Rhonda Gilson lights a candle every day for her late husband, Willie Gilson III.
It’s her way of remembering the devoted husband, father and grandfather, who was murdered in the front yard of his Indianola home, with his 6-year-old grandson watching, on December 18, 2015.
There’s also hope that as long as the candle flickers, someone out there may be getting close to finding whoever was responsible for shooting the love of her life.
The day of the murder was grandson Jamari’s sixth birthday, Rhonda Gilson said, and he was at the house that evening, excited to see his birthday present, a 4-wheeler the couple had spent most of the day purchasing and bringing home.
Rhonda Gilson said she was relaxing in the bathtub, while Jamari was outside with his “Baw Baw.”
“Jamari came to the door and said a man…he didn’t say three people or four people, he said a man came up to Baw Baw and shot him,” the widow told The Enterprise-Tocsin this week in an interview.
Wrapped only in a towel, she ran outside to see about her husband, who was on the ground, struggling for life. It’s a moment that continues to haunt both her and her grandson.
“Willie did five gasps, and the day after, [Jamari] asked me, ‘Was Baw Baw’s soul going to heaven when he made that noise?’ All I could say was yes,” she said. “He would ask me, ‘Why did that man do that?’ I can’t give him an answer for that.”
Rhonda Gilson said she and her husband met when she was 16 and he was 18. They dated for 10 years before they got married, a union that lasted almost a quarter of a century.
Together, the two raised three children, Shanice Gilson, Sharice Gilson and Willie Gilson IV.
He worked for Modern Line in Indianola for 18 of those years until it closed, and then he became a truck driver.
“He provided very well for us,” she said.
He was a jokester, and he would give anyone the shirt off his back if they needed it.
“Everybody loved him,” she said.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation primarily handled the case from the start.
For seven-and-a-half years, Rhonda Gilson, her three children and the rest of the family thought that law enforcement had the killers.
In fact, it was just two months after the murder, in February of 2016, that a special task force that included MBI and U.S. Marshals arrested four individuals for the crime.
Vilandrius Gibson, Garrick Price, Lucas Edwards and Alexandria Jennings were all initially booked on capital murder charges.
The state, largely relying on statements made by Alexandria Jennings, who was 16 at the time of the murder, was certain these were the individuals who masterminded a robbery against Willie Gilson that apparently went terribly wrong.
Since 2016, there have been multiple attempts to hold trials.
There was a change of venue from Sunflower County to Leflore County in 2019.
Then there was a mistrial.
COVID-19 hit.
At one point, two of the accused, Price and Gibson, accepted plea deals on the lesser charge of manslaughter, deals they would later withdraw.
Edwards has always maintained his innocence in the murder, claiming to have been nowhere near Indianola when the crime took place.
Jennings accepted a deal as well, but her sentencing was delayed, pending the outcome of the trials for Price, Gibson and Edwards.
And just like that, last month, the district attorney’s office motioned to dismiss all charges against the three men.
It doesn’t mean that Price, Gibson and Edwards have been completely eliminated, prosecutors told the family recently, but going to trial would be risky going only on the word of a witness who has admitted she has lied.
The E-T reached out to Fourth Circuit Court District Attorney W. Dewayne Richardson for comment on this story. He referred us to Assistant District Attorney Takiyah Perkins, who handled the case.
Perkins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Jennings apparently admitted that she lied about Price, Gibson and Edwards’s involvement in the murder, according to the Gilson family, who met with the DA’s office in the spring.
She received a 20-year sentence soon after that, with 15 to serve.
But as for who pulled the trigger on Willie Gilson, the investigation seems to be back to square one.
“The justice system has killed Willie again,” Rhonda Gilson said. “You just murdered him all over again. I really haven’t been right since then.”
The widow said she always had questions about the state’s case against the three men, but she said she played the cards she had been dealt.
She did say that she had a powerful encounter with one of the accused at a bond hearing.
“He looked at my daughter, and he said, ‘I didn’t kill y’all’s people,’” she said. “That just tore me up on the inside. That tore me up.”
