Avis Banks was pregnant and planning to marry Keyon Pittman. On November 29, 2006, he came home to Ridgeland, Mississippi, after coaching basketball practice. He had tried calling her. At the house he found Avis in the garage. She and her unborn son had been killed. Police examined a footwear impression and began working out who had been in the area that evening. [1]
The evening around basketball practice
Pittman and Carla Hughes taught at Chastain Middle School in Jackson and were having an affair. He testified that Hughes knew Avis was pregnant and that he intended to marry her. That evening he left groceries at Hughes’s home before practice and picked them up afterward. His account gave police a route to compare with phone records. Hughes’s defense later suggested Pittman was responsible. He was not convicted in the case. [1]
A borrowed gun and a pair of shoes
Three days before the killings, a witness lent Hughes a loaded .38-caliber handgun and a knife. She returned the gun empty on December 1. Ballistics connected it to the shooting. At her home, investigators found shoes whose tread corresponded to impressions at the house. A tread can be shared by shoes of the same design. What police later found on one sole was a separate piece of evidence. [1]
The first shoe test was negative
The strongest detail in the footwear evidence emerged only after a second examination. The Mississippi Crime Laboratory's initial test did not detect blood. The shoes then returned to police storage. On October 16, 2008, an investigator examining them with an assistant district attorney noticed small spots on the side of a sole. Five days later, the shoes were submitted to Scales Biological Laboratory. That later examination identified Banks's blood. [1]
The two results became a defense issue. Hughes argued that a negative test followed by a positive result suggested tampering, and she challenged irregularities in the evidence packaging. The state supplied a narrower explanation: the first laboratory had tested the tops and upper sides while avoiding areas needed for footwear-impression examination. The later spots were on the side of the sole, in an area not previously tested. The court found no adequate basis to infer probable tampering and rejected the challenge, also addressing the timing of the defense objection. [1]
That history makes the shoes more informative than a simple caption saying “DNA match.” The tread comparison associated a pattern with impressions at the house. The later biological examination associated blood on the shoes with Avis. Neither result was a photograph of the wearer committing the crime; the prosecution connected those findings to possession of the shoes, the weapon evidence and the telephone timeline. [1]
Minutes, rather than a pinpoint on a map
The telephone evidence also had a sequence. Hughes received a call at 5:37 p.m. and made one at 6:04 p.m. within the coverage area of the Ridgeland tower discussed at trial. Her next recorded activity, at 6:07 p.m., was outside that tower's range. The prosecution compared those records with its account of when Avis arrived home and was killed. [1]
The engineer described a coverage radius of approximately two miles. A call using that tower therefore supplied an area and a time, not a precise location inside a particular house. Pittman's records were offered for comparison, placing his calls during the relevant period in coverage associated with the school and Hughes's home. The jury considered that contrast alongside the defense claim that he had access to her house and had sometimes worn her shoes. The case depended on how those lines of evidence fit together. [1]
A verdict and an appeal
In October 2009, the jury convicted Hughes of two counts of capital murder. The court imposed concurrent sentences of life imprisonment without parole.
She appealed on several grounds, including the strength of the evidence, the search of her home and the admission of DNA evidence. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed on June 21, 2012.
The court also addressed a juror question about whether prosecutors could have called Hughes to testify. Her decision not to take the stand was protected and could not be used as evidence of guilt. The trial court directed jurors back to that instruction.
Avis was coming home to the place she shared with the person she planned to marry. For jurors, the question of who killed her and her son came down to events on that evening. They had a gun lent out three days before, call records marking a few minutes, and a trace of her blood on the side of a sole. [1]
Case brief
Ridgeland, Mississippi · 2006
- Recorded outcome
- Carla Hughes convicted of two capital murders; concurrent life without parole; affirmed 2012
Key moments
People in this case
- Carla Hughes
Convicted of murdering Avis Banks
Photo at source · WAPT · case coverage
Look closer · 3 visuals
Inside the evidence.
Open a visual to explore what it contributed to the case—and the limits of what it shows. These original illustrations explain the record; they are not photographs of the actual evidence.
The shoes and the second test
Original editorial illustration — not an actual evidence photograph or exhibit.
Read the evidence notes
Testing of a previously untested area on the side of a sole identified Avis’s blood. The court rejected Hughes’s tampering argument.
Illustration only: no actual shoes, blood, tread impression or DNA profile is depicted. A tread pattern alone is not a unique identification.
The weapon link
Original editorial illustration — not an actual evidence photograph or exhibit.
Read the evidence notes
A relative linked Hughes to the borrowed .38 handgun; laboratory testing identified it as the gun that fired the fatal bullets.
This is not the actual firearm or a ballistic comparison image. The jury considered this with the other evidence.
A phone covers an area
Original editorial illustration — not an actual evidence photograph or exhibit.
Read the evidence notes
The records linked calls to a tower with a roughly two-mile coverage radius that included the home.
A cell-site record is not GPS. The graphic deliberately shows no exact tower location or reconstructed route.
★ Key evidence used in a conviction · ✓ Exclusion or reversal · ◇ Disputed evidence · ⊘ Excluded at retrial · ◆ Identity / investigative finding, not a conviction. A symbol does not mean one item proved the whole case.
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Editorial review: 2026-11-12 · 773 words