Yella Beezy Trial Day 4: The Shooter's Cash, a Three-Night Booking, and the Link the State Still Hasn't Shown

Twelve days after Mo3 was shot to death on Interstate 35, a Mount Pleasant police sergeant sitting under a bridge on Interstate 30 watched a Dodge Challenger go past him at about 110 miles an hour. It was twenty minutes to three in the morning on November 23, 2020. The driver was Kewon White, the man a Dallas County jury has already convicted of firing the shots that killed Melvin Noble. In his front pockets were two fat bundles of cash wrapped in his own rubber bands. On the floor was a pistol, behind the seat was an AK-47 with a sixty-round magazine, under the driver's seat was a Glock, and in the back, in a bag from a jewelry store, was a receipt dated the day before with a name on it in parentheses: "Jerry."

On Day 4 of the Yella Beezy trial the State finally went after the money. It is the part of this case that decides it. Markies Conway, the Dallas rapper who performs as Yella Beezy, is not accused of pulling a trigger. He is charged with capital murder for hire: the State says he employed White to kill Mo3 for money, or for the promise of money. White has already been tried and convicted. Conway's own lawyer told the jury on Day 1 that White was the shooter. What this jury has to decide is whether Markies Conway paid for it, and after three days of testimony about a killing nobody disputes, Friday was the first day the State put a dollar in front of the jury at all.

So here is the question I want you to carry through this whole piece, because the State has not answered it yet and I am not sure it can on what it has shown so far. The State showed the jury the shooter's cash. It showed the jury where Markies Conway was sleeping. It has not yet shown the jury a single thing that connects the one to the other.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 15 Yella Beezy Trial Hotel Witness Testifies Conway's 26-Night Stay Was First Booked for Three / Pt 15

The witness who was supposed to start the day

Day 4 was supposed to begin at nine in Dallas with Theodore Thomas. If you followed Day 3, you know who he is: the man who told a grand jury about Markies Conway and then, the afternoon before, with the jury out of the room, took the Fifth on all of it, his own 143 pages of grand jury testimony included. The judge had ordered him back Friday morning with his lawyer.

He came back. The jury did not see him. When the judge took the bench more than an hour late, her first question was the one left over from Thursday: "What's the situation?" The State's answer was that it was still working on it. "It's very fluid right now, Your Honor." Nobody wanted Thursday's off-the-record conversations summarized yet, because nothing had been decided. So the court did housekeeping. Thomas remains under subpoena. He has to stay reachable through his lawyer. He is under the rule, which means he cannot talk to anyone about what he might testify to.

And then something happened that I want you to notice, because it will matter later. Thomas's lawyer, James Lee Bright, had himself been served with a subpoena by the State's investigator that morning. He was sworn in as a witness. He asked the court for the obvious exception, that a lawyer and his client who are now both potential witnesses still have to be able to talk to each other, and the judge granted it. The State told the court that once "a decision how we're gonna proceed or not proceed" is made, everything said off the record would be put on the record with everyone in the room.

Why would the State subpoena a witness's own lawyer? Nobody said on the record, so I will tell you what I think, and you can weigh it. On Day 3 the judge raised a recantation: Thomas had taken back what he told the grand jury, and he did it in front of a detective with his lawyer present. That makes the lawyer a witness to how the recantation happened. If the State is getting ready to argue that somebody got to Thomas, or that his grand jury account should come in even though he will not repeat it, the circumstances of that recantation are exactly what a judge would want to hear about. That is my read, not a fact on the record. What is a fact is the State's own phrase: "proceed or not proceed." After four days, the State still has not decided whether the witness it lined up on the hire is going to be part of its case at all.

The jury heard none of this. They came into the courtroom more than an hour after they were told to be there, the judge thanked them for their patience and said there had been logistical issues, and the trial moved on to money.

What the Federal Reserve can and cannot tell you about a hundred-dollar bill

The State's first witness was one nobody would have predicted: Joseph Catania, a director at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, there under subpoena with two of the bank's lawyers sitting in the courtroom. His job was to teach the jury how cash moves, and he was good at it.

