Anatomy of Injustice (10 page)

Strikingly few for a crime scene, DeFreese agreed. The only explanation was that “Mrs. Edwards, or whoever kept her house, was a very meticulous housekeeper. The place was extremely clean and extremely neat.”

Jones finished with DeFreese. Anderson’s cross-examination was brief, mostly about the method DeFreese had used to lift and compare the prints. Even if Mrs. Edwards had cleaned before the perpetrator arrived, the house would certainly not have been “extremely clean and extremely neat,” with so few fingerprints, after the struggle that had ensued. And how did she manage to remove the fingerprints from the tongs in the kitchen drawer, from the coffeemaker, and from all the doors, walls, and other surfaces she surely would have touched while trying to escape?

It was early evening when DeFreese stepped off the stand. It had been a long day, but Burnett wanted to keep going. After a ten-minute recess, Jones called Dr. Conradi. She had reached Greenwood after a harrowing journey from Charleston, where she taught at the Medical University of South Carolina. A SLED agent had picked her up, and even before they were out of the parking lot, he turned on his siren as well as the blue light on top of the car. Soon they were hurtling along at a hundred miles an hour. When they had to go through towns, he drove
on sidewalks to get around traffic. Apparently, it was all for show: when they reached Newberry, thirty miles east of Greenwood, the SLED agent said he was hungry and they stopped at McDonald’s.

T
ELL THE JURY
what a forensic pathologist is, Jones began his questioning of Conradi. “A forensic pathologist is really a medical-slash-legal pathologist, who examines bodies that died of unnatural types of death,” she answered. A smallish woman, forty-four years old, Conradi was a transplanted New Yorker who had moved to South Carolina with her doctor husband in 1973. Jones asked her to describe the injuries that had been inflicted on Mrs. Edwards. Anderson objected. Dr. Conradi should simply state the cause of death. The gruesome detail about the injuries was solely intended to arouse the passion of the jury, he argued. Judge Burnett said Jones could go on.

Conradi was clinical. “There was, involving her lower left leg, bruising at the knee in an area one point two by point eight inch in dimension, and there was patchy bruising of the inner aspect of the left calf, also blue in color, in an area two by two inches. Examination of the right leg revealed bruising of the right knee and the right lower leg, bluish and reddish purple in color, and medial, or in the inner aspect of the right knee, and also the right lower leg. On the front of the shin of the right lower leg was a cut, or laceration, measuring a third of an inch in length, and lateral to that on the outer aspect of that, about a half inch additional abrading, which is scraping away of the skin, with a band of intervening superficial purplish abrading. In other words, between the cut, or laceration, and the abrasion was an initial abrasion. And those, basically, were the injuries to the legs.”

Mrs. Edwards had thirty-three wounds on her chest, abdomen, and back, Conradi testified. Two-thirds “were red-based and were obviously a premortem injury,” she said.

“So you are saying that approximately twenty-two of them were administered before death and approximately eleven of them after death?” Jones said, reinforcing to jurors the notion of how vicious Elmore was to keep beating her after she was dead. Jones was playing to the jurors’ guts and emotions, not their intellects. He was looking ahead. Confident the jury would convict Elmore, Jones was implanting the horror of what had happened, the brutality, so that the jury would impose the death penalty. It was the strategy of any good prosecutor.

“Your Honor, I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Anderson said, rising. “It’s plainly calculated to inflame the jury.”

Overruled. It was relevant to the issue of malice, Burnett said. As a legal matter, in order for Elmore to be convicted of murder, and therefore subject to the death penalty, Jones would have to prove that Elmore had acted with malice; the killing of a person without malice is the lesser crime of manslaughter.

Thirteen of Mrs. Edwards’s ribs had been broken, Dr. Conradi told the jury. There were two stab wounds behind the left ear, made with a sharp instrument, such as a knife. “Or even pointed-nose, needle-nose pliers could have produced injuries such as that,” she said. Mrs. Edwards had thirty-three “small injuries” on her chest and abdomen, she testified. “By small, I mean up to two point five inches in length, but generally about a third of an inch in length.”

