On a summer morning in Winona, Mississippi, the quiet downtown was shattered by a horrific discovery. On July 16, 1996, inside Tardy Furniture, four people were found shot to death, each with a bullet to the head. The owner of the store, 59-year-old Bertha Tardy, a female civic leader, lay among the victims. Her employees, Carmen Rigby, 45, and Robert Golden, 42, were also found deceased at the scene.
A fourth victim, 16-year-old Derrick “Bobo” Stewart, was found clinging to life but succumbed to his injuries a week later.
The investigation into the quadruple homicide quickly focused on a former employee. Curtis Giovanni Flowers, who had been fired from the furniture store just days before the murders, was identified as a suspect. Investigators learned that a gun of the same caliber as the murder weapon had been stolen from Flowers' uncle's car on the day of the crime. Additionally, some witnesses claimed to have seen him near the store that morning. Less than six months after the murders, in January 1997, Flowers was arrested in Texas, where he had moved and found another job.
The legal proceedings that followed would stretch on for more than two decades, marked by a series of trials, convictions, and appeals. District Attorney Doug Evans prosecuted the case against Flowers six separate times. The first trial resulted in a conviction for the murder of Bertha Tardy and a death sentence, but this was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct. Subsequent trials followed a similar pattern, with convictions being overturned on appeal, often citing racial bias in the jury selection process, as prosecutors were found to have systematically excluded Black jurors. Two of the six trials ended in hung juries.
After his sixth trial in 2010 resulted in another conviction and death sentence, Flowers' case gained national attention. His appeals continued, culminating in a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned his conviction, again citing racial discrimination in jury selection. Following this ruling, the charges against Curtis Flowers were officially dropped in September 2020, after he had spent nearly 23 years in prison. To this day, no one else has been charged in connection with the murders at Tardy Furniture, and the case remains officially unresolved.
