DEAD PASSENGER
Dismembered ex, set for burial, is part of blended family’s 1,200-mi. car trip
On the sweltering summer afternoon of July 24, 2011, police searching for a missing woman found a headless, limbless torso in Oyster Creek, a canal near Richmond, Texas.
Through the next day, divers and cadaver-scenting K-9 teams braved the heat in search of the rest of the body. They found her, bit by bit — a skull with a face barely attached and then a severed leg.
Through dental records, authorities soon learned that the dismembered corpse was once Laura Jean Ackerson, 27, from Kinston, N.C. She was the woman they had been looking for.
Oyster Creek was the last stop on a macabre 1,200-mile road trip. At the wheel was musician Grant Ruffin Hayes, 31, Ackerson’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her two sons. Along with him were his wife, Amanda, 39, and three children, Laura Jean’s two boys and Amanda’s daughter, all under the age of 4.
Laura Jean rode alone in a U-Haul, packed on ice into three big coolers, her body destined to be a snack for Texas alligators.
Hayes and Ackerson met in 2007 and soon moved in together. Ackerson was taking classes and trying to find her way in the business world, working her way up in restaurant jobs. Hayes was a composer and musician who played in bars around Raleigh, N.C. His drug use made his artistic temperament dangerously unstable. He was prone to outbursts of violence and held paranoid fantasies that the government and aliens were out to get him, wrote Diane Fanning in her 2016 book on the case, “Bitter Remains.” As a string of harebrained business schemes or recording prospects fell through, Grant, whose stage name was Grant Haze, grew angrier, more unpredictable, and took more drugs.
Hayes treated Ackerson with increasing cruelty and contempt, bullying, abuse, and cheating.
It was clear that romance was doomed when he wrote a song just for her. He called it “Broomstick Rider.” Hayes sang about violent intentions. “I put a price tag on your head,” he sang. “My bullets will get you soon.” For a time, the couple lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands. There, Grant met a woman from Texas, Amanda Perry Tucker. She was a former actress who had landed some small parts in movies and TV years earlier. Soon, Hayes and Tucker were an item, and then a married couple with a baby daughter.
The new marriage sent Hayes and Ackerson into a bitter custody battle over who would get the two boys. He and Amanda had them during the week. Their mother got to see them only on the weekends.
On July 13, 2011, Ackerson left a message on a friend’s answering machine, saying that she was going to visit her sons at their father’s apartment. Then she disappeared.
She did not show up for several appointments, which was not like her. Worried family and friends, well aware of her boyfriend’s hatred for her, reported her missing.
Police started following a trail left by the Hayes family. It took them from North Carolina to Richmond, Texas, where Amanda’s sister lived.
Around the same time, Laura Jean disappeared, Grant Hayes had gone on a spending spree in Walmart. He bought a power saw, blades, industrial trash bags, plastic tarps, goggles, and duffel bags. Then he, Amanda and the three children hit the road, heading for the sister’s home.
As soon as they arrived, both Grant and Amanda started asking strange questions, such as the creek’s depth, whether there were alligators in the water, or if the area’s feral hogs ate people. Grant visited another store to buy a large trash can and hydrochloric acid. Prosecutors would later say that the plan was to dissolve the body in acid and, if that didn’t work, leave it in the creek for the gators.
The idea that they would take a dismembered corpse on such a long ride, only to dump it near a relative’s home, raised eyebrows among Texas law officers.
“So they drove through, what, five or six states and over a 40-milewide swamp in Louisiana, all so they can bring the body here?” a deputy sheriff said to the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer. “Fortunately for police, criminals just aren’t very smart.”
At their trials in North Carolina, each tried to place the blame for the actual killing on the other or said it was an accident. Grant, whose trial was held in 2013, was convicted of first-degree murder, for which he is serving a life sentence. In 2014, a jury found Amanda guilty of second-degree murder, for which she was given up to 16 years behind bars.
After the murder convictions, the pair still faced Texas charges for the crime of illegally disposing of a body. Texas prosecutors decided against trying Grant since he was already going to be locked up for life.
Amanda traveled to Texas from her cell in North Carolina for the second trial in 2018. “Woman fed husband’s ex to alligators, tried to dissolve the body in acid, prosecutors say,” was the headline on a wire story that ran in several papers across the country.
She vigorously denied having anything to do with the murder. As for the charge of covering up a crime with acid and alligators, she said she only did it because she feared that Grant would kill her if she refused.
The jury found her guilty and tacked an extra 20 years onto her jail time.
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