Defendant: Woman killed nightclub owner

By Shelley Smithssmith@salisburypost.com

In a 2006 statement to authorities, Nicholas "Nick" Steele claimed that he was not in the master bedroom of Mandy Latasha Clontz's house when authorities say Jeffery Allen Wills was murdered there.

Steele said Wills had come over to see Clontz and that she and Wills had gone into her bedroom.

Steele said he heard Wills say, "I thought you loved me." Steele said he went into the bedroom, and saw Wills on the floor shaking and bleeding from his head.

Clontz, he said, was in the bathroom throwing up and washing her hands.

Authorities dispute that version of events, however, and have charged Steele with first-degree murder in the Aug. 17, 2006 slaying of Wills, who owned the Saturday Night Lounge in north Kannapolis.

Clontz has testified that Steele killed Wills with a hammer out of jealousy and greed.

In testimony Friday, Travis Chriscoe continued to recount his actions on the day he says he assisted Nicholas "Nick" Steele and Mandy Latasha Clontz in moving the body of Jeffrey Allen Wills.

Investigators found Wills' body in the crawlspace of an abandoned Biscoe home weeks later.

Chriscoe testified he gave Steele, Clontz and her two children a ride to Clontz's home in Landis, and said he was asked to help move Wills' body.

Chriscoe said that as he was in the master bedroom with Steele, he noticed mattresses leaning against the wall with blood on them.

He said he drove to back to Biscoe and put Wills' body under the house with Steele.

Chriscoe said he has not seen Clontz since the incident and that he saw Steele only once in the past three years, when they were being held in adjoining cells.

Lt. Chad Moose of the Rowan County Sheriff's Office then took the stand, testifying on the sequence of events following the murder of Steele.

Moose told the court that he executed a search warrant at Clontz's Meriah Street home Sept. 8, 2006, stating that he entered the front room first.

"You notice the smell of decaying flesh," he said, noting the larger bedroom was the source of the smell.

Moose said the bed was bare of sheets or comforters, and objects were placed in random locations on the bed.

Moose found blood stains on the floor in the bedroom and closet, as well as blood on the ceiling and walls.

Moose said investigators also found bloodstains on the wall where the headboard would have been.

He said a mattress on the bed had a spot that contained a large volume of blood. The mattress had been flipped over, but it had so much blood on it, the stain had soaked into the box springs.

And he said it appeared someone had tried to clean the stains on the wall above the bed.

"There were cleaning supplies in odd places in the house," Moose said, "and the closer you looked, (you saw) blood stains."

District Attorney Bill Kenerly showed the jury a video of each room in the home and outside areas made by an SBI agent and asked Moose to point with a laser pointer to specific items.

Moose pointed out a military-style blanket on the child's bed, "similar to the blanket we would later find in Montgomery County," Moose said. He also pointed out a roll of masking tape that was sitting on the seat of a child's four-wheeler toy, which he said was similar to the tape found on the body.

A blanket found on the floor contained small bone fragments, a piece of a skull, thick congealed blood and maggots. Moose said the development of the maggots helped determine the time of Wills' death.

Moose testified that a nightstand had been moved over a blanket and that the blanket was sitting on top of a blood pool. A knife was also found in the blanket. Most of the blood stains on the wall were found near the end table.

On the closet floor was a single coin wrapper, as well as a bucket containing several additional wrappers.

After concluding the search at the Meriah Street home, Moose drove to Montgomery County, arriving as the sun was coming up.

The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office located Clontz and took her into custody.

Moose said investigators found a cigarette butt outside an abandoned house in Biscoe with Clontz's DNA on it. They also found two more with DNA they couldn't match, along with a coin wrapper.

Wills' body was found in the crawl space underneath the home, wrapped in blankets that matched items found in Clontz's home, including a camouflage blanket similar to the pattern on a pillow found in Clontz's home, and a comforter matching a pillow sham found in the master bedroom.

Moose pulled the body from under the house. He said it was so decomposed, "the flesh and blanket had become connected."

Police also found a woman's bra and a man's underwear and shirt with the body.

Questioning Moose, Steele's attorney, Jay White asked why officers had been at the scene where the body was found before Moose had gotten there, since Moose was heading the investigation.

Moose said SBI Agent Steven Holmes and Sgt. Jody Burleyson of the Rowan Sheriff's Office had been to the home before dawn that day. They left the scene and met Moose at the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department.

White asked if any Montgomery County deputies who initially found Wills' body wrote any reports about the scene, and Moose said they had not.

The morning Clontz arrived in Biscoe, Moose said, he had Clontz direct him to El Dorado Trading Post where Clontz said the murder weapon — a hammer — and clothing had been thrown into a dumpster. When they arrived, the dumpster had been emptied, and Moose was unable to recover the weapon.

Burleyson then took the stand and read the statement he received from Steele Sept. 15, 2006.

Steele's statement said that he was leaving court and walked Clontz to the park where Wills was watching her two children. They eventually all rode together to Clontz's home in Landis. Wills left, bringing back cocaine and marijuana, and Steele stayed the night with Clontz.

Steele said Wills came back the next day with more marijuana. The next morning, Clontz told Steele she was going to call Wills and ask him to come over because she thought he had around $15,000 cash on him.

Steele said Wills came to Clontz's home, and he claimed in his statement that's when she lured Wills into her bedroom and killed him.

After the murder, Steele said in his statement, Clontz went outside to a storage building and brought back a phone cord and tape. Wills' hands were wrapped in the phone cord and his feet were wrapped in tape.

Steele stated that he, Chriscoe, Clontz and Clontz's children drove back to Biscoe, and Steele's sister rented them all a room at the Days Inn.

At some point Steele said, he, Chriscoe and Clontz went back to Landis to move Wills' vehicle, which they pushed down a hill in Moore County.

That Monday Steele went with Chriscoe, Clontz and her children to Landis to move Wills' body, he said.

"Travis pulled the body to the back door and I helped load it up," he said in the statement. Chriscoe pulled the body under the house, leaving it there.

Also in the statement, Steele said Clontz told him in the hotel room that she had hit Wills in the head with a hammer.

Holmes, the SBI agent, testified that in a Feb. 9 meeting at the Rowan County jail, Steele told him that he had been selling Wills drugs. It wouldn't make sense to rob Wills, Steele told the agent, because he would get the money eventually through drug transactions.

He also told Holmes that he had a gun the day of the murder, and if he had wanted to kill Wills, he would have shot him.

Holmes said Steele also told him that he knew Wills had a jukebox in his lounge that had $70,000 cash hidden inside, and that he would rather have taken the money from the jukebox than rob Wills. Steele also claimed to Holmes that Clontz had a BB&T bank bag that belonged to Wills.

The trial is expected to continue Monday at 9:30 a.m.