- He took me under his wing and said he was going to guide me.
- John Davis, the night manager,
was this terrific guy.
- Somebody was lurking in the back of the van
waiting for his opportunity
to strike.
- Who has a motive to want this person dead?
- He is a prodigy. He is a talented musician.
He had an opportunity to be in one of the best boy bands
in the country or in the world.
- Boyz II Men become very successful
and this causes some resentment.
- That is when everything turns.
- She tells us that the attack on John Davis
was part of a contract
where they had agreed with one another
to kill five individuals.
- She was a black widow.
She was a narcissistic woman
that just wanted to eliminate men.
- He said to her, one down, four to go.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
[tense bassy music]
- The music scene in Philly has a long history
and has influenced many musicians over the years.
When a local talent hits it big,
the whole city celebrates the win.
But sometimes, artists make headlines
for all the wrong reasons
like in 2001
when a murder turned the Philly music scene on its head.
[tense music]
[car horns honking]
♪ ♪
- About a week before Christmas
at the David's Bridal Warehouse
in Whitemarsh Township,
one of the employees
opening up the building
in the morning
comes to the parking lot
and sees the night manager's van parked there.
The engine is running and that struck him as unusual.
He thinks he's asleep.
So he's banging on the window with no response.
And then he opens the door and he can see
that there's blood everywhere.
[dramatic music]
And then calls 911.
[distant siren wailing]
- Whitemarsh Police get onto the scene.
They see that the person that is still in the van,
their foot is still on the brake.
But they can see that
the victim has been dead for a couple of hours.
- Montgomery County homicide detectives are notified.
And now, a joint investigation commences.
When the detectives arrive, they set up a perimeter
so that there would be no entry anywhere near that van.
There are certain things that they can notice
by just quickly looking.
There's a gunshot wound to the back of the head
from relatively close range
that looked like the shooter was in the van
behind him in the back seat.
♪ ♪
The first thing you think about is was this a robbery?
But he has his wallet, the van is still there,
and he has $700 in cash in his pocket,
so it's unlikely that it's a robbery.
When the man who was coming to open the warehouse
tells the police positively,
this is my colleague, John Davis,
then we of course get the identification from
his wallet, matches up to the photograph
on his driver's license.
There's no question that it was John Davis.
♪ ♪
- After confirming John Davis's identity,
the forensic unit examines the inside of his van.
- The forensic people take photographs of everything
and then begin to collect hairs, fibers,
blood, DNA, things of that nature.
The van itself is clean
except for where the blood was located.
We know that killers frequently leave behind forensic evidence,
so we're looking for fingerprints.
And there weren't any.
It was very unusual.
That tells us that the crime scene was wiped down
with a specific intent
to keep us from finding forensic evidence.
♪ ♪
- Police officers realize that this seems very personal.
The gunshot wound to the back of his head
implies that somebody was lurking in the back of the van
really waiting for his opportunity to strike.
♪ ♪
- We were asking the owners of the warehouse,
is there any surveillance video
or anything of that nature?
Mind you, this is 2001, so there wasn't.
We were kind of operating in the blind here.
Naturally, the first thing that we look for is motive.
We want to know who this person is.
Who was the last person to see him alive?
And then who has a motive to want this person dead?
- Asking around his workplace,
detectives are able to piece together a timeline
of John's final hours.
- There was a fellow that he worked with, Mr. Woodson,
that was the last person to see John alive.
- I first met John Davis
when I applied for David's Bridal distribution.
When I came in,
he saw me and he said, ah, you're a tall guy.
That's what we need,
some tall guys with long arms around here.
He thought I was a motivated guy,
so he took me under his wing
and he said he was going to guide me.
And he was more like a father figure.
He was older than me at the time.
He was training me on life,
work, and being a parent.
♪ ♪
December the 17th was brisk. It was cold.
I was in there doing my p.m. duties,
you know, cleaning up, making sure everything organized.
John in the back.
I see him back on his desk on the phone.
He's talking. He said, "Give me a minute."
- Mr. Woodson told police
that there's some SNAFU with setting the alarm,
but they eventually get the alarm set.
They left about 9:00, 9:05.
