COURTLAND, MISS -- Jessica Chambers has become a household name. She has been featured on several cable networks and has been the subject of thousands of news articles over four years.
But while every teenage girl dreams of being famous, none would hunger for what gave her that notoriety. The years of followup after her death from third degree burns have served to keep all eyes on the case, hollow comfort to Jessica's family, who will never celebrate another Christmas or any other holiday or life milestone with her.
On Dec. 6, 2014, the tiny 19-year-old was set on fire on a back road in Courtland, a town of 500 in Panola County. She was found walking toward first responders with burns over almost her entire body. She finally died early the next morning in a Memphis hospital, holding her mother's hand.
Jessica Chambers (1995-2014) | Gallery
With a hung jury in the first trial of her suspected killer, the chronology of events will pay out again when the retrial of Quinton Tellis of Courtland gets underway Monday in Batesville.
It became a theater of tragedy as parts of the story came to light in the first trial. Witnesses testified about Jessica's life, about her death, about Tellis — a sympathetic defendant even investigators said was soft spoken and likable -- and about what prosecutors said were lies and electronic data that tied him to Jessica on her last night.
Witnesses also talked about the "Eric" factor. First responders testified en masse that they all heard the teen despite prohibitive airway burns say, "Eric did this to me. Eric set me on fire."
Many testified they will never forget the sight of Jessica walking towards them wearing only her panties, hair singed to a crisp and burns covering her body. That image for so many Courtland firefighters has become an emotional wound.
"I hope I never see anything like it again," said former Courtland Fire Chief Cole Haley through heartrending tears after a deeply emotional turn on the stand last year. He is no longer a firefighter, which had long been his passion.
When questions are directed to him now, he is quick to redirect the attention to his fellow firefighters. He reminds us it wasn't just him at that scene. Please pray for my brothers, he asks.
Medical personnel who worked on Jessica were amazed the thermal burns and smoke inhalation hadn't already killed her. For a few hours, as Jessica clung to life and they worked to save her, she was almost a miracle.
Almost.
Chambers parents seek justice for 'baby girl'
As the phone calls started reaching her family members — "They set Jessica on fire!" — the four-year nightmare began. It will continue, no doubt, but closure could be the first step toward healing.
Lisa Daugherty, Jessica's mother, has simultaneously been the picture of frailty and strength. The tears flow freely when she talks about her "baby girl," but somehow she has stood firm as the investigation hit snag after snag and finally settled on a man she'd never heard of.
She has campaigned for justice for her daughter. Her posts on social media are sometimes hopeful, sometimes defiant, almost always heartbreaking.
She doesn't sleep much, she said. Burying your child, your heart, can make sleep an elusive goal. Not to mention the dreams.
Jessica's father Ben Chambers is the flip side of the coin. Men cry, he has shown us throughout, especially after losing two children well before their time.
In the early stages of the investigation, Ben Chambers even said he'd find a way to get to Jessica's killer in jail. That he had connections and he would use them. Later he said, if anybody were going to physically harm her killer, he wanted to do it himself.
The Panola County Sheriff's Department assigned all its resources to the investigation. Maj. Barry Thompson was identified as the department's lead investigator on local aspects of the case. The department searched the woods near where the car was found, tracked down acquaintances and friends, gathered gang and drug intelligence.
Sheriff Dennis Darby said many times that the case was personal to him, not just because Ben Chambers worked as a mechanic in his shop, but because of the inhumane nature of Jessica's killing.
Darby also denied allegations the case was racial. In Courtland, he and other officials said, people had known each other their entire lives. Sure, there are some racial issues, but not the kind people kill over. Authorities also quickly ruled out internet chatter that Jessica's death was gang-related. Her boyfriend, Travis Sanford, was affiliated, but he was incarcerated at the time. Gang members came out to tell the Sheriff's Department they didn't have anything to do with it and that they would help find her killer in any way they could.
And behind the scenes, after the dozens and hundreds of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers gradually went back to their regular jobs, a small unit of state and federal resources coalesced around the case. It was their job to interview witnesses and suspects, track down leads, sift the data and connect the dots.
In addition to District Attorney John Champion and Assistant District Attorney Jay Hale, Special Agent Scott Meadows of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Mississippi Bureau of Investigations' Tim Douglas, and Paul Rowlett, an analyst from the U.S. attorney's office, formed the heart of the team, and finding Jessica's killer became an all-consuming mission to them.
Authorities interviewed as many Erics and Derricks as they could find. There was even a Jerrick. None of them panned out. A federal anti-gang operation turned up charges against 17 people on various drug and gang-related offenses during research into the case, but none of them was a suspect in Jessica's slaying.
Leads popped up that seemed like sure things and then fell through.
Someone wrote to the Clarion Ledger that he knew who killed Jessica. He was in Iowa, and a female friend of his had heard her boyfriend say he was involved in a homicide in Panola County, Mississippi. The girlfriend had used Google for the day he told her, and she found a reference to Jessica's slaying. Her boyfriend had just gotten back from there, the emailer said.
