- GARY: He opened up his garage and he saw his pregnant fiancée
in a pool of blood.
- MICHAEL: She was shot a total of four times.
And we believe that she was stabbed and slashed.
- JOHN: For that level of violence,
this was obviously a crime of passion.
- FRE-DREANA: I was at a loss for words,
it was just like, "Is this real? Am I dreaming?"
- NARRATOR: Five unique perspectives,
five points of view, one murder.
- FRE-DREANA: I'm the sister of Avis Banks.
- JOHN: I was the lead investigator.
- GARY: I serve as pastor.
- MICHAEL: I was district attorney.
- FRANK: I was the lead detective
doing the Avis Banks murder.
- ♪
- FRE-DREANA: My name is Fre-Dreana Banks
and I'm the sister of Avis Banks.
Avis grew up in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
She always had a love for children, education.
When I was young, we would play school,
and she would always be the teacher.
She would read to me.
I knew she would eventually be a teacher.
Avis was actually the first person in our immediate family
to graduate from college.
Avis seemed happy in her career.
She would come home and talk about
the babies in the daycare.
She eventually did say she wanted to have
two children of her own.
Avis and Keyon met in Vicksburg.
Her and I were at the gym working out
and he approached her.
And they had a conversation,
and when he walked off, the first thing she asked me,
she say, "What did you think?"
and I was like, "Well, to be honest,
"there's nobody out there that's gonna be
good enough for my sister."
Avis would talk about Keyon from time to time with me.
She would say how kind he was.
He would do different things for her.
He was really sweet to her.
They had similar careers. He was a teacher.
It kind of brought them closer together.
Avis and Keyon dated for somewhat a year
before they decided to move to Ridgeland.
Avis was excited.
It was a little bit bigger than Vicksburg,
a little more things to do,
and it was also closer to her job.
The home that Keyon and Avis bought was a three-bedroom,
big enough for a family.
By the time Keyon spoke to my dad
about marrying my sister, Avis was already pregnant.
Avis called me at about nine, ten o'clock one morning.
"You need to sit down."
And I was like, "What's wrong?"
She said, "You're going to be an aunt."
And I was overly excited.
It would have been my first time ever,
and we sat on the phone and we talked about names
and if you wanted a boy or a girl,
and it just so happened to be around my 21st birthday,
so, we were just gonna have a really big celebration.
- ♪
- FRE-DREANA: I can remember, I was giving my son his bath.
We were getting ready to kinda settle down for the night.
And the phone rang.
I get on the phone and Keyon is panicking and saying, um,
"Can y'all come over really quick?
'Cause something is wrong with Avis."
And he's saying "Y'all need to get over here quick,
get over here quick, the ambulance is on the way."
It's about a 30 to 45-minute drive
from Vicksburg to Ridgeland.
- [siren blaring]
- FRE-DREANA: We finally make it to Avis's neighborhood,
and you can barely get on the street.
There's police everywhere.
Firetrucks, ambulance,
people pretty much saying, hey, you can't go down there.
We're saying that's our family member's house,
"That's my sister's house," "That's my daughter's house.
We need to find out what's going on."
Finally, a police officer walks up to us and ask,
"Are y'all Avis's family?"
And to look in the officer's eyes...
and to hear him say Avis is no longer here...
is a feeling that I don't think I will ever get over.
After the officer explained to us what was going on,
I noticed Keyon was at the neighbor's house.
And he came out and he was kinda erratic,
and I'm like, "Keyon, what's going on?
"Were you there? What happened?
Did you see anything?"
And at this point, he's not saying anything.
About five or ten minutes later,
they're putting him in the back of a police car.
I'm thinking, "Is this somebody that I trust
that's actually a suspect?"
- ♪
- FRANK: I'm detective Frank Dillard III.
I was the lead detective doing the Avis Banks murder
back in 2006.
On November the 29th, 2006,
I was informed that a young lady had been murdered
and that her fiancée was the person that found her.
