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Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.
Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday. Already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts. How this whole thing plays out is just made for movie, right? Because it's just really hard to comprehend. We know what you did. That's why you're here. That's why you're charged. Not only could we not articulate...
any reason to kill this young man. But if that reason was for nothing more than being inconvenient, can you think of any worse perspective of humanity? I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anasiga Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murph. Virginia native Martre Coles was a typical teenager and like many, full of promise. In the year 2017, he had a loving girlfriend and a bright future as a talented artist. On March 12th of that year, Martre was in the middle of a text conversation with his girlfriend when he wrote...
I'll be right back. That was the last time anyone ever heard from him. The investigation into what happened to Martre uncovered a web of deceit and betrayal that would leave everyone that knew him forever changed. Henrico County Commonwealth Attorney Shannon Taylor learned of Martre's disappearance early on from a detective she worked closely with who came by her office to share some news.
The missing person was 19-year-old Martre Coles.
He was just any type of typical teenager. He had dreams of wanting to go to a college and that was his dream. He had a little girlfriend at the time, but he also was living in a home with his father and his father's girlfriend and his father's girlfriend's daughter.
As part of a blended family, Mar-Trey, or Trey as he was often referred to, had a young stepsister at home. But Trey was the baby of his own larger biological family. He had four older siblings, including a sister named Michelle, who did live close by. And we'll tell you right now that there are a lot of names in this one, but don't worry, we will do our best to help you keep track.
So Saturday, March 11th, was Trey's sister Michelle's birthday. He had agreed to babysit her children so she could go out and celebrate. She's going out with her sisters. They go out, they come home. She then brings Trey home in the early morning hours of March 12th. That's when he realizes, oh, I left my wallet back at your house. She's like, not a problem. I'll bring it to you later.
Michelle went home to sleep, but when she woke up, she had several missed calls from Martre's girlfriend, Ashlyn. While she was friendly with Martre's girlfriend, getting these calls from her was unusual. So Michelle called her back right away. Ashlyn then shares with her, I was talking to your brother, and then all of a sudden, the last thing he says to me is, be right back, and I haven't heard from him, and now it's been, you know, several hours.
Michelle was immediately worried. This wasn't like Martre, and also their mother had died a few years back, and Martre was still having a hard time with the loss. As a result, Martre struggled with depression, and at one point, he had even told his sister that he wanted to join his deceased mom.
The situation was made worse by the fact the siblings' father, Maurice Coles, had jumped into a new relationship within a month of their mother's and his wife's death. Soon after this new relationship began, Martre's father's new girlfriend moved into the family home that Maurice and his son Martre shared. The woman's name was Denise Gaye.
Denise had a young daughter who she also brought for the move. Let's just say tensions between Martre and the daughter were often high. As you can imagine, blending a family is not always easy. Worried about her brother, Michelle, and another sister of theirs drove over to their father's home. When they arrived, Denise, who remember was Martre's dad's living girlfriend, was walking into the home with her other daughter, 22-year-old Latoya.
Denise said that she didn't know, and LaToya, her daughter, the older one, well, she seemed preoccupied.
When they get in the house, Latoya is jamming stuff into a bag and non-responsive to any of the inquiries that the girls are making of Denise about where their brother was. And she just abruptly leaves, gets back into her car and just leaves. But more surprising to the sisters was when they looked in Martre's room.
There were things that the girls noticed about their brother's room. For example, his shoes were still there. There was the laptop bag that was still there. Things that they knew were out of the ordinary.
Michelle spoke with her father, Maurice, about Maitre and the messages that he'd been sending his girlfriend. The father didn't seem concerned, so Michelle left the house and continued searching on her own. You know, Scott, I just think there's this question whether this is about family dynamics, right? Because no family is the same as another family. Is it because this is the way they interact or maybe there was some tension from various reasons or is it because there's something up? Yeah, there's a lot of different ages going on here and different personalities, but
So it's so early in this relationship and we're learning so much about this new blended family. It'd be interesting to see if this really is something that develops into a real concern. Meanwhile, Mar-Trey's girlfriend, Ashlyn, continued to look for him. She too had spoken with Denise. And again, there's a lot of names here. So just a reminder that Denise was Trey's father's live-in girlfriend. So Ashlyn, Trey's girlfriend, was surprised by what Denise had said.
