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State v. Hawkins11/4/2005
cation the people who had driven him to the camper.
The appellant told Detective Christian that he threw the gun away while he went down the road but could not remember where he threw it. He said he went to his sister's house after the incident and did not know that the victim was dead until the victim's brother called him. The appellant told Detective Christian that he was not looking for trouble when he went to see the victim. He also told Detective Christian that the victim kept coming around with a gun, wanting to kill him. The appellant concluded the interview by saying that he was sorry, that he wished he had never gone to see the victim, and that he never trusted the victim around Booher and her children. After the interview, the appellant's statement was reduced to writing, and the appellant signed and initialed each page.
Detective Christian said that he and other investigators searched the crime scene the day after the second interview, but they never found a gun. Detective Christian went to Larry Swift's residence on April 23 where he made photographs of the caller identification box showing four calls from the appellant's cellular telephone number. Detective Christian found a walking stick inside the victim's camper which was similar to the tree limb recovered from the scene. Detective Christian noted that at the time of the murder the appellant was five feet, eleven inches or six feet tall and weighed about 250 to 260 pounds.
Charles Hardy with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory testified that he examined the tree limb, the appellant's shorts, and two boards of plywood, all of which tested positive for blood. Further analysis revealed that the blood contained the victim's DNA. One board of plywood also contained the DNA of another person. Hardy stated that the appellant could not be excluded as the minor contributor of that profile.
Dr. Gretel Stephens, an expert in forensic pathology, testified that on April 23, 2002, she performed the autopsy on the victim's body. She determined that the victim was five feet, six and one-half inches tall and estimated his weight as 170 pounds. The victim's blood alcohol content was .01%, and his urine tested positive for marijuana. Dr. Stephens determined the cause of death to be blunt trauma to the head. The doctor noted that she had examined the tree limb recovered from the scene. According to Dr. Stephens, the victim sustained "at least sixteen blows with an irregular club consistent with that tree limb," including blows to the head, face, neck, shoulders, upper chest, back, and right wrist, with "a minimum of nine blows to the head[,] face and neck."
Dr. Stephens discovered that the victim had two fractures of the lower jaw bones, fractures of the upper jaw bone, fractures across the face, vertical fractures of the jaws, and fractures involving the cheek bones and the nasal bone. There was a fracture to the frontal skull which was "a depressed fracture that shows it's kind of a raid appearance along it where it has sunken in quickly and these additional fractures are extending out from it." The victim also had six of his teeth knocked out and had a "partial separation of the coronal suture . . . meaning that the brain or the skull's suture which is supposed to be closed in a man of his age is actually sprung and is open from the injuries." Because of the victim's depressed fracture, Dr. Stephens opined that his head had been "braced against something solid behind him like a solid wall or even more likely on the ground because then even if he loses consciousness his head is not going to move markedly and that type of blow or repeated blows could be landed in that lying down position wit
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