Ricky Gray makes brief appearance
Paige Akin Mudd
September 18, 2006 3:25 PM
The final prosecution witness, a state medical examiner, will testify tomorrow morning about the suffocation deaths of the Tucker/Baskerville family.
In a surprise move today, defense attorneys asked Judge Richard D. Taylor Jr. to allow a courtroom identification of Ricky Javon Gray by Detective Howard Peterman, who interviewed both Gray and Ray Joseph Dandridge in Philadelphia.
The jury was sent out, and Gray was brought to the doorway of the inmate entrance to the courtroom. Taylor instructed Gray not to try to communicate with anyone in the courtroom when the jury was brought back in.
But prosecutors objected to the courtroom ID, saying that the jury would see Gray—dressed in prison garb and handcuffs—as the “monster” compared to Dandridge, dressed in a black dress shirt and slacks.
Taylor decided not to allow Gray back in.
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Detective relates Dandridge’s statement
Jim Nolan
September 18, 2006 3:10 PM
Ray Dandridge described the decision to kill Ashley Baskerville this way:
“He got tired of the girl, so he decided to kill her,“ Dandridge said of his alleged accomplice, Ricky Javon Gray, in a statement to Philadelphia police shortly after his capture on Jan. 7
“...So he could take her parents car and get out of here.“
But it was Dandridge who ended up putting duct tape over Baskerville’s mouth and nose that prosecutors said resulted in her suffocation death—an act repeated with Baskerville’s mother, Mary Tucker, and Tucker’s husband Percyell Tucker in their East Broad Rock Road home.
Dandridge said Baskerville had been his girlfriend before she started seeing Gray, his uncle. “He had been talking to me a while about killing her,“ he told Philadelphia Detective Howard Peterman, who testified this afternoon in Dandridge’s capital murder trial.
“I had to hold her down while I was taping her nose up,“ Dandridge told Peterman in the statement.
As the details of the killings were spelled out in the statement read aloud by Peterman, Tucker and Baskerville family members sat silently, some with their heads bowed, others shaking their heads slowly or dabbing their eyes with tissues.
Dandridge said it was Baskerville’s plan to have herself tied up as a means to rob her stepfather. But then he explained how, after he and Gray taped the Tuckers’ hands and feet and robbed their home, they wrapped their faces in duct tape and stabbed their throats with a kitchen knife.
Less than 24 hours after the killings, Richmond detectives, with the help of Chesterfield police, tracked down Dandridge’s new girlfriend and convinced her to contact Dandridge, who had driven to Philadelphia with Gray in Percyell Tucker’s 1993 Chevy Blazer.
In a recorded conversation, a seemingly relaxed and exhausted Dandridge casually chats with his girlfriend as rap music plays in the background—and Richmond Detective William Brereton listened in.
“Yo,“ says Dandridge.
“Love me?“
“Yeah,“ she says.
“...Miss you…“
Dandridge also discusses the carnage left behind in Richmond, and foretells what will happen when the bodies are discovered.
“They’re going to start looking for us,“ he said.
Less than seven hours later, Dandridge and Gray were arrested in the West Philadelphia row home of Dandridge’s father.
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Detective describes taped bodies
Paige Akin Mudd
September 18, 2006 11:44 AM
Jurors heard from the prosecution’s first two witnesses before a 12:30 p.m. lunch break.
One witness, Richmond police Det. Scott Leonard, collected forensic evidence from the Tucker/Baskerville house for nine hours after their bodies were discovered on Jan. 6.
He described how the victims’ bodies were found bound at the wrists and ankles with tape and with duct tape covering their mouths and noses.
Leonard said he submitted some of the tape and other evidence to the state crime lab for fingerprint analysis and DNA testing.
On cross examination, defense attorney Clair Cardwell rattled off a long list of evidence that Leonard either didn’t submit or that was submitted but never tested.
