A jury heard chilling testimony as the first witnesses took the stand in the DeKalb County murder trial of a Stone Mountain man charged with killing a woman and torching the car where she died.

Gerald Clark is facing a 10-count indictment with charges including malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, and kidnapping. The victim was 27-year-old Mary Kilpatrick.

In Tuesday’s opening statements, DeKalb County prosecutors told the jurors that Kilpatrick did not know her alleged killer, Gerald Clark. But they said the last time she was seen alive was on video at a Budgetel Inn & Suites--and Clark was seen on the same video.

The State alleges Clark drove around with Kilpatrick in her own Lincoln Town Car’s trunk, eventually shot her, and then set her car on fire near the old Hidden Hills golf course.

The defense is hammering away at the lack of any physical evidence tying Clark to the case and pointing the finger at another man—Clark’s cousin.

That cousin, Christopher Swope, spent hours on the stand on the first day of testimony. He said Clark came to his home in the 3:00 A.M. hour of September 26, 2020, saying he had “bodies in the trunk.”

Jurors saw Ring video from Swope’s home and security video from a nearby Chevron station where Swope bought gas for a can, and bought cigarettes and a T-shirt at the convenience store. The Ring video shows Clark arrive and talk to Swope, but the words are hard to hear. When Swope returned to his home from the gas station, he says Clark walked up, took the gas can, and told him to follow him, as he was going to “set this car on fire.”

“When he said it, I heard banging on the trunk and somebody screaming for help,” Swope testified, confirming it was a female voice. “I remember her yelling, ‘Help!’ and I believe she said, ‘I won’t tell.’”

When DeKalb County prosecutor Jennifer Scacco asked his reaction, Swope said he asked Clark, “Why’d you bring this s**t to my house?” Clark, he says, didn’t answer, just repeated that Swope should follow him so he could set the car on fire.

He testifies that Clark had little other reaction to the noise Kilpatrick was making, except to threaten her.

“He said something like, ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you right now. I’m trying to give you the chance to make it right with your Maker before I send you to meet Him,’” said Swope. He says he went along with what Clark--who showed him he was armed with a handgun--wanted because he feared for himself as well as his wife and children inside the home.

“I didn’t want to be in the trunk, too,” he said.

Scacco asked Swope if Clark had ever explained why he had done this. Swope says he doesn’t remember the time of the conversation but that one day, Clark told him Kilpatrick had “pulled a .38 on him trying to rob him or something like that, and he was able to take it from her.”

Swope said he couldn’t rationalize killing someone after disarming them.

“That was rage,” he said. “I couldn’t understand that.”

Swope testified that once they arrived at a different location, Clark opened the trunk and fired nine shots into the trunk. He says he drove away and returned a few minutes later to pick up Clark at his direction--but that Clark was nowhere to be found and wasn’t answering his phone. Swope says he saw the car in flames and rode around, looking for Clark, but never found him.

Swope also said he got several calls from Clark later, but that they were all coming from phone of a man he knows as “Tron,” whose house he visited after the incident. He says he told Tron what had happened. In one call, he says, he asked Clark where he’d gone and Clark said he’d run away.

Prosecutors said Clark was trying to set up someone else to take the fall and had taken that friend’s phone in one of his stops driving Kilpatrick’s car around DeKalb County.

He ultimately went to police two days later, he said, when someone shot at him as he was driving, sending shards of glass into his face, over what was apparently a disagreement over a truck he’d bought from someone.

Under cross-examination, defense attorney Nicole Feagan drilled down on the video evidence, noting that despite the Ring camera video from Swope’s home and clear, colorful security video at the gas station, there is no audio of Clark speaking about “bodies in the trunk,” no visual evidence of the vehicle Clark arrived in that overnight, nor of him with the gas can. Swope, she pointed out, is the only one seen with the gasoline can, which he purchased. Swope said the audio on the Ring camera was broken up and that’s why they didn’t hear what Clark said.

Feagan went over a series of phone records to detail evidence of Swope’s calls and texts. He said he couldn’t remember.

“You don’t remember texting Gerald the night you say you saw him killing someone?” she asked.

The prosecutor asked Swope if his relationship with his cousin was so rocky that he’d try to pin a murder on him. Swope said no.

The trial is expected to last for a week.