Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 7, 1994 TAG: 9403070089
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WINCHESTER LENGTH: Long
The wooden doors swing open. Camera lights burst on. Out strides the prosecuting attorney. Reporters and cameras circle to get the latest sound bite on what's happening in the case of Commonwealth vs. William Ray Layne.
Margaret Layne, almost 70, pulls herself up from a bench and creeps behind the media mob. She walks carefully on a pair of dark dress heels that hurt her feet. She listens, clutching her pocketbook and a plastic grocery bag that holds her flat "walking shoes."
This is the only way for her to find out what's being said in the courtroom about her son, Billy.
That scene was repeated many times last week in a courthouse in Winchester. Because she was listed as a witness for the defense, Margaret Layne wasn't allowed inside the courtroom - even though her son was facing the chance of the death penalty in one of the Roanoke region's most frightening murder cases ever.
He was accused of kidnapping, molesting and killing his 11-year-old stepniece, Phadra Dannielle Carter, and then chopping her body and burying her in a weedy patch of earth near his mother's home in Botetourt County.
On Saturday, the jury had its say: It took two hours to convict Billy Layne of capital murder.
Starting Tuesday, the jurors will hear testimony about whether Layne deserves the death sentence or life in prison. And Margaret Layne will get the chance to tell them what she's been aching to say out loud for a week - for months, really.
"I've known Billy longer than anybody. I'm his mother," she said outside the courtroom one day last week. "I've never seen cruelty. I've seen him angry - but I've never seen him cruel. In my heart, I know he didn't do it."
His mother, his wife, his daughters, his nieces and nephews, his sisters - they have stuck by Billy Layne even as the prosecution's evidence piled up. At the courthouse last week, his 5-month-old grandson, Jeremy, born after Layne was charged and jailed, wore a tiny bib that said, "I love my Grandpa."
This is a crime so horrible that the trial was moved far from Botetourt to help give Layne a better chance at a fair hearing.
It has split and pained his family. Phadra was their kin too. Billy's brother, Marty, had been Phadra's stepfather from the time she was 5. After she was killed, Marty said he believed Billy did it. Phadra's mother, Cindy Layne, testified for the prosecution about the confusing night Phadra was snatched from her trailer home in Rockbridge County.
Margaret Layne has labored to keep everyone together.
Over the Christmas holidays, she visited Marty and Cindy three times. Cindy "said some hard things" about Billy. "But I understand - she's lost her little girl."
"There's no side to stand up and cheer for," Margaret Layne continued. "A dear little girl has lost her life. . . . It's just pulled the family apart. We are heartbroken for Cindy and Marty over Phadra. But we also are heartbroken over what's happened to Billy."
This is what has happened to Billy:
Prosecutors built a compelling case of circumstantial evidence showing he forced his way in Phadra's home about 2 a.m. Sept. 18, dragged her to his beat-up Toyota station wagon and drove her an hour south to the Flatwoods section of Botetourt.
There, in a mountain forest just down a gravel road from his momma's house, Layne sexually molested Phadra and hit her 10 times in the head with a tire iron, they said.
Prosecutors say he left her body and drove to Roanoke, bought a shovel and a mattock from Hammerhead Hardware and filled out a credit application at Credit Tire and Audio. Then, they say, he drove back to the murder scene, dragged her body away and buried her in stickweeds a short distance away.
Layne was arrested two days later, heading for Tennessee. Phadra's body was found after two more days. Her legs had been hacked so they could be pushed back over her head. She had been stuffed into a 31-inch-long grave.
When investigators questioned him about that weekend, Layne claimed he'd been on a drinking binge and couldn't remember. And he said he didn't want to say anything that might hurt his family.
As they waited outside the courtroom, many of Layne's kin said they could not bring themselves to believe he was the monster that prosecutors claimed.
"If he came to me himself and said he did it - I don't know if I'd believe him," his daughter, Heather, 18, said.
Some family members swapped stories about the boy and man they called "Bibbee."
They said he was gentle inside and out. He tended his mom's flower garden. He knew the woods, and took his nieces and nephews on nature hikes. He was never too tired to push them in the old tire swing at his mother's house.