The Federal Reserve does not print money. It distributes it. A bank orders currency by denomination, one of the Fed's cash offices (there are 28 of them across 12 districts) prepares the order, and the bank's armored carrier picks it up off the Fed's dock. The Fed sends out two kinds of money. There are new notes that have never been in circulation, and there are used notes that came back in, got checked by a machine, and were judged fit to go out again.

Here is the part that matters. For brand-new hundred-dollar bills only, and only since about 2018, the Fed keeps a record. New notes come in serial-number order, every bundle carries a barcode that stands for the whole run of serial numbers inside it, and when that bundle is scanned out the Fed knows which bank it went to and on what day. Used money is a different story. It comes back in no order, gets sorted, and goes back out repackaged with nobody recording anything. A bill can come back through the Fed three or four times and no one would know.

The prosecutor admitted that when they first spoke, he had used the word "tracking," and Catania had corrected him. He corrected him again in front of the jury. "There's no chips in US currency," he said. Give the Fed the serial number of a new hundred and it can tell you the bank it was first shipped to and the date it went. It cannot tell you whose hands it passed through after that, where it was spent, or why.

Then the prosecutor put up two photographs. State's 662 was a hundred-dollar bill lying on a plastic bag. State's 674 was a bundle of cash with a hundred on top and several guns beside it. Catania was careful about his own limits: he did not collect these bills, he did not know where they came from, and he did not know who had them. What he could say, from the Fed's database, was where the bundles they belonged to started. The first bill came from a run of new notes shipped in 2014 to a Bank of America branch in Hialeah, Florida. The second, the one beside the guns, came from a run shipped new in June 2020 to OneWorld Bank on Walnut Hill Lane in Dallas.

Then the prosecutor asked three questions that sound like nothing. Neither of those is a Chase bank? Correct. Hialeah is not Frisco, Texas? Correct. And Dallas is not Frisco? Right.

If you were on Day 1, you know why that sounds like something. In its own opening statement the defense laid out the State's theory of the money for the jury: Markies Conway withdraws forty thousand dollars in cash in Frisco on November 20, 2020, and two days later a high school friend of his takes it and pays White. The State was making sure the jury knew these two bills did not start at a Chase branch in Frisco. Think about what that means. The one bill the Fed could trace to Dallas in 2020 goes to a different bank, in a different city, five months before the killing. If the State's theory is a Frisco withdrawal, the only traceable bill the jury saw on Friday does not come from it.

The defense kept the cross short and used the witness's caution as its whole point. The Fed calls this a payout, not a withdrawal. It does not track bills. And then a question I think the jury will remember: did he know the District Attorney's office first reached out to the Fed about these bills on April 7, 2025? He did. That is four years and five months after Mo3 was killed. On redirect the State made sure the jury understood the trace runs only one way: Catania cannot tell whether these bills had already been through the Fed and back. On recross, one last detail: the rubber bands around the stack in that photograph, dark and red and light, are not how the Federal Reserve wraps money.

So by eleven in the morning in Dallas, the jury had two photographed bills, one from Florida six years before the murder and one from a Dallas bank five months before it, and a witness from the Fed telling them in plain words that he could not say who ever held either one. The State told the court it no longer needed the witness it had lined up after him.

WATCH: DAY 4 NO BREAKS EDITION · LIVE SAT 10/31 10:00 PM CT Yella Beezy Trial Day 4, No Breaks Edition: Following the Money

Twenty-six nights in West Hollywood, or three

The next witness flew in from Los Angeles the night before. Timothy Glenn is the head of security at a hotel in West Hollywood, which back in 2020 was called the Mondrian. He does not know Markies Conway or anyone else in the case. He was there as the keeper of his hotel's records. The State had asked for everything the hotel had on Conway or anyone connected with him, and he sent about twenty-five pages of reservation screenshots and guest folios. They came in without objection.

He walked the jury through how to read a reservation, and then the State went to page five. A booking created on November 5, 2020. Arrival November 10, 2020, the day before Mo3 was killed on a Dallas freeway. Twenty-six nights. Checkout December 6.

The name on the reservation was not Conway's. The feed renders it two different ways at two different moments, and I am not going to print a name I could not hear clearly. Glenn explained that this is ordinary for entertainment guests: a label or a manager books the room for the artist who actually stays. On page ten was the screen that shows who was added to the room as an accompanying guest, meaning a person who can pick up keys and charge things to it: "Conway, Markies," added for November 10 through December 6. On page eleven was a note the hotel keeps on repeat VIP guests: the manager for Profit Money Entertainment and Hitco, "artist Yella Beezy."

