SULLIVAN, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — Hoping that justice might one day be done, a local woman held onto a piece of evidence for a decade.
It was a receipt from Walmart.
Annette McCammon, now 62, was one of the last people to see 85-year-old Lowell Badger alive before the retired farmer was killed in his home in December of 2012. McCammon testified Tuesday that she and Badger spoke for a few minutes while waiting in line at the pharmacy. Then he spoke with another man. As the two men talked behind her, she listened in.
“The matter of the fact is, I’m a nosy woman,” McCammon said. And over the objections of defense attorney Allen Lidy, McCammon was able to tell the jury that Badger told the other man that he planned to be out of town that weekend. That brief interaction in 2012 has stayed with her for the rest of her life.
“Something was telling me it was relevant,” she said. After she learned Badger had been murdered, she called the police and urged them to check the video surveillance at Walmart. The receipt would give them the time.
But as far as she knows, they never checked back with her or checked the cameras. Badger’s murder went unsolved for a decade.
But the interaction is burned into her memory, along with the face of the man Badger was speaking with. When asked by prosecutors, she positively identified William Ray Grimes, one of the three men accused of robbing and killing Badger, and the first suspect to go on trial in his case.
Lidy moved to have McCammon’s testimony stricken from the record on the grounds that it was hearsay, but was overruled. Lidy also asked McCammon how many of the Grimes boys she was familiar with and if she recognized the scars on his client’s head. McCammon said she didn’t see any scars then and did not see any scars currently. Whatever scarring Grimes may have seemed faint from a distance. Prosecutor Courtney Lawrence suggested Grimes could have had longer hair back then, and the scars were covered.
Ultimately, to McCammon, it was clear that Grimes must have thought Badger’s house would be an easy score. Other witnesses pointed out that Badger always left one door unlocked.
“They thought Lowell would be gone,” she said.
It was a theme witnesses would return to throughout Tuesday morning. Badger had planned to be out of town with his daughter and grandchildren for one of their basketball games. He changed his mind when the mother of a close friend died. Instead, he would stay in town to comfort her at the funeral. Investigators say that while at home, he was shot and killed, and the suspects took his wallet, a $2000 television, a landline telephone, and a safe.
They most likely didn’t know what his family knew, that the safe only held some important papers and coins that relatives picked up when they traveled to other countries, witnesses said. Coins that were worthless to anyone else but held sentimental value to Badger and his loved ones.
None of these items has ever been recovered.
That the suspects were able to remove the safe suggests that Grimes, if he is indeed the guilty, did not act alone, according to Linda Sturgeon, Badger’s daughter.
Moving the heavy safe, “is not a one-person job,” she said.
Jurors heard that and a wealth of details about Badger’s life from Sturgeon and his son, Alan Badger. The farmer loved horses, was active in his church, and was “passionate about farming and farming policy,” his son said.
Badger’s life was filled with routines. He went to the same places for lunch and dinner. Visited his children both in town and across the state, and kept his home tidy. Family members were able to easily identify what was missing because the wallet and other items were always in the same place. The furniture hadn’t changed for decades.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” Sturgeon said when she found out her father had been killed. “In our home. This cannot have happened.”
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