Jan. 18
MISSISSIPPI:
Solving Kathy Mabry's Murder: Brutal 15-Year-Old Crime Highlights Decades-Long
Mississippi Scandal
J.D. "Bubba" Roseman, the first black sheriff of Humphreys County, is a
convivial man. In his office and in casual conversations on the street in this
town of 2,200, he engages people quickly and easily, inquiring about a son on
the football team, a niece in college or a grandmother in the hospital. He
talks loud and fast, always smiling, and works a deep, infectious laugh into
just about every conversation.
But when Roseman, 57, talks about Kathy Mabry, the mirth drains from his face.
His brow straightens. He speaks softly. He pauses from time to time to swallow
the catch that latches onto his words, and his eyes sometimes well up. It's an
unexpected thing from a stout man wearing a gun.
Mabry was murdered here in 1997 at the age of 39. This part of America once
produced murder ballads about brutal crimes like this one -- blues greats like
Pinetop Perkins, Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson have all called
Humphreys County home.
Kathy Mabry's killer raped her, then slashed her face, head and throat with a
rusty razor blade. She was left to bleed to death on the floor of a vacant
house. "I think about that case every day," Roseman says. "I told Kathy's momma
I wouldn't get an honest night's rest until we got the man who did this."
Roseman was the Belzoni police chief back then, the first black man elected to
that position as well. His election to both positions shows just how much the
region has changed over the past half century. In what may have been the first
assassination of the civil rights era, the Rev. George Lee was murdered here in
1955 while registering blacks to vote. In those years, white citizen councils
beat civil rights volunteers with such frequency that the town earned the
nickname "Bloody Belzoni."
Today, Humphreys (population: about 9,000) is the 7th-poorest county in
America's poorest state. The poverty rate here approaches 40 %. But it's also a
close-knit community, where families go back several generations or more.
Violent crime is rare. The county saw all of 1 murder in 2012. "It just doesn't
happen that often here," Roseman says.
Mabry's murder stunned people here in part because it was so unexpected, but
also because it was so unspeakably vicious. "She came from a quiet, respected
family," Roseman says. "They're well-liked. Most folks around here hadn't ever
experienced that kind of murder. So it shook the town. It's still shaking the
town."
The case went unsolved for 15 years, until December, after a casual courtroom
conversation led lawyers from the Mississippi Innocence Project to investigate
it. That 2 attorneys for an organization better known for getting the wrongly
convicted out of prison would take it upon themselves to solve a cold case is
remarkable enough. Their search covered the state, from Columbus in the
northeast, to Oxford in the northwest, to the crime lab in Jackson, to a dusty
attic in the Humphreys County courthouse, deep in the belly of the Delta.
The reason they felt compelled to act is part of a larger scandal currently
unfolding in Mississippi. The original police investigation into Mabry's murder
hinged on the forensic analysis of Steven Hayne, a longtime Mississippi medical
examiner, and Michael West, a dentist and self-proclaimed bite-mark expert.
Hayne was a doctor in private practice who at the time performed nearly all of
the state's autopsies. West was one of his frequent collaborators. The 2 men
have been at the heart of the Mississippi death investigation system for two
decades. West has testified in dozens of cases, Hayne in thousands, including a
number of death penalty cases.
Media investigations over the years, however, including my own for The
Huffington Post and Reason magazine, have revealed that both Hayne and West
have contributed critical evidence that led to the convictions of people who
were later exonerated, and routinely and flagrantly flouted the ethical and
professional standards of their respective fields. West, for example, once
claimed he could match the bite marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich found at
a murder scene to the teeth of the prime suspect. In a more recent case, Hayne
claimed the bullet wounds in a murder victim showed that 2 people held the gun
when it was fired, not one. In the Mabry case, West used bite-mark analysis to
nab an innocent man for Mabry's murder. That man spent nearly a year in jail.
But the Mabry story also shows that the victims in this scandal include not
just the wrongly accused, but the families of the victims, the future victims
of the actual perpetrators, public officials like Roseman, and even entire
towns.
Mississippi officials have thus far resisted calls for a thorough review of
Hayne and West's work. In particular, the Mississippi Supreme Court has shown
little concern over the possibility that Hayne and West may have put an untold
number of innocents behind the razor wire at Parchman penitentiary. Neither has
Attorney General Jim Hood, whose office continues to defend convictions won
primarily on the testimony one or both of the men have given on the witness
stand. To concede there's a problem would implicate many state officials who
used the 2 men during tenures as prosecutors. It would also open hundreds,
perhaps thousands of cases to review.