- [siren blaring]
- FRANK: When I go into a crime scene,
I look for the straight facts,
and if it doesn't add up, then I start breaking it down.
In the garage was a car.
And laying outside of the car was a black female.
And you could tell she still had papers and clutching her purse.
I also noticed that the door
that led from the garage to the house was ajar.
And it was apparent that she was shot.
The bullet exit through the, uh, garage door.
That pretty much told us that it was gonna be a .38,
maybe a .357.
There were nothing else left behind.
Typically, if there are no shell casing,
that tells us that the weapon that was used was a revolver.
Upon entering the house,
I noticed that certain things were in disarray.
Drawers were open,
and the house had been ransacked.
The back door had several shoe prints on it,
all with the same pattern,
and that door was kicked.
The scene itself looked very staged.
There were too many items that were left behind
in order for it to be a robbery.
The killer should've heard the garage door open,
the garage door close, her open her car door.
That tells me that this person was not trying to leave
to avoid her.
This tells me that this person was waiting for her.
I did notice that there were some slash marks on Avis's body.
That speaks volumes.
Most people can shoot someone because it's at a distance,
they don't see the impact.
But when you cut someone, that's very personal.
- ♪
- FRANK: I did go to the coroner's office
to get results from the prelim autopsy.
I was informed that she was, at the time,
carrying what was a healthy baby boy.
I also was informed that the gunshot to the head
was possibly the fatal shot.
She was also shot in the stomach,
which means to me that someone was trying to not only
end her life, but end the child's life.
After hearing that, I was en route to the station,
where I could meet with the fiancée, Keyon.
He seemed to be kinda jovial to a certain degree,
very laid back.
He was texting, he was making phone calls.
He was even kind of laughing a little bit.
At one point I had to remind him that,
you know, "We're here because of an investigation
of your dead fiancée and your, uh, dead child."
I asked him some of the things that kinda happened
as he saw that night.
He was more than happy to tell me what he saw.
What he did.
According to Keyon, once he got off work,
he had practice later on, 5:30,
but he also had made groceries, and I believe he told me that
he took the groceries to a friend's house,
went back to practice,
and after practice is when he went home to find Avis dead.
Keyon said that when he pulled up to his driveway,
he hit the remote to open the door.
Once the door opened,
that's when he saw Avis laying out.
He ran over to her, shaking her and calling her name
to see if she was still alive,
and at that point he said he ran into the house
to see if the assailant was still there.
If a person has just killed someone,
you're gonna run into the house where that person is
without a weapon? That doesn't make sense to me.
During murders, most people who are killed
are killed by someone that they know.
He's the one that found the body,
he's the one that saw her last before she went to work.
We had no reason to rule him out.
Thinking that well, okay, I've-- I've gained his trust,
now I can read him his Miranda.
At that point, that's when he wanted to call attorneys.
- His demeanor changed.
He gets on the phone, he's talking to people,
he's lashing out about the police department.
- Before Keyon left, we did contact the judge
and get a search warrant,
so that we could do a GSR kit, gunshot residue.
We really weren't sure what it would support.
A gunshot residue just means
that someone was in close proximity
or had come into contact with someone who had been shot,
or, uh, that had shot a weapon.
We extracted gunshot residue from both hands,
just in case he came up to be our main suspect.
You don't always get instant gratification being a detective.
Some things are gonna come later.
- ♪
- FRANK: I spoke with the principal.
Apparently Miss Hughes was not there.
She had called it in, so the principal and I
went to his office,
and I asked him several different questions.
Keyon and Carla, were they dating?
According to the principal,
he had a no fraternizing type policy.
During the middle of our conversation,
Carla came into the office.
And she was already crying.
And I said, "Why are you crying? Wh--what--what's the problem?"
She said she was crying because of what Keyon had to go through,
you know, with his fiancée.
I thought that the way she was crying and sobbing
was very excessive, I mean,
why cry for somebody that you really don't know,
unless you know them?
- ♪
- My name is Gary Stewart and I serve as pastor
of Greater Fairview Baptist Church in Pickens, Mississippi.
