Tremayne Graham: Drugs, murder and deceit

Read Mara Shalhoup's award-winning series related to this cover story — "BMF: Hip-hop's shadowy empire."

The bounty hunter came recommended as one of the country's finest, and on the afternoon of June 16, 2005, he was within minutes of doing what he does best: taking a dangerous fugitive down.

The location was a Subway sandwich shop in an upscale L.A. neighborhood. The bounty hunter slipped inside to make sure the guy in line was in fact the man he'd been tracking for the past three months. He then gave the signal to a team of U.S. marshals, DEA agents and local cops assembled in the parking lot. As the fugitive walked out, sandwich in hand, he would claim he was someone else. He even had a California driver's license.

But that was a lie. His slender, 6-foot-5 frame, his narrowed eyes and crooked grin, a style of dress more suggestive of a bank executive than a cocaine kingpin – all of it was hard to miss. They had their man.

Tremayne Graham was done.

But the investigation – which eventually would net a mountain of evidence implicating Graham in crimes from cocaine trafficking to murder – was far from over. At the time they caught Graham, investigators barely knew the half of it.

There's something about Graham that made people believe in him, to become convinced he was someone he wasn't. He sold $150,000-plus cars in the clublike setting of his Atlanta dealership to the type of people who might qualify for an AmEx black card. He counted NBA stars Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan among his friends – friends so close that, when Graham went on the run, authorities found reason to question them. Graham even wooed, and later married, a petite, fresh-faced girl and got himself invited to Christmas dinner with her mother, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.

Basically, Graham had an uncanny ability to come across as legit.

Even after a 2004 federal indictment portrayed him as a cocaine supplier who used his Cheshire Bridge Road dealership, 404 Motorsports, as a front, he wasn't exactly cast aside as a pariah. Franklin – speaking to the Associated Press not as the mayor, but as a mother – appeared to be empathetic about her then-son-in-law's predicament. "I am saddened to hear of the indictment," she said, a few weeks before her daughter bonded Graham out of jail. "I am hopeful that he will be found innocent, but we must let the legal system run its course.

"My heart goes out to all the families who face this type of crisis."

Yet Franklin's family crisis would pale next to one that, through a tragic turn of events linked to Graham's case, would befall another family.

Five months after the mayor made her statement, Paul and Katie Carter of Fayetteville, N.C., received a terrible call. In the early-morning hours that day, two people had kicked in the door of their daughter's Atlanta townhouse. The men treaded upstairs to her bedroom, where they shot to death the Carters' daughter and her boyfriend. He was one of Tremayne Graham's co-defendants.

"I died that day, too," Katie Carter says of Sept. 5, 2004. "They've taken our life. I will never be the same."

Over the next three years, investigations into the homicides and the cocaine ring would reveal connections between Graham and some of the country's most notorious drug runners. The work of the bounty hunter, federal prosecutors, U.S. marshals, the DEA, the IRS and local law enforcement in Georgia, South Carolina and California revealed that Graham was a major drug dealer. It also would suggest that he devised a near-foolproof plan for moving mass shipments of cocaine across the country; that he worked in concert with the Black Mafia Family and Sin City Mafia, two multistate drug crews with big presences in Atlanta; and that, along with the leader of Sin City, he orchestrated a brutal crime for which he would later feign fear.

Even to the authorities, Graham wasn't what he first appeared. If there's any truth to the evidence against him, he was far, far worse.

In the early 1990s, Tremayne Graham, then a student at Clemson University, met Scott King, a basketball player from nearby Mars Hill College. Graham ran with a crowd that included Clemson basketball players Andre Bovain and Devin Gray -- both of whom would later be convicted on cocaine charges. Those were the same circles Graham revisited when, after moving to Atlanta, he started shipping large quantities of drugs up to Greenville, S.C.

