By Mrs. Eileen Hunter — about the author. Posted August 8, 2026. Last updated August 9, 2026.
This page reports what appears in filed, unsealed records of this prosecution — the trial transcript, the clerk’s minutes, the exhibits, and the published appellate opinion. Where we state a conclusion of our own, it is set apart under “Our view.” Where a court has made a finding, we quote the court.
The night: March 10, 2001
Anthony Rodgers was opening a new nightclub in Monroe, Louisiana that night. As the club filled, he sent Douglas Simons out for small bills to make change. Simons tried two gas stations and came back empty. Rodgers then sent Levi “Chico” Williams back to the house they shared at 221 Greenwood Drive, in the Tanglewood Heights subdivision, to get money from a safe.
Two eleven-year-old boys, Chavez Staten and Jeremy Staten, were sleeping over at the house that night. They were frequent overnight guests and called Rodgers their godfather.
Williams did not return and did not answer his phone. Rodgers sent Simons and sixteen-year-old Henry Staten to check. Henry Staten unlocked the front door with his key and found his brother and cousin on the floor, both shot in the head. Levi Williams was found in a back bedroom, also shot in the head. All three died. (Trial record; opening statements, trial transcript.)
Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office deputies David Godwin and John Spires were first to respond. The deadbolt on the front door was in the locked position but the door facing was damaged as if forced. Investigators recovered live and spent .22 caliber and .45 caliber cartridge cases. The spent .45 casings matched a box of live .45 cartridges found in Williams’s own desk. The bedroom where Williams was found appeared ransacked. (Trial record.)
Officers also recovered from behind a bathroom wall a small safe, three rifles, a set of keys, digital scales, and a bag of what appeared to be marijuana. Captain Harris testified that 221 Greenwood was “a major supplier of marijuana in that area.” Harold Black, who had lived at the house and moved out roughly two months earlier, told investigators he left “because of the drugs” and agreed there was “a good amount of drugs in the house.” Asked whether the killings were done to get drugs or money, Black answered: “Yes, yes, yes I do… I believe whoever went in that house… had to be somebody that knew us, knew what was going on, and yes, they did go there for drugs.” (Trial testimony of Captain Harris; Harold Black statement.)
The investigation stalls
The scene was processed. Doorknobs were dusted; no usable prints. The perimeter was examined for tire tracks and footprints; nothing. Officers canvassed the neighborhood and no resident provided assistance. Captain Harris testified: “I was running into a brick wall because nobody would talk.” Asked whether he had offered financial incentive for information, he answered: “Yes sir. Cash money.” The Sheriff’s Office offered reward money in addition to a $2,000 Crime Stoppers reward. (Trial testimony of Captain Harris; bond hearing transcript.)
There was, however, at least one other name in the record. Douglas Simons — one of the two men who found the children — testified that he had told police he heard on the street that a man known as “Fats” or “Fat” might have been involved. (Trial testimony of Douglas Simons, Bates Hunter 012613; recorded statement to Sgt. Medaries, March 11, 2001.) When defense counsel first asked whether “Fat might have been responsible for these crimes,” the State objected and the court sustained the objection; the lead reached the jury only in the narrower form — what Mr. Simons had told police.
On March 17, 2001, a week after the killings, Monroe Police recovered a .22 firearm from the median off Highway 165 near Hadley Street. It was traced to Randal Smith, who said he had given it to his son, Corey Smith. Corey Smith reported the gun had been stolen from his truck. Testing produced “no latent [fingerprints] on the weapon that would connect it to Tony Hunter.” (Trial record.)
Two days after the homicides, Emma Rodgers — Anthony Rodgers’s sister — told police she had seen a red extended-cab truck with dark tinted windows driving slowly on Greenwood Drive that night, with one of a pair of stacked lower headlamps out. She said she had never seen it in the area before. On March 26, 2001 she told police she had later seen a man she knew as “Trigger” in a new red truck at the gas station where she worked, and believed it was the same vehicle. (Trial testimony of Emma Rodgers.)
A year later, on March 11, 2002, the local paper ran “Triple homicide unsolved a year later.” The article reported the victims’ names, where they were found, and that a .22 caliber handgun was the murder weapon. A major with the Sheriff’s Office was quoted saying leads “have totally dropped off.” (Newspaper account, discussed in the record.)
