Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Murder victim’s sister testifies in cold case trial
Martha Jo Bailey told a jury Monday how she let her younger sister Dana Fader borrow her tan dress with spaghetti straps for an evening out, and helped her complete the ensemble with a leopard print scarf, black belt and black boots.
Fader, who worked two part-time jobs, had been upset over seeking child support for her youngest of three children. Bailey recalled how she “wanted her to feel good about what she was wearing that night.”
But it would be the last outfit Fader ever wore alive, because the 27-year-old, Lake Worth-area woman was found strangled to death the next morning, June 20, 1987, on the red leather back seat of her car, after she was reported missing.
Thirty years and two months later, Bailey wiped her eyes and identified the same dress, shoes, scarf and belt as Assistant State Attorney Reid Scott removed them from brown evidence wrappings. He displayed the items for a jury on the first day of Rodney Clark’s first-degree murder trial.
Prosecutors say Clark, 50, sexually assaulted and killed Fader — and got away with the random attack until DNA technology caught up to him late in 2012. That’s when Palm
Beach County cold case detectives paid him a visit in Jackson, Miss., with a claim that his DNA matched a blood and semen stain on Fader’s dress.
Clark, by then a convicted sex offender in a different case, admitted he was in Palm Beach County in 1987. After viewing Fader’s photo, he denied ever coming into contact with her.
But authorities said they also had a palm print match from Clark to the outside right rear window of Fader’s sedan.
“Rodney Clark is the stranger that took Dana Fader,” prosecutor Aleathea McRoberts said in her opening statement to the jury. “Rodney Clark is the man who did unspeakable things to Dana Fader. Rodney Clark is the man that strangled her and killed her.”
If the jury finds Clark guilty, prosecutors will then ask the panel to recommend a death sentence. Florida’s new death penalty law requires unanimous jury votes to impose capital punishment. It’s the first test of the updated law in Palm Beach County.
Assistant Public Defender Elizabeth Ramsey said there is more than a reasonable doubt about Clark’s supposed connection to the crime for the following reasons: there’s proof that the DNA evidence in the case had been “compromised” by investigators over the years; Clark’s DNA was nowhere to be found on a rope allegedly used to squeeze the life out of Fader; there was no evidence of a sexual assault; and the palm print is “circumstantial” evidence that doesn’t link Clark to the interior of the vehicle.
“There is no direct evidence of Mr. Clark’s involvement because he did not do this,” Ramsey said. “Mr. Clark is innocent.”
The jury Monday also viewed numerous crime scene photos, while retired sheriff’s deputy Barbara Hopper testified about finding Fader in the car without a pulse. Martha Bailey turned her head and covered her eyes, while her brother, Joseph Bailey, sat beside her and listened.
Fader’s body was found in her 1980 Ford Fairmont with her legs spread apart, and the dress pulled up to her waist, prosecutor McRoberts said. A rope was found leading from the car to the ground outside the rear passenger door. A blanket or cloth was hanging from the right rear passenger window.
The prosecutor said an autopsy found that Fader was strangled, and bruise marks and cuts were observed on her face. There was a bite mark on her left nipple, but a tissue sample of this was discarded by the medical examiner’s office around 2000.
“Everything [else] that was collected was preserved,” said McRoberts, adding that the dress and other items were sealed until DNA testing, first in 2006 and again in 2012.
Clark “is the source of the stains on the dress,” she said, noting that investigators ruled out all relatives, plus Fader’s boyfriend at the time, and an ex-boyfriend who was then facing domestic battery charges.
Martha Bailey said she lived in an apartment a few doors away from Fader, who shared a unit with their brother Joseph, and Fader’s 3-year-old son, J.P.
Fader was divorced, and her then 10-year-old daughter Angela lived out of state with her dad, and her other son, Kolby, 5, lived with his grandparents in the same complex. She worked some days as a seamstress for her family’s upholstery business, and other days as a cashier at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, said Bailey, who now lives in Chattanooga, Tenn.
After their night out at two bars, Bailey dropped off her sister at about 2 a.m. and went out to another bar by herself until close to 4 a.m. Later that morning, she had just started the first day of a new job at a Denny’s restaurant, when her boss pulled her aside and told her she needed to go home to her family.