What She Buried | 5. All the Kwanetas

A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people.

“It's like they have a stuff you want to hear about on TV.”

Fifteen murders in the last five years. Some criminals I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa, and from CBC's uncover and the fifth estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek, and what's behind it all.

But I'm not saying another word, leave me alone. The Mile Zero murders. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to every episode of what she buried, add free right now when you subscribe to the binge.

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The binge feed your true crime obsession. The binge. Campside media. After the Eric of Florida's Fiasco, it was undeniable.

“Even among people charged with heavy crimes,”

a difficult demographic to begin with, Queneta was a challenging client. She was a defendant in a murder trial, who, all out on bond, seems to have staged any elaborate ruse

to coerce a 19-year-old single mother into giving police a false confession. It would be a lot for any attorney to deal with. The day after Eric of false confession, Queneta's lawyer quit.

He told me, "I do the slicing and icing. When the defendant starts to slice in dice, I gotta go." The court appointed Queneta new representation.

Robbie McClung and Richard Franklin. They were professional partners. But when I met them, they had that look that married couple's get after spending decades together.

Kind of matching. The Richard is balding with gray hair and tortoise shell glasses, and Robbie is blonde with bright lipstick heels. They'd worked countless murders,

manslotters, aggravated assaults, aggravated robberies, and yet as always, Queneta stood out. Do you think Queneta was hard?

It was a stretch for me because there were so many different sides of her that she tried to play, and it was just very difficult.

Because I never knew which Queneta was coming out that day.

Who were the different Quenetas? There's the Queneta that was the rape survivor. There was the Queneta that was the abuse woman. There was the Queneta that was trying to save her husband from being sent off to some foreign land.

We're fighting, was it hurting? I mean, do you pick the day?

“She's got a different story as to why her life is the way it is.”

All the Quenetas. It certainly felt to me like Robby wasn't too fond of any of them. But she and Richard would nonetheless mount Esella's defense for their problematic client. We were blaming this murder on her boyfriend, right?

Were you? Well, that's what I'm asking. I thought we were. Yeah, they were. It had been a while.

She maintained that she was innocent so that he did it. And that he was the brains behind the whole thing. And he was forcing her to do it. She had to do what he said.

Okay. So that's what we were going with. He, as in Deandre, Queneta's boyfriend, he did it. This seemed to be the best approach

as far as Richard and Robby could see. Because there was tons of evidence that Queneta had orchestrated a financial fraud to steal Michael Giles money. And that Queneta had set up Erica Flores. But when it came to proving that Queneta had actually pulled the trigger,

that was where things got murky. And if the trial came down to why Queneta might have pulled the trigger, they were going to get murky or still. From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is what she buried.

I'm Justin Mandarin. Episode 5. All the Queneta's. There's no direct evidence she had done the crime. No one saw her do it.

She didn't admit to do it.

She actually said she never did it.

Josh Haley was the lead prosecutor in Queneta's case.

that would expose a racist DA with a scar on his head? That's Josh.

“There's nothing to suggest that he's ever been part of any racist conspiracy,”

but he does have a scar on his head, which is an unusually shiny head. When I met Josh Haley at his office, now he's in private practice, a defense attorney. He had his feet up on his desk in this room stuffed with files.

He back in me and he'd done a lot of press about this case,

and he was always open to talking about Queneta.

And when he did this big juicy grin spread across his face, what Josh lacked in direct evidence of the crime he made up for in circumstance evidence. The concrete slap, the money trail, Erica Flores.

And Josh's favorite part of all, when it is search histories. We had our computers and our cell phones. How to kill someone without leaving a mess? How to clean blood off a couch?

One way tickets out of Dallas or on that time, just the craziest searches. Josh Haley put the highlights. Things that could help him best make his case. In his prosecutors notes.

