UPDATED: Investigator says records of "hookup apps," texts deleted from Wall's phone
Jul. 15—Records of texts and phone calls between Christopher Mark Wall and the women he is accused of killing were deleted from his phone after the November 2017 double murder, jurors heard Friday shortly before the prosecutors rested their case.
Dating apps including SnapChat, Tinder, Pure, E-naughty, Hangouts and joi — all described by District Attorney Jeff Swain's investigator as "hookup apps" — also were deleted from the phone, investigator Marc Gray told the jury.
Wall, 38, of Weatherford, faces an automatic life sentence, without the possibility for parole, if convicted of capital murder in the fatal shootings of Ashley Pohorence and Kristra McClellan. Pohorence, 23, and 21-year-old McClellan died of gunshots Wall's attorney said he does not deny firing. Through attorney Andrew Deegan, the defendant is claiming the women and Sierra McMahan, who escaped injury that night, had been increasingly threatening him and demanding money after he invited two of them to his office through the now-defunct sex trafficking publication, Backpage.
Deegan previewed the defense he will begin putting up Monday during his opening statement last week — that, after meeting the women in a Willow Park bank parking lot and to pay them the latest demand, Pohorence and McClellan tried to force him into a car where McMahan waited, possibly with another person.
Taking the stand as the state's final witness, Gray said he had spent a month poring over 250,000 data points on Wall's phone. A data point is generated by, say, a text. The reply would create another data point, Gray explained.
And they never go away, he added.
"Are you available?" was deleted from Wall's texting file, one of many interactions between him and the women. So was another to him in August 2017 listing prices for a "massage," $100 for a half hour, $170 for a full hour.
Gray's "hookup apps" also had been removed from the cell phone.
Deegan also has said one of the women showed Wall a handgun in her purse in a threatening manner, but prosecutors and witnesses including McMahan said the women never carried weapons, not even knives, in their extortion scheme.
McMahan testified earlier in the week the women would place Backpage ads and when a man who answered one asked out loud for sex they would pretend to be offended and threaten to tell bosses, wives, others unless the man paid much more money.
Prosecutors on Friday also brought experts from the Department of Public Safety laboratory in Garland on Friday who linked blood stains on Wall's vehicle and a T-shirt and shoe seized from his house with the two slain women.
Testimony began with Weatherford Fire EMS Operations Chief Wesley McBride describing his discovery of a cell phone along Interstate 20 while responding to a wreck four days after the killings.
Another phone was found later off I-20 at the Bankhead Highway exit. McBride passed that phone to Hudson Oaks Sgt. Marshall Clark, who later testified he'd called the last contact dialed on that phone and a woman named Jasmine answered.
That's also Byron "Payday" Johnson's daughter's name, the boyfriend of Pohorence, according to testimony on Thursday.
"And she was hysterical and told me I was calling from a dead woman's phone," Clark told the jury.
Kristen Poirer, a forensic biologist at the DPS lab, said she used known blood samples of the two women and a swab from the defendant to link blood stains on Wall's T-shirt to be a mixture of his and Pohorence's.
Blood on the undercarriage of Wall's vehicle and one of its tires was McClellan's as was blood on a shoe seized from Wall's residence, Poirer said.
