Blood Ambush by Sheila Johnson Page A

out of town, Barbara said she went to visit Vernon Roberts at home and had sex with him while she was there. Later, she confessed to Schiess that she’d had sex with Vernon, and Schiess became furious. Barbara said that when she and Schiess went to Cherokee County on April 6, she thought Schiess was only going to talk to Darlene, but soon learned differently. His real plan, she said, was to have sex with Darlene to repay Vernon for committing adultery with Barbara.
    The questioning had begun to more closely resemble a narrative at this point, with Barbara doing most of the talking. She had definitely warmed to her subject, and the details flowed freely as a picture of her version of the events of April 6 began to emerge.
    Barbara admitted that she and Schiess had gone to Cherokee County, Alabama, on April 6, in his black Dodge Dakota pickup truck, stopping on County Road 941, only a short distance from Vernon and Darlene Roberts’s residence. They pulled off on the left side of the road in front of a blue pasture gate. Schiess got out and raised the hood of the truck to make it look as though they were having trouble and had broken down beside the road, needing help.
    When Darlene drove up to where they were stopped, Barbara said, Schiess waved for her to stop and Darlene pulled up to see if she could help him. According to Barbara, Schiess then pulled Darlene out of the car and made her lie facedown on the ground. He tried to use plastic cable ties to secure her hands, but he could not get them to work. Barbara said that Schiess then took some heavy cotton gauze to tie Darlene’s hands and feet, then stuck some rolled-up gauze in her mouth. She said that he then used some of the green-tinted stretch wrap, wrapped around her head, to hold the gauze in place. When asked about where the shotgun was at this point, Barbara claimed that Schiess had it with him.
    “I was freaking out at that point,” Barbara said. “I thought that he was only going to talk to her.”
    Darlene then managed to work free of her bindings and jumped up and began to run into the pasture, and Schiess made Barbara get into Darlene’s vehicle with him, she said. They drove into the pasture after Darlene, who ran down the fence line away from where her vehicle had been parked, until she got close to the back of the pasture and another fence.
    Barbara said she and Schiess followed Darlene when she turned and started running toward the pond in the pasture. Darlene ran into the pond, then ran along the edge of the pond until she got to a place where some tall grass was growing along the edge. Barbara told the officers that Darlene lay down in the water to hide behind the grass, but Schiess followed her, pointed the shotgun at her, and shot her three times, point-blank, as she lay facedown in the pond.
    “I was really freaking out,” Barbara claimed, and said that Schiess hit her in the face with the stock of the shotgun, trying to quiet her and breaking her glasses in the process.
    After the shooting, Barbara said, she couldn’t remember where they had parked Darlene’s vehicle. She remembered that she and Schiess got back into his truck and started driving back to Georgia. They threw Darlene’s cell phone out the window of the truck somewhere on the side of the road along the way, and Barbara said that she threw Darlene’s purse into a Dumpster behind a Texaco station in Rome, Georgia. The shotgun, she claimed, had been thrown into the Etowah River, on US 411 and Georgia Highway 20, as she and Schiess drove over the bridge. At first she said it had been wrapped in plastic and cement, then later said they didn’t use any cement.
    After they got back to Conyers, Barbara claimed, Schiess cleaned the inside of the pickup and later parked it in a new rental storage building in town. They threw away the clothes they wore during the murder in the Dumpster at the apartment complex.
    Barbara admitted to the officers that she had worn a disguise during the