They read. Defendant looks up images of the brain on victims computer. Defendant searches the value of victims' house. Defendant searches blood stain removal hints at do-it-yourself.com. Defendant searches,

how do I get blood out of furniture on Ask.com? It was going to be challenging for Richard and Robby to explain all of that away at trial. Josh knew he had the advantage. And it was clear that he really wanted Queneta locked up.

This one was personal.

I always did a find-up dad.

There's like five people to look at, and she's one. That's a nature of our business when I was a BA at that level. Where are the other four? Death penalty guys. You know, serial killer.

Racist killer had one. They didn't seek death, but he killed two people. And it was just evil. Just bad people. You put her up with them.

Yes. She probably works because she's got half a brain. To be honest, I mean, there are certain people that deserve to be rotting and hell from what I... called prison.

And she is one of them for what she did to that guy. So I wondered, when Josh was dealing with Queneta,

“what was it about her that made her especially terrifying?”

Had he felt it in person when he interacted with her? When she was first in jail, did you meet her? Well, I can't talk to her without her lawyer present. I'm not allowed to. When she was in jail, and for the bond hearing, I saw her there.

Yes. But I can't talk to her until I was a student. I don't know if I've ever had a conversation with her. Oh.

Josh had never actually spoken to Queneta.

He just formed this idea of her. And the idea. It didn't just come from the crime he was charging her with. Josh loves to tell us. Yeah.

He tells her what. He tells her what. He tells her what. Right to stop us in the hallway and tell us all sorts of terrible things about our client. Why?

As Josh? That's Josh. He likes to talk. He does. He likes to talk.

So he'll tell us stuff. He'll tell us stuff. And show us stuff. And there was some gross stuff that he found from her to various people out there that he showed us it. What kind of gross stuff?

I don't think we're going to. What? She was sitting in a picture, so out of her private parts. Oh, there we go. Okay.

And Josh had headed on the big screen in his office. It looked what. It's not good. But by the same token, it was not going to be invisible in evidence either. The pictures had been found by the police when they searched Queneta's devices.

And Josh had to turn them over to Richard and Robbie as part of Discovery.

“But still, what was the purpose of displaying them on the big screen?”

That he showed us to say, look, here's what you're dealing with. Like, it sort of strikes me as, maybe a little unusual. And maybe it's not for a prosecutor to find, say, personal photos of somebody as vagina. And then have it on his screen. No.

No. No. No. He went and show it to the general public. No.

It was stuff that it was, it was information that they had acquired by Sapina. You know, they sapina all this stuff, all the stuff that you get. It's jarring to envision two white men dressed in their suits and ties. One charged blocking Queneta up the other, defending her.

But just in terms of like his curiosity about it, was that how to do with anything?

“Well, we have the same information he does, okay?”

And we could have gone through there. We could have gone through our copy of it and found the same thing. We just hadn't gotten that far yet. Well, it kind of explained a little bit of the oddity of her relationship with men. He does it to get his idea of what he's dealing with and what he wants to do with her.

We never came to any kind of agreement at all prior to trial on what we could do with her.

The reality here is that there's research that shows that when a woman's sexuality is evoked, people perceive her to be lacking mental capacity and moral status. The legal system itself is based on an idea that most of us hold even unconsciously. That, in the words of the old time jurists, chastity equals veracity.

That a woman's sexuality is inverse to her truthfulness. Innocence and guilt are all intertwined for women here. For black women, research shows that this is compounded. They are disproportionately incarcerated, often denied the right to self-defense, and hyper-sexualized from girlhood.

It seems unlikely that Quinnetta knew the full academic backdrop back then.

She probably also didn't know that various people were inspecting and chuckling about and pathologizing intimate photos of her as they sifted through all of the discovery documents. But even if she had, by the time Quinnetta's trial rolled around in October 2009, it was pretty obvious to everyone concerned that she was doomed, even the judge.

“Do you remember how quickly you knew that she was guilty?”

