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Anna Benson, the hot 'Baseball Wives' star, once implicated in a murder
Former Mets pitcher Kris Benson's ex-wife, then Anna Warren, was the subject of a manhunt in 1996 after an 18-year-old man was killed in the Tennessee apartment she shared with her boyfriend.
BY RICH SCHAPIRO / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
PUBLISHED: SUNDAY, JULY 14, 2013, 2:30 AM
UPDATED: SUNDAY, JULY 14, 2013, 2:30 AM
Former "Baseball Wives" star Anna Benson's recent run-in with the law is not her first instance of legal trouble. After a bloody 1996 killing in Knoxville, Tenn., she and then-boyfriend Paul Dejongh were charged with murder.
COURTESY OF COBB COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE
Former "Baseball Wives" star Anna Benson's recent run-in with the law is not her first instance of legal trouble. After a bloody 1996 killing in Knoxville, Tenn., she and then-boyfriend Paul Dejongh were charged with murder.
Former Mets pitcher Kris Benson’s sexy wife has a dirty secret — she was once implicated in a grisly murder.
Anna Benson was the subject of a nationwide manhunt in 1996 after an 18-year-old man was executed in the Tennessee apartment she shared with her boyfriend, the Daily News has learned.
“Get rid of him,” she allegedly told her beau before he carried out the slaying, the lead investigator told The News, quoting witnesses.
Benson, then a 19-year-old named Anna Warren, hightailed it out of town with her man after the bloody slaying in Knoxville.
Tennessee cops obtained warrants charging Warren and her boyfriend, Paul Dejongh, 19, with the murder of Michael Evans, court records show.
She was captured five months later, but all charges against her were eventually dropped – infuriating the victim’s family.
“She got away with murder,” Evans’ father, Michael Evans Sr., fumed to The News.
“I don’t know how she can live with herself knowing that she conspired to kill my son.”
Anna Benson’s dark side returned last week when she allegedly burst inside her estranged hubby’s suburban Atlanta home — armed to the teeth and threatening him with a gun.
“She got away with murder,” Evans’ father, Michael Evans Sr., said.
STEVEN WHITE
“She got away with murder,” Evans’ father, Michael Evans Sr., said.
Evans Sr., a nuclear engineer based in Knoxville, said it was only after he was contacted by a News reporter that he learned Warren went on to wed a star pitcher.
“I’m really surprised that she was able to marry a professional baseball player,” Evans Sr. added. “From my vantage point, she’s a pure unadulterated bum.”
Warren’s life back then was indeed nothing like the world of luxury she would inhabit years later after marrying Benson.
In the mid-1990s, Warren was living inside a filthy Knoxville apartment, its walls covered with disturbing anti-cop graffiti and satanic messages.
“The only good pig is a dead pig,” read one message reported in the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
Someone scrawled “666” on one wall. Written on another, in felt-tip pen, was “187” — the California penal code for murder of a police officer.
By 8 a.m. on Jan. 22, 1996, those walls were spattered with blood. Detectives called to the apartment found a gruesome scene: Evans’ lifeless body splayed facedown near the front door – two bullet holes in his head.
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Evans was an unlikely murder victim. He was a community college student from a well-to-do family who was preparing to enlist in the Navy.
Warren was arrested five months after she was charged, but all charges were eventually dropped.
Warren was arrested five months after she was charged, but all charges were eventually dropped.
“The only thing he’s guilty of is having an association with people who have absolutely no value in life,” Knox County Sheriff Department Sector Capt. Ben Harkins told a local paper at the time.
Warren was at the center of the dispute that ended Evans’ life, the lead investigator on the case told The News.
“When the argument happened in the apartment, it was because the victim said something Anna didn’t like,” Assistant Chief Clyde Cowan said.
Witnesses told investigators that Warren urged Dejongh to “get rid of” Evans.
“That could have meant, ‘Throw him out of the house,’ but (Dejongh) took it to mean murder.
“She was very controlling of (her boyfriend),” Cowan said. “He pretty much did whatever she wanted him to do.”
A forensic expert would later determine that Evans had been shot once in the back of the head at close range, and then a second time as he stumbled toward a door.
There was drug paraphernalia inside the apartment, and strangely, multi-colored plastic balls like the ones found in a children’s play pit surrounded Evans. “It’s a very disturbing crime scene,” a police spokesman said after the murder.
Investigators said they were convinced there had been a violent struggle inside the apartment.
Benson was clad in black, wielding a baton, carrying ammo and a knife, and wearing a bulletproof vest on Monday in the incident at her ex-husband's home.
FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES
Benson was clad in black, wielding a baton, carrying ammo and a knife, and wearing a bulletproof vest on Monday in the incident at her ex-husband's home.
“There was blood everywhere — almost in every room,” Sheriff Tim Hutchison told reporters at the time.
Deputies were alerted to the crime at 7:30 a.m., when one of the occupants of the apartment called 911.
The woman went on to say she had been sleeping at the time of the shooting, but she knew that a man named Mike had been gunned down. There was no need for an ambulance, she grimly told the dispatcher.
Police determined there were five people in the apartment at the time of the murder – but two of them, Warren and Dejongh, were nowhere to be found. The pair were last seen driving a stolen 1992 red Lexus on Interstate 75 toward Georgia.
