Horrific images can haunt jurors

They saw horrific pictures that everyday people should never have to see.

The northwest Georgia county of Gordon had not, in anyone’s memory, experienced violence such as the January 2004 deaths at the hands of Jerry Jones on his former girlfriend’s family and his daughter.

John Spink / jspink@ajc.com

Defendant Brian Nichols was in court Wednesday for the final day of jury selection. The trial starts next week.

John Spink / jspink@ajc.com

Lawyers for Brian Nichols (front) and the state (left) talk during the final day of jury selection on Wednesday

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A jury of 14, including two alternates, decided Jones should die for killing his ex-girlfriend Melissa Peeler’s parents, smothering with duct tape her stepsister, and strangling his and Peeler’s 10-month-old daughter.

Memories of that trial still haunt the community and its jurors.

Now another jury, this one in Atlanta 60 miles away, is about to be tasked with the similar responsibility, to sit on a high-profile, multiple homicide in which there is no doubt as to who pulled the trigger: The death penalty case against courthouse killer Brian Nichols.

On Wednesday, 12 jurors and six alternates are expected to be selected from a pool of 90 jurors to hear the state of Georgia vs. Brian G. Nichols. The trial begins Monday.

Though the Nichols’ case only involved adults, there are some similarities between the cases.

• Details of the four murders in Ranger, about 10 miles from Calhoun in rural Gordon County, were well known, as are the details of the shootings at the Fulton County Courthouse the morning of March 11, 2005.

• The crimes and dramatic captures of both men a day later received national media coverage.

• Jones, 35, who was sentenced to death row in May, admitted to the four murders, but a jury still had to hear the case to decide his sentence. Lawyers in the Nichols case say there is no question of “who done it” but he has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; Nichols, 36, could be condemned if he is convicted of murdering Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Anne Brandau, deputy Hoyt Teasley or DEA agent David Wilhelm.

Several who sat on the Jerry Jones jury say the accounts of the pending Nichols case reminds them of their jury service last spring.

They say the real-life ugliness they saw and heard changed them forever.

“The day they showed us those pictures of the baby, I woke up in the middle of that night and the first thing that popped into my head was that image,” said Gina Floyd, a Gordon County elementary school bus driver.

Floyd cried when the jury announced its decision on May 2 that Jones must die for what he did.

“I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “I really thought there had to be something drastic that these people did to him that made him retaliate the way he did. But there was no rhyme or reason to it.”

Floyd said it was pure evil.

Jones admitted killing Peeler’s parents Tommy and Nola Blayloc, Peeler’s step-sister Georgia Bradley, and his and Peeler’s baby girl Jerri Jones to get back at Peeler for ending their relationship. Jones had Peeler’s other daughters — 3, 4 and 10 at the time — with him when he shot himself in the face once police cornered him in Chattanooga the day after the killings.

Jury foreman Brian Anderson said he was blindsided by “the amount of brutality and how close to [his] home” the murders happened.

For two weeks, beginning with jury selection and ending with the sentencing, the jurors were alone with their thoughts, prohibited from talking to anyone — each other, spouses or best friends — about what they were seeing and hearing.

“My wife is my best friend and I couldn’t tell her,” Anderson said. “The most stressful part was not being able to talk to anybody about it. There’s a lot of evil most people shouldn’t have to deal with. I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever forget.”

As prosecutors flashed on a screen crime scene pictures, juror Melissa Self looked to Jones’ disfigured face for answers.

“How could he do those things and … think he did nothing wrong,” Self said. “I was hoping for some kind of emotional reaction. If there was some kind of emotional reaction, there was some kind of heart in the man. But I didn’t see anything. It made me sad.”

When she got in her car to drive home the evening between the two days of deliberations, “I squalled. And I cried all night long,” Self said.

She was afraid of making the wrong decision.

But when she awoke the last morning, she knew.

The first vote was unanimous.