Well, as a judge, you're not supposed to free judge somebody and make them have to terminate until you've heard everything. But day one. The honorable Andy Chatham. Most judges want to speak to the press.

They however, he's a media whore. I love this stuff.

My wife will tell you, I've never met her microphone, I didn't like.

Maybe you missed a career. No, I got a face for radio and voice for newspapers. And when Andy Chatham was face-to-face with Quinnetta during pre-trial hearings, he saw, well, the same person Josh Healy did. Confident, adamant she was not guilty of this.

“This is what she does. She's a con artist.”

She is able to convince people to do things that they would not ordinarily do. The Andy Chatham, it was simple. She's the cement lady and she will always be the cement lady. There's no other apt description that I can think of, that's better. Quinnetta was up against a system that, from the start, viewed her case as a maid for TV spectacle.

Here was this master manipulator of men, a harlot who took scandalous photos and victimized an upstanding American veteran. Everyone seemed to agree that Quinnetta was guilty as hell. She even had a tablet worthy nickname bestowed on her by the judge. That concept of Quinnetta is the cement lady. It cast a poll over the proceedings and it made her extra frantic.

But the thing that doomed Quinnetta really wasn't anything the judge or the lawyer said or did. It was the deandry showed up. So we took her in the back and we're like, okay, he is going to talk. He is going to tell the story. They're going to take you based on his story and everything else. What do you want us to do?

That's when she told us to go ask and see if they would do something less. Quinnetta knew what she was up against. If convicted, she faced life without the possibility of parole. So she agreed to a plea. 50 years in prison.

To accept this brief call, press one to refuse this. Thank you for introducing. Secure us. You may start the conversation now. Hi.

Oh my god. Hi. I'm so involved in this. I think he's attracted to me. Okay.

It had been about a week since our interview across the glass. I was back in New York.

A checkup.

“She'd been having trouble reaching me on the phone.”

So she was a little frazzled at first. But pretty soon, she relaxed.

And now she seemed almost eager to go where we'd never really gone before.

She wanted to walk me through exactly what had happened in those moments before and after Michael Giles died. I already knew about the time surrounding the killing in late June, early July, 2006. Quinnetta's flight to Texas, the days of spaghetti warehouse, of half price books, of sex, and arguing. It's hot.

They're both out of sorts. They have it in for each other. So much history. So much resentment. Sometime earlier, they'd been arguing long distance.

“And Michael had called the nursing home where Quinnetta worked.”

Lobbing accusations that Quinnetta had acted improperly, making her look bad. Quinnetta was afraid she'd lose her job, and she denied the allegations. They wrote heated emails back and forth. Quinnetta wrote, "I could have got you in a lot of trouble in England, but I didn't." Michael wrote, "You love to bring up the old and talk trash to me."

Quinnetta wrote, "You have ruined my life, my career. I wonder if I go in today if I even have this bullshit job, or if you called and got me fired from that." Michael wrote, "I was into you, but you love to fight, love to control. Take some responsibility." Now she was back in town, looking for some funds, doing their quid pro quo.

So I don't know the timeline, because maybe you know the timeline. But I'm like, "Okay, you want me to tell you today he died. I tell you today he died. Yes, I do. Please.

No. He died. He died on the floor for July that night." In Quinnetta's telling, the series of events that leads to the killing begins a few hours after Michael Giles' mom has gotten the call that he's not coming to the family barbecue.

Bickering has turned into full-blown arguing. It's getting really heated. Quinnetta and Michael had arguments before.

He's never been the sweetest guy with her, but he wasn't violent.

Until she says, "He was." And I just remember, he was on top. And that's when I started, he was in my ear, talking shit. He was on top of me, he was mad. I remember he was mad.

He was willing to be just talking shit. He didn't make it himself matter. What happened in that room was never recorded or documented. Michael Giles can't respond to accusations. And Quinnetta only has, well, her word.

But then again, violence between people in a romantic relationship

that almost always happens behind closed doors, often when tensions run high.