Denise said that Martre had gone to visit Full Sail University, a school in Florida known for its art program. Martre was a talented illustrator and pursuing an art degree was the next step he hoped to achieve. He had been interested in Full Sail and had been communicating with them about applying. Ashlyn knew Martre's email login and using it, she began to search for any clues about where he could be.
The conversation with Ashlyn is, oh, he must have gone, you know, he had to go down to Full Sail, which is why then Ashlyn gets into Martre's emails and starts reaching out to this woman who had been corresponding with Martre certainly at least a day in advance, if not more, a couple of days in advance.
The woman was a prospective student coordinator at the university. Ashland then emailed her about Martre's trip to the school. She then follows up and says, and this is not verbatim, but something to the effect that she's Martre's girlfriend and was told that he's on his way down there and she hasn't heard from him and she's concerned.
The university coordinator responded and confirmed Martre's visit, but still for Ashlyn, the impromptu trip just didn't sit right. She and Martre met in high school during art class, and their relationship bloomed from there. And like many teens, their relationship was all-encompassing. So the fact that Ashlyn knew nothing about a visit to Florida was strange.
She's highly suspect of this woman who's claiming to be from the school saying, oh, he's on his way down here because Ashlyn knows and says there's no way he would have done that without me knowing.
There was also the email itself, which seemed off. It was from a Gmail address, but Ashlyn knew that higher education institutions regularly use that .edu address. She shared what she found with Trey's sister, Michelle, who at that point filed a missing persons report with the police. Now, although Martre was over the age of 18, police called the family home to speak with his dad and Denise.
Both of them kind of said the same thing, you know, did not know his whereabouts. Denise saying, walked to his sister's house to get his driver's license. No, they were not alarmed that they hadn't heard from him yet. Didn't have any friends in the area, said he was kind of a loner, played a lot of video games and no medical conditions. Something about the tone of the conversation raised alarm bells, or as I say, big red flags for the officer.
He knew from what the sisters had said that they were very concerned. And at least you have a biological father who seems to be very unconcerned. That officer had kind of like that, you know, that sixth sense that something just wasn't quite right.
The officer documented the call. The answers were too much the same, I dare say identical, that there was just something about the dynamic in his interviews that he went ahead and did create a document, did create an incident report for that day. And he reports to the sisters, I have done this and this is what they've told me, so I don't have any more information.
And really, that just means on a separate report, which is more administrative than anything else, that he documented this interaction. So after that initial outreach and filing their report, police waited to see if Martre would return home, but that never happened.
About three weeks later, a man was walking in an industrial area a few miles from the Coles' home. And this gentleman is taking a smoke break and realizes that he is running short on time and decides he's going to do a cut through from the road where he was walking along and to cut through back to his office area of the industrial park where he was working.
As he walked through some brush, he saw a large plastic bin with a sneaker sticking out of it. People being inquisitive, he kind of looks at it and pulls the box out and opens up the corner of the top and sees that it's a body and kind of freaks out and runs back to his work area.
He told a co-worker who went back with him, and he too saw the body. And then they called 911. When investigators arrived, they determined that the body was of a young man. There was no obvious signs of trauma, no blood or bruising, but the man's wrists were bound behind his back. They are removing the body there to see what's going on. That's when we notice that
He is bound. We have those bindings around his wrist. We noticed that there's some type of substance on him, on his body. And he's kind of placed in there the way I've always described it, like an accordion. So his knees are close to his chest and he's in this box with the other observation of the shoes that did not appear to fit.
With no identification on him, investigators added the details of the young man's body to a database. They soon found a match with Martre Coles. It was clear that this was a crime. So what had been a missing persons case quickly turned into a homicide investigation.