Who Tony Hunter is
The man the State would put on trial for these killings was, at the time, thirty-one years old, a father of five, and employed as a welder’s helper at James Machine Works, a Monroe machine shop. Those facts are not in dispute; the defense stated them in its opening and the State did not contest them. (Defense opening statement, trial transcript.)
He was born in Monroe in 1972 and raised by his mother. In his youth he ran track — a sprinter fast enough, by his own account, to imagine competing professionally. (Author’s account; see the book.) By March 2001 he was living with Stephanie Stokes and their children and working full weeks at the shop. His supervisor, Ronald Davidson, testified that Mr. Hunter worked a full week during the week of the homicides, March 5–10, 2001, and a full 39-hour week the following week. (Trial testimony of Ronald Davidson.)
Where he was that night
On March 7, 2001, three days before the killings, Mr. Hunter leased a red 2000 Ford F-150 extended cab from Enterprise to get to and from work. That same night, an OPSO sergeant stopped him in it at 10:47 p.m., in the Tanglewood subdivision, and cited him for speeding and an open container. He was not cited for a malfunctioning headlight. (Louisiana Uniform Traffic Ticket #5657208; trial testimony. R. 2081.)
At trial the State argued this stop showed Mr. Hunter “casing” the house he would later be accused of robbing. (Prosecution closing argument.)
On the afternoon of March 10, Mr. Hunter took his young daughter to a neighborhood birthday party — given, according to the offense report, by Florica Green for anyone with a March birthday, and chaperoned by Brenda Graves. Interviewed on May 8, 2001, Graves told investigators she remembered Mr. Hunter at the party; that the only person she saw him with was “a young black female, 11 or 12” who “may have been Hunter’s daughter”; that the last time she saw him was “around 7:00 to 7:30 p.m.”; and that she was “positive Tony Hunter was not at her residence… after 7:30 p.m.” The party “lasted until well after midnight and Tony Hunter never showed back up.” (Brenda Graves interview, May 8, 2001, OPSO offense report, Case No. 1-01-003253.)
In its opening statement the defense told the jury it would prove Mr. Hunter was at that party — but Brenda Graves was never called, and the jury never heard her account. (Defense opening statement; trial record.)
Stephanie Stokes — the mother of Mr. Hunter’s four youngest children — swears he was home the rest of that night. In a sworn affidavit she states that he came home while it was still light out; that Porcia stayed over to help prepare for their son Tony Jr.’s birthday the next day; that the television was on because he “liked to watch the news at 10 o’clock”; and that she can say “with complete certainty that Tony was at home the whole of the evening… He never left,” the two-bedroom apartment being too small to miss anyone coming or going. (Affidavit of Stephanie Stokes, December 19, 2022, filed as an exhibit to the 2022 application for post-conviction relief.)
The jury never heard it. Ms. Stokes swears she gave this account to Officer Royce Toney during the investigation; that he “kept re-directing our conversation to imply that Tony might have left”; that she “never saw Officer Toney make any kind of notes”; and that after she would not change her account, “even under threat,” he stopped contacting her. She swears she was never called as an alibi witness and “had no idea that the statement I gave was never passed along, until recently when Tony’s lawyer asked about an alibi.” (Stokes affidavit.)
How the focus shifted to him
By late April, investigators had turned back to Mr. Hunter, and the leased truck became the focus. After Mr. Hunter did not return the F-150, the Monroe Police Department entered it into the national crime database as an unauthorized use, and OPSO investigator David Harris asked the Enterprise branch manager for permission to take and process the truck “for any physical evidence in this case” — the triple homicide. The manager agreed. (OPSO offense report, Narrative #26.)
On May 4, 2001, Louisiana State Police stopped the F-150 on Winnsboro Road; Lamont Smiley was driving and Mr. Hunter was a passenger, along with John Graves. Smiley was arrested; Mr. Hunter was arrested for unauthorized use of a movable; Graves was released. The truck was towed to the crime scene bay at the Ouachita Correctional Center and processed. (OPSO offense report; trial testimony.) Its forensic testing did not connect Mr. Hunter to the killings — see no physical evidence.
The arrest arose from a payment failure, not a theft. The arrest affidavit states that Mr. Hunter rented the F-150 on March 7; that when Enterprise attempted to charge his credit card for a second month’s rental, the charge “would not go through due to the status of the card”; and that, with the vehicle still out and Mr. Hunter not located, it was entered as an unauthorized use. (Affidavit of Probable Cause for Arrest, City of Monroe, Case No. OLP-7641, May 4, 2001.)
