Bigsby facing murder trial this week
Accused of concealing son Codi’s body 7 months before reporting him missing; boy still not found
HAMPTON — More than two years after Cory Jamar Bigsby reported his toddler son had disappeared from the family’s Buckroe Beach home, he finally goes to trial this week.
Bigsby, 45, is accused of second-degree murder and concealing a dead body in the death of Codi Bigsby “on or about June 18, 2021,” or about seven months before he reported the boy missing. The boy has never been found.
There are only 18 cases in Virginia history of a murder being prosecuted without a body, according to a database compiled by Tad DiBiase, a former federal prosecutor who prosecuted such a case. The list goes back to 1810. But it’s the second such case on the Peninsula in recent months, following a Newport News murder case late last year.
After two years of twists and turns, jury selection in the Bigsby case was expected to take all day in Hampton Circuit Court on Monday, with the trial expected to take the rest of the week.
The trial is expected to center in large part on the statements Bigsby made while locked up, which
Hampton prosecutors contend is a clear confession to Codi’s killing. Prosecutors don’t have a body, eyewitness testimony, DNA evidence, video footage or other evidence often seen in homicide cases.
Bigsby’s defense team, on the other hand, is expected to contend that the statements were made while Bigsby was under duress — that they reflect a man undergoing a significant mental health crisis — and that the jury should pay the statements little heed.
Bigsby reported Codi missing the morning of Jan. 31, 2022. He told police that his son was sleeping in his bed at 2 a.m., but was
nowhere to be found by 7 a.m. The boy would have been 4 at the time.
Law enforcement investigators have long said they’ve had a difficult time determining when — or where — the boy was last seen alive, so it was difficult to know where to focus their efforts.
But a significant break in the case came began later in 2022, when Bigsby gave four different statements to guards at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail. At the time, Bigsby was locked up on a series of child neglect charges involving his sons that were filed within days of Codi’s disappearance.
In one of the four statements, dated November 2022, Bigsby wrote that he beat his then 3-yearold son “with his fist” in June 2021 until the boy fell unconscious. He tried to give the boy CPR, he wrote, but Codi never woke up. Then, he said, he buried him.
According to court testimony, guards found that statement — in a black and white composition notebook — in the inmate’s jail cell in December 2022.
“On June 18, 2021, I, Cory Bigsby, walked in the room and grabbed Codi and drag him into the kitchen,” he wrote. Then, Bigsby said, he “thumped (Codi’s) head on the floor and beat him with my fist and he went into cardiac arrest.”
After the CPR didn’t work, he wrote, he carried Codi upstairs and put him into the bathtub “to see if he would respond,” and he didn’t. “I held him and prayed to God that he bring my baby back,” Bigsby wrote. “Then I took him in the room and layed him (sic) on the bed.”
After that, Bigsby said he got a flashlight and charged it, bought gas and snacks at a gas station.
Bigsby wrote that he went to an empty car wash and put Codi into a bag, then drove home and put the toddler “in the fridge.”
Then he put Codi back in the car, he said, driving him behind a building, where he dug a hole by a tree and buried him. “Then went home and prayed for forgiveness,” Bigsby wrote. He went to King’s Dominion the next day, he added, and later “dumped my clothes from the crime in the trash and burned them.”
“Then the next day I went back to burn Codi and cover up scars from the beatings,” he wrote. (The statement doesn’t explain how he would have been able to access Codi again, given that he just wrote that he buried him).
“Please except (sic) my confession! Sincerely Cory Bigsby.”
The two page statement has large “X’s” over both pages, apparently written by Bigsby before the notebook was found.
That was the most incriminating of the four statements, which vary greatly about the dates and about what happened. The first two statements were made on Aug. 3, 2022, with Bigsby saying in one that he went out to wash clothes and came home to find Codi “at the bottom of the steps unresponsive.”
“He must have fallen,” Bigsby wrote.
In all four statements, he wrote that he tried to perform CPR, to no avail.
Bigsby wrote in several of the statements that he took his deceased son to “Building 5511” on “Garrett A. Morgan Boulevard” and buried him behind the building.
“Then I drove home and prayed to Jesus to save Codi, and I failed him,” he wrote in one statement. “So I am becoming tired of torture so now I am confessing because my family and the police is conducting these crimes and I cannot take it anymore.”
The Garret A. Morgan Boulevard address is in Hyattsville, Maryland, outside of Washington. Police and federal law enforcement officers searched that area in the summer of 2022, following Bigsby’s first statement, but did not find Codi.
Bigsby’s attorneys, Amina Matheny-Willard and Curtis Brown, maintain that Bigsby made the series of statements under duress from his time in custody. That began, they said, even before he was charged. His first night at the police station, in the early morning hours of Feb. 1, 2022, Bigsby twice asked for a lawyer and was rebuffed.
That came during an argument between Bigsby and a police detective over the results of a lie detector test. The issue led Hampton’s then-police chief to determine that his detective team had acted inappropriately in failing to stop the interview, with the chief replacing the case’s lead investigator.
Bigsby’s lawyers also contend that guards at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail promised Bigsby a meeting with his family if he provided the Aug. 3, 2022, statement. Two days later, the jail took the unusual step of having Bigsby’s family in for a luncheon in which they ordered from Hardee’s, Bigsby’s favorite restaurant. Jail guards have denied that there was any quid pro quo.
Bigsby is charged with second-degree murder, punishable by up to 40 years behind bars, and concealing a dead body, punishable by up to five years. A second trial against Bigsby, on the series of child neglect charges involving Codi and his brothers, will take place later.