Looking for initial information on what was now a murder case, detectives looked into the original missing persons report filed by Martre's sister. They also read the incident report taken after the phone call with Martre's dad and his live-in girlfriend, Denise. Then a sergeant remembered an incident that had happened on March 31st, just a few days before Martre's body had been found. Officers responded to an alarm that had gone off at the Coles' home.
From the outset, the incident seemed unrelated to the disappearance. That was until they spoke with Denise's daughter. Want to connect with more family and friends and their native language is in English?
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When officers arrived at the Coles' home, they were greeted by Denise's two daughters, the older LaToya and the younger, a 12-year-old. Since the girl was a minor at the time, we're not going to refer to her by her name, but rather give her the designation really just of her age. So either it'll be the 12-year-old or the preteen. LaToya explained that the 12-year-old had been home alone, something that was common in the household due to the mother working far from home.
Denise has given this 12-year-old daughter rules that she's supposed to abide by because their jobs were taking them two hours away from Henrico County. And there were these rules for this child to abide by because she was left at home alone. The mother would see, Denise would see that her daughter was misbehaving and would call her adult daughter, Latoya, to come and check on her.
But on that night, there were problems between the sisters. For whatever reason, little sister is mad at big sister and knows that the windows are also situated with alarms. So she opens up the window to activate the alarm. As Latoya spoke with the officers, the younger sister, the 12-year-old, stood next to her. She appeared frozen, with her shoulders up by her ears and her gaze straight to the ground.
The officer can visually see, as do we on the body-worn camera, that there's this dynamic that's happening between Latoya and her little sister. You can see that the little girl is looking down at the ground. And in an attempt to try to speak to her, she's very nonresponsive. So it gets to the point where she says, "Can I come out there? Can I talk to you?"
One of the officers took the 12-year-old to the side so they could speak privately, out of the earshot of the older sister. The little girl is talking low, not so low that you can't hear on the body-worn camera, but certainly in a way that she doesn't want her sister to hear what she's saying. It quickly became apparent why she didn't want to be heard. The 12-year-old told the officer that she knew something about her stepbrother, Martre, who was missing.
She said that on a Sunday a few weeks back, she had heard Martre making unusual sounds. She hears Martre making some noise, whether or not it's a scream. She hears something to the effect of, get off me, stop it. She, being the very inquisitive 12-year-old,
walks out of her bedroom down the hall and can look into Martre's room where the door is partially shut, not fully shut. When the young girl looked into the room, she saw her older sister Latoya sitting on Martre's legs and Denise, her mother, sitting on his chest. The 12-year-old sees her sister holding his legs down.
and sees her mother, whether it's sitting or pressing upon his chest area, is definitely putting her weight on top of him. The 12-year-old told the officer that her mom and sister were, in her words, suffocating him. While she sees this going on, her mother looks up, catches her eye, and gives her like a hand signal to go away.
The little girl then returns back to her room and with her little dog with her shuts the door and turns on TV. Then the young girl heard a dragging noise. So she opened up her door once again. And that's when she sees her sister pushing a plastic bin down the hallway.
She then would say her mother tells her that they're going to leave and, you know, to stay in her room and that she sees her mother and her sister get into the SUV vehicle that the mom drove and left and that she never saw Martre ever again.
In case there was any doubt what the 12-year-old was talking about, at one point she whispered emphatically to the officers, I saw my mom kill my stepbrother. That was creepy. That's put hairs in the back of my neck stood up. Sorry, did not mean to go all six cents on you all, but she did whisper, so there it is.
The responding officers were not aware of the missing persons report filed for Martre, so they listened to what the 12-year-old had to say and took it with a grain of salt. Because they also knew that this 12-year-old had a history of getting into trouble. And one of the officers that was there actually knew her. In fact, he had been at the Coles' home just a month prior for a separate incident involving the girl. He is aware that there is some dynamic. He
He is aware that this is a pretty, I mean, I don't want to use the term outrageous or outlandish, but it's a crazy story that he's hearing from this little girl that he's had some interaction with before. As the officer spoke with the 12-year-old, Latoya began to approach them. Latoya then leaves the house and now she's got her mother on the phone and on speakerphone.
