At 3:21 a.m. on February 14, 2013, a 911 dispatcher in Rutherford County, Tennessee, took a call from a couple in Columbia worried their adult son was about to kill himself. Three minutes later, sheriff's deputies were pulling into the driveway of 839 Kanatak Lane, a house in the Blackman community outside Murfreesboro. They had come to perform a welfare check on a man who might have a gun to his own head. Instead, they found his wife, Carla Dillard Pearman, dead in the bedroom. The man himself was already gone, driving his wife's Jeep Wrangler east on I-24, not toward his parents' house in Columbia, where the suicide call had originated, but toward Manchester, forty minutes in the opposite direction, where Carla's parents lived.
Jacob Pearman, 31, was taken into custody at 5:50 a.m. at a gas station near Exit 111 in Coffee County. During questioning, according to police, he confessed. He would go on to describe the choking in granular detail to a detective (how long it took, how she'd promised to do whatever he wanted if he stopped, how he didn't stop) while telling investigators he could not remember what had set him off in the first place. It was Valentine's Day. It was also, not coincidentally, the day he was due in court on a separate charge: beating his wife's seven-year-old son so badly that the boy had run from the house barefoot in December's cold.
A fast courtship, on a short leash
Jacob Pearman was, by every account entered at his trial, an imposing man: 5-foot-8 and roughly 220 pounds at the time of the murder, a personal trainer and competitive bodybuilder at the Murfreesboro Athletic Club. Before he ever met Carla, he had already been through the federal system once. In 2009 he pleaded guilty to conspiring to manufacture and distribute anabolic steroids and served time in federal prison, emerging on probation with a record that also included a 2009 domestic assault charge and a 2010 citation for selling alcohol to a minor. Any new conviction, however small, carried the risk of sending him back.
He met Carla Dillard in the fall of 2011. According to the relationship timeline laid out at trial, their first date was October 15, 2011; by November 6 they had exchanged "I love you." They got engaged on September 29, 2012, and married just seven weeks later, on November 18, 2012. Carla was 30, twice divorced by her own history, and raising a son, Maddox Thomas, from a previous relationship. Friends who later testified against Pearman described a woman eager for the relationship to work, and a household that closed in on itself almost as fast as it had formed.
"Marks resembling a footprint"
The marriage was three weeks old when, on December 14, 2012, something happened to Maddox that ended with Rutherford County's Department of Children's Services at the door. According to the police and court record, the seven-year-old was pulled from bed, choked, kicked, and slammed into a wall. He fled the house and was later found by a school counselor after running to school in freezing temperatures. When investigators examined him, they documented injuries to his neck, head, face, and body: marks that did not match Pearman's explanation, offered at the time, that the boy had hurt himself wrestling two days earlier.
DCS removed Maddox from the home and placed him with his biological father. Pearman was charged with aggravated assault by choking and child abuse. Because he was still on federal probation from the steroid conviction, a new criminal conviction of any kind threatened to send him back to prison, and a hearing on the charges was set for February 14, 2013, two months out.
The night before
Carla, meanwhile, was trying to get her son back. She had contacted a lawyer about regaining custody of Maddox, and according to testimony from her friend Christian Cooper, she had made up her mind: she was going to leave Jacob Pearman. Her attorney's advice, laid out plainly, was to remove Pearman from the home and file for divorce, a decision made easier, and more urgent, by the fact that Maddox's return depended on Pearman being out of the house.
On the evening of February 13, 2013 (the night before Pearman's own hearing on the child-abuse charge), Carla began packing his belongings. She had, by the state's account at trial, decided she would not testify on his behalf the next morning, and had made clear she intended for him to move out. Prosecutors would later argue this was the trigger: a man already facing the possibility of prison for what he had done to a seven-year-old, discovering on the eve of his hearing that the one person who might soften his position was instead about to make it worse.
What happened in the bedroom
What followed, prosecutors reconstructed largely from Pearman's own confession to Detective James Abbott. An argument turned physical. Pearman punched Carla and began to choke her in their bed. At some point she promised him she would do "whatever he wanted": testify for him, stay with him, whatever it would take to make him stop. He did not stop. The strangulation continued, on the bed and then on the floor, for what investigators estimated at ten to thirty seconds beyond the point she lost consciousness. Carla Pearman, who weighed 112 pounds against her husband's 220, had no real means of stopping him.
Afterward, according to the confession, Pearman placed her body back on the bed. He lay down himself for a while, and held the family dog. At some point in the early hours he reached out to his parents in Columbia with what they would later describe to police as a "troubling message," enough to make them fear he was suicidal, which is what prompted their 3:21 a.m. call to 911. But instead of driving toward Columbia and his parents, Pearman drove Carla's Jeep in the opposite direction, toward Manchester, where her parents lived, a detail prosecutors would return to at trial, suggesting, over defense objection, that he may have intended to go after her family next. He never got there. He was stopped at a gas station off I-24 a little before 6 a.m.