In Atlanta, Graham happened to bump into King again, while partying at a club. The two eventually hatched a business plan. In 2001, they opened a car dealership and customization shop offering $2,000 rims and $350,000 Bentleys. The walls were graced with autographed jerseys from clients such as Atlanta Brave Andruw Jones and Cleveland Brown Corey Fuller. Graham's business was a portal to celebrities. And his wife, whom he married three months after 404 Motorsports was incorporated, was a liaison to Atlanta's political elite.

Then there were the other major players with whom Graham allegedly hung out – those believed to be among the nation's biggest cocaine kingpins. One was Terry "Southwest T" Flenory, who's currently facing federal cocaine-conspiracy charges for his alleged leadership role in the $270 million cocaine enterprise known as the Black Mafia Family. According to a document filed in federal court in Greenville, "'substantial evidence' links defendant Graham and his co-defendants to the Black Mafia Family."

One former BMF member has described Flenory as a silent investor in 404 Motorsports. The informant recalled to the feds a 2003 meeting between Graham and Flenory, held at a Lithonia mansion dubbed "the White House" – perhaps so-named because the informant claims to have seen as many as 100 kilos of coke stacked in the basement. During one visit, the former BMF member claims, Flenory ordered him to load $250,000 cash into Graham's vehicle, which was outfitted with secret compartments.

Then there's Sin City Mafia. While BMF – an early version of it, anyway – arrived in Atlanta in the '90s by way of Detroit, Sin City came up out of Phenix City, Ala., just across the Georgia line. Its alleged leader, Jerry "J-Rock" Davis, is believed to have moved an amount of cocaine on par with the Flenory brothers, meaning tens of thousands of kilos in less than a decade.

While BMF was referred to in the Sin City camp as "the other side," members of the two crews appeared to be tight. Davis' wife was believed to have laundered money for BMF, and both crews are alleged to have worked together to move drugs across the country. Members of BMF and Sin City hung out at the same houses, including a storied party pad in Dunwoody. The Flenory brothers' father, Charles, or "Pops," helped Davis with some renovation work at his Westside recording studio, Platinum Recordings. And in May 2005, when a high-ranking BMF member found himself surrounded by federal marshals, he made a distress call to Sin City's Davis. Investigators believe Davis responded by sending someone to fire on the marshals gathered outside the house where the BMF member was being apprehended.

Tremayne Graham's links to Davis and the Sin City crew were even more pronounced than his ties to BMF. Court records would claim – and Graham would confirm to the feds – that Davis supplied him with the cocaine he and King sent up I-85 to smaller dealers in Greenville. Graham also is credited with devising a plan that Davis used to ship his cocaine from California, where it was imported from Mexico, to Atlanta.

"Graham's method," a confidential informant told the feds, was "designed to protect all of the participants, by allowing them to claim ignorance if they were caught with the drugs." The coke was packed in boxes and coolers and shipped to a fake Atlanta address. The informant claimed on one occasion to have met with both Graham and Davis to pick up a half-dozen boxes at one of Davis' California homes. (Davis owned at least three of them, which allegedly were referred to in Sin City circles as "first," "second" and "third" base.)

Graham had told the informant to wear conservative clothing, and he helped load the 70-pound boxes into a van. Graham then instructed the informant to drive the van to a nearby UPS store and send the packages off. The informant claimed Graham had a guy in an Atlanta UPS office who intercepted all shipments sent to the fake address and hand-delivered them to Graham and his crew. Davis paid Graham $60,000 for overseeing each multibox shipment, according to the informant.

Once, when the informant shipped some boxes belonging not to Davis but to his alleged right-hand man, a former BMF associate named Richard Garrett, a darker side of Davis allegedly emerged. The shipment was confiscated by authorities, according to a court document, and Davis confronted the informant; he said that if the shipment had belonged to him rather than Garrett, the informant "would be dead."

Davis wasn't the type of guy people wanted to cross. Which is why, when the feds began to make inroads into the Sin City organization, they only got as far as King and Graham. At least at first.