On the back of the body there were nineteen injuries, again most of them one-third of an inch. None of the stabs hit an artery or vein. Altogether, there were fifty-two wounds, most of them no more than a third of an inch deep. That was curious, since most killers slashed their victims, leaving long, deep gashes. This did not sound like the work of a person who had gone to rob, rape, and murder Mrs. Edwards. What’s more, most of the injuries had been inflicted by the bottle tongs, which measured slightly over a third of an inch in width, according to Dr. Conradi. The killer, whoever it was, seemed to have an obsession with the tongs. He used them to kill the victim and then carefully put them in the kitchen drawer after cleaning them of fingerprints. That, too, was odd.

Was there any evidence of sexual assault? Jones asked Conradi. There were abrasions on the vagina, Conradi said. But she found no traces of sperm in any of the “oral, rectal, and vaginal orifices.”

This wasn’t the answer Jones wanted and needed. A black man raping a white woman was a crime worse than murder to many southerners. Besides, if Elmore hadn’t raped Mrs. Edwards, some jurors might wonder why he had broken into the house, the police having concluded that robbery wasn’t a motive.

Is it possible for semen to be expelled into the vagina without there being sperm? Jones asked.

Possible, said Conradi.

That was too equivocal for Jones.

“I would ask you this, then, as a forensic pathologist: Was the injury to her vagina consistent with the insertion of an erect human penis?” Jones said.

Anderson could have objected. It was a leading question. On direct examination a lawyer is not allowed to ask leading questions, which are questions that suggest the answer. Generally, questions that can be answered yes or no are leading questions. A nonleading form of the question could have been: As a forensic pathologist, could you tell us what might have caused the injuries to the vagina? But Anderson didn’t object.

“Yes, sir,” Dr. Conradi answered.

Satisfied, Jones moved on to the crucial question of when Dorothy Edwards was murdered. Again, he had trouble getting the answer he wanted.

It is difficult to determine the time of death with any accuracy, Conradi explained. Mrs. Edwards could have been murdered anywhere from twelve hours to three days before she examined the body, Dr. Conradi said.

Jones wanted one time—Saturday evening. This is when the police had determined Mrs. Edwards had been murdered, based on what Holloway had told them. And Jones knew from police interviews with Elmore’s girlfriend, Mary, her brother Donnie, and Donnie’s wife, Sue, that Elmore would have trouble accounting for a two-hour period late Saturday night.

Conradi wanted to avoid being pinned down to a specific time. Determining time of death is not an exact science, and South Carolina pathologists were not well trained in conducting death investigations.

Jones was persistent.

“All right, then, I’ll ask you this question. Is that wide range of estimates consistent with the possible death between ten and twelve o’clock p.m. on the night of January the sixteenth?”

Another leading question. Anderson did not object.

Yes, said Dr. Conradi.

Jones was satisfied and was finished with questions for the pathologist. “Thank you, ma’am,” Jones said, sitting down. “Answer questions counsel will ask you.” He hadn’t asked her about the “Negroid hair” he had told the court she had found on Mrs. Edwards’s body, which seemed surprising. But it wasn’t an oversight by Jones; he knew something about that hair that he did not want Elmore’s lawyers to know.

John Beasley stood. He didn’t ask her about the “Negroid hair” either. He asked only six questions and did more to harm than help Elmore. Didn’t you say that you could not say with certainty that there was sexual assault? he asked Conradi. That was not what she had said, and this gave her a chance to reiterate. “I can say with certainty that there was sexual assault.” What she could not say with certainty was whether Mrs. Edwards had been raped. The penetration of the vagina might have been with “a foreign object,” she said. That was tantalizing, but Beasley didn’t ask, “Such as what?” On the time of death, Beasley didn’t ask Conradi if it could have been Sunday, which was within her parameters. He did ask her whether Mrs. Edwards might have been murdered as early as three o’clock Saturday afternoon. Conradi answered that while it might be possible, her estimate, which was based in large measure on what the police had told her, was that Mrs. Edwards had been murdered sixty-five hours before she examined the body, which would make it Saturday evening.

On recross, Jones used his questions, and Conradi’s answers, to drive home to the jury that Mrs. Edwards had been murdered
Saturday evening. This became a critical given in the case, accepted by virtually everyone.

