Killers in the Family

by Robert L. Snow

  The next afternoon, Pam went on, the police showed up at 1428 North Bosart Street. She drove up to the house with Paul Sr. in the car. Because the police were there, he wouldn’t get out, but had her drive up the street a bit. He told her to call him at the Woodcutter’s Bar when she found out why the police were there. Pam told the court that she didn’t call him.

  The defense attorney, upon cross-examination, asked Pam why she didn’t say anything to the police in her statement about Paul Sr. telling her not to go down into the basement. She said she hadn’t thought it was relevant at the time. The defense also asked if the washer and dryer even worked. Pam wasn’t certain.

  This ended the testimony for the day, and the judge admonished the jurors not to talk to anyone about the case.

  —

  On June 21, 2012, the prosecution began the day by bringing Carol Luken to the witness stand. After the bailiff had sworn her in, she told the court that in 1986 she’d lived on Nolan Avenue, which ran alongside the Reese house. From her home she’d had a clear view of the rear of the Reese house, which sat about seventy-five feet away. She said that she had seen Dawn Stuard at the Reese house several times.

  The prosecution asked if there was some reason she had been up at around 1:00 A.M. on March 17, 1986.

  “My dog had puppies and she wouldn’t take care of them,” Carol Luken told the jurors. “So I was up most of the night trying to keep the puppies alive.”

  “Was the area around your house and the Reeses’ lighted?” the prosecution asked.

  “There were two streetlights nearby.”

  The prosecution then asked Carol to tell the court about the events of that morning.

  She told them that she looked out her kitchen window and, “I seen them [the Reeses] take the green car and shove it out into the street. The only reason I know this is because it was very loud.” She said she also heard “loud talking, just real loud, and banging doors and stuff.”

  The prosecution asked what happened next. “They were pushing the car out onto the street,” she went on, “the two boys were. And then one of them backed up the brown station wagon.” She said she recognized one of the boys as Paul Jr. but couldn’t tell who the other boy was.

  When asked what they did with the brown station wagon, she answered, “It was backed up to the back door. All I seen was that they carried out a rolled-up rug and put it in the back of the station wagon.”

  The prosecutor asked who “they” were, and Carol said, “That would have been Paul Reese Jr. and Paul Reese Sr.”

  “Did you notice anything in particular about the rug?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Yes, it sagged in the middle.”

  Carol Luken said that Barbara Reese opened the tailgate and drove the station wagon away with the headlights out. She also said that a lighter colored car followed behind the station wagon.

  When asked why she had waited so long to report what she had witnessed, Carol said that she was frightened of the Reese family. However, she added, she felt guilty about not telling what had happened, so she eventually told a coworker about it, who then contacted Detective West. She said she suspected that her coworker would tell the proper people, because he was a reserve deputy sheriff.

  The defense, during cross-examination, went over her testimony again but didn’t uncover anything new.

  When Carol Luken stepped down, Detective Sergeant Roy West once more took the witness stand and was asked what had happened to the Dawn Marie Stuard case after the prosecution closed it in 1987.

  “I would continue to look at the case during my other investigations,” he said, “to see if there were any additional people to talk to. A few times information would come in during those years. I would follow that information up, but nothing resulted from it.” Two of these tips, he said, came from Crime Stoppers and named two specific men as suspects. However, West said, after he interviewed the men and checked out their stories, he eventually dropped both of them as suspects.

  West then went on to tell the jurors about receiving a letter that a man named DeAngelo Gaines had sent to the police department. It had been postmarked December 17, 2010. In the letter Gaines claimed that Paul Reese Sr. had confessed Dawn’s murder to him and that he was willing to testify in court about it. West interviewed Gaines on January 6, 2011. The prosecution then asked West if Gaines had been offered anything in return for his testimony. He said no.

