Shortly after convicting Michael Ledford in the 2006 beating death of Silver Comet Trail cyclist Jennifer Ewing, a Paulding County jury Monday set out to decide whether the killer will live or die.
A string of women, one of them Ledford's sister, told of scary encounters with the killer after being called by prosecutors seeking a death sentence.
Sherry Byess, Ledford's younger sister by a year, said she brought a criminal trespass charge against her brother after she caught him trying to open her 14-year-old stepdaughter's bedroom window in July 2006. It was the same month Jennifer Ewing, a 53-year-old wife and mother, was killed.
Byess testified she was supervising Ledford at the time after he'd completed a 10-year prison sentence for a 1991 rape.
"I thought that they were going to lock him up," Byess said. "Mike was spiraling out of control, drinking."
Each woman called Monday testified Ledford appeared to have been drinking when they encountered him, supporting his lawyers' contention that he was an alcoholic and only acted out when he was drunk.
Byess called Ledford's probation officer when she heard of Ewing's death because she felt her brother, now 46, may be involved.
Trying to portray the killer's sexual perversions, Chastity Rogers, daughter of Ledford's former girlfriend, said she caught him using her underwear and her picture to sexually stimulate himself. She said he was drinking beer at the time, May 2006.
Ledford lived with Rogers' mother on Snooky Drive in Paulding, a road that ran just a few yards from where Ewing's battered and nude body was found 70 feet of the bike trail on a mound of kudzu.
Another witness, Laura McAlister, testified Ledford came into her kitchen in Centerville, Tenn., on April 24, 2002, and threatened to harm her children if she screamed as he pressed her against a wall. She bit him on the chest to get away.
At the time, Ledford was living with his brother, Mark, whose house was next door to McAlister's. She said she smelled alcohol on Michael Ledford's breath.
Mark Ledford testified his brother was always "clumsy with women. Creeped them out," he recalled. "In my opinion, he definitely has a problem when it comes to his interaction with females. He just can't get it right."
Earlier Monday, the jury of 10 men and two women convicted Michael Ledford of three murder charges - two of them connected to two other felonies and one of them a malice murder charge that allows for a death sentence. He also was convicted of three counts of aggravated battery, two counts of kidnapping and one count each of aggravated sodomy and aggravated assault.
After the four and a half-day trial, it took jurors less than 90 minutes to convict him of all counts.
In this second trial, Ledford faces death by lethal injection, life without parole or life with the possibility of parole for Ewing's murder.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys said will reach into Ledford's past for the death penalty trial, but each would portray a very different defendant.
Prosecutors are trying to show him as a sexual predator, while his lawyers say he was mentally damaged by decades of alcoholism, a brain injury when he was 9 and sexual abuse as a child.
Ledford ambushed Ewing as she finished her 32nd mile on her routine 50-mile bike ride, a trip she took five times a week. He beat and stomped Ewing after she bit him when he tried to force her to perform oral sex on him.
The medical examiner testified she took dozens of punches and stomps, too many to count.
The next morning, searchers found Ewing, and deeper into the woods they found several other items - a glove, her biking helmet and shorts and a water bottle, scattered in the brush.
Her nose and larynx were crushed. Many bruises melded into others. Nine ribs were broken and her chest was crushed, causing her to suffocate. It took 20 to 30 minutes for her to die.
Lane, the Paulding prosecutor, described her death as " a violent, violent way to die."
About the Author