Investigators went to Iowa and found the man had allegedly been involved in a drive-by that happened the night before and didn't know the victims hadn't died. He wasn't Jessica's killer, just a weird coincidence 12 hours away. One of many.
As investigators zeroed in on Tellis as their main suspect, they realized he was in a Louisiana jail facing charges connected to the death of another woman.
The body of Meing Chen-Xiao was found in her Monroe apartment on Tellis' wedding day, her tortured body decayed in a scene law enforcement officers described as one of the worst they'd ever seen.
Tellis later was convicted in Louisiana as a habitual offender on credit card charges and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Authorities have said he's their No. 1 suspect in Xiao's murder. They say he tortured her with shallow cuts until she gave him the PIN number to her card, at which point they say he finished her off and left her in her apartment alone, her family overseas, thousands of miles away.
Tellis meanwhle married Chakita Jackson, one of five women he had been texting the night of Jessica's death. Authorities said the number of women he was actively texting at that time was in the double digits. After Jessica died, Tellis delted her contact and all her texts and told investigators it was because he didn't need a dead person's information in his phone.
Tellis' family pulled into nightmare
Fourteen months after Jessica's death, another tentacle of the nightmare that began on Dec. 6, 2014, began to wrap itself around Tellis' family. They have told reporters they firmly believe in his innocence. His mother, Rebecca Wright, has said her son wasn't "capable" of killing someone. His sisters, who remember him as their protector even though he was the youngest, have refused to stand down on their faith that he's innocent.
But Tellis, in interviews with investigators, waffled on his statements. He wasn't with Jessica that afternoon. Okay, he said, he was with her, but he didn't kill her. They had sex only once, he said — in her car — and they had been on the passenger side, where the seat had been laid back.
That's how the seat was positioned when her badly burned car was found.
He said it had happened probably not two weeks after they met. They had known each other for roughly two weeks.
When Wright was brought in to talk to him on one of the recordings from the interview room in Monroe, Louisiana, she was clearly shaken.
"They're telling me all these stories that you did it... He said the police are going to charge you with murder," she said, to which he answered, "I'm telling you the truth, I didn't do it."
Tellis hugged his mother, whose name is tattooed on his chest, and assured her that he'd only ever driven Jessica's car once: to the liquor store.
The trial in October 2017 brought other things to the surface: Tellis' multiple text messages to Jessica asking for sex, and her reply any woman recognizes as a rejection: "Oh Lord." The gasoline can he told officials he kept in the shed outside his house. The alibis he gave that fell through before his final admission that he was with Jessica just before she died.
The interview videos in which Champion, Rowlett, Meadows and Douglas could be seen grilling Tellis about the case were compelling, as was Douglas' testimony about them. One video shows Tellis shoving past where Rowlett was sitting and pushing Douglas as he went out the door, saying, "Get out of my way."
The prosecution gained momentum with cellphone and video data. Piece by piece, Rowlett laid out the movements of both Tellis and Chambers based on their texts, calls, cellphone GPS data, and surveillance videos from various stores. It seemed airtight.
Defense attorneys Alton Peterson and Darla Palmer, however, had Rowlett repeat over and over again how outlying pings are thrown out when putting together a map of cellphone hits, then pointing out that what he was saying could be interpreted as the fact all the data isn't used, and that it's not 100 percent accurate.
The ghost of "Eric" also came back to the surface.
"Eric is not on trial here," Palmer said, "but he should be."
A "mysterious man" reportedly seen at the scene of the fire had been brought up by first responders, who said he looked suspicious and had a strange look on his face as he stared at the car and at the spot in the woods where Jessica had walked out.
Could he have been Eric? Palmer asked. Authorities, however, had cleared him, and his name was not Eric or Derrick.
The DNA on Jessica's keys? There were multiple male profiles on those keys, and Tellis had admitted to police that he drove her to the doctor one day.
It was good enough for four members of the jury, but not the others, and the judge declared a mistrial.
Over the last year, both sides have been working to strengthen their case, and they'll meet head-on again starting on Monday.
Palmer mounted an offensive against Champion when she said he attempted to coerce one of her other clients to make false statements,urging that he be sanctioned and removed from the case. Champion disputed that allegation. Judge Gerald Chatham ruled against the defense's motions.The state Supreme Court upheld his decision. What else is up their sleeves remains to be seen.
The prosecution has said it will bring new witnesses and present new evidence.
In the meantime, families all over Courtland and Panola County are praying. Some for the man they believe to be Jessica's killer to finally be found guilty. Some for the man they said would never hurt someone to be vindicated. Some who don't know which to believe are just praying for God's will to be done.
And in a cemetery in Pope, a quiet headstone adorned with flowers and butterflies marks Jessica's final resting place where she remains forever 19 years old.
