|
'Unbelievable,' Rice attorneys say of failure to check Evonitz
By PAMELA GOULD
Darrell Rice's attorneys waited more than three years to get details about the Y-STR testing conducted in the Shenandoah National Park slayings case.
When they finally learned what was done, they were surprised not by the results but by what was missing.
In January 2004, after seven years of forensic tests that ruled out Rice as the source of crime-scene evidence, and three months after the only tests on serial killer Richard Marc Evonitz couldn't exclude him as the killer, federal prosecutors hired a private lab to conduct one more cutting-edge exam.
But they didn't ask to have the evidence in the May 1996 slayings of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans tested against Evonitz, only Rice.
"The only reason you don't test it is you're afraid he could be the perpetrator and if he can't be excluded, it will be yet another nail [in your case]," said Gerald T. Zerkin, an assistant federal public defender based in Richmond who represented Rice. "You're afraid it will be more evidence that Darrell Rice didn't do it."
Co-counsel Claire Cardwell of Richmond agreed.
"It is unbelievable that they would not do that under the circumstances, and it tells me that they don't want to know the answer," she said.
The FBI and federal prosecutors sent seven items to ReliaGene Technologies Inc. in New Orleans for Y-STR testing, a forensic tool specifically for analyzing male DNA.
Only two items produced profiles, and those were only partial profiles. One excluded Rice; the other didn't exclude him or roughly half-48.8 percent-of the white males in the nation.
But when Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Bondurant appeared in federal court on Feb. 25, 2004, to drop charges against Rice, he continued suggesting that Rice was a killer and waved the report as if it held some magical power that could one day solve the crime.
He told U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon that releasing the results would "destroy the investigation."
Now knowing the results, Rice's attorneys say the only risk was for federal officials who were then preparing to ask Prince William County to pursue Rice in an abduction case.
"The only thing it would have done is give Darrell Rice permission to say I've been exonerated-and possibly it would have forced Bondurant to continue the investigation [in search of other suspects]," said Rice co-counsel Deirdre Enright of Charlottesville.
"It's unconscionable that you would look at those DNA results in light of everything else you know and still refer to Darrell as a prime suspect," she added.
"I have no idea what interest was served by not conducting further testing in this case other than protecting themselves for prosecuting an innocent man," Cardwell said.
Zerkin said federal officials' handling of the investigation has not only been patently unfair to Rice, but also is an insult to the families of the victims.
If federal authorities truly want to know who killed Williams and Winans, they would check all of the forensic evidence against Evonitz, said James G. Connell III, a Fairfax attorney who helped represent Rice.
"Either it will come back positive against Mr. Evonitz and the victims' families and law enforcement will have some closure, or it will come back negative and law enforcement will need to continue looking," he said.
Rice finds goal of quiet life elusive
By PAMELA GOULD
Darrell Rice has spent the past decade in the spotlight, pursued by federal authorities who were convinced he killed two, and possibly three, young women in Virginia.
Now, he says he just wants to live a quiet life with family and friends.
In an interview shortly after his release from federal prison, Rice said he had never killed anything except perhaps a mouse.
He admitted he harassed and may have scratched bicyclist Yvonne Malbasha in Shenandoah National Park in July 1997, the crime for which he was imprisoned. But he said, "I didn't intend to kill her or rape her or take her away in the truck."
He called it a "crazy thing" to do, but said it was prompted by a series of frustrations.
He reluctantly admitted he might be schizophrenic, but didn't use that to excuse or explain his actions.
Allegations stir fear
Rice also expressed anxiety about how he would be perceived by the public.
"I've got concerns about trying to find a job and people in public recognizing me," he said in late July.
Six weeks later, those worries were validated. After an anonymous tip that a "serial murderer" had moved into the small community of Kent Island, Md., hysteria ensued. The reaction raised such concern that Queen Anne's County Sheriff R. Gery Hofman III responded publicly, distributing an e–mail to squelch the wild stories.
The Sept. 14 e–mail addressed five rumors about Rice from that day alone:
He was "attempting to stop a school bus and attack children."
Police were chasing him down a local highway.
The local high school was in lock-down because of him.
He was at a local Exxon hiding from police.
He had removed his GPS monitor and was "stalking people."