And this is when you see Henrico police trying to protect the little girl, but not wanting to alarm anybody. Here is audio from one of the officer's body cams.
We'll tell you everything she tells us.
And, you know, in dealing with a minor, there's a lot of different rules and considerations. But one, like she's not a suspect in anything where she would absolutely have the right to have a parent or guardian present. But here, really, it is the officer trying to get her alone away from others just to hear what she has to say. So really, it is for her benefit while he makes that initial assessment. But back at the Coles home, Denise was now on speakerphone with the police explaining that she was struggling with her 12-year-old daughter's behavior.
She has a problem with authority, right? And I need to know if you guys can share her some.
I mean, I'm giving you my permission. But you know, like basically talking to her. She's already been to detention. So I'm not worried about the detention part. I'm letting her know she needs to, you know, stand up for her actions or whatever. Otherwise, it's not going to be no easy detention because she thought detention was a joke. So if there's some type of way I can like steer her, let her know, you know, the stuff you're doing. Little girls don't do nothing like that.
One officer continued speaking with Denise while the other spoke with the 12-year-old. He reminded her that lying to police was illegal, but she insisted that her story was the truth. In the middle of this dynamic situation, the officers reached out to their sergeant to consult them on their next move. And the supervisor calls over to the investigative unit and they are like, "Yeah, we're not coming out."
There's nothing really more that can be done except for get the little girl in his patrol car and actually type out some type of report. So the officers wrote the report and went on their way. I want to step in for a second, not really the Monday morning quarterback, what the officers did on the scene, but they did have information from a minor and whether that information was correct or not. It still was information about something that could be a serious crime.
So when it turns out, which it does here, that it was, could things have been done differently? I think so. And that's just my opinion. But obviously, a short time later, Martre's body was found. And the report became the starting point for this investigation.
While the 12-year-old's trustworthiness may have been in doubt, details from what she said, like the plastic bin, matched how Martre was found. It was clear that at least part of what she was saying seemed to be accurate. So now it was up to investigators to uncover the rest of the story. And from the start, they were faced with a major dilemma.
Typically, when a body is identified, police prioritize notifying the family and loved ones of the victim as soon as possible. But in this case, Martre's family was suspected of being involved in his murder. Investigators made the strategic decision not to disclose that Martre's body had been discovered until they had a chance to speak with the family. We were then trying to determine how we were going to use this information
to begin the identification of who did this to Martre. Now that we had found him, now that we knew this was a homicide investigation, now that we were armed with the information about what the 12-year-old had told law enforcement back on March 31st, we needed to come up with a plan as to how we were going to perhaps interview individuals to see if we could find the responsible parties.
Detectives began with the women who initially filed the missing persons report, Martre's two older sisters. They asked them to come to the station to answer some questions about their family. One of the things that we're trying to figure out are like, who are we dealing with? Well, we know that from the sisters, we know that they don't like Denise and they definitely don't like Latoya.
But at the same time, their father had been acting strange since Martre had gone missing. We know that the girls had given a description of their father being highly unusual under the circumstances, that they weren't really sure if he had anything to do with this.
Martre's sisters agreed to a mouth swab before leaving the station. Then police began their own deep dive into the four people on their radar. Maurice, Martre's dad, Denise, Maurice's living girlfriend, Latoya, Denise's oldest daughter, and then there was the 12-year-old who had kicked off the investigation with her story to police.
