It was a horrendous crime. On the morning of July 16, 1996, Bertha Tardy, 59, a local merchant in Winona, and three of her employees were gunned down execution-style in her place of business, Tardy Furniture. Each victim was shot in the head. Tardy and two employees died instantly. The third died in the hospital.
Curtis Flowers: Mississippi’s Marked Man
The horrific quadruple homicide shocked the sleepy Southern town. Prosecutor Doug Evans felt intense pressure to find who committed the crime. On the day of the murders, without considering any other suspects, he settled on a 26-year-old black man named Curtis Flowers, a common laborer and part-time gospel singer with no criminal record.
Two weeks earlier, Flowers had worked for Tardy for three days but quit after he damaged three golf-cart batteries he was transporting for Tardy’s husband. Flowers’s unclaimed payroll check lay on Tardy’s desk on the day she died. In addition, on the morning of the murders, a .38-caliber handgun was stolen from a car belonging to one of Flowers’s relatives — the same type of handgun used to commit the murders (although it was later established that bullets fired from the gun did not match those found at the crime scene.) Finally, a bloody footprint near one of the victims was made by a Grant Hill Fila-brand sneaker, size 10-and-a-half. An empty shoebox for the same size and make of shoes—but not the sneakers themselves—was found in the duplex Flowers shared with his girlfriend, who told police the shoes, long since worn out and discarded, belonged to her teenage son, not Flowers.
No murder weapon was found. Flowers’s fingerprints did not appear at the crime scene, on the shoebox, or on his relative’s car. When he was first interviewed by police, Flowers was wearing Nike sneakers, not Filas. Upon interrogation, Flowers had no blood splatters on his clothes. He passed a lie-detector test. Still, based on scant circumstantial evidence (a check, a relative’s stolen gun, and an empty shoebox), plus profoundly conflicted eyewitness accounts that some observers of the case claim were fabricated, Flowers was arrested and charged with four counts of capital murder. He said he was in his duplex at the time of the murders, but since he was there alone he had no alibi.