By Lawrence Buser
Commercial Appeal
HENNING, Tenn. — A former corrections officer told investigators last year that killing two postal workers in 2010 in Henning, Tenn., “didn’t bother me one bit” until his own son and accomplice was killed four months later in a shootout with authorities.
Chastain Montgomery’s videotaped confession was played in a hearing Friday in a Memphis federal court where his attorneys are asking a judge to disallow it in trial because they say he was denied his right to an attorney and that the confession was coerced.
Montgomery, 48, of Lavergne, Tenn., admitted that he and his deceased son, Chastain Montgomery Jr., 18, shot and killed two postal workers Oct. 18, 2010, in Henning in what he expected to be a big-payoff robbery. He said he was in “total desperation” over financial, marital and parenting problems.
“I was going through hard times and lost my head,” Montgomery told postal inspectors in the Feb. 15 interview last year in the Tipton County Jail in Covington. “Everything went haywire when we found out there wasn’t no money in there. We was just trying to get some money. I wasn’t going in there to execute nobody.”
Full story: Former corrections officer confesses to postal killings on tape shown to judge