TALLADEGA COUNTY — A jury of seven women and five men deliberated for less than 2 hours Monday before convicting Norell Montrail Swain, 30, of capital murder, following a six day trial. Swain now faces a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.He will be formally sentenced Oct. 30 by Circuit Judge Bo Hollingsworth.
Swain was accused of murdering his parents, Bobby Joe Swain, 63, and Mattie Swain, 53, as well as his 9-month-old niece, Kiana Drisdom, by shooting them each in the head with a .40 caliber handgun while they were sleeping on Aug. 16 or 17, 2002. The defense countered that someone else actually committed the crime.
The state agreed to withdraw the possibility of the death penalty in this case at the request of the Swain family.
After the verdict was read, District Attorney Steve Giddens said, “It’s bad enough to lose a loved one to a stranger, but when it’s a member of your own family that does it, I can’t imagine. There’s really no closure in a situation like this, but at least the court’s part is done now.”
Speaking on behalf of the family, Augusta Burns, Bobby Joe Swain’s niece, said, “This is just another very sad day for the Swain family. Again.”
When asked if the decision to ask the state not to seek the death penalty was a difficult one, Arthur Drisdom, Kiana’s surviving grandfather, said, “No. No, it was not difficult at all.”
After the guilty verdict was read, Swain, through attorneys Jeff Salyer and John Aaron, decided to waive the sentencing portion of the trial, but requested a presentence investigation prior to formal sentencing.
Swain had told a cousin he planned to kill his parents about a week before the shootings, according to the cousin’s testimony. “I’m tired of being treated like an outcast,” the cousin said Swain told him. “I’m going to kill them. Lots of people don’t think I will, but I’m going to show them.”
On Aug. 16, 2002, a Friday, Bobby Swain was paid $600 cash for some work he had done with his brother, E.J. Swain, at a house in the Knoxville community. The defendant had recently undergone foot surgery, and was living at home. He was unemployed, and although he owned a car, it was not operable at the time of the shooting. Swain admitted he had a history of drug use, and he had taken a .40 caliber handgun that was normally kept in the glove compartment of his parents’ Ford Explorer the week before the murders. He claimed to have replaced the gun, but according to the state’s theory, put forward in the first closing by Assistant District Attorney Christina Kilgore, he still had it the night of the shootings.
According to testimony, on Aug. 16, Swain drove into Talladega with a neighbor, and stopped to visit his cousin at his job. When Swain asked the cousin to buy him some transmission fluid for his car, the cousin said he would have to wait until the following day, when he could cash his check.
“There is no tomorrow,” the cousin said Swain told him.
Swain and the neighbor then met a female acquaintance, and made arrangements for her to braid their hair the next day. While giving the acquaintance a ride to Curry Court, Swain first expressed interest in meeting a woman, then asked if she knew anyone who could sell him crack cocaine. She said she introduced him to a second woman who might be able to sell him crack.
The neighbor then drove Swain home shortly after 11 p.m., just ahead of the midnight curfew his parents had imposed on him.
In the master bedroom of the house on Zellwood Circle in Alpine where the Swains lived, seven shots from a .40 caliber handgun similar to the one that was normally kept in the truck were fired into the three victims. Four struck Bobby Joe Swain in the head, and two hit his wife, also in the head. The final shot destroyed the left side of the baby’s head.
Kilgore said Swain then used the gun to break out the window of the Explorer, cutting his hand afterward. He then smashed a glass storm door in front of the house’s front door, leaving a cast-off blood spatter pattern on the door and door jamb.
He then took a Jeep Wrangler, parked under the carport next to the Explorer, leaving blood on the steering wheel.
One of the key pieces of evidence for the state was the fact that there was glass from the Explorer window under the tires of the Wrangler, indicating it had been moved after the window glass was broken. Swain denied driving the vehicle, but could not explain why the glass was under the tires or why two witnesses saw condensation from the air conditioner dripping into a puddle at the front of the vehicle.
Pieces of glass from the door and the Explorer window were found inside a basketball shoe that Swain, by his own admission, had not worn onto the front porch. A small quantity of crack cocaine was found in the Jeep the next morning, and cocaine residue was found on a pair of tweezers in Swain’s room. Another piece of window glass was found under several of Swain’s papers laid out on his bed.
Since the gun was never recovered, the defense argued that someone else could easily have taken the gun. But since Swain’s younger brother spoke with his mother on the telephone just before 11 p.m. and Swain arrived home between 11:15 and 11:45 p.m., Giddens pointed out that the window of opportunity for an outside killer was ridiculously narrow. In 15 to 45 minutes, the killer would have had to break the window of the Explorer, steal the gun, break down the front door, shoot all three victims, take the Jeep into town, buy crack, drive back to Alpine, put the Jeep back, take the keys back inside, and then lock the front door behind them on their way out, Giddens said.
Swain is the third multiple homicide case to go to trial in Talladega County in the past 13 months. Ricky Charles Goodwin was convicted of killing his mother, father and brother in April 2002, and was convicted last August.
Wakillii Brown was convicted of beating his common-law wife and her mother to death with a hammer in 2002 earlier this year.
Goodwin is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole. Brown is on death row.
