-Caveat Lector- http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990926/news/news5.html Clinton politics and vigilante justice By ROGER FRANKLIN Before he fell from grace with the law and ended his days behind bars, the late Sheriff Coolidge Conlee of Forrest City, Arkansas, liked to show newly arrested suspects two meaty lumps that floated inside a fruit jar on his desk. ``Them's testicles - rapist testicles,'' former deputies recall Sheriff Conlee explaining. ``In my jurisdiction of Saint Francis County, what you're goin' to learn is that there's a lot to lose if you break the law.'' The spiel was usually enough. When the smiling Conlee locked his steady gaze on suspects and rolled that grisly paperweight in his hands, most were only too eager to confess. Nobody knows that better than a Little Rock handyman called Wayne Dumond, who is preparing to walk out of a Arkansas state penitentiary after serving 14 years for a crime even the judge who sentenced him now admits could never have been committed as the victim described. Along the way, apart from losing his reputation, the sometime lay preacher saw his heartbroken wife succumb to cancer and his home consumed by a petrol bomb. His car was torched and his dogs poisoned. While he was being gang-raped in an Arkansas state penitentiary, his two boys were taken repeatedly from their mother's custody by social service officials and his bank account pillaged by rapacious lawyers. And as Dumond, 48, added as an almost inconsequential aside last week, he also lost his manhood. They were his testicles on Conlee's desk. ``I was not supposed to survive,'' Dumond said the day after he learnt that his 20-year sentence had been commuted. ``From Conlee all the way up to (former Governor) Bill Clinton, the political machine that runs Arkansas wanted me dead. They knew I didn't rape anyone. But this was a girl from a rich, important family. Somebody picked me, a nobody, so that the police could give the people who own this state what they wanted, so that they could pretend justice was done. ``They thought I'd die when Conlee's boys castrated me and left me bleeding to death. And they thought I'd be killed in prison. But I wasn't. I wouldn't give them the satisfaction.'' In the old days, before the civil rights movement dragged the South into the 20th century, lynchings were a revered Dixie tradition. In those bad old days, it was mostly blacks and the occasional Jew who ended up hanging from a tree while lawmen looked the other way. Dumond's story represents a far slicker variety of vigilante justice: a legal lynching by a drug-dealing sheriff whose prime goal, Dumond charges, was a self-interested desire to keep the goodwill of Arkansas' monied elite - including that of an ambitious young governor who would become the president. ``It was politics, pure and simple,'' Dumond said. ``Not law and justice, just low-down, dirty politics. It couldn't have been any other way, not when the victim was Clinton's kin.'' Dumond's story began late in 1984 when 17-year-old Ashley Stevens dropped in at a burger joint on her way home from school to grab a Coke and, as she told detectives, ``to see who my ex-boyfriend was hanging out with''. He wasn't to be found, so the willowy high-school senior continued on home in her brand new BMW. According to the statement she dictated to an officer later that night, the only thing out of the ordinary was a battered red utility that swerved out of her way as she backed on to the main road. At 3.20pm, she was doing her homework in the lounge room when she heard a noise at the kitchen door. Assuming it was her mother, she continued with her books until, a minute or so later, the fall of heavy work boots echoed in the hallway. ``The door opened and I saw a white male standing there,'' her statement explains. ``He was wearing an old baseball cap, and he had long, dishwater-blond hair, a moustache and a full beard a little darker than his hair.'' But the striking thing about the intruder was his eyes. ``They were cold, hard, blue crystal - I can never forget them.'' If any rape can be described as typical, this one conformed to the universal pattern of a stalker who preys on solitary women. The rest of Ashley's story, however, soon took such a series of bizarre turns that detectives wondered quietly if she might not be concealing the truth. Some even speculated that she might have invented the episode. Rather than raping her in the empty house, the intruder bound Ashley's hands and feet and then carried her out the front door and across the lawn, in full view of neighboring homes, and laid her face-down on the seat of his truck. It was a red utility, just like the one with a shattered headlight that had almost sideswiped her car earlier. ``The story just gets weirder after that,'' said Fred Odam, a retired Arkansas state trooper, who joined Dumond's legal team as an investigator because ``I saw an innocent man being railroaded.'' ``She said he kept her head in his lap while he was driving and that she couldn't see anything,'' Odam said. ``Yet she knew he did a U-turn in the second driveway of a local doctor's home - not the first driveway, but the second. She could tell you the whole journey from start to finish - all the landmarks. But at the same time, she said she didn't see a thing.'' Out beyond the town limits, the attacker turned down an unpaved road and then drove over broken ground into a thicket of trees, where the attack occurred. When it was over, Ashley said she was taken on another circuitous drive. ``So where do you think this mystery man takes her?'' Odam asked. ``Why, straight back to her home because it looks like it might rain and he is worried that she will get wet. That's very considerate for a rapist, don't you think?'' At 4.10pm, when her mother returned, just 50 minutes had passed from the moment the intruder is alleged to have opened the door. Ashley was sobbing in the shower and, when her mother asked why, she blurted, ``I've just been raped''. By 5pm the teenager was telling her story to police as