I've been serving as Carla Hughes's consultant now
since this incident happened.
Carla and Keyon, they had met in July of '06,
at the Chastain Middle School.
There was a group of teachers that would meet as friends
hanging out after work.
When Keyon Pitman's fiancée had been killed,
the police began to question her
because of the fact that students had made testimony
that, uh, they were passing notes one to another,
things of that nature.
So, there was evidence that a relationship, uh,
was going on.
- GARY: Carla's very personable.
Somebody you really just couldn't conceive of being
in something of this magnitude.
- Initially, the reason why Carla denied the fact that
she and Keyon were in a intimate relationship
was because first and foremost they're teachers at the school.
But now you have two innocent people that are killed.
And so now truth has got to be dealt with.
- GARY: Mr. Pittman said he'd arrived home
and opened up his garage
and he saw his pregnant fiancée lying in a pool of blood.
He said that, uh, he immediately ran
to a neighbor's home and asked the neighbor to call 911.
Now, he has his cell phone,
and he said the reason why he didn't use his cell phone
was because he didn't want roaming charges.
And I thought that was kind of suspect and suspicious,
because who in the world
thinks of...roaming charges
at a time of that magnitude?
What he did was,
instead of immediately calling 911,
he reached out to Carla.
- Of course, we have to wonder, "Why is he not trying
"to reach out to her parents?
Why is he not trying to reach out to her family members?"
What he says is that he frantically called Avis
that evening trying to reach her,
trying to locate her, wondering where she is,
but the truth of the issue is,
Keyon has never done that before.
Which goes to a pattern of... "Why on this day
are you so frantic trying to reach out to your fiancée?"
There's never been this type of concern,
there's never been this type of urgency to speak to her before,
so why today? Why now?
Is it because you know that something has happened
and you're trying to cover your tracks?
One of the interesting things was...
when he gets to their home,
he parks his car on the street.
And I found that to be pretty odd because...
if I'm coming home, I'm gonna park
where I always park.
If I park in my driveway, I'm gonna park in my driveway.
If I park in the garage, I'm gonna park in my garage.
But why would you park on the street,
unless you know that when you open up your garage,
something is amiss?
The detectives were really, um, looking at Keyon.
- After her meeting with Keyon and him dropping off groceries
to her home, she then proceeded to go see a friend of hers.
- GARY: Keyon Pittman comes to Carla's home and stays
maybe 30, 45 minutes.
His timeframe of him being gone and returning back to the gym
is unaccounted for.
Where did he go? How do we account for...
his whereabouts for the time that all this is taking place?
He's the only one that could've gotten in and out
of his neighborhood without the neighbors or anybody
asking any questions.
His history, his pattern, produces nothing but suspicion.
- ♪
- I'm John Neal, current police chief
of the Ridgeland Police Department.
At the time of this case,
I was the lead investigator and the commander
of the Criminal Investigations Division.
This case started on a-- on a Wednesday evening and, uh,
by the time that we got to the weekend,
Keyon was--was still number one on our radar.
Most humans, if this was your loved one and your unborn child,
you're gonna move Heaven and Earth to offer as much
information as you can,
versus invoke your Fifth Amendment right and ask
to talk to an attorney when you haven't even been accused
of anything.
Keyon was pretty much a player.
He was a ladies' man and when you couple that
with the fact that he's fixing to get married
and he's got a fiancée at home who is--who is pregnant,
we--we kind of started wondering if maybe this is
the motive that we need to be looking for.
During that initial interview, he was able to give us
a little bit of information so we could start
backtracking his actions to find out where--where he was
during the time of the crime.
We were able to assume based off the facts at the scene
that Avis was killed somewhere between 5:45
and maybe six o'clock.
We were able to, uh, interview the assistant
basketball coach, Antonio Caldwell.
One of the questions that we wanted to make sure
that Caldwell answered for us was whether or not Keyon stayed
at the gym the entire time.
