It’s been nearly 13 years since the murders of 21-year-old Channon Christian and her 23-year-old boyfriend Christopher Newsom. For years, the families have sought justice for their loved ones and a Knox County jury granted them a final dose of that Tuesday.
This time, it was Eric Dewayne Boyd’s turn to face punishment.
After a day’s worth of deliberations, the seven-woman, five-man jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts, including first-degree felony murder, which carries an automatic life sentence for both killings.
In total, he was found guilty on 36 counts, including rape and aggravated robbery.
Boyd and his defense attorney, Clinton Frazer, stood stoic as the verdict was read and Knox County judge Bob McGee will deliver the final rendering on Sept. 18 at Boyd’s sentencing hearing. Already serving a federal prison sentence for assisting convicted ringleader Lemaricus Davidson in avoiding arrest, Boyd will likely spend the rest of his days in a jail cell.
For the family of Newsom, it meant receiving closure that they had not been granted despite the convictions of the other four assailants.
“Twelve years ago, we made a promise to Chris that we would get whoever did this,” Mary Newsom, the mother of Chris, said. “And today we got that. Justice was served.”
The fifth and final defendant to stand trial, Boyd has long-been suspected to be the individual that led Newsom out to railroad tracks off of Chipman Street - where he was raped and fatally shot three times before being set afire in an attempt to destroy DNA evidence.
It was just hours beforehand when he and Christian were carjacked and kidnapped and taken to a house that Davidson rented, where both were blinded, bound and gagged.
Christian was held against her will for nearly two days in the house, where she was repeatedly tortured and raped. Davidson, along with brother Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas and Valerie Coleman, were convicted of crimes against the couple including rape and facilitation. Coleman, while not directly charged with murder, was deemed a ‘facilitator’ in the slayings.
Investigators also discovered that bleach had been poured down Christian’s throat and on her body, another attempt to destroy DNA evidence, facilitated by Davidson. She was then placed into five trash bags and left to suffocate inside a garbage can.
Police didn’t discover her body until two days later.
For years, Newsom’s family was outraged at the fact that Boyd had yet to be charged for the murders, claiming he was nowhere near Washington Ridge or Chipman Street when the killings occurred.
Hugh Newsom, Chris’s father, had a different hunch.
"We said we would not stop until Eric Boyd was prosecuted,” Hugh Newsom said. "There were times we wanted to give up...he'll never be back on the streets of Knoxville to commit more crimes."
Davidson, who was convicted in 2009, is on death row awaiting execution. Coleman, who received a reduced sentence following a second trial, is serving 35 years.
Cobbins, infamously remembered for testifying against his companions in court, is behind bars for life without the possibility of parole. After a judge reduced his 127-year sentence for agreeing to testify against Boyd, Thomas received a punishment of 50 years.
From the start, prosecutors TaKisha Fitzgerald and Phil Morton believed they had a strong case against Boyd, based off of testimony from just three witnesses: Thomas, Xavier Jenkins and Adrienne Mathis.
The critical testimony came from Mathis and Thomas, as Mathis stated in Boyd’s federal trial that she lent him her Pontiac Sunbird on the night of the killings. Jenkins would later state that he saw the car parked outside of the Chipman Street house later that night, with Thomas directly linking Boyd to the kidnapping and Newsom’s murder.
Morton laid out the entire scenario during his closing argument, implicating that Boyd ‘provided transportation to steal a car,’ which then turned into a forceful kidnapping.
“This case comes down to choices — what choices this defendant made, what choices these other defendants made,” Morton said. “He had a choice. He could have said, 'no thanks. I don't want any part of it.' ... If you let your friends talk you into doing something, you suffer the same consequences as they do.”
Boyd’s defense attorney claimed that the killings were the acts of Davidson, Cobbins and Thomas alone, telling jurors that the state’s case rested on a lot of ‘speculation’ and labeling the witnesses as ‘liars.’
“These are the acts of Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, Vanessa Coleman and George Thomas,” Frazier said. “We've heard from many, many (experts). There is no physical evidence Eric Boyd raped or murdered (Christian and Newsom).”
Despite claims of memory loss by Mathis and Thomas refusing to reveal critical details while on the witness stand, the jury didn’t buy it.
And now, the family of Newsome may have finally found out who brutally took their son’s life in the wee hours of Jan. 7, 2007. As Fitzgerald pointed out in her closing statement, none of the details matter.
“Mr. Boyd was a part of it,” Fitzgerald said. “They're all responsible.”
