“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
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.
Read Less...
RSS 2.0