They're conferring in the parking lot.
- He was like, man, love you, dude.
Gave me a hug. He said, have a good night.
As I'm backing up, I see him getting in the car.
I see the doors shut.
I backs up, I'm proceeding to leave the lot.
I see his lights on. I'm thinking he cool.
I leave, I go home, and I got in the shower.
And me and my lady was in bed.
Next morning, when they came to me and told me what happened.
I was like, how? I just left him.
There's no way in the world, man.
♪ ♪
- Being the last person to see John alive,
police want to confirm Woodson's whereabouts.
His girlfriend is able to verify he was home all night.
- Me and John never had no issues.
And I just was there for a short amount of time
and I was doing good and me and John had good rapport.
- We talked to people that were working
with him at David's Bridal.
And we asked, is there some motive work-related?
But what we got was a composite of this terrific guy.
[somber music]
- I would describe John Davis as a life-changing individual,
and personality is off the charts.
Very enthusiastic person.
At work, if it was a boring moment,
not when he was in the area.
He was very good at team building
and motivating people to feel like they can overachieve,
even if they didn't have it in them.
John was a very community-oriented person,
very involved with youth development,
doing community service at different YMCAs
in the Philadelphia area.
He said he loved everybody
because he always see potential in people
that they didn't even see potential in themselves.
I come sometime after work,
we'd go sit and have a beer or whatever, quick beer.
He spoke highly of his family seven days a week.
- After speaking with John's colleagues,
detectives want to contact his loved ones
to notify them of his death.
[line ringing]
- Cops speak to the owner of the distribution warehouse,
and they're able to get his home address
where they're able to speak to his current girlfriend,
Tamara Walls.
And she is devastated.
- One of the things we try to do is create a timeline.
We asked her, you know, where were you?
And she was at a friend's house.
And when did you last talk with John?
I called him that night.
♪ ♪
- She does tell police officers that she spoke with him
from her friend's house.
And police were able to verify this.
- That was done with a cell phone.
We were able to determine that at about 9:40 p.m.,
that's when that call was made.
So that fit in with the time frame
for when he had set the alarm.
- John's girlfriend then tells detectives
that the start of their relationship
was less than ideal.
- She lets them know that John was in a previous relationship
when they got together with a woman named Kimberly,
John's ex-wife.
They did meet at the time where
him and Kimberly were still married,
but John decided to leave Kimberly
and be with Tamara.
And according to Tamara, it was a little messy.
- She says the divorce from Kimberly Williams
was very contentious,
and perhaps, she wanted to hurt him.
- John had just recently decided that
he was going to marry Ms. Wells.
So we thought that maybe that would
create a motive for the jilted wife to kill him.
♪
- Coming up.
- Investigators realize that she has a prior record
and they connect her to a firefighter
who was recently shot in Philadelphia.
- His story sounds eerily similar
to what happened to John Davis.
- Heaven knows the serial-killer-in-training,
what he would have done had we not been able
to move as rapidly as we did.
[tense music]
- The day after John Davis was shot to death
in the parking lot of his workplace,
detectives set out to talk to his ex-wife.
- Sounded as though the ex-wife,
who also had children with John,
would have a motive to want John dead
because he had left her.
♪ ♪
- Cops are beginning to wonder,
was this a complicated love triangle?
So they wanted to speak to Kimberly Williams
to see if they had any leads there.
♪ ♪
- We don't go in there assuming that she's the person.
But we want to find out whether that motive is something
that she might have acted upon.
♪ ♪
- So police officers get to Kimberly Williams' house,
and they're surprised to find out
they had an amicable breakup.
They were not resentful.
He was still continuing to take care of the kids
that he had in that relationship.
And she has no idea who would want to do something like this.
- There was not the vitriol, not the anger,
not the attitude that detectives expected
she would have if she really were involved in the killing.
- Kimberly Williams was at work that night.
She says that her kids were being watched by her mother,
that after she finished with work, she came home.
- We were able to verify all these things
not only with talking with the mother and with her,
but with telephone records and the like.
[tense music]
Homicide investigation is a process of elimination.
