MURDER MYSTERY: A Dance on the Razor’s Edge

Part 1

– By Sarah Russell –

The life of Billie Jean Phillips was a dance on the razor’s edge. In early September 1994, that dance ended abruptly, violently. But the music has played on for the killer who walked out of her blood-soaked bedroom and blended back into the community. It was perhaps inevitable that life would be short for the Huntsville woman whose life choices were such a combustible combination. But if the person who killed her thought it would be her final fight, they may have underestimated the tenacity of her spirit. The search for her justice seems to be coming back to life.

Packed tight in her 35 years were three marriages, involvement in two deaths and a sex life that spanned Madison County from lawmen to bad boys. One of the McKnight family, Billie Jean was a hard worker just like her folks. But she wasn’t interested in their churchgoing ways. She had more than the Bible on her mind. That became evident when at age 15, Billie Jean was caught by her daddy in a state trooper’s car, there being nothing lawful about the encounter between her and the older guy.

That relationship went on till she was 23, even overlapping her first marriage. He wasn’t special though. Billie Jean made it known around town that she intended to have sex with every cop around, crossing them off the list she kept once the deed was done. The fiery little redhead was catnip to men, heartburn to the women who loved them. And in case the cheated-on woman didn’t get the memo, Billie Jean would give her a courtesy call.

It wasn’t just cops that had reason to be uncomfortable. Billie Jean bragged that she had a briefcase full of incriminating information on a lot of prominent community men. And the women weren’t the only ones she taunted. Every man in her life found himself mercilessly compared to the others.

Her first marriage – and subsequently her first involvement in a death – came with a local man named Randall Wayne Sharp. After taking their vows on the diving board at a friend’s pool, it was clear that happily ever after wasn’t happening with these two. He matched her fire with plenty of his own, tying her up and tossing her in the closet when he wanted to go out gambling. When they became estranged, he headed up to an Alaskan pipeline job.

Visiting home in early December 1979, Sharp had checked into a room at Huntsville’s Jan-Ran Motel. Hanging out with him was a friend, who noticed that Sharp was none too pleased when Billie Jean and her baby brother Robert came knocking. Only Billie Jean and Sharp were inside the room when a single gunshot blasted out. Cops arrived to find a wailing Billie Jean holding Sharp’s bloodied head in her hands, professing her love for him. Sharp, 29, died at the hospital from a gunshot to his right temple.

Tests were conducted on Sharp’s hands by an Arkansas State Police investigator. There was gunshot residue on both. Because the strongest amounts were on Sharp’s right palm and right index finger, the investigator concluded Sharp had most likely shot himself, with the butt of the pistol held in his right hand, the left hand overlapping the right. Madison County Sheriff Randy Baker theorized Sharp might have been feigning suicide when he accidentally shot himself. Always a bullet or two still in the gun even after the clip is removed, he noted.

If Billie Jean was interrogated by the cops, nothing publicly emerged except that she tested negative on gunshot residue tests. Charges weren’t filed against her. Huntsville Police Chief Elmer Cook and Sharp’s family adamantly challenged the scenario. Why would Sharp shoot himself with his right hand when he was left-handed? Baker’s take was challenged too by Sharp’s friend who told investigators that the clip to the Colt .45 was taken out after the gun went off. He knew that, he said, because he was the one who ran in and did that.

Folks also questioned why Sharp, a man very knowledgeable with firearms, would put a loaded gun to his own head. Chief Cook later maintained that Baker and the Deputy Prosecuting Attorney of Madison County – who we shall call John Smith – told him to back off the investigation. The case was officially closed.

Sheriff Baker knew Billie Jean well, considered her a good –albeit platonic – friend. Our John Smith, though, would go on to become Billie Jean’s long-time lover, even right up until her murder. It was around the time of Sharp’s death, the McKnight family believed, that their affair started. All of this contributed to the bitter feelings of the bereaved family, leading Sharp’s daughter by a previous marriage to openly threaten Billie Jean.

Traumatized, Billie Jean moved back in with her parents after Sharp’s death. The nightmares were such, her sister Euna later said, that most nights she even slept with them. When she remarried over a year later, her sister thought it was just a rebound. New husband Dale Harp, a truck driver for Tyson Foods, came to believe her motive was money, that she thought his income was bigger than the reality. They fought and Billie Jean didn’t limit her barbs just to his paychecks. As she did with all her men, she was often quite cruel.