Tucker Carrington, the director of the Mississippi Innocence Project, says he
and his colleague Will McIntosh decided to pursue Mabry's killer themselves
after they attempted to bring the case to the attention of the prosecutor in
Humphreys County, and then to Hood's office, and received no response from
either.
"When you take on a case and it reveals a glaring injustice like this --
something that could easily be taken care of if someone would just give it some
attention -- you can't just turn a blind eye to that," Carrington says. "In the
end, I guess we saw this through because no one else would."
The defensiveness and nonchalance of Mississippi officials over the possible
wrongful conviction, imprisonment and execution of innocent people is troubling
enough. (Neither Hayne nor Hood's office responded to an interview request. The
Huffington Post was unable to reach West.) But the Mabry case shows that the
harm Hayne and West have done goes deeper. The same problems that allowed for
the conviction of innocents have also left brutal crimes unsolved, leaving
those affected to grieve and worry, with little hope of closure.
"Good people live here. They deserve to feel safe," Roseman says. "I took it
personal."
And there's another corresponding harm when the innocent are implicated: The
guilty often go free. Indeed, Mabry's murderer went on to kill again.
Julie Mae Wilson last saw her daughter around 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 22,
1997. "She had just cooked up some fish for the boys and said she had to go out
for a while," Wilson says. "She said she'd be back in an hour or so. I never
did see her again."
Wilson has lived in Humphreys County all her life. The drive down historic
Highway 61 from Memphis, Tenn., to her hometown of Isola slices through the
sort of harsh, agrestic beauty for which the Mississippi Delta is known. There
are scenes of crushing poverty, gooey marshes and quiet bucolic landscapes. The
route south backtracks the great black migration of the middle of the 20th
century, when Delta sharecroppers traveled upriver in pursuit of better lives
in Detroit, Indianapolis and Chicago. Like its neighbors, Humphreys County lost
a good chunk of its population then; it still grows smaller with each census.
Wilson and her husband, now deceased, spent most of their working lives in
cotton fields. The 2 had 8 children, including Mabry, and led the typically
hardscrabble lives of black farm workers in the civil rights era.
Today cotton has given way to a new business in the area: catfish -- raising
them, processing them, eating them and celebrating them. Two-thirds of
America's farm-raised catfish are grown within an hour of Belzoni. It's home to
the World Catfish Festival and the "Miss Catfish" pageant. At the moment, the
downtown features a collection of ceramic flatheads painted in different getups
-- overalls, fur coats, top hats -- for "Catfish on Parade," a down-home take
on Chicago's popular "Bulls on Parade" public art exhibit. There's also hope
that the new "Delta Blues Trail" will bring tourists down from the casinos in
Tunica to explore the legacy of the music borne of the area's troubled past.
But the residents of the county, now about 70 % black, still continue to
struggle economically. All of Wilson's children have left the area and now live
in Chicago with their families. She had hoped for better things for Mabry, too.
She graduated from high school and had started college, but picked up a drug
habit soon after.
"Kathy came up when things started to get better around here," Wilson says. "We
had spent a lot of years chopping cotton. But I was working [as a maid] in
houses by then. My husband was driving tractors," Wilson says. "But she didn't
last long in college before she got into the drugs. Wasn't long before she was
back at home."
Mabry battled her crack addiction for the rest of her life. She had some
periods of sobriety. She married and had two sons. But her struggle with
addiction eventually dissolved the marriage and dashed any hope of going back
to school. She fell into a series of abusive relationships. She and her boys
moved in with her mother in Isola, the tiny town of 900 people about 10 miles
south of Belzoni.
The last of those abusive relationships was with James Earl Gates, who was 48
at the time of the murder. "He was no good," Wilson says. "Broke her arm once.
They were in some kind of love, but he had a short, short temper. He would come
in here, into my home, and take over like he was the man of the house. I'm just
an old lady. Kathy was tiny. The boys were young. There wasn't much we could do
about him."
Mabry didn't come home after making dinner for her boys that Saturday night in
1997. When she hadn't returned by late Sunday morning, Wilson began to worry.
She knew about her daughter's drug problem, but Mabry had of late managed to
handle her addiction while still taking care of her boys and working at the
Confish catfish plant. She wasn't one to disappear without a phone call.
On Monday morning, Gates called Wilson to ask if she knew where Mabry was. He'd
called Mabry several times over the weekend, he said, and she hadn't picked up.
Until then Wilson had worried, but just assumed her daughter had been with
Gates. Now she was panicked. She called Roseman and asked him to look for Mabry
in Belzoni. Roseman checked around town. No one had seen her.