Often, when a man feels he's losing someone or something. And it doesn't just happen to sweet, submissive women. It also happens to women who lie and who scam, who do drugs and do crimes, imperfect victims, who nobody will ever fully believe.

“And when it came to Michael Giles, the fact is that Quinnetta never accused him of harming her,”

until just the once on the night of his death. "I didn't know he had it. I didn't even know where he pulled it from. He pulled the gun. He pulled the gun in me."

Put the gun in me. This isn't the first time Quinnetta has told me this. In August 2020, after we'd been corresponding for over a year, she gave me a similar account. Written down, disjointed, but with the same elements.

She wrote, "The nine millimeter came out. His gun in me." Threats, crying, choking. Quinnetta said that she had a method for when a man was like this. Did Michael Giles sexually and physically assault Quinnetta during this moment?

What I do know is that Quinnetta had survived abuse before,

and so she'd honed certain techniques to subdue an angry man. "I remember calm him down.

“I remember talking him down, but just think that's what I do."”

That's what I do. "All down, baby. We won't get through this. I'm comfortable with seeing that script. The whole, you know, I shouldn't have been doing this.

I know I know it's not going to, I know I push you to do this. I know I don't know why I'm making so bad with being in this. You know, I know how to do this." Once Quinnetta had neutralized the most immediate threat, she had a single goal in mind.

"I remember just thinking, "I'll keep the gun." "But how do you disarm a military man? One who is not happy with you?" "We've been finished. We're in shake-in.

And I remember making him a bowl of ice cream. But now ice cream. He asked me, "Did you pass him his vinegar or something? You're clear to somebody's back that he took a pass a minute." He seemed hard to get him from whatever state he was in

that he had a gun like that into a relax and a wild. Michael is still upset and Quinnetta is still reassuring him. Now, in her telling, she coaxes him to lie down on the couch. She straddles him.

Biggins to massage his back. The whole time, she's been tracking the gun.

“Now, with Michael just lying there, she reaches for him.”

"But what happens that you get it? And then what you do is shoot him. Like what happens there? He didn't even know I had grabbed it. It's made it.

And I think when he really has it, I remember him kissing. And remember him kissing. She lifts the gun. Presses it to the back of his head.

And pulls the trigger. Shooting someone in the head. There does seem to be an element to rage to that. A lot. No?

No, I think it was just more subtle. I grabbed it and I shot it because I didn't want... I don't know what I was thinking. I knew that I wasn't thinking like, "Oh, I'm going to shoot him in the head.

I don't remember thinking that." It was like a reflex. But why? In that moment, I kill him. What about a less permanent solution?

Get the gun and just back out of the house. That's what I should have do. That's what I should have did.

“You know how you have argument with someone.”

You don't say to things you're supposed to say to him. Like when you're in a shower, you think, "Oh, this is what I should have said. I have one of them."

I was never going to call the police.

Because I'm hiding something down here. But I should have held it on him. I just... It didn't work like that. It didn't happen like that.

It's easy to come up with better decisions when your years and miles away was sending to how a situation unfolded. But people in prison for murder. It goes without saying.

They made some very big mistakes. And Quinet is conceding to this. Should have done it differently. Shouldn't have even been there. But once it happened,

there was no turning back. Quinet a Harris shot Michael Giles. One time in the head. And then she took off. Did you know that he was good?

That would be good. I didn't check. I ran. If you ran, did you take any action? Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

I have my phone. And I have my purse. Of course. I know that. But I don't know if I...

I don't remember grabbing it. But I had to have it to get in the hotel. You didn't run straight up. You got your stuff in your room. I must have.

Because my stuff wasn't in the car. So I must have grabbed it. Or, you know, grabbed it. Running out. I think, and I was driving.

It was just like... Yeah, I had to go here to see it. But just like... Like the way it happens, it's not...

I put the emotions and stuff. It's not linear. It's just... I had to do it to my father's gear. And I remember running.

