October 16, 2018 • 40 mins
A murder plot unfolds. From deep inside a maximum-security prison, hitman Van Brett Watkins offers an unflinching account of the deal he struck with Rae Carruth to kill Cherica Adams and their unborn son. Along with confession tapes and a gripping 911 call, a portrait of Carruth as a master manipulator emerges. But to this day, some vehemently dispute his involvement.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
A listener. Note this story contains adult language and some
graphic descriptions of violence. Previously on, That's how she got
the name Shaika from Sunny and Shack. She always thought
Charlotte was a small place, and I'm gonna get out
(00:21):
of here one day. I'm gonna go and do the
things that I want to do. She knew everybody was
gonna know who she is. She knew that people were
going to know her name. So we've got Ruth Block
and you saw the talent, and you're like, oh, this
guy gonna be good some touchdown. He was pretty smitten
with Ray Caruth when she met him. They portrayed all
(00:43):
the women in his life as if he was some
big player running through women and whatnot. She had taken
about ten pregnancy tests, and she and Ray had gone
to the doctor together to take another one to make sure.
And she's telling me, I'm gonna be a grandma. Just
(01:11):
west of downtown Raleigh, North Carolina's massive Central Prison sits
on twenty nine acres of land surrounded by double rows
of razor wire. My visit here was more than six
months in the making. Rake Ruth declined to all my
requests to sit down for an on the record interview
for this project, but another crucial player in this drama said, yes,
(01:35):
Van Brett Watkins, he didn't stand up. I stood up
for mine. I said. I did it because he made
me do it. North Carolina's Department of Correction says it
takes about a week to schedule visits with most inmates
at the maximum security prison. Then again, a fender number
zero six eight zero is not most inmates. Watkins is
(01:58):
by all accounts, a murderer. By his own account and
revelations that have never been published before, he is a
prolific one. He's the sort of man who once set
another inmate on fire for insulting his family. Was talking
about assisted calling all kind of business. So the next
(02:20):
morning Watkins record lists more than fifty in fractions since
he's been locked up, ranging from using profanity to assaulting
the staff with a weapon at Central. He's hardly alone
in that a prison supervisor is still in the hospital
after he was attacked and stabbed at Central Prison. Exactly
one week after my three hour interview with Watkins, a
(02:43):
prison employee was beaten and repeatedly stabbed by inmates. Central
agreed to let me bring in a pocket sized voice recorder,
the kind you might buy at a convenience store. Sitting
there in a concrete room, looking at Watkins through two
pains of bullet roof glass and talking to him through
a tiny grate at the bottom of that glass offers
(03:05):
exactly the sort of audio quality you'd expect, But just
being there at all was important to me. In nineteen
years of covering this story, it was the first time
I had ever been face to face with the man
who shot Sharika Adams from the Charlotte Observer and McClatchy Studios.
(03:30):
This is Kruth. I'm Scott Fowler, and this is chapter
two the hitman speaks. By the summer of n Sharika
(03:51):
was telling everyone she was pregnant and trying not to
admit her relationship with Kruth was in trouble. She was
really really disappointed and raised reaction to her pregnancy. This
is Valerie Brooks, one of Sharika's closest friends. Lada not Scott.
I told her, I said just to be careful because
she did stay from time to time. He had a temper,
(04:13):
but she thought, in her mind, I can handle him,
and she said he's a want to be bad guy.
She said, I don't understand why. I thought maybe he
would be happy. There are many theories as to why
he wasn't. Kruth's NFL career had stalled and his future
with the Panthers was uncertain. He was also already paying
three thousand dollars a month in child support for a
(04:36):
son he barely saw. Beyond that, he and Sharika weren't
an exclusive couple, not even close. Karuth considered their relationship
one based mostly on quote carnal indulgences. Now, what he
says differs from what Sharika wrote in her diary and
what she told me. This is Sandra Adams, Sharika's mother. Um.
(05:00):
What she told me is that he was talking about
being a family, getting married, and he definitely wanted to
be there, you know, for the birth of his son,
because he had missed his first son's birth. So therefore
he decided to go on to Lama's class with her.
What we do know is that Sharika was determined to
(05:21):
have their baby as a single mother like her mother was.
If it came to that, she stopped dancing at the
Charlotte Strip club she had worked off and on as
a nanny and a babysitter for years, and Sandra recognized
her own maternal instincts in her daughter. I remember us
taking this trip down to the Arboretum. They were selling
(05:42):
these kits. What you place it on the mom's stomach
and you could play music to the baby. So she
had said, well, the baby needs to listen to Beethoven,
so he would have a certain disposition. And then she
could read into this my carphone and it would go
into the base. So she was reading Bible stories. Oh yeah,
(06:06):
she bought this and had it looked up. She was
actually reading the baby books. Some people just buy them.
The name Sharika picked out harkened back to her own
childhood and to her early years being raised by her grandparents.
Her grandmother's favorite soap opera had been The Young and
the Restless. My mom would say she had to watch
her story. So for two or three hours every day
(06:29):
they were watching the soap propers together. And the one
particular one that my mom liked best there was Mr Chancellor.
When she was deciding for a name for her son,
she knew it was either going to be Chancellor or Chandler.
But then she thought Chancellor just sounded more powerful, and
so Caruth began appearing by Sharika's side in public more often,
(06:53):
even if he didn't always make the best impression. He
later said he didn't even know Sharika's last name until
they signed in at that Lama's class. I would tell
you I didn't like him. I did not like him.
Um let me rephrase that I did not like the
way he treated her. Here's Brooks again. Of course I
could tell he was a playboy, a player. What I
(07:14):
imagined was again the philandering forever. I didn't think that
it would ever stop. Anytime he offered positivity, which was
very rare, she would get very excited. She said, he's
really smart, and she even said that he was kind
of nerdy, and she didn't understand his quest to be
(07:35):
a bad boy. But many times you cannot blame the
heart of where the heart goes. Some of Caruth's NFL
teammates remember him as a loner, but he had made
friends outside the team, friends that most of the Panthers
didn't know about. One of those friends was Michael Eugene Kennedy,
(07:55):
Welcome investigators say a recent drug bust. He illustrates the
changing world of illegal drugs. They called Kennedy little man
on the streets of Charlotte, and he had a deep
understanding of the city's dark side. Addictive illegal drugs are
coming to North Carolina. Investigators rated a Southwest Charlotte storage
unit and found drugs body army. Kennedy was twenty three
(08:16):
years old at the time and he made most of
his money selling crack cocaine. In February, n Kennedy ran
into Caruth at a tire shop that sold rims. He
complimented the rims on Kruth's car, and a friendship blossomed.
I met him Jilly f February and this place called
a cost assess was for your cause. This is Michael Kennedy.
(08:40):
He wouldn't speak to me for this project, but here
he is speaking to police in n who wasn't like
close friends. We just liked talked to him once in
a while. Kennedy's best friend was an eighteen year old
named Stanley Boss Abraham. The two had once been next
door neighbors, and Abraham looked up to Kennedy like a
big brother. They they did rap music together and roots
(09:02):
of poetry. Also that I don't know that they said
to rap music, but they were doing a lot of
it his rap music. I recently spoke with Abraham by phone,
but he declined to be interviewed for this project. So
this is Jim Gronquist, a veteran criminal defense lawyer who
would later represent Abraham. And that's how Michael Kennedy got
to know a little bit about Ray. They were hoping
(09:25):
to get some funding from Ray to do tape or
a record. Abraham wouldn't meet Kruth until the night Sharika
was shot, and he had barely said hello to Watkins before. Watkins,
who was then thirty nine years old, was familiar with
the US prison system. He had already done time in
New York for crimes like gun possession, assault, and threatening
(09:47):
to kill various people, though he told me for the
first time publicly that authority still don't know the true
extent of his murderous past or about the people he's crippled.
