LITMIR.BIZ

       RAE CARRUTH

       Happy families? Not him…

      The man with a head shaped like a baked bean rivals Darryl Henley and OJ Simpson for first place in the gridiron Hall of Shame, which is quite some boast. A real up-and-comer for the Carolina Panthers NFL team, his gravy train hit the buffers in 1999 when his 24-year-old girlfriend Cherica Adams told him she was expecting his child. Not wanting to play happy families and with hefty drugs debts to service, the thought of handing over any of his $650,000 salary in child maintenance payments was quickly dismissed as a non-starter. The solution? The little Rae of sunshine coldly arranged for a heavily pregnant Adams to be the victim of a drive-by killing in which she was shot four times in November 1999.

      He hired Van Brett Watkins to do the actual shooting, and under questioning, he soon confessed. Both Watkins and his friend Michael Kennedy, who drove the car that carried Watkins, gave identical testimony—and both of them put Carruth squarely in the frame as the mastermind of the plot. The most damning evidence of all, however, came from the mouth of the dying mother-to-be. In obvious pain, Adams told the operator who fielded her 911 call that Carruth had pulled his Ford Expedition in front of her car, forcing her to stop, before ‘somebody pulled up beside me and did this. I think he [Carruth] did it. I don’t know what to think.’

      It didn’t look good when the FBI, searching for Carruth, tracked him down in a motel parking lot, where they found him in the trunk of a Toyota surrounded by candy bar wrappers and a bottle of his own urine. He’d been there for almost twenty-four hours, curled up in the foetal position.

      In the face of strong evidence, further notes written by Adams before she died, and unflattering testimony from two ex-girlfriends, Carruth put up a flimsy defence. In a version of events contradicted by just about every other witness, he maintained that an angry Watkins shot Adams on his own because Adams had made an obscene gesture at him from her car after he had earlier rowed with Carruth because the gridiron star had backed out of a drug deal. It cut little ice. As a nation watched transfixed, it was clear to everyone that it was an embarrassingly porous yarn. Although Carruth’s lawyers managed to get him off the death penalty that would have accompanied the first-degree murder conviction sought by prosecutors, there was little doubt about his guilt, and his lack of remorse or emotion did little to endear him to judge or jury.

      Convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, of shooting into an occupied vehicle and of using a gun with intent to kill an unborn child, Carruth will be behind bars until approximately 2039. That’s if he lives that long: the numbskull has already had two spells in solitary confinement in Raleigh’s maximum security jail for his own safety after fighting with other inmates.

      His son Chancellor, however, was successfully delivered by emergency Caesarian section, but still bears the legacy of his traumatic entry to the world. Despite being a very rich child, he suffers from cerebral palsy and was unable to walk, hold a bottle or spoon until he was three years of age.