NYT December 12, 2000 Old Evidence Resurfaces, Unsettling '82 Murder By RAYMOND BONNER REENWOOD, S.C., Dec. 7 � A grisly crime shocked this small town nearly 19 years ago. A 75-year-old widow, Dorothy Ely Edwards, who grew up riding horses, studied music in college and took up painting in her 50's, was raped and murdered, stabbed 52 times, her body, clothed only in her robe, dumped in her bedroom closet. It took the police only a few days to arrest a suspect � Edward Lee Elmore, 23, one of 11 children, who had grown up in poverty, dropped out of school in the fifth grade and washed the windows at Mrs. Edwards's house a couple of weeks before she was murdered. Mr. Elmore was arrested and quickly convicted and has been on death row for 18 years. But on Dec. 21 his lawyers will seek a third trial, contending that their client is a victim of prosecutorial misconduct. This time, the defense has what it considers a powerful weapon in its arsenal: new DNA evidence from hairs that had been found on Mrs. Edwards's body. The chief forensic investigator had said repeatedly over the years that the hair samples had been lost; two years ago, under pressure from the defendant's lawyers and the state attorney general, he found them � in his file cabinet. They had probably been there all the time, an assistant attorney general said in a deposition last month. Mr. Elmore's lawyers contend that tests of the samples, filed with the court on Dec. 4, prove that Dorothy Edwards was killed by someone other than Mr. Elmore. For all its local elements, the Elmore case is typical of many capital cases around the country, said John Blume, a veteran death penalty defense lawyer in Columbia, S.C., who has worked on Mr. Elmore's appeal. The defendant is black, the victim white, and Mr. Elmore's court-appointed lawyers were underpaid and inexperienced. Above all, Mr. Blume said, there are the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. The state attorney general's office declined to comment and the state would not allow the investigator who had the hair evidence in his file cabinet to be interviewed. The director of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, Robert M. Stewart, said in an interview that he did not know whether the investigator's failure to find it before was "an intentional, criminal act, or some administrative mistake." At the heart of the case are hair samples discovered at the scene of the crime. Some � the ones that subsequently disappeared � were found on Mrs. Edwards's body by investigators, who contended at the time that they had come from a black man. But the new DNA tests show that some of the hairs were Mrs. Edwards's, while others belonged to someone else � a someone else who was white. In Mr. Elmore's two previous trials (the first conviction was overturned on appeal), investigators also testified that they had found 45 hairs on the bed that they said had been yanked from the defendant by Mrs. Edwards during a struggle. Mr. Elmore's lawyers claim that these hairs were planted. The defense lawyers note that the police found no other evidence on the bed, like blood or seminal stains, that might have been expected in a violent struggle. The hairs found under Mrs. Edwards's fingernails were from a Caucasian, the state and the defense agree. The defense lawyers also point out that the sheets were described only as "wrinkled" by a neighbor, the first person on the scene. The police took no photographs of the bed, saying later it was "an oversight." The defense lawyers also dispute the time of death, saying the state set it on Saturday evening, when Mr. Elmore had no strong alibi. Some evidence points strongly to Sunday, they contend, when he was with family members in neighboring Abbeville County. The medical examiner in the Elmore case, Dr. Sandra E. Conradi, relied heavily on what she was told by the police in setting the time of death, she said in her testimony. In a recent interview, Dr. Conradi declined to discuss her conclusions. But, she said, "If there's DNA evidence to indicate this guy's innocent, he ought to be set free." In 1995, in a postconviction review of Mr. Elmore's case, Judge J. Ernest Kinard Jr. ruled against all of the defense lawyers' claims. Now, in light of the DNA findings, Mr. Elmore's lawyers say that Judge Kinard, who will hear Mr. Elmore's request for a new trial, should investigate the state's conduct in the case, as should the Justice Department. On one thing, the defense agrees with the state: it was an extraordinarily violent crime. In