Joseph
Nelson allegedly killed his ex, their son, and her boyfriend as his girlfriend
watched. Thanks to a jailhouse wedding, he’s essentially silenced the only
person who can testify against him.
Pastor
Gregory Clemons has married off hundreds of couples, but he still can’t believe
he wed an accused murderer to the only eyewitness of the triple homicide.
Joseph
Nelson is accused of killing his ex-girlfriend Bianca Fletcher, their
1-year-old son JoJo, and Fletcher’s 18-year-old boyfriend Shannon Rollins. On
September 8, authorities say Nelson shot all three to death after an argument
while Shellana Davis, his girlfriend, watched. Now the two are married and thanks
to that she may not be compelled to testify against Nelson.
“I felt
like they were getting closer to God. But I did not know about the murders… I
just regret it now,” Clemons told The Daily Beast a week after learning what
the two allegedly did.
“It could
possibly be my last wedding because I don’t want to be in this kind of
situation again,” Clemons said. Ever since he discovered his blessing could
cause an unholy outcome, the pastor says he’s been repenting “in prayer.”
The
behind-bars love affair becoming an official marriage could grant a lifeline
for two accused killers.
Like any
wedding, Nelson and Fletcher set a date, December 7, and a venue: a visitation
cubicle inside the Jackson County, Missouri detention center.
“There
was glass between them,” Pastor Clemons said of the unorthodox ceremony. “We
had phones and we prayed and we talked about studying the Bible.”
Nelson
was outfitted in an orange jumpsuit and a kiss was out of the question so the
couple improvised.
“Palms
on glass,” Clemons said. “No exchange of rings. No kiss. I left them alone
after that.”
And at
the time the pastor never had any reason to question their motives, either.
“We were
there because they felt like God had brought them together and they wanted to
be joined in holy matrimony,” he said.”
And they
seemed to be smitten.
“I read
people’s faces and I feel I can see love in people’s faces. It was there at the
same time I’m looking at them, not knowing they may have committed murder,” he
said.
That’s
what prosecutors say happened on September 8 last year when Nelson and Davis
rolled up to Fletcher’s home at 9:30 p.m.
A source
close to the investigation confirmed that Nelson’s new girlfriend was embroiled
in “drama” with Fletcher who had only just begun dating Rollins for “a few weeks,”
a source and family members confirmed.
“Shellana
had an issue with the new girlfriend Bianca,” the source said. Nelson, the
police report notes, was “sick of it.”
So
Nelson and Davis barged into Fletcher’s home “unannounced” to “chill,”
according to police.
Instead,
Nelson began quarreling with his ex.
By most
of accounts (save for Nelson’s where he told cops he was “asleep for most of
the day” and denied any involvement), tensions rose to the point where Fletcher
“threw a diaper at Nelson, which struck him,” according to the police report
that quotes Nelson telling his friend, Mark Benson, what happened. The cops
heard two versions of what happened next.
One was
from Benson, 23, who said the alleged murderer confided in him about the
killings. The other was his fiancée Davis who gave her own account of the
bloodletting.
Either
the diaper-disgraced Nelson rose up, pulled out a pistol, and fatally shot
Fletcher before hunting down her boyfriend and his own son; otherwise, it was
Davis that had actually killed Nelson, and then forced her boyfriend to prove
his love by rubbing out potential eyewitnesses in Fletcher’s boyfriend and his
own boy.
Benson
told police that Nelson and Davis picked him up following the slayings and that
Davis was inconsolable, wailing as they all drove off together.
When
they arrived at Nelson’s home, the two talked on the porch. Nelson, according
to the police report, announced, “I was there and saw it, so other things had
to be done.”
Benson
says Nelson right then copped to the worst of crimes.
“I did
something bad,” he said. “I did something I don’t think I can live with… I
killed them. I killed them.”
The
diaper toss forced Nelson to go berserk.
“I lost
it,” he told Benson, according to the police report.
When
asked why Nelson shot to death Fletcher’s boyfriend and his own crying son, he
answered point blank: “Witnesses.”
Apparently,
the report adds, Nelson felt that JoJo’s crying would have drawn too much
attention.
Nelson
allegedly gave the murder weapon and a bag of shell casings to Benson, who told
authorities he got rid of them.
Benson
also said that Nelson charbroiled his and Davis’s blood-stained clothes in a
barbeque pit and that Nelson “showered numerous times and washed his hands with
bleach.”
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Shannon Rollins |
Davis’s
version mostly squares with Benson’s save for a few details. She told police
that the visit to Fletcher’s seemed civil; that the couple was sitting together
inside Fletcher’s living room; that words got heated Fletcher asked why Nelson
brought along his new flame to her home. Then things went wrong.
Nelson
ordered Fletcher to sit down and, according to Davis, she refused. Instead, she
tossed a “household item” at Nelson, which missed him.
“Nelson
then shot [Fletcher],” according to the police report. A frozen Davis winced as
she watched as Nelson “check to see if she was dead.”Davis said then she “heard
another gunshot” and turned her head away before she “then ran out of the
house.”
She
didn’t remain outside for long.
Nelson
apparently ordered her back inside to collect “as many shell casings as she
could find.”
Cops
ultimately caught up to Nelson and prosecutors hit him with a raft of murder
charges while Davis remained free. As detectives were busy trying to build a
case that she was at least culpable in the triple homicide, Davis reached out
to Pastor Clemons about getting married to the accused murderer sitting in
jail.
“Shellana
was very emphatic,” Clemons said. “She contacted me several times and and
wanted to get in there and do this.”
The
first call he remembered Davis simply asked if he could marry incarcerated
couples.