Then the folio for room 1105: minibar, overnight valet parking, and charges moved onto Conway's room from another room, 501, beginning on November 11. Three different valet tickets over the stay. And on November 21, nothing at all, no room charge and no parking. The State asked about that date specifically and moved on without saying why. Keep it in your pocket. When the State skips past a date on purpose, it usually comes back.

The last question on direct was the one the State built the witness for. The hotel found seven stays tied to Conway and his circle between 2020 and 2022: a night here, two or three there, two five-night stays in September 2022. And this one, twenty-six nights, starting the day before Mo3 died. Nothing else comes close.

You can see the argument the State is building. The man accused of hiring the shooter was fourteen hundred miles away when the shots were fired, on a stay booked five days ahead and unlike any other trip he ever took to that hotel. A man who hires a killing does not have to be there. A man who wants to be far away when it happens might plan to be.

WATCH THE CLIP · LIVE TIME TO BE POSTED Yella Beezy Trial Hotel Security Chief Testifies Conway Was Added as a Guest on a 26-Night Stay

The best ten minutes the defense has had in this trial

Toby Shook stood up, introduced himself by name, and in about ten minutes he took that argument apart with the State's own witness.

He started with time. Glenn did not work at the hotel in 2020; he started on the overnight front desk in 2022. The District Attorney's subpoena reached the hotel in December 2025. Before that, as far as Glenn knew, nobody from Dallas police or the DA's office had ever asked the hotel for anything. Same point Shook made with the Federal Reserve an hour earlier: the State went looking for the Los Angeles trail five years after the fact.

Then he went to what that delay cost. The records were pulled for the State by a revenue analyst at the hotel in January 2026, because Glenn no longer had that kind of access. Her cover email held a line the defense wanted the jury to hear: "Change logs tell me a lot, but I can't pull those unfortunately." A change log is the record of every edit made to a reservation: a stay extended, a guest added, a room moved. After five years it was gone. So nobody can say today when that reservation became twenty-six nights, and nobody can say when Markies Conway was added to the room.

Then the booking itself. It did not come through a travel website. It came through the hotel's own sales office, for an existing business account, the label's, at an entertainment-industry rate. The booking contact was an address at hitcomusic.com. Room 1105 was a deluxe studio suite, about 720 square feet, the biggest kind the hotel has short of the penthouse. The sales director who made the booking, Robert Nichols, still works there. And when a booking is made that way, the hotel's system automatically emails a confirmation to whoever booked it.

Then Shook showed him one. Defense Exhibit 50: the hotel's own confirmation email, sent to the label's contact at that same address, for Markies Conway. Arrival Tuesday, November 10, 2020. Departure November 13, 2020. "Okay, so length of stay three nights."

Three nights. The label did not book a month in a West Hollywood suite on November 5 to put its artist far away from a killing. It booked three nights, which, Shook pointed out, is what Conway's trips to that hotel usually were. The twenty-six nights were what the stay became, not what anyone planned. And the only record that could show when it changed is the change log nobody asked for until it no longer existed.

The defense then tried to put in an email exchange between the label and the hotel, Defense 51, and the State objected that emails between two people are not a hotel's business records just because they sit in its files. That is a fair objection. What happened next is the part I find interesting: the email was shown anyway, with the State reading from it. Thursday, November 19, 2020, about ten to five in the afternoon, the label's contact to the hotel, subject "Markies Conway one bedroom," a man named Greg copied: was there a weekly rate, because "they may want to keep it" from Friday, November 20 to Friday, November 27. The answer: $259 a night for an extension.

That email cuts both ways, and I want to be honest about it. The original checkout was the 13th. By the 19th the stay had already been extended at least once, at a time nobody can recover, and it was extended again later to December 6. The defense's version is a trip that kept running long, which happens, and Shook closed on common sense: a man packed for three nights who stays twenty-six runs out of clothes. The State's version is a man who stayed away from Dallas while Dallas investigated a killing. Both of those fit the paper. Neither one is evidence that anybody was hired.

