Grand jury will hear Chatt Inn strangling case

Mark Howard

The video, the detective said, shows Mark Howard going through the first corridor of the Chatt Inn, making a left, and passing two vending machines. Then, carrying two bags and a 24-ounce bottle of beer, the 52-year-old heads up a staircase, to room 236, where Jeanette Scholten was staying. According to text messages, the detective said, the pair had been discussing how long a possible drug deal might take.

"What time on [March] 21 can Mr. Howard be seen in the video entering the room?" a prosecutor asked the detective Tuesday in Hamilton County General Sessions Court.

Jeanette Scholten, 34, pictured here in this undated photo, was found strangled to death inside a motel room in The Chatt Inn on E. 23rd Street on Thursday.

Seven forty-three p.m., replied Lucas Fuller, a Chattanooga Police Department detective, and he didn't leave until 5:48 a.m.

"We watched from [5:48] in the morning on [March] 22 to when she was discovered by her family," Fuller said. "And no one else enters that room or leaves that room except for Mark Howard."

When Scholten's family members did finally open the door, on March 24, they found the 34-year-old alone under the sheets, her feet sticking out, her underwear bunched up between her legs, her hands purple and cold - strangled to death.

Using a combination of text messages, video footage and interviews with hotel residents, police said they traced the incident to Howard and charged him with criminal homicide in May. On Tuesday, after hearing evidence in his case, General Sessions Court Judge Gary Starnes sent Howard's charge to the grand jury on the same $250,000 bond, records show.

Linda Post looked through family photo albums Saturday, two days after her daughter, 34-year-old Jeanette Scholten, was found dead inside a motel room.

During the preliminary hearing, prosecutor Lance Pope also called Robin Combs, records show.

Combs said she and her daughter saw Howard around the Chatt Inn while they washed clothes on Saturdays. She never knew Scholten by name, just as the "red-head girl," which is how Howard described her on March 22.

That morning, Combs said, she chatted with Howard at a nearby bus station.

"He said the word, 'Jeanette' and I said, 'Who's that?'" Combs said Tuesday. "And he said, 'the little red-head girl.' He said she was acting crazy, which I've never seen. And he said she'd asked him to leave. But I didn't respond, but I thought to myself, 'Why didn't you leave? She was doing you a favor?'"

Howard, who was homeless, sometimes sneaked into the inn when the office was closed and stayed with Scholten, Combs said. That morning on the bus, they probably talked for 45 minutes, she said.

Kevin Loper, a public defender representing Howard, asked Fuller for specific details about the crime scene and Combs for more information about Howard's mental state that morning.

"Did he seem relatively normal?" he asked her.

"He was not," she replied. "He acted he would nod off. And then he just wasn't himself. He was going to try to find work today. I said to him, 'Mark, you're going to eliminate any possibilities of future employment if you go in there today.'"

Contact staff writer Zack Peterson at 423-757-6347 or zpeterson@timesfreepress.com. Follow @zackpeterson918.