From: "Karen and Kenny" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: First Day in series of Articles about Kenny Richey Case Date sent: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 17:04:54 +0100 First part of a week long series of interviews on Kenny's case. http://www.edinburghnews.com/ http://www.edinburghnews.com/taf/cl.taf.html VICTIM: Cynthia Collins was just two when she died in the fire Kenny Richey is said to have started In the heat of a deadly night Kenny Richey insists he's innocent of the murder of Cynthia Collins. So what really did happen that summer night? JENNIFER VEITCH "IT felt like my skin was melting . . . my lungs felt like they were boiling . . ." Kenny Richey's deep voice trails off as he recalls his desperate, unsuccessful attempt to rescue two-year-old Cynthia Collins from her blazing apartment. As the flames licked around him, he knew he was putting his life in danger - what he didn't realise was the real threat would come six months later - when three judges sentenced him to die in Ohio's electric chair. Now languishing on Death Row after his conviction for starting the fire, he vividly recalls the night in June 1986 which began with a drunken party and ended in tragedy. Kenny was on his way out to his father's car when, he says, he saw lights and heard sirens. He realised his friend Hope Collins' apartment was on fire - and remembered that her daughter, Cynthia, was alone inside. "I noticed a woman with four kids running, and I looked and saw light from a fire, and smoke," the 35-year-old says, his Edinburgh accent still surprisingly strong. "It looked like it was coming from a second-storey apartment, so I took off running and discovered it was Hope's apartment that was on fire. "I tried to get in. There was somebody already up there, a neighbour, I cannae mind his name. He grabbed a hold of me - said I was crazy. He said 'you go in there and you'll just die' - I said 'there's a kid in there, there's a kid in there'. "I ran in, broke away from his grip, and I got to the entrance to the hallway, and that was just about as far as I could get. "It felt like my skin was melting, and my lungs . . . my lungs just felt like they were boiling . . . There was a big sheet of fire. "There was a lot of heat coming off the sofa, and flames, and it was like a barrier. I couldnae go any further." He pauses before adding, bitterly: "Many's the time I wish I'd just said 'f**k it' and just run straight through. Three times I tried, and didn't manage it." Kenny, who has so far had 13 execution dates, maintains his innocence. There are two things nobody disputes about that night: one is that an innocent child died, and the other is that the Scot, then aged 21, tried to save her. Across the fields bordering the small rural town of Columbus Grove, Ohio, volunteer fireman Keith Hartoon could see the glow of the fire as he got up to answer the emergency call from the Old Farm Village apartments. By the time he reached the scene, he recalls, flames were shooting out of the building ten or 15 feet into the air - but Kenny was still struggling to get in. "He was just yelling that the kid was in the back bedroom," he says. "He was being restrained by a couple of other firemen at the time - they had to physically remove him." There was no way anyone could have made it through the blaze to save Cynthia. "I took one hit of that smoke and it was bad stuff - with that smoke, you took one hit and you knew you couldn't take another," he says. "Nobody could have made it through that smoke that night. Everything was burning." Once the blaze was under control, Keith says, Cynthia was found lying face down next to her bed. She had died from smoke inhalation, a few days before her third birthday. Still visibly upset by the memory, Keith adds: "The little girl's death really bugged me quite heavily, because my daughters were one and three at the time. "If you have seen a dead body, it doesn't make you feel very good at all. I refused to go back into the scene." The events leading up to the tragedy that sealed Cynthia's - and Kenny's - fate started early in the afternoon with a drunken party on the landing between 21-year-old Hope Collins' apartment, A-13, and that of neighbour Peggy Price. Their friend Kenny, then living with his American father at the low-income apartment complex, was also there, as was Candy Barchet, who lived in a flat below. Like Hope and Peggy, Candy was a young single mother. She had moved in two weeks earlier and started dating Kenny within a couple of days. The pair had a short-lived but intense sexual relationship, but after a week it was on the rocks after Kenny walked in on Candy having sex with another man, John Butler, during a party at Hope's apartment. Kenny had pulled a knife out of the kitchen and fought with Butler. The two men later made up, although Kenny punched a window in frustration and broke his hand. It was a minor skirmish, but it later came back to haunt Kenny in court. On the night of the blaze the party was in full swing. Hope, Peggy, Kenny, Candy and others were all drinking heavily. Many were smoking marijuana. Kenny, who was nicknamed "Scottie", spent much