her father, who owned a chain of funeral homes and is still one of the state's richest and most active political donors, worked the phones and called in favors. ``A rape, any rape, would have been big news in Forrest City,'' explained Odam. ``But this girl lived in one of the state's richest neighborhoods and was part of Arkansas' premier family. She's also the daughter of Bill Clinton's stepfather's sister, which makes her the President's second cousin. ``Believe me, the pressure to find the attacker was intense.'' Yet the police had precious few clues, and what little information there was seemed at odds with Ashley's story. At the rape scene, they expected to find a tangle of tyre tracks. Yet apart from a few, faint and fading imprints that were too narrow to have been left by Dumond's Ford F-150 utility, there was no evidence to support her story. At the hospital, where the police surgeon conducted tests to recover semen samples, Ashley insisted she had been a virgin until the assault. Yet, as the doctor noted, this assertion was contradicted by the physical evidence. While the doctor found rope burns on her wrists, there were no indications of recent intercourse. Such evidence of sexual activity as he could find, he said, led him to believe it had taken place at least 36 hours earlier. With another family, in another state, police might taken Ashley aside and confronted her with some very hard questions. ``But not with a Stevens girl,'' explained Odam. ``In Arkansas that's not a smart career move. Something happened to her, nobody doubts that. So let's just say there are an awful lot of loose ends nobody wanted to tie up.'' Two weeks later, after first focusing on the victim's former beau and his best friend, police began cross-referencing registration records for red utilities with the names of convicted criminals. Wayne Dumond was brought in for questioning the next day. ``I was no angel when I was young. I was a biker with a drug habit until I met my wife and she changed my life. She led me to Jesus and the wild days were behind me,'' Dumond told an interviewer early last year. Police twice put him in a line-up. And twice Ashley failed to pick him. There was no evidence tying Dumond to the crime, and his alibi - that he was on his way home after working at a construction site - was supported by fellow workers. When police tried to restage the crime, they found it would have taken Dumond almost two hours to reach the home, abduct Ashley, rape her, return her and then make it to his children's school, where witnesses next confirmed seeing him. But Sheriff Conlee was a determined man. A staunch Clinton ally, he also controlled the local Democratic Party as his personal fiefdom. When there was an election, smart candidates sought Conlee's support first. Away from the office he was equally active, as the FBI discovered when its agents prosecuted him for pocketing several million dollars in kickbacks from illegal bookies and drug runners. But the most enduring of Conlee's qualities was his refusal to take no for an answer. When the judge criticised the prosecution's case and released Dumond on a paltry $10,000 bail, Conlee took justice into his own hands. ``He let two dirtbags out of the county jail, gave them rubber gloves, a rope and a pair of scalpels and sent them over to Wayne's house in the afternoon,'' Odam said. ``What happened shouldn't have happened to a dog.'' Dumond was kicked half to death, then trussed ankles-to-wrists and hoisted off the floor on a rope tossed over a ceiling beam. Then one attacker tightened a noose of fishing line around his genitals while the other sliced open his scrotum and squeezed out his testicles. When Dumond's sons returned from school, they found their father unconscious, spinning slowly in mid-air above a pool of his own blood. That was the first outrage. The rest occurred in court. DNA tests, which proved that 36-hour-old semen was not Dumond's, were never introduced as evidence. Nor were the victim's statements concerning the attacker's ``unforgettable'' ice-blue blue eyes, apparently because Dumond's are a nondescript hazel. As for his hair, it is auburn rather than blond, while his beard, which Ashley insisted was darker, is actually several shades lighter with two patches of grey. Yet none of that evidence was raised in court. Why? Well, Odam has a hunch. ``Wayne's attorney was too smart a guy to overlook so many things that could have saved his client,'' said Odam. ``What I do know is that soon after the trial, Bill Clinton elevated him to the bench and then gave him several more promotions after that. You figure it out. ``Then, in 1990, Wayne got his hands on the DNA evidence and presented it to the parole board, which Clinton appointed. Well, the board recommended that he be released, but Clinton wouldn't accept the finding. He left Wayne to rot.'' Of course, the future president had bigger things on his mind just then. He was running for the White House and had just been blind-sided by Gennifer Flower's steamy recollections of their 12-year affair. Contributions suddenly dried up and many pundits were writing him off. In the end, all that kept him through those lean, uncertain days was an unsecured emergency loan from a Little Rock bank - a bank that just happened to be owned by Ashley Stevens' uncle and included her father among its directors. Now that Dumond is a free man, released from prison by Arkansas' first Republican governor in more than a century, he doesn't know how to begin picking up the pieces of his shattered life. Sheriff Conlee, who was convicted of graft and corruption in 1986, died of a heart attack in a prison hospital two years later - so Dumond has been robbed of any possibility of revenge. But there is one thing about which he is certain. Wherever he settles, it won't be in Arkansas. ``Maybe Texas, or Florida,'' he told Odam last week. ``If I want to stay alive, Arkansas isn't a healthy environment.'' -- ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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