On redirect the State put two things back in front of the jury. Room 501, the smaller corner studio a few floors down, was tied to Conway's stay. And the registered guest on the reservation, the name I could not hear clearly, has an address in the hotel's records, 1021 Glenhaven in Hutchins, Texas, that is the same address printed on the defense's own confirmation email for Markies Conway. Shook had one more question: do entertainers book under other names? From time to time, Glenn said, for privacy, and so the staff do not get starstruck. If Yella Beezy is an entertainer, it would not be unusual.

Here is what I want the State to answer, and it has not. Who was in room 501? Who is the person registered at Conway's own address? Is either of them somebody this jury has already heard about? The State spent the morning on those records and asked none of those questions out loud. If the answer helps the State, I expect we will hear it. If it does not, the jury will be left with a label-booked suite, a three-night trip that ran long, and a five-year gap in which the one record that could have settled it was allowed to disappear.

WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE FRI 11/6 1:00 PM CT Timothy Glen: Full Testimony, the 26-Night Stay First Booked as Three / Yella Beezy Trial

A truck stop on I-30, twelve days after the killing

Then the State took the jury two hours east of Dallas to Mount Pleasant, a town of about sixteen thousand on Interstate 30, and called the sergeant who stopped Kewon White. Juan Hernandez has seventeen years with the Mount Pleasant Police Department, five of them as a narcotics sergeant. In the early hours of November 23, 2020, he was working criminal interdiction on I-30, which means watching the highway for drugs, guns and money moving along it. He was parked under the bridge at mile marker 162, where I-30 meets Highway 271, on the road out of Dallas toward Arkansas.

And the first thing the jury learned from him was where those two photographs from the Federal Reserve came from. The hundred on the plastic bag and the stack of money beside the guns were pictures from his stop. So the one bill the Fed traced to a Dallas bank in June 2020 was in the shooter's car, on a highway out of Dallas, twelve days after the killing.

The stop itself was simple. White's car passed him at about 110 in a 75, he caught up about four miles down the road, called in the plate before he lit the car up (his habit, so dispatch knows what it is chasing if a car runs), and the Dodge pulled straight over. The jury started watching the dash camera, and then the courtroom's sound failed, the way it had been failing on and off all morning. Just before noon in Dallas the judge sent the jurors to lunch early so the technicians could work on it, with the sergeant still on the stand.

WATCH THE CLIP Yella Beezy Trial Narcotics Sergeant Testifies He Stopped Kewon White at 110 MPH on I-30

Lunch ran long. When the jury came back the sergeant described walking up to the car. He smelled raw marijuana coming from inside. His partner told him he could see a gun in the back seat. He saw a pistol on the floor at the front passenger's feet, and there was a woman in that seat. He got White out of the car, and on a photograph and on the dash camera he identified him. White gave his own name that night.

Then the jury watched the body camera. The sound on the feed is rough, but the shape is clear. White in front of the patrol car, handcuffed. An officer on the radio reading a rifle's serial number letter by letter to see if it comes back stolen. And then White's own voice, asking the question the State had been building toward all day. "So you gonna seize my money? How much money is it?" The answer he got: "Yeah, it's on camera. We got a camera right here."

The rifle was an AK-47, loaded, with a sixty-round magazine, down behind the passenger seat. The pistol on the floor was a Taurus. Later in the photographs a third gun appeared, a Glock under the driver's seat, along with a spare high-capacity Glock magazine that fit none of the three guns, and a loose rifle round of a different caliber. In White's front pockets were the two bundles of mixed bills. In a multicolored backpack on the passenger seat were THC edibles, three bottles of promethazine (the cough syrup sold on the street as lean), some marijuana and more cash. There was another bundle in a blue bag and loose bills in the console. In the back seat was a bag from Manhattan Jewelers, and the prosecutor asked for a closer look at it.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 16 · LIVE SAT 10/31 10:15 PM CT Yella Beezy Jury Sees Kewon White's Arrest on Body Cam With Three Guns and Bundles of Cash / Pt 16

November 22

Then came the piece of paper the State had been walking toward all afternoon. State's 675 is a receipt from Manhattan Jewelers found in that car, dated November 22, 2020, the day before the stop and eleven days after the killing. The name on it, as it was read in court, is White's rap name, and after it, in parentheses, "Jerry." White told the sergeant that night that the first name was his rapper name. The prosecutor made sure the jury saw the parentheses and moved on without another word.