At 5:30 the following morning, a truck driver named Junior Mitchell pulled his
rig up to his house, to fill up from the diesel pump in the front yard.
Mitchell had moved out of the place several months earlier to live with his
girlfriend, but still came by from time to time to get gas and check on his
property. The house had been burglarized several times since he left, and on
more than a few occasions he had shooed away drug addicts he found squatting
inside. The vacated building had become a gathering spot for them over the
winter months.
That morning, March 25, Mitchell noticed that a wall panel under the carport
had been kicked out. When he approached the front door to investigate, he saw a
trail of blood. He followed the trail inside and discovered Mabry's body.
The murder set the entire community on edge. "You might see someone getting
shot after an argument or something, but even that is really rare," says Dim
Pyle, the mayor of Isola. "Nobody had ever seen anything like this. Because of
the closeness everybody had with Kathy's family, the whole town, both towns,
well, we were all just devastated."
The county coroner, Roseman and John Allen Jones, who was the Humphreys County
sheriff at the time, arrived at the crime scene about an hour after Mitchell
found Mabry's body. Jones called the Mississippi Highway Patrol, who sent an
investigator and two inspectors from the state crime lab. They began
interviewing suspects that afternoon.
Mabry's body was sent to Steven Hayne for an autopsy. Though he held no
official state position, and was never board certified in forensic pathology,
between the early 1990s and the late 2000s, Hayne performed 80-90 % of the
autopsies in Mississippi, according to his own testimony in trials and
depositions. That amounted to an astonishing 1,500 to 1,800 autopsies per year.
The National Association of Medical Examiners recommends that a single doctor
perform no more than 250 autopsies per year. The organization refuses to
certify any lab where an individual doctor performs more than 325 per year.
Hayne's workload could result in some odd autopsy reports. According to a
complaint filed by the Mississippi Innocence Project, in one case Hayne
included in his report the weight of a man's spleen, and made comments about
its appearance. The problem: The man's spleen had been removed four years
before he died. In an autopsy on a drowned infant, Hayne noted the weight of
each of the child's kidneys, even though one of them had previously been
removed. In another murder case, Hayne noted in his report that he had removed
and examined the decedent's ovaries and uterus. The victim was a man.
Mississippi's autopsy system had long been loaded with bad incentives. Because
prosecutors and the elected coroners assigned autopsies on a case-by-case
basis, doctors had a strong incentive to tell them what they wanted to hear so
that they could benefit from future referrals. Sometimes, critics say, pleasing
prosecutors meant providing them with findings that would lead to convictions.
Other times, it might mean presenting conclusions that cleared a police officer
or prison guard when a suspect or inmate died under suspicious circumstances.
The state has made some progress in recent years, requiring that anyone who
performs an autopsy for prosecutors be board certified, and Mississippi now has
a credentialed state medical examiner. But the damage from the old system is
ongoing. It was a system almost designed for abuse. "If hadn't been Hayne," the
Innocence Project's Carrington says, "it would have been someone else."
Hayne performed most of his autopsies not in the state-of-the-art crime lab in
Jackson, but in the basement of a funeral home owned by longtime Rankin County
Coroner Jimmy Roberts. One former state official who had visited Hayne's
operation on several occasions likened it to "a sausage factory." Another said
that in 2006 he watched Hayne and his assistants eat pork sandwiches and smoke
cigars while cutting up multiple bodies at once. For much of his career he held
2 full-time jobs during the day. So he did most of his autopsies at night,
giving his practice a sort of macabre mystique.
One person often present at those all-night autopsy sessions was Michael West,
a dentist in Hattiesburg. West often assisted with Hayne's autopsies, and
sometimes videotaped them. The two men also wrote articles together, and by the
early 1990s, West had established a reputation as either an ingenious forensic
specialist far ahead of his time, or a charlatan, depending on whom you asked.
The police investigating Mabry's murder rounded up about half a dozen men who'd
been in or near the vacant house around the time of her death and held them for
questioning. Roseman and Jones initially focused on a man named Douglas Myers,
an addict who'd been in the house and had a fresh scratch on his face the
afternoon of the investigation.
"He couldn't give us a good answer for that scratch," Roseman says. But the
state officials seemed interested in James Earl Gates, especially after
learning that he had beaten Mabry before.
Despite the history of abuse between Gates and Mabry, Roseman never liked Gates
for the murder. "If she had been choked, or had hit her head, if she'd been
dumped out in a field somewhere, I'd say, 'Okay, that makes sense.' I could see
putting that on Gates. Maybe he'd lost his temper again. Maybe he got too rough
with her," Roseman says. "But when a man who loves a woman, when he's sleeping
with the same woman, he doesn't do her body like that. A mean man will hit a
woman he loves, but he won't cut up her face. You just don't see that."
