Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  Almost immediately, death penalty opponents began a quest for a case that would demonstrate, in the most direct way possible, the folly of allowing the state to execute human beings. This would have to be a case in which it could be proven, beyond all reasonable doubt, that a man or woman had been put to death for a crime he or she did not commit.

  They looked for several years without success. Then came the case of Roger Keith Coleman.

  Grundy, Virginia, is in the southwestern corner of the state. It’s about thirteen miles to the West Virginia border, fifteen miles to Kentucky, and only about fifty miles from both North Carolina and Tennessee. The seat of Buchanan County, Grundy is in the heart of Appalachia. Like many small towns along that mountain chain, its main livelihood is coal.

  On Tuesday, March 10, 1981, at about two-fifteen in the afternoon, twenty-one-year-old Bradley D. McCoy left his small brick and white-siding home near Slate Creek on the outskirts of Grundy for his three o’clock shift at the United Coal Company. Management considered Brad a smart and enthusiastic worker, so he had been assigned to be a parts clerk, rather than being sent down the mine. During a break at about 9:00 P.M., he called his wife, Wanda Faye. Wanda was nineteen, wasn’t employed and wasn’t all that comfortable being home alone while Brad was at work. So he liked to call around this time and check up on her. They talked about common things, such as what they would do with the tax refund they were expecting.

  When Brad returned home around 11:15 P.M., he was surprised that the outside of the house was dark. Wanda usually left the porch light on for him. Also, the storm door was unlocked; Wanda was usually more careful than that. He let himself in the front door with his key and stepped into the living room. The room light and television were on; the coffee table was out of place; he saw what looked like small drops of blood on the floor. He called to Wanda, but he got no response.

  Rushing to the bedroom, he found Wanda on the floor on her back. Her arms were over her head. Her hair was pulled across her face, and her legs were spread straight out. Her cable-knit sweater and bra were pushed up around her neck. Her dark blue panties were twisted around her left ankle, and her blue jeans lay on the bed. The only articles of clothing that remained in place were her blue-striped socks. There was significant blood on her chest, her neck and the side of her head.

  Horrified as he was, Brad had enough presence of mind not to touch the body. He called his father, Max, a retired coal miner known as “Hezzie,” who lived nearby. Hezzie called the Buchanan County Sheriff ’s Department; then he went to Brad and Wanda’s house to await law enforcement.

  Sergeant Steven D. Coleman was first on scene, arriving at about 11:25 P.M., accompanied by another officer. He tried to check Wanda’s neck for any sign of a pulse, but it was so severely cut that he couldn’t even find an intact vessel.

  Within minutes, the Grundy chief of police Randall S. Jackson arrived. He felt Wanda’s wrist, which he said was still warm, but he couldn’t detect any pulse, either. He ordered the entire scene secured and sent for medical examiner (ME) Thomas D. McDonald. Dr. McDonald lived nearby and came quickly. He made the death pronouncement and determined that the “slashing wound to the throat” was the cause. Based on the body temperature and the lack of rigor mortis, he concluded the time of death was within thirty minutes either way of 10:30 P.M. He decided not to move the body until a state police special investigation unit could examine the scene.

  Once the crime scene team had finished, the body was transported to Roanoke, where an autopsy performed by Dr. David W. Oxley confirmed Dr. McDonald’s findings. The slashing was so brutal and deep that the right carotid artery, jugular vein and larynx were all severed. Two deep stab wounds to the chest had penetrated the heart and lung, but since there was little hemorrhaging, Oxley concluded that they were inflicted postmortem, or at least after the arterial wound cut off blood pressure. He found two foreign hairs in the genital region.

  The brutal murder sent predictable shock waves through this small town. Brad told investigators that Wanda was a naturally shy person and skittish about staying home alone, particularly at night. Had I been assisting on this case, this would have been a key piece of the victimology, particularly since the front door was locked when Brad returned home. He said there were only three men in town for whom she comfortably would have opened the door. The police were quickly able to alibi two of them.

