A 69-year-old Jacksonville woman accused of trying to hire a hit man to kill the father of her granddaughter, whose parents are engaged in a tense custody dispute, was ordered Thursday to remain in jail until her federal charges are resolved.
At the end of a hearing in which defense attorney Molly Sullivan sought the pretrial release of Jeri Dianna Tarter and the government opposed it on the grounds that she is a danger to the community, U.S. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere sided with Assistant U.S. Attorney John Ray White.
Sullivan, of the federal public defender's office, presented testimony from one of Tarter's daughters, Elizabeth, who said her mother could stay at the daughter's 13-acre home in the country near Malvern, where she wouldn't have a vehicle and where telephone reception is spotty.
The daughter also testified that she was never aware of a plan by her mother to hire a hit man, but that "I know we had talked about hiring a private eye."
White argued that Tarter's motive for wanting another daughter's ex-boyfriend killed "continues to exist, and will continue to exist whether she's in Jacksonville or Malvern."
He said the grandmother was "committed" to a plan to hire someone to kill the man, who lives in Ward in Lonoke County, as evidenced by her attempts to hire at least two people to carry out the murder, her readiness to obtain cash to hire an FBI agent posing as a hit man, an urgent deadline she set for the agent, and a text she sent him with the intended victim's street address.
Robert Bell, a Little Rock police officer assigned to the FBI's GETROCK Task Force, testified that when he met with Tarter the afternoon of Oct. 20 in a Walmart parking lot in Jacksonville, communicating through the driver's-side windows of their vehicles, which were parked side by side, Tarter discussed a variety of ways to make the murder look like an accident.
The FBI said it had been alerted to Tarter's plans by another man who said she wanted him to finish off the man, with whom her daughter had a child though they were never married. That other man, who wasn't identified, instead returned Tarter's call while the FBI listened in, and offered to connect her with someone else who would be "sympathetic" to her plight, authorities said.
That other man, whom authorities said Tarter readily agreed to meet with, was Bell, working undercover.
Bell testified that Tarter suggested he could drown the man, or plant drugs on a scale nearby to make it look like a drug deal gone wrong, "and she asked if I knew what potassium chloride was, because he is such a large fellow it wouldn't seem strange if he had a heart attack."
He said Tarter, who sat listening in the courtroom in a wheelchair, wearing a Pulaski County jail uniform with her long gray hair tied back into a ponytail, also told him that she would do it herself if she were 80 pounds lighter. Sullivan later said Tarter had been using the wheelchair since undergoing an electrocardiogram earlier in the week because she was so upset after her arrest. Sullivan noted that the woman has had quadruple bypass heart surgery.
Bell said Tarter told him that she didn't want the murder to be carried out in Lonoke County because her son lives there, because he has guns despite a prohibition against owning them, and because she "was afraid he would be the No. 1 suspect."
"We met on a Tuesday, and she advised she wanted it done prior to the coming weekend because it was going to be his weekend to have the child," Bell testified. He said the granddaughter is nearly 4 years old.
Bell said Tarter pulled up a picture of the girl's father on her cellphone and texted it and a picture of the man's truck to him, and "described where he lived, even to the point of some boots on a fence and a dog next door. She urged me to drive by that day."
White asked about a reference to a pistol in another FBI agent's affidavit that led to an arrest warrant being issued for Tarter last week. Bell said, "She said we -- I assumed her family -- are crack shots."
He said Tarter described how she was once driving down a road when a car pulled up next to her as if the occupants planned to rob her, and she reached down and grabbed her .45-caliber pistol and fired into the other vehicle, which had several occupants, and then it crashed into a ditch.
Bell said that according to Tarter, she backed up, saying, "They're not going to tell on me," but then a passenger in her vehicle "freaked out," so she abandoned her plan to drive up to the crashed vehicle and shoot again.
"She said she never heard anything about it, but just to be on the safe side, she got rid of the truck," Bell testified.
In discussing money, Bell testified, Tarter first offered to pay him $1,500 but then agreed to pay him $2,000, starting with $500 cash to allow him to buy a "clean gun" that couldn't be traced to her or him and would "ultimately end up in the river."
Bell said he was pretending to be from out of town and that he offered to stay overnight and get the cash in the morning. But, he said, "she looked at her phone and said, 'I think I can get it, but it will only leave me $40 in my account.'"
He said she then drove to a nearby ATM, got the cash and drove back to Walmart, where she handed it over to Bell.
Bell said that after Tarter was arrested last Friday, officers searched her home and found $1,500 in cash in an envelope lying on her nightstand, as well as a .22-caliber pistol in her bedroom that was confiscated.
He said officers found a rifle in a room used by her daughter, the little girl's mother, but didn't take it.
Under cross-examination by Sullivan, Bell acknowledged that Tarter told him "about the abuse of her daughter and granddaughter."
He also said that when he first asked if she wanted him to scare the girl's father, "she said he could not be scared."
Bell said Tarter referred to the man as her former son-in-law, but officers later discovered that Tarter's daughter and the man had never been married.
In arguing for Tarter's release, Sullivan said the criminal case "has so negatively impacted her daughter's custody case" that she was sure Tarter would behave if freed from jail.
Deere wasn't convinced. She said: "The government's case is pretty solid here. If this were just a case of a grandmother trying to protect her grandchild and child, it would be a one-off, but she had a pretty lengthy criminal history" of property crimes.
Noting the testimony that described the lengths Tarter was said to have gone to in an effort to have the girl's father killed, Deere cited Sullivan's argument that Tarter would probably stay out of trouble to avoid making the custody case worse.
"At this point," she said, "you can also argue that she's got nothing else to lose."
She added: "I don't think there's any way I can release her from custody. I understand she's older and has health problems, but the situation is of her own making."
Tarter's case is expected to be presented to a federal grand jury for potential indictment.