A quick look into the 12-year-old's past revealed that she and Martre had a history of conflict. There was actually a pending charge in the juvenile court where she had taken a pair of scissors and attacked him. She had poured a caustic substance, I think it was bleach, under the door of his bedroom and had on another occasion said,
smashed kind of like a garden squirrel against the door because he wouldn't let her in. So there was a history there, the dynamic between the 12-year-old and Martre. Investigators had to consider the possibility that the 12-year-old's issues with Martre could have escalated to the point that maybe she was somehow involved in his death. And that would mean that what she was telling them might be made up.
We have this dynamic with the 12-year-old and thinking, my God, is it possible that she could have killed him and these grown-ups are like covering this up? So we're having this whole thought process of who are our players? Investigators decided it was time to get a search warrant for the Coles' home. What we're trying to figure out at this time is,
Do we think this happened at the house? Can we find any evidence of anything that happens at the house? We are looking for things that could have been done, maybe to clean up any type of scene inside the house, anything unusual. Latoya was at the home when the officers arrived. They spoke with her briefly, and then she got in a car and left. Investigators were a step ahead of her. In planning for this,
We were going to be trying to see if there was anything to, you know, follow, if any person who was going to come to the scene and follow. So that's when we have this one investigative unit follow behind Latoya when she has left the house. Latoya drove only a short distance before she stopped at a location that was already known to police and perhaps to Martre's killer.
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Police had yet to release the news that Martre Coles' body had been found, so when his older stepsister Latoya drove straight to the spot where the body was discovered,
It raised everyone's eyebrows. So our surveillance team, they're aware of what the circumstances are. They know that we found Martre's body in this one particular spot. And they know that they have followed Latoya to an area that was close enough to be relevant to where Martre's body was found.
By the time LaToya had driven off, investigators had a new idea. The theory then being with the investigation and the group kind of talking about it is, I wonder if they're going to come back to this particular area. Because now we're thinking, yeah, LaToya at least knows that that's where Martre's body was. Are they going to try to come back looking for Martre?
One person on the team was an avid hunter, and he thought of a solution for staking out the location. He goes and puts up his personal game camera, which is a nighttime detection, and those guys are supposed to be checking this camera. Nothing much showed up on that camera initially. That was until four days later.
They see a vehicle parked on the side of the road next to this wooden cut and they see an individual pass in front of the camera with what appears to be a hood over top of their head and some type of implement in their right hand walking past the camera.
While they couldn't exactly make out the figure in the video, they were able to identify the car. The wheels were not the factory issue for the Escalade. It didn't take long before they matched the car in the video to the car belonging to Maurice Coles.
Investigators then went to his place of work to see if they could figure out and map out where he had been and when. And surveillance video showed that both on the night that the car has seen in that video and also on the day that his son, Martre, went missing, that Maurice Coles was at work.
Although Maurice was still on their radar, his alibi was undeniable. But at the same time, Martre's autopsy results had come back with some notable findings.
Two drugs were found in Martre's system. The first was Trazodone, which is an antidepressant and sleep aid that can slow breathing and heart rate. The second was GHB.
which is what we commonly call a date rape drug. It is something that we hear about in investigations, something that is a tasteless liquid that we talk about being placed in someone's drink and that they'll consume an alcoholic beverage or maybe just a regular beverage. And next thing they know, they are completely passed out and have no recollection of anything that has happened.
Like Trazodone, GHB can also suppress breathing and the combination of the two drugs can be fatal. But the official cause of Mortray's death wasn't the drugs, it was asphyxiation. As we talk about asphyxiation, it can be strangulation, it could be because of some type of weight that had been placed on the body itself.
And in this case, because he was found in the manner in which he was found, i.e. like the accordion, it was hard to say if it was positional asphyxiation or was he already dead by the time he is placed in the bin in that manner. While the medical examiner couldn't say for certain how the asphyxiation occurred, it was another piece of evidence that matched what the 12-year-old had said.
Here's something else. During the search of the Coles home, investigators had confiscated Denise's computer and made a shocking discovery about the email from Full Sail University.
Not only did we identify that Denise had created a VPN for protection of that email address, but not so much that it didn't show that she was doing some of this work while she was at the North Ivy location. That meant that while Martre had thought he was emailing with the university, he was actually emailing with his father's girlfriend instead.
