PHELPS: I could see Tray laying on the ground.
He wasn't moving, wasn't breathing.
HOLLOWAY: Tray was beaten severely
and was covered in blood.
Could it have been multiple attackers?
A lot of people knew Tray.
Tray loved to sing, loved to play the guitar,
loved his son, Noah.
STOCKDALE: When police are dealing with somebody
who's a practiced liar,
it's tricky, because they tell more lies to cover the lies
they already told.
HOLLOWAY: This was a very orchestrated event.
We didn't have the smoking gun per se.
We still needed more.
NARRATOR: Every day in North America,
dozens of people are murdered.
The key to solving the toughest of these homicides
lies in the final 24 hours of the victim's life.
To crack the case,
detectives must reconstruct that critical timeline,
the minutes and hours containing evidence that can
help unlock the mystery and catch the killer.
[country music playing]
Hayti is a town in Pemiscot County that borders on
the banks of the Mississippi in the boot heel of Missouri.
HOLLOWAY: Hayti is a small community, very rural.
We're kind of nestled right in between Saint Louis
and Memphis.
Hayti is known for their agriculture.
Their high school had a great football program.
HOLLOWAY: Hayti is very, very close-knit.
Everybody knows everybody,
and if you don't know somebody,
you know somebody that knows them.
NARRATOR: But on an early fall morning in 2015,
some of those close bonds are broken forever.
[phone ringing]
For long-time Hayti resident David Phelps, that day started
like any other, before he got a call about his grandson,
26-year-old Tray Phelps.
I got a call at around 6:20 that morning that
Tray had not made it into work, and Tray was never late,
never, and so I said, "I'll go over and wake him up."
So I just drove over to Tray's house.
NARRATOR: But while Tray's grandfather is on his way,
one of Tray's neighbors notices something disturbing.
JONES: Around 6:30 a.m.,
Lisa Sullivan stepped out her front door on Swan Lake Drive.
She sees her neighbor, Tray Phelps, lying face-down
on his driveway, and she contacts 911.
[siren wailing]
The ambulance got there just about the same time as I did.
I could see Tray laying on the ground beside his car,
and I knew something was wrong.
He wasn't moving, wasn't breathing.
JONES: The EMTs checked Tray's
vitals and realized that he was deceased.
NARRATOR: Investigator Eddie Holloway with the Pemiscot
County Sheriff's Department takes the case.
Tray was beaten severely and was covered in blood.
David Phelps Sr. identified himself.
He was very upset and said that Tray was his grandson.
A lot of people knew Tray.
Tray was a good kid.
He was on the training program to be a riverboat pilot.
PHELPS: We put barges on and off the big tows going up and down
the Mississippi River, and Tray was going to be a boat pilot,
and, uh, he was gonna be a good one.
JONES: I've known Tray since he was a little bitty boy,
but I've been friends with the family for a long time.
I knew Tray loved to sing, loved to play the guitar.
Tray loved his son, four-year-old Noah.
NARRATOR: Now investigators begin looking for clues
to explain why such a promising young father
was so brutally beaten to death, and by whom.
JONES: Tray is lying in a large pool
of blood beside the open car door.
HOLLOWAY: He had a large laceration to his forehead
and a lot of contusions and bruising to his face and head.
We determined pretty quickly that Tray was beaten
with something, but we don't know what object it was.
The forensic report indicated Tray was hit over a dozen times,
causing extensive internal bleeding,
and the ultimate cause of death was a blow to his head.
His skull was fractured in multiple places.
The medical examiner determined that it had to have been
some type of hard weapon,
baseball bat, a pipe, or something like that.
NARRATOR: Not only was the attack incredibly violent,
the injuries on Tray's body may indicate something else.
HOLLOWAY: With that many blows
and that type of injury, it leads an investigator
to think that there were multiple attackers,
just from the amount of blows that happened.
NARRATOR: Investigators examine Tray's vehicle for clues
as to what may have transpired.
Tray's car, the driver side door was open.
His keys are in the ignition, and the dome light is on.
