Mother Knows Best?

Mum's the Word

When the Scene spoke with Diane Sanders last Thursday, on the morning police arrested her daughter, Kelley Cannon, for murder, officers had only left her Green Hills home a few hours earlier. Sanders says police arrived in an unmarked car and knocked on the door of the home at about 8:30 a.m. to find her wearing a housecoat and Kelley in her pajamas.

Despite the morning's commotion—an event that Sanders describes as horrific—the mother, with her raspy tone and near-screeching voice, began to defend her daughter against charges that she strangled her estranged husband and stuffed him in the closet of their tony West Nashville home. But Sanders never portrays Kelley as a good, kind, loving person—the kinds of things you would hope your mother would say should you be charged with murder. And she absolutely never says that her daughter simply is incapable of killing another human being, instead explaining that Kelley "just got mixed up with the wrong man, I guess. I don't think she murdered him."

Kelley admitted to the Scene and police that she was inside the Cannon home the night of Jim's murder, but she says she quickly left the home with her three children when she called out to Jim and couldn't find him. Since then, she has been charged in the murder of her husband and is being held on $500,000 bond—an amount Sanders says the family cannot pay.

Now, Kelley's criminal attorney, Peter Strianse, says his client will "plead not guilty without a question" to the "dubious charge." But police say scientific analysis of evidence collected from the home implicates Kelley in the homicide.

Just exactly what that evidence is, however, is still unclear. The autopsy report of Jim's death has not been released, and police have disclosed few details about the crime scene.

But Sanders seems surprisingly privy to intimate details of the murder. "Physically, I know the details of the murder and everything," she says. "I can't divulge what I know." She says that Jim's body was stuffed into a closet in the room shared by his two sons, ages 9 and 7. "There was a chest of drawers knocked over that weighs about 300 pounds because it's solid wood against the door of the closet—like blocking the door so he couldn't get out," she says. It's a detail that two sources close to the case have also confirmed.

In her interview with the Scene, Kelley said that she went into the boys' room in her search for Jim the night of his death. Kelley said it was clear that Jim was staying in the bedroom because she saw both his briefcase and his glasses in there, but she never mentioned the chest of drawers blocking the closet. "There's no way a little 90-pound girl like her could've done all that was done to him in the manner in which he was killed. And knocked over a 300-pound chest and all that kind of stuff," Sanders says.

Sources close to the case say that Jim suffered a ligature strangulation with a chord or an object—not with anyone's hands—and that his face was beaten severely. Police would not confirm this or any other details about the homicide.

But Sanders continues on with her rapid-fire description of Jim's death, seemingly without a filter—or without a clue of how her statements may hurt her daughter's case. When she describes how she doesn't think her 90-pound daughter could have killed Jim, who weighed about 190 pounds, Sanders alludes to knowledge that Jim's body was drug across the floor. "Physically she couldn't have done it. I don't know how you drag a 190-pound man across the floor, you know, and put him in a closet—a dead weight. Dead weight."

As if to counter her own argument about how Kelley couldn't have possibly overpowered Jim, Sanders says police are looking into whether Kelley had an accomplice—a notion she then quickly decries, saying Kelley didn't have the money for a hired killer. "Well, she was out of [Jim's] house for two months, and she had no money except what he gave her," she says. "It's not like murder for hire. And she didn't have any affairs going on...illicit relationships, boyfriends, anything like that."

Sanders breeched the boyfriend topic without being asked, just as she brought up speculation that Kelley, the executrix of Jim's will, may have murdered her husband for the insurance money. With Jim as Kelley's sole source of income, Sanders says her daughter couldn't be the killer. "Why would you murder somebody when that's your source of income? It wouldn't be for the insurance or anything—that's stupid."

Several months before Jim's death, a judge awarded the successful attorney and businessman custody of the couple's three children because of what he described in divorce papers as Kelley's bizarre pattern of schizophrenic episodes and drug abuse. Since then, Jim had been paying for Kelley to live in apartments across the city, and most recently, at the Grove at Whitworth on Elmington Avenue, a short walk from the family home.