While Denise's motive for doing this was a mystery, her actions were quickly being uncovered by police. A subpoena of Denise's phone records helped investigators draw a map of her whereabouts. And here's what they learned. On the night that the person was caught by the hunting camera, Denise was in the vicinity of where Martre's body was found. And on the day that Martre went missing, Denise had traveled from Nicole's residence to the area where his body was.
This stunning evidence was enough to arrest Denise and charge her with second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Eight days after Martre's body was found, Denise then sat down with police for questioning. Here's a piece of audio from that conversation. I don't think that it's a surprise why you're here, right? In a way. What do you mean by that?
i what is it that i'm being held you're saying i murdered somebody that's correct you know what you're here you know having seen the video you could see denise's mind is racing as she's searching for the right response you know you're looking at her facial expressions and her eye movement she's trying to come up with something where's trey that i don't know it doesn't concern you that he's banished it does
It concerns you and you haven't... When's the last time you heard from him? It's been a while. And remember, at this point, Denise still doesn't know that Martre's body has been found. But that was about to change. We know what happened. And you know that we found him. We know that. That's what we want you to tell us. We do. What happened? You killed him in your house. The last time you saw him, he was in a storage bin.
Denise continued to deny any knowledge or involvement. Following her arrest, her older daughter Latoya was also charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder. She was found in South Carolina and she was likely on the run. She claims it's a planned trip, but when we follow up with the family, nobody knew she was coming.
Between the mother and daughter's phone records and computer searches, Shannon and the team of prosecutors felt confident in their case. But remember that part of this case would depend on the testimony of a preteen who had been only 12 when this occurred. We do know that this little girl had been exposed to a very manipulative mother and had been left alone for significant periods of time that she was troubled.
As the trial drew near, prosecutors wondered how the 12-year-old would do when she took the stand. We definitely have the little girl, which then becomes the next hurdle, which is how are we going to put a case on with a very, very disturbed 12-year-old little girl? Make today the day you kickstart a new healthy routine. Fuel up with factors.
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The trial against Denise and Latoya Gay for the murder of Martre Coles began in December of 2017. Starting with the 12-year-old's testimony, the prosecution presented a detailed scenario of what they believed happened the day that Martre went missing.
What we believed to happen on March 12th is that Latoya is contacted by her mother. She comes over to the house the morning of March 12th. That the 12-year-old sees what she sees and that Denise and Latoya have placed Martre's body into the plastic bin, have put the plastic bin into the back of the black SUV,
And they're now trying to figure out what to do with the body. Phone records show that Denise and Latoya then drove to a neighboring county, but suddenly they veered off the road. Now, what we believe happened then is that Michelle has called Denise on her cell phone to say, we are coming over here.
And we argue that Denise and Latoya obviously can't have the body of their brother in their car so that they removed the plastic bin and left it in this clearing off the side of the road, of a rural road. The women were pulling up at the home when Martre's older sister, Michelle, came in looking for her brother, Martre.
What we believe and what we argued was that now that he's missing, now that the sisters know that he's missing, Denise has to come up with some type of story, some type of ruse, so that if he is to be found, that they've got a story to go along with that.
Denise then decided to stage his body as if he had been kidnapped, including by tying his wrist and putting shoes on his feet.
We believe that she has gone to Goodwill to buy shoes to place on his feet because he was walking back to his sister's house to get the wallet and somewhere along the way is abducted and some other group has harmed him and put him in this position.
At some point, a substance was rubbed onto Mortray's body, likely with the belief that it would accelerate decomposition. But there was a major mistake.
We think that she was thinking it was going to be lye, i.e. something to facilitate an acceleration of the decompensation of a body, but instead gets lime, which then preserves and slows down the decompensation of the body. The plastic tub was then moved to a new location where it was later discovered.