  The third was Wanda’s brother-in-law, Roger Keith Coleman, twenty-two years of age and married to her sixteen-year-old sister, Patricia. Wanda and Patricia were the two youngest of a family of eight boys and eight girls. Like Brad’s father, Wanda’s dad was a retired coal miner. Roger and Patricia lived in his grandmother’s house, about a five-minute walk from the McCoys’.

  Coleman was arrested on April 13. He denied any knowledge of the crime, saying he would have no reason or motive to rape and kill his wife’s sister. He said he could account for his whereabouts the evening of the murder, with witnesses to alibi him.

  On the night in question, he showed up for his shift as a miner at the TJ and M Coal Company, only to learn that the entire shift had been canceled. He detailed for police where he had been since leaving his house, ending up at a bathhouse in town where miners often showered and changed clothes before returning home. He willingly turned over to the state police a plastic bag containing the clothing he was wearing that night. He also agreed to give samples of blood, hair and saliva without the police having to seek a warrant.

  Despite his cooperative attitude and profession of innocence, police had a compelling reason to suspect Coleman.

  On April 7, 1977, elementary-school teacher Brenda Ratliff ’s house had been broken into. The intruder pulled a gun on her, made her tie her six-year-old daughter, Megan, to a chair, then forced the woman to an upstairs bedroom, where he tore off her clothing. Despite her pleading, he jumped on top of her and told her, “Don’t make me mad!”

  As he was assaulting her, he put down his gun, at which point Brenda struggled free, called out to Megan and ran downstairs. She managed to get the still-bound little girl out to the porch before the attacker caught up with them. He tried to drag them both back into the house. But by this point, neighbors had heard Brenda’s screams, so the intruder fled.

  She identified Roger Coleman as her attacker; and though he claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, she said he stalked her on the street and tried to intimidate her as he was free on bail awaiting trial. He was convicted and served two years in prison for aggravated assault, always claiming he was innocent.

  Then, about two months before Wanda McCoy was murdered, county librarian Pat Hatfield said Coleman came into the library shortly before closing time, exposed himself and exhibited what she characterized as hostile behavior. Coleman denied it, but Hatfield insisted her ID was correct.

  Things only went downhill for Coleman from there. While he was being held pending trial, a cellmate, Roger Matney, claimed Coleman told him he and another man had raped Wanda McCoy. This became a key piece of the prosecution’s case when Coleman went to trial in March 1982, just a little over a year after the murder. A week before the trial began, at the prosecution’s urging, Matney was released from serving the remainder of four concurrent four-year prison sentences. At some point later, his mother-in-law claimed he had admitted fabricating the story, but Matney denied this.

  In addition to Matney’s testimony, Commonwealth Attorneys Michael McGlothlin and Thomas Scott cited the lack of forced entry, as suggesting an offender known to the victim, and several hair and fluid samples. The hairs found on the body were consistent with Coleman’s and his semen sample put him in the 10 percent of the population that matched one of the two types found on the body (through blood secretion). The other matched Brad. Some specks found on the defendant’s clothing were the same blood type as Wanda McCoy. The prosecutors asserted that wet pant legs on Coleman’s jeans came from his having to wade across Slate Creek. Also, given the notoriety of the crime, it’s lik
ely most, if not all, of the jurors knew of the previous conviction and might have considered it as evidence of Roger Coleman’s emotional and physical capability of committing violent rape.

  The defense was headed by Coleman’s court-appointed attorney, Terry Jordan, who was just two years out of law school and had tried only one murder case. He expressed hesitation about taking on Coleman’s defense. However, when the judge insisted, he proceeded gamely. He countered McGlothlin by showing that a pry mark on the front door was a definite sign of forced entry and that various defensive wounds on the victim showed that she had indeed put up a fight, which would indicate a stranger. Jordan noted that this was a purely circumstantial case, with no established motive and no witnesses, and that while the semen could have come from Brad and Roger, it could also have come from a lot of other individuals and certainly was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Also, when the evidence team vacuumed the McCoy house, they retrieved numerous hairs that did not match Coleman’s. As far as the wet pants legs, Coleman said that easily could have happened when he showered and changed clothes before going home.