You mentioned you would killed somebody before, as you killed
more than one person. Most of these were paid hits,
Watkins told me, contracted by women who had either been
(10:09):
beaten by or were tired of the men they had
wanted killed. And that was all in New York. And
first of all, got away every time. In the summer
(10:30):
of nineteen nine, Watkins was the head of security for
a Charlotte strip club and, at six ft three and
two eighty six pounds, an occasional construction worker and bodyguard.
He mostly went by the nickname New York, a reference
to his Brooklyn birthplace and also an alias for a
man who often solved problems with violence. He was just
(10:52):
the sort of man Caruth was allegedly looking for. The
two first met by chance in at a strip club.
Watkins was watching the door, Caruth was watching the stage.
So you met him at the script club the first time.
I said strip club. I'm more or less watching for
(11:12):
any danger, says I want to run from her the police.
I wasn't impressed For me and the little guys. Watkins
did need money, though. By June, Watkins had started washing
and detailing Caruth's red Mercedes c okay and his white
(11:33):
Ford expedition. For a professional athlete, Karuth was building a
questionable network of friends, among them a drug dealer and
a man already convicted of five felonies. It was a
far cry from his protected childhood, where he lived under
his mother's watchful eye. Watkins is now fifty eight. As
we sat in that spartan visitation room at Central Prison,
(11:56):
the hitman rocked back and forth trying to get comfortable.
He suffers from hip disease that forces him to walk
with a cane. I was struck, but how far he
had veered from a path? He says began with the
Cub Scouts and shoveling snow for his elderly neighbors in Brooklyn.
Every time I did a good I wasn't board all
(12:22):
that has embraced me like this, because that's start, and
then I'm started moving bad. After a few weeks of
doing odd jobs for Kruth, Watkins says he got a
phone call from the football player Caruth asked to meet
him in a nearby U haul parking lot. Caruth had
(12:43):
a very different type of job to discuss me girl
and make a board a baby. I said, I don't
need a girl. I met. The assignment would pay three
thousand dollars up front and another their three thousand dollars
on completion, though Karuth could only get three hundred dollars
(13:04):
on the spot, and he he said, I'm closed and
the rest After that meeting Watkins says he stalked Sharika
on and off for months. He got to know her
black BMW with the tinted windows. He found out where
(13:26):
she lived and where she parked her car. Still, Watkins
didn't do the job. He told me he did feel
some hesitation about hurting a woman, but in the sadistic
calculus of this transaction, he was mostly trying to figure
out how to get away once he had hurt Sharika,
but she and Karuth were still locked in their tumultuous relationship.
(13:47):
Sharika kept insisting she was going to have his baby,
and Watkins says Carruth grew impatient. So well, your friend said,
(14:08):
I if you're a liar, I was. Watkins would later
testify that Caruth made other grim proposals to In one,
he suggested that he takes Sharika out to dinner and
partner a dumpster behind the restaurant. Watkins, he said, could
(14:30):
wait nearby and attack her there. During this time, she
was doing a lot of journaling here, Sandra. Again, he
invited her back out. She talks about going to this
um restaurant and him parking near a dumpster and going
into the restaurant. And leaving her out there for a
long period of time. Van Brett Watkins was supposed to
(14:54):
come up and get her from the van and beat
her up and make her lose the baby. Well, then
that didn't happen. So during one of these next times,
Ray came to the house to stay and he retrieved
a key from Sharika and gave it to Van Brett Watkins,
and he was supposed to go into the home and
(15:17):
knock her down the steps or whatever, and he didn't
do that either. By late summer of Caruth joined the
Panthers training camp in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but his mind
was often elsewhere, always sensitive to criticism. He was unclear
(15:39):
where he fit in on the team after barely playing
the previous season due to injury, and he told others
that some teammates made fun of his predicament with Sharika,
and he talked about it like in once in a
while and we've seen each other. Here says something about
it like she's still pregnant, and people on the team sandasta.
This is Kennedy again. In this recording, made two weeks
(16:02):
after Shariko was shot, He's being interviewed by Charlotte Mecklenburg
police officer Tony Rice. The interview was key in helping
detectives understand what happened that night, saying that she was
a whole and he can't be having a maybe about
most strip and stuff like that with no car and he,
(16:26):
in the face of mockery, Caruth's desperation metastasized into vengeance.
The Bacon boarding killed by November, Sharika Adams was thirty
weeks pregnant. As Kruth was plotting her death, it seems
(16:48):
he found it most advantageous to get closer to her.
This November was going to be their first real date
as a couple, again what she wrote in her diary,
and she was ecstatic about going on this date with
him while she was pregnant. I had seen her really
(17:12):
every day since Mother's Day except that day because she
she was like, Mom, I've got to go and get ridy,
i gotta get my outfit just right. We're going on
a real date. We're getting back together. And so she
was so excited about doing that. And I thought Karuth
(17:35):
had planned to take Sharika that night to a Denzel
Washington Angelina Jolie film called The Bone Collector, a movie
about a serial killer playing at the Regal Cinemas in
South Charlotte. Watkins and Kennedy would later testify that in
the matter of a few hours before the movie began,
(17:56):
Karuth hatched a new plot. Remember it was a Monday,
and we're just kind of start from there and tell
us what happened. I want you to be honest with us. Okay,
here's Kennedy again. Around seven or eight, Rank Carruth had
called me in um. He asked me what was I doing.
I was like nothing and uh. He asked me if
(18:20):
I had a hoop deal, if I had a car
that he could get that night. And I told him
that I had a maximum and he told me to
come over his house, He explaining, so we all know
be on the same sheet of music. What do you know? What?
Who need to be? UM? A card is not flashy,
it doesn't stand out. Kennedy and his friend Stanley Abraham
(18:42):
drove to Kruth's house. Soon Watkins also arrived. Abraham was
a starstruck teenager at the time, and he gave himself
a tour of the NFL player's home. Actually, he was
making phone calls to friends while the three of them
were moving all around the planet outside, down the hall
and in the Cruce's bedroom, etcetera. He was sitting in
(19:04):
the living room. Crew didn't even really know who he was.
This is Abraham's lawyer, Jim Grondquist, And I think there
was sometimes when Kruth was talking to Van Bred Watkins
and sometimes to Michael and to them together, and Stanley
was just oblivious to this whole thing because he's playing
the I'm in this famous guy's house, called friends, just
looking and let them know that he's hanging out in
(19:26):
a real cool dude's house and was real happy about it.
Sharika would soon be arriving at Caruth's house for their
date and a hasty plan took shape. Come outside outside,
I was asking him, you know what he needed to
call for? And he asked me, do I know where
he can get a gun at? And at that time
(19:47):
I told him yes, I knew. A guy was setting
a third eight and he was sending up for like
a hundred dollars. I was like, why why you wanted
a gun? And he was like, want um get Shaika
because she was pregnant and he want to pay no,
five thousands semi dollars a month and tire support. He
said that, um, he had a friend that was gonna
(20:08):
do it, and I told him that I didn't want
to do it. I was like, I don't want to,
you know, I don't have no part. And I said,
because I mean, anything that happened, I could get killed anything.