So even when we eliminate the ex-wife
and the current girlfriend,
that's advancing the ball
because those are people who are out.
♪ ♪
- As detectives map out their next move,
John's body is taken for autopsy.
- The autopsy on John Davis was December 18th,
a few hours after the body had been found and processed.
We were reasonably certain
that he'd been shot before midnight December 17th
because he was exhibiting rigor mortis,
which is something that takes several hours to come on.
He was the victim of a homicidal gunshot.
And all the bullets that struck him stayed in.
- As we expected, Dr. Hood told us
that John Davis had been shot in the back of the head.
But also, Dr. Hood discovered two additional bullet holes
in John's torso,
which we did not know of at the time.
- All three bullets were retrieved.
And they all appeared to be the same.
- The ballistics expert gave us the information
that was obvious to him, that they were .38s
and that they had fired from a .38 revolver
and the same one.
This, of course, becomes very important in our case.
♪ ♪
- But for Dr. Hood, there is something
about the pattern of John's wounds that is not adding up.
- Why do we have an execution-style wound
in the back of the head
and then these two rather unusual wounds
that are shot into him in very different angles
in the back and the chest?
All three bullets were identified as having been
fired from the same weapon.
So now, we have somebody who was shot
from three different directions with the same gun.
Or if there's two shooters,
it means that they've used one gun,
which only adds another layer of weirdness to this case.
♪
- Realizing that there are now two possible killers
on the loose, detectives expand their search
to come up with a lead.
- We realize that this personal connection
must be outside John's immediate group.
So we wanted to find out if there was anything more
we could learn from the employees
that John worked with at the warehouse.
♪ ♪
- Going back to people we've already interviewed
is not uncommon.
In the moments after a traumatic event,
people's memories can be affected,
so a second or even a third conversation with them
can bring up new details.
♪
- Detectives speak with Robert Woodson,
John Davis's coworker,
and he does recall a conversation
at the end of the dinner shift.
♪ ♪
- He's, like, got his phone in his hand, texting.
And I said, John, what's up, man?
Why are you-- you know, what's going on?
Why you got that look on your face like that?
What's going on?
He said, nothing, just got a call
from a chick I used to deal with.
And she want to meet up with me.
But I'm a little skeptical, man,
'cause I ain't seen this girl in a minute.
He said they had a sexual relationship at one time.
John thought that she wanted to meet up
to rekindle or try to go out.
But he was very apprehensive about meeting her.
- Mr. Woodson told the police that
none of this would have stuck in his mind
but for the fact that John expressed fear
and then said, "I wonder if I'm being set up."
- But Mr. Woodson didn't know who that was.
He only knew that it was a former employee.
- I had no name. I had no familiarity with her.
I never seen her.
Her stint at David's Bridal was before I even got hired.
- John had a work line that had voicemail on it,
so the IT people at David's Bridal were able
to get us the information from John's work phone,
get the recordings from the voicemails,
and we did get a hit.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- Detectives investigating the murder of John Davis
have discovered a voicemail on his work phone.
The message is from a woman
and was left hours before Davis was killed.
For investigators, this is the first big break in the case.
♪ ♪
- It became important to us to figure out who this woman was
that John was supposed to meet that night.
So we talked with other people who worked there
and this employee remembered a specific incident
where this Vernell girl left work.
- She left in her own car around 5:00.
And around 6:30, a man drove up in the same car
and asked to speak with Davis.
- The boyfriend had come there and said,
stay away from my girl.
♪ ♪
So there was no fireworks or anything.
Then the boyfriend leaves.
- The coworker's account feels like a promising lead.
But there is one problem.
- They don't know if Vernell is a name, if it's a nickname.
This is not a David's Bridal store,
which would typically have about eight to ten employees,
this is a warehouse.
There's hundreds and hundreds of employees that work there,
so detectives have a lot of names to go through.
- While one team of investigators
pores over the employee records,
another focus is on John Davis's phone.
- Police have this phone number
and they find that it goes to an insurance company
in King of Prussia.
So Whitemarsh detectives show up and try to find out
where does this number lead them to?
- A woman does come forward and she says, hey,
this is my extension, but I did not make the call.