And all that driving. And the more I drove back on foot, I didn't feel no better.

Finally, she checks into a hotel.

Just off the interstate. Finally, she checks into a hotel. Just off the interstate. I left the light front. I was supposed to go to the hotel.

I was scared to turn the light up. I wanted to take a shower. I was scared to get a shower. I just was pale. I don't know what...

I was... I was... I was just... I... Here.

Afterwards. I was... I don't understand. I was really scared. Something is happening in Dawson Creek.

A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people.

Fifteen murders in the last five years.

Some criminals...

“I put them into the category of supervillains.”

I'm Timothy Sawa. And from CBC's uncover and the fifth estate. An investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek. And what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word.

Leave me alone. The miles here are murders. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. What Quinnetta told me? It's plausible.

It lines up more or less with the stained couch.

With the bullet to the brain.

Even with the approximate timing that Michael Giles family remembered. That last call to his mother on July 4th. The way Quinnetta talked, flat, about a sexual assault, about Michael Giles actions. That was, in my experience interviewing people who've gone through similar things. Normal enough.

Some people crumble. Some people are removed. I'd heard of driving back and forth after killing someone. Running, scared to crappy hotels, crappy motels. And most people didn't call the cops.

They were not from communities typically that had good relationships with law enforcement. Some were already involved in other illegal activities. And also, you panic when you have a dead body. It's natural to think about how to hide it. Not how to present yourself to authorities for punishment.

I'm not the only one Quinnetta told this version of her story, too. Quinnetta's lawyer, Robby McClung, of the Richard and Robby duo, remembered this account. It's just, it hadn't been useful as a defense.

“I mean, I remember that story because the massage part is what clicks it back in my memory.”

Because I was like, you're giving him a massage and then you shoot him in the back of the head. Really? Wow. I just kind of looked at her kind of funny, like, I don't think that's really going to be a defense. Because you, you knew when you were telling you, you were going to give him a massage.

You knew you were going to shoot him in the back of the head. That's intentional. I mean, it is intentional. I didn't think it was going to be a strategy that was going to get her what she wanted. She wanted it to be like some sort of battered woman syndrome or something.

And I'm like, I don't think you're going to get there because you literally picked up again and shot him in the back of the head. That his intentional murder. No two ways about it. Quinnetta only ever described what could be defined technically as intentional murder.

So if this was all a lie, it was a useless one. In my opinion, if Quinnetta were lying about this, she would have lied better. Because she's a fantastic liar. She could have made up a story in which Michael Giles had abused her for years, or was hurting her in that very moment, and she fought back.

But she never said that. I thought this story is chaotic, and it doesn't absolve her of her crime. And for that reason, it's a conceivable scenario. I hope you don't believe in her, but I don't see it. Yes, that's your prerogative obviously.

Josh Helie again. Yeah, I'm neither here nor there. I'm trying to understand what happened. Obviously nobody knows what happened in that room.

“I mean, what happened after seems quite clear, but what happened then is anyone's guess really?”

Correct. Josh knew that there were no absolutes here. But he also felt strongly that Quinnetta planned the killing in advance. That she murdered Michael Giles for the money, and only for the money. And I can't refute that.

I wasn't in that room either. What to believe? What not to believe? People like Josh were saying don't believe a word Quinnetta says.

But remember, Josh never even talked to her.

I had for years. My own instinct was to keep listening to Quinnetta. It was too neat and simple to discredit her entirely because she lied. But engaging with Quinnetta and the complexities and uncertainties of her story, it was confusing, a little alienating.

I needed some guidance. So I called in an expert of sorts. My friend, Josie Duffy Rice. She's a journalist with a Harvard Law degree who has worked in a public defender's office, and now does podcasts and substacks and articles.

She's a person who's basically entirely immersed in the criminal legal system,

I told Josie this whole story.

Start to finish.

