman.
“But you couldn’t let the last one go, could you? They had the nerve to enter your home, they tried to beat you up, they grabbed your woman, and knowing them to be the rednecks they were, I’m sure they called you a nigger.
“They pissed you off and you made the mistake of thinking because you were a cop you could get away with breaking the law.
“You killed the husband and brother and the other brother broke and ran. And you couldn’t let him get away with it. You shot him in the back and when you looked around and couldn’t find any weapons on them, you used a drop gun, one that couldn’t be placed, and put it on the third brother.
“You were too smart, Shawn. We checked and they didn’t have guns. They didn’t use guns. If they’d come after you with clubs, that would be believable. But not guns. And a weapon that can’t be traced! We can’t find prior ownership. No numbers.
“Somehow they just wound up with the perfect untraceable weapon.
“It stinks. It stinks to high heaven. All your bother officers know it. The Sheriff knows it. My boss knows it. Even the NAACP knows it. And the only reason we haven’t rolled on you is that you’re a decorated cop—and you’re black.
“But that’s not enough Shawn. I’m tied up now, but in the next couple of weeks I’m going to let the Sheriff and my boss know I’m taking this to the grand jury. I’ll leave it in their hands what to do with you. But you will go to the grand jury and nothing’s going to keep you out of there.”
His hand dropped to the butt of his Glock and I wondered for just a moment if he could possibly be stupid enough to do something in front of a whole room full of witnesses, including a few plainclothes cop detectives.
“You do that and it would be the worst mistake you ever made, Maitland. You’re not so big that you can’t be crushed by the people on my side, and the Sheriff. Edwards is a politician. When they put enough pressure on him, he’ll step on you.
“And no matter what happens, you son of a bitch, I won’t forget this. I’m going to be watching you, and someday I’ll get my turn. Wait and see.”
He walked away; I finished my salad and turned to look at the detectives sitting toward the back of the sandwich shop. They found something irresistibly interesting to stare at where I wasn’t. Didn’t surprise me. Cops stick up for each other. Even the murdering assholes.
I had just walked back into my office when the phone rang.
But we couldn’t prove it. There was no physical evidence. No one had seen the two of them together. No one could swear that he had even left his mother’s home.
He could have reached Jacksonville in a couple of hours on the Interstate, killed her, and gotten back in five or six hours tops. But we had no proof he’d done so.
And his mother was a rock, swearing very believably that she had been up and down with an upset stomach all night the night that Sheila was murdered. And she had spoken to and seen her son sleeping in his bed four or five times during the night. She said it was impossible that he had left her home.
For nearly seven months we had investigated, we had questioned, we had probed, we had interrogated Sutton a half dozen times here and there and couldn’t develop a crack in his story. It was driving me crazy.
I was picking up the phone to call Ned Colman, the homicide detective with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office to check in with him when Cheryl buzzed me.
“Mr. Maitland, Detective Colman from Marion County is on the line.” “Colman, talk about great minds. I was picking up the phone to call you and
see if anything new was shaking down there.” “Are you sitting down?”
“Oh, shit, don’t tell me...”
“Billy Boy might be up shit creek without a paddle.” “Give.”
“There’s an old guy named Wilbur Bell who lives about 200 yards down that dirt road from Sutton’s mom. There are only five houses on that cul de sac and you know the other three residents are half dead with age and nobody was up that night. We couldn’t reach Wilbur because he has a habit of taking off from weeks or months at a time to visit relatives or just to RV around the country.“He came back into town two days ago and called us this morning. I went out to talk to him and I think we have the son-of-a-bitch. Wilbur left town the week after Sheila was murdered and didn’t hear anything about it until he got back into town. He hates Sutton’s mom because of some boundary dispute they’ve been squabbling about for years. And he hates Sutton.
“But he’s clear as a bell. He was up at midnight the night Sheila was killed. He remembers very distinctly Sutton’s MOTHER’s car pulling down the road,
slowly, with its LIGHTS OFF. He thought that was very weird. The old lady never goes anywhere at night.
“At 6 a.m. the next morning the sun was just rising, but it still wasn’t full light. He had gotten up to catch the early morning news when he looked out his window and saw the old lady’s car pulling back down the road and into her driveway. The lights were off and it was going slowly and quietly.