Roseman also says Gates wasn't defensive about Mabry's death. In fact, he
seemed crushed. "He showed real strong emotion when he heard she'd been
killed," Roseman says. "He didn't try to give us an alibi. We had to ask him
where he was. I don't think he even considered the possibility that he could
have been a suspect."
He'd soon become the only suspect. During the autopsy, Hayne claimed to have
found bite marks on Mabry's body. As he had done in numerous other cases, Hayne
then called in West, who claimed to have pioneered a new way of identifying
bite marks in human skin, then matching them to 1 person, to the exclusion of
anyone else. He called it "The West Phenomenon."
West claimed that only he could perform this method of analysis, which involved
yellow goggles and ultraviolet light. He said his method couldn't be tested by
anyone else. It couldn't be photographed or recorded on video to be scrutinized
by other forensic specialists. At various points in the 1990s, West and the
prosecutors who used him in their cases compared his bite-mark genius to
musician Itzhak Perlman, Galileo and Jesus Christ. The National Academy of
Sciences, however, does not consider bite-mark analysis to be credible as
evidence in a trial. And even within the already questionable field of
bite-mark analysis, concerns about West were already mounting.
On March 27, 1997, West confirmed that what Hayne had found were indeed bite
marks. He took photos of them, then drove to Belzoni to make plaster molds of
the suspects' teeth. Using only the plaster molds and the photos of the bite
marks he'd brought with him, West excluded all of the men then in custody. For
dramatic effect, he used the same line each time: "Sheriff, this is not your
man."
The police then escorted West to the home of James Earl Gates, who also allowed
West to make an impression of his teeth. West then compared Gates' mold to the
photos. In his report, Jones wrote that West next "pointed out to me the
similarities between the bite marks and impressions. He informed me that this
was a possible suspect."
West then drove back to the morgue to compare the mold of Gates' teeth directly
to the marks on Mabry's body. At 12:45 a.m., West called Jones. "This is your
man," West said.
On April 1, 1997, James Earl Gates was arrested for the rape and murder of
Kathy Mabry. He was booked at the Humphreys County Jail.
MISSISSIPPI'S SLOW-MOTION DISASTER
By 1997, Mississippi officials should have known that West was less than
credible. He had already been the subject of unflattering profiles in the ABA
Journal and the National Law Journal. He had also been suspended by the
American Board of Forensic Odontologists for testifying beyond his expertise,
including in the infamous bologna sandwich case. In that case, the defendant
was convicted, but the conviction was later overturned when West admitted to
disposing of the sandwich after studying it. He said that he had thrown the
evidence away because, since no other forensic analyst was qualified to
replicate his methods, the sandwich was no longer necessary.
Yet West remained a favorite in Mississippi courtrooms, and among law
enforcement officials and prosecutors. In 1999, the Mississippi Supreme Court
considered the appeal of Kennedy Brewer, who was on death row for the rape and
murder of 3-year-old Christine Jackson 6 years earlier.
As in the Mabry case, Hayne had claimed to find bite marks on the victim's
body. He again called in West, who again matched the marks to the dentition of
the chief suspect, in this case Brewer, the boyfriend of the girl's mother. In
light of the continuing revelations about West, Brewer's attorneys asked the
court to overturn the conviction and death sentence, and to suppress West's
testimony. In 1997 the court refused. A majority of the justices still believed
West possessed the "knowledge, skill, experience, training and education
necessary to qualify as an expert in forensic odontology."
West can sound convincing to juries and to those without scientific training.
"I should have gone with my instincts about Gates," Roseman says. "But when
West showed me the video where he matched the marks, he made a good case. I
just thought, this is what the man does every day. All these judges and crime
lab folks trust him. He sounds scientific. Who am I to say he's wrong?"
In fact, in Mabry's case West may not have been wrong, at least about the bite
marks. Mabry's previous paramours told Roseman that she enjoyed rough sex,
including biting. Gates himself admitted to having bitten his girlfriend a few
weeks before she died. That, of course, doesn't validate West's methods. Gates
may have bitten Mabry, but there was no evidence he bit her on the day she died
(indeed, a competent analyst should have recognized that the marks were weeks
old). And old bite marks from her boyfriend certainly weren't evidence that he
killed her.