Hofman refuted each rumor. He said Rice had been home all day, was wearing his fully functioning GPS monitor and had been visited by both his probation officer and a sheriff's deputy.
Hofman recently told The Free Lance–Star that Rice has created no problems but that the stir created by some residents strained his resources and required his deputies to monitor the area where Rice and his family live for their protection.
Rice's attorneys were so concerned for his safety that they posted a statement on the community's online forum. They said he had been "maliciously and falsely prosecuted," and listed the evidence for his innocence of all three slayings.
"You have nothing to fear from Darrell Rice, and we hope that he has nothing to fear from you," wrote attorneys Deirdre Enright, Gerald Zerkin, James G. Connell III and Claire Cardwell.
Afterward, people posted messages attacking the attorneys and continued the vitriol directed at Rice. One wrote that he would be "elated" if someone "took him out."
Release restrictions
Darrell Rice is to be supervised by federal probation officials for three years.
As a condition of living in Maryland with his mother and near his sister's family, he was also ordered to wear a GPS monitor for six months and undergo sex-offender treatment.
His attorneys initially balked at both additional requirements because they weren't ordered as part of his sentence, but relented so he could live with his family.
Rice's attempted-kidnapping conviction is not a sex crime, and thus he is not required to register as a sex offender.
Though they didn't like the idea of the ankle monitor, it worked to his benefit, providing an alibi for every accusation spread since his release, his attorneys noted in their second posting to the Kent Island community.
But in that note, they also expressed frustration with the unsubstantiated allegations that have haunted Rice for years.
"When you identify someone publicly as a serial killer, even falsely, you will invariably generate additional false accusations," they wrote.
Finding a family
Years ago, Darrell Rice bought infant-size, tie-dyed outfits for the children he planned to have one day.
Now, at age 40, Rice's hopes for a family of his own have dimmed.
In an interview, Rice was calm, patient and occasionally displayed a dry wit.
He wasn't interested in laying out the evidence of his innocence or bemoaning the extra prison time he served because of federal authorities' view of him as a killer.
The one distress he shared was that his father died during his 10 years in prison.
Now, Rice just wants to pursue his simple pleasures: playing guitar, catching up on movies, watching the Redskins and enjoying time with his family and friends.
He doesn't have ambitions for a career. He doesn't view himself as beginning life anew. And he doesn't want to dwell on the accusations-and possible death sentence-that dogged him for years.
Once he had good attorneys, he was confident they would prove his innocence, he said.
He grew especially close to Enright, who made him feel like part of her family. It was her home he chose as his first stop after leaving prison on July 17.
He wanted to meet in person her husband and their four children, whose milestones he had heard about and with whom he had chatted over the years.
And he wanted to sit down to a meal in the house he had pictured during countless conversations with Enright.
"When I was at the jail, it helped a lot being a member of her family," Rice said. "It helped a lot."
FBI: Charges right move, despite flaws
The FBI supervisor responsible for the Shenandoah National Park slayings investigation admitted the case against Darrell Rice was never strong.
He acknowledged that the case lacked forensic evidence, a confession, a murder weapon, a motive or anything directly linking Rice to the crime. But he said he felt it was sufficient to seek an indictment and he supported taking that step.
'I think all of us were aware that this wasn't the strongest case in the world'the lack of an eyewitness and compelling forensic evidence,' said Donald W. Thompson Jr., who supervised the FBI's Richmond Division from February 1998 until his July 2006 retirement.
'I think we all felt we weren't going to be comfortable unless we strengthened it before we went to trial,' he said. 'We did everything we could to shore it up and bring in other information.
'Clearly, [Rice] was not the best of subjects, but the only game in town at that point.'
Thompson said Rice was investigated in Alicia Showalter Reynolds' slaying and other 29 Stalker cases as part of a thorough investigation.
'I think he was pursued along those lines not to bolster or strengthen the Shenandoah case, but it was the right thing to do if he was responsible for a broader array of crimes,' he said.
'If you really think a guy is a bad guy and he needs to be off the street, your thought process could be, maybe we should look at this and give it a whirl'and maybe we get lucky. There's nothing to lose.'
Lawrence J. Barry, chief counsel and former spokesman for the FBI's Richmond Division, said he never released a statement saying the Shenandoah slayings and Reynolds' killing were committed by the same person.