She did not need another word, and here is why. Go back to that defense opening on Day 1. The defense itself told the jury what the State was going to claim: that on November 22 a friend of Conway's, a man the transcript has as Jerry, met with Conway, took the money, and took it to the Ramona Avenue house to pay White. On Day 3, a detective brought three phones into evidence labeled Jerry 1, Jerry 2 and Jerry 3. And now there is a receipt for White dated November 22 with "Jerry" written on it.

Then redirect added one more thing to that same day. After the arrest, the sergeant interviewed White for about an hour. White said he was driving from Dallas to Arkansas. And he said he bought that AK-47 at a gun show in Dallas, "the day before." November 22 again. The sergeant later confirmed the purchase when the rifle's serial number was traced. How a convicted felon buys a rifle at a gun show, he said he had no idea.

So November 22, 2020 now holds three things in this trial: the day the defense's own opening said the State would claim Conway's cash changed hands, a jewelry receipt with "Jerry" on it, and a rifle bought by a man who is not allowed to own one. That is the State's picture of a payday, and I understand why a juror might look at it and see one.

Now look at what that picture does not have in it. It does not have Markies Conway. The receipt says "Jerry." It does not say who Jerry is, whether Jerry paid, whether Jerry was standing there, or whether it is just another name White uses. No witness explained it. The forty thousand dollar withdrawal in Frisco that the State's theory depends on is something the jury has heard about only from the defense's opening statement; no bank record and no witness has put it in evidence. And nobody has yet shown the jury that a single dollar of it went anywhere near Kewon White.

WATCH THE CLIP Yella Beezy Trial Sergeant Testifies Kewon White Had $9,670 and a Jewelry Receipt Naming Jerry

$9,670, and the money nobody can ever compare

The seizure report says Kewon White had $9,670 on him that night, from his pockets, the car and the backpack. Then the sergeant explained what his department does with seized cash: photograph it, count it, have a second officer count it again, a supervisor signs, and it goes into evidence. Here it was deposited in a bank about the next day. Nobody wrote down a serial number. Nobody asked the bank for one.

Sit with that for a second, because it is the single most important fact the State proved on Day 4 and it does not help the State. The money that could have been compared, bill by bill, to a bank withdrawal is gone. It was gone within a day. The only bills anybody can ever trace are the two whose faces happen to show in a photograph, and the Fed told the jury that morning where those two started: Florida in 2014, and a Dallas bank that is not in Frisco. I do not blame a small-town narcotics sergeant for handling a highway seizure the way his department handles every highway seizure. He had no reason that night to know whose case this would become. But somebody in Dallas knew who Kewon White was. When did Dallas learn that the man it suspected of killing Mo3 had been stopped twelve days later with nearly ten thousand dollars? The record does not say, and it is a fair question to ask.

Toby Shook did not fight the stop. He used it. What did you charge White with? Money laundering, being a felon in possession of a firearm, felony possession of the THC edibles, felony possession of marijuana, and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, which the sergeant agreed is the legal term for driving a stolen car. The marijuana was bagged with small empty baggies beside it. White was later charged federally for the guns. Every one of those questions is a reason, other than a murder payment, for a young man on a highway at three in the morning to have nearly ten thousand dollars in his pockets.

Then the defense put up its own board, Defense 65, made from the sergeant's seizure report, and walked the jury down it one line at a time. Sixty-six ones. Two twos. Three hundred fifty-four fives. One hundred two tens. Forty-three twenties. Sixty-three fifties. Twenty-eight hundreds. Six hundred fifty-eight bills, $9,670.

Count it the way the defense wants it counted and most of this money is small bills: 567 of the 658 are twenties or smaller, which looks like street money and does not look like a bank withdrawal. Count it by value and the bigger share, $5,950, is in fifties and hundreds. Both sides can use that board, and I expect both will. On Day 1 the defense told this jury White's money was in fives, ones and tens. By count that is true. By value it is not the whole story. Nothing on the board tells you where any of it came from.

