Air Force News, news from Iraq - Air Force Times

Trial set for airman accused of murdering fellow airman

Airman 1st Class Ashley Turner was not supposed to die like this.

Not two years out of high school. On a carpet stained with blood. Far from her Maryland home, on a craggy island jutting out of a turquoise sea.

Crime scene tape was still stretched over doorways in Ashley Turner’s dormitory one year later when her father, mother and brother arrived at Iceland’s Naval Air Station Keflavik to see the room where she died.

To Ashley’s mother, Lisa, there was something ethereal about her daughter’s death. Grief deceived her. Ashley’s still stationed in Iceland, she’d imagine.

Some day, she’ll come home.

“Until I saw that scene, it didn’t hit me that, no, Ashley’s not coming home,” said Lisa Turner, who collapsed to her knees after walking in the room.

Starting April 16, in a small courtroom at Washington, D.C.’s Bolling Air Force Base, prosecutors will try to convince jurors that Ashley Turner’s murderer was a friend-turned-killer.

Airman Calvin Eugene Hill, 21, of Warren, Ohio, is charged with premeditated murder, false statements, absence without leave, larceny and obstruction of justice. The Air Force alleges that Hill beat and stabbed Turner on Aug. 14, 2005, to conceal a string of thefts.

They say he stole about $2,800 from her, got caught, lied about the thefts to investigators and murdered Turner to silence her pending testimony at a Keflavik court-martial.

Hill, who is not required to plea until arraigned, has said he is innocent through his three-person Air Force defense team.

He watched the movie “Top Gun” that day with an Icelandic girlfriend, his attorneys said at an Article 32 hearing last year, and left his room only a couple of times.

Staff Sgt. Jerrod Sunderland was the first to find Turner, motionless on the floor, in a common room at the Keflavik dormitory. There was blood pooled around her head.

Sunderland dialed 911, but it was too late. She died at a nearby hospital.

Hill was detained within hours. And investigators would later claim they found a speck of Turner’s blood on his shoes.

Hill is being held at Quantico Marine Corps Base, Va. If convicted, he faces the death penalty.

The Air Force has provided almost no biographical information about Hill. In the only circulated photo of him, he’s being escorted out of court through a parking lot. He is wearing service dress and his face is downcast.

‘My friend Calvin’

Turner’s family describes her as a natural sweetheart. A girl who mucked horse stalls without flinching, but looked radiant in a prom gown.

“I can see her right now,” said her father, Larry Turner. “She’s still fresh in my mind and my heart.”

Ashley was a little lost after graduating in 2003 from Middletown High School outside Frederick, Md. College didn’t feel quite right. Neither did a lifetime waiting tables.

“I asked her, ‘Well, why don’t you join the military?‘ “ her mother said.

After all, it was sort of the family calling. Both of her parents are retired Navy. Her older brother, Jason, now an Army second lieutenant, had also taken the military route.

So Ashley joined the Air Force, first completing basic training and then working through technical training at Keesler Air Force Base, Miss.

“It took some convincing,” Larry Turner said, “and it was rough for her at first. She injured her ankle at boot camp. She realized what it was like not to be at home. But she sucked it up.”

More than that, her family says, she finally discovered true ambition. In Ashley Turner’s last phone conversation with her brother, they discussed the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

“Her ambition was night and day compared to high school,” Jason Turner said.

While in Mississippi, Ashley e-mailed her mother a photo that seemed harmless at the time, but eerie years later. It was Ashley, posing with a technical sergeant and two new friends — one named Calvin.

“It said, ‘Mom, this is my friend, Calvin,‘ “ Lisa Turner said. “They actually flew over to Iceland together.”

For both Hill and Ashley Turner, the 56th Rescue Squadron was their first unit, and Keflavik their first deployment.

If college sounded like a bad fit to Ashley, Iceland just sounded strange. And cold.

“She said, ‘I don’t want to go to Iceland,‘ “ Larry Turner recalled. “I told her, ‘It’s all what you make it. Go. Have a good time. Make lots of friends. A year goes by fast.‘ “

Missing money

According to prosecutors and the Turner family, it began with a small loan.

Hill asked to borrow $60 one day, they say, and peered over Turner’s shoulder when she withdrew the cash from an ATM.

Then money started to vanish. There were withdrawals she didn’t make. Missing funds ultimately adding up to nearly $3,000.

That led to Hill’s first court-martial, set to take place in late 2005. He was accused of using Turner’s debit card — and PIN — to deplete her account over several weeks. (Those proceedings are now folded into Hill’s murder trial.)

“Ashley was devastated” when Hill was accused of the thefts, Lisa Turner said. “It broke her heart. This is someone she considered a friend.”

Ashley Turner was slated to leave Keflavik in summer 2005, the Turners said, but she was asked to stay in Iceland until Hill’s court-martial several months later.

The two continued to live in the same dorm building, which Larry Turner said was “extremely uncomfortable” for his daughter.

“I encouraged her to go forward and make this person accountable,” Larry Turner said.

“It was something,” he said, “that had to be done. He’d be court-martialed. She’d testify. Done. Come home.”

‘People live. People die’

Larry Turner ignored the first knocks on his door. Salesperson, he figured.

The second wave sounded harder. More urgent. He walked downstairs and opened the door.

The two uniformed airmen didn’t have to tell Turner why they were standing at his door after dark.

“I just had to wait for them to say it,” he recalls.

Turner laments the grandchildren he’ll never meet, never seeing his daughter’s first gray hair. Lisa Turner misses the daughter who called her twice a day despite their distance.

For Jason Turner, born barely a year before his sister, almost twinlike in their appearance, this loss runs just as deep.

“It’s like two people dying,” he said. “A sibling and a best friend.”

Jason Turner expected an Iraq deployment in October, a staging ground for him to grow into “one of the best infantry lieutenants in the world,” he said. “I wanted nothing more.”

But, for now at least, Jason Turner will not go to war. Not when his parents’ agony is so fresh. Not when his mother says losing both her children would bring a “mental breakdown.”

So Jason Turner, an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University graduate, will become one of the world’s best Army finance officers.

Still, there is reason to celebrate. Jason Turner is engaged, getting married in September and soon to be stationed at Fort Lee, Va.

Not too far from mom and dad.

And when his son talks children, Larry Turner breaks into a rare smile and pumps his fist.

“People live. People die. Our daughter was murdered, and it set off a chain of events that will never be reversed,” Larry Turner said. “All of us have to restructure our lives after her loss.”

Discuss:

Airman Hill murder trial