Following a jury trial, co-defendants Steve Manley and Robert Allen appeal their convictions for the murder of Emmett Whatley.1 For the reasons set forth below, we must reverse in both cases. 1. In the light most favorable to the verdict, the record shows that, in or around January 2007, Alexandria Phillips became friends with Whatley and visited his home. A few weeks before Whatley was murdered, Phillips had conversations with Allen, Manley, and Allen-Brown,2 another co-defendant, about Whatley. She told Allen, Manley, and Allen-Brown that Whatley had a recording studio at his house and that Whatley kept cash in his home. At this point, Allen, Manley, and Cody Allen-Brown planned to rob Whatley. On the night of February 8, 2007, Phillips saw Allen-Brown enter Allen’s Lincoln Navigator SUV around midnight Allen and Manley were already in the car, and Allen called her to get directions to Whatley’s home. In a series of subsequent calls, Allen and Phillips discussed that: 1 Whatley was not home; 2 Whatley returned home with a woman; 3 Whatley and the woman left; and 4 Whatley had returned again by himself.3 Cell phone records prove that calls were made from Phillips’ phone to the phones of Manley, Allen, and Whatley near the time of the murder. Other testimony showed that Whatley did have a date that night, and he returned his date to her mother’s house around 2:00 a.m.
Some time after 2:00 a.m., Whatley’s neighbors heard a gunshot, and one neighbor witnessed three people running from the scene to an SUV parked down the street. The next morning, Whatley was found dead in his front yard from a gunshot wound to the chest. On February 9, 2007, Phillips met with the co-defendants, and, during this meeting, Phillips received a text message from a friend that Whatley was dead. When Phillips asked the three co-defendants about this, Allen-Brown admitted to the shooting, though he said he did not mean to do it. Allen told Phillips to keep quiet about the crime, and Allen and Manley explained to her that they were going to make up a cover story that they were just trying to buy drugs from Whatley on the night in question. In March of 2007, an informant contacted police to tell them that Allen-Brown had recently admitted to him that he had shot someone. Later, during questioning by police, both Allen and Manley admitted that they went to Whatley’s home to buy drugs on the night of the murder but fled when they heard gunshots. In his statement, Manley indicated that he saw a man lying on the ground after the gunshot. Both Manley and Allen implicated Allen-Brown as the shooter in their written statements.