Edwards’s mother told The E-T this week that she knows her son has committed crimes, but she said from the time of the arrest, she knew he was not involved in a killing. She said Edwards was handcuffed on the ground, and he looked up at her.
“When he looked up at me and told me, ‘I did not kill nobody’ I never doubted it one time,” Sharon Edwards said. “I believed in him from day one. I know my child. My child will rob Walmart...He’s a stealer, but he’s not a killer.”
There did seem to be inconsistancies with the official account.
Jennings named Gibson, Price and Edwards in separate statements to investigators at the Sunflower County Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Both statements have been reviewed by The E-T.
Jennings stated that she saw Willie Gilson at the Indianola Double Quick that had a Church’s Chicken restaurant inside.
“He never shopped at that store,” Rhonda Gilson said.
Jennings said she witnessed Willie Gilson at that store with a large sum of money, which set in motion a conspiracy to rob him.
After Gilson was shot, he only had $76 and some change in his pants, his widow said.
Jennings then claimed she called at least one of the men she initially fingered in the crime. By the time they set out to find Gilson, she said they were all in Edwards’ vehicle, and he was in the driver’s seat.
Edwards, an admitted career criminal, has always maintained that he never hung with Jennings or the other two men.
In fact, he said, they were not on friendly terms at all.
“Me and those guys was beefing,” Edwards told The E-T in a phone interview this week from the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility. “I don’t hang with those guys, period, point blank. I don’t like Landy (Gibson). I don’t like Domino (Price), and I don’t even like her. Domino is supposed to be my cousin, and I still don’t like him.”
But most importantly, Edwards offered a rather unique alibi to investigators, something that would implicate him in criminal activity but at the same time prove that he could not have been involved in the Indianola capital murder.
Edwards claims that on the day of the murder, he and three other individuals drove to the Memphis area. They visited his cousin at one point, and then they decided to hit multiple Walmart stores down the I-55 corridor, shoplifting.
“At the time they are saying the man was killed, we were inside of Batesville Walmart,” he said.
Things originally escalated when the group made off with a woman’s wallet at a Walmart in Hernando, Edwards said.
“Like I told the lead investigator, they never bothered to do an investigation,” Edwards said.
Edwards said he told investigators back in 2016 every detail of that day, including the contents of the woman’s wallet, right down to the name on her credit cards, which he said he disposed of in a bathroom further down the road.
And there was indeed a police report taken from a woman in that Walmart that day. The E-T has reviewed that report as well, and it seems to match up with Edwards’s story.
He fit the description from the woman’s statement, and his vehicle fit the description described by police in the report as fleeing the scene.
“How could I tell you everything that happened that night if I wasn’t there?” Edwards said. “I gave you all the details. I gave them every detail right down to the T that nobody knew but me, and when the report came out, that’s when they said they lost the audio recording of me telling them everything. They had lost that, but then they gave a statement saying I mentioned something about it.”
Edwards said that if investigators had looked into his phone records from the start, the data would have corroborated his story.
“The only thing they always had was just her word, saying that we were all together,” Edwards said. “They never had my phone records. My phone records never linked to their phone records. They showed me phone records with all three of those communicating together, but they never produced anything with documents saying, ‘Here’s your number on her phone records” or “Here’s your phone number on his phone records.’”
At one point, the state presented Edwards with a plea deal, similar to the ones Price and Gibson accepted and later withdrew.
“My lawyer kept saying go on and take the plea bargain,” Edwards said. “He said it numerous times. The state only came to me one time, but my lawyer kept telling me we don’t have no fighting chance if we go in there.”
Edwards never once considered taking the deal.
“I kept telling him no. I ain’t copping out,” he said.
Edwards said that he repeatedly asked for a speedy trial, but as he sat in prison on a separate conviction, the capital murder trial never came.
Price said in a written statement to investigators in June of 2016 that he was getting a haircut when he heard someone had been shot on Walker Street, which is where the Gilson family lived.