“He says he was looking at the car when he saw Sutton get out, walk over to a burn barrel in their back yard and dump something that might have been clothes into it. Then he went inside his mother’s home. Wilbur thought that was weird but didn’t think much of it.
“He left on a tour of the Canadian Rockies the next week and didn’t know anything until he got back and heard all the news. He called my office five minutes later and I’ve got his entire statement.”
“Damn. You believe him? He’s not just some disgruntled angry neighbor trying to get back at the old lady?”
“He could be lying, but I doubt it. The story rings true. And he says he’ll take a lie detector test. He could have been where he said he was and seen what he said he’d seen. I made it very clear to him that if we go ahead on his story, and prosecute Sutton on his testimony, and we find out he’s lying, we’ll nail his ass for perjury and he won’t ever be going on any jaunts ever again.”
I just sat there silently for a few minutes.
“Alright, you’ve got to get his testimony. Video tape it. I want a clear chain of evidence if he drops dead tomorrow. Something we can still introduce. Have him take a lie detector test.
“Then I want you to convince him to move out of his house and contact us so we can put him someplace up in Jacksonville at our expense where he can vacation. I’ll assign security for him up here. If he balks, tell him I’ll arrest him, hold him as a material witness and he can spend the next few months sitting in a comfortable jail cell instead of a condo somewhere.
“Then I want you to get your Sheriff to assign someone on a regular basis to keep an eye on Sutton. I don’t want him leaving town without us knowing about it. And where he winds up. Tell him we’ll help with funding if you need overtime.”
“You think he’d go after Bell?”
“You think a guy who’d beat his own wife and son to death would hesitate to kill or arrange an accident for an old man trying to send him to the death chamber? Anyway, get him up here so I can interrogate him. If this works out, we have to decide whether to go ahead now while the old man is alive and healthy. Is he?
“He’s alive. He’s 79. Got a bad heart, diabetes, a pacemaker. I wouldn’t place a large bet that he’ll be around if Sutton doesn’t go to trial for another year or so.”
“Alright, we need to move on it.”
After I’d thanked Colman again I tried to decide if it was worth rolling the dice. We still had no hard evidence. There had been no bloody clothes recovered after Sutton’s house was searched, no other evidence of murder, no murder weapon. He or his mother’s car hadn’t been spotted in Jacksonville.
We now had what would probably be a strong eye-witness to testify against him, but he had a mother to testify for him. Who would the jury believe? This was a much bigger crapshoot than the Killer Granny.
And I could never forget, we’d get only one bite of the apple. If I brought him to trial and he walked and we later got the goods on him, he’d be free forever. We could never try him again for the murder. And trying him for violating her civil rights only worked for the Feds.
But we had to at least get ready. I was on the phone for the next three hours and it was 2 p.m. before I came up for air and realized I was hungry. I was going to ask Susie to call in something when I changed my mind and decided I wanted to get out and stretch my legs.
I walked across the street to a little sandwich shop that strangely enough served pretty good salads and I ordered one with broiled chicken. There was a day my stomach would have rebelled at the very idea of broiled chicken, but I had changed. I had changed.
I was sitting at a counter running along the plate glass window at the front when I realized someone was standing behind me.
I turned and looked into the eyes of a black cop standing there with his hand on his holster.
“Officer Smith. What can I do for you?”
He was about 5-foot-10, slender but muscular. He was one of those black guys so black his skin was almost blue. Good looking. Hair cropped short and tight to the skull. He had that typical cop stare. He was looking straight at me, but his eyes shifted almost constantly so that he was aware of everything going on around us.
“Could I talk to you for a minute, Maitland?”
“I think your sheriff would say that’s Mr. Maitland.”
“No one died and appointed you God. It’s Mr. Edwards, but you’re just an Assistant.”
“No one ever gave you the lecture on how to make friends and influence people? How to deal with prosecutors”
“I deal with them fine, except when they’re screwing me over.”
“I see you’re back in uniform. What’s your beef?”
“I’m back in uniform, but that possible homicide charge is still hanging over my head. You’ve never come back with a finding on my case, just told the Sheriff the resolution was still waiting on a final decision. You gave me back my street job, but the cloud’s still over my head. Those rednecks’ family has filed a lawsuit for $ 1 million against me and I can’t shut it down while you’re holding the criminal case open.”
