THOMASVILLE — Testimony is under way in the trial of a man accused of killing a Thomasville woman in July 2018 and then embarking on a series of crimes that led to an exhaustive manhunt.

Robert Carter has pled not guilty to all 21 counts against him, including the felony murder charge he faces. The state contends Carter killed Deanna Shirey in July 2018 and hid her body. 

Her body was found in a shallow grave on Carter’s property about nine days after she was reported missing.

Prosecutors laid out a timeline of events for jurors, beginning with a routine nightly phone call between Shirey and her niece in Massachusetts and ending with the discovery of Shirey’s body in a shallow grave. 

In between, assistant district attorney Jess Hornsby said Carter took Shirey’s cell phone and Honda CRV and took them to Tallahassee, Florida and summoned a cab ride back to Thomasville. 

Carter then went on a crime spree, the state alleges, including two separate kidnapping and armed robbery incidents and a sexual battery charge. Carter is accused of tying up an Ochlocknee family and escaping through the back door of their house, without his shoes, as law enforcement entered the front of the house. 

A massive manhunt ensued, and Carter was found hiding under a log in the Ochlockonee River on July 8, 2018.

Defense attorney Ricky Daniel Collum said the state’s show of its evidence doesn’t tell the whole story. He said law enforcement first searched Carter’s property on July 6 but did not discover her body in a one-foot, three-inch-deep grave until six days later. 

Also, Collum said, continued welfare checks of Shirey’s house found it to be in order but did not turn up any sign of Shirey and that Carter couldn’t have buried the body.

Denise Parnell testified that she and Shirey, her aunt and godmother, talked on the phone every night between 7 and 8 p.m. Parnell recalled her aunt as a big New England Patriots fan.

“If you rode by her home on game day, you would see her big Patriots flag out,” Parnell said. 

Parnell, who lives in Danvers, Massachusetts, just north of Boston, said she last spoke with Shirey on July 1, 2018. Parnell said they talked for about 15 to 20 minutes and everything seemed normal.

“She said she was tired and wanted to go read in bed,” Parnell said. 

Parnell said she tried to reach her aunt by phone the next night but got no answer.

Mandy Ferguson Ramos, a Vero Beach, Florida resident who at the time was engaged to Shirey’s son, said she received a text message from her prospective mother-in-law’s phone on July 3 that seemed odd.

“She wouldn’t text me on a daily activity,” Ramos said, adding the text message mentioned Shirey was going for a spa day in Tallahassee. 

The message’s composition, with its use of lower case letters and words running together, also seemed off to Ramos. She said she called Shirey’s number back and said her son had been in an accident and to call Ramos back. 

Ramos said she never got any response to that, nor to any subsequent text messages.

Family members converged on Thomasville and began their own search for Shirey, Ramos said. The family was in Thomasville for 18 days.

“We did everything,” she said. “We searched from here to Tallahassee. We searched the woods. We searched. We searched. We searched.”

Ramos described the family’s frame of mind as “panic.”

“Just pure panic,” she said, “worrying, scared.”

Thomasville Police Department Sgt. Scott Newberry said he conducted a welfare check on Shirey’s house July 3, 2018. This time, the Honda CRV Shirey drove was missing. There also appeared to be fresh tire tracks in the front yard, as if somebody had tried to back up to the front of the house.

Police also found a notebook with passwords and, by using the Find My Phone app, located Shirey’s cell phone in Tallahassee, along with her vehicle and her purse. 

Testimony is expected to continue Tuesday.