Cory Bigsby gave a jailhouse statement to a correctional officer last summer. Now, he’s charged with killing his son.
Did a statement Cory Jamar Bigsby Sr. gave to a correctional officer at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail last summer lead to a murder charge against him?
Law enforcement investigators have said for more than a year that they’ve had a difficult time determining when — or where — his son, Codi, was last seen alive.
They’ve been frustrated in lacking a good starting point for where exactly to search.
But based on a statement Bigsby made while locked up on a host of child neglect and abuse charges, Hampton police and the FBI searched an outdoor area in Maryland, near Washington, in the summer of 2022, a law enforcement source said.
Though that didn’t turn up any leads on Codi’s whereabouts — and the boy’s body wasn’t found — Bigsby’s jailhouse statement is still being discussed in his case.
In March, one of Bigsby’s attorneys, Amina Matheny-Willard, wrote in a motion to toss the case that prosecutors — through the regional jail correctional officer — “obtained a statement” from Bigsby last August while he was locked up. What exactly Bigsby said in the statement remains a mystery.
“I’m not going to discuss the contents, but just suffice it to say it was concerning enough for us to ask for a (competency) evaluation,” she told reporters in March.
Matheny-Willard contended that prosecutors slow-walked providing the jailhouse statement to Bigsby’s defense lawyers, saying it took more than three months to turn over. But Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell said it didn’t need to be shared earlier because it involved the investigation into Codi rather than the other pending charges.
It wasn’t immediately clear Friday whether that obtained statement was part of the basis for this week’s new charges.
The evidence backing the charges isn’t spelled out in the two bare-bones indictments handed down Monday, and Bell has declined to answer questions about them.
The Hampton grand jury indicted Bigsby on Monday on one count of second-degree murder and another count of concealing a dead body “to prevent detection of an unlawful act,” according to the documents filed in Hampton Circuit Court.
The grand jury contends he killed the boy more than seven months before reporting him missing. The panel asserts Bigsby killed Codi “on our about June 18, 2021” in Hampton and concealed his body on the same date. Codi would have been 3 at the time.
Bigsby called Hampton Police the morning of Jan. 31, 2022, to report his son missing from the family’s Buckroe Beach home. He told police he last saw Codi, who by then would have been 4, sleeping in bed at about 2 a.m. That set off numerous searches around the city, including among police and citizens.
An aunt told investigators she talked by phone with Codi about 13 months before he went missing — on either Thanksgiving or Christmas in 2020, according to two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case. As far as investigators can tell, that’s the last time anyone aside from Cory Bigsby spoke with Codi.
The child’s mother, who lives in the Washington area, wasn’t involved in Codi’s life, and Cory Bigsby was raising the boy and his three brothers alone.
Grand juries meet in secret, with a prosecutor and police detective presenting evidence of a crime. Such panels, which in Virginia typically consist of seven members, then vote on whether there’s probable cause to advance the charges. Unlike with trial juries, grand jury votes in Virginia don’t have to be unanimous.
Bigsby separately faces 25 counts of child neglect stemming from his admissions that he’d leave Codi and his brothers alone for hours at a time. The past charges also include three counts of child abuse and two counts of failing to get medical attention for a child.
A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday in that case. Matheny-Willard said she was talking with Bigsby’s family and might provide a statement Monday on the new charges.
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com