He stepped closer and lower his voice so only I could hear him.
“Melanie left me. She couldn’t deal with the pressure of never knowing if I was going to be charged. And her family said she was a nigger lover for hanging with the man that had killed her husband and two brothers.
“She couldn’t defend me, couldn’t say I was defending myself because your office won’t clear the case. And one day she just told me she couldn’t take the pressure and the looks and walked out of me.”
He leaned in closer and gave me a contemptuous look.
“Is that what it was, Maitland? You couldn’t hold that whore of yours with your tiny dick so you get a kick out of costing me my woman?”
I leaned back and looked at his quiet, tense face.
“I would never accuse one of Jacksonville’s finest of being stupid, but did you really think you were going to come in here, insult me, get me to swing on you or so something equally stupid that would get me tossed off your case? You figured another SA would yield to the pressure and just give you a clearance on a fatal triple shooting?”
“My woman didn’t have to go off and suck another man’s cock to get her jollies. She liked what I had, a lot more than that pencil-dicked husband of hers.”
I just shrugged.
“I’m sorry your woman left you. I’m sorry three men are dead that didn’t have to be dead. I’m sorry your career has been in limbo for more than a half year. I’m sorry you might wind up before a grand jury. I’m sorry you might close out a pretty good career in law enforcement behind bars yourself.
“But, that’s out of my hands. If I send this to a grand jury, it’s up to a bunch of strangers how your life works out.
“But,” I said, straightening up and staring into his eyes, “It’s all on you, Shawn. You pulled out a department Glock and killed two men. One of them was your girlfriend’s husband. Granted, they broke into your house, but they were pinheads from everything I’ve heard.
“You’re a veteran cop. You’ve been in shooting incidents. You’ve won a couple of awards for heroism and public service. You weren’t panicked. Most men would have been but I don’t think you were. You could have shot one or two of them and let the other one go and likely you would have skated.
“I don’t think you were panicked, but with the Sheriff’s Office and the NAACP backing you, I don’t think I could have gotten any traction. There would have been a hearing in a couple of weeks or a month, you’d have been exonerated. You’d have had your career and your woman.
“But you couldn’t let the last one go, could you? They had the nerve to enter your home, they tried to beat you up, they grabbed your woman, and knowing them to be the rednecks they were, I’m sure they called you a nigger.
“They pissed you off and you made the mistake of thinking because you were a cop you could get away with breaking the law.
“You killed the husband and brother and the other brother broke and ran. And you couldn’t let him get away with it. You shot him in the back and when you looked around and couldn’t find any weapons on them, you used a drop gun, one that couldn’t be placed, and put it on the third brother.
“You were too smart, Shawn. We checked and they didn’t have guns. They didn’t use guns. If they’d come after you with clubs, that would be believable. But not guns. And a weapon that can’t be traced! We can’t find prior ownership. No numbers.
“Somehow they just wound up with the perfect untraceable weapon.
“It stinks. It stinks to high heaven. All your bother officers know it. The Sheriff knows it. My boss knows it. Even the NAACP knows it. And the only reason we haven’t rolled on you is that you’re a decorated cop—and you’re black.
“But that’s not enough Shawn. I’m tied up now, but in the next couple of weeks I’m going to let the Sheriff and my boss know I’m taking this to the grand jury. I’ll leave it in their hands what to do with you. But you will go to the grand jury and nothing’s going to keep you out of there.”
His hand dropped to the butt of his Glock and I wondered for just a moment if he could possibly be stupid enough to do something in front of a whole room full of witnesses, including a few plainclothes cop detectives.
“You do that and it would be the worst mistake you ever made, Maitland. You’re not so big that you can’t be crushed by the people on my side, and the Sheriff. Edwards is a politician. When they put enough pressure on him, he’ll step on you.
“And no matter what happens, you son of a bitch, I won’t forget this. I’m going to be watching you, and someday I’ll get my turn. Wait and see.”
He walked away; I finished my salad and turned to look at the detectives sitting toward the back of the sandwich shop. They found something irresistibly interesting to stare at where I wasn’t. Didn’t surprise me. Cops stick up for each other. Even the murdering assholes.
I had just walked back into my office when the phone rang.
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