When Conradi finally finished testifying, it was very late. Burnett apologized to the jurors and let them go to the Holiday Inn.

“G
OOD MORNING
, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you had as pleasant an evening as you could under our circumstances. Y’all do look very fresh and ready for another very difficult day,” Judge Burnett cheerfully greeted the jurors when they returned at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 15, the fourth day of the trial.

Jones called Mary Alice Dunlap, Elmore’s estranged girlfriend, to the stand. Jones was wary, not certain whose side she’d be on. She was sworn in and took the witness chair. She was nervous as she looked at the crowded courtroom but seemed to relax once she started giving testimony. Jones asked her about her relationship with Elmore: how long they had dated; their on-again, off-again living together in her Greenwood Gardens Apartments; how she would ask him to leave, he’d move out, then she’d take him back. Jones came to Saturday the sixteenth. Her story largely matched what Elmore had told the police. She added a few details. On the way from Kmart to her mother’s they had passed him on Baptist Street. It was around ten. She and the other members of her family had arrived at her apartment around ten thirty. Around midnight, or maybe twelve thirty, Elmore showed up. She told him to leave. He refused. He said he wanted to get the clothes he had left at her house. She told him she had thrown them away. She turned off the lights and everyone left, except Elmore.

Jones had more questions.

“Was there any conversation concerning the condition of his lip?” he asked Dunlap.

“He asked was his lip swollen. I said it was swollen a little bit.”

“That’s his upper lip.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jones didn’t ask the obvious question. He knew the answer. As part of their investigation, Greenwood police detective Perry Dickenson and SLED agent Tom Henderson had questioned Warren Martin, the live-in boyfriend of Elmore’s sister Peggy. He had seen Elmore on Sunday morning. He was limping and his lip was swollen, Martin told the officers. “Did he tell you what happened?” they asked. Yes. Elmore said he had slipped on some ice coming out of Mary Dunlap’s apartment, Martin told the police officers. The jury never heard this. Jones preferred to leave the inference that Elmore had cut his lip struggling with Mrs. Edwards.

Jones asked Dunlap what Elmore was wearing. A brown jacket, an off-white shirt, and jeans, she answered.

“What, if anything, transpired with regard to the jacket, white shirt, or jeans?” Jones asked.

“What you mean, ‘transpired’?”

“What took place? What happened to it? What happened to the coat, shirt, or britches?”

Elmore had started to unbutton his shirt, then just ripped it off, she said. “I picked it up and threw it in the trash.”

Again Jones left the obvious question unasked. He preferred leaving jurors with the inference that the shirt had blood on it and that Elmore was getting rid of incriminating evidence. “Your Honor, that’s all I have at this time,” Jones said, and sat down.

Anderson had only a few innocuous questions. When did Dunlap and Elmore begin dating? When did she get divorced? How many children did she have? Did she want to marry him? Yes. Had they had lovers’ spats? Yes. Did she still love him? Yes. That was it. If Anderson had read the police interviews of Martin and Dunlap, which Jones had given to him, as he was required to, he would have known the questions to ask, and the answers would have helped Elmore.

Like a good prosecutor, or defense lawyer, Jones wasn’t going to let a critical piece of evidence—where Elmore was at the
time the state said Mrs. Edwards had been murdered—rest on one witness. He called as a witness Frances Moseley, Mary’s mother. She, too, could testify that Elmore had not been seen between 10:00 p.m. and midnight—if Jones could get her to speak so that the jury could understand what she was saying.

Where do you live? Jones asked.

He couldn’t understand her answer.

“It might help a little bit, if you don’t mind, if I could take your gum. Do you mind?” She was a habitual gum chewer.

“No, sir.”

“Can I have your gum?”

“Okay.”

Jones took a piece of paper off the counsel table, walked a few steps, and gave it to Mrs. Moseley. She took the gum out of her mouth, put it in the paper, and held it while Jones took up the questioning. He still had difficulty getting the responses he wanted.

“Do you know when it was that you went back down there to your daughter’s house?” asked Jones.

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, now, I thought the four of you went down to your daughter’s house first.”

“Yes.”