HAMPTON — Cory Jamar Bigsby wrote in a jailhouse statement last year that he beat his then 3-year-old son “with his fist” in June 2021 until the boy fell unconscious.
He tried CPR, he wrote, but Codi never woke up.
The statement was introduced in Hampton Circuit Court Wednesday in a motion by Bigsby’s attorneys to block four written jailhouse statements from being used as evidence in his pending murder trial.
The defense asserts Bigsby made the statements under duress.
While Circuit Court Judge James Hawks hasn’t ruled on whether to bar the statements, they became public after being introduced as exhibits at the hearing.
In three of the four statements, all written while Bigsby was in custody at Hampton Roads Regional Jail, he said he had simply found Codi unconscious.
Bigsby tried to give his son CPR, he wrote, and then buried him. The four statements contain varying dates for when that happened.
But in one statement, dated November 2022, Bigsby wrote that he beat his son before the toddler became unresponsive.
Unlike the other three statements, Bigsby didn’t willingly hand over that statement or dictate the words to a jail guard. Instead, guards found it — in a black and white composition notebook — in the inmate’s jail cell in December 2022.
Hampton Police then obtained the statement by way of search warrant on the jail, with prosecutors now planning to use it as evidence at Bigsby’s second-degree murder trial in March.
“On June 18, 2021, I, Cory Bigsby, walked in the room and grabbed Codi and drag him into the kitchen,” he wrote. Then, Bigsby said, he “thumped (Codi’s) head on the floor and beat him with my fist and he went into cardiac arrest.”
After the CPR didn’t work, he wrote, he carried Codi upstairs and put him into the bathtub “to see if he would respond.”
“He did not, so I held him and prayed to God that he bring my baby back,” Bigsby wrote. “Then I took him in the room and layed him (sic) on the bed.”
After that, Bigsby said he got a flashlight and charged it, bought gas and snacks at a gas station.
Bigsby wrote that he went to an empty car wash and put Codi into a bag, then drove home and put the toddler “in the fridge.”
Then he put Codi back in the car, he said, driving him behind a building, where he dug a hole by a tree and buried him.
“Then went home and prayed for forgiveness,” Bigsby wrote. He went to King’s Dominion the next day, he added, and later “dumped my clothes from the crime in the trash and burned them.”
“Then the next day I went back to burn Codi and cover up scars from the beatings,” he wrote. (The statement doesn’t explain how he would have been able to access Codi again, given that he just wrote that he buried him).
“Then I went home and took a bath with (another child),” he wrote. “Please except (sic) my confession! Sincerely Cory Bigsby.”
The two page statement has large “X’s” over both pages, apparently written by Bigsby before the notebook was found.
It was one of four statements Bigsby made while locked up at the regional jail after reporting his son missing from the family’s Buckroe Beach town home on Jan. 31, 2022.
He was released on bond earlier this year. Codi was never found.
The defense asked the judge to seal the jailhouse statements before trial, but Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell was adamant the statements be made public, saying Bigsby’s lawyers have been “trying their case in the press” and now is their “day of reckoning,” with the truth coming out.
Bell said he would agree to have the statements sealed if Hawks placed a gag order on Bigsby’s attorneys going forward. But one of those attorneys, Amina Matheny-Willard, said she had a right to speak about the case. In the end, Hawks overruled the request to seal the statements, allowing reporters to access them.
Bigsby’s four statements vary greatly not only about the dates, but also about what happened. The first two statements were made on Aug. 3, 2022, with Bigsby saying in one that he went out to wash clothes and came home to find Codi “at the bottom of the steps unresponsive.”
“He must have fallen,” Bigsby wrote.
In all four statements, he wrote that he tried to perform CPR, to no avail.
Bigsby wrote in several of the statements that he took his deceased son to “Building 5511” on “Garrett A. Morgan Boulevard” and buried him behind the building.
“Then I drove home and prayed to Jesus to save Codi, and I failed him,” he wrote in one statement. “So I am becoming tired of torture so now I am confessing because my family and the police is conducting these crimes and I cannot take it anymore.”
The Garret A. Morgan Boulevard address is in Hyattsville, Maryland, outside of Washington. Police and federal law enforcement officers searched that area in the summer of 2022, following Bigsby’s first statement.
They found no trace of Codi.
Bigsby’s attorneys, Matheny-Willard and Curtis Brown, maintain that jail guards promised Bigsby a meeting with his family if he provided the Aug. 3, 2022 statement. Two days later, the jail took the unusual step of having Bigsby’s family in for a luncheon in which they ordered from Hardee’s, Bigsby’s favorite restaurant.
But Lt. Col. William Anderson, the regional jail’s deputy superintendent, testified that he asked the family in for the visit only because Bigsby was “losing weight and not eating,” and he was concerned about his mental health. Anderson said he finds hat people’s mood improve if they can “eat what they love to eat” and be in the company “of people they love.”
“Was there any type of agreement to get him to provide a confession?” a prosecutor asked.
“No,” Anderson said.
Hawks also ruled Wednesday that prosecutors can have a key witness — Codi’s 6-year-old brother — testify at trial by way of a camera hookup rather than being in the courtroom. The judge made the ruling after a counselor testified the boy would find it traumatic to testify in front of his father.
The hearing will continue Thursday.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
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