- Keyon was at Chastain Middle School
and remained there until about 7:30 that night.
So, we--we knew he was not at the scene.
That Tuesday afternoon, almost a week into the case,
we got that--that break that we were really looking for.
About halfway through the day,
Detective Dillard comes to my office and said
he just received a phone call from one of our local attorneys.
He thought he had a piece of evidence
that--that might be valuable to us.
This local attorney had a client, Patrick Nash,
and indicated they were in possession of a firearm
that they think may have killed Avis Banks.
You're always cautious about stuff like that because
as many guns as there are out there on the street,
you know, maybe this is just something that's gonna be used
to throw us off of our trail.
What is it that they're gonna be looking for
if they come forward with this information?
What's the price that we're gonna have to pay?
We've got an interview room, uh...
at the--the investigations division.
So whenever the attorney and his client get there,
we walk 'em into that room.
They've got a good relationship with Detective Dillard, uh,
so we just let him go in there and--and work his magic.
- ♪
- JOHN: You know it's almost the longest hour
of--of your life because you-- you want to know what's going on
in that room.
You want to know what information
is--is coming out of it.
As we're watching from the monitor room,
the excitement of this is that proverbial smoking gun
piece of evidence that we've been looking for...
This is pivotal.
Mr. Nash was-- was able to tell us
through that--that initial interview that his father
and Carla's father were actually brothers,
so Carla is-- is Patrick's cousin.
Carla had come by Patrick's house,
and during their conversations, uh, she mentioned that she was
having some trouble with some neighbors
and she just didn't feel very safe at her house over there.
Patrick questioned her as to why,
and she just said, you know, "There's just been some--
"some break-ins around, I'd just like to have something
for my protection."
Patrick had a .38 caliber Rossi five-shot revolver
that he wasn't using at the time.
And he offered that to--to Carla just to take back with her
for protection.
Uh, and prior to Carla leaving the house,
he also gave her a bladed hunting knife, uh,
for just in case.
But then he tells us that on the day
that--that Avis was murdered, that he got a phone call
from Carla that indicated that, uh, Keyon's fiancée
had just been found dead in their house.
It raised a little flag with him but he didn't think much of it.
Until a couple of days later, uh, closer toward the weekend,
Carla came back by his house and wanted to--to return
the firearm that she had borrowed.
Patrick, he looked at it and examined it and noticed
that what was delivered to her as a fully loaded firearm
was now empty.
And Carla's statement to him was,
"Well, you know, sometimes I just went out
and did a little practice shooting."
He thought that kind of odd.
It just ate at him even more, and after a couple of days, uh,
he--he did the right thing and turned it right over to us.
When we got that firearm...
Well, we also needed to get that--that to the crime lab
as quick as we could.
Every day, we're waiting on those results
to--to come back in.
And after about seven days, they did.
It was exactly what we were hoping it was gonna show,
that the firearm that Patrick Nash had turned into
the Ridgedale Police Department
was, in fact, the firearm that killed Avis Banks.
You'd been waiting on these things,
these pieces of the puzzle to fall in ever since
this horrific crime happened, and bam.
[chuckles] Just what we were waiting on.
- ♪
- My name is Michael Guest.
I was district attorney for Madison and Rankin County.
On that Tuesday, Carla Hughes's uncle and cousin came
to the Ridgeland Police Department.
And they had with them a .38-caliber
five-shot revolver handgun.
The expert from the Mississippi State Crime Laboratory stated
that without a doubt, uh, that the weapon, uh,
that Carla Hughes had borrowed from her cousin
the Sunday before the murder
and returned the Friday after the murder,
was in fact the gun that was used to shoot
and kill Avis Banks.
She actually returned the weapon to her cousin
just hours after telling Detective Frank Dillard
that she did not have any firearms in her possession.
And on Wednesday, a warrant is issued
for the arrest of Carla Hughes.
She is originally charged with the crime
of accessory after the fact.
Uh, because law enforcement does not have enough evidence
to link her to actually the death of Avis Banks
at this point.