The sergeant also explained why seized cash goes to a bank so fast: forfeiture. If a civil judge finds the seizure lawful, the money goes to the department, and the officer needed probable cause that the cash was tied to a crime. That is why one of the charges was money laundering. Think about what the jury just heard from the State's own witness. On November 23, 2020, the police who seized this money believed it was drug money.

WATCH THE CLIP · LIVE TIME TO BE POSTED Yella Beezy Trial Lieutenant Tells the Defense Kewon White's Marijuana Was Packaged for Sale

The question the defense should not have asked

After the afternoon recess the State put about thirty exhibits of phone company records into evidence by affidavit, with no witness and no objection, and then called Lieutenant Travis Nichols, who supervises the narcotics officers and detectives in Mount Pleasant. He was there because he had the login to the Titus County jail's phone system, and somebody asked him to pull every call Kewon White made from that jail. The disc of those calls, the list of what is on it and the spreadsheet of every number White dialed went into the court's file, but not to the jury. The prosecutor told the judge the State would show why they matter later. The one thing the jury did get from him was White's jail property list from November 23: clothes, two necklaces, two earrings, white shoes, and four cell phones.

Then the defense went right back to the drugs, and it got what it wanted at first. The lieutenant agreed the marijuana was packaged for sale, not for a man's own use. Street dealers sell five and ten dollar amounts out of trap houses. Men who sell drugs often carry guns.

And then the defense walked him down the money board and asked the question it had been building toward all afternoon: aren't small bills what street drug sales look like? Usually, he said. And then he kept going. In twenty years he had never seen a dealer carrying that many five-dollar bills at once. "Just not that many at once." "That's unheard of."

When a lawyer in this trial makes a mistake I am going to say so, on either side, and this was one. The defense had already made its point through the sergeant: White was a dealer, the drugs were packaged for sale, the police themselves seized the cash as crime money. It did not need a narcotics supervisor's opinion on the board, and when it asked for one, it got an answer that a prosecutor will repeat in closing. The small bills that were supposed to look like drug money looked, to the man who supervises the drug cops, like nothing he had seen in twenty years.

Be careful with that answer, though, because it does not do what the State will want it to do either. Three hundred fifty-four fives do not look like drug money to that lieutenant. They do not look like a forty thousand dollar bank withdrawal to anybody. Banks do not hand out forty thousand dollars in fives, and nothing in front of this jury says what denominations that withdrawal was in, or that it happened at all. The fives cut against both sides' clean stories.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 17 · LIVE SAT 10/31 11:15 PM CT Yella Beezy Trial Lieutenant Has Never Seen a Dealer With 354 $5 Bills Like Kewon White Had / Pt 17

The evidence sitting in the jury's room that nobody has opened

The rest of the afternoon was the State laying track. Michael Hildebrandt from Securus, the company that runs jail phones, explained how a jail call is recorded: an inmate dials with his booking number and his own PIN, every call is recorded, and both people on the line hear a warning that it is being recorded. His spreadsheet of White's calls, in order, went into the court's file. Then a Dallas police officer from the department's fusion center, Johann Ortega, testified that he copied two iPhones belonging to Jocelyn Jackson, the Day 1 witness who was seeing Mo3 that fall, with her consent. Both copies went into evidence. Nothing on them was shown.

Step back and look at what the State has now put in the record without showing the jury a word of it. Three phones labeled Jerry, from Day 3. Thirty exhibits of T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon records, on Friday. Every jail call Kewon White made from Titus County, in the court's file for now. Jocelyn Jackson's two phones. If the State has a case on the hire, it is sitting on those discs. A call log that ties a number to Markies Conway and a number to a man named Jerry around November 11 or November 22. A jail call where White says who paid him. Something with Conway's own voice or hand on it.

And if one of those jail calls is played, the fight over it is going to be one of the most important rulings in this trial. Kewon White has not testified. If the State plays his words to prove who paid him, it is putting a convicted shooter's account in front of the jury without anyone ever getting to cross-examine him. A call from jail to a friend is generally not the kind of statement the Confrontation Clause bars, but the hearsay rules still apply, and a statement made after White's arrest is a poor fit for the rule that lets in what one conspirator says to further a conspiracy. I will be watching how the judge handles that, in both directions, and I will tell you what I think when it happens.

WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE THU 11/5 11:00 AM CT Johan Ortega: Full Testimony, Copying Mo3's Girlfriend's Two iPhones / Yella Beezy Trial

Four guns, forty-four casings, and a question nobody asked

One more thing from Mount Pleasant that I could not stop thinking about. On Day 3, the State's own firearms examiner told the jury the 44 casings on that freeway all came from one gun, and that it was not any of the guns the police had seized from the Ramona Avenue house. One unknown gun. On Friday the jury learned that twelve days after the killing, Kewon White, the man convicted of firing those shots, was carrying three guns in his car.

The AK-47, by White's own account and the gun trace, was bought on November 22, eleven days after the killing, so it cannot be the gun that fired on November 11. But there was a Taurus on the floor and a Glock under the driver's seat, the one Glock White said was not his. Were those two ever compared to the 44 casings? Nobody said. The State did not ask. The defense did not ask. Maybe it was done and the answer was no, in which case the jury deserves to hear that the shooter's own guns do not match either. Maybe it was never done, in which case somebody should explain why. Either way, a jury being asked to convict a man of capital murder over a killing whose weapon nobody has found is entitled to know whether anyone looked in the shooter's car.

And then the sound went out

The defense had no questions for Officer Ortega, and the State called its next witness. That is where our record ends. At that moment the courtroom feed lost its sound completely, and a few minutes later the picture went to black. Whoever took the stand next, how long court went on, when the jury was sent home and told to come back, none of it reached the public broadcast. The courtroom's audio had been failing since before lunch, and this time it did not come back.

I want to say something about that, because it is not a small thing. A trial is public for a reason. The people watching this one are watching a man tried for capital murder on a theory of money, and the public record of the day stopped in the middle of the State's case. I am not suggesting anyone did that on purpose. I am saying the public's view of what happens in that room depends on equipment that broke over and over on Friday, and when it breaks, what the jury heard and what the public can check stop being the same thing. We will cover what we can confirm when we can confirm it, and we will not fill the gap with guesses.

WATCH: DAY 4 TOP MOMENTS · LIVE SAT 10/31 10:45 PM CT Yella Beezy Trial Day 4 Top Moments / $100s, 26 Nights, 354 Fives

Where four days leave the State

Here is the charge, because everything turns on it. To convict Markies Conway of capital murder for hire, the State has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kewon White intentionally killed Melvin Noble, that Conway employed White to do it, that it was for money or the promise of money, and that Conway intended the killing to happen. All four of them, and the first is the only one nobody disputes.

The first is proven several times over. Nobody disputes who killed Mo3, and the defense told the jury so on Day 1.

The second, that Conway employed White, still has no evidence in front of the jury. Friday added circumstance: Conway was registered to a West Hollywood suite from the day before the killing until December. That fits a man who arranged to be away. It fits a man on a label-booked trip that ran long, and the defense now has the three-night confirmation on paper to prove it. Being somewhere else is not evidence of hiring anyone. The witness the State lined up on this element, Theodore Thomas, is under subpoena, has taken the Fifth outside the jury, and the State still cannot say whether it will proceed with him.

The third, the money, is where Friday was the State's strongest day, and it is still missing the link that matters. The shooter had $9,670 twelve days after the killing. He spent money at a jeweler on November 22 with "Jerry" on the receipt, and he bought a rifle the same day. That is a man with money. What the jury has not seen is the money leaving Markies Conway. No withdrawal is in evidence. No witness has said Conway gave anything to anyone. The bills that could have been compared were deposited with no serial numbers recorded, and the one Dallas bill the Fed could trace started at a bank the State itself made a point of saying was not in Frisco. The defense has a second source for White's cash on the State's own witnesses, drug sales and a stolen car and a seizure the police themselves made as crime money, dented but not destroyed by the lieutenant's 354 fives.

The fourth, Conway's own intent, has nothing yet. Not a word he said, not a message he sent, not a dollar he paid.

