On March 2nd, Otis Byrd went to the casino.
Byrd sometimes liked to gamble, said Sheriff Marvin Lucas, who has lived in rural Claiborne County, about an hour and a half drive from Jackson, Mississippi, all his life.
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Lucas, who besides being sheriff is also the immediate past president of the local NAACP chapter, knew Byrd, whom he would sometimes see at services at Mount Burner Baptist Church. Lucas has known the church’s pastor, Ray Earl Coleman since eighth grade.
Byrd was on probation in February 1980 when he robbed the Trim Grocery store in Port Gibson, the nearest town. “The store was not far from where his dad lived on Tillman Road,” Lucas said of Byrd. “Lucille Trim had this little store and he robbed it, and when he did he shot and killed her. He probably went there every day. He knew her.”
Trim, then 55, was white. Byrd was black, and 19 years old at the time.
Lucas says the motive for the 1980 robbery was a meager amount of money. “He was trying to get money to pay his probation officer fees,” Lucas said of Byrd. “It was $15 a month that he had to pay. He robbed the store to get it.” County records show he got $101. He was convicted of capital murder on October 28 that year and served more than 25 years.
The dead woman’s daughter, Martha Rainville, went on to become the first woman state adjutant general in the history of the National Guard in Vermont in 1997. She currently lives in Virginia and is married to former Pennsylvania Congressman Paul McHale, who is also a former assistant secretary of defense.
Lucas says prison is likely where Byrd met Tom Wood. Wood had a troubled past of his own. Around 1983, the sheriff said, Wood and two friends, Cornell Curtis and Carla Curry, committed an armed robbery at another store in Port Gibson, killing the mother of a local man, Cody Parker. Parker still lives in town. Lucas says he runs a company called Deer Park Fencing.
Byrd was paroled in 2006, after serving more than 25 years. He returned to Claiborne County, and became reacquainted with Wood. He rented a house on Rodney Road, from a man named Mr. Buck, who Lucas said, “buys old houses and rents them out.” Byrd lived alone, but his father, Willie Shorter, his sister, Reather Ann, an assortment of nephews, nieces and other family members sprawled out over the smattering of houses in a heavily wooded area just outside Port Gibson, checked in on each other frequently. Byrd had been to see his father just two days before he disappeared. People who knew him around town, who aren’t hard to find in the small enclave, say he mostly kept to himself. “He was quiet,” said Andre Wyatt, who said he’d known Byrd his whole life.
“After he came back” in 2006, Wyatt said, “you didn’t hear about him getting into anything.”
And Byrd enjoyed gambling in Vicksburg, at the casino boats less than 20 miles from his rented home.
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On the morning of March 2nd, Byrd’s niece was the first to take him to the Riverwalk Casino in Vicksburg, Lucas said. She told the sheriff she drove her uncle back to his house afterward and dropped him off. Sometime later that day, Byrd decided to go back to Vicksburg and gamble some more.
“Tom Wood took him to the boat and dropped him off,” Lucas said, and Byrd “caught a ride back” with a man Lucas declined to name, since he came forward anonymously, telling the sheriff he dropped Byrd off at the house on Rodney Road, alive and well. “That was Monday night, 10:30 to 11:00 at night,” Lucas said. The fact that the house is where the friend says he last saw Byrd was “how we knew to look around there” when Byrd went missing, the sheriff said.








