Murder or Vigilante Justice?

Oct. 19, 2007 — -- Amanda Cunningham said she vividly recalls the day her Uncle Coy raped her.

"I remember I had my purple Little Mermaid shirt on," she told ABC News. "He told me to take my clothes off, and I said no, so he took them off me."

She was 9 years old. Coy Hundley was drunk, Amanda said, but that wasn't unusual. He would rape her again a few months later, she testified in court.

Nearly five years later, in the fall of 2003, Amanda's mother, Kimberly Cunningham, finally learned of the alleged attacks. What happened next was the talk of Knoxville, Tenn., for years.

Kimberly got into her car and drove to the tool company where Hundley worked. She called him out into the parking lot. Cunningham said that she was praying he would deny the rape. Instead, she said Hundley, 39, laughed at her.

"What are you going to do about it?" he allegedly said.

Kimberly shot him five times, reloaded the weapon and fired five more rounds, killing him.

"I'll never forget him laughing at me," she testified at trial, according to court transcripts.

Witnesses said that after Kimberly shot Hundley, she got back into her car, pulled out of the parking lot and up to the road, put her blinker on and calmly drove away. Forty-five minutes later, she was in the Alcoa, Tenn., Police Department, turning in her nickel-plated revolver and telling police there had been a shooting.

"The person who is a good mother and in control — and I'm a compassionate person — was completely gone," Kimberly told ABC News. "You wouldn't believe how tiny she was," Kimberly said, her voice cracking. "This little thing, she wasn't more than 42 pounds, and for someone to do such vulgar things to her … there [sic] is simply no words to describe what happened … I just totally lost control."

On an audiotape of the police interrogation obtained by ABC News, Kimberly can be heard sobbing. "He raped my baby!" she told police.

In her first trial in April 2005, a Knoxville jury acquitted her of first degree murder, but deadlocked on second degree murder. In a second trial in October 2005, the jury acquitted Kimberly of second degree murder, but found her guilty of voluntary manslaughter. She was sentenced to four years in prison, a sentence that was recently reduced on appeal to six months in prison.

"If she hadn't reloaded that gun," said Carl Eppolito, a juror from the second trial, "I would have let her walk."

For the tight-knit town of Knoxville, nestled in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains, the case posed the thorniest of questions: What would you do if you believed your child had been raped?

Kimberly had obtained a gun permit, taken lessons at a firing range and carried a loaded gun in a black purse in her car since August 2003, when she learned that Hundley's eldest son had allegedly molested her son Shane, now 15, as well as Amanda.

After Kimberly reported this to police, the Hundleys threatened her, Kimberly testified. Hundley was the common-law husband of Kimberly's sister Rhonda.

"I was scared of their family," Kimberly said. "They wanted me to drop it, kept telling me that 'it's gonna come out of my a--' if I didn't drop it." She said that Hundley and his friends repeatedly told her that they'd "never find my body."

Feeling helpless and angry, she said, she smashed the windows in Hundley's son's car. When she called Hundley at work, she testified, he told her the vandalism made the two families "even."

Repeated attempts by ABC News to interview Hundley's son were unsuccessful. Evelyn Hundley, Hundley's mother, denied that any molestation or rapes had occurred.

"I just think it's unjust," she said. "I don't believe in the justice system no more. Because she got away with cold-blooded murder."

Though Kimberly contacted police after her children told her they'd been molested, no charges were filed against Hundley's eldest son, according to Evelyn.

For nearly five years, Amanda had harbored her secret, and it was beginning to wear on her. Her mother said that the A student had become listless and withdrawn. She remembers Amanda lying on the floor outside her bedroom door, "screaming and crying" until her mother would let her come in and sleep in her bed with her.

"I knew there was something wrong with her, but I didn't know what it was," Kimberly said. Mother and daughter began to fight bitterly, until one day in the early fall of 2003, in utter frustration, Kimberly put her daughter in the backseat of the car and told her she was taking her to the juvenile detention center.

"Why are you acting like this?" her mother pleaded with her. Then she had a thought. "Who is bothering you?" she asked her daughter.

The mother began ticking off the names of the people in town.

"When she got to [Coy's son's] name, I shook my head, yes," Amanda said. Her mother went to the police and then took her young son Shane to McDonald's. He, too, said that Coy's eldest son had been "touching" him.

Kimberly continued to press Amanda, but Amanda couldn't bring herself to tell her mother everything. "I didn't want to tell her because that was more embarrassing to me because he was an adult," Amanda told ABC News. But the secret distressed her, she said.

On Oct. 6, 2003, while her mother was putting Shane to bed, Amanda asked her to come into her bedroom. She said that she had something she wanted to talk about.

"I told her I had been having dreams about Coy," Amanda said. "She told me she knew there was more to what I was trying to say."

Amanda finally broke down and told her mother that Hundley had forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was 9 and then raped her. She said he had raped her again after that and threatened her not to tell anybody.