‘A total whodunnit.’ Russell County mystery killing ends in manslaughter conviction
The crime scene that investigators were called to Jan. 14, 2021 at 12:49 p.m. was baffling.
The crew working on a church under construction at Kitetown Road and Uchee Pines Road near Fort Mitchell, Alabama, had found the body of a man shot in the back of the head.
That body was all the evidence Russell County Sheriff Heath Taylor’s investigators had, when they got to the secluded spot.
No car was parked nearby. No identification was in the man’s pockets. And no clue hinted at why he was there.
“It was what we call a total whodunnit,” Taylor said Thursday, the day after a jury found Samantha Elizabeth Malasig guilty of manslaughter in the man’s death.
The man turned out to be Christopher Roper, 38, fatally shot miles from his home on Cut Rate Road in Phenix City. He was identified after Taylor held a news conference asking for the public’s help.
Backtracking Roper’s last days, investigators learned witnesses had seen him hanging out with Malasig, who was driving a burgundy Honda Civic missing a front bumper.
A traffic camera at Alabama Highway 165 and Russell County Road 39 had recorded the car coming and going that morning, before church workers found Roper’s body, Taylor said.
After her arrest, Malasig told investigators she couldn’t remember where she left the car, so the sheriff again asked the public for tips.
It turned out Malasig took the car to a friend in the Bleecker area, off U.S. 280 in Lee County, and asked him to hide it, Taylor said. And when the friend saw authorities were looking for it, he parked it at a machine fabrication plant off the highway.
It just so happened that one of Taylor’s employees was on the highway to Opelika when she passed the plant and recognized the car, he said.
That’s how investigators built the case presented to a jury this week, though exactly what happened at the church was never clear, the sheriff said.
“What happened is several different stories because she told different stories,” he said.
Malasig confessed to shooting Roper, but she also told authorities that someone else shot him, and that someone else made her shoot him, Taylor said.
He believes she had been using methamphetamine. Because she likely was under the influence, at the time, jurors had the option of finding her guilty of manslaughter instead of murder, he said.
Manslaughter under Alabama law means recklessly causing another person’s death. Malasig, who was 28 when charged in Roper’s shooting, faces up to 20 years in prison.
“We put together, in my opinion, as good a case as we could put together,” Taylor said, noting it was enough to persuade the jury Malasig caused Roper’s death.
“This case was difficult in the sense of, there wasn’t a ton of physical evidence,” he said.
