[stop-polabuse] kilCA99-DEA killer had history of legal trouble
Michael Novick
January 9, 2000
The Orange County Register
Tony Bailey's killing of his ex-fiancee was not his first brush with law
enforcement:
JUNE 1990:
A Drug Enforcement Administration colleague he dated, Cheryl Littlejohn,
told Los Angeles police that Bailey attacked her when she tried to end the
relationship. No charges were filed, but he was placed on unpaid leave for
32 days, DEA officials say.
NOVEMBER 1995:
West Covina police questioned Bailey after his mistress, Sylvia McGee, 37,
died under suspicious circumstances. She was nine months pregnant with
Bailey's son. Officials never determined her cause of death. The DEA was
aware he was interviewed.
APRIL 1997:
Federal court clerk Karen Kirksey — with whom Bailey was having an affair —
told police that Bailey attacked her during two arguments. No charges were
filed.
OCTOBER 1997:
The DEA took his badge after his daughter, Alexus, suffered severe brain
damage, allegedly because Bailey shook her violently. A judge last year
acquitted him of felony child-abuse charges.
MARCH 1999: Bailey is cleared of criminal baby shaking by the DEA, but
officials say they then launched an investigation into his making false
statements. He remained on paid leave.
SEPTEMBER 1999: His then-fiancee Veda Harris called police to report that
Bailey had punched her 14-year-old son and hit her when she intervened.
Police were still investigating at the time of Bailey's death. Bailey's
mother said Harris told her she recanted.
OCT. 28, 1999: The DEA recommends that Bailey be fired for making false
statements to investigators the day after he killed Harris and shot her
sister. Officials say his involvement in the shooting contributed to the
decision.
CRIME: A DEA agent seemingly didn't plan to kill his ex-fiancee before
taking his own life.
January 9, 2000
By BILL RAMS
The Orange County Register
The federal drug agent poured his feelings into the one-paragraph,
typewritten suicide note.
Then he taped it to his refrigerator and drove to Fullerton to pay his
brain-damaged daughter, Alexus, 2, a final visit.
He couldn't live without his daughter, he wrote, and he still loved his
ex-fiancee — even though she wouldn't allow him to see the baby.
The only one he planned to kill was himself, the note seemed to indicate.
But that's not the way it happened.
It was Oct. 27, just before 10 p.m.
Special agent Tony Bailey stormed into the home of his ex-fiancee's sister
with a 9 mm handgun. He chased down and shot his ex-fiancee, Veda L.
Harris, 32, in the back of the head. Then he shot her sister, Wendy
Campbell, 36, in the stomach before jumping in his black Ford Explorer and
disappearing.
Authorities launched a nationwide manhunt.
Three days later, police found him in Louisiana.
Bailey, 35, sprinted away from the officers, into a gulley, before putting
the gun to the side of his head and ending his life.
The note, obtained this week by The Orange County Register, depicted a man
despairing over his estrangement from his daughter and the job he loved as
a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent.
"Don't be mad at Daddy," Bailey wrote. "I will always love you with all my
heart but your mom does not want me to see you, therefore I can't go on
without you.
"Goodbye Daddy's baby."
Bailey's final words have brought some comfort to his mother.
They enrage Harris' family.
To Evelyn Bailey, the note is proof that her son had no intention of
killing — or even hurting — his ex-fiancee.
"His objective was to go see the baby and say goodbye," she said. "It
wasn't a violent letter and he wasn't angry. He was extremely depressed.
Something must have happened."
She said she has reread it several times.
"I heard him very clearly, what he's saying," she said. "He was tired of
fighting. All they can see is him being a really bad guy. They didn't see
the pressure, the hours I spent talking to him. He wanted to do the right
thing. Then suddenly, feeling no way out, he took this way out."
To Harris' sister, the note is a painful reminder.
"I really don't know or care what he was thinking," Campbell said in her
first interview since being shot. "All I know is I haven't seen a joyful
day since this happened."
THE NOTE
Bailey addresses the note "To Whom It May Concern" and says goodbye to all
who cared about him. He denies responsibility for Alexus' brain damage.
A judge in 1998 found him not guilty of abusing Alexus, after he was
accused of violently shaking her when she was 3 months old.
"What a cruel thing to do to a beautiful girl," he wrote in his suicide note.