But we do have enough evidence to link her to disposing
of the murder weapon.
We also were beginning to develop motive,
and that motive was that Carla Hughes
was romantically involved with Keyon Pittman.
We saw that, uh, Carla was very possessive of Keyon,
uh, that she wanted Keyon to leave Avis
and to be with her.
Carla Hughes had every motive in the world, uh,
to kill Avis Banks,
even more of a motive than Keyon.
After she's arrested, there is an attempt, uh,
by law enforcement to interview Carla.
We attempted through her attorney to see
if she had information that she could offer that would
implicate Keyon in the death of Avis Banks.
After consulting with her attorney, uh,
she chooses not to speak with law enforcement.
- MICHAEL: After Carla Hughes's, uh, arrest on Wednesday,
a search warrant is issued for her home on Friday.
- They're looking for the knife that was used to both
stab and slash Avis Banks.
Uh, they're looking for maybe items of clothing that
would have blood on them, uh, looking for anything
out of the ordinary that could tie Carla Hughes
to the death of Avis Banks.
- MICHAEL: One of the things that they know from
the shoe impressions left on the rear door of the home,
uh, they know that they are looking for a certain type
of shoe that would have that same shoe pattern.
As they begin searching through Carla's closet,
one of the very first boxes of shoes that they find
in the top of her closet
is a size 10 Treadsafe tennis shoe.
Uh, it has an identical pattern on the bottom of the shoe
that matches the rear door of Avis's home.
They began to examine the shoe very closely visually,
uh, and they notice what they believe to be
very minute amounts of blood on the shoe.
So, we now believe that we have the shoes that the killer wore
on the night in question.
We now have two crucial pieces of evidence
against Carla Hughes.
First, she was in possession of the murder weapon,
and now we have the shoes that were worn
by the individual that gained access into the house.
She would have been having to wear those shoes at the time
the projectile would have struck Avis.
Uh, blood would have spattered from that wound and that's how
that blood would have been deposited on the shoes
that we found in Carla's residence.
At that point, we believe that almost immediately
after Keyon left Carla's home, uh, that she then drove, uh,
to the home uh that Keyon shared with Avis Banks.
We believe that she kicked in the door.
That she staged the crime scene there.
And was laying in wait for Avis
at the time Avis pulled in.
When, uh, Avis exited the car...
she was immediately confronted by Carla,
who was waiting just inside the door.
- [gunshot]
- MICHAEL: She was shot a total of four times,
two of those wounds being fatal gunshot wounds
to the chest and the head.
As she was on the ground,
we believe that she was stabbed and slashed.
- ♪
- MICHAEL: She immediately went home,
cleaned up and awaited for Keyon to arrive.
Based upon this new evidence that is recovered there
at the home of, uh, Carla Hughes,
the charges against Carla Hughes are now upgraded
from accessory after the fact to murder,
to now two counts of capital murder.
One being the death of Avis Banks
and the second being the death of Avis's unborn child.
Capital murder in Mississippi carries one of two options.
It's life or death.
- ♪
- FRE-DREANA: We got a phone call
the morning of Avis's funeral and it was Lieutenant Neal,
and he said that, "I know today is gonna be a hard one for you,
but let me kinda ease your pain."
And he said, "We have a suspect."
- JOHN: We knew by the time this--this case was wrapped up
and packaged for the district attorney's office,
we were 100% confident that we had the right person.
- FRANK: On December the 8th,
Carla was charged with two counts of murder.
One because she killed Avis,
and the other one because she killed Avis' baby.
- MICHAEL: Our strategy in this case as we're preparing
for trial is we know we gotta do two things.
Uh, one, we have to convince the jury
through circumstantial evidence that Carla Hughes did in fact
kill Avis Banks.
Simultaneously, we also know, uh, that we have to defend
Keyon Pittman.
The defense is going to try to give a theory of the case
to the jury that Carla Hughes did not murder Avis Banks,
but it was in fact Keyon Pittman.