In late 2002, Greenville police and the DEA launched an investigation into a local cocaine dealer named Barron Johnson. Within a year, they had a wire up on Johnson's phone. Agents listening in learned that Johnson was getting his coke from Atlanta -- from a supplier named Scott King.

Johnson and King, along with several of Johnson's Greenville associates, were indicted, under seal, in December 2003. Johnson was quickly apprehended. It didn't take long for investigators to convince him to talk. He even arranged a four-kilo shipment from King, who didn't know about the Johnson arrest or his own pending federal charges. King sent one of his guys to Greenville, as he'd done countless times before.

On Jan. 21, 2004, King's courier, Ulysses Hackett, arrived at a stash house King used, on Greenville's Singing Pines Drive. The police were waiting. And Hackett, his vehicle packed with the coke in an electronically operated secret compartment, was promptly arrested.

In addition to the four kilos Johnson had ordered, investigators found another 10 kilos in the stash house. The drugs, along with $80,000, were stored in five underground safes. Investigators were able to track down the Atlanta locksmith who'd done the work, and the locksmith said he'd been hired by a guy named Tremayne Graham. Graham's name also was on the lease for the house. And investigators connected Graham to King through 404 Motorsports.

Less than three months later, Graham's name was added to the King-Johnson indictment. He turned himself in at the Atlanta U.S. marshals' office, was granted bond, and was ordered to wear an ankle monitor and remain under house arrest at his and his wife's Marietta home.

King, however, remained at large, and he allegedly maintained contact with Graham. Later, he would claim that in the summer of 2004, Graham was extremely concerned about Hackett, the courier. According to King, Graham thought Hackett was the only of his co-defendants who had any real dirt on him.

Hackett also was the only person arrested in connection to the Greenville sting who could implicate King's and Graham's supplier, Jerry Davis, King would claim. That's because on one occasion, when King and Graham were out of town and owed the boss money, they had Hackett deliver the cash.

As King would later tell investigators, Graham was convinced: Ulysses Hackett was going to bring him down.

Katie Carter is quick to admit she and her husband spoiled their only daughter. When she graduated from Spelman, the Carters bought her a Highland Avenue townhome. They paid for her car, her clothes and whatever else Misty could possibly need. To the Carters, it was worth it. She was a good daughter.

It was during a trip to Atlanta that Katie Carter first met her daughter's boyfriend. "A very nice young man," she recalls. "Well, I should say, 'appeared to be.'"

He picked them up at Misty's place, took them to breakfast and then to his work. Katie Carter could tell he was proud of the place. And she herself was impressed with the sparkling showroom at 404 Motorsports. "Even though a guy was in the back, putting on – what do you call those things? – the rims on a car, it was just like a kitchen floor," she says.

At first, she thought her daughter's boyfriend, Ulysses Hackett, or "Hack," as everyone called him, was one of the dealership's owners. But she soon realized he was only working for them. One of the owners, Scott King, was Hack's roommate.

Misty's mother never met King. "The only time I heard Misty mention him was in connection with him playing golf with some of these sports people," she says. "And she never mentioned Tremayne Graham."

However, she did mention that Hackett seemed to be out of town a lot. "I'd say to her, 'Misty, where's Hack going? Why is he always going to South Carolina? Did you ask him?'"

"Yes," Misty answered, "I asked him."

"What did he say?"

"He said some things are better that you not know."

Misty didn't tell her parents that her boyfriend recently had been arrested. But Katie Carter is sure her daughter knew. She wouldn't have told her parents, because she'd have known they'd insist that she come home to Fayetteville. Plus, Misty probably thought she could turn him around. Katie Carter believes she found proof of her daughter's intentions: a book on Misty's end table called Why Good People Do Bad Things.

In the summer of 2004, the Carter family went to San Diego. Paul Carter, a vascular surgeon, had a medical conference to attend. His wife and daughter tagged along. Katie Carter took the opportunity to press her daughter for more info on her boyfriend's frequent trips.

"He doesn't say anything about it," Misty insisted.

"Well, you need to know," her mother said. "He's probably going to see another woman. He could have a wife somewhere. You don't know. You just don't know."

