Jury finds defendant who represented himself at Tarrant County capital murder trial guilty

If he could, Rickey Edwards still would be making his case.

Beyond plodding speech and repetition, the substance of Edwards’ argument at his Tarrant County capital murder trial, at which he represented himself, was at times incoherent.

In lines of questions that seemingly made sense only to him, Edwards probed whether his call to 911 ended when he intentionally hung up the telephone or was dropped in a technology failure and explored if a friend of one of the victims had stolen flowers from a porch after the killings.

Edwards asserted that he was restricted from calling witnesses to testify.

Judge Wayne Salvant, who appeared to understand that he was not dealing with Clarence Darrow at the defense table in Criminal District Court No. 2, pressed ahead.

“Let’s just move on, Mr. Edwards,” Salvant said.

“That’s the end of it ... They’ve heard everything that they’re going to hear that’s relevant,” the judge said of the jury.

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When it appeared Edwards would not rest and close his case, the judge did it for him.

“Have a seat, Mr. Edwards,” Salvant instructed.

The deaths were a familial execution.

Edwards fired 10 rounds from a Glock pistol into his stepson, Kameion Kitchen. He shot his wife, Portia Williams-Edwards twice in the head. The defendant on May 3, 2020, took some of the shots as he stood over the victims’ bodies. Their blood specked a wall and soaked into the laminate wood floor.

In 14 minutes of deliberation, the jury on Monday rejected Edwards’ argument that the killings were justified by self-defense and found him guilty of capital murder. Salvant sentenced the defendant to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the offense’s automatic punishment when the state, as it did in the Edwards case, waives the death penalty.

Edwards chose to represent himself at the trial in which he was accused of the murder of multiple people in the same criminal transaction. He also elected to testify. Because there was no advocate to ask questions on his behalf, Edwards from the witness stand directly addressed the jury.

“I’m going to let you say whatever you have to say,” Salvant told the defendant before urging him to remain focused.

Edwards did not heed the admonishment and delivered a monologue in which he pounded his fists on the witness stand. He paused for several seconds between most sentences.

Edwards recounted the early days of the couple’s relationship after meeting as colleagues at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

He told the jury of a gondola ride in Irving during which he said Williams-Edwards cried.

“Portia stated she didn’t deserve me,” Edwards said. The anecdote drew a groan of skepticism from observers in the court gallery.

When he finally reached the killings, Edwards’ storytelling grew less crisp. The defendant was vague when describing his final encounter with his wife and stepson.

On a Sunday spent supervising furniture deliverymen, installing rods in the master bedroom closet and handling other chores of moving, Edwards also was dealing, he said, with a fastidious wife.

He dreamed of playing pool and watching television in a theater room at the couple’s newly constructed house in Grand Prairie.

Williams-Edwards, who the defendant said insisted on cleanliness, erupted when Edwards placed clothing on a bed that was among four in the house that his wife intended to make, according to Edwards’ account.

Williams-Edwards telephoned one of her two adult sons. (Prosecutors said the call came after her husband struck her in the head with an object.)

The arrival of his 28-year-old stepson, Kitchen, was a surprise to Edwards, and Kitchen struck Edwards and knocked him out, Edwards said.

When he regained consciousnesses, Edwards’ wife was lying across him and may have held a box-cutter, the defendant said. Kitchen, who may have held a flashlight, put Edwards in a chokehold, according to the defendant.

“I was begging for my life,” Edwards testified.

The defendant said he retrieved a weapon. He said he fired a warning shot. He appeared to acknowledge that he shot both victims.

“That day Portia wasn’t well, and I didn’t know that,” Edwards testified.

Prosecutors allege that earlier on the day he killed Williams-Edwards, 46, Edwards struck his wife on the forehead with an object. She telephoned her father and son to tell them of the assault. Her son drove to the new house in the 7000 block of Monet Lane.

In an exchange during cross examination, prosecutor Robert Huseman asked facetiously, “It’s her fault that she’s dead, right?”

The defendant said, “I had no reason to kill my wife.”

“But you did,“ a woman in the gallery whispered.

At the end of the court session on Friday, Salvant held Edwards’ bond insufficient and ordered him jailed until the trial resumed on Monday.

Edwards telephoned 911 about an hour after the shooting and declined to describe precisely what had happened.

Jaren Edwards, then a Grand Prairie police officer, arrived. Rickey Edwards handed his driver’s license to the officer, who is not related to the defendant, then said his wife and her son were inside, dead.

How did he know, the officer asked.

“He told me ‘I did it,’” the officer testified. Rickey Edwards wore a tank top stained with what the officer said appeared to be blood and the defendant suggested at trial was paint.

Like most pro se defendants, Edwards often floundered in his evidence presentation and seemed unfamiliar with the requirements of criminal procedure. At times his questions of witnesses did not reach an evidentiary point.

Salvant gave the defendant wide latitude, though the judge occasionally became irritated, particularly at bench conferences, on the relevance of the defendant’s questions. At one point, Edwards questioned a witness on an exhibit that he had not offered for any purpose. At another, a district attorney’s office employee was pressed into service to act as Edwards’ technology aide.

Behind Edwards in the front row of the court gallery sat standby counsel Gary Smart and Brian Eppes. The defendant declined assistance from the veteran attorneys.

When Edwards, who is 54, seemed to believe he had led a witness to notch a substantive idea in support of the defense case, he emphasized it by saying, “for the record,” and repeating the underwhelming revelation.

When handed a state exhibit to review before it was admitted, Edwards often simply said, “OK,” rather than stating he has no legal objection. Salvant then confirmed Edwards did not intend to object.

During a confounding moment that Edwards prompted, Salvant, Huseman and the defendant discussed the existence and relevance of metadata within crime scene photos.

“Everyone in this courtroom is confused about what the hell is going on right now,” Huseman said outside the presence of the jury as the trial was on the record.

In a meandering opening statement, Edwards told the jury he loved his family and listed a series of circumstances and emotions but did not connect them or explain how they may legally justify a killing.

“COVID, isolation, anxiety, depression, stress,” he said.

He noted a mental illness stigma among Black people without making clear how that phenomenon was at play in his case.

“This is a case of domestic violence, rage and control,” Huseman told the jury in his opening statement. Huseman, a deputy chief in the district attorney’s office criminal division, prosecuted the case with Assistant Criminal District Attorney Melinda Hogan.

The pistol that Huseman and Hogan alleged Edwards used to shoot the victims was found on a dining table.

Two Tarrant County deputy medical examiners testified about their autopsies and described for jurors the recovery of bullet fragments from Williams-Edwards’ brain and skull and tracking the path bullets tore through Kitchen’s body.

Hogan told the jury: “This was not self defense as the defendant claims. The evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt that he executed Kameion and Portia.”

“When his wife and stepson lay bleeding on the floor, an hour before calling 9-1-1, he went out and moved his Lexus and put up the sun screen so his seats didn’t get damaged,” Huseman told jurors.