January 1982, someone entered Mrs. Edwards's home through the kitchen door � presumably somebody she knew, the police concluded, because there was no evidence of forced entry. Robbery does not appear to have been the motive. A large diamond ring and other valuable jewelry were untouched in the bedroom, and antique silver was also left behind, the police report says. Mrs. Edwards's body was found by her next-door neighbor of 36 years, James Holloway. Mr. Holloway told the police, according to their report, that when he noticed the rear screen door open, he went in, saw a denture piece, a pair of needle-nose pliers and some blood on the kitchen floor, and then went to Mrs. Edwards's bedroom, where he saw blood on the walls. The television was on, an alarm clock, set for 6 a.m., was ringing, and the automatic coffee maker was still on, with burned coffee in the bottom of the pot, he said. Mr. Holloway left, got another neighbor, returned, put on gloves and opened the closet door in Mrs. Edwards's bedroom, where he found her body. It was Mr. Holloway who led the police to Mr. Elmore, telling them they would find the suspect if they looked in the victim's checkbook. Mrs. Edwards had paid Mr. Elmore $43 on Dec. 30. It is not clear how Mr. Holloway, who died in 1994, knew that Mrs. Edwards had paid with a check. Mr. Holloway's statements were also critical in placing the time of death on Saturday evening. He told the police that he found the Sunday and Monday newspapers when he arrived at the house, and that Mrs. Edwards had told him that she was going on a trip on Sunday. The police found only one of Mr. Elmore's fingerprints at the house � on the outside of the back door, where Mr. Elmore had been working two weeks earlier. But when they issued the arrest warrant, they also had the medical examiner's findings that she had found a black person's pubic hair on the victim's abdomen, the prosecutor said at the time. (This was the evidence that was later lost, and now, after its rediscovery and testing, has been shown to be the hair of a Caucasian.) "Pubic hairs are pretty easy to identify," Dr. Conradi, the medical examiner, said in an interview. Yet, on his lab report, the chief forensic investigator, William Earl Wells, the man in whose file cabinet the evidence was found after 16 years, wrote that only "blue fibers" were found on the victim's abdomen. Mr. Wells repeated this under oath at the postconviction hearing for Mr. Elmore in 1995, when he also said he could not find the evidence. While the state could not find the hair samples that had been on Mrs. Edwards's abdomen, it trumpeted the hairs investigators said they found on her bed. "That's what convicted him," said a juror in the second trial, Teresa Davis. "There's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that's he guilty," Ms. Davis added. Mr. Wells testified that the hairs found on the bed were from the defendant, and that they had been "forcibly pulled out." He had the defendant's hairs to test because when the police arrested Mr. Elmore, they pulled pubic hairs from his groin, with his consent. This gave the investigators hairs to plant, or perhaps the hairs were never on the bed at all, defense lawyers argue. The only direct evidence linking Mr. Elmore to the crime was the testimony of a jailhouse informant, James Gilliam. Mr. Gilliam, who was in jail for a probation violation, from a conviction for theft, testified that Mr. Elmore told him that he had killed Mrs. Edwards because she started screaming, and that he had wiped his fingerprints. Mr. Gilliam later recanted that testimony, both during a conversation with his pastor and during a postconviction hearing. For Mrs. Edwards's only child, Carolyn Lee, a new trial will awaken a nightmare. "You go through something like this and you cope with the grief," said Ms. Lee, now 61. "The one thing I've had all these years to help me was that the person who did it had been caught and punished." As Ms. Lee absorbed the results of the DNA test, which she was hearing for the first time, she began crying. "This is going to be a whole different type of coping, if it turns out that whoever did this horrible thing has not been caught and punished." Ms. Lee has been an activist for victims' rights, she said, but added, "I certainly would never want to see the wrong man punished." Ask questions about National News and tell other readers what you know in Abuzz, a new knowledge network from The New York Times. � � ------------------------------------------------------------------------
