In the summer of 1996, in the small town of Winona, Mississippi, sixteen-year-old Derrick 'BoBo' Stewart was embarking on a new chapter, having just started a job at Tardy Furniture. On the morning of July 16th, what began as a regular workday descended into a tragedy that would haunt the community for decades. That day, Stewart and three of his colleagues were brutally shot inside the furniture store. The other victims were the store's owner, Bertha Tardy, 59, and two other employees, Carmen Rigby, 45, and Robert Golden, 42. While Tardy, Rigby, and Golden were pronounced dead at the scene, Stewart clung to life for a week before succumbing to his injuries.
The investigation into the quadruple homicide led police to Curtis Giovanni Flowers, a former employee who had been fired from the store just days before the killings. Prosecutors built a case around the theory that the motive was revenge for his termination and a dispute over his final paycheck. This theory, coupled with eyewitness accounts that placed Flowers near the store on the morning of the murders, formed the basis of the state's case against him. Seven months after the murders, Flowers was arrested and charged with the killings, setting the stage for a legal battle that would span more than two decades.
Curtis Flowers was tried an unprecedented six times for the same crime. His legal journey was a convoluted series of trials, convictions, and reversals. The first three convictions were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct. The fourth and fifth trials ended in hung juries. The sixth trial, in 2010, resulted in another conviction and a death sentence. However, this conviction was ultimately overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019, which cited a pattern of racial bias in the jury selection process by the prosecution.
After spending nearly 23 years behind bars, Curtis Flowers was released on bail in December 2019. The following year, the Mississippi Attorney General's office announced that it would not seek a seventh trial, citing a lack of credible witnesses and unreliable evidence. The charges against Flowers were officially dropped, bringing a close to one of Mississippi's most protracted and debated criminal cases. To this day, the murders at Tardy Furniture remain officially unsolved, leaving a painful and unanswered question for the families of Derrick BoBo Stewart and the other victims.