Coming home, Paul and Katie were on a separate flight from Misty. But they did have a short layover in Atlanta before heading on to Raleigh. Misty's flight arrived in Atlanta before her parents', and she ran to their terminal to give them yet another goodbye. It was the last time Katie Carter saw her daughter.

As usual, however, they spent a lot of time over the next few weeks talking on the phone. Misty was the type who checked in with her mother about everything: the fact that she was going across the street for ice cream, the property she was interested in renting to open a men's spa, the furniture she was considering for her townhouse and whatever else happened to cross her mind.

On Sept. 4, 2004, Katie Carter spoke with her daughter no fewer than three times. Misty said she and Hack were staying in that night. And so, unlike those nights when Misty went out with her girlfriends, her mother didn't wake up to check the clock. She didn't wonder whether her daughter was safe. On that night, Misty already was home.

She and Hack were most likely asleep when, in the early-morning hours, two men kicked in her door and gunned them down in her bed.

After the killings, Graham -- who was still out on bond and under house arrest -- moved into his mother-in-law's house, King would claim. He said Graham wanted to give the appearance that, by staying with the mayor, he was scared for his life.

But any semblance of Graham's propriety disappeared when, less than two months after the double homicide and a few days before his trial was set to start, Graham skipped town.

In the seven months he was a fugitive, his wife would divorce him on the grounds that he'd abandoned her, leaving her in massive debt. According to divorce and bankruptcy papers filed by Kai Franklin Graham in early 2005, her husband had burdened her with the $347,000 balance of the bond he'd jumped and the $5,000 monthly mortgage on their sprawling Marietta home. And he'd taken most of the couple's cash and valuables, including almost all of the diamond jewelry, with him. His wife, unemployed and, according to her bankruptcy documents, nearly penniless, was getting by on about $2,000 per month from her mother, her father (the mayor's ex-husband), and her siblings.

The company that had bonded out Graham was desperate to recover the money his near-bankrupt wife was incapable of paying. The small, family-run business wasn't used to taking that kind of hit. Unless Graham turned up soon, Free at Last Bonding was in trouble.

First, Free at Last appealed to the mayor, claiming she was somehow responsible for her son-in-law's disgrace. Then, the bonding company hired a couple of local private investigators, who turned up a few good leads but still no Graham. Finally, the company dished out the $45,000 fee that one of the country's best bounty hunters demands.

On March 8, 2005, Free at Last Bonding Vice President Jennifer Greene called Miami bounty hunter Rolando Betancourt and handed over the company's file on Graham. The most promising lead in the file was a 2004 Ferrari Spider that Graham might have leased in California, using an associate's name.

Betancourt's first stop, according to an affidavit he later filed in federal court, was Tremayne and Kai Franklin Graham's Marietta home. He kept a close watch on the handsome brick house and noticed Kai pulling out of the garage in a Lincoln Navigator. No Ferrari, though. And no sign of Graham.

Betancourt thought he might have better luck in California, where the Ferrari was registered. Three weeks after getting the file, he flew to L.A.

Betancourt headed to the address listed on the Ferrari's registration, in an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley. It was a neighborhood where the income level isn't exactly consistent with a $150,000 sports car. The property manager said the woman who lived in the apartment that was listed on the registration drove a Ford pickup, not a Ferrari. He also told Betancourt that her rent was subsidized, meaning she had to provide bank statements. And a few months earlier, there'd been some suspicious activity on one of the statements: airline tickets, prepaid cell phones and the deposit of a $6,000 check.

A week later, Betancourt went back to the complex to try his luck with the woman and the pickup. Sure enough, she emerged from her apartment, climbed into the Ford and took off. Betancourt followed her as she wound through several side streets, toward Ventura Boulevard. Her destination was a three-story, multimillion-dollar home on Libbit Avenue in Encino. A pair of Land Rovers, black and white, was out front, and a silver Infiniti SUV was in the garage. Betancourt didn't know it at the time, but he'd stumbled upon "first base" – one of the three homes that, according to the confidential informant, were used by Davis' cocaine organization.

