The Limestone County Circuit Courtroom sat in rapt silence twice Wednesday in the opening day of testimony in the capital murder trial of Andrew Reid Lackey—once listening to the taped sounds of violent death and once viewing the video of resulting carnage.

Lackey, 24, of Huntsville, is accused of the Oct. 31, 2005, slaying of 80-year-old Charlie Newman in his North Hine Street home in Athens.

After opening statements Wednesday by District Attorney Kristi Valls and defense attorney Randall Gladden of Huntsville, Valls played an approximately two-minute 911 call originating from Newman’s home at 7:32 p.m. In it can be heard an apparently violent confrontation.

A voice identified as Newman’s screams “Ow!” and “Leave me alone!” and attempts to reason with his assailant, “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” and “Come sit down and let me pray for you.”

Interspersed with Newman’s pleas is a deeper voice repeatedly demanding, “Where’s the vault? Where’s the vault?”

Later in the day, juxtaposed against the loud chaos of the 911 recording, jurors watched a videotape shot of the crime scene by Athens Police investigator Trevor Harris. With no accompanying commentary and amid a hushed and darkened courtroom, the tape rolled, showing bloody footprints leading from Newman’s home.

A glass storm door with a bloody smear opens to more bloody footprints across the kitchen linoleum tile and into the den, where Newman lay sprawled on his back in blood-soaked blue pajamas.

During opening statements, Valls said Newman was shot, stabbed 70 times—including two slashes to his carotid artery – bludgeoned with a blunt instrument and had his left eye gouged from its socket.

Lackey appeared to sit impassively throughout the gruesome tight shots of Newman’s battered and slashed body.

Computer geek

In his opening statement, Gladden said he could not “argue with the basics of the case,” but rather paint a portrait of a young man he called a “geek” and who spent hours daily trading over the on-line auction Web site e-Bay.

Testimony from Derrick Newman, the victim’s grandson, painted an even more bizarre picture of Lackey, who he said would have as many as four computers up and running at one time and simultaneously engaging in up to seven games with opponents around the globe.

Gladden said these activities, along with the array of items found in a rental car Lackey allegedly drove to the murder scene—hammers, mallet, hatchet, duct tape, Super Glue, stun gun, batteries, starter pistol, night-vision goggles, ski mask, screw drivers— make Lackey seem bizarre.

“You would have to say there’s got to be something wrong with this person’s mind.