So here is my position, and I want to be plain about it. If the State rested on the record as it stood when the sound went out on Friday, I do not think it would have met its burden on this charge. It has proven who killed Mo3. It has proven the shooter had money afterward and spent it on November 22. It has not proven who paid him. That is my read of the record, and you are welcome to read it differently; there is room for that. And this is not the end of the State's case. The phone records, the Jerry phones and White's jail calls are all in the file and none of them has been opened in front of the jury. The State's whole case on the hire now depends on what is on those discs, or on whether Theodore Thomas ever takes the stand. If what is on them puts Conway's voice or Conway's money in this story, I will tell you so, the same way I am telling you now that it has not happened yet.

There is one more door the jury may get to walk through if the State cannot close the money gap. Capital murder in Texas, for hire, requires the money. A juror who believed Conway played some part in this killing but was not convinced of payment could, if the court submits it, look at murder instead of capital murder. Whether that question is ever put to them depends on what the State shows next.

Catch up on the end of Day 3

When we wrote up Days 1 to 3 on Thursday night, the last stretch of Day 3 was still being built. It is up now: the FBI examiner on a home camera clock that ran five months behind, Theodore Thomas taking the Fifth on his own 143 pages of grand jury testimony with the jury out, and the bail bond agent who said Kewon White paid $300 in cash the day Mo3 died. The full Day 3 No Breaks edition and Day 3 Top Moments are public, and three whole testimonies from Day 3 are booked.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 12 Yella Beezy Trial FBI Examiner Testifies a Home Camera Clock Ran Five Months Behind / Pt 12 WATCH: CASE STORY PT 13 Yella Beezy Trial State Witness Takes the Fifth on His Own 143-Page Grand Jury Testimony / Pt 13 WATCH: CASE STORY PT 14 Yella Beezy Trial Bail Bond Agent Testifies Kewon White Paid $300 Cash the Day Mo3 Died / Pt 14 WATCH: DAY 3 NO BREAKS EDITION Yella Beezy Trial Day 3, No Breaks Edition: Casings, Fire, the Fifth WATCH: DAY 3 TOP MOMENTS Yella Beezy Trial Day 3 Top Moments / 44 Casings, a Backyard Fire and a Witness Who Takes the Fifth WATCH THE CLIP · LIVE SUN 11/1 10:30 AM CT Yella Beezy Trial Examiner Testifies the DVR Ran 5 Months Behind and Nov 11 Was Not on It

The whole Day 4 testimonies

If you want every witness from Friday start to finish, each one is going up as its own video. The Federal Reserve director and the hotel's head of security, the Mount Pleasant sergeant and lieutenant, and the Dallas officer who copied the phones are all built and booked, and so are the Day 3 firearms examiner, the FBI examiner and the retired FBI phone supervisor.

WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE FRI 11/6 11:00 AM CT Joseph Catania: Full Testimony, Two $100 Bills the Fed Can't Follow / Yella Beezy Trial WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE SAT 11/7 11:00 AM CT Juan Hernandez: Full Testimony, the I-30 Stop That Found Kewon White's Cash / Yella Beezy Trial WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE THU 11/5 1:00 PM CT Travis Nichols: Full Testimony, 354 Five-Dollar Bills / Yella Beezy Trial WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE WED 11/4 1:00 PM CT Phillip Duong: Full Testimony, 44 Casings From One Unknown Gun / Yella Beezy Trial WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE TUE 11/3 1:00 PM CT Scott Morris: Full Testimony, a Yellow Jacket and a Backyard Fire on Camera / Yella Beezy Trial WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE WED 11/4 11:00 AM CT Thomas Tedder: Full Testimony, Four Phones and Six Months to Crack One / Yella Beezy Trial

What the next court day has to answer

When court picks back up, here is what I am watching for. Whether the State plays any of White's jail calls, and how the judge rules on the objection when it does. Whether a phone records analyst ties any of those thirty exhibits to Markies Conway, and to a man named Jerry. Whether the State ever puts the Frisco withdrawal in evidence through a bank record instead of leaving it in the defense's opening. Who was in room 501, and who is registered at Conway's address. What happened on November 21. And whether Theodore Thomas walks into that courtroom in front of the jury, or the State decides not to proceed with him at all.

Four days in, the State has shown this jury the shooter's cash and the defendant's hotel room. It has not shown them a line between the two. That line is the whole case. Every Case Story Part from this trial is in the playlist below, in order, and we will be there for whatever the State puts on next.

THE FULL TRIAL, IN ORDER Yella Beezy Trial: The Case Story Playlist