State appeals court upholds firefighter’s murder conviction
Joe Carr serving 60-year sentence in girlfriend’s death.
A state appeals court Friday upheld the murder conviction of Joe Carr, a former firefighter serving a 60-year sentence for killing his girlfriend in 2011 and dumping her body in Lake Travis.
The Austin-based 3rd Court of Appeals rejected Carr’s argument that the evidence presented at his 2014 trial failed to prove he was responsible for the death of Veronica Navarro, 22, whose submerged body was found near Pace Bend Park wrapped in a tent, bound by rope and weighed down with cinder blocks and paint cans.
Writing for the court’s three-judge panel, Chief Justice Jeff Rose said jurors were presented enough information to establish “motive, opportunity and consciousness of guilt,” even though there was no direct physical evidence tying Carr, 31, to the murder.
Jurors, for example, heard witnesses describe an unstable relationship between the couple and Carr’s unusually subdued and distracted behavior in the days after Navarro disappeared, Rose wrote.
Other evidence showed Carr’s cellphone traveled near the spot where her body was discovered, that Navarro was wearing a T-shirt in Carr’s size and style, that a tent bag found at his house matched the tent wrapped around her body, and that her body was bound in ropes that were tied with unusual knots similar to knots found in Carr’s home, Rose said.
The court also rejected Carr’s claim that he deserved a new trial because law officers failed to give his lawyers a store’s surveillance tapes, shot days before Navarro’s disappearance, that would have been helpful to his defense.
The tapes, which were illegally withheld from defense lawyers, showed Navarro was not afraid of him or planning to end the relationship, argued Carr, a former member of the Pedernales Fire Department.
The appeals court, however, sided with state District Judge Cliff Brown, who determined that the video would have had no effect on the jury’s guilty verdict given the “overwhelming circumstantial evidence of guilt” presented against Carr.
Carr also claimed that his trial judge improperly allowed jurors to hear a taped jailhouse phone conversation in which his mother asked whether he killed Navarro, and Carr responded with silence and a quick change of subject.
Rose, however, said the taped conversation was fair game because prosecutors did not compel Carr to phone his mother.
“There is no evidence that the state prompted him to make the call. His mother — not an agent of the state — asked him questions,” Rose wrote.