In October 1997, Gates' attorney asked Humphreys County Circuit Court Judge
Jannie Lewis to suppress West's testimony, citing the mounting questions about
West's credibility, and about bite mark evidence in general. Lewis ruled that
there was no reason to doubt West's credibility, but he did give Gates funding
to hire his own expert to examine the alleged bite marks.
A few months later, District Attorney James Powell sent the scrapings taken
from under Mabry's fingernails to the state crime lab in Jackson for DNA
testing. At that time, DNA testing was more primitive. A test could exclude
someone as a suspect, but couldn't yet match a suspect to biological evidence
the way the technology can today.
The tests came back a few weeks later: Kathy Mabry had scratched someone in a
frantic fight to save her life, but it wasn't James Earl Gates. In fact, it
wasn't any of the men the police had rounded up as suspects -- not even Douglas
Myles, the man with the scratch on his cheek.
On Jan. 21, 1998, Powell dismissed the murder charge against Gates. It was now
10 months after the crime. Memories had faded. Some witnesses had left town.
And Roseman and Jones were back to square one.
Julie Mae Wilson was crushed when she heard the news. Her daughter's killer was
still on the loose, and with so much time now passed, it seemed unlikely he'd
ever be found. But she was also terrified. Gates may not have murdered Mabry,
but he had shown he could be a violent man. He was now free, likely angry, and
almost certainly knew that Wilson had told the police he beat her daughter,
which likely made him a suspect in the first place. Roseman and Jones told
Gates he wasn't to go anywhere near Wilson, her home, or Mabry's boys without
Wilson's permission.
"We didn't see him much after that," Wilson says. "But those first few weeks,
we were awful scared."
In the years that followed, Hayne and West continued to apply their
questionable brand of forensic analysis to other cases. At the same time, their
work also began to attract more scrutiny, though mostly from outside the state.
In 2001, Arizona defense attorney Christopher Plourd tricked West into matching
crime scene photos of a bite mark left on a murder victim's breast to a dental
mold taken from the mouth of the attorney's own private investigator, who had
nothing to do with the crime. After accepting a retainer fee, West confidently
sent back a 30-minute video in which he methodically explained how the bite
marks in the photos could only have come from the attorney's "suspect."
It was the best evidence to date that West is a charlatan. And yet Mississippi
prosecutors still defended convictions won on West's testimony, and Mississippi
judges still upheld them.
In 2002, Kennedy Brewer's attorneys were finally able to test the DNA of the
semen found in young Christine Jackson's body. The tests showed that the DNA
did not belong to Brewer. But rather than release Brewer and declare him
innocent, West and District Attorney Forrest Allgood insisted that while
someone else may have raped the little girl, West's analysis still clearly
showed that Brewer had bitten her.
They posited that perhaps Brewer had held the girl down and bitten her while
someone else raped her. Brewer's conviction was overturned, but Allgood
promised to try him again. So Brewer remained in prison. Brewer's attorneys
next tried to get the DNA profile of Christine Jackson's killer uploaded to
state and national databases to see if they could find a match. Allgood fought
them every step of the way. (Allgood did not respond to a request for comment.)
In 2004, Tyler Edmonds was convicted of conspiring with his sister to kill her
husband. Edmonds was just 13 at the time. The prosecution's theory was that
Edmonds and his sister had simultaneously held and fired a gun at the victim
while he slept. Hayne testified that he could tell by the bullet wounds in the
body that there were two hands on the gun that created them.
But that assertion was too preposterous for the Mississippi Supreme Court. In
2007, the court overturned the verdict -- but also went out of its way to
explain that the ruling pertained only to the Edmonds case. The majority made
clear that it wasn't questioning Hayne's credentials or credibility in other
cases.
The following February, the Innocence Projects of New York and Mississippi, now
representing Kennedy Brewer, were finally permitted to search the DNA databases
for a match to the semen found in Christine Jackson. The search not only turned
up a match, it also found a match to the rape and murder of another little girl
in the same county 2 years before Jackson was killed. Hayne and West's
testimony had already helped Allgood convict another innocent man, Levon
Brooks, for that crime.
The DNA in both cases matched that of 51-year-old Albert Johnson. Johnson was
arrested and convicted for both murders. In both cases, Hayne claimed to have
found bite marks other doctors had missed and called in West, who matched the
alleged bites to the dental molds of the prosecutor's main suspect (who in both
cases happened to be the mother's boyfriend). Johnson was initially a suspect
in both cases.
Had Hayne and West not been so eager to affirm the hunches of law enforcement,
Christine Jackson could well be alive today. Brewer and Brooks were immediately
released, having served more than 30 years in prison between them.
