Anatomy of Injustice (28 page)

“It was the most convincing element in the whole trial,” said Ganza Bryant, a twenty-eight-year old alternate juror in the first trial and an African American who had been in the first class to integrate Greenwood High. “How does my pubic hair get there unless you’ve been there? I may do work for her, but for my pubic hairs to get there I had to have slept with her or done something.”

“That’s what convicted him,” said a juror from the second trial.

Holt ridiculed Solicitor Jones’s version of what happened. It was preposterous to believe that Mrs. Edwards, exhibiting “superhuman strength for a battered and bloodied woman of advanced years,” managed to reach up “and pull with enough force and grip to rip out over forty hairs from her assailant’s
pubic region, without getting any of the hair particles under her fingernails,” Holt said, “or anywhere on her sticky, bloody body, or on her sticky, bloody robe.”

As Jensen and Holt drew out the contradictions, inconsistencies, and impossibilities in the state’s “hair-on-the-bed” evidence, it was the legal equivalent of watching people climb out of a phone booth—they just kept coming and coming. The number of hairs alone that the state claimed to have found made Holt suspicious.
Forty-some
hairs at a rape scene? If true, it belonged in the Guinness book of world records. Preposterous, said Hayward Starling, the veteran North Carolina investigator. He usually found only two or three at a rape scene, he said. “Most I’ve ever found, as I recall, were six or eight, and I considered it a field day.”

The testimony of the state’s own critical witnesses belied anything having happened on the bed. “The bedcovers were folded down as if somebody was folding the cover down to get ready to go to bed,” Johnson testified at Elmore’s trial. “The bed had been used and folded—it looked like put back together, or made ready for bed again,” Jimmy Holloway testified. He hadn’t noticed any wrinkles or indentations, he said, answering a question from Solicitor Jones. Jones didn’t like what he was hearing from his witness. “You’re not saying that there were no wrinkles or indentations in the bed covers, just that you don’t now recall having seen such?” Holloway was clear. “I have a photographic memory of what I saw there.”

Holt laughed when she thought about the state’s theory: after sexually assaulting Mrs. Edwards, Elmore murdered her, dragged her into the closet, then came back and made the bed (as well as spending several hours cleaning the house, washing the dishes, and putting the tongs in the drawer).

Jensen poured more doubt on the state’s hair-on-the-bed evidence through his cross-examination of SLED agents DeFreese, Parnell, and Wells, who couldn’t keep their stories straight.

DeFreese and Parnell had photographed the crime scene. Four rolls of film—three Kodacolor II, one Plus-X—each twenty-four exposures, ninety-six pictures in all. They photographed
the kitchen, where there was evidence of a struggle, and the den, where the state said Mrs. Edwards had been watching television when her murderer forced his way into the house. They even took photographs of the guest bedroom—including the bed—where nothing had happened, where nothing had been disturbed, where no evidence was found.

But neither agent took a picture of the victim’s bed, where the violent sexual assault was said to have occurred. There is a photograph in which the bed is visible, but only the bottom two-thirds. And there is camera gear on it. On this supposedly prime piece of evidence, the SLED agents had dumped their camera bodies, lenses, and bags.

Thirteen years after the first trial, the state realized that the absence of any photographs of the bed was a problem and that Elmore’s lawyers would exploit this. In the manner of all good trial lawyers, Zelenka sought to mitigate the damage by getting the information out himself, as if there were nothing to hide. Why didn’t Parnell take a picture of the bed and of the hairs he said he’d found on it? Zelenka asked him at the PCR.

“It was an oversight on my part,” Parnell said.

Did you take the sheets as evidence? Zelenka asked.

No.

Why not?

“There were no obvious blood or other stains present,” Parnell said. “Nothing of evidentiary value on them.”

When it was Jensen’s turn to cross-examine Parnell, he wanted to underscore that the SLED agents had not taken the sheets, which, unless they were grossly incompetent, cast serious doubts on whether anything had happened to Dorothy Edwards on that bed.

“You testified that after inspecting these sheets, that you decided there was nothing of evidential value on the sheets, so you didn’t collect them?” he asked Parnell.

“That’s correct.”

“Is it conceivable that a microscopic or chemical examination might have revealed something on the sheets that you didn’t see?”

Parnell was categorical: “I saw nothing else that could have been examined.”

Jensen kept asking the question in varying ways. Parnell kept saying there was no reason to take the sheets because there was nothing on them. “We examined the sheets visually. We did not see any stains of any kind.”

No blood on a bed where a violent rape had occurred? The explanation must be, Holt would say mockingly, what Solicitor Jones had said in his closing argument to the jury: “
She could have been swallowing the blood
.”

Parnell insisted he had found hairs on the bed, put them in a plastic baggie, and written on it.

Jensen turned to that. When they went through the house gathering evidence, Parnell and DeFreese had placed each item they collected into a bag and affixed a SLED label:

This tag was on every piece of SLED evidence the state introduced at Elmore’s trials—including pliers, dentures,
TV Guide
, calendar, checkbook—except for the bag with the hair Parnell said he’d found on the bed. There was no label on that bag. Instead, on the baggie in which Parnell said he had put the hairs he found on the bed he had written directly:

Why didn’t he use a label on this bag? Jensen asked Parnell. First, in a non sequitur, he said that he hadn’t affixed a label because he had been the one who had found the hairs and put them in the bag. Jensen pointed out that Parnell had put labels on other pieces of evidence he had found. Parnell responded with another non sequitur: “There’s also one in there that Mr. DeFreese did, that I didn’t do.”

Jensen kept at it. Why was it that this one particular exhibit, the ziplock bag of hair, didn’t have one of those labels on it?

“Are you talking about the physical label itself?” Parnell answered.