Another of Betancourt's stops was the bank that issued the check for the $100,000 down payment on the Ferrari. It turned out the account belonged to a known associate of Graham's, a man named Eric Rivera.

Two months later, Betancourt got a call from an L.A. detective. The day before, members of a narcotics task force had stopped a man who was about to board a private jet at the Van Nuys airport. He'd paid a $5,000 cash deposit the night before for the $17,000 flight. When task-force agents started questioning him at the terminal, he told them his name was Gary Rich. He said he was going to Atlanta. "Business or pleasure?" the agents asked. "Business," he replied. "I'm in the Internet raffle industry."

Agents then asked if they could search his three pieces of black luggage.

"No," he said. "I'm not comfortable with you searching my bags or me."

A drug dog was brought in to sniff the bags. The dog alerted the agents to the presence of narcotics. Inside, 20 kilos of cocaine were individually packaged in plastic wrap. A picture of a Hummer vehicle was included in the packaging, and the bricks themselves were pressed with the word "Hummer."

The man was arrested and charged with drug trafficking. After he was fingerprinted, investigators learned his name wasn't Gary Rich. It was Eric Rivera.

What's more, the FBI got a call that night from a confidential source who said Scott King was supposed to be on Rivera's flight. But King had called Rivera while the agents were questioning him, and Rivera was able to give a warning that something had gone wrong.

After the airport bust, investigators headed to the Studio City residence listed on Rivera's driver's license. The property owner told them a bounty hunter, Betancourt, had inquired about Rivera weeks earlier. When the agents called Betancourt with the news about Rivera, he told them that if they captured Graham and King, they'd find far more than 20 kilos.

L.A. police gave the bounty hunter two seemingly small leads, both of them taken from Rivera at the time of his arrest. One was a receipt from a dry cleaner. The other was the card for a pool-cleaning service.

Betancourt tried the dry cleaners first. The owner recognized photos of Rivera and King, though not Graham. And he seemed nervous. He motioned Betancourt into a side office and said King had been in the store that very day. He'd been driving a pearl-colored Land Rover.

When Betancourt left the shop, he called the U.S. Marshals Service in Greenville. "We should probably get the L.A. office involved at this time," he said.

A few hours later, his hunch proved correct. When he followed the second lead, the pool-cleaning company, the owner recognized Graham's photo. He said his company had cleaned the pool at the house where Graham lived. The home was on Oso Avenue, in Woodland Hills. It was the home believed to be Davis' "third base."

The following afternoon, five hours after Betancourt and his team set up camp outside the Oso Avenue house and seven months after Graham had disappeared, Graham walked out the front door of the home, stepped into a black Volvo and took off to grab lunch. The agents followed him to the Subway shop. Led by Betancourt, they took him down.

But the day's work wasn't over.

The agents kept watch on Oso Avenue. Three hours later, a silver Infiniti SUV pulled to the curb. The driver walked three blocks to the house and disappeared inside. A half-hour later, he started to make his way back to the SUV. Five officers, guns drawn, jumped from their cars and stopped him, yelling, "Sheriff's department, get on the ground!" The man did as he was told. He was cuffed, searched and placed in the back of a van. His wallet held a Michigan ID with the name Kevin Miller, but officers were unconvinced.

One of them asked if there was anyone else inside.

"Yes," the man answered.

"How many?" the officer asked.

He wouldn't say.

At about the same time they detained the man, the officers were granted a warrant to search the house. They brought the man inside and sat him on a sofa. If anyone else had been in the house, they'd already fled.

The officers told the man that if he was arrested, he'd be fingerprinted and they'd learn the truth about who he was. The man looked down and said, "My name is Jerry Davis."

A set of keys pulled from Davis' pocket, as well as ones found on Graham, opened both the home's front door and one of its locked rooms. Inside the room, investigators found $1.8 million and a whopping 250 kilos of cocaine. Like the coke at the airport, the bricks in the house were pressed with the word "Hummer."

