Chatter Heard on Scanner Leads to Criminal Charges

A woman listening to a police scanner she had gotten for Christmas picked up a conversation over cordless telephones and heard what turned out to be a murder plot unfolding, investigators say.

Donna McGee tipped sheriff’s deputies to what she had heard, and on Thursday a woman and her boyfriend were arrested and accused of conspiring to kill the woman’s husband and make it look like a burglary gone awry.

“It appears their motive was to collect the insurance money and get out of debt, and for them to continue their lives together,” said Sheriff’s Capt. Joe Ball.

Jacqueline Lee Greene, 32, and Christopher Scott Davis, 21, were charged with conspiracy to murder her husband, James Kenneth Greene. Davis was also charged with criminal attempt to commit murder.

McGee said the scanner chatter she heard Wednesday caught her attention fast.

“I heard this man say: ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ She said she was sure, and asked him if he was sure,” McGee said Friday. “She asked him: ‘Do you really love me enough to kill for me?’ He said: ‘Yes, I do. Do you have any doubts?’ ”

The man and woman talked about having Davis enter the Greene house through a window, McGee said.

“She said if he came through the unlocked patio door, there wouldn’t be any sign of forced entry,” McGee said. “She said: ‘If you come through the window, Kenny will hear you and he’ll come and that’s when you shoot him.”’

By this time some of McGee’s family was listening. When the woman on the scanner called her daughter, McGee’s daughter recognized a playmate’s name. Eventually, the McGees said, they realized the identity of the intended victim.

Greene “was just absolutely amazed, scared, shocked” when sheriff’s deputies informed him of the plot against him, Ball said.

Cordless telephones use radio waves to communicate between the handset and the base. Those radio waves can easily be intercepted by a police scanner.

Ball said there was nothing illegal in McGee’s listening to the cordless phone conversations because it was a random scanning.