Carly Madison Gregg, the Mississippi teenager who killed her mother and tried to kill her stepfather, has been found guilty on all charges after a Rankin County jury returned from deliberations with a verdict on Friday.
In what turned into a high-profile case garnering both national and international attention, the question was never if Gregg murdered her mother, local teacher Ashley Smylie. Rather, it was whether she was in her right mind when committing the crimes.
The defense used the week-long trial to bring in witnesses to try to frame their client as someone suffering from insanity at the time of the killing. Gregg’s stepfather, Heath Smylie, seemed to have swung the pendulum in favor of Gregg early with his testimony claiming it looked like Gregg “had seen a demon or something” when shooting him in the shoulder. Heath, who said he still talks to Gregg every day, asserted his stepdaughter was not the girl he knows when the crimes took place.
Gregg’s attorneys also used medical officials to try to prove that a change in medication before the crimes were committed and that their client’s use of THC products could have put her into a state of hypnosis, meaning Gregg did not know what she was doing when killing Ashley and attempting to kill Heath.
The jury did not buy it, though, as the nine members sided with the prosecuting state of Mississippi. Prosecutors called on or cross-examined multiple witnesses to prove that Gregg’s behavior was both deliberate and diabolical, but still unexplained.
“Those crimes were awful. She has shown zero remorse. Zero remorse for what she has done,” Assistant District Attorney Katherine Newman said after the verdict was returned. “We don’t know why she committed these crimes, but we know she did and we know that she is a danger to society.”
On March 19, 2024, video footage from inside the Brandon home’s garage presented in court showed Gregg and Ashley arrive from Northwest Rankin High School – where Ashley worked as a math teacher and Gregg attended as a student – around 3:54 p.m. At 4:14 p.m., video footage from inside the kitchen showed Gregg walk towards her mother’s bedroom with what is believed to have been a gun behind her back. While there were no security cameras inside the bedroom, the footage from the kitchen picked up audio of three gunshots. Ashley was later found deceased with three gunshot wounds to the head.
After the initial shots sounded, video footage from the kitchen showed Gregg rushing back in with two worried dogs circling her. She ignored the dogs and proceeded to use her mother’s phone to send a text message to Heath reading, “Are you almost home, honey?”
After Heath received and responded to the message, believing it was his wife texting him, he returned from his work as a physical therapist at 5:03 p.m. Footage from the garage then caught the audio of three more gunshots going off when Heath walked inside the home. He wrangled the gun away from Gregg and she fled the home before being caught by law enforcement shortly after.
What seemed to have shifted the pendulum back in favor of the state, even after a convincing testimony from Heath, were testimonies from various doctors who had seen Gregg. Dr. Jason Pickett, a psychiatrist who had Gregg as a patient in the months leading up to the deadly day, said from his perspective, there had never been any evidence of Gregg being insane.
“My opinion is that Carly does not meet Mississippi’s standard for insanity at the time of the events and that she knew the nature, quality, and wrongfulness of her actions during that day,” Pickett said.
Dr. Andrew Clark, the doctor tasked with performing Gregg’s psychological evaluation before the trial began, said there’s no proof of insanity. However, he could not provide an objective opinion, still slightly leaning toward Gregg not being culpable.
Even with Clark’s wish-wash answer after the defense called him to the stand, the jurors gleaned more from a lack of evidence showing Gregg was out of her mind when killing her mother and trying to kill her stepfather.
“What I understood is that Carly had this really kind of low dissociative experiences for a number of years where she felt distant from, the world was dreamy, sort of a sense of unreality, that had been persistent but hadn’t necessarily been a significant problem,” Clark said, adding that he diagnosed her with Bipolar II rather than the more severe Bipolar I. “What I think happened on March 19 is that Carly was really having a mental health crisis.”
At the conclusion of the trial, Gregg was sentenced to two sentences of life in prison, which will run concurrent, for first-degree murder, attempted murder, and tampering with evidence. She was also given an additional 10 years for the tampering with evidence charge. This came after she twice rejected a 40-year plea deal and decided to let nine jurors decide her fate.
Gregg’s counsel will have 10 days to file an appeal and noted after the trial that they plan to do so.
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