HOLLOWAY: There was a large amount of blood
on the center console, pooled in the floorboard,
drops of blood like he had been in that car
or tried to get in that car.
There was blood spatter on the inside
and on the edge of the door.
There was a very noticeable dent in the top
frame of the car where the door would shut,
and the way the dents were located in the car
and how they were shaped,
we figured it was either a large pipe
and/or a baseball bat or something like that.
JONES: Investigators located a Ruger pistol
in Tray's glove compartment.
NARRATOR: Investigators have seen enough to formulate
an initial impression as to how Tray was attacked.
JONES: In my opinion, if he had got in
the car to go to work, someone got his attention...
for him to step outside of his car with his car
left running and the key is still in it.
I think he was most likely blindsided,
didn't know what was coming,
and he was attacked.
HOLLOWAY: There was a lot of sign of struggle.
The movement of just the gravel and stuff,
and the amount of blood in the driveway, in the car.
We believe they were trying to probably finish Tray off,
just wildly swinging and missing and hitting that car,
when Tray was trying to get in his car
to get a handgun to defend himself.
NARRATOR: They beat him on the ground until he was dead,
then fled.
As investigators process the crime scene,
Tray's grandfather suddenly remembers something urgent.
David Phelps Sr. told investigators that
Madison Stegall,
Tray's girlfriend, was possibly still in the home.
I started thinking about Madison, you know,
because I didn't know if she might be hurt
inside the house or something.
Well, I went up and beat on the door,
trying to wake her up or find out,
and she didn't come to the door.
[knocking noises]
We feared that Madison might also be dead inside the home.
So I just kept beating and banging,
and then she finally came to the door.
I woke up, because I heard pounding on our door,
and I thought Tray had forgot something,
either a phone charger or something that he needed
at work, but when I got to the door,
it was Pawpaw, Tray's grandpa.
I told Madison in the words, "Maddie, Tray is dead."
And, uh, she just said, you know, "Oh, no,"
and went to pieces.
NARRATOR: To solve the mystery of Tray Phelps' murder,
investigators will need to reconstruct
the last 24 hours of his life.
Tray usually left for work
about 5:30 in the morning.
His car was running at the time when they found him.
So he was getting ready to go to work.
With Tray being expected to work at six,
investigators believe that Tray was murdered
somewhere between 5:30 and 6 o'clock that morning.
NARRATOR: Investigators search the property and also a local
garbage truck,
looking for weapons or any evidence connected to
the murder.
HOLLOWAY: Investigators didn't find any weapons
or bloody clothing in the trash.
At this point, investigators had no weapon.
We really didn't have any suspects at the time.
Investigators need to speak to Madison to make sure
there wasn't any quarrels
or any kind of domestic situation
going on with the two of them.
Tray's fiancee, Madison, claims to have slept
through this entire traumatic ordeal.
She tells investigators that she didn't hear or see anything,
despite the fact that Tray is beaten
for several minutes, and there's significant
damage to his vehicle, too.
Someone is smashing door panes,
windshield glass, and things that make noise.
NARRATOR: Was Tray's fiancee sleeping while he was
violently attacked, or is she somehow involved?
NARRATOR: Just hours after 26-year-old Tray Phelps
is found dead on his driveway,
Pemiscot County investigators want to know if his fiancee,
19-year-old Madison Stegall, had something
to do with his murder.
The attack took place just outside her bedroom window.
We asked Madison if she remembered
or seen Tray before he left for work.
STEGALL: I told the investigators that
Tray had woken me up around 5-ish
to kiss me goodbye,
and I fell back asleep.
NARRATOR: The attack on Tray happened
minutes later in her driveway, a few feet away.
How could Madison have slept through it without waking up?
I'm a heavy sleeper, and I have to have
at least one fan going when I sleep.
NARRATOR: She told investigators the noise from the fans
blocked out sounds of the attack on Tray.
I never didn't hear anything that morning,
and that's one of my biggest...
regrets is I feel guilty for not...
hearing anything, not being able to...
save him.