  There was also the matter of a McCoy neighbor who discovered a bag containing bloody sheets and two Western-style shirts. The prosecution dismissed this potential evidence as irrelevant and the defense made no challenge.

  Most tellingly, though, Coleman had several witnesses who could vouch for his whereabouts for almost the entire evening. In other words, there would have been insufficient time for Coleman to park his truck, get down into the creek, cross it in ten-inch-deep water and go up the other side, climb a thousand-foot hill, get to Wanda’s house, have her open the door, overpower her, rape her, stab her repeatedly and practically saw off her head, and do it all so carefully and efficiently that he left no obvious traces of himself or his traversing of the creek—not even a muddy smudge or footprint. With the horrifically gory state of the body and the crime scene, the defense reasoned, shouldn’t Coleman’s clothing have been covered with blood? Despite the defensive wounds on Wanda’s body that indicated a struggle, Roger didn’t have a scratch on him. And didn’t he cooperate with every investigative request of the police and willingly surrender potential evidence? Was that the behavior of a guilty man?

  The trial lasted four days, during which the prosecution stressed the supposed jailhouse confession and the suggestive blood and semen evidence, and did its best to poke holes in the defense’s timeline covered by witnesses who had seen Coleman at various times during the evening.

  The jury took only three hours to deliberate. On March 18, 1982, shortly before 11:00 P.M., they returned a verdict of guilty of rape and first-degree murder. The next morning, Coleman’s attorney moved to have the verdict set aside on the grounds of insufficient evidence. The judge denied the motion. The defense had tried for a change of venue before the trial began, arguing that the brutality of the crime had so affected the Grundy community that no one accused could get a fair trial there. A sign put up at the gas station near the somber gray stone courthouse proclaimed: IT’S TIME FOR A NEW HANGING TREE IN GRUNDY. The change of venue request had also been denied.

  At the sentencing hearing, the prosecution was allowed to bring in Coleman’s prior rape conviction and allowed the victim, Brenda Ratliff, to testify. On April 23, Roger Keith Coleman was sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and death for the murder.

  Coleman didn’t give up. He appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court, but he was denied. The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear his case. He then filed a writ of habeas corpus with the Buchanan County Circuit Court, raising several constitutional arguments against his sentence. The court held a two-day evidentiary hearing; then it denied all of Coleman’s claims, entering its final judgment on September 4, 1986.

  He next appealed back to the Virginia Supreme Court, but the court dismissed his motion on a technicality: Coleman’s attorneys had not filed the appeal within the statutory thirty days of final judgment. Through a clerical error, they had missed the deadline by three days. He exhausted all of his federal appeals without success.

  While sitting on death row, as a result of his continued protestations of “actual innocence” (as opposed to merely a procedural or legal mistake in his arrest or trial), he had attracted a formidable new defense team, far stronger and more experienced than the one that had originally represented him. James McCloskey was an investigator from New Jersey who, convinced of Coleman’s innocence, worked for years to prove it. His Centurion Ministries was—and is—an effective innocence project headquartered in Princeton, dedicated to reversing the sentences of those wrongly convicted, particularly in the case of murder. Kathleen “Kitty” Behan was an attorney with the powerful Washington, DC, law firm Arnold & Porter. Both worked long hours completely pro bono.

  In addition to exploring every investigative lead and legal option, Coleman’s team did an exemplary job of publicizing his case and making his impending death sentence into a national, then worldwide, cause. This might not seem all that important, since it is the courts and not the public that are the ultimate decision-makers. But in our imperfect and overburdened criminal justice system, effective publicity literally can mean the difference between life and death.

  The attorneys pointed out that there were no witnesses for the prosecution and plenty for the defense, no credible motive and that the case against Coleman was purely circumstantial. We must point out here that that, in itself, is not necessarily a negative. Most cases are circumstantial, and circumstantial evidence can often be more reliable than eyewitnesses. Also, except in the instance of felony murder, in which a killing is committed during the performance of another felony, such as a bank robbery, or when one victim escapes after another one has been killed, witnessed murders are rare. By the very nature of the crime, few are alive to tell the tale. Sightings of escaping fugitives are sometimes helpful, but often wrong.