Since then, the evidence against Hayne and West has continued to pile up. In
2009, I reported on the case of Jimmie Duncan, who was convicted in Louisiana
in 1993 of sexually abusing and murdering the daughter of his girlfriend. That
case produced video of West performing one of his notorious bite mark
examinations. The video shows him repeatedly jamming a plaster mold he'd made
of the suspect's teeth into the skin of the alleged victim, 18-month-old Haley
Oliveaux. Jimmie Duncan was still convicted, and is still on death row in
Louisiana.
A similar video surfaced in the case of Leigh Stubbs, which The Huffington Post
reported on last year. Stubbs was convicted in Mississippi in 2001 of
assaulting Janet Kimberly Williams, in what prosecutors hinted may have been a
quarrel between lovers. West claimed that he matched bite marks on the victim's
hip to Stubbs' teeth, and also testified that lesbians were more likely to bite
one another during domestic disputes.
The videotaped examinations in the Duncan and Stubbs cases show that, at best,
West was committing malpractice, tampering with evidence and desecrating a
corpse. (In the Stubbs case, West may have committed assault, since he
performed his analysis on the alleged victim while she was comatose.) At worst,
West was using dental molds of the defendants in these cases to create the bite
marks he would then testify proved the defendant's guilt.
(source: Huffington Post)
INDIANA:
Trevor McDonald recalls his haunting experience visiting murderers on death
row; "I can't get these people out of my head. I see most of them every day. I
can't wash those images away"
The names fall from Trevor McDonald's lips as if he were reciting a list of
past American presidents. "Ronald Sanford, Frederick Baer, Benjamin Ritchie..."
Their faces and their stories are seared into the memory of the veteran
newscaster. "I can't get these people out of my head," he confesses. "I see
most of them every day. You can't wash them away. I can't wash those images
away."
Given the backgrounds of the men in question, it's no surprise. Each is a
convicted killer incarcerated in America's Indiana State Prison. 2 of them are
on death row, awaiting execution by lethal injection.
McDonald spent 2 weeks in the prison last summer, talking to inmates and their
jailers. Journalists can, on occasions, reach for hyperbole a little too
casually when promoting their own programmes, but the impact this experience
has had on him is unquestionably profound. "It was, in every way, one of the
more remarkable things I have ever done. I can't think of anything else which
could compare."
Part of his reaction can be attributed to the fact that despite more than 50
years as a journalist, he had never set foot inside a jail until he crossed the
threshold of the high-security Indiana prison 50 miles east of Chicago. The
average sentence served by each of its 1,900 inmates is 52 years. Many of those
he met will die inside, most of old age, but some still in their prime at the
hands of the state.
"So many bits of these films are stamped indelibly in my mind. I would go back
to my hotel room and lock the door. I had books to read and there were endless
acres of awful American TV to watch, and I would find myself stopping and
thinking back. I would call up the producer and say, 'Do you remember what that
guy said?'"
One conversation chills him. Frederick Baer slit the throats of a 24-year-old
woman and her 4-year-old daughter after breaking into their house intent on
committing rape. He couldn't go through with the assault, so killed both of
them instead. His death row cage - for that is what it is - is covered with
pictures of Princess Diana. McDonald was appalled. "I said to him, 'How on
earth can you surround yourself with these pictures of somebody who represented
such goodness when you think of your dark crime?' He said he had always admired
and loved her..."
For nearly an hour McDonald sat on the bed of the handcuffed Baer, hearing him
describe his crimes, express his remorse and accept his fate at the hands of
the executioner. "To sit there, late at night, in that cell, and to talk to
someone about the brutal murder of a woman and her daughter, and the way in
which he killed them...you're almost physically ill really. It's probably the
most horrendous thing anybody has ever told me."
Did McDonald concur with Baer's view that he deserved to die for what he did?
"Well, you couldn't disagree with him." If that encounter sickened McDonald,
another troubled him deeply. Ronald L Sanford (right) was just 13 years old
when he murdered 2 elderly women after a robbery attempt went horrifically
wrong. At the age of 15 he was sentenced to 170 years in prison. Today, 23
years into the sentence that will keep him behind bars for the rest of his
life, Sanford is articulate and, apparently, well adjusted. The shelves in his
cell groan under the weight of books on everything from eugenics to
metaphysics. 4,000 miles away in the cellar of a swanky west London hotel,
surrounded by racks of fine wine and vintage port, McDonald ponders the
hopelessness of Sanford???s life. Does it make him despair?