of the evening playing with Cynthia, who was called "Scootie", pulling the toddler around in her little wagon. Soon it became clear Candy was attracted to another man, 27-year-old Mike Nichols, who was visiting his mother at the apartments. It was the first time he had met her. Mike sensed there was something between Candy and Kenny, and went downstairs to Candy's apartment to talk to the young Scot. She followed, and told Kenny she wanted to go out with Mike instead. Mike later testified in court that Kenny asked him: "Do you know what you're getting yourself into?" However Mike, who now lives in Candy's old apartment with his disabled mother, says Kenny simply wished him luck and walked away. "Me and Kenny went downstairs to talk about Candy. They told her we were downstairs talking. "She came downstairs and she said, 'well, I will tell you who I want', and she chose me. Kenny just told me 'good luck' and basically that's just what he said." All three returned to the party, which continued late into the night. At about midnight Candy and Mike left, and went to bed together in the room directly below Cynthia's. Witnesses, including Peggy, later testified that Kenny boasted he was going to burn the building down that night. However, none agreed on the time he was supposed to have said it, and Peggy has since retracted her statement. The party broke up at around 2.30am, and Kenny drifted outside, where he decided to "help himself" to two hanging flower baskets from a greenhouse across the road. He returned with the flowers, which he set down next to the shed outside Hope's apartment. Later he was talking to Hope when a friend of hers, Dennis Smith, stopped by in his truck to invite her to another party. Hope later testified that she said she would go if Kenny would look after Cynthia, and claimed Kenny agreed if she'd let him sleep on her couch. Kenny denies he said yes, but acknowledges Hope may not have heard him. "All of a sudden Hope Collins starts climbing in the truck, and she says 'Look after Scooter for me', and I say no, 'uh-uh'," he recalls. "I didn't say 'no', I shook my head and went 'uh-uh'. I don't know if she heard me or not, to be honest. I'd be lying if I said she did or not. "Whether she did or not, she still got in the car and drove off." Kenny says he then passed out for a few minutes before heading back towards his father's apartment, where he took some sleeping pills to get high. "I went into the bedroom and just lay on the bed. I put the radio on and was messing around writing a song, listening to the radio and relaxing. "I took me some pills, Sominex 2, they're a sleep aid. I was extremely drunk, I took pills to get high off." He was afraid of being seen in such a state so decided to sleep in his father, Jim's, car - but then he heard the sirens. The prosecution alleges Kenny, whose broken hand was still in plaster, stole cans of paint thinner and gasoline from the greenhouse, scaled a 5ft-high sloping shed with the cans onto the balcony of Hope's apartment, and set it on fire. His motive, they argued, was to kill Candy Barchet and Mike Nichols, who were sleeping in the apartment below. Mike remembers waking up to the "snap, crackle and pop" of the fire upstairs. When he and Candy went outside, he recalls Kenny came running around the side of the building and tried to get into Hope's blazing apartment to save Cynthia. "He ran up the stairs and he was screaming, 'there's a baby in there, there's a baby in there'," he says. "Three or four firemen had to hold him back." Mike says he thought Kenny was supposed to be babysitting Cynthia, although he had already gone to bed before Kenny's conversation with Hope had taken place. The next day, he recalls Peggy Price telling him that Kenny had boasted the night before that he was going to burn down the building. "I just heard what Peggy told me," he says. "She said that she and a few other people heard him make this statement that this site was going to go up." However, Mike says he was surprised when it was alleged that Kenny had set fire to Hope's apartment in an attempt to kill him and Candy. "I was more shocked than anything else. I couldn't believe it. I had just met this girl - that was the first night. I really didn't even know Candy or Kenny. "I only knew Kenny that day. He seemed pretty cool, he seemed all right." Initially, Columbus Grove's volunteer fire chief, Len Heffner, ruled the blaze had been an accident, caused by an electric fan. The contents of the apartment were cleared out by the management and taken to the local dump. Fire Marshall Robert Cryer later inspected the apartment and suspected arson. He ordered the carpet to be retrieved from the dump for testing. It was laid out on the pavement in front of the Columbus Grove police station, near a fuel pump, for two days before the Ohio Arson Crime Laboratory confirmed the fire was started deliberately, using accelerants. Cryer also noted the apartment's smoke detector was unhooked, and concluded this had been done before the fire. The evidence against Kenny was still circumstantial. No traces of paint thinners or gasoline were found on his clothes, and no containers were ever found. The