Pressly's mother gives emotional testimony

LITTLE ROCK — Television anchorwoman Anne Pressly reached weakly toward her mother after a brutal attack, her last attempt to communicate before falling into a coma and dying five days later.

Patti Cannady was visiting Little Rock to celebrate her daughter’s bit role in the movie “W” and to see her only child serve as master of ceremonies at a governor’s mansion event. But Cannady discovered her 26-year-old daughter bruised and bloodied after she didn’t answer her daily wake-up call.

“Anne, momma’s here. Momma’s here,” Cannady said Wednesday, recalling for jurors in the trial of the man accused of killing Pressly how she tried to aid her daughter on Oct. 20, 2008.

Curtis Vance, 29, is charged with capital murder, rape and burglary. He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could face execution.

Cannady said Pressly didn’t answer any of the 40 or so wake-up calls she made, nor any of those by Pressly’s stepfather, Guy. Cannady drove to her daughter’s home and found the front door locked — but the back door ajar.

“I was calling her name the whole time. Anne, Anne. Anne, Anne,” Cannady said.

She found Pressly lying on a bed on her left side, “in what I would say was almost a fetal position,” moaning and struggling to breathe. “I absolutely could not take the scene in.”

As she called out to her, her daughter raised an arm weakly, then was still.

Cannady said she ran out the front door, screaming for help. After first dialing 411 instead of 911, she reached emergency operators who asked her to place something on Pressly’s open wounds. After an ambulance arrived, Cannady prayed in the bedroom — closing her eyes and lifting her head. When she opened her eyes, she saw blood on the ceiling.

“That’s how horrific ... her attack was,” she told jurors. “She was beyond recognition.”

Pressly and her mother, who was in town from South Carolina, had visited at a friend’s house hours earlier. As Pressly left for her bungalow — a home that has since been torn down — the anchorwoman rolled down her window and “I kissed her on the head.

“I told her ‘I love you’ and she said ‘I love you, too,”’ said Cannady.

Under brief cross-examination by defense lawyer Katherine Streett, Cannady said her daughter had never had a boyfriend.

The emergency room doctor on duty at St. Vincent Infirmary the morning of the attack said she didn’t recognize the blonde TV personality when she was brought in.

“She was full of blood. She looked like she had red hair” because of the amount of blood, Dr. Therese McBride testified.

McBride told jurors the front of Pressly’s skull and jaw had been fractured so severely that she was unrecognizable as a human.

“All of the bones in her middle face and mandible were broken,” she testified, describing the difficulties of placing a breathing tube in.

Pressly had a faint pulse when brought to the hospital but monitors picked up no vital signs. Her lungs only gurgled and there was no oxygen in her blood, McBride said.

In opening statements, Prosecutor Larry Jegley told jurors police came to see Vance as a suspect through a rape examination kit used while paramedics were trying to save Pressly’s life.

“We will present evidence that will put Curtis Vance in Anne’s bedroom,” Jegley said.

Defense lawyer Lott Rolfe said police and prosecutors rushed the case and that Vance was innocent.

“Curtis Vance is wrongfully accused of a homicide he did not commit,” Rolfe said.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza ruled last month prosecutors could play for jurors a series of tapes that include Vance admitting to the crime, but that include different accounts. The defense team says the interviews were conducted improperly.

Vance faces a separate rape charge in his hometown of Marianna, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Police say DNA evidence collected there linked Vance to the Little Rock attack.