(NOTE: This blog entry is the first in a series. I've always planned for this particular true crime story to be told in several installments. It will be obvious as you read why the story can't possibly fit into one or even two blog entries. I'm not going to hem myself in by promising when the next parts will come, but I assure you they will -- I've put in too much time researching to leave the story off in the middle. But there will be blog entries about other things in between. I will, however, always be sure to link entries in a way that will make it easy for any reader to range across the parts of the story and not feel like they've missed something.)
Foreword
For at least 13 years, a remarkable true crime story has been sitting right in front of me, hiding in plain sight. It has also been hiding in plain sight from the general true crime reading public, a fact that stuns me every time I consider it.
This story begins in the early '90s and ends (for now), a couple of years ago.
The tale starts out with a horrible, brutal double murder, and appears to end with massive allegations of Internet-based fraud.
Among the great cloud of witnesses attached to this story as it slashed across the years were members of my own family -- specifically my eldest sister, Sherry Huff, and her husband of twenty years or so, Richard Grimes.
Recently I was thinking about how true crime stories are often more potent when the storyteller has some sort of personal connection to the story. That connection can be entirely the narrator's perception, or the narrator can be someone who experienced the events directly. Either way, that ectoplasmic tether must be there between the writer and the tale or the end result can fall quite flat.
A door creaked open in my psyche as I mused about this. It revealed a storeroom filled with faded, yellowed, cobwebbed memories, things I'd never sorted properly but set aside for later, I guess. Out of that little-used corner of my brain I pulled a conversation with my then-brother-in-law Richard in the home he and my sister shared in East Nashville. It was either 1994 or 1995, I'm not sure.
I'd just read about a suspected murderer named Tom Steeples in the Nashville Scene, my hometown's free weekly newspaper. Nashville cops, in fact, felt that Tom was a multiple murderer. If the police were correct, Steeples's murderous career ended with the deaths of Rob and Kelli Phillips, a couple who had come from California to Nashville to get into the music business.
My brother-in-law Richard knew alleged serial killer Tom Steeples. He knew him well enough that he and my sister had been guests at the home Steeples shared in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee with his wife, Tillie Ruth.
And if I remember correctly, when I asked my brother-in-law how my sister got along with Tom Steeples, Richard told me with some amusement that the man who'd just suicided in the Metropolitan Davidson County Jail was afraid of my sister Sherry.
I could understand someone fearing my sister. Tall, beautiful, with long, curly auburn hair and pale green eyes that could be full of maternal, big sisterly affection one moment and ice cold anger the next, Sherry could be a formidable woman. Since recalling this conversation, I've thought of Steeples as "the serial killer who was afraid of my sister."
If Tom Steeples was afraid of Sherry Huff Grimes for his own strange reasons, that was probably a very good thing for Sherry and Richard both.
For to be in the same home with Tom and Tillie Ruth Steeples must surely have been, in hindsight, a bit like partying in a viper's den.
Tom and Tillie Ruth would be proven over time to have been a match truly made in hell.
Rob and Kelli
Kelli Phillips was 28, her husband Rob 24.
The couple came to Nashville from Fallbrook, California (over 50 miles north of San Diego) in 1994, chasing a dream. Natives of the Music City would have told them to take a number, to be careful about trusting, to watch their backs. But there wouldn't be time for that.
They'd tried to make it work in California. They just couldn't seem to find anything steady. Kelli worked in the catering business, Rob as a construction worker and mechanic. Four months into marriage, the Phillipses tried a hail Mary.
A hotel in Nashville called Kelli several times after receiving one of the many resumes she shotgunned all over the country trying to find permanent employment. Maybe Rob and Kelli took this as a sign -- Rob had been singing and playing guitar in country bands for some time, and what better place than Nashville, Tennessee to get as close as possible to the heart of the country music biz?
Anticipating only an interview with the hotel in Nashville, Kelli and Rob sold most of their possessions. With just $1100 they set out for Tennessee on March 4, 1994.
It took them only three days. By March 7 Rob and Kelli were in Nashville, at an Econo Lodge on Murfreesboro Road, the name Highway 41 takes on as it bisects Metropolitan Davidson County.
For Rob, Nashville was probably more akin to going home. He'd grown up in rural South Carolina, only ending up in California after impulsively joining the Navy in 1987, when he was 17. Accents in Nashville would have been a bit more familiar to Rob Phillips, and the music, of course, was already deeply embedded in the fabric of the young man's life. For Kelli, Nashville would have been a whole new world. A city filled with hotels and churches was a city filled with people needing good food now, and catering would be a big business there.
Kelli called her mom, Judy Widgery, when they arrived in Nashville. To her mother she sounded excited, upbeat. Kelli and Rob's trip had been nice, no car troubles, and now they were where they wanted to be. Kelli told her mom that she and Rob were heading out to dinner and then to bed.
Blood, everywhere
According to the Nashville Scene, Deputy District Attorney Tom Thurman and Detectives Pat Postiglione and Bill Pridemore were dubbed "Nashvillian(s) of the Year" for 2006.
In the summer of 1996, a well-to-do mother of 2 and professional artist named Janet March disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Janet vanished from the home she shared with husband Perry March, an attorney, in an upscale West Nashville neighborhood. The mystery that began that August wouldn't find any sort of resolution for 10 years.
Thurman, Postiglione and Pridemore were called "Nashvillian of the Year" because they'd all played key roles in bringing about the trial that finally saw Perry March pronounced guilty of murder in August of 2006.
The Scene asked Pridemore and Postiglione about significant past cases they'd worked:
Asked to name cases that had deep personal impact, Postiglione and Pridemore almost simultaneously cite a young couple from California brutally murdered in 1994 in a Murfreesboro Road motel room. (...) The crime scene was so horrific that neither detective will describe it...Twelve years after they encountered the horrific scene in the room at the Econo Lodge, hardened veterans Pat Postiglione and Bill Pridemore still remembered Rob and Kelli Phillips.
And they still thought of the man whom they were certain was responsible for the scene they found in that room.
Postiglione, in the same article, referenced a homicide he'd investigated in October of 1993. Someone shot a nightclub owner named Ronald Bingham, then set his body on fire. The suspect in that case was also business owner Thomas Steeples, who was 49 years old at the time.
Both detectives felt that some of the details of the murders of Rob and Kelli Phillips resembled the murder of Ronald Bingham. Pridemore and Postiglione knew that forenic evidence from the Econo-Lodge murders drew a connection between the Phillpses and Bingham.
And after all, Tom Steeples was out on bond when Rob and Kelli were killed, awaiting trial for Bingham's murder.
But how? How had Steeples, the owner of little old Computer Forms and Supplies, Inc., out on Elm Hill Pike come to be accused of three murders and the rape of Kelli Phillips?
The Phillips crime scene was described in 1994 as "gruesome," and police said that "blood was everywhere." The cash Rob and Kelli had left, however much there was, was gone. Whatever the killer of the couple seeking the timeless brass ring of country stardom was, he was savage, he was soulless.
By April of 1994, Thomas Steeples was in jail again. Even if they'd not had forensic evidence linking him to Rob and Kelli Phillips, police still had Steeples on felony cocaine possession and possession of coke for resale. Steeples had probably long ago scrubbed away any blood he'd shed in March of that year, but he couldn't hide the monkey he had on his back. Cops even found coke at Computer Forms and Supplies, and a good deal of crack cocaine in Tom Steeples's car.
It would later become clear that Tom Steeples wasn't done yet with cocaine. Steeples would embrace that particular demon. And his wife Tillie Ruth would help.
(To be continued...)