“She could cut you so low it would take a stepladder to climb onto a match box,” Harp said. After one particularly contentious exchange, he found himself the second husband to hold a gun to the head. Only this time, it was to hers. A couple of years and they were done, although Harp said he never quit caring about her.

Billie Jean’s third vows were made with Chic Phillips, a federal poultry inspector. In what was a new set of dynamics for Billie Jean, Phillips didn’t play when Billie Jean’s ugly side came out. He’d quietly pick up and take off. That’s not to say the marriage was totally explosion free. But he loved her deeply, flaws and all, and he truly thought the days of sharing her with others was over. But the wife of John Smith, who we’ll call Jane Smith, a local teacher and mother, was still fighting to get Billie Jean away from her husband.

Billie Jean became a mother but even that wasn’t glue enough to keep her eight-year marriage together. The divorce was official July 1, 1993.

Less than two weeks later, Billie Jean was involved in the death of Kristi Box, the daughter of a prominent Huntsville doctor. They were partying at Box’s place when the two women and Box’s boyfriend, Thomas Garrett, got in the car to go somewhere. A good friend of Billie Jean’s, Garrett was a night manager at the Ozark Shoppe, a convenience store her parents owned. A one-car crash ensued, in which Box was killed and Garrett and Billie Jean were seriously injured. But the latter was nowhere to be found by the time the law arrived.

Picked up at the crash scene by a friend, Billie Jean was then taken by John Smith to a Fayetteville hospital. Garrett subsequently found himself charged with negligent homicide by the Deputy Prosecuting Attorney of the 4th Judicial District – none other than our John Smith.

Beyond his interaction with the law at the scene of the accident, Garrett supposedly was never questioned by any investigators. But he got four years’ probation and was fined $7,500. Oh, and he was fired. The only public statement he has ever made about the situation was to say that convincing state troopers who arrived on the scene that he was the driver was a “hard sell.”

There’s no record of the reaction of Kristi Box’s family to all of this. Other folks, though, took keen interest in John Smith’s next moves. He had multiple legal titles; he was also the Huntsville City Attorney as well as a private attorney. Acting in the latter role, he secured a $21,000 settlement for Billie Jean from Garrett’s insurance company, of which her mother later said $11,000 was to go for her daughter’s medical expenses and attorney fees – meaning Smith’s fees. The pay-out came about two weeks before the murder.

In the hours before her murder, Billie Jean told her mother Edna that she had rented a safe deposit box at Madison Bank and Trust. If anything happened to her, Billie Jean said, she wanted her mother to go get the single sheet of paper that was in it but didn’t elaborate on its contents. After Billie Jean’s death, investigators didn’t find a such a box. But they did find a second box, under Smith’s and Billie Jean’s names, with two stacks of $10,000 each. Smith, a member of the bank’s board of directors, immediately claimed it as belonging to his soon-to-be divorced son.

Billie Jean had more than the safe deposit box on her mind. Both of her sisters, Euna and Diane, later said that leading up to her death, she had mentioned to both of them several times that a big drug bust was going to go down soon. It wasn’t so odd that she knew though, Madison County had a major meth problem. She knew the dealers and the cops, including those cops who would later be revealed as collaborating with the dealers. And among a group that would often sneak off to the caves near her house to party and do drugs was both her brother and ex-husband, Harp.

Her brother Robert worried after the murder that maybe he had brought this on her. A habitual drug user, Robert resisted her constant attempts to get him clean. Still, she’d typically put up the money when he couldn’t pay his drug debts. But he told investigators, one dealer beat him up over some debts weeks before the murder. That, of course, was denied by the dealer.

It wasn’t any of the men in her life who found Billie Jean’s body. It was her 7-year-old son. Shortly before noon on Saturday September 3, Chic Phillips drove up in Billie Jean’s yard, letting their son out. Suddenly the child ran back out of his momma’s yellow frame house.

“Mommy,” he told Chic, “fell painting.”

Concerned, Chic put his son back in the truck, then went inside to see what had happened. Stunned by what he saw, he rushed back out, got in the vehicle, and sped off. It was clear – Billie Jean Phillips was dead, and the paint that was everywhere in her bedroom was her blood. He initially struggled to contact any of her family, but he managed to locate her parents at the Ozark Shoppe. Then he called the Madison County Sheriff’s Department. This would be the start of an investigation that still haunts Madison County. Who killed the woman who lived her life as a dance on the razor’s edge?

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