HOLLOWAY: When we interviewed Madison,
we found that they were very happy young couple.
Tray even had life insurance, but it was in his son's name.
So there's no monetary benefit for Madison
to have something to do with this.
JONES: Madison, very sweet girl, was
a great relationship that those two had.
NARRATOR: Still, investigators aren't surprised
when Tray's heavy-sleeping fiancee
tries to point blame elsewhere, at Tray's ex-wife.
I told the detectives and the investigators that Tray had
been having problems with his ex-wife,
Heather Cummings,
about the custody of their son, Noah.
NARRATOR: Two years before his death,
Tray and his ex-wife, Heather Cummings, divorced.
Heather and Tray were together for 13 months,
and she had become pregnant while they were dating,
and so they got married.
In the beginning, they were happy.
But on their second anniversary,
Heather told Tray that she wanted to be single again.
Tray was awarded joint custody of Noah.
It was 50-50.
One week with Tray, and Noah would spend one week
with his mother, because they were living just a few blocks
away from each other to make sure Noah was taken care of,
because we just all loved him so much.
NARRATOR: In fairness to both young parents,
the family court judge split custody evenly between them.
So investigators are unclear why Heather might be upset
with Tray about it,
enough to possibly kill the father of her son,
as Madison now claimed.
I told investigators that
I thought Heather could be involved in Tray's murder.
NARRATOR: Did Heather Cummings have any reason
to want to harm Tray?
We bring Heather to the station for questioning.
HOLLOWAY: She seemed upset and shocked.
We asked Heather, um, what her status
was with Tray and their relationship.
Heather told us that Tray was a good father,
and she was pleased with the new custody arrangement
that -- that happened, uh, in court.
Heather tells my colleagues, her and Tray
were always friendly in front of their son.
NARRATOR: Heather says like Tray,
she agreed to the 50-50 custody with their son.
But can she verify where she was at the time of the murder?
HOLLOWAY: Heather tells us that she was with Noah
that morning at her mom and dad's house.
HOLLOWAY: About 7:20, 7:30,
her and her mother drop Noah off at preschool.
She returns home, they pick up her boyfriend,
Bert, and drive him to his mother's house.
Investigators made contact with the preschool there in Hayti
and confirmed that Noah was dropped off about that time.
NARRATOR: There's something else about Heather
that doesn't quite fit the crime.
HOLLOWAY: Looking at Heather's build,
Heather is about four-foot-nine, maybe 115 pounds.
There's no way that Heather Cummings
could have inflicted those wounds on Tray.
NARRATOR: Investigators return to Tray's home
to ask his fiancee, Madison,
if anyone else may have wanted to harm Tray.
Madison points to a suspicious character in the neighborhood.
Madison describes a gentleman to us that was kinda
lurking around her house a couple weeks prior.
It was usually in the daytime,
about midday or afternoon.
He had asked if he could rake up leaves in our yard.
So we were like, "No, no, thank you."
The man had come back a second time,
either a day or two later, and asked if we wanted to buy
some German Shepherd puppies.
Said, "No, we don't need another dog."
My neighbor had told me in passing, the man coming by,
he had previously been in trouble for arson
at The Store in Hayti,
which is a local gas station convenience store.
It just scared me knowing that I was gonna be there alone,
and it seemed like this man kept coming by.
NARRATOR: Investigators ask Madison's neighbors if
they might know the man's name.
During this canvass, investigators identified
a gentleman named Callum Thorpe.
He's kind of a local handyman, odd jobs guy.
We discovered that he had just recently been arrested
for robbery, which is kind of interesting
due to the fact that Tray was
bludgeoned to death with a weapon.
Robbery is essentially theft
plus violence -- you bring a weapon to
a burglary or to steal something, that's now a robbery.
Given that we have an improvised weapon
or a weapon commonly used in robberies, a baseball bat,
investigators have to wonder, was this a robbery gone bad?
NARRATOR: Investigators need to find Callum Thorpe.
He's robbed and used a weapon in the past.
Is he now a killer?