Two months later, Davis' name was added to the indictment charging King, Graham and the Greenville crew. Confidential informants would portray him as the organization's mastermind.

The following spring, after jury selection began in Davis' and Graham's trial, the two men entered last-minute guilty pleas. Graham's plea agreement included a willingness to cooperate with the government in exchange for a lesser sentence. Davis' did not; he agreed to a sentence of 35 years. According to one court filing, "Mr. Davis was not willing to expose his family to possible retribution by cooperating against others, and particularly the members of the 'Black Mafia Family.'"

Two months later, in May 2006, Graham sat down for a series of interviews, including two polygraph tests, as agreed upon in his plea deal. It appeared to federal prosecutors that he was hiding something. His stories were inconsistent with some of their evidence. And his attitude during the polygraph tests was surprising. "At one point during the questioning, the examinee laughed about the results," according to a report on the tests. "The examinee displayed an attitude of arrogance and indifference."

The first test, which Graham failed, had to do with whether he was being truthful about "an individual who has not been charged to date in connection with this investigation." Elsewhere in the court file, it states that Graham "withheld information with respect to [one] individual because of his close relationship with that person."

The second test was intended to determine whether he was withholding information about the murders of Ulysses Hackett and Misty Carter. Those results were inconclusive.

Two weeks after the polygraphs, the alleged holes in Graham's stories would start to get a lot more pronounced. After a high-speed chase on a California highway, authorities finally nabbed Scott King, who'd been a fugitive for more than two years. By the fall of 2006, King had flipped on Davis and Graham. And in October, prosecutors handed over 200 pages containing new evidence – including "allegations by Scott King."

The following day, King pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and launder money, and he agreed to fully cooperate with the government. Also on that day, Greenville U.S. Attorney Reginald Lloyd sent a letter to Davis' and Graham's attorneys. The deals were off, the letter states; prosecutors would now be seeking the maximum penalty.

The letter raised the stakes in the prosecution of Davis and Graham, and it provided a taste of the testimony that King would offer the following year: "The United States also intends to present evidence as to the defendants' involvement in various crimes and acts of violence (including but not limited to the brutal murder of Ulysses Hackett and Melissa Carter) in support of its request for a life sentence."

The week before the April 17, 2007, sentencing hearing for Graham, Davis and King, Greenville Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Moore filed a memorandum that offered the most detailed public account to date of the events leading to the deaths of Hackett and Carter.

The document describes Graham's attempts to play down his alleged role in the killings, and it asserts that he committed a serious breach in his plea agreement: "[T]he government bargained for full, complete and truthful information. Instead, it has received lies and false information."

Some of Graham's "lies" concerned two associates who allegedly had a hand in the double homicide. The memo contends that Graham was protecting them "because he knows that both of them could directly implicate him in the murder of a potential witness – and that witness' girlfriend."

Neither of the associates is named. But the memo states that one moved drugs between Atlanta and California on Graham's behalf. Yet in debriefings during which Graham was supposed to share with the feds everything he knew about the drug crew, he failed to mention that particular associate. "Graham's motive for withholding information about Associate Number One is simple," the memo states. "Graham told Scott King that this associate supplied the gun used to murder Ulysses Hackett and his girlfriend."

Elsewhere, the memo states that Graham told King he'd arranged the murder of Ulysses Hackett through Davis.

Davis' attorney says his client has maintained his innocence in the killings. "Jerry has always adamantly denied any involvement in that," Christopher Fialko tells CL. "And the government really did not pursue that in his sentencing. They made some allegations, roughly, at some points in time."

Graham's attorney, Jessica Salvini, could not be reached for comment.

The other associate whom Graham allegedly tried to protect is described as a violent accomplice to Davis. According to the memo, Graham and King were with that associate when he committed a double homicide in Washington. King confirmed the story; Graham denied it.

