Woman not guilty in July 28 Triangle Place slaying

A charge against a city woman accused of helping her husband kill a man in July was dismissed Tuesday after a bench trial in Lynchburg Circuit Court.

Family and friends jumped up and erupted into cheers when Judge Mosby Perrow found Rachelle Scott-Hayward not guilty of being an accessory to murder.

“I don’t think you’ve come close,” Perrow told Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Gretchen Hutt in regard to proving the woman’s involvement in the slaying beyond a reasonable doubt.

Scott-Hayward, 49, was accused of holding neighbors and bystanders at bay with an aluminum baseball bat on July 28 as her husband, William Hayward, stabbed Christopher Flood to death outside the Haywards’ Triangle Place home.

Hutt argued that testimony showed Scott-Hayward encouraged her husband, yelling, “Give him what he deserves,” while keeping neighbors from helping Flood.

“It’s preposterous for the defendant to say she went out to protect her husband,” Hutt argued. “Everyone else outside saw what was happening and she didn’t.”

However, that was Scott-Hayward’s testimony.

She testified her husband and Flood argued earlier in the evening, after her sister complained that Flood was touching her (the sister) inappropriately and disrespecting her.

That argument ended with William Hayward punching Flood and knocking him down, she said. She went out and broke up the fight, she said. She told Flood to come back in a few days, since the man and her husband had been friends, and thought it was over, according to testimony.

But Flood came back, she testified, and there were neighbors behind him yelling at her husband.

“I thought they had come up there to jump me and my husband,” she testified.

Greg Smith, her lawyer, argued that the prosecutor didn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Scott-Hayward’s actions in swinging a bat to keep what she thought was an angry mob at bay were connected to Flood’s slaying. They were separate events, Smith argued.

Behind her back, according to testimony during the trial, her husband was beating Flood in the head with a metal pry bar and stabbing him with a knife. One of those stab wounds cut an artery in Flood’s abdomen, causing him to bleed to death.

“I didn’t see anything,” she testified. “They were behind my back.”

But several witnesses testified they saw Scott-Hayward turn around during the beating to look at her husband.

Former neighbor Yolita Burford testified that she and others yelled at Scott-Hayward to stop the fight, but were told, “It ain’t gonna be no jumping.”

Another neighbor testified she told Scott-Hayward that her husband was going to kill Flood and that the woman responded to her by saying, “He shouldn’t have come back up here.”

Latricia McCullers, Scott-Hayward’s sister, testified Flood had been grabbing her under the table at the Triangle Place home earlier in the night and “wasn’t taking no for an answer.”

McCullers said she was worried about her sister’s prospects going into the daylong trial.

“I knew it wasn’t what they were making it out to be,” she said. “At the end, listening to the judge, it sounded like their witnesses weren’t reliable.”

She said the family is relieved that her sister will be released from jail, where she has been held since being charged in August, but is also praying for William Hayward.

Hayward is charged with first-degree murder. He is scheduled to go to trial on Jan. 20.