And he was like, something still can happen to you regardless,
because you know about it. Kennedy said. Kruth gave him
five CRISP twenty dollar bills and told him to go
by the gun during the time Caruth was at the
(20:29):
movies with Sharika. After that he should wait for Kruth's call.
It wasn't exactly a tidy scheme, and when Sharika arrived
at Caruth's house sometime around nine pm, everything seemed off.
So she called me on the phone and said, Mom,
you know, I don't even know why I'm here because
he's got all these people in the house and he's
(20:52):
been down there secretly on the phone, and I think
he's talking to another woman. So I'm telling her. I said, well,
you have to go to work tomorrow, so you tell
him you're not going to go to the movie. And
I could hear him in the background saying no, no, no,
we're getting ready to go right now. And uh so
(21:12):
at that point, that's where she decided, she made her
decision that she was going to go ahead and stay
and go on with him, and that that was the
last conversation I had with him. M The couple left
for the movie in Caruth's car. The three other men
(21:34):
had left the house already, Kennedy driving his Maxima with
Abraham and the front passenger seat. Watkins sat in the
back behind Abraham. Only later with the men in the
front seat, learned watkins real name. He was using his
dead brother's name William as an alias, but that night
they just called him New York when they said anything
at all, and mostly they didn't. Kennedy, I need you
(21:57):
to come with me where I'm going. Here's Abra Ham's
lawyer again. And he reluctantly agreed to do that, but
new once he got in the car, once he met
Dan Brett Watkins, he knew he was in for a
lot of trouble. The plan was that after the movie,
Kruth would bring Sharika back to his house to pick
up her car, and then he would create an excuse
(22:17):
to invite himself over to her place for the night,
and follow Kennedy drove the men to meet his contact,
and there he bought a Charter Arms thirty eight Special.
The chamber held five bullets. What did you get? Some bullets?
(22:40):
And it was a good lock on the gun. And
the dollars you paid him was at the same hunt
Ray gave you. Yes, I held that gun not long ago.
It resides in a plastic bag in an evidence box
in a Charlotte courthouse. It's silver with a black handle,
and it's small, all with a two inch snub notes.
(23:02):
Although rusty and extremely light, the thirty eight Special still
feels dangerous. The gun wasn't loaded, of course, under official supervision.
I pulled the trigger to see if it still worked.
The gun responded with a menacing click. But that's how
we went to the parking lot and William told me
(23:27):
to pull us out of Sewa. Kennedy pulled up outside
a Chick fil A in the nearby Stone Crests shopping
center and he duped bullets and I think the Boston
the bullets was in. He yes, he didn't need them all.
Do you know how many he can? Well? The couple
watched the movie, Kennedy, Abraham, and Watkins drove aimlessly around
(23:51):
South Charlotte, stopping at a supermarket and then at a
gas station so Watkins good buy a beer. At that point,
only two of the three men understood what was about
to unfold, and we went toward gast. I got can
were so I tried. When Watkins went in to buy
(24:14):
his beer, Kennedy told his best friend about the plan.
I told Stanley that, um, they want me to um
follow him when he lead the movies, and he wanted
a guy that was right with us to shoot the
girl that he had pregnant. He was like, take me home.
He was like, why you got me? And I was like,
(24:35):
just by that time, we was coming back out the
store and I was just so scared. Didn't I didn't
say nothing else. Kruth called Kennedy at PM to say
the movie it ended. He and Sharika drove back to
his house to retrieve her car. They went in one
together in the movie theater and went back to his home.
(24:56):
So that's where the plot changed it. Now I'm going
to stay at your ho here's Sandra again. Ray realized
that he had a appointment. He had injured his leg
or something, so he had a therapy appointment. It was
going to be easier to make the appointment from her house,
so we'll just drive your car back and my car
(25:18):
instead of riding together. At twelve nineteen am on November six,
Karruth called Kennedy again to say they were leaving his
house and to get ready. Watkins snapped on a pair
of surgical gloves he had carried with him. Karruth was
driving alone in this white Ford expedition. Sharika followed in
her black BMW. Michael Kennedy pulled behind Sharika and his
(25:42):
gold niece on Maxima, Stanley Abraham alongside him in the
passenger seat, with van Brett Watkins in the back seat
behind Abraham. Carruth pulled onto Ray Road. He passed the
enormous crown shaped Calvary Church locally known as the Big
Pink Church, at the intersection of Highway fifty one. Ray
(26:03):
Road narrowed to two lanes. After that, it was dark
and mostly secluded. Occasional lights came from housing developments, but
those were often blocked by the dozens of pine trees
lining the road When they went over, and they went
down in a dip all right, road, um pulled behind
Sorika cor Ray. Stop He's in the front season back
(26:27):
and there's no stop sign. Stop he just stop. Will
was like pull up beside him and then Michael Kennedy
way to now I'm putting me on the right hand
back process they either work both cars. Did they come
to a complete stop in the old fool side of
the younger with black? I said, shoot lower park? How
(26:53):
many times? Have really proud of this gun? And it's
win and then I on everybody involves, I love the
rag rove, I'm join the call and I'm the window
tells and shoot drown? Where did raise cargo? Ray was
(27:22):
looking in the new and he s Caruth and his
defenders dispute much of what you've just heard, or at
least the motivations behind it. Well, you know, I have
never believed that he hired Van Brett, Watkins or Michael
Kennedy to harm Sharika in any way. I mean, I
(27:46):
don't know if he was innocent in the sense that
he never did anything wrong, but he he hadn't hired
these people to kill Sharik Adams. This is David Rudolph,
who would later become Caruth's lead defense attorney, Carruth authorized
Rudolph to speak to us on his behalf, and the
lawyer is the only person I interviewed to have actually
(28:06):
been face to face with Kruth in the past few weeks.
I did go see him, ye Uh, you know, we
talked about the case and about what had actually happened. Uh.
You know, he's fine with me talking with you, Caruth
through Rudolph acknowledged for this project that he was there
in the moments just before Sharika was shot. Looking in
(28:28):
his rear view mirror, Kruth saw Kennedy's car with Watkins
in the back seat, pull up beside Sharika's and then Carruth,
scared that Watkins was coming for him, took off. He
didn't call for help then or later Karuth fled, leaving
Sharika and his unborn son at Watkins mercy for nearly
(28:48):
two decades. Caruth's defenders argued that he was not present
for the shooting or the lead up to it. Ray,
did you conspire to murder Sharrika Adams and your unborn son? No?
I did not, as Kruth himself off did. During this
two thousand one interview with CNN s I the only
in depth interview Karuth has ever done about the events
of that night. I was not there. I didn't see
(29:09):
the shooting. I didn't hear any shots. I can't testify
anything that happens to re conray Rode. Now that's changed,
But Rudolph told me Kruth's presence on Ray Road that
night had nothing to do with a contract killing. There
was no quote planning for this until the very day
that it all happened. And that's just that's just not
(29:30):
how a murder for hire takes place. I mean they
even had to go and get a gun that day.
Uh so, uh, the whole thing just didn't make sense
to me. Rudolf and his client maintained that in Caruth
had agreed to finance a major interstate drug shipment from Georgia.