NARRATOR: Just hours after the murder of Tray Phelps,
investigators question an ex-con named Callum Thorpe.
He was seen at the house just days before the murder.
Investigators bring Callum in to
the police station for questioning.
Mr. Thorpe said that he didn't even know
Tray was murdered until his mother had told him.
HOLLOWAY: Mr. Thorpe tells us that he goes
to bed the night before, about 11 o'clock,
wakes up about one o'clock due to some medication
that he takes, makes him sleep a lot.
HOLLOWAY: Investigators spoke with Callum's mother.
She verified his story, said he was at home that night.
A consent search was also conducted of his residence,
and there was no evidence located
in his residence either.
Investigators removed Callum from the list of suspects.
NARRATOR: With Callum eliminated as a suspect,
and the unknown killer or killers still at large,
homicide investigators broaden their search.
Investigators turned to social media to see if
they could learn any clues about Tray's murder.
Tray was very active online with his music,
singing songs, played his guitar.
This goes out to y'all.
[playing guitar]
Played about anything -- country music,
rock music, pop music, whatever, he'd play it.
Let's burn it down.
[strums guitar]
We didn't find anything. Tray was just a well-liked kid.
NARRATOR: Casting a wider net,
investigators search social media pages
of Tray's friends and family.
They find some questionable photos linked to the page of
Tray's ex-wife, Heather,
but she didn't post the pics.
They were posted by Heather's new boyfriend,
41-year-old Bert Ellison.
We went through Bert Ellison's social media.
Um, there was a lot of postings of him with rifles and handguns
and kind of, um,
"look what I got" bravado-type thing -- it was concerning.
Bert had posted online about,
"If you mess with my family,
you're messing with me."
NARRATOR: Investigators also discover
that Bert's a former college football player,
and 20 years after the end of his playing days,
Bert still relishes his reputation for toughness,
especially with his new girlfriend, Heather.
HOLLOWAY: When looking at this relationship
between Heather and Bert,
I think that's about a 14- or 15-year age gap between them,
um, it's important to look at, you know,
who's the dominant figure in that relationship?
Is there a jealousy portion?
NARRATOR: Tray's family says that Tray and Bert argued
more than once, when Tray came to pick up
or drop off his young son, Noah.
Bert had threatened to beat him up or, you know,
fight him, I guess to try to scare him off.
STOCKDALE: The fact that Heather's current partner
doesn't get along with Tray is something
that needs to be explored, because
those types of relationships, there can be competition,
and perhaps he wants to take matters into his own hands.
JONES: Bert Ellison is brought
to the police department for questioning.
He had a kind of, uh, didn't care attitude.
Um, he didn't ask what happened to Tray.
HOLLOWAY: Bert tells us that he's never been to Tray's house.
He says he was never involved in the --
in a murder or never involved in hurting Tray.
Bert brings up, um, David Phelps Jr.,
Tray's dad says, "Hey, I'm friends with this guy.
"Um, I went to school with him. I'm a father too.
There's no way I'd hurt Tray."
HOLLOWAY: During this part of the interrogation,
investigators ask Bert Ellison to look at his cellphone.
They find photos of Tray's house.
That's a big clue, when he just
tells us that he's never been there.
And at that point, we looked at the timestamps
on those photos, and they're from September of 2015,
about the time Tray is murdered.
Bert has now lied to investigators about
his knowledge of the victim and where the victim lives.
HOLLOWAY: Those photos are what we would consider
like reconnaissance photos,
being taken just days before Tray being murdered,
and with all the animosity going on,
there was enough probable cause at that time
to go ahead and arrest Bert Ellison.
NARRATOR: Just hours after the homicide,
Bert is arrested with probable cause for the first-degree
murder of Tray Phelps, but he insists he's innocent.
NARRATOR: Investigators still need evidence to prove it.
Bert Ellison's house was searched, but there was
no evidence found,
no bloody clothes, no weapon.
NARRATOR: Still, investigators remain convinced that
Bert knows more than he claims,
and likely who else was involved.
We knew that there are still multiple suspects in this.