But I can tell you who did.
- She allowed a person
named Vernell Jones to use her extension,
that she made several phone calls,
one of which she overheard her telling a person
that she would meet them that evening
between 9:30 and 10:00.
- Then she heard Vernell say,
Don't tell anybody I'm coming,
or words to that effect.
- She also then witnessed, or overheard,
Vernell get off the phone and immediately make a phone call
to her boyfriend and says,
I'm going up there and I'm going to meet with him.
♪ ♪
- Well, by this point, Vernell Jones is now somebody
that we're very interested in,
so we wanted to get a background on her.
This is when we discover that Vernell Jones
was in the Philadelphia music scene
and had been a singer for years,
part of a locally well-known group called Surprise.
[tense music]
- They reach out to her.
They ask her to come down to the station,
but she doesn't come alone.
She brings her boyfriend/manager,
Kenneth Burno.
♪
- It's not unusual for people to bring someone
to the police station with them
while they're being questioned,
but they're thinking in the back of their head,
this could be a love triangle.
And what does Burno have to do with it?
- We make the decision to go ahead
and interview Vernell Jones with him there.
She says that, yes, she worked at David's Bridal
and that she was friendly with John Davis,
dating on and off casually,
and that she had made calls and set up a meeting
for after work on the 17th of December
to have a drink with him.
♪ ♪
- She admitted that she tried to make her boyfriend,
Kenneth Burno, jealous,
and did set up a meeting to meet with John Davis,
but that she chickened out in the end.
- Kenny's acting all sympathetic,
squeezing her hand and whatnot,
but he actually was kind of in the way.
And was making it more difficult for us
to do our job.
He seemed to be more interested in the details
of the crime than we think somebody who's just there
for moral support ought to be.
He put himself into the mix and put himself on our radar.
- Vernell's alibi is that she was with Kenneth,
and the only time that she was not with Kenneth
was for about a period of a half an hour,
but that she didn't go anywhere.
Detectives are beginning to feel that
there's something suspicious going on with Vernell,
but they can't keep her
because they don't have any evidence.
♪ ♪
- Vernell Jones is now somebody that we're very interested in,
so we went and talked with her sisters and her family.
We wanted to ascertain whether Vernell Jones had been violent
in the past toward any other boyfriends.
♪ ♪
So when we spoke with her family and friends,
they gave us a list of various relationships with other men
in the past, one of whom was Ronald Humphrey,
who was a Philadelphia fireman
who worked next door to where she lived.
- Investigators are now talking to Ronald Humphrey.
And they discover that between July of 2001 and August,
Humphrey had a relationship with Vernell Jones.
♪
- We're trying to find out
was she violent in any way toward him?
[tense music]
Just for background information.
And when we asked him...
♪
He said, "That bitch shot me."
Which was a, you know, quite a surprise to us.
[gunshot]
[tense music]
- It's been four days since John Davis was found
shot to death, and detectives' prime suspect
is his former lover, Vernell Jones.
Now they're learning that she shot another one of her exes.
Could be a coincidence,
but detectives rarely believe in coincidences.
[tense music]
- On December 21st, 2001,
our detectives interviewed Ronald Humphrey.
And he tells us that Vernell Jones,
the previous October, had shot him.
♪
- Between July of 2001 and August,
Humphrey had a sexual relationship
with Vernell Jones,
but Kenneth Burno gets wind of it
and comes to the fire station and confronts him
in front of everyone.
After that, Humphrey had no contact with Vernell Jones
until October.
And that's when she called him out of the blue.
Saying that she wants to hook up.
And finally, he agrees to meet with her.
♪ ♪
- It was a specifically arranged date by her,
which is of great significance.
They buy some beer.
Then they drive to a secluded area in Fairmont Park,
which is in Philadelphia.
- It turns into a sexual encounter.
She performs oral sex on him.
And he thinks that it's going to go further.
- Vernell Jones, according to the fireman,
says she has to go to the bathroom
and she gets out of the fireman's truck.
♪ ♪
- She leaves the truck.
He goes to the back seat of the truck,
anticipating that they're going to have sex.
♪
- She opens the door.
