Once or twice a decade, Whitley County gets a murder case too horrendous to ever forget. I am talking one of those that bothers pretty much everybody, who knows much at all about it, and you have to fight back feelings of outrage when you think about it.
The killing of three-year-old Amoura Smallwood is one of those cases.
She died on Feb. 19, 2023. The official cause of death was blunt force injuries to her little head and body due to non-accidental injuries, but this doesn’t really come close to describing what actually happened to her.
When first responders got to the little girl, who wasn’t breathing at the time, her little body was covered in bruises from head to toe. The bruises were in various stages of healing meaning that they occurred over an extended period of time.
An approximately one minute-long video that was recorded about a week before her death gives us a small glimpse of what she went through. An arm could be seen in the video coming from one side of the screen and forcefully covering Smallwood’s nose and mouth as she gasped for air and struggled to remove the hand from her face.
Jordan Taylor, who would go on to kill her two days later, can also be heard taunting Smallwood in the video as she was being smothered. Investigators found the video on Taylor’s phone.
In October 2024, Taylor, 24, of Corbin, entered a guilty plea to charges of murder, first-degree sodomy and first-degree strangulation of Smallwood in exchange for prosecutors agreeing to a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Text messages between Taylor and his girlfriend, Smallwood’s mother, Alexandra Ward, show that he threatened to beat Ward saying, “I will leave this whole house a crime scene,” among several other threats he made towards her.
In the days leading up to Smallwood’s death, Ward failed to intervene in Taylor’s abuse of Smallwood.
During a text conversation between Taylor and Ward on Feb. 17, 2023, Ward wrote, “We’re never gonna get rid of the marks” talking about the marks on Smallwood’s body. Additional phone data showed that on that same day, Ward searched for how to get bruises to go away fast and how to get scratches to go away fast multiple times.
On the day of Smallwood’s death, Taylor texted Ward, saying, “I’m about to flip on her” and “It’s her fault.”
During her trial last week, Ward took the stand in her own defense. She testified that she thought Taylor was joking when he threatened to kill her and leave the house a crime scene. She didn’t take it seriously.
While Ward may not have taken Taylor’s threats seriously, last week her jury did. The jury also took the signs of bruising and abuse on Smallwood and Ward’s lack of action to do anything to protect her daughters seriously too.
Last Tuesday a Whitley Circuit Court Jury recommended a sentence of life in prison for Ward, who they convicted of complicity in the February 2023 murder of her daughter, and complicity to commit first-degree strangulation in her daughter’s death.
Seldom have a pair of life imprisonment sentences been so deserving as the ones for Taylor and Ward.
This is as close to justice as our legal system can provide, yet it hardly seems anywhere near enough punishment.
I, for one, would like to say thank you to the jurors in this case for their service and for seeing that justice was done.
I am pretty sure that the jurors, who heard all of the evidence, will bear emotional scars from this case for a long, long time and perhaps forever.
Serving on jury duty is tough, but cases like this are good examples of why good people need to agree to serve on jury duty when they are called.
Even though it may be inconvenient and tough, we need good people to serve on juries so that justice can be done for innocent victims like Amoura Smallwood.
(Information for this column was contributed by News Journal Reporter Timothy Wyatt.)