Jason Tolley remembers one morning when he decided to surprise his uncle with breakfast. Jason, just 5, rummaged through the kitchen and fixed Billy a sandwich out of a hunk of cheese with mustard and mayonnaise - topped with a glob of honey.
Excited, he ran and woke Billy up.
"What's this?" Billy asked.
"Your breakfast," Jason replied, beaming with pride.
Jason watched as Billy ate every bite.
Life wasn't always easy. Layne's father had a long history of alcohol abuse, according to a probation officer's report.
Margaret Layne said her husband, who is now quite ill, has been a generous man, a good provider who never missed a day of work despite his drinking. But "you ever hear anybody who can't play a harmonica or guitar, play all night long?"
She says Billy took a heavy load, mowing the yard, tending to the house, "driving his daddy home from somewhere" after he'd had too much to drink.
Billy Layne served a year in prison for a string of burglaries in the late 1970s that he said he'd done while on a drinking binge of his own. Then he got a 51-year sentence for another burglary spree in the mid-1980s that his brother Marty and a friend also had a hand in.
But until Saturday, Layne had never been convicted of a violent or sexual crime.
In all the years she's known him, his niece Kristi Marshall says, "there was never any suggestion" of anything sexual.
Layne served almost nine years in prison. He wrote recently in a letter to his brother, Ronnie, that he tried to commit suicide and expected to go crazy someday.
Is it possible that his time in prison changed him, pushed him off the deep end?
His sister, Joan Tolley, says no. "I've seen a change [for the better] in Bib."
After he got out of prison in December 1992, she says, he seemed to be doing well.
He lived with his wife and two daughters for a while, but then moved out. He told Sheriff Reed Kelly that things "were never peaceful or quiet."
He was living with brother Ronnie the weekend Phadra disappeared.
Kristi Marshall remembers her mother calling after the kidnapping and saying, "Watch the kids - we don't know who done this."
When news reports said Billy was a suspect, Marshall says, "I didn't believe it. Then when they pulled him over and she [Phadra] wasn't there, that backed up our theory - that he didn't do it."
Two days later, Marshall and the rest of the family watched from Margaret Layne's home as Virginia Military Institute cadets and other searchers tromped through the woods and weeds around Flatwoods.
Then they saw a four-wheeldrive rumble in. Out came a stretcher. Marshall knew the worst had happened: They'd found Phadra's body.
Her grandmother, Margaret Layne, was "talking and functioning the whole time. But to this day - she can't remember what happened that day."
The case has drawn an avalanche of media attention. Margaret Layne says that all people have seen are the stubbled-faced, greasy-haired pictures of her son on the news - not knowing that he hadn't been given a chance to shave or wash before his early court appearances.
"They want everybody to think he's some sort of lowlife," his daughter Heather says. "And he's just not like that."
Heather, not quite 19, sat on a bench at the Winchester courthouse and used her foot to gently rock the bassinet her son, Jeremy, was snuggled in. Billy Layne has never held his grandson.
"If there was one person in the world I would trust Jeremy with - Dad would be it," Heather said.
In court last week, Billy Layne sat straight-backed. His hair was cut short but he looked a bit uncomfortable in a three-piece suit.
When a sister or daughter would peek in and wave, he'd nod his head and give a reassuring smile.
Outside the courtroom one day, Margaret Layne watched her son Ronnie emerge through the double doors. Prosecutors had called him to testify in order to fix Billy Layne's whereabouts the evening before Phadra disappeared.
Ronnie Layne zigged, then zagged to avoid the cameras and ducked into the men's room. The camera people staked out the restroom door, waiting for a shot of him as he came out.
Ronnie doesn't mind testifying, his mother explained, but he doesn't want all this to be on television: "He thinks it's a family matter."
Finally, he came out and agreed to hold still long enough for the camera people to get his picture. His sister, Joan Tolley, kissed him on the cheek.
When the guilty verdict came back Saturday, Margaret Layne was in a hospital bed recovering from dehydration and stress.
She's out of the hospital now, and will testify Tuesday at the sentencing hearing. She'll fight her failing health just as she fought to make it from the opening gavel through the closing arguments last week.
The last time she visited her son before the trial, she says, he was worrying about her. "He told me that he was going to be all right.
"And he said: Maw, if you don't feel like you can come, don't worry about it.
"I said: Billy, I will be there if I have to crawl."
by CNB