One of Tennessee's oldest unsolved murders might hinge on deleted Facebook messages

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Knox.news
https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/cri ... 745243002/


Travis Dorman
Knoxville News Sentinel
Sept. 13, 2020

Did Facebook conversation between two women lead to murder charges in one of Tennessee's oldest unsolved killings?

Defense attorney Jim Logan says yes, and that the two women involved — the victim's sister and the prosecution's star witness — deleted their messages when ordered to turn them over.

Logan's client, Max Calhoun, is the second person ever charged in the killing of John Raymond Constant, a baffling case that has become something of a legend in Monroe County. On March 16, 1973, Constant was found riddled with bullets and slumped inside his truck on the banks of what's now Tellico Lake, kicking off a generation of speculation about his shadowy ties to organized crime and his supposed plan to turn FBI informant.

Rumors and law-enforcement theories over the decades have blamed his death on everything from a love triangle to a local arm of the so-called "Dixie Mafia."

After 46 years, the case is no longer about the suspected gunman or the only known eyewitness. Both men died decades ago, one gunned down in an apparent mob hit two states away, the other consumed by cancer soon after testifying from his deathbed.

The case comes down now to the words of a new witness: 65-year-old Arwana Amos.

Amos came forward in December 2018. Thanks to her testimony, prosecutors obtained a first-degree murder indictment against Calhoun. They have yet to specify their theory about his role in the killing, and Amos's testimony remains secret.

But statements made in court suggest Amos claims to have heard Calhoun talk about the killing 40 years ago. Calhoun, for his part, has pleaded not guilty, and his attorney says they have evidence proving Amos is wrong.

"We have significant evidence which refutes the asserted place of disclosure (and) the circumstances under which the asserted disclosure was made," Logan said during a recent hearing. "So we've got to understand why, in 2018, somebody said something after all of that time."

'Maybe we could help each other'

Amos spoke to authorities several months after she had at least one conversation with Constant's sister, Patricia "Dee" Miller, on Facebook.

"Depression is real!" Miller wrote in a Facebook post on June 20, 2018, according to a screenshot of the post included in court filings. "I'd like to see five of my friends post this message (Not share) to show you are always there if I need to talk."

"Anytime, night or day," Amos replied. "I'm here. Although I haven't met you in person, I still concerned (sic) you as a friend. Pm (private message) me for my phone number. I'm just a call away. I too suffer with depression. And being here with no one to turn to is hell. I get so depressed. It goes for days and days before I can pull myself up. It's so hard. So maybe we could help each other."

Miller later contacted an investigator with the local prosecutor's office and said that Amos had information about her brother's unsolved killing.

Amos gave a statement in December 2018, and in February 2019, the prosecutor held a news conference to announce a grand jury had indicted Calhoun for murder.

A witness living with a terminal illness had come forward to crack the case, said 10th Judicial District Attorney General Steve Crump.

"After that, we thought we had enough to go to the grand jury and present a case, and we did get an indictment," Crump said.

Crump didn't name Amos as the witness at the time, but court records later revealed her identity. Calhoun's attorney, Logan, then found the public Facebook exchange Amos had with Constant's sister. His office sought the two women's private Facebook messages as evidence that could help prove Calhoun's innocence.

When Crump didn't oppose the move, Logan's office obtained subpoenas, signed by the circuit court clerk, ordering Amos and Miller to bring their cellphones "without modification" to court.

But when the women handed over their cellphones, Logan wrote in a motion, their Facebook messages with each other were gone.

Amos had deactivated her Facebook account and created a new one, according to the motion. Investigators managed to log into her old account and found that her private messages with Miller had been deleted. Similarly, Miller's phone showed her "entire message conversation with Ms. Amos had been deleted though her message conversations with other individuals were intact," the motion reads.

Logan filed a motion in the case to hold Amos and Miller in criminal contempt for disobeying the subpoenas, a charge punishable by up to 10 days in jail.

Judge: Motion denied
No one filed a response to the motion or showed up to defend the women in court. As it turns out, no one had to.

Tenth Circuit Court Judge Andrew Mark Freiberg shot down the motion for contempt two months ago during a half-hour hearing at the Monroe County Courthouse.

Freiberg noted that the decision to hold someone in contempt is left to a judge's discretion and gave several reasons why he felt it was inappropriate in this case. Criminal contempt is meant to preserve the processes of the court, he said, but he never saw the subpoenas, much less signed them. He expressed concerns that the subpoenas were unreasonable and violated the two women's privacy — an argument neither Amos nor Miller had made themselves. And he said he didn't want to intervene in the case when the defense could simply cross-examine the women at trial.

