MoS took on America’s ...with a shoe-size gauge
It’s a dramatic O.J. Simpson moment: in a murder case, a man’s life rests on the size of his foot. So why IS an MoS reporter measuring it? He reveals all in this surreal despatch from US’s Deep South
In his closing speech to the jury, lead prosecutor, district attorney Bill Smith, told jurors she would never forget his face: her bedroom light had been on, and his appearance was ‘burned into her memory’.
What Smith did not mention was that all along, concealed in his files, was the report of her original police interview on the morning after her attack. She said then that it had been so dark she did not know whether the strangler was black or white, much less what he looked like.
Testifying last week, Smith admitted this. He should, he agreed, have ‘turned it [the document] over’ to the defence, but, he added with a shrug, with so much paperwork to go through, it had been easy to miss.
Fortunately, Ms Miller’s nightdress was tested at an independent lab in Virginia, using the worldwide standard method to isolate semen from other cells.
This was fortunate because the prosecution also had to make a bombshell disclosure: that the Georgia state forensic lab had earlier wrecked its test on a sample from another victim, Martha Thurmond, 69, through gross incompetence – and in the process, destroyed the sample.
Bizarrely, witnesses from the lab told the court that the microscope slide made from a swab of semen found on Ms Thurmond’s abdomen was ‘contaminated’ by a ‘control sample’ – semen produced by an unnamed worker at the lab.
Cross-examining other lab witnesses, Mr Martin established that there had been several other cases of samples becoming contaminated by ‘stray DNA’ in the lab. And astonishingly, it had lost track of Gary’s own DNA samples, taken from him in prison. One of the scientists admitted that when she went to check the sealed envelope which should have contained several swabs taken from inside Gary’s mouth, it was empty.
This, Mr Martin suggested, might well be why the prosecution was claiming they had matched Gary to a sample from victim Jean Dimenstein. The judge declined to admit this alleged match into evidence, though he said he may do so later.
Finally, there was the question of Gary’s confession. According to the
DNA sample destroyed by gross incompetence
prosecution, he spoke freely about the murders after his arrest, while two detectives drove him around the area where the victims lived and supplied many details that ‘only the killer could have known’. Yet at the time, the officers made neither notes nor a tape. A highly incriminating 12-page ‘statement’ shown to the jury was made days or weeks later – none of the officers could remember when quizzed last week – based on their memories of the interrogation. Such a document would not survive scrutiny for a moment in any British court.
Last week, one of those officers, Detective Michael Sellers, said that when Gary was taken to the police station after his arrest, he was asked to remove his shoes. Sellers claimed he noticed that his toes were ‘all bent up from wearing shoes that were too small’.
Strangely enough, until Mr Covington came forward with the footprint, no one had ever mentioned Gary’s ‘ bent’ toes in the case’s 30-year history.
Sellers was the man who first made Gary a suspect by tracing a gun stolen in a burglary in Columbus at the time of the murders to one of his relatives, who said he bought it from Gary. According to Sellers, his inquiry started when the gun’s rightful owner, Henry Sanderson, called detectives, saying he had been given a phone message revealing police had recovered the weapon. In fact, they hadn’t, and no one had left a message.
Sellers said the imaginary message was the result of ‘divine intervention... I believe absolutely it was a phone call from God.’ Astonishingly, the trial prosecutor Bill Smith agreed: ‘A phone call from God is what it might have been.’
Despite all this, the bar for Gary is high. To win an appeal in England, the defence has to show a conviction is ‘unsafe’. In Georgia, the defence must persuade the judge that, had the jury known about the fresh evidence, they would ‘probably’ have reached a different verdict.
It will now take many weeks to produce a transcript of the hearing, and then there will be several rounds of l egal argument, conducted through written submissions. All of this may easily take a year.
Sitting through all of it in the public gallery was Gary’s wife, Debra, a nurse practitioner. ‘I don’t care how long it takes,’ she said.
‘I just want him home.’