“She
called and asked ‘Do you do weddings at the Jackson County Detention Center?’
and I told her ‘I had done them. We can talk about it and meet down there. The
caseworker has to approve it and there’s plenty of time to talk.’”
The
pastor is struggling with the fallout since the news hit the couple was
hitched. Yet he insists there were others in place to put a halt the couple’s
wedding.
“I did
not research their backgrounds, the people that issue the licenses do that. It
has to go through a caseworker in the jail. It went through a string of people
before I was allowed to come into that environment and do that.”
A month
before Nelson and Davis became husband and wife, Jackson County’s prosecuting
caught wind of the pending nuptials and raced to depose Nelson before it was
too late.
“The
State has now learned that on October 21, 2015, the defendant and Ms. Davis
have filed an application with the Jackson County, Missouri Recorder of Deeds
for a marriage license,” Jean Peters Baker wrote in a motion. Otherwise,
Davis’s “testimony, in some respects, could become unavailable to the State
after she is married to the Defendant.”
So the
the prosecutor pleaded with the judge to be able to “preserver [Davis’]
testimony by deposing her on video.”
 |
| Marriage license for Joseph Nelson and Shellana Davis |
Unfortunately,
it appears the judge didn’t act in time to approve the motion.
Prosecutors
have since filed another motion for special bond conditions so that Nelson “be
ordered to have no contact” with any of the witnesses in the case, including
his wife. The fact that Nelson has “shown a willingness to contact witnesses…
has been done for the purpose of impacting testimony.”
The
prosecution faces multiple obstacles before the trial gets underway in October,
especially regarding any statement by the former Miss Davis against her new
husband, says Frank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri Law
School.
First,
she may have some criminal liability even if she didn’t kill anyone, since she
allegedly admitted helping cover up the crime, Bowman said. Therefore she can
avoid testifying simply on the basis of her Fifth Amendment to not incriminate
herself, which would be available to her even if she wasn’t married to Nelson.
The prosecution could surmount this hurdle by asking the judge to grant her
immunity from any charges in this case, Bowman added.
Second,
Missouri has a “spousal testimony privilege.” That means the new Mrs. Nelson
can refuse to testify against her husband about things “that happened during
the marriage, but also things that happened before the marriage,” Bowman said.
Like these killings.
However,
if the prosecutors can convince the judge that the marriage was a “sham,”
entered into for the purpose of creating a testimonial privilege, the privilege
could be rendered void.
“Even if
that marriage had all the bells and whistles like a marriage certificate—if it
was meant to bar her from testifying then the privilege doesn’t apply,” Bowman
said.
A
partial solution to the privilege problem may lie in the fact that Missouri law
voids the spousal privilege in cases with victims under 18, as two of the
decedents were. Bowman said using this statute might require two different
trials, one for the minor victims and one for the adult.
Finally,
if Mrs. Nelson can’t be compelled to testify against her husband, you might
think the prosecutors could use the statements she made to the police before
she married and clammed up. However, those statements may be barred by the
“Confrontation Clause” of the Constitution and rules against “hearsay.” Both
those barriers might vanish if the judge believes the defendant engineered his
“wife’s” silence by marrying her.
Her
father, Andrew Hill, doesn’t believe it was a match made in love.
“I’m
trying to get answers,” he told The Daily Beast, adding that Nelson corrupted
his daughter. “She was on a good track and then she fucked it up. She met him
and he’s a bad person and he has a bad history.
“I’m
lost right now and trying to figure out how this happened.”
Still,
getting pass the legal hurdles will be easier than getting over the three lives
lost that night.
“At the
end of the day a loved one is gone,” Rollins’ uncle Lee Washington, who says he
helped raise the promising dancer, told The Daily Beast. “No matter if this guy
and his woman goes back in the jail for the rest of their lives I don’t get any
satisfaction because Shannon’s life was taken.”
The
family has been “pitching in” to raise Rollins’s son who is now fatherless. The
fact that his nephew’s alleged killers are now married, further salts the wound
torn open by bullets.
“The
only way we get justice is if we kill that motherfucker ourselves and that
ain’t going to happen,” he said. “And if they dupe the system it really doesn’t
matter because we still lost Shannon. We still have a great kid gone that has a
child left here without a father.”
The
funeral was especially tough, his uncle said.“We
buried him on his 19th birthday.”
Washington
remembered of Rollins as a handsome heartbreaker.
“Shannon
had a great smile and very likeable and was too smart for his own good,” he
said.“Shannon had so many girls it was ridiculous. We had to change schools
because had so many girlfriends.”
The
proud father who worked night shifts at various odd jobs to support his baby
was a means to a greater ends.
“His
main goal in life was to get into showbiz,” Washington said.
Rollins
went by the moniker Akira Kenzo a.k.a. "Whiteout" in a series of
homemade, solo dance videos featuring Rollins gyrating his body to
base-thumping, heavy synthed tracks.
But for
all his talent and natural athleticism, it was a slow rise to fame. A few
months back Rollins put up a testimonial on YouTube admitting how much of a
struggle it’s been to shine as a dancer in his hometown.
“Everybody
on here y’all my family; I love y’all… This shit’s hard, especially dancing.
I’m coming out of Kansas City and there’s not that many dancers down there. I’m
proud to say I’m one of the many few… That’s all a nigga needs is one viral
video and I’m straight, man. That’s all I need. Help me out.”
The
grieving uncle who helped raise Rollins said he was very much a victim of
“being at the wrong place, wrong time.” But the real tragedy is that the
gun-toting Nelson became unhinged over a diaper toss. “We have a society that
turns out people like Joseph [Nelson],” Washington said. “He came up through
the system, he was abandoned and he was forsaken.
“Nobody
takes time to love him and teach him any empathy for others. When you grow up
in the streets it’s a jungle out there.”