owner of the greenhouse could not confirm that any paint thinner or gasoline was missing. Kenny's defence lawyers are now pushing for another trial, to present new evidence that the fire was started accidentally - most likely by discarded smoking materials. They also have evidence that Cynthia had a history of starting fires, including one at Peggy's apartment shortly before the fire, which Keith Hartoon confirms he was called to attend. However, Kenny was the last person seen near the apartment before the fire started, and one of the first at the scene. On July 10 he was charged with aggravated murder, aggravated arson, breaking and entering, and child endangering. A death penalty specification was attached to the charge of aggravated murder. Hope Collins was also charged, with involuntary manslaughter and child endangering. She served 45 days in jail and was given a two-year suspended sentence and three years' probation. Kenny stops short of criticising Hope, but questions why she didn't ask police about him when they told her Cynthia had died. "When they went to where she was, and told her that there'd been a fire and her child had died, she didn't say, 'what about the babysitter, where's the babysitter, why wasn't he there?' "She made no mention of the babysitter, which kind of made me think she might have heard me after all. That's the clue that I get from that - that she didn't ask about the babysitter because she knew I'd refused." Chris Underwood, who managed the apartments with her former husband until a few months before the fire, recalls Cynthia was often left alone in the apartment. She reported Hope Collins to the local welfare department. "When Hope first moved there she took good care of Cynthia, but when she and her husband broke up she was partying and going out at night," she says. "Hope just left the baby with anybody who would watch it. After a while she apparently didn't care. "Peggy once told me that Hope gave the baby sleeping tablets - that way she could go out and she didn't have to worry about her waking up." She adds: "Hope got off easy. She has to live with that for the rest of her life - but at least she is living. "I can't understand why they hit him so hard and didn't hit her because she was out. I always feel it was a little bit of prejudice." Chris adds that Richey was not alone in his taste for drinking and parties. She says the low-income apartment complex had quickly become unpopular with the conservative townsfolk in Columbus Grove. "The people in the town understood it was to be for senior citizens - not dump city," she says. "The cops spent more time out there than anywhere else in town. "Most of these kids came from families that had a decent background. But it was party, party, party everywhere. I hate to say it, but they were just a bunch of dumb people." Despite the prosecution's argument that Kenny had tried to murder him, Mike Nichols is not convinced. Looking through a neat file of press clippings he has religiously kept on the case, he says he "honestly can't say" whether Richey started the fire. But he finds it odd that Kenny would boast about it and then put his own life in danger trying to save Cynthia. Asked if he believes Richey should have been sentenced to death, he pauses before saying: "To be honest with you, no. "I have thought about this, I really have. Sometimes when I am off by myself, once in a while, I will think about it. You have to put yourself in his place." His voice trails off as the memories of the night of the party come back to him. "Somehow or other it was just a crazy night that night," he comments. "The only thing that burns me up was that an innocent kid died over something stupid." He exhales slowly, and adds: "It's hard, her mom should have been there to watch her. She shouldn't have gone off to that other party. "I thought that was wrong. We were all drinking. "None of us should have been responsible for that kid that night." Before the nightmare began . . Kenny Richey was born in Holland in 1964 to an American father and Scottish mother. His parents settled in Edinburgh when he was just three months old. In 1982 Jim and Eileen Richey divorced. On Christmas Eve that year, 18-year-old Kenny left Edinburgh to live with Jim in his native Ohio. Within a year Kenny spent a month in Putnam County Jail after a fight with a girlfriend's father. After his release he joined a portrait photography company as a salesman and travelled the country for a year with Jim, later becoming a portrait specialist. In 1984 Kenny moved to Brainerd, Minnesota, where he met his future wife, Wendy, and he joined the marines. He was discharged from the marines in late 1985 after reportedly suffering from depression. After his marriage failed he went back to live with his father in Columbus Grove, Ohio. In January 1987, following a four-and-a-half day trial before three judges at Putnam County Court House, he was sentenced to death. An immediate appeal against the death sentence was lodged, and Kenny's lawyers are still pushing for a retrial to allow new evidence to be heard. Thirteen execution dates have been set as each appeal has worked its way through the