POTEAU, Okla. -- A Crawford County man testified Wednesday in LeFlore County District Court that his brother killed a Fort Smith woman by slitting her throat after sodomizing her and forcing her to perform oral sex.
Dressed in a bright orange jail jumpsuit and shackled hand and foot, Johnathen Thacker said his older brother, Elvis Aaron Thacker, used a straight razor to cut Briana Ault's throat Sept. 13, 2010, after trying first to drown her in a pond just over the state line in Pocola, Okla.
"When he asked me to help drown her, I told him I wouldn't do that," Johnathen Thacker said in a monotone during testimony Wednesday afternoon.
The brothers were charged with first-degree murder and forcible sodomy in Ault's death. Johnathen Thacker, 27, pleaded guilty to the charges in April 2014 in exchange for his testimony against his brother and to avoid the death penalty. The state is seeking death for Elvis Thacker, 28.
Johnathen Thacker testified that his brother wanted to rob Ault, 22, because he thought she had won $1,600 at a casino. But before Ault picked up the brothers about 2 a.m. Sept. 13, 2010, Elvis had told him they were going to help a friend move boxes for a sick uncle for money.
Elvis Thacker, sitting next to Ault in the front seat of her orange Chevrolet Cavalier, gave her directions to the pond off Texas Road just outside Fort Smith, Johnathen Thacker said.
Directing Ault to pull over, Elvis Thacker pulled out a razor and told Ault she was going to do whatever he told her. Johnathen Thacker, sitting in the back seat, said Ault looked at his brother as if he were joking.
Johnathen Thacker said he, too, was surprised and tried to stop Elvis Thacker when he cut the straps of Ault's halter top and bra and forced her to perform oral sex on him. He said Elvis Thacker struck him and threatened to kill him.
When he sat back, Johnathen Thacker said, Elvis Thacker used the razor to make cuts on Ault's back.
"I told Elvis you can't do this because this was wrong," he said.
Elvis Thacker forced Ault out of the car and to undress, Johnathen Thacker testified. Elvis Thacker then forced Ault to walk down a dirt track to the pond and ordered Johnathen Thacker to go along, too, Johnathen Thacker said.
Elvis Thacker forced Ault to perform oral sex on Johnathen Thacker while he raped her, Johnathen Thacker said.
Johnathen Thacker told jurors that after his brother ordered Ault to crawl into the pond and drink water to wash the semen from her mouth, Elvis Thacker began to try to drown her. Johnathen Thacker said he tried to stop his brother by pushing him off Ault into the pond.
Elvis Thacker slashed at him with the razor and Johnathen Thacker said he went back to the car. Elvis Thacker returned to the car minutes later and the two drove off, he said.
Johnathen Thacker said he checked Ault's cellphone and saw that one of her friends had texted her, wondering where she was. He said his brother told him to pretend to be Ault and text back that she had gone home. He then threw the phone into the Arkansas River from the Midland Boulevard bridge between Fort Smith and Van Buren.
Ault's friend, Lacey Ebarb, 27, testified Wednesday that when she saw the text Johnathen Thacker sent about 3:30 a.m. she was concerned because Ault would not have left her at Rooster's bar in Fort Smith without giving her a ride home as she had promised.
The text, a picture of which was shown to the jury, said "Hey, im goin home my intended got another ride."
Ebarb and another friend, Kitty McFeeters, testified that Ault had been getting texts throughout the evening from an ex-boyfriend who was asking for a ride from one end of Texas Road to the other and offered to pay $50 and fill her gas tank.
About 2 a.m. Sept. 13, 2010, Ault left Rooster's to give the ex-boyfriend the ride and told Ebarb she would be back in 15 or 20 minutes. Ebarb said she relied on Ault's return because she had ridden with Ault to the bar and Ebarb had left her purse in Ault's car.
Johnathen Thacker said his brother drove them to an abandoned house in Cedarville where they got a change of clothes from a bag they had stashed there. Afterward, Elvis Thacker said they had to get rid of the car so they drove to South 36th and Tulsa streets in Fort Smith near Southern Steel and Wire, where both men had worked, and set the car on fire.
They ran back to the apartment at the Tulsa Square Apartments where they had been staying with a friend and his wife, Johnathen Thacker said.
One of Elvis Thacker's attorneys, Gretchen Mosley with the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, told jurors Tuesday that the defense was that Johnathen, not Elvis, killed Ault and blamed it on his brother, who was laid up with a broken leg.
She questioned Johnathen Thacker for more than an hour about whether the brothers had been together the entire time they ran from the scene of the car fire, and whether he had run past a dumpster along the way as he had testified shortly after his arrest in 2010.
Johnathen Thacker testified Wednesday that he and his brother were separated as they made their way to the Tulsa Square Apartments and that he never passed a dumpster.
But under questioning by Mosely, Johnathen Thacker admitted he had changed his story from what he initially told investigators after one of the investigators in the 2010 interview told him surveillance video showed only one person running past the dumpster at the time the brothers were running from the car fire.
Cross examination of Johnathen Thacker continues at 8:30 a.m. today.
State Desk on 04/14/2016