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“She knew I wanted a family …so it turned into, you know, the kid, the car, the white picket fence and all that.”
The American Dream, right. … the white picket fence and all that? Maybe it started out that way in Paul Estes’ imagination, but it turned into an American Nightmare.
“We had been smoking crack all night, run through $200 or $300, and we were tapped out … She said we need to get some money … and then she just started talking about killing her mom pretty much, and she kept it up for probably a good hour and then finally, you know, she talked me into doing it. I went upstairs and she went with me …”
It was about 3 a.m. the day of May 19, 2009. Debora Brooks was sleeping in her bed when Estes put a pillow over her face. There was a struggle. Kicking and clawing. The pair ended up on the bedroom floor. Debora Brooks finally lost consciousness next to the dresser.
“I asked Meagan to check her to make sure she was dead because my heart was racing so hard I couldn’t tell. Then she brought up that Dollar Store bag, that yellow Dollar Store bag, and put it over her mother’s head.”
The above italicized paragraphs are taken from the confession recorded by retired Harrodsburg Detective Garry Bradshaw on Aug. 10, 2009. Estes again admitted his role in Brooks’ murder and stood by the account he gave Bradshaw during a recent interview at the Boyle County Detention Center where he has been incarcerated for 31⁄2 years while awaiting trial.
“I still feel bad about it, I really do, but there is nothing I can do to change it now,” Estes said during the interview, which he initiated.
What Estes hopes to change is the notion put forth by Commonwealth’s Attorney Richie Bottoms that Estes was the main perpetrator of Brooks’ death, that he was the one who snuffed the life out of her that night, and that he is the one who deserves to take the brunt of the punishment for the crime.
Meagan Brooks, Estes’ former girlfriend and Debora Brooks’ daughter, is at least equally culpable, if not more so, Estes said, and he doesn’t understand why Bottoms doesn’t see it that way.
“It ain’t exactly fair, and it pisses me off,” Estes said. “I watched Meagan do it. I watched her put the bag over her mother’s head.”
While Estes has stewed over his perceived injustice of the justice system as he waits for his day in court, Meagan Brooks already has had hers. She cut a deal with Bottoms in November 2011 in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter, hindering prosecution and tampering with evidence in exchange for a 17-year prison sentence.
Under the deal, the manslaughter charge was classified as a non-violent offense, meaning Meagan Brooks would be eligible for parole after serving 20 percent of her sentence, or about three years. She has nearly served that time already and is soon due for her first hearing before the parole board. The plea bargain had the blessing of Debora Brooks’ family.
Bottoms offered Estes a deal, too: plead guilty to murder and get a life sentence with no hope of parole for 25 years. Estes has repeatedly rejected the offer, contending the disparity between the two sentences is grossly unfair.
“I deserve, at most, what she got,” he said. “I don’t know why they turned on me and made me the fall guy for this. I’m not a monster, and that’s what they’re trying to make me look like.”
Mercer Circuit Judge Darren Peckler recently issued a gag order in Estes’ case — which could be set for trial during a hearing next month — preventing Bottoms and public defender Susanne McCollough, who represents Estes, from commenting on remarks made by Estes during the jailhouse interview.
Prior to the issuance of the gag order, Bottoms said evidence points to Estes as the only participant in the actual smothering of Debora Brooks.
“We have zero evidence that she was involved in the physical act,” Bottoms said in April, referring to Meagan Brooks.
Any contentions, true or not, that Meagan Brooks initiated the plan and egged Estes on would be irrelevant in the case against Estes because Brooks would not be on trial, the prosecutor said previously. At trial, Bottoms has said he will ask the jury to recommend the maximum sentence for Estes — life in prison with no hope of parole. Estes’ plan is to admit his guilt and try to convince jurors that in order for justice to be meted out fairly in this case they should recommend a sentence on par with what Meagan Brooks received. McCullough previously described this strategy as “a slow guilty plea.”
“I don’t know if it will work or not, but I really don’t have much to lose,” he said.
It’s not yet known what evidence or testimony would be allowed at trial, or if Estes will take the stand in his own defense. But he would like the jury to hear the whole story of how his relationship with Meagan Brooks at first filled him with hope, was soured by drugs and descended into murder in a span of nine months.