He thanks his friends at the DEA for their support, then says the agency
failed him when he needed it most, after the accusations had been leveled
that he shook his baby.
The agency placed him on leave for two years while it investigated the
allegation. A day after he killed his ex-fiancee, investigators recommended
that he be fired for making false statements to them.
In the note, Bailey accuses Harris of being the source of his sorrow —
alleging that she wouldn't allow him to visit Alexus.
"Now she is gone off with my daughter and I have nothing to live for," he
wrote.
Campbell reacted angrily upon hearing Bailey's words.
"He's a liar," she insisted. "He was here every day visiting Alexus. But
that isn't why he came over. He wanted to get Veda back."
WHAT HAPPENED
Bailey had dated Harris for three years. They lived together and took care
of Harris' other children, Edward and Kanesha — and Alexus, until the
injury left her with shaken-baby syndrome.
The couple's relationship soured as his child-abuse trial approached.
But, then, over the objections of her sister and other family members,
Harris took him back.
Edward, 14, said in an interview this week that he never liked Bailey, a
former Grambling State University baseball star who attended all of the
boy's Little League games.
Bailey came down hard on him when he made a mistake on the field.
One time, the teen-ager recalled, Bailey started yelling at him because he
hadn't gone to school. Angry, Edward went outside to the trash and
retrieved the newspaper notice proving that school was not in session that
day.
"He grabbed it out of my hand and started hitting me with it," the youth said.
In his suicide note, Bailey urges Edward to "work hard in school and make
it to the big leagues."
"I've got too much rage against him," the teen said.
In September, police came to their home after Bailey hit Harris when she
tried to break up an argument between himself and Edward.
The couple broke up a short while later, family members said, when Harris
found out he was cheating.
Harris and her three children moved in with Campbell, her three children
and Harris' boyfriend, James Fife.
Then on Oct. 27, just before 10 p.m., Fife spotted Bailey lurking outside
their home.
Campbell said she went outside to confront him.
The special agent demanded to see the baby.
When Campbell told him to come back the next day, Bailey shoved her and
forced his way into the house, she said.
She said he wanted to know where Harris' new boyfriend was. He then said
something else and pulled out a gun, Campbell recalled.
He fired a shot through a back window.
"I told my daughter to dial 911," Campbell said.
Bailey jumped on the sofa bed in the living room, nearly stepping on
Alexus, and shot Harris in the back of her head.
Campbell tried to stop him as he headed for the door. She pushed him into a
wall and attempted to wrestle the gun away. But she couldn't.
Bailey ground his 9 mm handgun into her stomach and fired.
"I fell to the floor," she said.
Three days later, Bailey was dead, Campbell was still in the hospital, and
her three children and her sister's three children were at Orangewood
children's home.
A FAMILY'S STRUGGLE
Campbell was out of the hospital in a week."I didn't have any choice,"
Campbell said of her quick recovery.
"I couldn't leave the children there. Especially Alexus. She was going
downhill quickly," she said.
Not only did she have to deal with raising six children with Fife, a postal
worker. But their rental home had yet to be cleaned up and repaired. So the
family bounced from hotel to hotel for weeks before finally moving back in.
Then, Bailey's mother made a bid to gain custody of Alexus.
Campbell said she wasn't about to let that happen.
"I cannot see how she had the audacity to ask," Campbell said, pointing out
that Alexus' grandmother, who lives in New York, has never seen the child.
A social worker awarded the child to Campbell.
Campbell said she is upset because the DEA hasn't contacted her to talk
about benefits for Alexus.
Terry Parham, acting chief of public affairs for the DEA, said Bailey
listed his mother as his beneficiary on one document and somebody other
than Alexus on another.
Alexus is entitled to a monthly survivor's payment until she's an adult, he
said, adding that because she is handicapped, she may be eligible for life.
Campbell says her life is more hectic than ever, which is good, because it
doesn't give her time to dwell on her sadness.
She sat during an interview this week, on the carpet not far from where her
sister was killed and where she was shot. Alexus lay nearby in a reclining
chair in front of a television.
Campbell said she thinks about her sister all the time.
"I remember her in the kitchen, cooking with me. She was such a good
mother. She should still be here."
Campbell paused.
"I can't even afford to break down right now," she said.
She leaned over to Alexus, kissed her on the cheek and said: "Besides,
we've got a little bright face to keep us going."
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