Content Warning: This story contains descriptions of events involving sexual assault, stalking, murder and suicide. If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual violence and needs support, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or online at RAINN.org. If you or someone you know are experiencing thoughts of suicide, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling, texting or chatting 988.
ST. FRANCISVILLE, Louisiana (InvestigateTV) — As Peggy Beasley began her nighttime routine in September 2021, she had no idea that a man who was arrested for raping her weeks before had snuck into her laundry room with a gun, lying in wait.
Marshall Rayburn, Beasley’s estranged husband, shot and killed the 70-year-old woman in her home, then turned the gun on himself.
Beasley had no warning before Rayburn’s Sept. 20, 2021, attack — even though authorities were supposedly monitoring his every move.
When Rayburn was released on bail for the rape charges, he was outfitted with an ankle monitor.
ADVERTISEMENT
That monitor had a geo-fence, or exclusion zone, an imaginary circle that encompassed hundreds of feet around Beasley’s home that Rayburn was informed he was forbidden to enter or risk losing his bond privileges.
“I did feel more safe that he had the ankle monitor,” Beasley’s daughter, Devlin Hopper said.
But despite Rayburn entering the “exclusion zone” multiple times in the weeks leading up to the murder, law enforcement authorities said they weren’t notified by the monitoring company.
Beasley’s murder isn’t the only case where critics allege a lack of supervision has led to tragedy.
Across the country, InvestigateTV found cases where individuals wearing ankle monitors were subsequently arrested — often accused of committing other crimes of violence like assaults and murders. Although each case is different and the circumstances may not be the same as Beasley’s case, some are calling for greater oversight of the use of ankle monitors and the companies involved.
ADVERTISEMENT
A loving mother and grandmother
A pillar of the community, Beasley’s family members describe their late mother and grandmother as a woman who was well respected and beloved around the sleepy town of St. Francisville.
Retired from her career at a local nuclear power plant, Beasley was enjoying the simple things, such as eagerly awaiting family gatherings where she could try out new margarita recipes.
“She loved to have fun. She laughed a lot,” Hopper said. “She was a caring, loving and supportive mom.”
Beasley also spent her time volunteering within her church.
“[She] would do anything for anyone,” her son, Jared Crow said.
Looking back, the siblings said they think it was their mother’s independence and caring nature that led her to keep quiet about what she was dealing with at home.
“She didn’t want to burden her kids, you know, telling us she was scared,” Hopper said.
Beasley was scared of Rayburn, her husband of 15 years who had allegedly been drugging and raping her while she was unconscious.
In August 2021, Beasley went to law enforcement after finding evidence of the assaults, including pictures on the family computer
Rayburn was arrested by West Feliciana Sheriff’s Deputies, and after posting his $100,000 bail informed prosecutors he would be living with family — about 41 miles away from his wife, who filed for divorce in the days following his arrest.
ADVERTISEMENT
The conditions of his release required him to stay away from Beasley, and an ankle monitor he received was designed to enforce that provision.
Testing the system
The ankle monitor assigned to Rayburn was programmed with an “exclusion zone” around his wife’s house. If at any time he came within that designated geographic area, the action would trigger an alarm within the monitoring system, and that information would be passed on to law enforcement by the monitoring company.
The monitor was also designed to issue alerts for other abnormal activity such as, the device disconnecting from the system, losing power, or no longer sharing location data.
According to GPS data from the monitor analyzed by InvestigateTV, notifications of such breaches began within 72 hours of Rayburn’s release from jail.
Data shows the monitor first began tracking his location on Aug. 28, 2021, around 12:22 p.m. The next day, data shows the system “lost communication” with the device which prosecutors say should have triggered a notification to law enforcement or the court by the ankle monitoring company.
On Sept. 1, GPS data shows Rayburn entered the exclusion zone and came within 500 feet of Beasley’s home five times. The monitor logged zone violations at 12:25, 1:26, 2:26, 2:32 and 4:06 that afternoon.
A week later, on Sept. 8, Rayburn entered the exclusion zone again.