After the arrest, Mr. Hunter was held not in general population but in a two-man isolation cell — and Christopher Wiggins, who would later testify that Mr. Hunter confessed, was housed in that cell with him for about two months. R. 2129, 2134. (See the jailhouse informants.)
On May 6, 2001, Mr. Hunter was interviewed at the Ouachita Correctional Center. He waived Miranda, said he did not know Levi Williams or the two children, said he had never been to 221 Greenwood Drive, denied any involvement, and offered to take a polygraph. (Interview record; trial testimony.)
On June 12, 2001, KTVE aired stories reporting that Mr. Hunter had been arrested in another homicide and that investigators believed he was also involved in the Tanglewood killings. Statements against him began to arrive only after that broadcast — and after the reward money was publicized — where before, as Captain Harris testified, the investigation had run into “a brick wall.” Among those who came forward were the three men, incarcerated alongside Mr. Hunter, who would testify against him at trial: Vaccara Comanche gave a recorded statement on July 20, Christopher Wiggins on August 2, and Clarence Kennedy on August 20, 2001. (Broadcast records; recorded statements; trial testimony of Captain Harris.)
Nineteen months after the homicides — and more than a year after those statements — Mr. Hunter was indicted on October 17, 2002, for three counts of second-degree murder and one count of armed robbery. (Bill of Indictment, October 17, 2002.)
The nickname the jury heard
Throughout the trial the State referred to Mr. Hunter as “Trigger.” The prosecutor opened by telling the jury that “Tony Hunter, also known as ‘Trigger,’ is a cold, calculating, and to some extent a very smart murderer,” and returned to the nickname in closing. (Prosecution opening and closing statements, trial transcript.)
The nickname did work in the courtroom. Emma Rodgers testified she had seen a man she knew as “Trigger” driving a red truck, and the State’s theory tied that truck, and that nickname, to Mr. Hunter. On direct appeal, one of the assignments of error the Second Circuit addressed was the use of the nickname “Trigger” at trial; the court affirmed. (Trial testimony of Emma Rodgers; State v. Hunter, 907 So. 2d 200.)
The record also shows how the name became Mr. Hunter. Questioned by defense counsel about how the investigation developed a suspect, the investigating detective testified that the case “was initially identified as a person… called Trigger, who we identified as being Tony Hunter.” (Trial transcript, Bates Hunter 012765.) The equation of the street name with Mr. Hunter was, on the detective’s own words, a conclusion the investigators drew — not a name Mr. Hunter gave himself.
Mr. Hunter has said the name was never his to begin with — and the fuller story, told in the book, involves two men who shared a last name.
The court record first. In 1994, a man named Frankie Ray Hunter Jr. pled guilty to manslaughter in the same courthouse where Mr. Hunter would later stand trial. The Bill of Information charged that on or about March 5, 1994 he killed Glen D. Hawkins; he pled guilty on April 18, 1994 and was sentenced to twenty-one years at hard labor. (State v. Frankie Ray Hunter Jr., No. 94-F-0462, 4th Judicial District Court, Parish of Ouachita; minutes, April 18, 1994.) That conviction is a public record — and it is the only fact about him this page states in its own voice.
The account, as the book tells it. Frankie Ray Hunter lived about two blocks away, and — on Mr. Hunter’s and the author’s account — it was Frankie who was known on the street as “Trigga” because of that 1994 killing. Tony Hunter was incarcerated on an unrelated matter when that killing happened; the name was not then his. When he came home in 1995, people began to confuse the two men — same surname, same part of Monroe — and the name drifted onto Tony. He had done nothing to earn it, stopped correcting people over time, and by the 2004 trial it was simply what people called him. (Mr. Hunter’s and the author’s account; see the book.)
The author’s investigation has tried to locate Frankie Ray Hunter to put the account to him; to date it has not been able to find him.
To be explicit about what this section does and does not say: nothing here connects Frankie Ray Hunter to the Greenwood Drive homicides. No one has ever alleged that, and neither do we. His 1994 conviction, cited to the record above, is the only fact about him stated in our own voice; the nickname account is Mr. Hunter’s and the author’s, labeled as such, and does not appear in the court record of this case. We tell it because a borrowed nickname is not evidence — yet the jury heard the State attach a killer’s name to Mr. Hunter from its first sentence, the defense raised the nickname’s use as error on direct appeal, and the Second Circuit affirmed.