Rudolph told me the shooting of Serrika Adams and attempted
(29:53):
murder of Karruth's unborn son was violent retribution. The NFL
player claims he backed out of his promised to pay
tens of thousands of dollars for a truckload of marijuana
Watkins had delivered from Atlanta. What I believe happened and
what Ray clearly has told me from day one is
(30:14):
that he agreed to fund a marijuana deal that Van
Brett Watkins brought up a load of marijuana from Atlanta
on the front, as they say, in other words, Vambrett
Watkins was a middleman sort of. So he got a
load of marijuana that was in the trunk of his car.
(30:36):
He brought it up to Charlotte, and Ray was supposed
to provide the money to him to pay for that marijuana,
and he would then sell it and Ray would get
some profit. And Michael Kennedy was a part of that. Uh.
And on the day that it happened, Van Brett Watkins
showed up with the load of marijuana and Ray backed out.
(30:59):
You know, I think there were probably a lot of
reasons for that, and not at leasta, which was that
he was a professional football player, and he realized that
what he was doing, uh, presumably to do a favor
for Van Brett Watkins because he certainly didn't need the money,
was just stupid. And so he backed out. And now
here's Van Brett Watkins in Charlotte with a load of
(31:21):
marijuana that he hasn't paid for, that he can't pay
for and they had a huge argument uh there at
Ray's house. Rudolph agreed in this interview, which again was
fully authorized by Kruth, that Sharika and Kruth went to
the movies that November night. The attorney also agreed that Kennedy, Abraham,
and Watkins drove around town during that time, and that
(31:44):
Karuth called Kennedy when the movie was over, But Rudolph
says the call was for a different reason. Van Brett Watkins.
And you've seen him. Uh. He's a scary guy and
a very unstable guy, and he was threatening Ray. Uh
And so Ray ended up going to the movies with Sharika.
(32:07):
He was very worried about what Van Brett Watkins was
gonna do because Van Brett knew where he lived. Uh.
And so he and Sharika went to the movies and
he called Kennedy at some point to ask Kennedy, what's
going on with Van Brett? You know? Is is he
(32:27):
calmed down? Kennedy was like, no, he's not calmed down
at all. Uh. He is hot when you really think
about it, why it makes a lot more sense if
he's calling Kennedy to check on Watkins, then to call
Kennedy to say, okay, we're on. I mean if if
they hit his on, then they just follow him out
(32:49):
of the movie theater. The couple returned to Caruth's home
and picked up Sharika's car. The Rudolph disputes that change
of plans was part of a criminal conspiracy. Instead, he
told me, watkins anger and instability made Caruth fear for
their safety and he thought it best for them to
sleep elsewhere that night. You know. At that point, Uh,
(33:09):
the plan sort of changed in terms of where they
would go. Ray was in front of Sharika driving, Sharika
was behind him, And I guess Van Brett Watkins had
been driving around with Kennedy looking for because he knew
that they were going to the movies. Um, and Kennedy
knew they were going to the movies, so he was
driving around looking for Ray's vehicle. Soon everyone agrees Kennedy's
(33:34):
Maxima caught up with Carruth and Sharika on Ray Road,
but Rudolph insists that watkins active violence does not implicate
Caruth in a murder plot. At some point on Ray Road,
Ray saw Van Brett Watkins pull out and Um, what
he says, uh, and this is sort of new information.
(33:55):
I guess is he packed and when he saw Vambrett
Watkins pull out and pull up next to Sharika, he
took off because he was afraid that Vambrett Watkins was
coming to get him. Instead, Vambrett Watkins shoots Sharika. Uh.
(34:18):
And then Ray suddenly finds himself in a situation where
you know, he's he's been there, he left, uh, you know,
and what's he gonna do? I mean, he knows these guys,
and so he's sort of panicked for the next few days.
Rudolph told me that Kruth had bad associates that had
(34:40):
made dumb mistakes, that had fled the scene of what
was about to be a violent crime and never called
to report it. It sounded to me like this alternate
theory boiled down to eight words. Karuth was no killer.
He was a coward. So that's the truth, as far
as I know, and as far as Ray has told me,
It makes perfect sense to me about what happened. Ray
(35:04):
doesn't make excuses for what he did in terms of uh,
you know, dealing with Van Brett Watkins. Kennedy was a
little bit of a sort of a small time drug dealer,
at the time, and he doesn't make excuses for hanging
out with the wrong people. You know, what he is
adamant about is that he never stopped his car, quite
(35:25):
the reverse. He was scared and he took off, and
he's not particularly proud of that. Uh. You know, it's
not sort of a heroic thing to do. Uh, you know,
big football player, you know, running, But that's what he did. So,
I mean, I don't know that he can really explain it, um,
(35:47):
other than the fact that he was what twenty two
years old at the time. Three, yeah, maybe twenty four.
You know, think think back to the stupid things you
did when when you with twenty four. You don't have
to and you certainly don't have to admit it. Uh,
but but I think we can all say that we
did some pretty stupid things. So in that sense, he
(36:09):
is responsible. It's just it's not a murder case. It's
morally responsible. Regardless of the version you believe. Kruth sped
off in his suv. Watkins had fired all five bullets.
He told me, Abraham began laughing hysterically, and Kennedy panicked.
And the reason why I didn't get on the call
(36:35):
and turn around turnarround and go back and speed. If
I don't think he knew that bullets, so you used
up all your bullets that was in and anyone shots
for at all, That's when he really go one to
(36:57):
stop laughing and the other one stopping. One thing Abraham
did stress to me during our phone call is that
he strongly disputes watkins account of him laughing after Sharika
was shot. He said he was quiet and all he
could think about at that moment was that he wished
he could be anywhere else besides that car. A car
(37:20):
Kennedy was steering through Charlotte's back roads, a car that
was eerily quiet until Watkins spoke up. So we got
to the to the light. The light was read, so
I made a right and then I made a left.
And when I made a left, um he told me
to stop the car. And that's when I heard him
throwing stuff out the cars. I gotta get rid of
(37:41):
his stuff. This is Kennedy again, the gun and the
gun lock, and he has some good I heard gloves
he threw out the window, but I didn't see him
though I was. I just heard. I didn't know that
Watkins tried to throw the gun into a creek, but
he missed. Kennedy drove him back to his truck, where
wat Can screwubbed himself down with gasoline strip off the
(38:03):
sweatshirt the base and I got guess way from my
detail shop, my mobile detail shop, and I worked myself there.
But he hadn't finished the job. Karuth hired him to
do one. Thank you police, fir attic. Where are you
(38:24):
at Avery Church? At how free church? Man? You're on
right aware? And at least one person in that getaway
car knew. It was the first time you realize that Sharika,
she's not dead. Think she was dead? Didn't night So
(38:48):
look back, I've seen you like her preat lights like
blink on. So I didn't think she was dead and
the miracle was about to begin. Matic she's been shot.
She's pregnant. All I can get out of road? No, no, no,
I'm clear. Okay, what more shot at? I don't know?
(39:15):
All right, man, We're gonna get diamous on the way
to you. Okay, alright man. I'm Scott Fowler and this
podcast is produced by Jeff Signer and Rachel Wise and
(39:37):
Davin Coburn at McClatchy studios. Find lots more about this
case at Charlotte Observer dot com slash Caruth, and for
just thirty dollars, subscribe now to a full year of
The Observer's award winning sports coverage at Charlotte Observer dot
com slash sports pass. In chapter three, the Race to
save two lives and track down the shooter, Sharika was
(40:00):
in very bad shape when she came in. She had
lost a lot of blood. It was the hospital on
the line, and I just remember dropping to my knees
as well, and she couldn't talk, but she could write.
One of the questions was do you think Ray was involved?
