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Darlene left around 7:00 A.M. to pick up Heidi and give her a ride to work. Vernon left home around 7:10 A.M. on the way to Temple-Inland Paperboard and Packaging, Inc., in Rome, Georgia, where he and Darlene both worked in the same building and were scheduled on the same shift.
    Vernon said that he left his office around 10:00 A.M. for a doctor’s appointment and returned at noon in time to have lunch at the mill with Darlene and their friends Leesa Norton, Danny Alexander, and Lynn Willoughby. Vernon said that he returned to his office around twelve-thirty, and Darlene called him at four-thirty to let him know she was leaving work and planned to pick up Heidi, give her a ride back to her home, and then stop to get some groceries at Wal-Mart on the way.
    Vernon said that he went home from work and started the chores he had planned to get completed on that afternoon before his brother arrived for the weekend, and he said that Darlene called him to see if he needed anything from Wal-Mart while she was there. After finishing his work and taking a shower, Vernon said, he was surprised that Darlene hadn’t come home yet, and he grew concerned that Darlene didn’t answer her cell phone. He called Heidi to see exactly what time her mother had dropped her off at home. He claimed that he told Heidi he was getting worried because he couldn’t contact Darlene after repeatedly calling her, and he said that Heidi also had tried to call her mother and had no luck, either.
    Vernon stated that he told Heidi he was going to look for Darlene; then he went to Wal-Mart, didn’t find her there or anywhere else on the way back from Rome, and headed home, only to be stopped on the road, detained by the officers, and brought to the Leesburg office for questioning.
    Vernon then signed a waiver of rights, and the interrogation began in earnest.

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    After confirming that his wife’s name was Martha Darlene Roberts, Vernon answered the officers’ questions with mostly the same information he had already given in his written statement. A few additional things came to light as he recalled details, such as a white convertible that came past his house while he was working on his chores, sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 P.M. , turning around in the driveway of a house up the road, then driving back past the house, and a couple of shots he’d heard coming from the direction of the pond while he was outside the house, working on the pool. He believed, he said, that he’d possibly heard the shots after Darlene had called him for the last time, from Wal-Mart.
    “I didn’t give it a thought,” he said of the gunshots. “That area is just covered up with deer and turkey, and she wasn’t late yet, so I didn’t think anything about it.”
    Vernon also remembered seeing Williams and Sammons on the Gator.
    “I saw the two guys on the Gator, and I thought they were down there weedeating around the pond so people could fish better,” he said, adding that Darlene’s son, Benji, had talked about doing that same thing on one occasion, because the grass and weeds were very tall around parts of the pond.
    “That’s what I thought those guys were doing. I didn’t care if they fished in that pond. It’s not mine, so go ahead.”
    Vernon said that when he was stopped by the officers on his way home, “I knew there was something bad, wrong.
    “Heidi called, and I said, ‘Something’s wrong, there [are] police cars all over, the ambulance ...’
    “Heidi is going to panic,” Vernon said. “She was very nervous about her mother, when she wasn’t able to get in touch with her. I went home thinking she’d probably be there already, but I got stopped. You said she’d been injured, but what happened? Did somebody shoot her?”
    One of the officers said later that he had found it very odd that Vernon had not been more upset. He had not, at that point, been told whether or not his wife was dead, injured, or just exactly what it was that had happened to her,