GREENVILLE - Prosecutors laid out a timeline for jurors Wednesday in the capital murder trial of Brandon Woodruff.
Ralph Guerrero and Adrienne McFarland of the state attorney general's office, named as special prosecutors after the Hunt County district attorney's office was recused from the case, questioned friends of Woodruff and an expert on cellphone traces to try to pin down his whereabouts on the weekend of Oct. 15-16, 2005.
Brandon's parents, Dennis and Norma Woodruff, were found dead in their country home on Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005. Both had been shot, and Dennis Woodruff had been stabbed repeatedly.
They are believed to have died on a Sunday evening, and Brandon Woodruff apparently was the last person to see them alive.
Woodruff, 22, has insisted he left after sharing pizza with his parents to go back to college in Abilene.
Janssen Herring testified Wednesday that Woodruff was supposed to call around 5 p.m. that Sunday to make arrangements to meet her and her boyfriend, Robert Martinez, in Dallas and give him a ride back to school.
She said Woodruff didn't show up until about 10:30 p.m., after several phone calls and a period of almost an hour when he didn't answer his cellphone.
Alex Rulli and James Britt testified that they went with Woodruff and Martinez to a club in the Cedar Springs section of Dallas after that and stayed at the club until "around 2 a.m."
After Rulli and Britt testified that on the way back to Rulli's father's house, Brandon "freaked out" when they started to go through things in his bag, defense attorney Katherine Ferguson indicated that wasn't because there might have been incriminating evidence in the bag. She offered another explanation - intolerance against gays.
Under cross-examination by Ferguson, Rulli and Britt said they believed that Woodruff and Martinez's school, Abilene Christian University, was against homosexuality and that Martinez was straight.
Rulli, who said he and Woodruff had dated in the summer of 2005, said Brandon called the next day to apologize and told him there was stuff in the bag that he didn't want Robert to see.
Randall Lunz, who lived near the Woodruffs' former home in Heath, said the Woodruffs asked him to keep an eye on the place. They were still in the process of moving to the country, he said, and were using Ms. Woodruff's truck to do so. Lunz said he saw Brandon Woodruff at the Heath house between 10 and 11 p.m. the night of the murder, exchanging his old pickup for his mother's newer one.
That surprised him, he said, because she seldom let anyone else drive it.
"You could use anything of Norma's, but not that truck," he said.
Ferguson made frequent use of statements the witnesses gave investigators in the weeks after the murders to refresh their memories about times and places, in a testimonial battle over when Woodruff left home and where he went the night of the murder.
Lunz said he remembered that Ms. Woodruff had let Brandon drive her pickup once while his was being repaired.
Ferguson countered testimony by a prosecution witness about cellphone traces by pointing out that several calls made on Brandon's phone that weekend weren't included in the reports provided for analysis by phone companies.
The trial is expected to continue through most of next week, with expert witnesses likely to take the stand Monday.
The prosecution has waived the death penalty. If convicted, Woodruff would face life in prison.
He has remained in the Hunt County Jail since his arrest on Oct. 24, 2005, with bail set at $1 million.