  DeAngelo Gaines then took the witness stand. He wore what appeared to be a small helmet. The prosecutor asked him about that and Gaines said it was to protect his head because he had epilepsy and grand mal seizures. He then told the jurors that he had been in the Marion County Jail, cell block 4D, on a burglary charge. The jailers put Paul Reese Sr. in the cell next to him, and they talked. “He told me he did something, that he was paying for something that was unrelated to what he was in for now. He said that he deserved it because he took someone’s life. He said it happened over a quarter century before. It was a person who lived in the neighborhood.”

  Gaines went on to say that he ran into Paul Reese Sr. about four months later in the Pendleton Correctional Facility cafeteria, and that he was frightened because he had already written the letter and didn’t know if Paul Sr. knew about it. When they spoke in the cafeteria, Gaines found that Paul Sr.’s attitude had changed since they’d talked in the Marion County Jail.

  “He told me that he couldn’t be convicted,” Gaines told the jurors, “that the statute of limitations had run out on the crime. He told me that he could tell the President about it, and they couldn’t do anything. He also told me that it was a young girl who was a friend of his youngest son, but that she had just stayed too late.” Then, Gaines added, they had talked again later and Paul Sr. told him that he had hidden the body up near 21st or 26th Street.

  The defense attorney, on cross-examination, asked if Gaines was having memory problems because of his seizures. Gaines replied not about Paul Reese Sr. Wall then tried to get Gaines to say that he had written the letter to the police in the hope that it would help with a post-conviction relief request he had submitted, but he said that that process was already over by the time he wrote the letter. He told the court that the judge in the case had already told him that since he had pleaded guilty, he had no grounds for an appeal. The defense attorney continued with a lengthy cross-examination in an attempt to get Gaines to say that he had written the letter because he hoped to get something in return, but she couldn’t get him to.

  “He wants you to believe that after one day of knowing him, [Paul Reese Sr.] told him all of his deepest, darkest secrets,” defense attorney Michelle Wall would later tell the jury. “It makes no sense. They didn’t even know each other. You cannot believe anything he says.” Still, when Wall asked DeAngelo Gaines if the state had offered him a reduced sentence for his testimony, he answered, “No, they haven’t. They wouldn’t even buy me lunch.” This brought a laugh from the courtroom. There was then considerable recross and redirect questioning, but Gaines never wavered from his statement that he didn’t expect, nor did he receive, anything for his testimony. The judge, seeing that the prosecution and the defense had no more questions, excused the witness.

  Following DeAngelo Gaines’s testimony, the prosecution asked that some stipulations the defense had agreed to be read into the record, specifically that the keeper of the records at the Marion County Jail confirmed that DeAngelo Gaines and Paul Reese Sr. had been in adjoining cells in cell block 4 at the same time. Also, the keeper of the records for the Pendleton Correctional Facility confirmed that Gaines and Paul Sr. had been there together in early 2011.

  The prosecution next called Robert McCurdy to the witness stand. He told the court that he was a Ph.D. who worked for the Marion County Crime Lab. He said that he had examined the paint on the newspapers West had collected in 1986, both at the crime scene and from the Reese house, and found that they had a
common origin.

  The defense had no cross-examination.

  Next, the prosecution had another stipulation read into the record. The stipulation said that John Mann of the Marion County Crime Lab had in 1986 examined the carpet samples taken from Dawn’s body, from the Reese house, and from East 19th Street and North Forest Manor Avenue. He said at the time that they may all have had a common origin.

  Prosecutor Denise Robinson had warned the jury in her opening statement that they would hear a lot about carpeting and carpet fibers during the trial, and they did. The carpet fibers found on Dawn’s body were fragile and easily displaced. This meant that she had had contact with the carpeting just before or after she had died. Therefore, the carpet fibers that had been found on her body and at the dump site on East 23rd Street came from the site where she had been murdered.

  “I was sick of hearing about carpet fibers,” admitted Ted’s wife, Linda Stuard, “but I knew it was important to the case.”