This was a very orchestrated event, and it
took more than one person to pull this off.
NARRATOR: The Pemiscot D.A. informs Tray's parents that
Bert Ellison is in the county lockup for murder,
but he's refusing to talk.
Tray's dad and I talked to the prosecutor.
We asked could we make a video.
SKELTON: We were pleading with him as parents
to give us information.
NARRATOR: One day after 27-year-old Tray Phelps is
beaten to death on his front lawn in Hayti, Missouri,
Tray's parents make an emotional plea to
family friend, Bert Ellison.
Bert's been charged for Tray's murder,
but they feel certain that if he did it,
Bert wasn't acting alone.
Investigators could see in --
in Bert's eyes that video got to him.
We were hoping that Bert would implicate more people
and tell us the entire story of what happened.
NARRATOR: Chester Cummings is the father of Bert's girlfriend,
Heather Cummings.
He's also a mild-mannered school bus driver without
a criminal record -- that makes him
an unlikely suspect in the brazen murder
of Tray Phelps on his driveway.
So investigators have one question --
by implicating Chester in the homicide, is
Bert lying again just to protect himself?
With Bert's claim,
investigators can also file murder charges against Chester.
But unless Bert was a direct eyewitness,
investigators still need more to make the charges stick.
We go ahead and arrest Chester Cummings,
and Chester, he's not a very big person.
Very quiet, not violent, doesn't seem violent anyway.
Investigators ask Chester what he was doing on
September the 24th,
the day of Tray's murder.
HOLLOWAY: He told us that he woke up about
six o'clock that morning.
He told us that Heather and Bert were asleep at the house.
He said that Ronda, his wife, dropped
him off at the bus barn for work about 6:25.
Investigators checked the surveillance
at Chester's work and determined Chester's wife, Ronda,
dropped him off in a 2010 Dodge Avenger at 6:25 a.m.
NARRATOR: The video confirms Chester's statement,
but where were Chester and Ronda
an hour earlier, at 5:30 a.m., when Tray was killed?
NARRATOR: Chester insists they were still asleep in bed.
NARRATOR: Chester remains in custody until
investigators can verify his claim.
If they find his wife Ronda's black Dodge
Avenger on local surveillance cameras earlier than 6 a.m.,
they'll know he's lying.
HOLLOWAY: We obtained video surveillance from
the local convenience store gas station.
We started going through the video, and, um,
at about 5:30, we observed a Black Dodge Avenger
go through the intersection, going south,
toward Tray Phelps's house, and about 5:50,
we see that car again,
coming back north, going to the Cummings residence.
We determined that that car was a Black Dodge Avenger,
about the same year model
of a vehicle owned by Ronda Cummings.
NARRATOR: The angle and resolution conceals
the identity of the driver.
But other footage does make one detail perfectly clear.
HOLLOWAY: In the surveillance video, it's clearly seen
there's at least three people in that vehicle.
There's a driver, a passenger, and someone in the back.
ARNTFIELD: An exterior security camera that confirms
it's a black sedan with three occupants.
Police are dealing with not one,
not two, but potentially three murderers acting in league.
That denounces all the stories that has been told to us
so far.
NARRATOR: Investigators suspect two of the people
in the car are already in custody --
Bert Ellison
and Chester Cummings.
They suspect the driver is Chester's wife,
Ronda Cummings.
Investigators pick up Ronda to hear her version of
what she and Chester did that morning
and who may have been in her car.
She said, "Yeah, that's exactly what we done.
I dropped him off at work, and I came home."
NARRATOR: Now investigators press Ronda about seeing her car
in surveillance video earlier than she claims
with three people in the vehicle.
HOLLOWAY: We confront Ronda and tell Ronda that we have
her vehicle on surveillance going toward Tray's house
prior to Tray being murdered
and then a short time later, coming back.
JONES: Ronda doesn't deny it's her car,
but she says she doesn't have any idea who's in it.
NARRATOR: Investigators believe all three suspects are lying,
but to get convictions, they need proof.
We still needed more.