And she just made a question mark. What we knew
at the time was what Sharika said on the novel
one call. But he didn't know that. I knew that.
(40:22):
I immediately decided, oh my god, I gotta call Ray
because he didn't know what's happened.
A listener. Note this story contains adult language and some
graphic descriptions of violence. Previously on, That's how she got
the name Shaika from Sunny and Shack. She always thought
Charlotte was a small place, and I'm gonna get out
(00:21):
of here one day. I'm gonna go and do the
things that I want to do. She knew everybody was
gonna know who she is. She knew that people were
going to know her name. So we've got Ruth Block
and you saw the talent, and you're like, oh, this
guy gonna be good some touchdown. He was pretty smitten
with Ray Caruth when she met him. They portrayed all
(00:43):
the women in his life as if he was some
big player running through women and whatnot. She had taken
about ten pregnancy tests, and she and Ray had gone
to the doctor together to take another one to make sure.
And she's telling me, I'm gonna be a grandma. Just
(01:11):
west of downtown Raleigh, North Carolina's massive Central Prison sits
on twenty nine acres of land surrounded by double rows
of razor wire. My visit here was more than six
months in the making. Rake Ruth declined to all my
requests to sit down for an on the record interview
for this project, but another crucial player in this drama said, yes,
(01:35):
Van Brett Watkins, he didn't stand up. I stood up
for mine. I said. I did it because he made
me do it. North Carolina's Department of Correction says it
takes about a week to schedule visits with most inmates
at the maximum security prison. Then again, a fender number
zero six eight zero is not most inmates. Watkins is
(01:58):
by all accounts, a murderer. By his own account and
revelations that have never been published before, he is a
prolific one. He's the sort of man who once set
another inmate on fire for insulting his family. Was talking
about assisted calling all kind of business. So the next
(02:20):
morning Watkins record lists more than fifty in fractions since
he's been locked up, ranging from using profanity to assaulting
the staff with a weapon at Central. He's hardly alone
in that a prison supervisor is still in the hospital
after he was attacked and stabbed at Central Prison. Exactly
one week after my three hour interview with Watkins, a
(02:43):
prison employee was beaten and repeatedly stabbed by inmates. Central
agreed to let me bring in a pocket sized voice recorder,
the kind you might buy at a convenience store. Sitting
there in a concrete room, looking at Watkins through two
pains of bullet roof glass and talking to him through
a tiny grate at the bottom of that glass offers
(03:05):
exactly the sort of audio quality you'd expect, But just
being there at all was important to me. In nineteen
years of covering this story, it was the first time
I had ever been face to face with the man
who shot Sharika Adams from the Charlotte Observer and McClatchy Studios.
(03:30):
This is Kruth. I'm Scott Fowler, and this is chapter
two the hitman speaks. By the summer of n Sharika
(03:51):
was telling everyone she was pregnant and trying not to
admit her relationship with Kruth was in trouble. She was
really really disappointed and raised reaction to her pregnancy. This
is Valerie Brooks, one of Sharika's closest friends. Lada not Scott.
I told her, I said just to be careful because
she did stay from time to time. He had a temper,
(04:13):
but she thought, in her mind, I can handle him,
and she said he's a want to be bad guy.
She said, I don't understand why. I thought maybe he
would be happy. There are many theories as to why
he wasn't. Kruth's NFL career had stalled and his future
with the Panthers was uncertain. He was also already paying
three thousand dollars a month in child support for a
(04:36):
son he barely saw. Beyond that, he and Sharika weren't
an exclusive couple, not even close. Karuth considered their relationship
one based mostly on quote carnal indulgences. Now, what he
says differs from what Sharika wrote in her diary and
what she told me. This is Sandra Adams, Sharika's mother. Um.
(05:00):
What she told me is that he was talking about
being a family, getting married, and he definitely wanted to
be there, you know, for the birth of his son,
because he had missed his first son's birth. So therefore
he decided to go on to Lama's class with her.
What we do know is that Sharika was determined to
(05:21):
have their baby as a single mother like her mother was.
If it came to that, she stopped dancing at the
Charlotte Strip club she had worked off and on as
a nanny and a babysitter for years, and Sandra recognized
her own maternal instincts in her daughter. I remember us
taking this trip down to the Arboretum. They were selling
(05:42):
these kits. What you place it on the mom's stomach
and you could play music to the baby. So she
had said, well, the baby needs to listen to Beethoven,
so he would have a certain disposition. And then she
could read into this my carphone and it would go
into the base. So she was reading Bible stories. Oh yeah,
(06:06):
she bought this and had it looked up. She was
actually reading the baby books. Some people just buy them.
The name Sharika picked out harkened back to her own
childhood and to her early years being raised by her grandparents.
Her grandmother's favorite soap opera had been The Young and
the Restless. My mom would say she had to watch
her story. So for two or three hours every day
(06:29):
they were watching the soap propers together. And the one
particular one that my mom liked best there was Mr Chancellor.
When she was deciding for a name for her son,
she knew it was either going to be Chancellor or Chandler.
But then she thought Chancellor just sounded more powerful, and
so Caruth began appearing by Sharika's side in public more often,
(06:53):
even if he didn't always make the best impression. He
later said he didn't even know Sharika's last name until
they signed in at that Lama's class. I would tell
you I didn't like him. I did not like him.
Um let me rephrase that I did not like the
way he treated her. Here's Brooks again. Of course I
could tell he was a playboy, a player. What I
(07:14):
imagined was again the philandering forever. I didn't think that
it would ever stop. Anytime he offered positivity, which was
very rare, she would get very excited. She said, he's
really smart, and she even said that he was kind
of nerdy, and she didn't understand his quest to be
(07:35):
a bad boy. But many times you cannot blame the
heart of where the heart goes. Some of Caruth's NFL
teammates remember him as a loner, but he had made
friends outside the team, friends that most of the Panthers
didn't know about. One of those friends was Michael Eugene Kennedy,
(07:55):
Welcome investigators say a recent drug bust. He illustrates the
changing world of illegal drugs. They called Kennedy little man
on the streets of Charlotte, and he had a deep
understanding of the city's dark side. Addictive illegal drugs are
coming to North Carolina. Investigators rated a Southwest Charlotte storage
unit and found drugs body army. Kennedy was twenty three
(08:16):
years old at the time and he made most of
his money selling crack cocaine. In February, n Kennedy ran
into Caruth at a tire shop that sold rims. He
complimented the rims on Kruth's car, and a friendship blossomed.
I met him Jilly f February and this place called
a cost assess was for your cause. This is Michael Kennedy.
(08:40):
He wouldn't speak to me for this project, but here
he is speaking to police in n who wasn't like
close friends. We just liked talked to him once in
a while. Kennedy's best friend was an eighteen year old
named Stanley Boss Abraham. The two had once been next
door neighbors, and Abraham looked up to Kennedy like a
big brother. They they did rap music together and roots
(09:02):
of poetry. Also that I don't know that they said
to rap music, but they were doing a lot of
it his rap music. I recently spoke with Abraham by phone,
but he declined to be interviewed for this project. So
this is Jim Gronquist, a veteran criminal defense lawyer who
would later represent Abraham. And that's how Michael Kennedy got
to know a little bit about Ray. They were hoping
(09:25):
to get some funding from Ray to do tape or
a record. Abraham wouldn't meet Kruth until the night Sharika
was shot, and he had barely said hello to Watkins before. Watkins,
who was then thirty nine years old, was familiar with
the US prison system. He had already done time in
New York for crimes like gun possession, assault, and threatening
(09:47):
to kill various people, though he told me for the
first time publicly that authority still don't know the true
extent of his murderous past or about the people he's crippled.
