By Louie Graves
News-Leader staff
The man who police believe stabbed his girlfriend to death last week may have spent two nights in the same room with her corpse.
Gerald Martin, 47, apparently stabbed his girlfriend, Gracie Haddox, 43, multiple times sometime during the day, Wednesday, May 10. The woman was found the morning of Friday, May 12 by one of her three children living in the home at 310 Meadow Lane, Nashville. At that point police began searching for Martin.
Later that morning, when executing a search warrant at the house, police discovered the body of Martin who had apparently hanged himself in the bedroom closet.
The timeline began Wednesday morning when Martin took one child to school in Nashville, and Haddox took the other two. When Martin picked up the children after school that afternoon, he allegedly told them their mother was sick and that they shouldn’t bother her. The fact that he picked up all three children after school was unusual, police were told.
Haddox had been stabbed multiple times with a long kitchen knife.
At some point, Martin went into the bedroom closet where there was an access to the attic. He looped a rope over an overhead support and hanged himself.
The bodies were in their bedroom all day Thursday. Police were not sure of Martin’s time of death.
On Friday morning, one of the children reportedly decided to check on the mother and discovered the body in the bloody bedroom. Police were called shortly before 7:30.
No one knew where Martin was at this point, and officers called his employer in Gurdon in an effort to locate him.
But during the search of the house, Martin was found dead in the large closet of the bedroom. The discovery was made at about 11:30 a.m.
Martin was a “lifetime parolee” out of Texas where he had been convicted of murder in the early 1990s, according to officials. Ironically, when he was arrested for that murder of a girlfriend, he had returned home to Mineral Springs. He was arrested there by Howard County authorities and was returned to Texas for trial.
He had been living here with Haddox for about two years, and officers said there had been no complaints on either of the couple. Their bodies were sent to the state crime lab as required, but Howard County Sheriff Bryan McJunkins said that the deaths were determined to be murder and suicide. He said the case was closed.
