The Widow Speaks

Sounding remarkably measured, Kelley Cannon says that she’s so distraught that she simply cannot function since a housekeeper found the limp body of her husband, attorney Jim Cannon. The night before her husband was found dead and stuffed in a closet, she says he called her and said, “I’m afraid.”

Since his death in late June, Jim’s family and friends have looked toward the spindly brunette as an undeniable suspect. Jim’s colleagues at the Franklin-based Medical Reimbursements of America, a successful medical bill collection firm that Jim co-founded, have completely shut Kelley out as well.

It’s really no wonder. A former private school prom queen whose upscale life now lies in ruins, Kelley amassed a slew of police reports and court documents that depict her as a schizophrenic drug addict with an explosive, bizarre pattern of behavior. Police affidavits from the last few years of the Cannon marriage say she pushed Jim around, threatened him with a knife and led police on a short, high-speed chase after snatching her toddler away from her husband.

Little of it is true, she says. In fact, in an exclusive interview with the Scene, Kelley calmly insists that she, the doting mother and devoted wife, was not the problem in the relationship—Jim was. In an hour-and-a-half discussion, Kelley, a one-time deputy press secretary to former Gov. Ned Ray McWherter, spoke civilly and at length about her life with Jim—a fact made all the more remarkable given the intimate details of her troubled marriage published in last week’s Scenestory (“Who Killed Jim Cannon?” July 3).

Though she says she’s reticent to drag her beloved husband’s name through the muck, she lists a multitude of ways in which Jim had wronged her and their three children. Hewas the drug addict, she says. Hewas the one prone to emotional outbursts. Hewas the one begging her to violate the very orders of protection he took out against her.

The marriage was tumultuous, to be sure. It was a fiery coupling wrought with infidelity and distrust, Kelley says. And it would all end that June night in the family’s nearly $660,000 home, which sits in the same quiet neighborhood as former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist.

Kelley, by her own admission, was there that last night of her husband’s life. And so were all three children, ages 1, 7 and 9. Kelley says she doesn’t know who killed her husband, but she knows he was uncharacteristically rattled the night of his death.

After leaving her apartment for dinner with a friend—Jim had temporary custody of the children as well as an injunction preventing Kelley from staying at the family home—Kelley got a call from her husband. He said he was scared and that he loved her, and then insisted that she come over. Kelley recalls the conversation: “He said, ‘I’m just telling you, things have spun out of control…[things] that I can’t even talk about. I feel threatened, and I’m afraid.’ ” Kelley says that, in the more than decade she’d been married to Jim, she’d never known him to be the fearful type. “He was always, you know, a control freak.”

After she “paced and paced and paced,” sometime after midnight, she drove by their home. She figured that, if she drove up the driveway, she could look inside the windows to see if all was well. But when she pulled into the driveway, Kelley saw that the back door was open.

She has a lucid memory of what she found inside: All of the downstairs lights were on. The furniture was askew—some of it was turned over and much of it was in complete disarray. There were towels strewn about the floor. She called for Jim. He didn’t answer. So she headed upstairs for the children’s rooms.

She says she got her youngest child first and then checked Jim’s office, where she says he usually slept. The family called the room “the cave” because Jim liked to sleep in total darkness. He wasn’t there.

She checked on the boys, who were sleeping in the master bedroom. The boys’ own bedroom was unoccupied, but Kelley says it was obvious that Jim had been sleeping in there because his briefcase and glasses were in the room. “I kept calling for him, and I didn’t hear him,” she says. “And then I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get the kids out of here. Whoever did this has got to be in the house and may be watching the house.’ ”

Although she admits she was afraid and sensed that something was wrong, Kelley says she took the time to pack a bag for her youngest daughter, gathering up the girl’s diapers, bottles and such. But Kelley adds that, when it comes to Jim, she “never saw him at all.”