The Stories We Don’t Talk About Enough
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DAVE’S WORLD
By David Howell
It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a decade since that awful night in December 2014. Jessica Chambers was found on a lonely rural road near Courtland, her car burning, her body severely burned. She was still alive and fighting to speak. What she whispered in those last moments, “Eric” or “Derek,” would become the most haunting clue in a case that will likely never be solved.
A suspect, Quinton Tellis, was tried twice, and both times the jury was split.
But the Chambers case wasn’t the only one Tellis faced. In Louisiana, he was charged in the killing of Meing Chen “Mandy” Hsiao, a former University of Louisiana Monroe student found stabbed to death in her apartment in 2015. Prosecutors allege Tellis robbed and fatally stabbed Hsiao, then used her debit card repeatedly in the days after her death.
Tellis was scheduled to stand trial in Monroe, La. starting Monday, but that trial was continued after the long, tragic saga claimed another life.
Retired Brigadier General Paul Rowlett, the digital forensics specialist who helped map the cell-phone trail in the Chambers investigation, was killed Saturday in a car crash in Hattiesburg. Rowlett worked on the prosecution with the Chambers case and he was on his way to Louisiana for the trial when he was killed in the crash in Forrest County.
These cases have touched a lot of lives along the way — some in ways that were obvious, and I believe others in ways only those closest to them saw.
Former District Attorney John Champion, who carried the weight of the Chambers case for years and became the public face of the prosecution, died of cancer in 2022. His death wasn’t connected to the case, but his name will always be tied to it because he gave so much of himself to that investigation and prosecution.
MBI Investigator Tim Douglas, one of the most respected investigators I ever met, died in 2024 — also far too young. Douglas worked the Chambers case with a relentless drive that set him apart. By the second trial for Tellis in 2018, Douglas’ life was already on a downward spiral. Many believed that the emotional strain of the investigation was weighing heavy on him.
There were others involved in the case who I know, law enforcement officiers I grew up with in Panola County, who also struggled. Lives changed. Lives lost. And still no resolution for the Chambers case.
Once a high profile case, it felt like the whole world was watching. But for all the attention, prosecutors could never bridge the gap between Jessica’s dying words — “Eric” or “Derek” — and Quinton Tellis. No expert could explain those names. And two juries couldn’t either.
As I reflected on this case following the reports of Rowlett’s death during the weekend, it got me to thinking about another high-profile homicide in our area that has slipped from the headlines. The murder of Ashley Henley in the Boat Landing community outside Water Valley.
Henley, a former state representative, was shot and killed in 2021 while mowing grass at the same trailer where her sister-in-law, Kristina Michelle Jones, had been found burned months earlier. The case quickly drew national and even international attention after Henley said she had uncovered something significant about her sister-in-law’s death. Days later, she was murdered.
A suspect was indicted, then unindicted. When District Attorney Jay Hale inherited the case — after returning from federal service and successfully running for district attorney — he didn’t have the evidence needed to move it forward. Hale and his team requested that the indictment be dismissed without prejudice in a filing dated Nov. 17, 2023 — and no updates have been released since.
Two high-profile cases. Two families still waiting.
The cameras left. The headlines moved on. But the questions didn’t.
