NEW BOSTON, Texas-It has been nearly 20 years since Billy Joel Tracy crept into a 16-year-old girl's Garland, Texas, bedroom, beat and strangled her into unconsciousness, burned her with cigarettes and left her in the woods, but the trauma is still fresh.
Kasey Kuhn, 36, testified Wednesday during the punishment phase of Tracy's capital murder trial about the night Tracy assaulted her in January 1998. Tracy, 39, was found guilty by a Bowie County jury last week in the July 2015 beating death of Correctional Officer Timothy Davison, 47. In 1998, Tracy was sentenced to two life sentences plus 20 years by a jury in Rockwall, Texas, for crimes including a brutal attack that left Kuhn in need of reconstructive facial surgery, dental implants and psychotherapy.
Kuhn is among the first witnesses to provide testimony meant to aid the jury in deciding if Tracy should receive a sentence of life without the possibility of parole or death by lethal injection for murdering Davison. Kuhn buried her face in her hands and sobbed when Assistant District Attorney Kelley Crisp showed her a photo taken in the hours after she was rushed to Parkland Hospital in Dallas in the early morning of Jan. 28, 1998.
Kuhn and a young man she was dating arranged to meet the day before and when her date showed up at her Garland home, Tracy was driving them in his small white hatchback. Kuhn said she had met Tracy before but didn't really know him. She said she, Tracy and "Chris" smoked marijuana, bought some beer and went to Tracy's apartment. She said Tracy was aware she was dating his friend but repeatedly made sexual advances.
Tracy's unwanted sexual aggression eventually led Kuhn to request she be taken home at about 9 or 10 p.m., a request Kuhn said led Tracy to become angry and call her a "b****." Once in her bedroom, Kuhn said she dressed for bed in a T-shirt and underwear, put her hair up and started to watch a movie.
She said she left her first-floor window cracked to let out the smoke from a cigarette she'd lit and was startled when she heard tapping on her window. Kuhn said she tried to shoo Tracy away, but he climbed into her room and refused to leave unless she had sex with him.
"I was crying and begging him to leave," Kuhn said. "He was trying to console me in a creepy way."
The jury was shown photos of a window screen with a bent frame and pictures of a pair of panties, a hair tie and other items strewn on a front lawn.
Kuhn said her fear increased as Tracy removed his shirt and shoes and stretched out on her bed. When he tried to kiss her, Kuhn said her reaction was to bite. Kuhn said a furious Tracy started hitting her.
"He was holding me down with a knee on my stomach. He covered my mouth and my nose and pushed down to where I couldn't breathe," Kuhn said. "He was strangling me. (Afterward) I had no skin from ear to ear."
Kuhn said her neck still bears scars from the attack. She said she lost consciousness and woke up to find herself in a crumpled heap on the floor of the front passenger side of Tracy's car. Tracy became further enraged when he realized Kuhn's blood had stained his upholstery and stopped the car when she asked him "why?"
Tracy dragged Kuhn's body across the ground, shredding her skin, and into woods near a park in Rockwall. Later Kuhn would learn that orbital bones around her left eye had been crushed and her vision would never be the same. She has a metal plate in her face holding bones together. Her nose required reconstructive surgery as did her jaw which will never again be aligned. Dental implants now replace teeth Tracy's blows knocked out of her mouth. Kuhn said she has suffered debilitating migraine headaches ever since.
Tracy's attack on Kuhn was halted when then-rookie Rockwall police officer Paul Britt noticed a car in the grass and suspected a drunken driver had crashed. Britt testified he was confused when he heard a voice he thought was female saying, "help me, help me, it's me," but saw a man standing in the 4 a.m. darkness. Britt said he saw blood on Tracy's hand and told him EMS was on the way. Britt said Tracy became aggressive and started fighting him, causing a wound to the officer's head which required seven stitches. Britt said Tracy repeatedly shouted at officers to kill him and eventually fled.
"I started to give chase, but then I heard another voice," Britt said. "I looked into the woods and she stood up."
Kuhn's mother, Brenda Fowler Snoke, said she "fainted to the ground" when she saw her daughter in the hospital, under questioning from Assistant District Attorney Lauren Richards.
Garland and Rockwall authorities launched a manhunt in the area that included helicopters and warnings to nearby schools. Rockwall resident Joyce Lemmons testified that she arranged to follow her daughter, a high school senior, home from classes so she wouldn't be entering their house alone. Lemmons said the sound of helicopters and a gathering cadre of police in her neighborhood led her to check the locks on her doors earlier that day, but she later realized one door in her garage wasn't secured.
