1836
Pembroke was settled in 1836.
about 0:05:29The story
The murders at the centre of this story happened on one street in the town in November 2015 and took three lives: Calvin Phillips, his wife Pamela, and their neighbour Ed Danzerow.
His father was a 30-year Air Force veteran who served in Vietnam, his sister retired from the Air Force after 20 years, and his grandfather had ridden with the Army Cavalry. The family moved to Europe when he was two and lived for a time in Germany. Before finishing high school he signed up for the Army Reserves, then went to basic training at Fort Knox and enrolled at the University of Nebraska in its ROTC programme. He met Stacy, a Middle Tennessee State University ROTC student, at Fort Lewis in Washington. He graduated from Nebraska in 1990 with a degree in geography, and in May 1991 he flew to Tennessee to marry Stacy; he was 22 and she was 25. Their daughter Megan was born in December 1992.
He applied for and passed Army Ranger School, then flew Apache attack helicopters, logging more than 1,000 hours of combat flying, 500 of them on night vision. He served three tours in Iraq and reached the rank of major. In 2010 the family returned to the United States and he studied for a master's degree in national defence at the Navy War College in Rhode Island. His next posting was Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with the 101st Airborne Division.
By then his first marriage was over. One of the first women to reply was Joan Harmon Guerra, a petite blonde with three children: a son, Justin Elijah, who went by Elijah, and two daughters. Joan told him the boy's father had been decapitated in a logging accident and that her ex-husband, Carlos Guerra, had stalked and threatened her. They married at the courthouse on 7 December 2004, after he had already asked Stacy for a divorce; it later emerged that Joan had never divorced Carlos.
In 2010 Joan found an old house in Pembroke, and they bought it at auction for $60,000 and painted it bright yellow. Across the street lived Cal Phillips, 59, a 17-year military veteran, and his wife Pam, 58, who worked at a bank in Hopkinsville.
Around the same time Cal found what he believed was classified material on a laptop and computer disks and handed them to the FBI. The allegations were extensive: beatings with a belt, a bamboo stick and a whip, a duct-taping in the basement, wrestling that ended in choke holds, and baths with the girls.
A court-martial was set for December 2015, and Cal Phillips was to be a prosecution witness.
On 18 November 2015 Pam left for work at about 7 a.m. At noon she was told a washing machine could not be delivered because nobody was home. She left work at 5 p.m. and called her friend Frances Marlene LaRock. LaRock had been to the Phillips house at about 2 p.m. and found the front door open; when she went back an hour later the car had been turned around and the door was shut. On the phone with Pam she heard a scream, then silence.
At about 2.15 a.m. a neighbour, John Homick, had been woken by two explosions or gunshots from his farm. Later he found a burning Pontiac Grand Am in his field. Inside were two sets of human remains. The car was registered to Cal and Pam Phillips. Police went to the Phillips house and found Cal dead in the cellar, with signs of fire set around him. In the backyard was blood beside a Second World War era pistol belonging to their neighbour Ed Danzerow, 63; the blood was Ed's. Pam's blood was on the back door and in the yard. The bodies in the car were Pam and Ed.
Cal had five gunshot wounds and blunt force trauma to the face and limbs, inflicted before death; a tooth under the body and blood on the stairs suggested he had been thrown down the cellar steps. Three bullets had entered his chest and stayed there; the wounds to his neck and right clavicle had exited, with the exits lower than the entrances, suggesting shots fired from above. He was killed with G2 Research RIP .45 bullets. Pam and Ed had been shot repeatedly with a .22; fragments were in both brains, and an intact .22 bullet was in Pam's heart. Both were badly burned.
Cal and Pam's son Matthew and his aunt Diana installed cameras at the house. Months later Diana noticed a metallic object under some wood on the breezeway, and Matthew recognised it as a shell casing. Phone records showed his alarm had been set for about 1.10 a.m. on 18 November.
The prosecution was allowed to use statements Cal and Pam had made to Stephen Durham, Stephen Bollinger, Major James Garrett and Penny Case under the forfeiture by wrongdoing exception.
Joan's former supervisor Lisa Petri said Joan seemed strangely happy after the murders, and another witness said Joan had handed Pam's reset phone in at an AT&T store. The defence noted that Joan carried a .45 Glock and that her boyfriend was in the area. Joan and Elijah both invoked the Fifth Amendment, and the court ruled neither could be called.
He denied the murders and denied arranging them, said the dog tag found in the Phillips house was not his because his were always on a breakaway chain, and explained the 1.10 a.m. alarm as a check on a new kerosene heater. He said he had target-shot at Cal's range, that Joan had fired his guns there, that Cal was his own key witness, that he had never owned the RIP ammunition, and that he had moved his Glock into his safe on his lawyer's advice. On cross-examination he insisted the .22 bullets did not match his guns, though the expert had said they could not be excluded.