A manhunt was launched. The couple’s pictures were splashed across local papers; even “America’s Most Wanted” featured the case.
An alert was sent out to the press describing Warren as a white female, 5-feet-5 inches tall and weighing 120 pounds, with short dark hair.
RELATED: 'BASEBALL WIVES' ANNA BENSON IN BULLETPROOF VEST BREAKS INTO ESTRANGED HUSBAND KRIS BENSON'S HOUSE
Warren was captured in Portland, Ore., June 18. Her brunette hair was dyed purple and she sported a tongue ring, reports show.
Detectives swarmed her after she used a pay phone to call her grandmother, who was caring for her young child.
Michael Evans Sr. and his wife, Romaine, pose with a photo of their son Michael Evans Jr., who was found dead in January 1996 with two bullet holes in his head.
WADE PAYNE/THUNDERHEAD PHOTOGRAPHY
Michael Evans Sr. and his wife, Romaine, pose with a photo of their son Michael Evans Jr., who was found dead in January 1996 with two bullet holes in his head.
Warren had been calling periodically to check on her kid, authorities said, and she told investigators she was four months pregnant.
“She indicated (to her grandmother) she was getting tired of running,” Knox County Sheriff Tim Hutchison said.
But Warren clammed up as soon as Knox County authorities picked her up.
“She refused to give a statement, and as far as I know, she never gave a statement,” Cowan told The News.
Dejongh was captured that August in the Atlanta area. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder in January 1998, but the verdict was overturned on appeal.
Dejongh later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 21 years behind bars. He died in prison.
Prosecutors later dropped the murder charges against Warren and instead brought forward an accessory charge, but the state ended up dismissing that charge in May 1998.
“We have determined we don’t have sufficient proof to show she is guilty of that charge,” Knox County Deputy District Attorney Bill Crabtree said, according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
That decision didn’t sit well with Cowan, the investigator.
Evans was a community college student from a well-to-do family who was preparing to enlist in the Navy.
Evans was a community college student from a well-to-do family who was preparing to enlist in the Navy.
“That was against my will,” he said. “I would think the fact that she was pregnant had something to do with it.”
Warren’s lawyer at the time, Tom Dillard, insists that there’s a simple reason why the charges were dropped.
“She didn’t do anything,” Dillard told The News. “There was no miscarriage of justice. The state couldn’t prove the case. There was no evidence that she was involved in assisting and abetting the shooter.
“She was frightened, as you could imagine, and left the scene with this fellow,” Dillard added. “That was the only problem she had.”
After the charges were dismissed, Warren seemed to fall off the grid.
RELATED: ANNA BENSON FILES FOR DIVORCE FROM FORMER MET KRIS BENSON
“I didn’t know what happened to her,” Cowan said. “The last thing I remember hearing is that she was going to live with her grandmother in Atlanta.”
Some 15 years later, Evans Sr. remains convinced Warren played an instrumental role in the slaying.
He said he’s always believed Warren got off “because she had rich parents who got her a good lawyer.”
Kris and Anna Benson in 2004. Anna Benson has been charged with aggravated assault with a gun after allegedly trying to rob her ex-husband of $30,000 at gunpoint on Monday.
Kris and Anna Benson in 2004. Anna Benson has been charged with aggravated assault with a gun after allegedly trying to rob her ex-husband of $30,000 at gunpoint on Monday.
To this day, he thinks she was involved. “She was definitely a part of the murder of my son,” Evans Sr. said. “She’s a killer.”
Warren certainly had killer looks, and she used them to turn her life around in a flash.
The same year her charges were dropped, Warren met Benson at an Atlanta strip club where she worked.
It’s unclear if Benson had any idea about his new girlfriend’s dark past, but the pair married the following year, and Anna Warren became Anna Benson — who was soon known as the most polarizing wife in Major League Baseball.
Benson’s beauty bragged about having sex with the budding Pittsburgh Pirates star in a stadium parking lot.
She did a jaw-dropping Penthouse spread and, after he was traded to the Mets, she showed up at the team’s 2005 Christmas party in a shockingly revealing Mrs. Claus suit.
The pair had three children — daughter Haylee, and sons P.J. and Devin James. They also raised Anna’s daughter from her first marriage, Alyssa Warren.
It’s unclear if Benson’s wife ever delivered the child she was carrying while on the lam.
Kris Benson, 38, filed for divorce in 2012, setting up the bizarre incident last week.
Authorities say the 37-year-old burst inside her estranged hubby’s Georgia home on Monday and tried to rob him at gunpoint of $30,000. The former “Baseball Wives” star was clad in black, wielding a baton, carrying ammo and a knife, and wearing a bulletproof vest.
Benson made it out of his house unscathed and called 911.
Anna Benson was charged with aggravated assault with a gun — and tossed behind bars.
Evans Sr. believes that’s where she should remain.
“This girl doesn’t care about human life,” he said. “She’s a very dangerous person.”
“I wish her husband the best,” Evans Sr. added. “He made a big mistake.”
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/anna-benson-dirty-secret-article-1.1398254#ixzz2Z7UMdXUJ -The Knicks’ coaching search still includes a lone frontrunner, Kurt Rambis, whose qualifications for the position include a strong relationship with Jackson and a willingness to take the job.
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