court system. In March 1997 evidence was presented to the Ohio Court of Common Pleas which his lawyers argued established his innocence. It was rejected. Prosecutor Dan Gerschutz argued: "Even though this new evidence may establish Mr Richey's innocence, the Ohio and United States constitutions nonetheless allow him to be executed because the prosecution did not know that the scientific testimony offered at the trial was false and unreliable." Last year the Ohio Supreme Court rejected calls for a retrial, and three months later Kenny came within two days of being executed. He received a stay of execution after the US Federal Court granted another appeal, which is now his best chance to escape the death penalty. If this bid fails, Kenny has two further courts of appeal, but those courts generally uphold the Federal Court's decision. Could Kenny get a fair trial in this town? THE burnt-out apartment block was gutted, restored and freshly-painted years ago. New families live there now, their children play outside in the hot Ohio sunshine, their voices carry far over fields filled with head-high ripening corn. Neighbours drop in and out of each other's apartments, their conversation as lazy in the late afternoon heat as the pace of life in Columbus Grove. The legacy of the fire which killed Cynthia Collins in 1986 at this anonymous building is not immediately apparent - few people outside of Putnam County can even remember Kenny Richey's name. He is, after all, only one of 200 men waiting for the executioner on Ohio's Death Row. Yet, here in Columbus Grove, the mere mention of the case is enough to re-open the wound, which still runs beneath the population's consciousness like a fault line. The media feeding frenzy after the Scot's conviction for starting the fire which killed Cynthia has long since passed. But the continuing campaign by supporters of Kenny for a re-trial to hear new evidence they claim will prove his innocence ensures the case continues to haunt the town. Most of the townsfolk trust their system of justice so implicitly that few question the conviction. The only miscarriage of justice they see is the sympathy for Kenny and lack of respect for the memory of the little girl who died. And the impact of Cynthia's death in a town as close-knit as Columbus Grove cannot be underestimated. A former Indian sugar grove, with only two main streets, many of its 2300 residents are farmers. Kenny's defence lawyer advised him to waive his right to a jury trial and opt for a three-judge panel because of the risk he wouldn't get a fair hearing. Fatal blazes are far from common, and volunteer fireman Keith Hartoon says there hasn't been another one since Cynthia's death. Keith has spent all his life in the town, which he describes as a close-knit community - two next-door neighbours are first cousins. "This area has a real good work ethic," he says. "People work, and a lot of people work two jobs. They don't consider themselves rich - everybody is somewhat the same and they give a lot to the community." He adds that there was "some sentiment against" the Old Farm Village apartment complex where the fire happened, and admits it might have been hard to have found an unbiased jury for the case. "He was from out of town. If you run over somebody's cat then the whole town is inflamed - it's the town cat. Would you go against the town?" Keith adds that he initially believed Kenny had started the fire, but had not intended to kill Cynthia. "I wish there was some way to honestly find whether Kenneth Richey was guilty or not guilty above a reasonable doubt," he adds. "It's wrong to keep some guy in jail that's costing the taxpayers $20,000 to $30,000 a year and it's wrong to kill him if he's not guilty." Former manager of the Old Farm Village apartments Chris Underwood moved to Putnam County decades ago, but says she still feels like an outsider. She says Kenny's lawyer should have asked to have the trial held in a different county. "They really should have had a change of venue because with a little county like this when something like this happens, it's like happening to one of your own," she says. "This is a purely Catholic county. They are family-oriented and if something happens to a child they are automatically going to go after whoever. I genuinely think that they think he did it. But not everyone in Ohio believes he is guilty." But there is one person who is convinced Kenny Richey should die in the electric chair. Tom Sterling, now Hope Collins' husband, is fiercely protective of his wife, whom he married a year after the tragedy. The couple live with their two children at a sprawling ranch house in Lima, a large town about 15 miles from Columbus Grove, in neighbouring Allen County. He blocks all requests for interviews, and has allegedly threatened reporters with a shotgun if they turn up on their doorstep. Hope Sterling hasn't given an interview since 1992. When contacted by phone, Mr Sterling says: "She ain't gonna talk to you now either. "If you want to respect Cynthia's memory, then fry that bastard. Good-bye." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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