You mentioned you would killed somebody before, as you killed
more than one person. Most of these were paid hits,
Watkins told me, contracted by women who had either been
(10:09):
beaten by or were tired of the men they had
wanted killed. And that was all in New York. And
first of all, got away every time. In the summer
(10:30):
of nineteen nine, Watkins was the head of security for
a Charlotte strip club and, at six ft three and
two eighty six pounds, an occasional construction worker and bodyguard.
He mostly went by the nickname New York, a reference
to his Brooklyn birthplace and also an alias for a
man who often solved problems with violence. He was just
(10:52):
the sort of man Caruth was allegedly looking for. The
two first met by chance in at a strip club.
Watkins was watching the door, Caruth was watching the stage.
So you met him at the script club the first time.
I said strip club. I'm more or less watching for
(11:12):
any danger, says I want to run from her the police.
I wasn't impressed For me and the little guys. Watkins
did need money, though. By June, Watkins had started washing
and detailing Caruth's red Mercedes c okay and his white
(11:33):
Ford expedition. For a professional athlete, Karuth was building a
questionable network of friends, among them a drug dealer and
a man already convicted of five felonies. It was a
far cry from his protected childhood, where he lived under
his mother's watchful eye. Watkins is now fifty eight. As
we sat in that spartan visitation room at Central Prison,
(11:56):
the hitman rocked back and forth trying to get comfortable.
He suffers from hip disease that forces him to walk
with a cane. I was struck, but how far he
had veered from a path? He says began with the
Cub Scouts and shoveling snow for his elderly neighbors in Brooklyn.
Every time I did a good I wasn't board all
(12:22):
that has embraced me like this, because that's start, and
then I'm started moving bad. After a few weeks of
doing odd jobs for Kruth, Watkins says he got a
phone call from the football player Caruth asked to meet
him in a nearby U haul parking lot. Caruth had
(12:43):
a very different type of job to discuss me girl
and make a board a baby. I said, I don't
need a girl. I met. The assignment would pay three
thousand dollars up front and another their three thousand dollars
on completion, though Karuth could only get three hundred dollars
(13:04):
on the spot, and he he said, I'm closed and
the rest After that meeting Watkins says he stalked Sharika
on and off for months. He got to know her
black BMW with the tinted windows. He found out where
(13:26):
she lived and where she parked her car. Still, Watkins
didn't do the job. He told me he did feel
some hesitation about hurting a woman, but in the sadistic
calculus of this transaction, he was mostly trying to figure
out how to get away once he had hurt Sharika,
but she and Karuth were still locked in their tumultuous relationship.
(13:47):
Sharika kept insisting she was going to have his baby,
and Watkins says Carruth grew impatient. So well, your friend said,
(14:08):
I if you're a liar, I was. Watkins would later
testify that Caruth made other grim proposals to In one,
he suggested that he takes Sharika out to dinner and
partner a dumpster behind the restaurant. Watkins, he said, could
(14:30):
wait nearby and attack her there. During this time, she
was doing a lot of journaling here, Sandra. Again, he
invited her back out. She talks about going to this
um restaurant and him parking near a dumpster and going
into the restaurant. And leaving her out there for a
long period of time. Van Brett Watkins was supposed to
(14:54):
come up and get her from the van and beat
her up and make her lose the baby. Well, then
that didn't happen. So during one of these next times,
Ray came to the house to stay and he retrieved
a key from Sharika and gave it to Van Brett Watkins,
and he was supposed to go into the home and
(15:17):
knock her down the steps or whatever, and he didn't
do that either. By late summer of Caruth joined the
Panthers training camp in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but his mind
was often elsewhere, always sensitive to criticism. He was unclear
(15:39):
where he fit in on the team after barely playing
the previous season due to injury, and he told others
that some teammates made fun of his predicament with Sharika,
and he talked about it like in once in a
while and we've seen each other. Here says something about
it like she's still pregnant, and people on the team sandasta.
This is Kennedy again. In this recording, made two weeks
(16:02):
after Shariko was shot, He's being interviewed by Charlotte Mecklenburg
police officer Tony Rice. The interview was key in helping
detectives understand what happened that night, saying that she was
a whole and he can't be having a maybe about
most strip and stuff like that with no car and he,
(16:26):
in the face of mockery, Caruth's desperation metastasized into vengeance.
The Bacon boarding killed by November, Sharika Adams was thirty
weeks pregnant. As Kruth was plotting her death, it seems
(16:48):
he found it most advantageous to get closer to her.
This November was going to be their first real date
as a couple, again what she wrote in her diary,
and she was ecstatic about going on this date with
him while she was pregnant. I had seen her really
(17:12):
every day since Mother's Day except that day because she
she was like, Mom, I've got to go and get ridy,
i gotta get my outfit just right. We're going on
a real date. We're getting back together. And so she
was so excited about doing that. And I thought Karuth
(17:35):
had planned to take Sharika that night to a Denzel
Washington Angelina Jolie film called The Bone Collector, a movie
about a serial killer playing at the Regal Cinemas in
South Charlotte. Watkins and Kennedy would later testify that in
the matter of a few hours before the movie began,
(17:56):
Karuth hatched a new plot. Remember it was a Monday,
and we're just kind of start from there and tell
us what happened. I want you to be honest with us. Okay,
here's Kennedy again. Around seven or eight, Rank Carruth had
called me in um. He asked me what was I doing.
I was like nothing and uh. He asked me if
(18:20):
I had a hoop deal, if I had a car
that he could get that night. And I told him
that I had a maximum and he told me to
come over his house, He explaining, so we all know
be on the same sheet of music. What do you know? What?
Who need to be? UM? A card is not flashy,
it doesn't stand out. Kennedy and his friend Stanley Abraham
(18:42):
drove to Kruth's house. Soon Watkins also arrived. Abraham was
a starstruck teenager at the time, and he gave himself
a tour of the NFL player's home. Actually, he was
making phone calls to friends while the three of them
were moving all around the planet outside, down the hall
and in the Cruce's bedroom, etcetera. He was sitting in
(19:04):
the living room. Crew didn't even really know who he was.
This is Abraham's lawyer, Jim Grondquist, And I think there
was sometimes when Kruth was talking to Van Bred Watkins
and sometimes to Michael and to them together, and Stanley
was just oblivious to this whole thing because he's playing
the I'm in this famous guy's house, called friends, just
looking and let them know that he's hanging out in
(19:26):
a real cool dude's house and was real happy about it.
Sharika would soon be arriving at Caruth's house for their
date and a hasty plan took shape. Come outside outside,
I was asking him, you know what he needed to
call for? And he asked me, do I know where
he can get a gun at? And at that time
(19:47):
I told him yes, I knew. A guy was setting
a third eight and he was sending up for like
a hundred dollars. I was like, why why you wanted
a gun? And he was like, want um get Shaika
because she was pregnant and he want to pay no,
five thousands semi dollars a month and tire support. He
said that, um, he had a friend that was gonna
(20:08):
do it, and I told him that I didn't want
to do it. I was like, I don't want to,
you know, I don't have no part. And I said,
because I mean, anything that happened, I could get killed anything.
And he was like, something still can happen to you regardless,
because you know about it. Kennedy said. Kruth gave him
five CRISP twenty dollar bills and told him to go
by the gun during the time Caruth was at the
(20:29):
movies with Sharika. After that he should wait for Kruth's call.