Nine days later, on Sept. 17, data shows the monitor logged both a “communication loss” alert and a “location loss” alert, but once more, authorities weren’t notified.
On Sept. 18, data shows Rayburn entered the exclusion zone for the seventh time, coming within 300 feet of Beasley’s home.
Prosecutors said each of those zone violations should have triggered a notification, but that law enforcement was not made aware.
“He blatantly broke the rules,” Beasley’s son, Jared Crow said. “He tested them. He would ride by a certain area just to see if it would trigger, and the GPS data shows that.”
The evening of Sept. 20, roughly two hours before Rayburn snuck into Beasley’s home, data shows the monitor logged three exclusion zone violations in 30 minutes, the last of which occurred at 9:24 p.m. A few minutes later, the monitor reported a “location loss.”
Beasley’s other son, Brandon, said the timeline left him in disbelief.
“Why wasn’t my mother notified?” Why weren’t the police notified?” he said. “Just pure anger to see with facts in your face that this was completely preventable.”
‘There’s no monitoring at all’
As Beasley went outside to let her dogs out before she went to sleep, Rayburn snuck inside her house.
A neighbor heard screams coming from the home and called 911 before running over to see what was happening. When the neighbor entered the home, she encountered an angry Rayburn standing in the living room with a gun pointed at Beasley.
The recorded call captured the moments the neighbor pleaded with Marshall to put the gun down.
He refused.
“Marshall put the gun to the neighbor’s chest and fired through her chest, through her back and hit the victim and killed her,” District Attorney Sam D’Aquilla said.
Despite the gunshot wound, the neighbor survived and remained conscious and able to stay on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, describing what happened next.
In the recording, the neighbor can be heard sobbing as Rayburn sat down in a chair and turned the gun on himself.
After Rayburn’s ankle monitor registered a zone violation at 9:24 p.m. and location loss at 9:29 p.m., the monitor did not record any data until the device reconnected as authorities processed the crime scene in the early hours of Sept. 21.
Crime scene photos show the device was still attached to Rayburn’s ankle but was wrapped in aluminum foil.
“That aluminum foil disrupted the signal, therefore the loss of communication after he entered the restricted zone,” D’Aquilla said.
Questions were asked almost immediately that night by responding deputies and the district attorney about how Rayburn managed to gain access to Beasley with no one getting notified about it.
D’Aquilla said this isn’t an issue isolated to southeastern Louisiana.
“It happens all across the country as well,” he said. “It’s just like the ‘Wild West.’ I mean, these monitoring companies show up. They talk to a judge. They talk to the sheriff. They enter into an agreement and say, ‘We’re going to monitor these individuals’, and there’s no monitoring at all.”
A national problem
InvestigateTV reviewed news reports from across the country and found numerous examples of defendants who were issued ankle monitors as a condition of bond and were accused of committing new crimes while wearing them:
- In New Orleans, a 15-year-old wearing a “deactivated” ankle monitor was arrested and charged in the death of a tour guide in the city’s famed French Quarter. The juvenile had been ordered to wear the ankle monitor to enforce his home incarceration after being convicted of aggravated assault and other crimes.
- In Memphis, Tennessee, a pastor was killed in a deadly carjacking in July 2022. One of the individuals arrested and charged in the killing, a 15-year-old, was wearing an ankle monitor as part of a juvenile court rehabilitation program for armed carjacking charges the teen had received in December 2021.
- In Nashville, a man was wearing an ankle monitor when he was arrested in July 2023 and charged with armed robbery and attempted homicide. It was the third time the man had been arrested for a shooting-related crime in a year. After his second arrest, he was issued an ankle monitor.
- In Louisville, Kentucky, a man was arrested in December 2022 on charges of murder, assault, and a slew of other crimes after a double shooting left one man dead and a woman injured. The arrest was aided when the injured woman told law enforcement the suspect had an ankle monitor. The man was wearing the home incarceration tracker for a different alleged crime when he was picked up nine days after the shooting. News reports indicated that if the accused shooter were to make his $1 million bond, he would again be released into home incarceration.