With a silver revolver,
fires a shot right at him.
[gunshot]
Hits him in the right upper arm.
♪ ♪
- The Philadelphia Police Department investigated
the shooting incident.
At that time, Ron doesn't tell them
that it was Vernell that shot him because
he was in a relationship with someone else.
But his story sounds eerily similar
to what happened to John Davis.
♪ ♪
- The conversation with Ronald Humphrey
is of critical importance because we have
his eyewitness testimony that it was a silver revolver.
We know from the three bullets we took out of John Davis...
♪ ♪
That they came from a revolver.
♪ ♪
Philadelphia Police were able to turn that bullet
that they had dug out of the truck over to our expert,
compare that to the three bullets
that came out of John Davis.
♪ ♪
- With all signs pointing to Vernell's involvement
in both shootings,
detectives go back to her family
to understand why she would want two men dead.
- Vernell Jones was 32 years old at the time of this crime.
Her and her sisters used to perform all the time.
And after a while, they formed a girl group called Surprise.
- Vernell was the lead singer of Surprise.
And she was going to become, really, the talent.
[soft upbeat music]
Vernell really wanted to pursue music,
but the gigs were not coming often enough.
So she had to work a 9:00 to 5:00 at the bridal warehouse.
- As the group was getting better and better
and getting more and more opportunities to play,
her hours at the bridal warehouse
were getting in the way.
And it was the habitual missing of work that led to her firing
earlier that year.
- Kenneth Burno was a manager of musicians.
And he meets this charismatic, very attractive,
talented woman, Vernell Jones.
And he decides, I'm going to make her a star.
But Kenneth Burno was somewhat of a celebrity himself.
- I'm Lamar Burno, youngest brother of Kenneth Burno, Jr.
At an early age, he had a gift.
Kenny entered into
Creative and Performing Arts high school.
And the choir picked certain members to be part of a group
called Unique Attractions.
And they would go to churches all around Philadelphia
singing, making a name for themselves.
And they sang for Michael Bivins.
And that's what made history, because he enjoyed the sound
and changed their name to Boyz II Men.
- When it came right down to the contract time,
he found out his girlfriend was pregnant
and decided to let go of show business.
- Kenny was OK with it 'cause he was in college.
No one ever knows how long your singing career will last.
But if you go to college and get a degree,
you have something to fall back on.
So that was his focus.
- Boyz II Men become very successful,
selling over 60 million albums.
And this causes some resentment in Kenny.
- There's always some regret.
But Kenny said, well, look, it was their time.
It was just their time.
I'm not going to say he wasn't hurt.
He never took his hurt to a point
that it destroyed anyone else.
[tense music]
- Burno decided, I still want to be in music,
but he decided to be in a different capacity.
He decided to contribute to somebody else's stardom,
and that was the stardom of Vernell Jones.
- When Kenny met Vernell,
that changed Kenny.
She was a different type of woman.
Vernell wasn't his only artist.
He was just-- she was just the main artist
that he was working with.
Vernell had the potential that he saw
that he could help her grow.
And she just thought he just was the king of music.
At this time, Kenny was still married.
But I would always see Kenny
taking care of Vernell financially.
I would see Vernell
acting like she was his queen.
♪ ♪
- After a while, his marriage is dwindling.
It eventually ends.
Then, Kenny and Vernell do have
a tumultuous five-year relationship.
♪ ♪
- Friends and family often provide us
with background info on a suspect,
but that doesn't always give us a motive.
As detectives work out the why in a case,
physical evidence can help us figure out the how.
- Ballistics take the bullet taken out of Humphrey's truck
and see if there's anything consistent with the bullets
that they've already recovered from John Davis' injuries.
And lo and behold, they find out
that it is the same type of bullet
and the same type of casing shot from the same gun.
This is a huge break in the case.
- That links the killing of John Davis
to the wounding of Mr. Humphrey, the fireman.
And the linchpin, the thing that connects the two of them,
is Vernell Jones.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪
- Ballistic testing has linked the same gun and bullets
to both John Davis and Ron Humphrey's shootings.
Since Ron Humphrey has already confirmed that Vernell Jones
was his shooter, authorities are ready to make an arrest.