When the 12-year-old successfully took the stand and told the jury what she had seen, the defense focused their efforts on suggesting that Maurice or the 12-year-old were involved in Martre's killing. The jury went to deliberate, and when they returned, Denise and Latoya Gay were found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, a charge that carried a maximum sentence of 10 years. But on the charge of felony murder, the jury was hung.
By just one vote. That's all it takes. There was one woman who was a holdout who would not go forward on the first degree murder. We arguably, we think she did not want to convict Latoya. But because there was a mistrial in the first degree, we then had to do that charge over again.
And this time, the judge decided that Denise and Latoya would have to be tried separately. And I know, Anastasia, this is really your forte about just explaining why two separate trials. So you can do this differently, right? The judge is saying two separate trials, most likely here because it is, whether it's irreconcilable defenses or maybe one was going to testify. Again, things that
one jury cannot assess in deciding the guilt or non-guilt of the other person. So really they have two options. You can either do this as a double jury, and that really did become my thing in the DA's office. But a lot of jurisdictions and courts
won't let you do that because basically it means you have two separate juries. There's a lot of like you take one jury out when there's something they can't hear. So here the judge is saying like, let's just keep it simple and clean and separate them, two trials. The issue with that then is for the witnesses who have to come in twice, for the prosecutor to hope they can get them. But again, the judge is doing it to be cautious and make sure that the evidence and the defenses presented don't impact or unfairly prejudice the other defendant.
The day after the trial, Shannon got a surprising phone call from one of the detectives on the case. You're not going to believe this, but Maurice has reached out to me, said he was cleaning out the house and has found some items that he thinks I might be interested in. The fact that Martre's father had reached out seemed like a sign that he might be ready to cooperate, giving more than he had been up to that point.
It's that interaction that convinced myself, the assistant on the case with me, that Maurice did not have anything to do with this. Maurice handed over Denise's purse with her wallet and her cell phone. But Shannon wanted more from Maurice than just these items. And that's when we started to be able to have more frank conversations with him.
to see if he could provide us any insight as to why this happened. He agreed to sit down with prosecutors and explain how his relationship with Denise began. They met each other at the Tyson's chicken plant. And when Maurice's wife died,
It didn't take Denise very long to scoop in. Their relationship seemed to be one of obsession, jealousy, and control. We learned about other women that Maurice dated and the interactions that Denise had with those women to kind of start to paint this picture of a very jealous relationship
Denise Gay and her, I don't know if you call it love, I don't know if it's infatuation, whatever this sentiment is that she had for Maurice Coles. So he was able to kind of help us paint this picture to give us a better understanding of how this all even happened.
The conversation with Maurice painted the same picture that Michelle and her sister had painted for investigators, that Denise wanted every trace of her boyfriend's deceased wife and life erased. In the closing, it was literally, that is the only thing we could ever think of. She just wanted him out of the way.
Armed with this new evidence, Shannon headed into the retrial of Denise. They had decided to try her first in the hopes that LaToya might choose to cooperate and perhaps strike a deal to testify against her mother. And the strategy there was that we actually wanted to see if LaToya wanted to cooperate, but she did not and she would not cooperate. So we went ahead, if nothing else, just to show that we met business and tried her mother first.
During the trial, Shannon presented the items that Maurice had shared with investigators. And while investigators had pulled Denise's phone records, her actual phone held text messages that no one had seen before. That included several disturbing conversations with Latoya.
In one text thread, the two were messaging about the box that Martre was found in. One message read, "I don't think you can lift." Another said, "Didn't see it." And that wasn't all that the phone revealed. Denise had searched for GHB, how to suffocate someone, and how to dispose of a body. And finally, there was a receipt for a shovel that Maurice had found in his garage.
During her closing statements, Shannon was finally able to articulate the one thing that had seemed like a mystery up until this point, Denise's motive. She summed it up by concluding that Martre was a inconvenience to Denise.
took his life because he was inconveniently in her way, whatever that may be. Inconvenient because it created problems with her own 12-year-old daughter. Inconvenient because it deviated the attention from Maurice that she desperately was always wanting or some other reason, but none of which are any reason to kill a human being.