"Despair is too mild a word. I am haunted by the idea of a young man at 15
years of age facing up to a sentence of 170 years. As he said himself, he'd
never been to a prom, on an aeroplane or been out of the country. He never
owned a passport. I can see him in my mind's eye now. I know exactly what he is
doing. So you look back on all those wasted years and then you know they go on
and on. They will continue, and for him there is no end to it." And did his
remorse seem genuine? "I have no way of knowing and no way of doubting. I mean,
if you are looking at 170 years, then you would be sorry, wouldn't you?"
Other encounters remain with him, too. "There was a father and his son in there
both for murder. We took the father to meet the son, and I can still picture
the son walking down to meet his father, and saying rather oddly, 'We see much
more of each other now than we ever have.' I thought that was, profoundly, one
of the saddest things I have ever heard. Father and son in prison, both for
murder, and the son saying he saw more of his father now than he ever did. You
wince at that."
There are currently 11 people on death row at Indiana State Prison, though 2009
was the last time a man was executed there. The picture across America shows
fewer states exercising their power to take life. Last year, 43 men were put to
death - the same as in 2011 - with Texas topping the list with 15 executions. A
CNN poll conducted in 2011 showed that a small majority of Americans favoured
life sentences instead of the death penalty for murder.
Having sat on death row and seen the prison???s execution suite, McDonald
remains opposed to the death penalty. But after listening to stories of child
murder, contract killing and police slaying, he understands why capital
punishment remains on the statute books of 33 American states.
"When you hear what people did, you understand why Americans feel as they do.
It didn't change my mind, but I understood and almost had sympathy with the way
they felt. One has to respect the fact that this is a system that would not
exist if the American voters didn???t want it. I don't know what the vote would
be in this country if you asked people what should happen to whoever killed
those 2 police officers in Manchester. It wouldn't surprise me if there were a
majority in favour of the death penalty."
How would he vote? "I'm against it. I don't like the idea of the state killing
people. But if you try to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who has lost a
family member, then emotion crowds out any kind of rational views you may have
of it, and I understand that. I hope it wouldn't happen in my case, but I don't
know because I have been fortunate not to lose anybody that way. I don't know
what I would do."
(source: Radio Times)
OHIO:
Moms who kill: The Nicole Diar caseBy Katherine Cavazini
--Nicole Diar was convicted of killing her 4-year-old son Jacob, then setting
her home on fire to cover up the murder
--Diar herself suffered horrific burns in an accident at age 4
--Prosecutors alleged Diar no longer wanted a child, and taking care of Jacob
was interfering with her lifestyle
During the early morning hours of August 27, 2003, a fire broke out at the
Lorian, Ohio home of 28-year-old mother Nicole Diar. While Diar managed to
escape the home unharmed, her 4-year-old son Jacob perished inside.
At the age of 4, Diar herself had suffered horrific burns after her brother
accidentally set her pajamas on fire. She underwent a total of 61 operations in
just 14 years in an attempt to repair permanent scarring over much of her body.
While it's hard to imagine that a mother - let alone a burn victim - would
intentionally start a deadly fire at her home, authorities charged Diar with
the aggravated-murder of her son in 2004.
At trial, prosecutors alleged Diar killed her son before the fire started, and
she attempted to cover up his death by using gasoline to send her house up in
flames.
Discovery of the body
Jacob's severely burned body was found on a bed in a first-floor bedroom. A
Lorian firefighter who entered the home a few hours after the fire was
extinguished testified at Diar's trial that he smelled gasoline immediately
upon entering the home. He also said he noticed obvious burn patterns that led
into the bedroom where the child's body was discovered.
Examination of the home
Lee Bethune, a firefighter with the Ohio Fire Marshal's Office, examined the
home after the fire. Bethune concluded that the fire was started "by the direct
act of a human hand and flame device with an accelerant," according to court
documents.
Bethune testified that the bedroom where Jacob's body was found was "targeted
with a trail [of gasoline] being poured from the living room to the dining room
and into the bedroom," documents state. However, Bethune said he was unable to
find a gasoline container, or the remains of one, inside the house or the
surrounding area.
Genevieve Bures, a fire investigator hired by Diar's landlord's insurance
company, also examined the home and concluded that the "fire was set," and it
was not accidental, court documents state.
An electrical expert who examined the wiring, appliances, hot water tank and
furnace inside the home testified that there was no electrical failure or
malfunction that might have caused or contributed to the fire.
Autopsy results
While Jacob's exact cause of death was never determined due to the fact that
his body was so badly burned, Dr. Paul Matus, the Lorian County coroner who
conducted the autopsy, determined Jacob died as the result of "homicidal
violence," court documents state. Dr. Matus testified Jacob did not die in the
fire because his mouth and nasal passages were clear of any soot, foam or
debris.