“Yes, it didn’t have a label like the other exhibits. It just had some handwriting on the outside of the plastic bag?” Jensen noted.

“It was something I could write on, as opposed to writing on something else that would possibly mess up a fingerprint or whatever might have been on it,” said Parnell.

That didn’t work either. All the exhibits were in plastic bags, so Parnell could have written directly on any of them.

“So is there any particular reason why this exhibit wasn’t treated the same way, that you can recall?”

“None that I recall.”

That was as good as Jensen was going to get.

He turned to another question.

“And this particular bag, was it ever sealed to your knowledge?”

“Not while I had it,” said Parnell. “It was my intention to take it straight to our hair and fibers examiner at the time. I did not seal it with tape.”

Jensen could not believe what he was hearing. “Knocked me off my chair,” he would say later. Evidence not sealed? In New
York, in most courts throughout the land, a judge would not have allowed the baggie into evidence, or if he had, the defense lawyer could argue that it should be treated with great doubt. Anyone could have put hair into that bag.

Jensen had still another question for Parnell. To whom had he given the unsealed baggie with the hairs? “To Lieutenant Earl Wells with our chemistry department at the time,” Parnell said. “It was midmorning on the nineteenth.”

Earl Wells was later called as a witness for the state at the PCR. Answering questions from Zelenka, he said that Parnell had given him the hairs. That was not what he had testified, under oath, at Elmore’s first trial. DeFreese had given him the hairs, Wells had testified. And at the trial, DeFreese also testified that he had given them to Wells.

Jensen asked Wells what had happened to the hairs that had been yanked from Elmore. How were they delivered to him?

Wells didn’t remember. He assumed they were in a container of some kind.

Do you have those containers today? Jensen asked.

No, sir.

“Would it surprise you if I told you that there were no containers of the suspect’s hair?” Jensen asked.

“Would it surprise me? Conceivably. I don’t know.”

The state agents were entangling themselves in a thorny thicket. They couldn’t agree on what the hairs had been put into, who had given them to Earl Wells, or when. They didn’t even know how many hairs were supposedly found on the bed and examined.

At Elmore’s first trial, Jones, in his opening statement said “there were found fifty-three hairs.” When Earl Wells was on the stand, Jones showed him State Exhibit 58 and asked if it contained “fifty-three hairs gathered from the bed of the deceased, Dorothy Edwards.” Wells corrected him: there were only forty-nine hairs in the bag when he received it. He went on to say that there were only forty-two left, because he had taken seven out and mounted them on slides for microscopic examination. And Wells wasn’t sure how many slides he had used.
“There could have been two, three, four, five, multiple hairs, single hairs mounted,” he told Jensen at the PCR. “I’m not sure.”

“Do those slides exist?” Jensen asked Wells.

“They existed at one time, yes, sir.”

Jensen pointed out to Wells, and Judge Kinard, that no slides were introduced into evidence at Elmore’s trials.

The state’s case was beginning to resemble Pinocchio’s nose. And it was about to grow in length. Parnell had testified that he dropped off the hairs to Wells “midmorning on the nineteenth.”

That is not what Wells testified.

It was “one or two in the morning” of the nineteenth when he examined the evidence, he said in answer to a question from Jensen. He’d been at home when he got a call asking him to go down to SLED headquarters, he explained. He was met there by Parnell, who was on his way from Greenwood to Charleston with the victim’s body, according to Wells. He said, he had a clear recollection. “The body was in a body bag,” he said, brought “into the laboratory on a gurney.” At that time, Wells said, he was given a baggie with a “quantity of hair,” which he said he was told had come from the bed of Mrs. Edwards. “I examined the questioned hair under a microscope to determine, number one, possible racial origin.”

“Did you reach any conclusions at that time from your examination?” Jensen asked.

“I identified the hair as being of a Negroid race origin.”

Wells continued. The hairs had a reddish tint to them, he said, and he had immediately called the Greenwood Police Department and told the person he spoke to that the hairs were “from a Negroid individual with reddish-black hair.” The policeman replied that he knew someone in Greenwood County who had those characteristics, Wells testified.

But it was not possible for Wells to have seen the body at one or two in the morning. Mrs. Edwards’s body was in the cooler at Self Memorial Hospital then, secured by evidence tape, Sgt. John Owen recorded in his four-page police report prepared at the time.

He had removed it at 6:15 a.m. on the morning of the nineteenth,
Owen wrote, and then he and two other officers drove the body to the medical university in Charleston, 196 miles across the state. They arrived there at 10:15. Owen had a reputation on the force for being a stickler for detail, for taking his job very seriously, too seriously in the view of some officers. He’d even give his mother a speeding ticket, they said.

At 4:09 p.m., Owen and the others left Charleston with the body and the evidence Dr. Conradi had gathered during her autopsy, Owen went on. They arrived at SLED headquarters just before seven. “I met Lt. Wells in the Chemistry Dept.,” Owen wrote. “This evidence was surrendered to him at 6:59 p.m. on January 19th, 1982.”

This was some sixteen hours
after
Wells claimed to have examined it.

Undercutting Wells’s testimony and bolstering the conclusion that no hairs were found on the bed are the police reports and court proceedings prior to trial. In none of them is there any mention of any hairs of any color on Mrs. Edwards’s bed.

Sergeant Johnson, who was initially in charge of the investigation at the crime scene, said in his report that evidence gathered in the house had been turned over to Owen. In his report, Owen wrote: “This evidence consisted of: one pair of needle nose pliers, One case pairing knife, One cake knife, or spatchler marked Gitie’s Blade, One upper denture, One fragment dentures, One fragments ashtray, One bottle tongs, One pill bottle, and color Photographs of the position of the body.” Nothing about any hairs on the bed.