  Following the stipulation about John Mann’s examination of the carpet fibers in 1986, the prosecution next called Dirk Shaw to the witness stand. He told the court that he worked as a trace chemist at the Marion County Crime Lab. He said that the Crime Lab now had a Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometer (FTIR). This device, he said, would tell exactly what type of fiber was being examined and would also run a spectra on the fiber. He added that, unlike in 1986, the crime lab now also had a melting point apparatus and a digital microscope. He told the jurors that he had been asked to reexamine the fibers in the Dawn Marie Stuard case, and that he took samples from every location the fibers had been collected. He then put up on an overhead projector the six samples he had tested.

  Shaw told the jury, “These are the six submissions of carpet . . . to show that they were all manufactured with specifically the same type of twist.” The carpet samples being examined, he said, all had an “S” twist, which is a specific way the carpet was manufactured. He testified that all of the carpeting samples had identical coloring, even though some of them had been stained and some of them faded from age.

  He then put up slides on the overhead projector that displayed the samples of carpeting laid side by side and viewed under a digital microscope to show that they were identical. Next, he put up slides of the fibers lit with special lighting to show their identical interference patterns. Shaw told the jury that he then subjected the fibers to solubility testing, measured at what temperature the fibers melted, and dissolved the fibers in acid to see what color they produced.

  The results of this testing, he told the court, were that all of the fibers melted at exactly the same temperature, all of the fibers produced the same color when dissolved in acid, and when examined with the FTIR spectrometer, the spectrum showed all of the samples to be identical.

  The prosecution then asked, “So after all that, what can you tell us about these fibers and pieces of carpet based on your scientific opinion?”

  Shaw responded, “After all that testing I could not find anything to differentiate any of the samples from one another.”

  The defense had no cross-examination, and the judge excused the chemist.

  Sarah Klassen, a serologist at the Marion County Crime Lab, next took the witness stand. The prosecution used her simply to identify various pieces of evidence examined by the crime lab so that they could be entered later into evidence.

  Following Klassen, Shelley Crispin testified. After being sworn in, she told the court that she was a forensic scientist in the DNA section of the Marion County Crime Lab. She talked for several minutes about what DNA was and how it could distinguish one person from another. She then spoke about restriction fragment length polymorphism, which was the type of DNA testing done in the 1990s, and how it needed a quarter-size sample in order to be tested. Crispin next told the jurors about short tandem repeat analysis, which was the type of DNA analysis used today, and how it only needed a microscopic sample in order to be tested.

  The prosecution then asked her about item number 63, the blood sample taken from the brick furnace flue in the basement of the Reese home. Who did it belong to?

  Crispin told the court that, minus an identical twin, the blood belonged to Dawn Marie Stuard.

  Upon cross-examination, the defense asked Shelley Crispin if she could tell how long the blood had been there before collection, and she answered no. The defense then asked her if she could tell where on Dawn’s body the blood had come from, and again she answered no.

  Defense attorney Michelle Wall said that she wouldn’t contest the finding of the DNA analysis of the blood since DNA analysis had been shown to be reliable. But, she added, she also wouldn’t try to explain why the blood was there. “We do not have to come up with an alternate theory,” she said in an article in the Indianapolis Star. “We just have to show that the prosecution did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  Following Shelley Crispin, the prosecution once again called Detective Roy West to the witness stand. They wanted to discredit the defense attorney’s strategy of saying that there had been a lot of people in the house on Bosart Street that day and that any one of them could have killed Dawn.

  The prosecutor asked West if he could account for the whereabouts of Paul Reese Jr. during the time the coroner said Dawn had been murdered. West answered yes, that he had witnesses who had seen Paul Jr. at the Liberty Bell Flea Market on West Washington Street during that time. The only time Paul Jr. wasn’t in sight was when he left for thirty minutes, but a trip back and forth to the house on Bosart Street would have taken at least eighty minutes.

  The prosecution next asked if West could corroborate younger son Brian Reese’s story of being away from the house most of the day on March 16, 1986. West answered that he was able to confirm that Brian had left at around 11:00 A.M. to noon and spent the day with friends at their home at East 9th Street and North Arlington Avenue.