"When we walked in the house my daughter said, 'Mom, who is that,'" Lemmons said.
Mother and daughter fled to a neighbor's home, and police quickly surrounded Tracy where he'd taken refuge on top of a newly constructed three-story home. Lemmons said Tracy did a flip from the roof and landed in bushes below, where he was taken into custody. Tracy has been behind bars since.
Lemmons said police recovered pieces of jewelry from Tracy that he'd taken from her home. Officers showed her a closet where a pallet of blankets had been made and food from the kitchen stashed, as if someone intended to use the space as a hideout. Human feces were discovered on the floor of her garage, Lemmons said.
In her opening statement, Crisp told the jury that Tracy's conduct while being held in the Rockwall County jail was so destructive that local officials requested he be transferred to a Texas prison as quickly as possible following his 1998 trial there. Three days after Tracy was convicted of assaulting Kuhn and Britt and of burglarizing Lemmons' home, he was picked up by Texas Department of Criminal Justice officers. Inmates typically spend up to 45 days in a county jail after being sentenced to prison.
TDCJ Classification Committee member Kelly Enloe testified that since Tracy's incarceration on the Rockwall charges, he has spent most of his time in administrative segregation. Including a short stint Tracy did for retaliation in 1995, Tracy has only spent three years in general population, Enloe said. Enloe described at length the process by which inmates are classified statewide and at the unit level. Inmate classifications automatically change with time, Enloe said. Depending on their offense, inmates with good behavior find themselves classified as less of a security risk and can enjoy more movement, more contact with other people and more commissary options, Enloe said.
Enloe said inmates in administrative segregation undergo classification reviews frequently and that there is no guarantee Tracy will be kept in administrative segregation, where inmates live in one-man cells and are restrained while outside their cells, if he is sentenced to life without parole. Tracy was in general population when he stabbed an officer seven times with a homemade weapon in 2005.
The first witness to testify Wednesday was TDCJ Office of Inspector General Regional Supervisor Anthony Allison. An audio recording of Allison interviewing Tracy at the Coffield Unit about a week after Davison's murder was played for the jury. Allison said Tracy made it clear to him that he was in control and would choose which of Allison's questions to answer.
"I call him Illinois. I don't know his real name," Tracy said of Davison, who was not a Texas native.
Tracy repeatedly claimed he did not intend to kill Davison and said, "I was more mad than I expected to be and hit him more than I planned on."
In the recorded interview, Tracy said his rage increased because Davison "busted him in the head," but the video of the beating shown during the first phase of Tracy's trail showed that Davison never struck Tracy in the head and was quickly rendered unconscious.
Davison's skull was shattered by Tracy's repeated blows with the officer's metal tray slot bar the morning of July 15, 2015, at the Barry Telford Unit in New Boston. Tracy told Allison he "doesn't like authority" and that he is "an angry man with a lot of time."
"There's always a chance. I can hurt someone any time I want to," Tracy said in the interview.
Under cross examination by Texarkana lawyer Jeff Harrelson, Allison agreed that Tracy claimed to have a reason for assaulting Davison and that Tracy said he didn't mean to kill. Allison said he believes Tracy is one of the "more intelligent" inmates he's interviewed and said he saw no evidence that Tracy suffers from mental disease or a diminished intellect.
Before the jury entered the courtroom Wednesday morning, Tracy's lead defense attorney, Mac Cobb of Mount Pleasant, Texas, expressed concern to 102nd District Judge Bobby Lockhart that one of the jurors had winked at Crisp during proceedings last week. Lockhart and Crisp said they had not seen any misconduct by the juror and Lockhart agreed to take Cobb's concerns under advisement.
Cobb asked that each juror be provided with a copy of Tracy's manual, "How to thrive and survive in prison," so that each has an equal opportunity to read it. Lockhart agreed to consider the request.
Cobb also told Lockhart that Tracy wanted to make a statement.
Tracy complained that Cobb and Harrelson haven't subpoenaed witnesses he feels might help his case and accused Crisp of prosecutorial misconduct. At the end of the day, after the jury had been excused for the evening, Lockhart addressed Tracy's morning statement and mentioned that he previously ruled against hybrid representation, meaning Tracy cannot file motions on his own behalf while being represented by licensed lawyers.
Testimony is expected to resume this morning at the Bowie County Courthouse.