Trial: a crime of passion, or a man who planned to erase a witness
Jacob Pearman's trial opened in January 2015 before Circuit Court Judge David Bragg, with Assistant District Attorney J. Paul Newman and retired DA Bill Whitesell prosecuting, and Luke Evans and Heather Parker representing Pearman. The case drew enough attention that a 48 Hours crew sat in on the proceedings.
The defense did not dispute that Pearman had killed his wife. Instead, Evans and Parker argued for second-degree murder (a killing committed in the heat of passion, provoked, unplanned) rather than the premeditated first-degree charge the state was pursuing. They suggested Carla had provoked the confrontation, that Pearman had simply "lost it," and that his behavior afterward, including an apparent search for a gun, pointed to a man contemplating his own death rather than someone executing a plan against hers.
The prosecution's theory ran the opposite direction: that Pearman killed Carla specifically because her cooperation (her willingness to testify on his behalf at the child-abuse hearing hours later) was the only thing standing between him and a probation violation, and once he learned she would not give it, and would not even stay, he eliminated the problem. Newman pressed the point in his closing argument, noting that Pearman, despite recalling extensive details of the strangulation to detectives, claimed no memory of what had "set him off":
"How can you ever forget why you killed your wife on Valentine's Day? He didn't want anybody to know."
— Assistant District Attorney Paul Newman, closing argument
Whitesell built part of the state's closing around a piece of jewelry Pearman had given Carla, inscribed with the phrase "What a difference a day makes," using it to argue that the relationship's rapid, isolating arc, and Pearman's efforts to reshape both Carla and her son (prosecutors described his attempts to "toughen up" Maddox despite the boy's interest in art), had left a 30-year-old woman, twice-divorced and hopeful for a fresh start, effectively trapped by the time she tried to leave.
Not everything the state wanted in was allowed. Carla's friend Megan Porter testified, outside the jury's presence, that Carla had told her Pearman threatened that if she waited until the night before his hearing to tell him she wouldn't testify, he would kill her, a statement that would have been devastating for the defense, and that Judge Bragg ruled inadmissible hearsay. Maddox, for his part, took the stand and testified that Pearman's build appeared visibly smaller at trial in 2015 than it had in 2013, an detail hinting at his conditioning and the physical disparity between him and the two people he'd hurt.
Verdict and sentence
The jury deliberated for roughly seven hours before returning a verdict: guilty of first-degree murder. Jurors also convicted Pearman on the separate charges tied to Maddox: aggravated assault by choking and child abuse.
Judge Bragg sentenced Pearman to life in prison for the murder, adding five years for the aggravated assault and three years for the child abuse, to run concurrently. Under Tennessee's sentencing structure for a life term, Assistant District Attorney Newman noted after sentencing that Pearman would not be eligible for parole for decades: different reports at the time put the number at roughly 51 to 53 years, which would put him in his mid-to-late 80s, or, as it was later put during his appeal, eligible in the year 2073, when he would turn 91.
The appeal
Pearman did not stop fighting the conviction once it was handed down. In May 2017, he brought six separate grounds before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals in Nashville, arguing among other things that the trial court had wrongly denied his motion for a change of venue and improperly refused to strike a juror for cause. The appellate court rejected all six. He pushed the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which declined to let the appeal move forward on September 21, 2017, a date that happened to be Pearman's 35th birthday.
An address like any other
Kanatak Lane sits in Blackman, an unremarkable stretch of subdivision on the edge of Murfreesboro, the kind of address that draws no attention until a patrol car's lights are turning into the driveway before dawn. Nothing about the marriage's public face (a wedding photo, a courtship measured out in the small romantic milestones friends remembered for the trial record, an inscribed necklace) signaled what investigators would piece together from a seven-year-old's bruises and a confession given hours after the fact. By the time anyone outside the household understood what Jacob Pearman was capable of, Maddox Thomas had already been removed from it once, and Carla Pearman had run out of time to remove herself.
Sources
- Guilty: Whitesell, Newman Hang First-Degree Murder Conviction on Jacob Pearman — The Murfreesboro Pulse
- Murfreesboro resident Jacob Pearman admits to police that he murdered wife Carla — WGNS Radio
- Day Three of the Jacob Pearman Trial In Murf. — WMOT
- Pearman gets five years added to prison sentence — Murfreesboro Post
- UPDATE: Wife murderer Jacob Pearman gets struck down for new appeal request — WGNS Radio
Trial testimony, sentencing, and appellate rulings referenced above are matters of public record in Rutherford County, Tennessee (State of Tennessee v. Jacob Pearman). Jacob Pearman was convicted at trial in January 2015 and his conviction was upheld on appeal through the Tennessee Supreme Court in 2017.