Prosecutor needs room as items pile up

As he walked the aisles of dusty bins, bloody furniture and concrete blocks, Ron O'Brien's memories of murder, mayhem and innocent victims spilled out.

"It brings back both a sense of the most spectacular and horrendous crimes in Franklin County," said O'Brien, Franklin County's prosecutor since 1996.

The prosecutor's property room contains evidence, some of it 40 years old, of crimes large and small. It's where justice is patient.

O’Brien wants to replace the overcrowded property room that holds evidence for thousands of criminal cases: bicycles and bolt cutters, snow shovels and crossbows, a lightbulb with a fingerprint on it. And it gets weirder.

“There’s a lot of sex toys in here,” said Dave Clark, a retired 35-year Columbus police officer. He’s worked in the evidence room for a year.

Thousands of pieces of evidence are stored there — for a minimum of two years in minor cases and seven for the most serious crimes — as convictions are appealed and prison sentences are served. In some cases, the advent of technologies such as DNA testing breathes new life into cases. Some pieces, such as evidence involving those required to register as sexual offenders for life, have to be

held until the criminal dies.

“We get rid of things at a much slower rate than it comes in,” Assistant Prosecutor Ryan Pfefferle said. Much of his job is keeping track of evidence and the laws affecting how long it must be kept.

Stored evidence has been used to overturn convictions, O’Brien said.

Joseph Fears was released from prison in 2009 after DNA exonerated him of a rape conviction. After serving 18 years in prison for rape, Robert McClendon was cleared by DNA evidence and released in 2008. He is so thankful O’Brien kept the evidence that he has campaigned for O’Brien’s re-election.

The evidence that solved big cases and led to convictions in sensational cases also is embedded in O’Brien’s memory:

■ John Miller Jr. was convicted of murder thanks in part to a tube of blood, a plaster cast of a shoeprint and

hair in a brush still stored in a bin.

That evidence didn’t help police solve the 1971 killing of Christina Mitchell and her child until Ohio prison officials refused to place Miller, imprisoned on a charge in a separate crime, in solitary confinement in 1974 as he requested. Trading information for solitary confinement, Miller told a prison guard he’d killed two people in Columbus. Columbus police told Miller to tell them something only the killer would know.

Miller told them that he took a camera off of a table and took a photo at the scene. He described where the knife was embedded in Mitchell’s body. He was convicted and sent to prison for life.

“Had he not come forward, it may never have been solved,” O’Brien said.

■ A .22-caliber handgun hangs on the wall at the Columbus Police Academy. It was the gun brothers

Thaddeus and Gary Lewingdon used in 1977 and 1978 to kill 10 people in Franklin, Fairfield and Licking counties in one of the worst killing sprees in Ohio’s history. The gun led to the brothers being referred to as “The .22-Caliber Killers.” Other evidence in the case remains in the prosecutor’s property room.

■ Another handgun still in the property room was used to convict Charles McCoy. The notorious “I-270 Sniper” used the 9 mm handgun instead of a long gun as his nickname suggested. The evidence room contains the gun and a block of wood with a bullet in it that McCoy shot during his spree.

■ One unusual piece of evidence still kept in the property room is a bag of Wallingford brand coffee, among the evidence gathered to convict John Harris of murder and send him to Ohio’s death row.

It’s unclear how the coffee figured into the case against Harris, 17 at the time, after he and several others kidnapped, raped and murdered nurse Jeanette Nichols in 1974. Harris’ death sentence was commuted to life in prison when Ohio’s death penalty was declared unconstitutional in the 1970s. Harris remains in prison.

Concerned about the stuffed property room, O’Brien told his assistant prosecutors not to order evidence from police property rooms unless they are sure the case will go to trial. That way, it stays with the police departments and out of the cramped prosecutor’s property room. O’Brien is looking for more space to help dispense justice.

“By law,” O’Brien said, “we have had to keep things that we might not have kept otherwise.”