Jury convicts Clearlake Oaks woman of first-degree murder in ex-boyfriend’s killing
- Elizabeth Larson
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — A jury on Thursday convicted a Clearlake Oaks woman of first-degree murder for the fatal July 2021 shooting of her ex-boyfriend.
Tammy Sue Grogan-Robinson, 58, is facing decades in prison following the verdict, handed down in Judge Andrew Blum’s courtroom on Thursday afternoon.
The six-man, six-woman jury decided the case at the end of deliberations that had begun on Thursday morning following a four-week trial, said Deputy District Attorney Rich Watson, who prosecuted the case.
Grogan-Robinson was found guilty of the killing of 56-year-old Charles Vernon McClelland of Rohnert Park, her on-again, off-again boyfriend of five years who the prosecution said she had planned to shoot after he rejected her attempts to get back together.
McClelland was shot at the Clearlake Oaks home he owned, part of which was rented to Grogan-Robinson, on the morning of July 7, 2021.
Grogan-Robinson told authorities that she killed McClelland after he sexually assaulted her at gunpoint. However, within weeks, those claims started to fall apart as the Lake County Sheriff’s Office conducted follow-up investigations.
“Charles McClelland did not sexually assault her,” Watson said.
“Not only did she kill him, she tried to smear his name in the worst way possible,” Watson added.
Grogan-Robinson took the stand during her trial, but her testimony did not appear to sway the jury, Watson said.
Watson said the jury convicted Grogan-Robinson of first-degree murder, finding to be true special allegations of intentionally discharging a firearm causing death, use of a handgun in committing the crime and inflicting great bodily injury or death.
She also was convicted on a second count of assault with a firearm, as well as a special allegation to that charge of committing great bodily injury on McClelland.
Watson said Grogan-Robinson is facing terms of 25 years to life for the first-degree murder conviction and 25 years to life for the gun use enhancement.
Sentencing will take place at 1:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 12, in Judge Blum’s Department 3 courtroom at the Lakeport courthouse.
“Ms. Grogan Robinson is very disappointed in the outcome. She continues to maintain her innocence,” Mitchell Hauptman, Grogan-Robinson’s attorney, told Lake County News in a Thursday afternoon email.
Hauptman said an appeal of the verdict will “absolutely” be filed.
The facts of the case
Watson said McClelland had been married for 15 years, he and his wife grew apart and they divorced. He raised a son, now 21.
After his divorce, McClelland and Grogan-Robinson had dated on and off over the course of five years. Watson said McClelland had decided he wasn’t willing to commit to a long-term relationship with Grogan-Robinson and they broke up in March 2021.
However, Watson said Grogan-Robisnon was obsessed with McClelland, and while he made clear that he didn’t want to continue their relationship, she didn’t get the message.
That was borne out in the investigation, Watson said. “We went through 1,600 text messages between the two of them.”
While McClelland kept telling Grogan-Robinson that he wanted her to move on and be happy, she “was relentless,” Watson said, and continued to text him, sending messages including one wishing him a happy anniversary.
Ultimately, the prosecution argued that Grogan-Robinson killed McClelland because of her jealousy.
During the 2021 Independence Day weekend, McClelland came up to spend the weekend at the lake. Grogan-Robinson lived in the main house on his property and he used an apartment there as his vacation home, Watson said.
On that weekend, Watson said McClelland had friends with him. “When he gets there, she starts texting him, sending him salacious pictures.”
She continued to pursue McClelland over that weekend. Watson said McClelland’s friends went home on July 4, leaving Grogan-Robinson and McClelland alone at the home.
Watson said they started chatting, and he argued Grogan-Robinson was getting her hopes up that they would reunite.
They spent time together on July 5 and then on July 6 Grogan-Robinson, according to her trial testimony, said she fixed them dinner.
Watson said it was on that evening, McClelland’s last night alive, that the mood changed.
He said Grogan-Robinson became angry when she found out McClelland was texting his new girlfriend.
It was at that point that Grogan-Robinson started texting a male friend, Kenneth Hobbs, telling him that she was going to shoot McClelland in the face, according to testimony given at her November 2021 preliminary hearing. She later asked Hobbs to delete those texts.