- GARY: The prosecution laid out its case,
and it just stuck to one thing.
Carla Hughes met Keyon Pittman
and she wanted the lifestyle,
she wanted Keyon Pittman.
And she was willing to do anything, to include murder,
to have Keyon Pittman.
- JOHN: Keyon was gonna be the man that was gonna
rejuvenate life in her.
But Avis was in the way.
The relationship, how did you view it?
What did you think was going on?
- A sexual adventure.
It was pretty much, uh, whatever we chose to do sexually.
- MICHAEL: How did you view the long-term, uh, prospects
for your relationship with Carla Hughes?
- There was no long term.
- MICHAEL: What we tried to show to the jury is the longer
that Carla and Keyon's relationship went on,
the more possessive that she became.
When you were around friends and relatives
during this period of time,
how would she introduce you to those folks?
- She would introduce me as her future husband.
- MICHAEL: Did there ever come a time when she began
to talk to you about leaving Avis or getting married?
- [sighs] That would always come up.
- MICHAEL: On the day before Carla borrowed the firearm,
Keyon testified that Carla continually called him,
and he said that she became very angry,
and she even uttered the phrase, "Something is about to change."
And we know that that's when she determined
that she was going to remove Avis Banks from the equation.
She knew that Avis was pregnant?
- Yes.
- ♪
- FRE-DREANA: Carla wanted what Avis had.
Carla wanted the life, she wanted the child,
she wanted the house.
- GARY: In my getting to know Carla, uh,
versus...the picture that was painted of Carla...
two total opposites.
The prosecution, they wanted us to believe that Carla was able
to separate the door frame from the house,
causing the footprints of those shoes--
those Treadsafe shoes-- to be on the door,
stage the house as if though a burglar had come in...
shoot and stab Avis Banks,
and get out of there in 21 minutes.
My suggestion would be Carla would have to be superhuman,
or there'd have to be somebody else.
- FRANK: Carla's attorneys did try to make it seem as though
Keyon himself did it and blamed Carla for it.
- GARY: They wore the same size shoes,
he had a key to her place, sets it up all for him
to be able to commit this crime,
get the shoes and get that weapon back to Carla's place,
and her not know anything about it.
It was the perfect frame-up.
- ♪
- MICHAEL: The defense tried to paint a picture of Keyon
as someone who did not wanna be tied down, uh,
as someone who was more of a playboy type of personality.
But there was no way physically possible that Keyon
could have been in two places at one time.
We had put forth eyewitnesses
placing him at basketball practice during the time
of Avis' death.
Mr. Pittman, did you kill Avis Banks?
- No. No.
- MICHAEL: Do you feel any responsibility for her death?
- Yes.
- MICHAEL: Tell me how.
- If I would have stayed faithful to who I was with,
but made a bad choice to sleep around
and flirt with other women,
this chain of events would have never taken place.
- JUDGE: If the, uh, defendant would please rise.
- FRANK: On October the 13th, 2009, Carla was convicted.
A sentence of incarceration
without the possibility of being paroled.
- FRE-DREANA: When the words
"Carla Hughes is found guilty" was read,
it was like...closure.
It was relief.
It was... "Now my sister can rest."
- FRANK: Carla seemed like she couldn't believe it.
She really thought she was gonna get off.
She was sitting over, doodling on paper,
and she was planning the wedding for her and Keyon
after the trial.
- JOHN: The gut feeling we have about Keyon Pittman
that he's got some involvement in this is still there,
but we just couldn't back it up with any--with any proof
or--or evidence.
- FRE-DREANA: I believe Carla is the right person.
Do I believe Keyon is guilty? Yes.
But the crime that he committed, he could not be charged for.
Keyon was...a womanizer,
and if it was a crime for being a cheater,
yes, Keyon is guilty for that.
- GARY: In this particular situation,
a dangerous game was played.
And--and you have to be careful about playing with the feelings
and the emotions of people,
simply because you just don't know how it can turn out.
- ♪
♪♪