It wasn't exactly a tidy scheme, and when Sharika arrived
at Caruth's house sometime around nine pm, everything seemed off.
So she called me on the phone and said, Mom,
you know, I don't even know why I'm here because
he's got all these people in the house and he's
(20:52):
been down there secretly on the phone, and I think
he's talking to another woman. So I'm telling her. I said, well,
you have to go to work tomorrow, so you tell
him you're not going to go to the movie. And
I could hear him in the background saying no, no, no,
we're getting ready to go right now. And uh so
(21:12):
at that point, that's where she decided, she made her
decision that she was going to go ahead and stay
and go on with him, and that that was the
last conversation I had with him. M The couple left
for the movie in Caruth's car. The three other men
(21:34):
had left the house already, Kennedy driving his Maxima with
Abraham and the front passenger seat. Watkins sat in the
back behind Abraham. Only later with the men in the
front seat, learned watkins real name. He was using his
dead brother's name William as an alias, but that night
they just called him New York when they said anything
at all, and mostly they didn't. Kennedy, I need you
(21:57):
to come with me where I'm going. Here's Abra Ham's
lawyer again. And he reluctantly agreed to do that, but
new once he got in the car, once he met
Dan Brett Watkins, he knew he was in for a
lot of trouble. The plan was that after the movie,
Kruth would bring Sharika back to his house to pick
up her car, and then he would create an excuse
(22:17):
to invite himself over to her place for the night,
and follow Kennedy drove the men to meet his contact,
and there he bought a Charter Arms thirty eight Special.
The chamber held five bullets. What did you get? Some bullets?
(22:40):
And it was a good lock on the gun. And
the dollars you paid him was at the same hunt
Ray gave you. Yes, I held that gun not long ago.
It resides in a plastic bag in an evidence box
in a Charlotte courthouse. It's silver with a black handle,
and it's small, all with a two inch snub notes.
(23:02):
Although rusty and extremely light, the thirty eight Special still
feels dangerous. The gun wasn't loaded, of course, under official supervision.
I pulled the trigger to see if it still worked.
The gun responded with a menacing click. But that's how
we went to the parking lot and William told me
(23:27):
to pull us out of Sewa. Kennedy pulled up outside
a Chick fil A in the nearby Stone Crests shopping
center and he duped bullets and I think the Boston
the bullets was in. He yes, he didn't need them all.
Do you know how many he can? Well? The couple
watched the movie, Kennedy, Abraham, and Watkins drove aimlessly around
(23:51):
South Charlotte, stopping at a supermarket and then at a
gas station so Watkins good buy a beer. At that point,
only two of the three men understood what was about
to unfold, and we went toward gast. I got can
were so I tried. When Watkins went in to buy
(24:14):
his beer, Kennedy told his best friend about the plan.
I told Stanley that, um, they want me to um
follow him when he lead the movies, and he wanted
a guy that was right with us to shoot the
girl that he had pregnant. He was like, take me home.
He was like, why you got me? And I was like,
(24:35):
just by that time, we was coming back out the
store and I was just so scared. Didn't I didn't
say nothing else. Kruth called Kennedy at PM to say
the movie it ended. He and Sharika drove back to
his house to retrieve her car. They went in one
together in the movie theater and went back to his home.
(24:56):
So that's where the plot changed it. Now I'm going
to stay at your ho here's Sandra again. Ray realized
that he had a appointment. He had injured his leg
or something, so he had a therapy appointment. It was
going to be easier to make the appointment from her house,
so we'll just drive your car back and my car
(25:18):
instead of riding together. At twelve nineteen am on November six,
Karruth called Kennedy again to say they were leaving his
house and to get ready. Watkins snapped on a pair
of surgical gloves he had carried with him. Karruth was
driving alone in this white Ford expedition. Sharika followed in
her black BMW. Michael Kennedy pulled behind Sharika and his
(25:42):
gold niece on Maxima, Stanley Abraham alongside him in the
passenger seat, with van Brett Watkins in the back seat
behind Abraham. Carruth pulled onto Ray Road. He passed the
enormous crown shaped Calvary Church locally known as the Big
Pink Church, at the intersection of Highway fifty one. Ray
(26:03):
Road narrowed to two lanes. After that, it was dark
and mostly secluded. Occasional lights came from housing developments, but
those were often blocked by the dozens of pine trees
lining the road When they went over, and they went
down in a dip all right, road, um pulled behind
Sorika cor Ray. Stop He's in the front season back
(26:27):
and there's no stop sign. Stop he just stop. Will
was like pull up beside him and then Michael Kennedy
way to now I'm putting me on the right hand
back process they either work both cars. Did they come
to a complete stop in the old fool side of
the younger with black? I said, shoot lower park? How
(26:53):
many times? Have really proud of this gun? And it's
win and then I on everybody involves, I love the
rag rove, I'm join the call and I'm the window
tells and shoot drown? Where did raise cargo? Ray was
(27:22):
looking in the new and he s Caruth and his
defenders dispute much of what you've just heard, or at
least the motivations behind it. Well, you know, I have
never believed that he hired Van Brett, Watkins or Michael
Kennedy to harm Sharika in any way. I mean, I
(27:46):
don't know if he was innocent in the sense that
he never did anything wrong, but he he hadn't hired
these people to kill Sharik Adams. This is David Rudolph,
who would later become Caruth's lead defense attorney, Carruth authorized
Rudolph to speak to us on his behalf, and the
lawyer is the only person I interviewed to have actually
(28:06):
been face to face with Kruth in the past few weeks.
I did go see him, ye Uh, you know, we
talked about the case and about what had actually happened. Uh.
You know, he's fine with me talking with you, Caruth
through Rudolph acknowledged for this project that he was there
in the moments just before Sharika was shot. Looking in
(28:28):
his rear view mirror, Kruth saw Kennedy's car with Watkins
in the back seat, pull up beside Sharika's and then Carruth,
scared that Watkins was coming for him, took off. He
didn't call for help then or later Karuth fled, leaving
Sharika and his unborn son at Watkins mercy for nearly
(28:48):
two decades. Caruth's defenders argued that he was not present
for the shooting or the lead up to it. Ray,
did you conspire to murder Sharrika Adams and your unborn son? No?
I did not, as Kruth himself off did. During this
two thousand one interview with CNN s I the only
in depth interview Karuth has ever done about the events
of that night. I was not there. I didn't see
(29:09):
the shooting. I didn't hear any shots. I can't testify
anything that happens to re conray Rode. Now that's changed,
But Rudolph told me Kruth's presence on Ray Road that
night had nothing to do with a contract killing. There
was no quote planning for this until the very day
that it all happened. And that's just that's just not
(29:30):
how a murder for hire takes place. I mean they
even had to go and get a gun that day.
Uh so, uh, the whole thing just didn't make sense
to me. Rudolf and his client maintained that in Caruth
had agreed to finance a major interstate drug shipment from Georgia.
Rudolph told me the shooting of Serrika Adams and attempted
(29:53):
murder of Karruth's unborn son was violent retribution. The NFL
player claims he backed out of his promised to pay
tens of thousands of dollars for a truckload of marijuana
Watkins had delivered from Atlanta. What I believe happened and
what Ray clearly has told me from day one is
(30:14):
that he agreed to fund a marijuana deal that Van
Brett Watkins brought up a load of marijuana from Atlanta
on the front, as they say, in other words, Vambrett
Watkins was a middleman sort of. So he got a
load of marijuana that was in the trunk of his car.