“Then I look up a month later they locking up me, Lucas Edwards and Vilandrius Gibson for this crime when all us were enemies,” Price said in the statement reviewed by The E-T. “Ion know how they put this together to were they saying we commit this crime when neither one of us hang or associate period. We all were beefing. But I know I was on Cox St and Lincoln at [a] house getting a haircut.”
Rhonda Gilson said that the family’s relationship with the DA’s office was “Okay” at first.
“[W. Dewayne Richardson] ensured Mrs. Gilson, Willie’s mom, that he was going to be the one to work this case,” she said.
But the case, she said, was handled by the ADA instead.
Over time, things became more tense between the family and the DA’s office, she said.
“He ignored us,” she said of Richardson.
She said trial was set at one point, but ADA Perkins was not present.
“They said, ‘All rise,’ and everybody was there except [Perkins],” she said.
At one point, Rhonda Gilson said she and her family were forced to sit for hours in the same confined space as the accused, Alexandria Jennings, as they waited for trial to start.
“At no time was I supposed to be in her presence or was she supposed to be in my presence,” she said. “I got up, and I’m sitting there praying, ‘Lord, don’t let me do nothing to this girl.’ I got up to go choke her, and God told me to go to the bathroom. I didn’t have to use the bathroom, but I went in there and used it… They were talking to her like they were at a football game or something. They weren’t saying anything to me and my grandson. They told us we couldn’t have our phones, but she’s sitting there playing on hers, scrolling.”
She said the DA suggested during a meeting earlier this spring that some statements that may have implicated others in her husband’s murder may not have been followed up on back in 2016.
“Even if it’s wrong, you’re supposed to check it out, but you didn’t check it out,” she said.
In the meantime, Price is serving a sentence for a murder he committed in April 2017.
The state Supreme Court recently denied his appeal for a new trial in that case.
Edwards is serving a lengthy sentence himself for a gun charge unrelated to the Gilson murder.
He has two sons he says he hopes he can see soon, outside of jail.
“Everybody has always known that I love my kids,” he said.
Gibson is reportedly the only one of the four accused who walked away free when the court dismissed the case in May.
Rhonda Gilson said she feels sympathy for the three men who were accused of this particular murder for so long.
An apology to them, she said, would need to come from the state.
Sharice Gilson, Jamari’s mother, said she decided to move with her now 13-year-old son to Utah.
“Every year, on my son’s birthday, I have to make it extra special, since my dad was murdered on his birthday, in front of him,” she told The E-T. “He’s never been the same. None of us are the same, but we try. Relocating from the Delta doesn’t make it all the way better for me, but as long as I know that my son and I aren’t there year-round, it makes me feel a lot better for our safety. I don’t trust the justice system at all.”
Edwards said he is currently appealing his gun conviction. Regardless of how that turns out, he will eventually walk out of prison.
He said he has no plans of coming back to Indianola once he’s out.
“I feel like when this is over with, I’m a free man, but it’s six, seven years of being looked at as if I committed a crime, and I’m trying to tell everybody I didn’t do it,” he said. “That’s going to forever mess with me. That’s my life. Honestly, I’m going to another state. I’m going to change my people, places and things. I feel like if I have to have a gun to stay in Indianola, I’d be coming back to prison. Why would I set myself up for that failure?”
Rhonda Gilson said she writes letters to different agencies, hoping an outside group will take a look at how this case was handled.
“I need somebody else to come in, at their expense, and start from scratch,” she said.
The wound, she said, only gets deeper as the years go by without justice.
“If we don’t get that closure, we’ll never begin to heal,” she said.
Aside from seeking justice, she works to keep Baw Baw’s memory alive in her now three grandchildren, Jamari, of course, AuBree and Isaiah.
For the ever-grieving widow, some memories are sweet, and some are haunting.
“The dreams that I have,” she said. “Willie, he’s in them, and they’re always pleasant behind him, but in front, there’s always a storm or a war. I guess I’m in the war. I’ll say out of seven days a week, I get five nights of that dream in some sort of way.”