Denise's motive, like really this obscene motive for killing Martre, was a hard pill for everyone to swallow. I think that's probably the worst part about this whole crime, was that not only could we not articulate clearly
any reason for why Denise decided that she had to kill this young man to remove him from the day-to-day activities of life. But if that reason was for nothing more than being inconvenient, can you think of any worse perspective of humanity?
When it came time for a verdict, the new evidence and motive turned out to be enough to convict Denise of murdering Maitre. But before the success of the first trial could sink in, it was time for LaToya's trial. While the 12-year-old had testified against her mother, Shannon wasn't sure how she would handle testifying against her sister.
While we knew that the young lady, the 12-year-old, didn't have any problem testifying against her mother, she did have very deep feelings for her sister. And we were very concerned about whether or not she was going to be able to testify against her sister about what she had seen.
When the trial began, Latoya's defense attorney placed the majority of the blame on Denise. Her lawyer was saying, you know, Latoya did not kill Martre. She was thrust into a scenario not of her own making. She was sucked into the situation because of the fear of her own mother and did try to
suggest that she had no control over the situation. She was just doing merely what her mother was telling her to do. But Shannon argued that every action has a consequence and that same thinking should apply to Latoya.
She did choose to participate in this regardless of how manipulative her mother was. She did participate in this. And so we focused on that and said that she was as much to be held accountable as her mother. You know, just because she wasn't around to help her mother dispose of the body didn't mean that she wasn't still a part of the decision making as to what was going to happen to this case.
During the trial, the 12-year-old also once again bravely took the stand and told the story of what she'd seen her sister do. In the end, the jury sided with the prosecution. Latoya was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Shannon remembers Denise's sentencing well, and she admits it was a trying process.
Shannon was struck how Denise had insisted on placing the blame on her own young daughter.
This whole idea from day one that this woman was telling her attorneys that somehow her 12-year-old daughter committed this crime and wanted to accept zero accountability, it was kind of hard not to feel some harsh ways about Denise Gaye.
And what I remember saying to the jury was something to the effect of like, this is the most offensive thing that can be said, which is a mother trying to tell you all that her 12-year-old daughter killed this young man. And I did not hold back when I said that she deserved the most severe punishment, which was life. In the end, that's exactly what Denise Gay got.
When Denise Gay joined the Coles family, she was supposed to take on the motherly role for a child that had recently lost his own. But in the end, her selfish desires won out over any nurturing and protection. Even in the face of loss of his own mother, Martre had found solace in his art. With his death,
That's where his legacy remains, with the intricate characters he drew full of life, expression, and hope.
The callousness demonstrated by Denise Gay is hard to conceive of, whether due to jealousy, inconvenience, or any reason at all. She took the life of a 19-year-old teen. She moved into his home soon after his own mother died. Rather than wrapping him in her arms and helping him rebuild after the loss, she took his life and stuffed his body into a barrel. ♪
She showed disregard for her own child, her older daughter Latoya, by wrapping her into this murderous scheme. And Latoya then too became a willing participant in murder.
Family relationships can be complicated. They can be strained and lead to all sorts of problems and pain. But murder? That is never the answer. Martre Coles, you were only 19 years old and should have had so many years ahead of you to live, love, and hopefully dance through life the way you wanted. Pursuing your art, caring for your friends, family, a young man trying to live out his dreams. That's the person you were and that we will remember you for.
Martre had made the turn from dealing with the grief of his mother's passing to focusing on his future, his passion, his creativity for art.
We all know that most blended families in time grow closer together and benefit from the new unity, establishing deep connections and a supported atmosphere. But others face significant strife where jealousy, unresolved past issues, and different styles of parenting can foster an environment where emotional turmoil might escalate into serious conflict or even crime.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original. Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Tracy Levy. Researched by Kate Cooper. Edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?
Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.
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