“Up until then, she'd never heard of Quinnetta.”

It was all new to her. My immediate thought is this sounds like both an extremely fucked up thing to do to kill someone, lie about it, fake that they're so alive, take their money, like it sounds so ridiculous. And also, it sounds to me like the reflection of a behavior towards someone she represented and hated, or for whatever reason. Josie, unlike anyone who I'd ever talked to about this,

put herself in Quinnetta's shoes right away. What I'm picturing is this dude has like, for years been at best, needy, at worst, manipulative, coercive. Now he's got any fired from her job.

Now you're on your third marriage, whatever.

That job wasn't making you shit money anyway. Now you probably like, you hate him, you resent him, you don't even, you don't only do not feel bad killing him. You don't feel bad taking his money. What doesn't sound to me like it happened is that she was like, in that moment, under such a dress that she had to shoot him. And it could be true that she felt like her back was against the wall,

but not in a way that is self-defense. Like a guy saying, I'll call your next job and get you fired. Let's doesn't rise to the level of, I get to kill me in a way with it. I think it's totally plausible she did not go down there to kill him. I also think it's totally plausible that became part of the plan.

Pretty fast. Josie sensed how I was feeling.

“It must be, I'm trying to think about the best way I say this.”

I wonder for you how disappointing a such a shitty word, but that's actually how you feel. I'm like, sucks to go into something, feeling X. And look, I love guilty people, they're my favorite kind of people. But it is really, it's like, oh, I thought you were being abused until this guy and then actually you made your fiance put bandages on so you could put it into it.

It feels like a different vibe. However, it reminds me of the like, the Nietzsche idea of like suffering doesn't make you good. Like all of it could be true. It's interesting this vibe of like, you seem like you're a bad person. You also might have been in a kind of shitty situation.

I would say it's not exactly disappointing. I think what it is is completely discombobulated. Look, I do not discount the possibility that they're very evil people in the world at all. And not one of the people that's like, everybody deep down is good.

They're 8 billion people in the world.

I'm sure some of them are like, you're a demonly bad. Like most people are somewhere in the middle. And Quinnetta and me still feel somewhere in the middle. She does not feel to me to be like an irredeemable heartlet. She does feel to me more manipulative than, you know, some other people.

“To me that doesn't mean that you're getting played, right?”

Like, I think I can only be true that she wants a good story about her and likes you. And obviously opinions about the system that are like actually good and interesting. And Mrs. or kids and feels Miss characterized and did some really fucked up shit. Quinnetta had stacks of magazines in herself. She read and wrote voraciously.

She knew about the craft of journalism. How stories are reported, how information is verified, how a profile subject takes shape over the course of an narrative. When I started doing this podcast, she'd been eager to participate. Not just by talking to me, but by offering me reporting suggestions.

The name of an old friend who might remember things from back in England, the phone number of an ex-husband who could offer a different perspective on their lives. Information on where old hospital records or police reports might be found. She seemed to be guiding me toward something. And it became clear that most everything and everyone from her life before was in Detroit.

The city where she was born and raised. So I went to see if Detroit was the missing piece of the puzzle. There, I could try to understand her world by getting to know the people who shaped it. I was the drug dealer. I had guns all over the fucking house. I had guns in the kitchen and everywhere.

Once I actually shot at me. She shot in the ground. Did she?

That's next time on what she buried.

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What she buried is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media.

This show was reported and hosted by me, Justine Vanderland. Eric Benson is the executive producer. Ashley Ann Crigbaum is the managing producer. Production assistance from Lane Rose, Josie Duffy Rice,

“Mosey Secret, Emily Martinez, Shiba Joseph, and Michael Meyer.”

The story editor is Matthew Share. The series was mixed in sound design by Garrett Tidiman, a support from UNLi Trimulin. Fact checking by Matthew Jiles. A special thanks to our operations team.

Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dingo. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriades, and Matthew Share.

If you enjoyed what she buried, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.