Again, prosecutors believed Graham lied to protect the associate. "His motive for lying about this becomes apparent," the memo states, "when juxtaposed against the fact that an eyewitness has picked Associate Number Two out of a lineup leaving the vicinity of the apartment where Hackett was murdered."

A paper trail of federal court filings in three states reveals the identity of "Associate Number Two" as a New Jersey man named Jamad Ali. According to the Greenville memo, "Associate Number Two" faced federal drug and weapons charges in both Jacksonville, Fla., and New Jersey. Ali, an associate of Davis, pleaded guilty in December to federal weapons charges in New Jersey, according to court filings there. Federal cocaine charges against him are pending in Jacksonville.

Ali was indicted in the Jacksonville case in 2002, but he'd remained on the run until June 2005. According to documents filed in New Jersey, a federal surveillance team acting on a tip tracked Ali to a white stucco house in a ritzy neighborhood. Inside, the agents apprehended Ali and seven accomplices, as well as a loaded machine gun, a kilo of coke and $800,000.

When it came time for King to testify at Graham's sentencing hearing, he reiterated much of what had been alleged in the memo and other filings: that Graham had arranged Hackett's death through Davis, and that Ali was one of the gunmen.

Because he lied to investigators, Graham was sentenced to life in prison on his cocaine and money-laundering charges. Davis ended up with a 40-year sentence. King, due to his cooperation, got 20 years.

Investigators say charges in the double homicide could be pending.

They also say that, unlike her boyfriend, Misty Carter had nothing to do with the drug ring. She was a victim of circumstance.

More than two years after her death, Misty Carter's Highland Avenue townhouse is just as she left it. Her mother says the mere existence of it can be excruciating, when she imagines, for instance, the paramedics bringing her daughter out. But the townhouse is also a source of solace.

"Listen," she says, "I'm not mentally ill. But I try to think in terms of her still being in Atlanta. I can visualize her place, and her in it. She was so happy with her little townhouse. I haven't moved anything. I couldn't. It's almost like when I do, I know this is it. She's gone."

After her daughter's death, Carter started working long hours at her husband's practice. The work would take her mind away from things for a while. At home, the pain was constant.

Of the many things Carter misses about her daughter, one is her voice. "It's still on my answering machine at home," she says. "Periodically, I call home just to hear it."

Carter does not come across as angry about her daughter's death. Devastated, yes. Frustrated and defeated, certainly. And she seems to be suspended in a state of disbelief.

"She didn't deserve this," Carter says. "She just did not. It was something that should have never happened to her."

In addition to the allegations about the killings, the April sentencing hearing also offered insight into whether Kai Franklin Graham had anything to do with her husband's crimes. According to the Greenville News, IRS Criminal Investigations Special Agent Wayne Wright testified that she's currently under investigation by his agency and the U.S. attorney's office.

The attorney who represented Kai Franklin Graham in her divorce told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she "denies any involvement in any criminal wrongdoing whatsoever." Contacted by CL, attorney James Dearing would say only that he was not representing her and didn't know who was.

Mayor Shirley Franklin has had nothing to say publicly about Graham since she expressed hope for his innocence two years ago. In that time, her spokeswoman Beverly Isom has stressed to CL and other publications that Graham is the mayor's former son-in-law.

Over the past two weeks, CL sent detailed e-mails to Isom asking if Franklin would be willing to comment on the investigation into her daughter, on King's claim that Graham lived with her after the deaths of Carter and Hackett, and on any hope she might have that there eventually will be an arrest in the nearly three-year-old deaths of Hackett and Carter. Isom declined CL's requests.

Shortly after the April sentencing hearing, Franklin did issue a more general statement:

"While I have no knowledge of the details of the case or its proceedings, I find the sale and use of illegal drugs abhorrent," the mayor wrote. "I have long believed and there is more than enough evidence that illegal drugs, guns and violence have been destructive to the very fabric of American life. My contempt personally and professionally for the devastation that drugs and violence has caused in our community has not changed."