Prosecutor Matthew Geary said it’s impossible to test every piece of evidence from a crime scene. Investigators have to be selective and submit the items they believe will yield results, he said.
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Jurors hear opening statements
Jim Nolan
September 18, 2006 11:15 AM
As they pulled up to the East Broad Rock Boulevard home of Percyell and Mary Tucker early in the morning on Jan. 6, Ray Dandridge, Ricky Gray and Ashley Baskerville had a plan.
Baskerville, Mary Tucker’s 21-year-old daughter, would allow herself to be tied up in her bedroom and pretend she was being held against her will. Dandridge and Gray would then proceeed to rob the couple of anything of value in their modest single-story home.
But that wasn’t the whole plan, according to opening statements today in Dandridge’s trial.
With Baskerville and the Tuckers bound at the hands and feet with duct tape, prosecutors say, a robbery turned into a gruesome triple murder.
In his opening statements, Chief Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Matthew Geary calmly and methodically told jurors that Dandridge, 28, wound strips of duct tape around the heads of the helpless couple and Baskerville, beginning the process of suffocation that took approximately six minutes.
“He wrapped and wrapped and wrapped and wrapped, over and over and over again,“ said Geary, demonstrating the act to the jury using his own roll of tape on a cardboard cylinder.
“He killed them. He killed all three of them with duct tape,“ Geary added.
At that moment, several members of the Tucker and Baskerville family seated rushed out of the courtroom.
In similarly understated tones, Dandridge defense attorney Claire Cardwell told jurors in her opening statement that what happend on Jan. 6 was horrible.
“Nothing we do or say is intended to degrade their memory,“ she said, referring to the deaths of the Tuckers and Baskerville.
Cardwell acknowledged what several on the panel had expressed before their selection to hear the capital murder case—that deliberating the evidence and her client’s guilt or innocence was likely to be a “very sobering task.“
She asked jurors to put aside “the emotion, passion, sadness and horror,“ of what happened that night and deliberate Dandridge’s fate based on their responsiblity to hold the Commonwealth accountable for proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
She also suggested that police investigating the murders relied heavily on the statement Dandridge gave to Philadelphia police upon his capture there on Jan. 7—and that the statement may not have been entirely truthful.
“...They relied upon the assumption that everything he said was true,“ said Cardwell.
Gray, 29, Dandridge’s uncle and alleged accomplice in the Tucker and Baskerville slayings, was convicted last month of capital murder in the slayings of the Harvey family in South Richmond.
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Jury chosen in Dandridge trial
Jim Nolan
September 18, 2006 10:39 AM
A jury has been selected to hear the capital murder trial of Ray Joseph Dandridge in the Jan. 6 slayings of Percyell and Mary Tucker and Ashley Baskerville.
Using their peremptory strikes, prosecution and defense attorneys narrowed the pool of 28 prospective jurors to 16—12 panelists and four alternates.
Twelve women and four men will hear evidence in the case. The panel of 16 includes nine blacks and seven whites. The four alternate jurors will be chosen at random when court reconvenes shortly after 11 a.m.
Opening arguments are scheduled to begin immediately following the selection.
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Trial opens at 10 a.m.
Paige Akin Mudd
September 18, 2006 8:52 AM
The trial of Ray Joseph Dandridge will begin about 10 a.m. today, when the jury is narrowed to 12 jurors plus four alternates. Attorneys will make opening statements, then present evidence.
Defense attorneys have not said whether they will present a defense.
The prosecution should wrap up its evidence tomorrow morning.
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Trial resumes Monday
Paige Akin Mudd
September 15, 2006 9:25 AM
Jury selection wrapped up Thursday shortly before 6 p.m., with 28 prospective jurors selected.
The pool of jurors will return at 9 a.m. Monday and will be further narrowed to 12 plus four alternates. Then, opening statements and evidence will follow.
For more on what to expect at next week’s trial, read this Sunday’s Times-Dispatch.
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