Estes, 37, said he was a divorced, unemployed construction worker living with his mother in Lancaster when he first met Brooks in fall 2008. She was 21 then, a recently divorced mother of a young daughter who lived with her mother at the Belmont Apartments in Harrodsburg. She worked in the electronics department at Walmart in Harrodsburg, which is where they met, he said.
In short order, they became engaged, and visions of a life together as a family began dancing in Estes’ head, with Brooks’ daughter standing in for Estes’ own daughter, of whom he had lost custody in his own divorce.
But instead of working to make those dreams come true, the couple spent their time and money getting high on crack cocaine, Estes said. It was Brooks who led them down that path, he said.
“I had never been arrested before meeting Meagan. I only smoked pot,” he said. “She was smoking crack and said if I didn’t do it with her, she would find somebody who would.”
Estes said he quickly became hooked and dependent on Brooks to find the drugs. She would steal money from her mother or use her car as collateral for drug buys. It got to the point where Debora Brooks kept her money pinned inside her shirt to keep it safe, Estes said.
Estes said Debora Brooks was 44 and worked two jobs. When she wasn’t working, she was often left to care for her granddaughter while her daughter and Estes chased the high life. Debora Brooks was seeking to gain custody of the child, and a court hearing was scheduled for the week after her death.
Estes said the couple were partying especially hard on the day leading up to the killing. Though he told Bradshaw during his confession that they spent $200 or $300 on drugs that day, he said during the jail interview it was actually more than $1,000.
Both had been using crack and methamphetamine all that day, Estes said, and he also was taking Xanax, Klonopin and other pills. The clock had moved past midnight into the wee hours of May 19 when the drugs and money were spent and Brooks first introduced the idea of killing her mother as a solution to their problems, Estes said. It had never been mentioned before that night, he said.
In making her pitch, Estes said Brooks mentioned the possibility of losing custody of her daughter as motivation. She also said her mother had a life insurance policy worth $500,000 that they could use to make their white picket fence fantasies into reality, he said. Brooks never promised to pay Estes any part of the insurance money, just convinced him they would share it to finance their dreams, he said.
“Nah, she wasn’t paying me to do it. It was just we were supposed to be together and start our family,” he said.
Those sweet nothings from Brooks, combined with a mind fried by drugs, finally enticed Estes to creep up those steps to Debora Brooks’ bedroom, he said. When he faltered, his girlfriend was there to urge him to “do it, do it, do it,” he said. So he did. And she did. And he left. And she called 911 to report her mother had committed suicide.
Authorities believed that story for a while, testament to Brooks’ skills as an actress, Estes said, able to cry on cue for investigators and television news crews.
Though a preliminary autopsy turned up no suggestion of foul play, embalmers at a local funeral home noticed suspicious marks around Debora Brooks’ neck as they were preparing her for her funeral. Another autopsy was conducted and determined that she had been suffocated by somebody’s hands other than her own.
As police were closing in on Meagan Brooks as a suspect, Estes said she texted him with instructions: He was supposed to commit suicide after writing a letter stating he had acted alone in smothering Debora Brooks to death.
That text would provide proof that Meagan Brooks was an equal partner in crime, Estes said, but when he asked Bradshaw if he could retrieve it from his cell phone, the detective told him his phone was too small and did not have enough memory to keep it after it had been deleted.
His childhood friend, Frankie Peace, saw the text, Estes said. Peace was scheduled to testify at Estes’ trial last April but suffered a heart attack — leading to the trial’s postponement — and later died. Bottoms has said he has DNA and fingerprint evidence that implicates Estes in the murder. Estes said his prints were the only identifiable ones lifted from the yellow Dollar Store bag, which he explained by saying he carried the bag from the store after buying two-liter sodas.
Estes also said he’s heard from various other inmates at the Boyle jail who were there during Meagan Brooks’ time there, before she was sent to state prison after her guilty plea. “She told them I didn’t get it done, that I was a (expletive deleted), so she had to get the bag and finish the job,” Estes said. “Meagan told them I was wrapped around her finger and would do anything she wanted.
“She used me as a tool.”