Working-class Courtland, Mississippi, population 500, is not a town with deep divisions that typically hoards its secrets.
“We don’t have a lot of haves and have-nots here,” Rupert Howell, then the managing editor of rural Panola County’s family-owned newspaper,The Panolian, told PEOPLE in 2016. “Everyone’s in the same boat.”
But 14 months after a petite blonde former high school cheerleader was intentionally set on fire on the night of Dec. 6, 2014, and died within hours from her horrific injuries, thestubborn mystery that had everyone talkingstill had no answers.
Who killedJessica Chambers?
Acriminal indictmentannounced on Feb. 23, 2016, appeared to crack the case, according to law enforcement, and offered a theory that would not be fully aired untila trial last fall.
Chambers Family
“I think she was making friends with the wrong people, with drug dealers,” her ex-boyfriend Bryan Rudd told PEOPLE in December 2015, a year into the homicide investigation.
Still, he added, “She did nothing that was bad to get herself burnt alive.”
Chambers’ grandmother Willie Berdain recalled her as a beaming pixie atop her high school cheerleading squad’s pyramid at football games. “When she was cheering, she knew she looked good,” Berdaintold PEOPLE for a 2016 cover story. “And when they threw her up, she was so light you just about had enough time to go get you a hot dog before she’d come back down.”
The blaze that engulfed her was so hot, it turned her black Kia Rio white, incinerated her clothes and blinded her.
Her father, Ben Chambers, said Jessica and her vehicle were burning for at least 30 minutes before the fire department reached them. “They told us she was like the waking dead,” her mother, Lisa Chambers, told PEOPLE in 2016.
“This is beyond murder,” Jessica’s father said then. “This is a revengeful, hateful killing.”
District Attorney John Champion agreed, telling PEOPLE that the attack was “very, very personal. Someone meant to cause her great pain.”
AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
In the aftermath police questioned not only Jessica’s former boyfriends but also convicted drug dealers who might have had a connection to her. Jessica herself had expressed concerns involving her friends to her father, who worked as a mechanic for the county sheriff’s office.
“The last six weeks before she died, she told me 10 or 15 times, ‘Everybody thinks I’m snitching because you work for the police,’ ” her father told PEOPLE.
Police also had another tantalizing clue: Several first-responders reported hearing Jessica utter a namethat sounded like “Eric” or “Derek,”possiblysteering them toward her attacker.
Yet the apparent disconnect over the name loomed large after Tellis was charged with Jessica’s murder and went to trial last October. If Jessica had indeed named her assailant — as Tellis’ defense attorney, Darla Palmer, argued in court that Jessica had done — then Tellis could not have been involved, since no one knew Tellis as “Eric” or “Derek.”
While prosecutors argued that Tellis strangled Jessica after they had sex and then started the fire believing she was already dead, jurors failed to reach a verdict on his guilt or innocence. The judge in the case declared a mistrial, opening the door for prosecutors to try Tellis a second time on the murder charge.
That trial is set to begin Sept. 24 in a courtroom in Batesville, where the first trial unfolded and with Circuit Judge Gerald Chatham once again presiding.
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When authorities accused Tellis of Jessica’s murder in 2016, they discovered him already in jail — charged with the unlawful use of a credit card belonging to a college student who was stabbed to death in Louisiana in August 2015. He later was charged with murdering that student, 34-year-oldMeing-Chen Hsiao.
Though Tellis admitted using Hsiao’s credit card, he has pleaded not guilty to her slaying. That trial is on hold until his alleged role in Jessica’s murder is resolved.
Tellis, now 29, is serving a five-year sentence in a Mississippi state prison after an unrelated conviction for burglarizing an unoccupied dwelling, according to jail records.
If convicted of Jessica’s murder, he faces life in prison without parole. He continues to maintain his innocence.
source: people.com
