Witness: Mayor’s former son-in-law ordered double homicide

Tremayne Graham, who until early 2005 was married to Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin’s daughter, was sentenced this week to life in federal prison on drug and money-laundering charges — and has been implicated in court documents as the mastermind of a 2004 unsolved Atlanta double killing.

At Graham’s April 17 sentencing hearing in Greenville, S.C., where he’d regularly delivered shipments of cocaine from Atlanta, one of his co-defendants, Scott King, described Graham’s alleged role in the murders of one of Graham’s alleged drug couriers Ulysses Hackett, and Hackett’s girlfriend, 24-year-old Spelman graduate Misty Carter.

According to court documents filed in the case:

GRAHAM was very concerned that Hackett would cooperate and testify against him, and that GRAHAM had a number of conversations with King about the need to have Hackett murdered. GRAHAM ultimately made statements to King indicating that he arranged for this murder through co-defendant Jerry Davis.

Davis was sentenced this week to 35 years on drug and money-laundering charges. King, for his willingness to testify in the case, will receive a lesser sentence.

Elsewhere in the document, it states:

Graham told Scott King that an associate of theirs supplied the gun used to murder Ulysses Hackett and his girlfriend.

At around 4 a.m. on Sept. 5, 2004, two men broke into Carter’s Highland Avenue apartment and shot her and Hackett to death as they lay in her bed. No arrests have been made, though investigators have indicated that murder charges could be forthcoming.

Graham is believed to have been tied to alleged multistate crime ring the Black Mafia Family and is accused of keeping close company with some of BMF’s high-ranking members. Two months after the double homicide, Graham skipped bond on his recent federal drug charges out of South Carolina and went on the lam for seven months. He was captured in June 2005 in California at an alleged BMF safehouse. Inside, investigators found $1.8 million and a haul of cocaine with a street value of $20 million.

For more details of the accusations against Graham and background on the case, check out the April 26 issue of Creative Loafing.