Fatal error

Andre Knight and Fabian Davy were among a group of men who buried two bodies in a shallow grave in Spanish Town, St Catherine, on an October night in 2013 and were about to use the cover of darkness to get away with murder.

That was until a chance traffic stop about 11:05 p.m. by a team of cops, metres from where the bodies were buried on October 18, 2013.

Soon, their dark secret began unravelling as a routine traffic stop quickly morphed into a murder mystery.

Last Wednesday, nearly 10 years later, it took a jury 68 minutes to convict Knight for two counts of murder for the 2013 killing of Tannashay Bennett, a 19-year-old student from Clarendon, and Keron Frazer, 29, a Trinidadian man who came to Jamaica to pursue his dream as a music producer.

Knight’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for October 13.

Davy died before the trial commenced.

The bodies of Bennett and Frazer were found in the shallow grave on Arlington Avenue, Duncan’s Pen, in an advanced state of decomposition on November 10, 2013, according to investigators.

Their identities were confirmed through DNA samples provided by relatives, prosecutors Jamelia Simpson and Kristen Anderson revealed.

Bennett died from manual strangulation, while Frazer died from blunt force trauma to the head, the postmortems revealed.

The trial involved nearly three dozen exhibits, including call records, text messages, a witness statement from entertainer ‘Black Ryno’ (born Romaine Anderson), and the jailhouse confession of a prisoner who Knight confided in.

The prisoner died of natural causes at the Kingston Public Hospital in 2017, forcing prosecutors to rely on Section 31D of the Evidence Act to have the confession included in the trial.

“It took a lot of effort and diligence,” Simpson and Anderson told The Sunday Gleaner during an interview last Thursday, referring to the near seven-week trial in the St Catherine Circuit Court. “There were lots of issues as it relates to the admissibility of evidence and the fact that some people died along the way.”

According to the evidence, Knight, Davy and at least three other men were travelling in a Honda motorcar along the March Pen main road when a police team signalled them to stop.

Knight was arrested because he did not have a driver’s licence and could not account for how he came in possession of the vehicle. The other occupants of the car were released.

Investigators later found the owner of the vehicle, who said that he did know Knight and that the vehicle had been rented to Frazer.

Detectives learnt, too, that Frazer was reported missing to the Spanish Town police while a missing person report was filed for Bennett in Clarendon.

Scenes of crime investigators were called in to process the vehicle and found traces of blood and dirt in the trunk.

Tests conducted by the Government Forensic Laboratory concluded that the aspiring music producer and the student “could not be ruled out” as the source of the blood found in the car.

The murder probe took a dramatic turn months later when an inmate, who was being held at the Bog Walk Police Station, asked to speak to lead investigator Inspector Ruben Gunther.

The prisoner gave a statement, saying that Knight confessed that he and two of his cronies killed Frazer and Bennett to fulfil a $500,000 contract.

According to the statement, Knight admitted transporting the bodies in the rented Honda to the makeshift burial site.

Further, the prisoner said Knight told him he had a telephone in his jail cell that he used to communicate with his co-conspirators and others “to create a false alibi” for himself.

Call data records, text messages and cell site data for Knight and Davy’s mobile phones, which were obtained through the Interception of Communications Act, showed nine conversations between them on October 18, 2013, the day they were apprehended, prosecutors disclosed.

“Many of the calls were just minutes apart and lasted for seconds. The cell site they were using is the one that services the Duncan’s Pen community.”

In one text message sent by Knight around 8:19 p.m. that day, he told someone, “inna di bush a di sup’n”.

livern.barrett@gleanerjm.com