Jessica Chambers trial: Quinton Tellis admits to being with Chambers the evening she died

BATESVILLE, Miss. – Jessica Chambers spent her final evening going to Taco Bell in Batesville with Quinton Tellis despite his long insistence that he had last seen her hours earlier that day, video testimony revealed Friday.

In video testimony viewed by jurors in Tellis' capital murder trial Friday, Tellis admitted in January 2016 that the 19-year-old Chambers picked him up at his Courtland residence about 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 6, 2014. That was only minutes after the last video footage of Chambers alive was recorded as she bought gas at the M&M First Stop across from Tellis' residence.

Chambers was found shortly after 8 p.m. stumbling from the woods near her burning Kia Rio sedan on Herron Road in Courtland.

The testimony was the most dramatic since the trial began Tuesday. The video interrogations of Tellis, three in all, were played as part of the testimony of Mississippi Bureau of Investigation agent Tim Douglas. He was on the stand most of the day.

"We have the moment of truth now, don't we?" District Attorney John Champion asked Douglas after one segment of the video interrogation.

Friday's testimony stopped short of explaining what happened between the time Chambers and Tellis returned from Batesville at about 6:30 p.m. and when Chambers' burning car was reported shortly before 8 p.m. 

It did, however, establish that Tellis had been lying about details of Chambers' final day.

Testimony also revealed that Tellis changed clothes that evening and had on the new clothes when he was caught on security camera at Fred's dollar store in Batesville about 8:30 p.m. buying a cash card for a girl friend in Louisiana.

Douglas, Chambers and other investigators questioned Tellis in Monroe, La., Nov. 2-3, 2015. He was already in jail there at the time of the interviews on credit card theft charges.

Tellis was subsequently charged with the first-degree murder of the woman from whom the card was stolen, a Taiwanese exchange student, and faces a trial on that charge after the Chambers case is finished.

After checking alibis given by Tellis during those interviews, the investigators discovered they didn't check out and returned to Monroe to question Tellis again on Jan. 27, 2016. 

Tellis told the investigators in November that he followed Jessica to Batesville that afternoon, where he gave her marijuana and $10 to buy food, in a truck owned by friend Mike Sanford, known as "Big Mike." He said Chambers was alone in her car.

But investigators confirmed that Sanford was in Nashville for a Tennessee Titans football game. Alibis from two people who supposedly saw him after he and Chambers returned to Courtland from Batesville also didn't check out. 

"When Quinton Tellis was met head-on with the fact that we had evidence, Quinton would change his story," Douglas said of Tellis' evolving accounts of his last day with Chambers.

At one point during the video interviews, Tellis suggested Chambers' father, Ben Chambers, might have had something to do with his daughter's death when asked by investigators who could have committed such a crime.

Ben Chambers and Jessica's mother, Lisa Chambers, were in the front row as the testimony played. They showed no reaction.

Douglas' testimony, including the Louisiana interviews with Tellis, came on a day when the trail of cell phone data that prosecutors were banking on began to come into play. The links tying Tellis and Chambers together through much of the day she died were a key part of the confessions that slowly trickled out of Tellis during the Louisiana questioning.

Douglas said during morning testimony, before the video interviews were played, that investigators had basically reached a dead end by the fall of 2015, when the analysis of cell phone records began providing a break.

Much of the data investigators were seeing didn't match what they had been hearing from Tellis.

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During the course of interviews, Douglas indicated Tellis' accounts of the day Chambers died changed enough, and were enough at odds with phone records, that they implicated him.

Video viewed by jurors before lunch showed Tellis saying he rode around with Chambers and her friend, Kesha Myers, on the morning of her death before admitting he had been with Chambers that evening.

He says they dropped him off at his house about noon, and that was the last time he was actually with her. He said the last contact he had with Chambers after that was when she messaged sometime before dark asking for money to get something to eat. He said he dropped money in her car at the M&M First Stop and didn't talk to her again. 

Douglas also said in his morning testimony that early tips kept coming back to the names "Eric" or "Derek," who multiple first responders testified earlier they thought they heard Chambers identify as her killer as she was dying. He, like Champion and others, said investigators ran down every tip they could find on people by those names, but to no avail.

"You can't believe the number of calls we had coming in from people giving tips," Douglas said. "I told investigators 'we've got to make sure we look for every Eric we can find.'"

Douglas added, however, that investigators never limited their search to those names.

"We didn't limit ourselves to the dying statement of a girl in the shape she was in," Douglas said.

Douglas was the second witness Friday. Matthew Simon, a forensic chemist in the Atlanta lab of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified first. 

Simon said he tested various items taken from the scene where Chambers was found, and determined gasoline was used as an accelerant. Among other items, he tested cloth believed to be from Chambers' clothing.

Champion had hoped to call the last prosecution witness Saturday, but testimony will resume at 9 a.m. with cross-examination of Douglas by the defense.