Facts of the Crime:
Before his 1998 escape from a North Carolina Department of Corrections work release program in which he was serving a sentence for numerous felony breaking or entering and felony larceny convictions, Scott Allen met Vanessa Smith and they became romantically involved.
Immediately following Allen’s escape, he met Smith in a parking lot, and the couple began moving around from hotel to hotel through out the country, which Smith paid for with proceeds from a large settlement arising from her father’s death. The couple returned to North Carolina in the summer of 1999. Allen had false identification under the name of Byron Johnson, which he used when he moved into a mobile home near Badin Lake. In addition to Allen and Smith, Robert Johnson, Christopher Gailey, and Danny Lanier and his family resided in the mobile home. Christopher Gailey and Allen were long-time friends, but Smith never considered Gailey a friend. Life at the mobile home consisted of heavy partying, drinking, and drug abuse. Much of the drugs were provided by Gailey.
On July 9, 1999, the day of the murder, Allen told Smith and Gailey he had stashed some firearms in a cabin in the Uwharrie Forest, and they should get them and sell them for drugs. The three arrived that evening at the Uwharrie Forest, after which they entered the forest and walked for what Smith described as at least an hour. Smith smoked marijuana while Allen and Gailey used cocaine. As they walked single file down a very narrow trail, fired a shotgun twice, first delivering a heavy buckshot blast into Gailey’s back, and then firing lighter birdshot into Gailey’s knee.
Smith testified that she and defendant then went to the nearby cabin to sit and wait for Gailey to die. According to Smith’s testimony, for seven to eight hours after defendant shot Gailey, he would creep over on his stomach to Gailey’s body to throw rocks at him to discover if he would make a noise. During this waiting period, defendant told Smith that Gailey would never call her a “bitch” again and that he could not believe Gailey turned on him and was going to “rat him off” by reporting his location to the authorities. hristopher Gailey died as a result of his wounds.
Bookmarks