'If the prosecutor did, you'd have to talk to him about that,' he said.
Neither John Brownlee, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, nor Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Bondurant, lead prosecutor in the Rice case, would agree to be interviewed.
Charles J. Cunningham, the current special agent in charge of the FBI's Richmond Division, said Brownlee's office and the Department of Justice instructed him not to discuss the investigation because it's an open case.
Thompson said he wasn't aware of the forensic results showing serial killer Richard Marc Evonitz couldn't be ruled out as the source of two head hairs found at the Shenandoah slayings scene'one on a glove and the other within layers of duct tape wrapped around Lollie Winans' wrists.
'That's news to me,' he said.
But, in contradiction to FBI Lab hairs-and-fibers expert Douglas Deedrick, Thompson downplayed its significance. He said the hair could have been on the tape for months and come from countless sources.
'That in and of itself doesn't mean your subject or suspect isn't the person responsible,' he said.
Thompson said he saw no reason to eliminate Rice from consideration in the Shenandoah slayings.
'I by no means think we should walk away from him, and I would tell the office pursuing the investigation to either strengthen or appropriately rebut it,' he said. 'If he didn't do it, I would want to know and I think we should want to know. I don't think we should close our minds to it.'
Cunningham said the case remains active and unsolved.
Last year, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia reviewed the case, but spokesman Channing Phillips would not comment on the outcome.
Regardless of how the situation might look, Cunningham said, federal officials weren't more interested in pinning a crime on Rice than in seeking the truth.
'We never try to do that,' he said. 'That's not something I would condone. We are out for truth and justice for the guilty party, not to fit a round peg in a square hole.'
'Pamela Gould
Culpeper prosecutor: Rice not a suspect
Neither Culpeper County Commonwealth's Attorney Gary Close nor Virginia State Police ever named Darrell Rice as a suspect in Alicia Showalter Reynolds' slaying.
'I've never had any plans or discussions to indict him and I don't plan on doing so,' Close told The Free Lance'Star in an interview for this project. 'Just to even discuss him really gives his name a lot more weight and merit than it really deserves.'
State police first checked out Rice immediately after his July 1997 arrest, using screening tactics employed with more than 1,000 other suspects in the case.
Within weeks, they showed his photo to one of two women used repeatedly to weed out suspects, and she didn't identify him. During the same period, they examined his truck but found it wasn't a black Nissan with teal-colored accents and an automatic transmission, the type of vehicle state police zeroed in on based on witness descriptions.
Rice was 28 at the time, whereas police sought a 35- to 45-year-old man, state police reports show.
Additionally, by early 1996, Rice had just a tuft of hair atop his head, his 1995 driver's license photo shows. By contrast, several women described the Route 29 Stalker'the man suspected of killing Reynolds'as having stringy hair he habitually brushed out of his face.
In 1997, state police didn't even bother with a step taken with other 29 Stalker suspects'checking Rice's fingerprints against prints found in Reynolds' slaying and the stops of other women drivers.
Rick Jenkins, now a state police captain and head of criminal investigations for the Culpeper area, refused to discuss his department's process in evaluating Rice.
He wouldn't discuss why the department returned to Rice just as he was to be indicted on federal charges in April 2002, nor why state police suddenly requested forensic checks of him immediately after that indictment.
But when asked about the state police's involvement in both the federal murder and state abduction prosecutions, Jenkins said the department 'supports' other departments if it can.
Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert said he continues to see Rice as a 'prime suspect' in Reynolds' slaying'though it's not his case to prosecute'and as the 29 Stalker.
He was unaware, however, that two women who rode with the Stalker said Rice wasn't the man, and said that would probably be significant to him if the women were certain.
State police have checked out thousands of men'hundreds since learning about Rice'and said they are currently hoping for a confession or a tip from the public to help them resolve the case.
'I don't know who killed Alicia Showalter Reynolds and I'm not sure anybody else knows, either,' Close said.
But he said criminal investigations should be approached with an open mind.
'The evidence will lead to the suspect,' Close said. 'You don't put a bull's-eye on somebody and work toward it. In my opinion, that's not how you come up with a suspect.'
'Pamela Gould
|