We didn't have the smoking gun, per se, to
put any of them in jail with ironclad evidence.
During the interview of Chester,
we asked him for his cellphone,
and he immediately gives his phone up willingly.
When we examined his phone,
he had already deleted a lot of his text messages
and his call logs to avoid us reading it.
We asked him why he had deleted it.
He said, "Oh, that's just something I do."
Anything in that timeframe was deleted.
We got a search warrant for Chester Cummings' call logs from
his provider, and his call log was conflicting to his story of
what time he got up in the morning.
He was receiving and sending messages and receiving
and making phone calls before he said he had actually got up.
NARRATOR: Chester said Ronda woke him at 5:45 a.m.,
but his call logs reveal he was texting
almost an hour earlier, just after 5 a.m.
20 minutes later, Ronda's car is headed towards Tray's home.
With the mounting evidence that we were putting
on Chester and the pressure we were putting on him,
he finally says,
"Okay, I drove Bert to Tray's house,
but I didn't kill him."
NARRATOR: Chester claims he dropped Bert off
at Tray's house just minutes before the murder,
but he doesn't know what Bert did next -- is Chester Cummings
telling the truth, or is he spinning another lie?
After hours of intense interrogation,
Chester Cummings, father of Heather Cummings,
the ex-wife of murder victim,
Tray Phelps, admits he was involved in the attack on Tray,
but only as a driver.
Chester claims the killer is someone else.
He finally says Bert is the one that killed him.
Chester told investigators that he picked up Bert Ellison
that morning,
and he dropped him off in his wife's car at Tray's house.
HOLLOWAY: Chester tells us he stays in the car.
He doesn't get out.
NARRATOR: If Chester is being truthful
and Bert Ellison killed Tray Phelps,
one key question remains -- what tension between Bert
and Tray could have escalated to the point of murder?
Chester said that Bert was very upset
about the custody issue
and the fact that Heather was hurt in this deal because of
the custody battle.
Heather was not happy
with the recent 50-50 custody
we had just gained of Noah.
SKELTON: Tray didn't get to see Noah for 13 months,
because it took 13 months for their divorce to become
final, because Heather kept fighting with her lawyer
against Tray's attorney about visitation.
NARRATOR: Was Heather furious enough at Tray
that she got her new boyfriend, Bert Ellison, involved?
SKELTON: Heather would say, "I'm gonna have my dad or Bert,
they're gonna beat you up," and they're gonna,
you know, do all kinds of things to him.
NARRATOR: It's possible Bert made good on
Heather's threats against her ex-husband, Tray.
So investigators want to hear what
Bert has to say about Chester's accusations.
HOLLOWAY: We show Bert Ellison Chester's statement.
He reads it, becomes enraged.
NARRATOR: Now, investigators aren't sure what to believe.
Did Bert and his girlfriend, Heather, really execute
a plan to kill the father of her child?
HOLLOWAY: We had zero physical evidence of
Heather being even remotely involved in this.
Investigators reached out to family, community, friends,
to help shed light on Heather's involvement.
NARRATOR: Members of the Hayti community
respond to investigators' requests for help.
A grocery clerk who had worked with Heather reports
a threat that Heather made just a few weeks
prior to Tray's homicide.
NARRATOR: Several witnesses, including Heather's own
sister, come forward with similar accounts.
And what those witnesses claimed
Heather wanted more than anything
was her ex-husband dead.
Now, investigators confront Heather
with those witness statements
from friends and family to see how she responds.
NARRATOR: But when investigators repeat the witness statements
against her, Heather's story changes.
HOLLOWAY: When we start telling her all these different quotes
from her family and some of the public
about how bad she hated Tray and how she wanted him dead,
she starts pointing a finger at her dad,
Chester Cummings.
Heather tells us that she believes
that Chester acted alone in killing Tray.
I believe Heather is throwing her dad under the bus.
NARRATOR: And Heather is not the only one.
Her cousin, Michael Hemingway, who now faces
obstruction charges also claims
that Chester was the killer -- hoping for leniency,
Michael confesses to his limited role
in the crime after Tray was killed.
