The Murder of Dee Whigham (SOLVED)

Dee Whigham was a twenty-five-year old transgender nurse who was murdered on July 23, 2016 at a hotel in St. Martin, Mississippi by twenty-three-year old, Dwanya Hickerson.

From what I've read I believe Dwanya used the trans-panic defense method for his crime against Dee; stabbing her one-hundred-ninety times after having anal sex with her. He claimed he "didn't know" she was transgender; however unless she was post-operative, how could he not have known? Evidence shows he burned Whigham's cellphone before dumping it in a fire pit at a beach in Biloxi. Since investigators couldn't find any interaction between the two prior to the day Dee was killed, they could not prove a "heat of passion" case against Hickerson; in what would have yielded a stronger sentence of manslaughter in the state of Mississippi.

While some believe Dwanya's sentence of only thirty-five years for the murder and eight years for robbery is "too small", District Attorney, Tony Lawrence explains that if convicted of manslaughter in the case of Dee Whigham, Dwanya would have only been sentenced to twenty years in prison, only to be released after ten years. Even a simple murder conviction would still allow him to petition the court to be released from prison as early as the age of fifty-five-years old. The number of stab wounds is a proof of murder, but not manslaughter due to Mississippi's "heat of passion" rule for determining said crime. Going with the murder charge ensures Hickerson will be in prison until the age of sixty-years old. In other words, concerns prosecutors had was that every piece of evidence could be argued either way; resulting in a prosecution of a lesser charge or even an acquittal.

Prosecutors subpoenaed Dee's: phone records, emails, and iCloud pages; however all they could find to prove that the two had been communicating long before the murder, may have occurred on a private messaging app, which cannot be traced. All they could find were messages between the two the day of the murder. Statements from witnesses knew Whigham but did not show that they knew Dee and Dwanya had a previous relationship. The burning of Whigham's cellphone could have been the "smoking gun" to show previous messages between the two. However I feel that the amount of stab wounds and the fact that the phone was destroyed by Hickerson proved to the judge that they knew each other longer than he let on; allowing for the harsher sentence.