Besides kidnapping and killing, Fred Dalton Brooks' trick has always been getting away. He escaped jails and prisons in Cobb, Gwinnett and Walker counties. He ducked Mississippi cops by picking the lock on his handcuffs and leg irons with a paper clip.
This week, DeKalb County prosecutors are trying to reverse one of Brooks' greatest escapes of all. He's being retried on a 1976 Tucker murder after the Georgia Supreme Court tossed the conviction earlier this year.
Opening statements began Tuesday.
Now 67, Brooks is accused of the brutal killing of James Earl Carter, a 39-year-old Hormel meat packing plant guard. Police found Carter at the plant his hands tied and seven bullet wounds in his back one day in March 1976.
Authorities believe Brooks was one of two men who killed Carter while trying to steal money from vending machines at the plant.
Brooks confessed to the crime in 2012 in hopes that authorities would agree to move him from a maximum security unit in Jackson. Serving life for kidnapping and robbery, he'd been moved to the secure unit after an escape.
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The supreme court concluded his 2014 conviction in the DeKalb murder was invalid because the court allowed information about when he killed a state trooper in Mississippi. He and an accomplice killed Danny Nash in Franklin County, Mississippi, in 1983.
Information about that case could've prejudiced the jury, the supreme court ruled.
By confessing to Carter's murder, Brooks hoped he could be moved back to Mississippi’s Parchman Farm, from which he had escaped decades ago. He claimed at trial that he falsely confessed.
He's remained in prison down in Jackson since his conviction in the DeKalb case.
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