- It is two days before Christmas,
and police believe they have their woman.
They go get Vernell Jones
and they find her at Kenneth Burno's house.
She is charged with conspiracy and third-degree murder.
She is taken to Montgomery County Jail
and she continues to deny that she has any connection
with John Davis's death.
- The community's reaction to Vernell's arrest is shock.
And the press goes wild.
- The only thing I know about her
is from what I heard on the news.
I just heard that she was a black widow.
She was a narcissistic woman
that just wanted to eliminate men.
♪ ♪
- Vernell's already in jail for the murder of John Davis.
And on January 10th, 2002,
the Philadelphia Police Department add the charge
of aggravated assault for the October shooting
of Ronald Humphrey.
♪ ♪
- Despite having physical evidence
to connect Vernell to both cases,
the Ronald Humphrey shooting will be pursued first
in the courts.
- We now know we have a guaranteed strong case
against Vernell Jones for the wounding of the fireman
because he's still alive and can tell us what happened.
[birds singing]
- When Vernell got locked up, Kenny was shocked.
He started calling different lawyers
to see if they would take her case.
- So initially, detectives saw the relationship
between Vernell and Kenny as a loving relationship.
He would encourage her.
But then, they began to wonder if this relationship was more,
was he guiding her?
Was he coaching her?
Was he putting words in her mouth?
Was he telling her
what she should say to the police officers?
- We all think that Kenny Burno is a conspirator,
if not a killer.
So now, the goal is
how are we going to gather the evidence to prove that?
♪ ♪
My assessment was that Vernell Jones was flaky.
And I was absolutely sure that
Kenny Burno would not pay enough attention to her
while she's locked up.
♪ ♪
Initially when she's in prison,
Kenny Burno is visiting her, writing to her, calling her.
Well, those visits and calls and letters
get fewer and fewer until eventually, they stop.
And Vernell Jones is getting visits from her family
and they're saying, you know, Kenny's out there
and he's dating other girls
and he's getting away with this.
We know that the pressure is working on her
and that would eventually work its way to the point where
she's not going to go down by herself.
♪
- But Vernell remains silent.
This goes on for eight months until August of 2002,
when her trial for the shooting of Ron Humphrey
is about to begin.
- Vernell Jones realizes she's all alone.
She realizes she has no one to support her.
She realizes she has been holding the truth all along.
And then, that is when everything turns.
♪ ♪
August 21st, 2002,
she decides to take a plea bargain
in Ronald Humphrey's case.
She pleads to aggravated assault
and she gets ten years behind bars.
And as a part of her plea bargain, she begins to talk.
- She wants to get out from underneath the possibility
of a mandatory life sentence for the murder of John Davis.
And we want to know what involvement
Kenny Burno may have had in the murder.
So we set up the meeting.
And what she told us was far in excess
of what we had anticipated.
♪ ♪
- Vernell proceeds to tell them that her boyfriend
of five years has been abusive.
♪ ♪
He was possessive
and very much a part of everything that she was doing.
- I never saw Kenny hit her.
There's not one police report about him abusing her.
My theory is she had to create that backstory
because Vernell couldn't handle Kenny seeing other women.
- Vernell said that she wasn't allowed to have a pager.
She was only allowed to use a cell phone that he paid for
that was in his name so he can keep track of the records.
- Vernell Jones also was required to hand over
every check that she made,
so all of her money was going to Burno,
So she didn't even have her own money
to take care of her own family.
- He went from being relatively normal
to obsessed with Vernell Jones.
♪ ♪
- He was crazy-jealous and even threatened
some of the people that she had relationships with previously.
♪
- Vernell tells detectives
the relationship hit a fever pitch
in the summer of 2001
when Kenny accused her of having a sexual relationship
with his cousin.
He's beating on her,
he's being emotionally and verbally abusive,
and she's scared,
so she goes along with whatever he says.
- So Kenny required her to write down the men
that he thought she had a sexual relationship with.
There were five of them.
And then Burno gave Vernell an ultimatum.
Either you kill these five guys
or our relationship is over.