Trial and conviction
Trial began February 17, 2004 in the Fourth Judicial District Court, Parish of Ouachita, before Judge C. Wendell Manning. The State’s theory was that Mr. Hunter followed Levi Williams home to rob him and killed the two boys because they could identify him. In his opening the prosecutor told the jury: “the crime scene unit did not recover any usable prints from inside 221 Greenwood,” and that there was no other physical evidence linking Mr. Hunter to the residence. He told them the Sheriff’s Office “had run up into a brick wall.” (Prosecution opening statement.)
The defense, in its opening, laid out the alibi and the absence of forensic proof, and told the jury the case would be “wanting in quantity and wanting in quality.” (Defense opening statement.)
On February 25, 2004, after the defense opening, the State filed a Motion in Limine seeking to prevent the defense from questioning Detective Harris about what he learned during his investigation, and from eliciting evidence that marijuana was sold and delivered at 221 Greenwood Drive. (Motion in Limine, February 25, 2004.)
On March 4, 2004, the jury returned verdicts of guilty on the three counts of second-degree murder and the responsive verdict of attempted armed robbery. Motions for New Trial and for Post-Verdict Judgment of Acquittal were denied. On May 25, 2004, Judge Manning sentenced Mr. Hunter to three life sentences without parole plus 49½ years, all four counts to run consecutively.
The Motion for New Trial recorded what the trial had and had not contained: no witness testified that Mr. Hunter directly committed the offenses; no physical evidence connected him to the scene; there were no eyewitnesses; the weapon recovered a week later had no connection to him; he made no inculpatory statement to police and did not testify. (Motion for New Trial, April 16, 2004.)
The appeal
The Louisiana Second Circuit affirmed. State v. Hunter, 39,664, p. 5 (La. App. 2 Cir. 6/29/05); 907 So. 2d 200, 204, writ denied, 2005-2027 (La. 3/10/06); 925 So. 2d 507. The court addressed five assignments of error, including sufficiency of the evidence, the use of the nickname “Trigger” at trial, and the exclusion of the polygraph offer. It held the informants’ accounts were direct rather than circumstantial evidence, and that the jury had heard the witnesses’ prior convictions and their potential for favorable treatment.
In the same opinion, the court described that testimony as “the only evidence that directly linked Tony Hunter with the crime.” 907 So. 2d at 204.
Full procedural history, 2004 to 2026: appeals and filings.
The sequence
The dates are not in dispute, and set side by side they show how the case was built:
- March 10, 2001 — the homicides. No suspect and no physical evidence; the investigation runs into what Captain Harris called “a brick wall.”
- May 4, 2001 — Mr. Hunter is arrested — for unauthorized use of the rental truck, not for the homicides — and the truck is seized to be processed for the murders.
- June 12, 2001 — a KTVE broadcast names Mr. Hunter in connection with the killings; reward money is publicized.
- July–August 2001 — the three incarcerated witnesses come forward (Comanche July 20, Wiggins August 2, Kennedy August 20).
- February 2, 2002 — the State receives the Gene Screen report; its testing does not connect Mr. Hunter to the scene, the victims, or the weapon.
- October 17, 2002 — more than seventeen months after his arrest, Mr. Hunter is indicted for the murders.
Between the arrest and the murder indictment, no physical evidence tying Mr. Hunter to 221 Greenwood was developed, the scientific testing pointed away from him, and the only new evidence was the testimony of the three incarcerated witnesses. Affirming the conviction, the Second Circuit described that testimony as “the only evidence that directly linked Tony Hunter with the crime.” State v. Hunter, 907 So. 2d at 204.
Our view
The site’s own analysis, resting on the facts set out above.
In our view the record described on this page is unusually one-sided for a triple-homicide conviction. The State conceded, in its own opening and closing, that there was no physical evidence. The man it prosecuted had a documented workplace record for the week of the killings, a birthday party his daughter attended with him that afternoon, and a red truck he had leased three days earlier and been stopped in — without any headlight citation. What remained was the word of three incarcerated witnesses, and the Second Circuit itself called that word “the only evidence that directly linked Tony Hunter with the crime.” Whether it should have been enough is the subject of the linked pages.
The four issues
No physical evidence · The jailhouse informants · The window · Withheld and uncorrected evidence