In a statement to Knox News, Logan said he will appeal the judge's decision.

"We believe that Judge Freiberg was correct when he announced that the conduct of Amos and Miller will be rich fodder for the cross-examination of the witnesses should they testify," the statement read, in part. "Why would they destroy their private communications with each other?"

Crump, the prosecutor, told Knox News his office is evaluating the case after learning of the allegations that Amos deleted her messages.

"Any time there is something that affects the credibility of a witness such as the allegations that have been made, we have to take it seriously," he said. "I just think we’re trying to evaluate at this point what this means to the case and what realistically are the facts that we believe happened and where we go from here."

Knox News reached both Amos and Miller through Facebook.

Amos denied deleting her messages and said she only made a new Facebook account because her original account had too long of a name. Her old account is still active, she said: "It's all still there. It's hard to delete something that was never there in the first place." She said that she didn't come forward sooner because of fear.

Amos stopped replying when pressed about the messages.

Miller did not deny deleting her messages and instead called the subpoenas "a violation of our civil rights." When asked once about the messages, she blocked this reporter on Facebook and said "do NOT try to contact me again, or one of your colleagues may be writing a story about you being charged with harrassing (sic) a murder victims sister! Have a good day!"

Twists and turns
The development marks the latest twist in a case that has been full of them.

Around 1 a.m. on March 16, 1973, Vonore resident Tom Miller found a 1973 Chevrolet pickup shot full of holes, its emergency lights flashing, on the south bank of the Little Tennessee River. Inside, Miller discovered John Constant slumped over the steering wheel. He'd been dead for hours, and now his hands were frozen to the wheel. He'd been shot at least 17 times, authorities found, probably with a high-powered rifle or machine gun.

Constant, a 35-year-old former Marine turned truck driver, lived a life that left no shortage of suspects. He'd been married five times. His fifth wife had separated from him, swearing out a restraining order and filing for divorce days before his death.

Authorities hinted at the time that Constant might have been hauling bootleg cigarettes and other black-market goods for a ring of local criminals who claimed to be part of the "Dixie Mafia." Family members say Constant had been tired and anxious for months. They believed he'd been keeping notes and planned to give his information to the FBI.

The day he died, Constant told his mother he planned to meet someone. She never saw him alive again.

The case quickly went cold and remained that way for nine years. The only known eyewitness, S.L. Poteet, came forward in 1981. Poteet, a McMinn County man so sick with cancer he had to testify by videotaped deposition, swore Constant died nearly 25 miles from the riverbank, at a 24-hour self-service car wash in Etowah.

Poteet testified under hypnosis he'd been hosing down his car the night of March 15, 1973, when he heard a sound "like firecrackers, some scuffling and a truck slinging gravel." He looked up to see a pickup pull in front of his stall with three men in the cab.

He recognized two: Marvin Ray Pittman, alias "Big John" Giorgiani, a drifter and suspected mob assassin; and Constant, who sat propped up in the middle between Giorgiani and the third man.

Giorgiani, viewed by some to be the most likely gunman in the case, turned up dead two years later in Tampa, Florida, with a bullet hole in his temple.

Prosecutors claimed Poteet identified the third man in the truck as Harold Buckner, a former McMinn County deputy and one-time candidate for sheriff. A grand jury heard this and indicted Buckner, the first person ever charged in the killing.

Prosecutors were forced to drop the case in 1982 after Poteet insisted he never said the third man was Buckner — just that the man had brown hair like Buckner did. Buckner denounces the case as a frame-job to this day.

"I never was even questioned until after I was arrested," Buckner told Knox News last year. "They said they had nine witnesses. There were no witnesses. I didn't know John Constant. They asked me where I was that night. I said it was nine years ago, I don't remember."

The car wash where authorities believe Constant died was owned by Max Calhoun's father. The father swore out warrants against two of Constant's brothers in the weeks after the killing, saying they blamed him for Constant's death and threatened to get even. The father died 20 years ago, never charged.

The son, Max Calhoun, was 21 years old and had blond hair — not brown — at the time of the killing, according to his attorney.

The younger Calhoun was questioned but wasn't charged for 46 years — not until prosecutors said, for the second time, that a dying witness had come forward to crack the case.

Calhoun could face trial April 20, 2021.

Reach Travis Dorman at travis.dorman@knoxnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @travdorman.