It's Hard Out Here for a Player

On October 14, Vital got a phone call from Major Edwards Jr. Edwards was someone who'd always been on the outside of Da BombSquad's clique. He asked Vital out for drinks and then picked him up in his 1988 maroon Ford Thunderbird a little after 9 p.m.

Vital's wife of four years, Kristie Vital, watched her husband step inside the car.

"I love you," she told her husband from the doorway. "Just be careful. Call me later, OK?"

"OK," he answered "I will."

Kristie had reason to worry about her husband going off with Edwards. In 2005, Edwards was charged with beating three men outside the Lawrence bar Last Call. Those charges are still pending, but court papers filed in August 2006 by James Rumsey, an attorney for Edwards, claimed that Edwards had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was taking legal and illegal drugs to "try to self-medicate."

Thomas says Da BombSquad sometimes hung out with Edwards simply because they'd grown up together and knew each other's families. He suspects that Edwards, who often talked of trying to put out his own rhymes, may have been jealous of the success of Da BombSquad and its former members. "As BombSquad members, everyone pretends they're our friends," Thomas says. "There's jealousy for what we got and what we did musically." Loneker agrees that the Lawrence hip-hop scene is small and the pickings are slim. Consequently, he says, there's a heavy dose of "competitiveness and territorialism."

In the months before Vital's death, Thomas said he'd heard rumors that Edwards was plotting against all of the former members of Da BombSquad. "We were told Major Edwards was plotting to get us all." But nobody thought it was more than talk. "He was supposed to be plotting to get all our asses.... But when we saw him, he was cool. You know, we even smoked a blunt with him."

The week before Edwards arrived to pick up Vital that October night, Kristie says, Edwards had been calling her husband continually, badgering him about a lost cell phone. "I just felt like something wasn't right," 36-year-old Kristie says. Edwards claimed that the phone was buried in the crack between the seats in Vital's '97 Lincoln Continental. Vital checked, but Edwards kept calling. Edwards eventually found the phone in somebody else's vehicle, but the pestering didn't stop. "The next week it was something else he was accusing Anthony of, something like picking up some money when they were hanging out one night," Kristie says.

She told her husband to stay away from Edwards when he was flipping out like that. Vital told her: "It's no big deal. It ain't nothing."

Despite her misgivings about the man, Kristie didn't think much about Vital traipsing off with Edwards. Her husband loved to party — maybe a bit too much, some friends say.

Loneker recalls that Vital once came knocking at five or six in the morning, looking for a place to crash. Loneker — seven years older than Vital — confronted him. Vital just smiled and said, "I know, cuz." He kept going out night after night.

Hawkins, the cellmate whom Vital collaborated with before Da BombSquad was a reality, says Vital would often be the one who wanted to keep partying when everybody was done. Other times, Spates says, Vital would be the voice of reason. "We would be getting high or something, and he would have everybody sitting there ready to put the blunt out, like he'd be saying 'There's demons in y'all!'"

Vital's carousing also got him in trouble. In 1997, Vital and six friends wanted to scare an acquaintance named Damien Williams during a spat over a girl. So they barged into his house dressed in ski masks. Williams called the cops, and Vital admitted, after he was arrested, that he had brought a shotgun with him. He received 36 months' probation after he pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary, criminal threat and conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary. While on probation, Vital continually broke curfew and tested positive for drugs, which landed him in jail with Hawkins.

After her husband left with Edwards, Kristie went out with her sisters. Vital didn't return home. The following afternoon, two sheriff's deputies and a chaplain came to her door.

At around 9 a.m. on October 15, farmer Gary Tilley was pulling out of his driveway and onto U.S. Highway 40 when he saw something in the grassy ditch beside his gravel drive. Tilley's house stands a quarter-mile from the road. There's no mailbox, and the driveway is blocked by a large, rusty gate. Tilley peered into the ditch and found the mangled corpse of Anthony Vital.

When Kristie told detectives that her husband had left Saturday night with Major Edwards, cops went looking for him. Edwards had already left town.

An ex-girlfriend of Edwards' told police that she had bought him a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. As a convicted felon, Edwards isn't allowed to own a gun, so police put out a warrant for him on firearms charges.