NARRATOR: The evidence tossed in the dumpster
is never found by sheriff investigators,
but they do find call logs from Chester to Michael
confirming that they arranged for the bag's disposal
before Tray was killed.
The call log showed that
the night before Tray's murder had happened,
Chester had called Michael to arrange to dump the evidence.
NARRATOR: Not only did Chester Cummings
premeditate Tray Phelps' murder,
Heather's own sister gives a written deposition that
Heather told her she was also part of the plan.
She drove with Bert and Chester to the crime scene,
and she was there when Tray was attacked and killed.
I think Heather orchestrated this.
I believe she got Chester and Bert,
plotted a plan, and Bert and Chester
executed that plan by going over there and killing Tray Phelps.
Said, "Listen, if you love me, you'll do this for me."
NARRATOR: Tray's ex-wife, Heather, her boyfriend, Bert,
and her father, Chester, are
all charged with first-degree murder.
Heather's mother, Ronda, is charged with obstruction,
and her cousin, Michael Hemingway,
is charged with tampering with evidence.
Then at the 11th hour, Chester Cummings
has a change of heart.
In an effort to shield his wife and daughter
from prosecution,
he changes his story once again.
While awaiting sentencing,
Chester Cummings writes a letter to
the prosecution taking sole responsibility
for killing Tray Phillips.
Based on Chester's confession that he acted alone,
investigators now believe they know what
happened the morning Tray Phelps was murdered.
HOLLOWAY: About 5:15 a.m., Tray Phelps kisses
his fiancee before heading off to work.
NARRATOR: Minutes later, security cameras capture
Ronda Cummings' car
headed to Tray Phelps' residence at 5:30 a.m.,
but investigators remain unable to confirm who
was driving.
JONES: At 5:35 a.m., Tray starts his car.
NARRATOR: According to Heather's sister's written deposition,
Heather was there that morning as Tray was getting ready
to leave.
HOLLOWAY: We believe that given that time in the morning
and seeing Heather,
Tray probably thought there was something wrong with his son,
Noah, and gets out of his car.
NARRATOR: At 5:37 a.m.,
Tray Phelps is ambushed in his driveway.
Evidence from the crime scene appeared to indicate
that more than one person likely struck Tray,
but only Chester Cummings ever admitted to it.
HOLLOWAY: At 5:50 a.m.,
Ronda Cummings's vehicle is captured on
video surveillance driving away from the scene.
Ronda and Chester bring
the evidence to Michael Hemingway for disposal.
Michael Hemingway disposes of the evidence
in a dumpster outside of town.
HOLLOWAY: Ronda dropped Chester off at work about 6:25.
Chester Cummings receives a life sentence
after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.
Ronda Cummings was sentenced to four years in
prison for tampering with evidence and obstruction
of justice.
NARRATOR: Michael Hemingway was also sentenced to
four years for tampering with evidence.
To help save himself,
Bert provides evidence against Chester, Ronda,
and his now ex-girlfriend, Heather Cummings.
Bert Ellison receives a five-year sentence for
pleading guilty, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
NARRATOR: In a plea bargain,
Heather confesses to the same charges as Bert,
but due to witness statements against her, including
the deposition from her own sister
that Heather was at the scene that morning,
she receives a stiffer sentence than Bert.
JONES: Heather Cummings was sentenced to 15 years in
prison for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
I'm most proud of how we brought closure to that family.
They don't have to wonder what happened to Tray.
They know what happened to Tray.
Tray's murder has devastated our whole family.
And all he ever wanted to do was spend time with his son.
NARRATOR: Amidst the tragedy,
there shines a single bright spot,
a young boy who is no longer at the center of a deadly feud.
My grandson Noah is doing great.
He's a really good student in school.
He lives with his grandmother, Tray's mother.
She has since adopted him, and he's doing great.
Tray was such a joy to be around.
He loved life, he loved playing his guitar
and singing, and he loved his son more than life itself.
I think all of us, all of his family,
would give just about anything to have him back.