Watson said Grogan-Robinson and Hobbs were texting from about 6:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. that evening. In those texts, Hobbs was trying to dissuade her from harming McClelland.
The next morning, July 7, Grogan-Robinson shot McClelland four times with her own 9 millimeter handgun, Watson said.
While Watson said he didn’t know exactly when the shooting occurred, he believes it was sometime between her first correspondence with her workplace, Adventist Health, at 6:39 a.m. and when she left her home at 7:45 a.m., which was shown on her door camera.
She later told Hobbs that McClelland had entered through her bedroom window at around midnight, that he struggled with her for her handgun, which was on the nightstand, that he had sexually assaulted her and she shot him, claims that the investigation would disprove.
Watson said Grogan-Robinson told investigators that she drove into Clearlake, made a couple of phone calls, including to Adventist Health, which directed her to Sutter Lakeside Hospital for the sexual assault exam. That’s where sheriff’s deputies first spoke with her.
Grogan-Robinson told investigators that after she shot McClelland, she smoked a cigarette and walked around the house, packed a bag, but didn’t call anyone to report the shooting or to ask for help for McClelland, Watson said.
“She just got in her car and left,” Watson said.
Watson said authorities immediately started a full sexual assault investigation which disproved Grogan-Robinson’s story.
“As the evidence started to come back, it showed that her story didn’t line up,” he said.
The DNA evidence excluded McClelland from having touched the grip of the handgun that she had claimed he held on her.
“This was an exclusion, which was huge for his name,” Watson said.
Watson said the DNA testing from the sexual assault testing and from McClelland’s autopsy showed that they had not had sex, and so he had not committed the sexual assault that she had claimed.
That matched the evidence reported to a deputy who, when collecting the sexual assault kit at Sutter Lakeside Hospital, was told by a nurse that there were no physical findings of sexual assault.
After the murder, Grogan-Robinson went to Missouri, where she has family. She was arrested there in August 2021 and extradited back to Lake County in September 2021. She has remained in custody since then.
She pleaded not guilty to McClelland’s killing in an October 2021 court appearance and in November 2021, following a preliminary hearing, Judge J. David Markham ordered her to stand trial for McClelland’s murder.
The trial
Watson said the trial began with jury selection on Oct. 19. The presentation of evidence began on Oct. 26.
Testimony at trial included the appearance of Dr. Bennet Omalu, who conducted the autopsy and concluded that McClelland died of the gunshot wounds and that his injuries were consistent with defensive wounds. Omalu is well-known for his work in studying concussion injuries in professional football players.
Also during the trial, Grogan-Robinson herself took the stand, giving her own version of events, Watson said.
While it’s uncommon for defendants in criminal prosecutions to testify during their trials, Watson said he wasn’t surprised when she took the stand.
“It was believed that she wanted to take the stand the whole time,” he said. “She wanted to tell her story.”
However, Watson said he didn’t think it helped her case. She showed no emotion whatsoever while giving her testimony.
Neither did her version of events appear to sway the jury.
During his cross examination of Grogan-Robinson, Watson asked her why she left McClelland to die while she smoked a cigarette. He said she denied doing that.
Rather, she testified that she caused injury to McClelland in the abdomen and in her experience as a surgical technician working in surgical rooms, she has seen people survive the same type of injury, Watson said.
Watson argued that her statements before and actions after killing McClelland showed her state of mind.
Following closing arguments, the jury got the case at 4 p.m. Wednesday. Watson said that rather than start deliberations then, the jury started fresh at 9 a.m.Thursday.
At 10 a.m. Thursday, the jury asked to review evidence in the form of video, including the interview the sheriff’s office conducted with Grogan-Robinson at the hospital and subsequent interviews.
Watson said altogether the jury watched about two hours of video before breaking for lunch at noon.
They came back and continued deliberations, and at 2 p.m. he got the notice that they had reached a verdict.
During the verdict reading, Grogan-Robinson again showed no emotion.
For the type of case it was, Watson said the verdict came quickly.
Regarding the decades of prison time Grogan-Robinson is potentially facing at next month’s sentencing, Watson said she needs to be held accountable.
As for McClelland, victimized both in his killing and in Grogan-Robinson’s attempt to destroy his reputation as a justification, “His name needs to be cleared, too,” Watson said.
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