♪ ♪
- She tells us that the attack on John Davis
was part of the manifestation of a contract
where they had agreed with one another
in writing to kill five individuals.
[tense music]
- Montgomery County detectives are all ears
as Vernell Jones reveals her list of past lovers
and the reason Kenneth Burno was making her target them.
- Kenny creates this hit list because he feels like
this is the only way for Vernell to show
her allegiance to him.
They agree to kill Larry Tucker,
a former coworker,
Ronald Humphrey, the firefighter,
John Davis, and two of Burno's cousins.
She has to kill the first name on the list,
and that first name is Ronald Humphrey.
♪ ♪
- Vernell told investigators she was terrified
because not only did Burno drive her to the scene
of where she was supposed to kill Ronald Humphrey,
he was hanging in the background
in the car waiting for her to do it.
♪ ♪
She was so nervous,
she couldn't even fire a straight shot.
- When she shot him, Mr. Humphrey,
he didn't go down like it's on TV.
And that frightens her and she runs off.
Well, that infuriates Kenny.
So they decide that the next person they're going to kill
is John and they'll come back to Ronald Humphrey.
And this time, Kenny's going to fire
the fatal shot because she's an incompetent marksman.
♪ ♪
So on the night of the murder,
they're waiting for John Davis when he comes out.
Somehow, Kenny has gotten in the back of the van.
And she's hiding in the shadows.
- When John Davis and Vernell return to the van,
Kenny Burno fired the shot in his head.
[gunshot]
And as another gruesome act of allegiance,
required Vernell to fire two shots into his body...
[gunshots] From the same gun.
She was terrified.
She was upset.
He was happy and joyful.
And then said to her, one down, four to go.
♪ ♪
- Detectives know Vernell's word
isn't enough to build a case against Kenny Burno.
- The detectives wanted to see Kenny.
And they wanted to ask him questions.
Kenny showed up at the Montgomery County
District Attorney's office with his lawyer.
And instead of answering direct questions,
he getting kind of, you know, smart with these detectives.
Well, they didn't like that.
- So we got a search warrant for Kenny's place.
And we find the address of the man in Atlanta, Georgia,
who was on the contract list.
- That man was Larry Tucker.
- We called him.
We were able to corroborate what Vernell had told us.
We also have the fireman's eyewitness testimony
and we could corroborate that Kenny came to the workplace
of John Davis and Ronald Humphrey,
so I thought circumstantially, we had enough.
[tense music]
- December 17th, 2002,
a year to the date of when John Davis was found dead,
Kenneth Burno was charged with criminal conspiracy
and first-degree murder.
The very next day,
Vernell Jones decides to take a plea deal
and agree to third-degree murder and conspiracy
and to testify against her ex-boyfriend, Kenneth Burno.
♪ ♪
- I won't say the entire case against Kenny Burno
rests on what Vernell says, but a great deal of it.
And the strongest pieces of evidence are all of the things
that she testified about her victimhood
at the hands of Kenny Burno.
They helped to explain her conduct.
That's very impactful to a jury.
- When Vernell was being cross-examined,
he said, "Did you shoot John Davis?"
She said, yes, but I know Kenny took the fatal shot.
♪ ♪
I know Kenny's innocent
because I know he's not going to take a man's life.
But I know Vernell is guilty
because she confessed to being guilty.
- The jury sees things differently
and finds Kenneth Burno guilty of conspiracy
and first-degree murder in the killing of John Davis.
He is sentenced to life in prison.
For her part, Vernell Jones is given
a reduced sentence of 17 to 35 years.
♪ ♪
- When he was found guilty,
it was a shock to all of us.
The family was hurt.
Our thoughts and prayers go to the victims.
But the judicial system has failed my brother.
- I have some sympathy for Vernell Jones,
because women can be forced to do things
that they otherwise wouldn't do.
She was ultimately paroled
to try to rehabilitate her life in 2018.
- A great man is gone,
so I think that on all areas, everybody's suffering.
They took a well-respected man away from us.
And honestly, I think that they got what they deserved.
God knew John was good.
John, I love you, man.
I know you in a better place, man.
And I know you right now,
you're sitting at the center table up in heaven.
♪ ♪