Court documents state Dr. Matus also testified that Jacob's manner of dress at
the time of death was "very peculiar and somewhat alarming." Despite the warm
weather, Jacob was wearing long pants, a t-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt.
An examiner with the State Fire Marshal Forensic Lab concluded that the hood
and underwear Jacob was wearing at the time of his death, as well as the
mattress pad he was found on top of, tested positive for the presence of
gasoline.
Odd behavior after the fire
The day before Jacob's funeral, a clerk working the drive-through lane at
Junction Beverage testified Diar popped her head outside a limousine her
brother was driving and said, "I want liquor. Don't forget the liquor," court
documents state.
On the evening of the funeral, Diar was seen drinking, singing karaoke, and
line dancing at Jack & Diane's Lounge, according to a witness. That same
evening, a friend of Diar testified he saw her at a bowling alley drinking and
having a good time.
The week after Jacob's death, Diar refused to participate in a candlelight
vigil for her son, or pass out flyers to help find the person responsible for
her son's death, another friend testified.
Police interrogation
During a videotaped interview with police on September 3, 2003, Diar explained
her version of events leading up to the fire.
The night before the fire, Diar gave her son a bath and they fell asleep in the
living room, her on the couch and Jacob on a chaise lounge, she told
detectives. Diar stated Jacob woke up and asked for some juice at 4:30 a.m.. He
went back to sleep on the chaise lounge with his dog, she said.
Between 8:50 and 9:00 a.m. that morning, Diar told detectives she woke up to
"black smoke everywhere," according to court documents. Diar said she screamed
for her son, but he didn't answer. She went outside and screamed for someone to
call 911. Diar told authorities she then went back inside the house to look for
Jacob, but the smoke prevented her from going any further.
Diar told investigators she believed the fire was accidental and speculated
that her son may have accidentally started it, but she said there was no
gasoline in the house.
After investigators confronted Diar with evidence proving Jacob was dead before
the fire started, Diar began to cry and said, "I did not harm my son. He was my
life," court documents state.
When police suggested Jacob might have died by accident in the bathroom, Diar
insisted that didn't happen and denied starting the fire to cover up Jacob's
death.
Possible motive
Prosecutors theorized that Diar killed her son because she no longer wanted a
child and taking care of Jacob was interfering with her lifestyle.
The state called witnesses to testify that Diar went out on many occasion and
left Jacob with different babysitters. One babysitter testified that on a few
occasions, Diar called his school, pretended to be his mother, and obtained an
excused absence so that he could babysit.
2 other babysitters said that Diar did not leave emergency phone numbers for
them to contact her if something happened to Jacob, according to court
documents.
A 14-year-old babysitter testified that Diar paid him with cigarettes for
watching her son, and she often wouldn't come home until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m.
Another babysitter testified that on three different occasions Diar asked her
to give Jacob codeine to help ease his hyperactivity. Diar allegedly said it
was "no big deal" when the babysitter told her that medication made Jacob sick,
according to court documents.
Defense's case
In an attempt to disprove the state's theory that Diar was an unfit mother, the
defense called Diar's sister and friends to testify that she was a loving
mother.
Her sister stated Diar was thrilled when she learned she was pregnant with
Jacob. She also said Diar was "upset" and appeared to be in shock after
learning her son was dead, according to court documents.
Diar didn't hand out flyers seeking the person responsible for her son's death
because she was advised by her attorney not to do anything since she was being
treated as a suspect, her sister said.
Guy Morton, the pastor at Jacob's funeral, testified that Diar's behavior was
typical of someone who had lost a loved one.
Darrell Eberhardt, a family friend, said Diar had a warm and loving
relationship with Jacob, and he observed Diar grieving during the funeral
service.
Linda Powers, a medical social worker who ran "burn camps" for young burn
survivors testified that Diar was a regular participant in camp activities
until she was 18 or 19 years old. Powers said Diar loved Jacob and they had a
"very caring, very nurturing" mother-son relationship, according to court
documents.
Verdict
In October 2004, after just 4 hours of deliberation, a jury found Diar guilty
of the aggravated murder of her son. 1 month later, she was sentenced to death.
However, in December 2008, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned Diar's death
sentence while upholding her conviction. The court found jurors weren't
properly instructed because they should have been advised that any single juror
could save Diar's life by refusing to recommend the death penalty, according to
documents.
Diar, now 37 years old, is currently serving a life sentence without the
possibility of parole at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
HLN reached out to Diar's attorneys who represented her at trial, her appeal
and resentencing, but calls were not returned.
(source: HLN TV)
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