(30:36):
He brought it up to Charlotte, and Ray was supposed
to provide the money to him to pay for that marijuana,
and he would then sell it and Ray would get
some profit. And Michael Kennedy was a part of that. Uh.
And on the day that it happened, Van Brett Watkins
showed up with the load of marijuana and Ray backed out.
(30:59):
You know, I think there were probably a lot of
reasons for that, and not at leasta, which was that
he was a professional football player, and he realized that
what he was doing, uh, presumably to do a favor
for Van Brett Watkins because he certainly didn't need the money,
was just stupid. And so he backed out. And now
here's Van Brett Watkins in Charlotte with a load of
(31:21):
marijuana that he hasn't paid for, that he can't pay
for and they had a huge argument uh there at
Ray's house. Rudolph agreed in this interview, which again was
fully authorized by Kruth, that Sharika and Kruth went to
the movies that November night. The attorney also agreed that Kennedy, Abraham,
and Watkins drove around town during that time, and that
(31:44):
Karuth called Kennedy when the movie was over, But Rudolph
says the call was for a different reason. Van Brett Watkins.
And you've seen him. Uh. He's a scary guy and
a very unstable guy, and he was threatening Ray. Uh
And so Ray ended up going to the movies with Sharika.
(32:07):
He was very worried about what Van Brett Watkins was
gonna do because Van Brett knew where he lived. Uh.
And so he and Sharika went to the movies and
he called Kennedy at some point to ask Kennedy, what's
going on with Van Brett? You know? Is is he
(32:27):
calmed down? Kennedy was like, no, he's not calmed down
at all. Uh. He is hot when you really think
about it, why it makes a lot more sense if
he's calling Kennedy to check on Watkins, then to call
Kennedy to say, okay, we're on. I mean if if
they hit his on, then they just follow him out
(32:49):
of the movie theater. The couple returned to Caruth's home
and picked up Sharika's car. The Rudolph disputes that change
of plans was part of a criminal conspiracy. Instead, he
told me, watkins anger and instability made Caruth fear for
their safety and he thought it best for them to
sleep elsewhere that night. You know. At that point, Uh,
(33:09):
the plan sort of changed in terms of where they
would go. Ray was in front of Sharika driving, Sharika
was behind him, And I guess Van Brett Watkins had
been driving around with Kennedy looking for because he knew
that they were going to the movies. Um, and Kennedy
knew they were going to the movies, so he was
driving around looking for Ray's vehicle. Soon everyone agrees Kennedy's
(33:34):
Maxima caught up with Carruth and Sharika on Ray Road,
but Rudolph insists that watkins active violence does not implicate
Caruth in a murder plot. At some point on Ray Road,
Ray saw Van Brett Watkins pull out and Um, what
he says, uh, and this is sort of new information.
(33:55):
I guess is he packed and when he saw Vambrett
Watkins pull out and pull up next to Sharika, he
took off because he was afraid that Vambrett Watkins was
coming to get him. Instead, Vambrett Watkins shoots Sharika. Uh.
(34:18):
And then Ray suddenly finds himself in a situation where
you know, he's he's been there, he left, uh, you know,
and what's he gonna do? I mean, he knows these guys,
and so he's sort of panicked for the next few days.
Rudolph told me that Kruth had bad associates that had
(34:40):
made dumb mistakes, that had fled the scene of what
was about to be a violent crime and never called
to report it. It sounded to me like this alternate
theory boiled down to eight words. Karuth was no killer.
He was a coward. So that's the truth, as far
as I know, and as far as Ray has told me,
It makes perfect sense to me about what happened. Ray
(35:04):
doesn't make excuses for what he did in terms of uh,
you know, dealing with Van Brett Watkins. Kennedy was a
little bit of a sort of a small time drug dealer,
at the time, and he doesn't make excuses for hanging
out with the wrong people. You know, what he is
adamant about is that he never stopped his car, quite
(35:25):
the reverse. He was scared and he took off, and
he's not particularly proud of that. Uh. You know, it's
not sort of a heroic thing to do. Uh, you know,
big football player, you know, running, But that's what he did. So,
I mean, I don't know that he can really explain it, um,
(35:47):
other than the fact that he was what twenty two
years old at the time. Three, yeah, maybe twenty four.
You know, think think back to the stupid things you
did when when you with twenty four. You don't have
to and you certainly don't have to admit it. Uh,
but but I think we can all say that we
did some pretty stupid things. So in that sense, he
(36:09):
is responsible. It's just it's not a murder case. It's
morally responsible. Regardless of the version you believe. Kruth sped
off in his suv. Watkins had fired all five bullets.
He told me, Abraham began laughing hysterically, and Kennedy panicked.
And the reason why I didn't get on the call
(36:35):
and turn around turnarround and go back and speed. If
I don't think he knew that bullets, so you used
up all your bullets that was in and anyone shots
for at all, That's when he really go one to
(36:57):
stop laughing and the other one stopping. One thing Abraham
did stress to me during our phone call is that
he strongly disputes watkins account of him laughing after Sharika
was shot. He said he was quiet and all he
could think about at that moment was that he wished
he could be anywhere else besides that car. A car
(37:20):
Kennedy was steering through Charlotte's back roads, a car that
was eerily quiet until Watkins spoke up. So we got
to the to the light. The light was read, so
I made a right and then I made a left.
And when I made a left, um he told me
to stop the car. And that's when I heard him
throwing stuff out the cars. I gotta get rid of
(37:41):
his stuff. This is Kennedy again, the gun and the
gun lock, and he has some good I heard gloves
he threw out the window, but I didn't see him
though I was. I just heard. I didn't know that
Watkins tried to throw the gun into a creek, but
he missed. Kennedy drove him back to his truck, where
wat Can screwubbed himself down with gasoline strip off the
(38:03):
sweatshirt the base and I got guess way from my
detail shop, my mobile detail shop, and I worked myself there.
But he hadn't finished the job. Karuth hired him to
do one. Thank you police, fir attic. Where are you
(38:24):
at Avery Church? At how free church? Man? You're on
right aware? And at least one person in that getaway
car knew. It was the first time you realize that Sharika,
she's not dead. Think she was dead? Didn't night So
(38:48):
look back, I've seen you like her preat lights like
blink on. So I didn't think she was dead and
the miracle was about to begin. Matic she's been shot.
She's pregnant. All I can get out of road? No, no, no,
I'm clear. Okay, what more shot at? I don't know?
(39:15):
All right, man, We're gonna get diamous on the way
to you. Okay, alright man. I'm Scott Fowler and this
podcast is produced by Jeff Signer and Rachel Wise and
(39:37):
Davin Coburn at McClatchy studios. Find lots more about this
case at Charlotte Observer dot com slash Caruth, and for
just thirty dollars, subscribe now to a full year of
The Observer's award winning sports coverage at Charlotte Observer dot
com slash sports pass. In chapter three, the Race to
save two lives and track down the shooter, Sharika was
(40:00):
in very bad shape when she came in. She had
lost a lot of blood. It was the hospital on
the line, and I just remember dropping to my knees
as well, and she couldn't talk, but she could write.
One of the questions was do you think Ray was involved?
And she just made a question mark. What we knew
at the time was what Sharika said on the novel
one call. But he didn't know that. I knew that.
(40:22):
I immediately decided, oh my god, I gotta call Ray
because he didn't know what's happened.
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