  “John and Jeremy Reese were confined that day at the Juvenile Center, correct?” the prosecutor continued.

  “Yes.”

  “Was Doyle Stinson ever in the house that Sunday?”

  “No.”

  “Archie Ward and his girlfriend were in the house between 5:30 and 6:00 P.M., correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Besides what we’ve talked about, who can you place inside the house during the day of March 16, 1986?” the prosecution asked.

  “Paul Reese Sr., Barbara, Jenny, Cindy, Pam, and, of course, Dawn Stuard.”

  “What significance did you give to Pam saying that it looked like Paul Reese Sr. had just taken a shower before she returned to the Reese house on March 16, 1986?”

  “Seeing the living conditions within the home and the personal hygiene of the individuals living in the home,” West answered, “I felt it was significant that Mr. Reese would have been taking a shower at that time of day.”

  “And to your knowledge who was the last person to see Dawn Stuard alive?”

  “Doyle Stinson, between noon and 2:00 P.M.”

  “And that was at?”

  “At 1428 North Bosart Street.”

  “The next person arriving at the house would have been?” the prosecution continued.

  “Pam Winningham at between 4:15 and 4:30 P.M.”

  “And when did you first talk to Paul Reese Sr.?”

  “At police headquarters at around 6:15 P.M. the night of March 17, 1986. He wasn’t a suspect then. I was just trying to get some information on Dawn Stuard.”

  The prosecutor then went over the initial statement West had taken from Paul Reese Sr., and after West had told the court about it, the prosecutor asked if West had taken a second statement from Paul Sr. He answered yes, and also noted that by the time of the second interview, taken on April 15, 1986, he now suspected that Paul Reese Sr. had in fact murdered Dawn Marie Stuard.

  West said he asked Paul Sr. if he thoug
ht Dawn was attractive. West said that Paul Sr. answered, “Yes, she was pretty nice looking.” Then West asked him if he had been sexually attracted to Dawn, more interested in seeing Paul Sr.’s body language than hearing his answer. West said Paul Sr. hesitated a bit and then replied, “No, not really, no.” West found the hesitation a confirmation that Paul Sr. had in fact been sexually attracted to the girl.

  West said he then asked Paul Sr. if there would be any reason for his fingerprints to be on Dawn Stuard. At first, West told the court, Paul Sr. said no, but then got to thinking about it and said, “Well, she had a habit of getting up on the pool table and I would pull her off.”

  In response to the next prosecution question, and to let the court know that the blood being spattered on the brick furnace flue had likely occurred that day, Detective West told the jurors that he had talked to Dawn’s family, friends, and people associated with the Reese house. “I never learned of any injuries to Dawn Stuard around the Reese house.”

  The defense then began its cross-examination of Detective West. Michelle Wall asked if Paul Reese Sr. had voluntarily supplied his shoes to match against a footprint found at the crime scene on East 23rd Street. West responded that he had taken Paul Sr.’s shoes when he served the search warrant. Wall then asked, “Were all of the statements Mr. Reese gave you consistent?”

  “Yes, he continued to deny involvement in Dawn’s death,” West answered.

  “Have you over the years received tips about other suspects in this case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it true that Dawn had some bruises before she went to the Reese house on March 16, 1986?”

  “Yes, a few.”

  Wall then asked Detective West about how many unsolved cases he’d had as a homicide detective. West responded that he had investigated over 125 murders and had 15 still unsolved. She then asked about Barbara Reese, who at five feet four and 173 pounds would have been bigger and stronger than Dawn. Couldn’t she have easily overpowered Dawn? Following this, Wall then moved on to asking about all of the people who had been in and out of the Reese house on March 16, 1986, and whether some of the timing of the events that day could be off. West said that there were no clocks in the house, so it was possible. Finally, the defense asked West if it was really that unusual for Paul Reese Sr. to have taken a shower at 4:00 P.M. West said that based on the condition of the house and the people in it, yes.