  Despite McCloskey’s and Behan’s best efforts, and despite repeated declarations of innocence, the long legal appeals process moved inexorably toward Roger Coleman’s rendezvous with Virginia’s electric chair. Protests were coming in from all over the world. Many of these were demanding that the remaining fluid samples be retested, now that DNA science was becoming more sophisticated and specific. The state denied all such requests. By this time, Wanda’s sister Patricia had divorced Roger. He now had a girlfriend, Sharon Paul, a college student whom he had met by mail while in prison.

  As the date of execution drew near, the public response continued to mount. Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa and Amnesty International sent pleas to Virginia governor Douglas Wilder to grant clemency. The May 18, 1992, issue of Time had a photograph of Coleman on its cover. Sitting against a cinder block wall in a blue shirt, black pants and work boots, hands in his lap, he looked like an ordinary, good-looking everyman. The message of the picture was clear: If it can happen to him, it can happen to any of us.

  Over the photograph, in type large enough to cover most of the page, was written:

  THIS MAN MIGHT BE

  INNOCENT

  THIS MAN IS DUE TO

  DIE

  ROGER KEITH COLEMAN WAS CONVICTED OF

  KILLING HIS SISTER-IN-LAW IN 1982. THE COURTS

  HAVE REFUSED TO HEAR THE EVIDENCE THAT COULD

  SAVE HIM. HIS EXECUTION IS SET FOR MAY 20.

  Mr. Wilder, a former defense attorney and the first African American elected governor of Virginia, was a pro–death penalty Democrat. But he could not have been unaffected by the outpouring of support for Coleman or his own need for some sort of personal validation of justice. So early on the morning of May 20, Coleman was taken from his holding cell in the Virginia death house at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt and driven by prison van seventy miles to a Virginia State Police office in Hanover County, where he was given a polygraph exam. Predictably, he failed.

  When you’ve got a man on the morning of his scheduled execution, who hasn’t eaten or slept, knowing that his
life literally depends on what some unknown examiner thinks of his responses, how can you possibly consider this test a reliable indicator of anything? Remember, a polygraph works through indirect, nonspecific indicators such as galvanic skin response and respiration, and so in my opinion it shows emotion in general rather than necessarily truthfulness. Under similar conditions, if I stated that the sky was blue, I’d probably come off as untruthful. Also, McCloskey had his own polygraph examiner ready to review the results. However, through some apparent administrative slipup, he was given the wrong address, so he never even got there.

  The failed polygraph was enough for Governor Wilder to deny clemency. “I wanted to make certain every avenue was opened and made available so as to remove any vestiges that Virginia was not interested in affording fair and adequate opportunities for persons to receive fair trials,” he explained to a group of reporters. Just before noon, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down a request for a stay of execution. The countdown to death was set in motion.

  Meanwhile, thousands of letters and phone calls were pouring into the governor’s office in Richmond, all but a handful protesting the execution. Of those that favored it, almost all came from the Grundy area, according to one of the governor’s aides.

  James McCloskey, known as “Jim,” and Kitty Behan were with Coleman for several hours and shared his last meal of pepperoni pizza, chocolate marshmallow cookies and 7UP. They noted that he had grown surprisingly calm. “He was in remarkably good humor,” McCloskey reported. Behan had not given up and still had a final appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court.

  The electrocution was scheduled for 11:00 P.M., but it was held up pending the U.S. Supreme Court’s final word. At 10:59 P.M., it announced it was refusing to take any action. The vote was 7–2, with Justices Harry Blackmun and David Souter dissenting.

  As he was being strapped into the electric chair, Coleman was given the opportunity to make a final statement: “An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight. When my innocence is proven, I hope Americans will realize the injustice of the death penalty, as all other civilized countries have. My last words are to the woman I love. Love is eternal. My love for you will last forever. I love you, Sharon.”