Was Joanna Hayes attempting to commit the perfect murder by gunning down daughter-in-law Heather Strube, or was she the victim of an overzealous Snellville police force bent on solving a high-profile crime?
That’s the question a Gwinnett County jury faces after prosecutors and defense attorneys on Wednesday presented opening statements in the murder trial for Hayes.
Assistant District Attorney Christa Kirk said Hayes sought to disguise herself as a man by using a fake wig and mustache on the afternoon of April 26, 2009. Hayes was so confident in the ruse that she confronted Strube in broad daylight in a busy Target parking lot, put a gun to her daughter-in-law’s head and pulled the trigger. Strube’s 18-month-old son Carson sat a few feet away, strapped into his car seat waiting for his mom to take him home.
The motive was simple, according to Kirk: Bad blood stemming from Strube’s soured marriage to Hayes’s son.
“The defendant, she didn’t like Heather,” Kirk told the jury. “She didn’t want Heather to have custody of Carson in the divorce and she did not think Heather was a good mother.”
Strube had just met her estranged husband, Steven Strube, outside the store to exchange custody of their son. Witnesses said they saw Steven Strube drive out of the parking lot a few minutes before the shooter approached, and he has not been charged with the killing.
Hayes drives a white Ford F-150 pickup truck similar to the truck witnesses saw parked at a motel behind the Target the night of Strube’s slaying, prosecutors say. And fiber “consistent with a wig” later found inside of Hayes’ truck is part of the state’s evidence. Prosecutors also plan to call a co-worker of Hayes to testify about a conversation in which Hayes talked about committing the perfect murder.
Bruce Morriss, one of two attorneys representing Hayes, said the case is circumstantial and based on a flawed theory by Snellville Police. He said investigators zeroed in on Hayes because they believed she was among a select group of people who knew about Strube’s child custody arrangement with Steven Strube. However, Morriss said the custody arrangement had been filed in court for several months, available for anyone to see.
The murder was horrible and tragic, Morriss said, but he asked jurors to imagine the hardship that Hayes and her family had been put through when she was accused of murder after such a loss. He said Hayes and her family tried to cooperate with police, hoping she would be exonerated, but instead she was targeted.
“Within a matter of a couple of days, perhaps 24 hours, she was the primary suspect, the focus of these detectives and the media and they never looked back,” Morris told the jury. “We are so pleased and relieved this trial has begun. And if you approach this evidence with us, with an open mind, we are confident in what the result will be.”
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