KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals is giving no break to a vengeful man who murdered his Knox County parents, cut up their bodies and tried to disintegrate them with chemicals, writing they found no significant errors that robbed him of a fair trial.
A three-member panel led by Judge James Curwood Witt Jr. on Friday affirmed Joel M. Guy Jr.'s convictions from his September 2020 trial.
Guy, 35, is serving a life sentence at the Tiptonville, Tenn, prison.
A Knox County jury convicted him of plotting and carrying out a plan to kill Joel Guy Sr. and Lisa Guy in their West Knox County home while visiting for the Thanksgiving weekend in 2016. The 28-year-old unemployed Guy lived in Baton Rouge, La., and relied on his mother to send money for living expenses.
Guy was angry because his parents were about to cut off his support, court testimony showed. They wanted to move to Surgoinsville and enjoy retirement.
The son first turned on his father, stabbing him to death in an upstairs workout room on Saturday morning, Nov. 26, 2016. He then waited for the mother who had doted on him throughout his life to come home from grocery shopping, killing her on the upstairs landing.
Guy then dragged their bodies into the couple's master suite, where he dismembered them and put their body parts in blue totes. He bought corrosive chemicals he hoped would dissolve their flesh until it was unrecognizable.
Guy put his mother's head in a stock pot on the kitchen stove.
He'd been planning the attack for some time, evidence showed. He made notes to himself and kept a to-do list of what he'd need to carry out the killings.
Ultimately, he planned to burn the house down to destroy all the evidence, testimony showed.
But in the course of dismembering his parents that weekend, Guy suffered cuts for which he needed medical treatment. He decided to drive back to Baton Rouge to get medical attention.
While he was gone, a friend of Lisa Guy's alerted Knox County authorities that she hadn't shown up for work. Knox County deputies and detectives went to the Guy home, which had just been sold, and discovered the extensive and violent crime scene.
Guy's defense team raised numerous points during a hearing last fall before the appellate court to discredit their client's convictions, overseen at trial by Judge Steve Sword.
They singled out the search of the parents' home, the seizure and search of Guy's backpack, which contained highly incriminating evidence, and a search of his vehicle, which contained a meat grinder among other items.
Said the appeals court Friday: "The trial court correctly concluded that the search of the backpack was an appropriately-conducted inventory search. The trial court did not err by refusing to suppress surveillance video obtained using the receipts discovered from the unlawful search of the defendant’s Louisiana residence because the trial court correctly concluded that the police would have inevitably discovered the surveillance video during the course of the investigation.
"The trial court did not err by admitting evidence that the victims intended to stop providing financial support to the defendant. The proscriptive statute criminalizing the abuse of a corpse is not void for vagueness, and the evidence adduced at trial was sufficient to support the defendant’s convictions of these offenses. Finally, because we conclude that the trial court did not commit any error, no error obtains to accumulate. We affirm the judgments of the trial court."