Witnesses never heard
Let’s suppose you were wrongfully charged with savagely murdering your spouse in your home with a blunt instrument that police never located only to have at least three witnesses on your behalf prevented from testifying. That’s pretty much what happened in the disgraceful conviction and life sentence of Belynda Goff of Green Forest, now spending her 22nd year of imprisonment in the Arkansas Department of Correction. I wouldn’t be involved in exploring this case if I believed this 57-year-old mother and grandmother had bludgeoned her husband Stephen to death inside their apartment during the predawn hours of June 12, 1994. This latest installment in trying to understand the state’s arguments in this deeply questionable case involves what I believe were at least three potential witnesses who might have helped reveal Goff’s innocence. They certainly could have raised reasonable doubts where no physical evidence was produced to convict her. Despite being subpoenaed to appear, the couple’s neighbor at the time, Jodi Morgan, and two others never were called to testify at Goff’s 1996 trial. I believe police and others had to have known their accounts could be pertinent to Stephen Goff’s murder. Morgan knew Stephen from the Goffs’ children playing with her own at the Forest Court Apartments. Both Goffs worked at the nearby Tyson poultry plant. Morgan’s account of two strangers carrying baseball bats and parking in front of the Goff’s apartment on the very night Stephen would die several hours later is compelling. Based on her July 1996 sworn statement to police (and our phone interview just last week) the nurse and hospital director explained what she witnessed. During the late afternoon of June 11, 1994, Morgan said, two men pulled into the apartment complex and parked their older model hatchback that appeared to have a faded paint job near the complex mailboxes within view of Morgan’s apartment. Her small children had been playing in the front parking area as they often did on early summer days. She’d left the front door open to watch after them. After a while, the men’s car pulled away. But they returned not long afterwards, this time parking much closer to her apartment. One man remained in the car as his companion with dark hair approached her apartment. Both men appeared to be in their 20s. The dark-haired man stopped, beer in hand, to speak with Jodi’s children. She stepped outside to ask what he wanted. She said he persistently and in somewhat “belligerent” tones asked about an unnamed woman the men had supposedly met at a local bar who told them she lived in the complex’s first apartment. The suspicious Jodi, who lived in the first apartment, knew no one fitting that description. It was then she said she saw a baseball bat leaning up in the back seat. Another witness, Michelle Belle, who gave a statement but also never testified, corroborated Morgan’s account. Belle also saw a second bat in the rear seat, Morgan told me. Morgan said the unusual experience was frightening. “I was concerned about the kids,” she explained. “We’d never seen these men before, or after. It has been very frustrating that the incident … just hours before the murder was never really investigated.” She said the insistent man finally relented and returned to the car. The car then backed up and into a parking space directly in front of the Goffs’ No. 4 apartment, which sat at an angle to Jodi’s with an adjoining wall. She said she watched through a bedroom window as they sat for some time before leaving. Still nervous about their intentions and her children’s welfare, she said she then closed her blinds and curtains so no one could peer inside. Morgan notified police afterwards and an officer agreed to escort her through town looking for the men’s car to no avail. She also was asked if she’d consent to a photo lineup, which she did, but that lineup never happened. In July 1996, she gave a sworn statement about what she’d witnessed to the lead investigator in Stephen Goff’s murder, Archie Rousey, and Kenny Elser of the prosecutor’s office. David Clinger, the Carroll County prosecutor in 1994, did not file charges against Belynda. Clinger’s successor, Brad Butler, arrived, and nearly a year after Stephen’s death chose to pursue Belynda Goff based on the investigation led by former Sheriff’s Lt. Archie Rousey. Morgan said she answered a subpoena to testify at Goff’s 1996 trial but was never called after former Circuit Judge Tom Keith granted motions to strike her testimony along with that of Belle and Harold Johnson regarding men with bats and a reported “bloodbath” that June evening. Rousey, on Sept. 27, 1994, wrote in his investigator notes that “Johnson was to have possibly overheard a conversation between three men [in] reference to one killing someone with a baseball bat. I asked Johnson if he indeed heard this conversation. Johnson said that he and his friend from work, Bo Franklin, were sitting on the Berryville Square early Sunday morning around 5 a.m. and they had just got off work at Tyson’s in Berryville. “Johnson said there were five or six young men in a two-tone white and red Chevy pickup talking about a blood bath that had occurred in Green Forest. He said he didn’t know exactly what they were saying but it sounded like they suspected someone that was responsible and they were going to see if they could find him. “Johnson said he thought that one of the men had a baseball bat, not sure. He didn’t know any of them but he thought they were local Berryville boys, approximately 20 to 25 years old. He said the next day he read in the Harrison paper that Steve Goff was dead. He said he knew Steve Goff from work and he was a friend from when Steve worked the night shift.” Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.