“The public is sick and tired of seeing people on bond after bond, continuing to re-offend with no consequences,” South Carolina 9th Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson told a local TV station in 2022.
The long-time Charleston prosecutor spoke to WCSC after the area saw multiple cases within a few years of defendants violating the terms of their bond or reoffending while wearing ankle monitors
In one instance, a man charged in an April 2022 shooting that injured a 9-year-old girl was wearing an ankle monitor that was supposed to enforce a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew as the man awaited trial for murder charges.
That shooting occurred around the same time that a 16-year-old facing multiple sexual assault charges in Orangeburg, South Carolina had been released on strict home incarceration but had been visiting golf courses and other leisure establishments as well as traveling across state lines, according to court hearings.
Wilson pointed to the set-up of the bonding and monitoring system — and the money involved — as a contributing factor to a pattern seen coast to coast.
In many cases, ankle monitors are outfitted and monitored by bonding companies, and defendants pay the cost of the monitor directly to that company, which Wilson has argued dissuades some companies from paying close attention because they would lose that stream of income.
“It’s a moneymaker to have people out on these bonds, paying for the GPS monitor, and there’s not much of an incentive to turn them in,” she said in 2022.
Wilson has advocated for reform for years, even taking some bonding companies to court, and in late 2022 Charleston launched a pilot program to have law enforcement officers in charge of monitoring rather than a third party.
Still, oversight remains limited in much of the country — though some lawmakers are looking to change that.
Beasley’s murder captures attention of lawmakers
Following Peggy Beasley’s murder, lawmakers in Louisiana began tightening up regulations and laws on ankle monitoring companies in the state.
Earlier this year, lawmakers passed a law that will provide harsher consequences for ankle monitoring companies that do not report violations to law enforcement.
Under the new law that took effect in June, company employees could face six months imprisonment, a hefty fine and a prohibition from working in the ankle monitoring field for five years.
Louisiana’s actions are novel. InvestigateTV contacted the other 49 states and the District of Columbia about their ankle monitoring laws. Nearly all that responded said that they do not have any measures in place to hold monitoring companies criminally liable if they don’t do what is required.
Of the states that responded, only California and Maine said that they have tort negligence laws on their books that allow for some civil liability in certain cases. They said their laws could allow the contract with an ankle monitoring company to be terminated, but there’s no provision that allows for criminal liability against those companies.
Seeking justice, a first-of-its-kind indictment
Back in West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana, D’Aquilla, the district attorney, went before a grand jury — pointing the finger of criminal liability directly at the ankle monitoring company.
In one of the first of its kind indictments in the country, that grand jury charged the owner of the company, AEM, and the employee tasked with reporting the violations for Marshall Rayburn with negligent homicide.
Both won dismissals of the indictments from an appellate court. But the victory was short-lived — the Louisiana Supreme Court reinstated the indictments in early June.
The case remains pending against the owner of AEM and its employee, and D’Aquilla said his team will continue to pursue justice.
“The system failed, and the system is failing,” D’Aquilla said. “Peggy [Beasley] lost her life. For her and the neighbor not to have any consequences at all for the company, it’s just unbelievable. Somebody needs to be held accountable for this.”
The lack of accountability continues to frustrate Beasley’s family.
“You have days where you just want to scream and yell and grab them and ask them, ‘What the hell are you doing,’” Brandon Crow, Beasley’s son, said. “Why? Why did you allow this to happen? Why didn’t you do your job?”
The family is pushing for efforts like the one in Louisiana to increase oversight of monitoring companies nationwide.
They are trying, Beasley’s daughter Hopper said, to prevent others from dealing with the same heartache they now face — heartache that could have been avoided.
“That’s one of the hardest things for my brothers and my daughters for us to live with,” Hopper said as she fought back tears.
“Knowing that her life could have been saved so many times. It didn’t have to be this. It didn’t have to be.”
Copyright 2024 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.