Eleven years ago, in a small, sooted town of central Appalachia, a young woman was murdered. From that shocking crime in Grundy, Va., has spun the kind of twisted tale that gives Southern Gothics a good name. Trouble is, this one’s not fiction and Coleman, 33, may be an innocent man on his way to the electric chair next month.
Capital cases, like other human endeavors, can end in mistake (following story). Yet, in a wave of recent restrictive rulings, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have made it virtually impossible for appeals-even ones claiming new, vital evidence-to be heard. Their warning to the condemned is clear: don’t look to us to save your necks. Roger Coleman’s case illustrates the risks of that message.
Late one winter night, in 1981, someone walked into the Slate Creek home of 19 year-old McCoy, raped her, slashed her throat and stabbed her in the chest. Her husband, Brad, found Wanda lying face up in a back bedroom-dead blood still oozing from her wounds. Brad gave police the name of Coleman, Wanda’s brother-in-law, who had access to the house and who once served time for attempted rape.
A year later Grundy had itself a three day trial. The courthouse should have had a big top. Signs outside proclaimed TIME FOR ANOTHER HANGING IN GRUNDY, and townspeople lined up for seats in the gallery. Coleman was convicted and sentenced to death, wholly on circumstantial evidence. He lost several rounds of state appeals, then was denied any chance at federal court review because his lawyers missed a filing deadline by one day. “We’ve all heard of people who get off because of a technicality,” says Kathleen Behan, one of Coleman’s lawyers. “Roger is going to be executed because of one.”
So far, that’s a garden-variety capital case. Investigation, trial, conviction, some mediocre lawyering, a few unsuccessful appeals-in America, the defendant gets a basic trial, not a perfect one. Then the bombshell landed: in late 1991, one Teresa Horn, a county resident, came forward with an affidavit that seemed to exonerate Coleman. She claimed that a local man, Donney Ramey-known to friends as Trouble -had confessed to her that he raped and killed McCoy, his next-door neighbor. The circumstances? Horn stated that Ramey tried to rape her in 1987 and that, during the attack, Ramey warned “he was going to do me like he did that girl on Slate Creek.” Horn never pressed charges. Through counsel, Ramey, 31, denies the allegations; he still lives in the area.
Then the case took its cruelest turn. Three weeks ago Horn was found dead. The day before, she had given an interview to a Roanoke TV station, recounting the alleged attack by Ramey and naming him as McCoy’s killer. It was the only time she went public other than filing her affidavit as part of Coleman’s appeal. A preliminary autopsy indicates a drug overdose and state investigators say there is no evidence of foul play. Nonetheless, Horn’s family says she had bruises all over her limbs and they suggest the 23-year-old woman was beaten and poisoned. “It’s awful suspicious,” says her mother, Brenda Keene. “She gives the interview one day and dies the next.”
Horn’s death killed Coleman’s best chance, slim as it was, of winning a new appeal or getting a new trial. Right now, he’s just about out of legal maneuvers state or federal. Since Horn is obviously not available for cross-examination, Coleman’s lawyers fear her affidavit may be inadmissible in court. And while two other women have signed sworn statements charging that Ramey sexually attacked them, they cannot link him to the McCoy slaying. Those facts make it much less likely that a judge in state court would overlook Virginia’s requirement that new evidence be presented within 21 days of conviction.
Federal judges aren’t likely to be sympathetic, either, because the U.S. Supreme Court has made it so difficult to appeal in the final stages of a death-penalty case. Decades ago Congress made the federal judiciary the last hope of state prisoners challenging their incarceration. But that safeguard known as “habeas corpus” relief-has largely been obliterated. In a string of high-court decisions, the justices have made clear their frustration with a system of capital punishment that has produced only 167 executions in 16 years.
The system had followed the old axiom that nothing concentrates the mind like a hanging. There were so many defendants and so few able lawyers that possible legal flaws often weren’t really pursued until an execution loomed. At that point, appeals would get serious-and often successful. To end that, the Supreme Court made it nearly impossible for federal judges to throw out most death sentences. Only claims of innocence would seem to be good enough.
Yet even that, in practice, might not be true anymore. In February, the justices agreed to hear the strange case of Leonel Herrera, on death row in Texas for killing two police officers. His plea: new evidence that his late brother Raul confessed to the murders prior to his 1984 death, as well as the testimony of Raul’s son that he witnessed his father committing the crimes. The state maintains that Leonel’s evidence of innocence isn’t relevant at this point.
The court may be willing to listen to Herrera, but remarkably so far the justices have refused to stay his execution. (There were four of nine votes on the court to grant the appeal-that’s enough-but not the five required for a stay.) It wasn’t until minutes before the scheduled February execution that a Texas state court intervened. But, a month ago, another state judge disagreed, so Herrera now has a date at the high court in October-and a date in the electric chair on April 14. “The test of innocence is a unicorn,” says Dick Burr of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Everybody knows what it looks like, yet nobody has ever seen one.”
Back in Grundy, the folks haven’t even seen a Supreme Court justice. Quite apart from Teresa Horn’s mysteriously timed death, the case of Roger Coleman has both fascinated and unnerved this coal-mining hamlet of 1,300. For one thing, Wanda was a real McCoy, marrying into the sprawling mountain clan that feuded with the Hatfields nearby a century ago. To the locals, the story of her murder and her killer’s fate makes that hillbilly legend pale. “It’s the most bizarre thing that’s ever happened in this county,” says Tom Scott, who helped prosecute Coleman.
The town is split. “For a longtime everybody was so sure it was Coleman,” says Roger Potter of LeAnn’s Jewelry. “Now le have mixed emotions.” But Lodge Compton, editor of The Virginia Mountaineer, thinks otherwise. “All the girl’s death has done,” he says, is make for “a romantic jingle. The facts are the same as they always were.”
That’s not exactly a ringing tribute to Grundy justice. While the initial evidence against Coleman was plausible, it wasn’t airtight. The blood on his jeans, type 0, matched McCoy’s-and half the rest of the population. Pubic hairs at the crime scene and semen inside McCoy pointed to Coleman, but not in any scientifically conclusive way. Coleman also was in the area of the McCoy house the night of March 10, 1981. “It fit together like a puzzle,” says prosecutor Scott.
But the state’s version ignored inconsistencies. For example, the prosecution referred to Coleman’s three-inch knife as the murder weapon, yet didn’t explain two wounds in McCoy’s body four inches deep. Police officers said there was no evidence of forced entry but didn’t mention the pry mark on the victim’s front door. Moreover, recent genetic tests show the presence of two men’s sperm in McCoy’s vagina. Most important, the jailhouse informant who testified that Coleman confessed to him has since admitted to his mother-in-law that he contrived the account.
At the Mecklenburg Correctional Center in southern Virginia, Roger Coleman awaits his lot with haunting equanimity. A court hearing or two may be granted, and Gov. Douglas Wilder still hasn’t made a decision on clemency. “I’m trying to be optimistic,” says Coleman. “At the same time, I’m trying to prepare myself mentally and emotionally for May 20.” Jim McCloskey, the lay minister who has searched for exculpatory evidence for Coleman, admits time is short. “We better find something and we better find it soon,” he says. Coleman’s longtime friend, Sonya Vandyke, a waitress in Grundy, can’t understand what’s happening. “How can you execute a man when there is so much to show that he might be innocent?”
Perpetual disrespect for the finality of convictions disparages the entire criminal justice system.
–JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY, May 1991
were 2,547 inmates on death row as of December 1991. Only 14 were executed last year.
The average inmate spends eight years on death row.
Since 1972, 42 percent of those who filed federal appeals won new trials or vacated sentences.
