Is Justice Miscarrying? -- Execution Date Looms As Guilt Is Questioned

GRUNDY, Va. - Only two facts about the Slate Creek murder remain undisputed.

On the night of March 10, 1981, a young housewife died violently in her tiny, one-bedroom home on a hillside above a fast-flowing creek.

And on Wednesday, her brother-in-law, who served as a pall bearer at her funeral, is scheduled to be electrocuted for the crime.

This Appalachian coal-mining town was stunned by the murder and soon focused its attention on a likely suspect. When 22-year-old Roger Keith Coleman was convicted and sentenced to die, nearly everyone here believed the right man had been caught and would receive the punishment he deserved.

But in the decade since then, startling new evidence has emerged. Doubt has replaced certainty. Some now believe Coleman is about to die for a crime he did not commit.

Coleman's troubling saga is the kind of story that may be repeated in the years ahead as the U.S. Supreme Court makes it increasingly difficult for Death Row inmates to reopen their cases for judicial review.

A series of recent rulings limits the rights of state inmates to file writs of habeas corpus before a federal judge. For example, the justices said last year that the door to the federal courthouse is closed in most instances after inmates have filed one broad challenge to their convictions.

Last month, an exasperated Supreme Court intervened in the case of a California murderer, Robert Alton Harris, and blocked any further moves to halt his execution.

A year ago, the Supreme Court used Coleman's case to announce a particularly stiff new procedural rule: If a convict's lawyer bungles - as Coleman's did by filing a state appeal one day late - no further appeals may be heard in a federal court.

"This is a case about federalism," the Supreme Court said in its opinion, referring to the doctrine better known as states' rights. It "concerns the respect that the federal courts owe the states and the states' procedural rules."

Unlike Harris, whose appeals were litigated for more than 10 years in federal courts in California, Coleman has been barred from the federal courts. And his claim is more fundamental: Unlike Harris, Coleman says he is innocent.

But on April 15, the Virginia Supreme Court rejected Coleman's last appeal and repeated its own tough rule: "Allegations of `newly discovered' evidence" are not grounds for reopening a case in the state courts.

Says Kathleen Behan, the Washington, D.C., attorney who has fought to save Coleman: "Roger is going to die because of a technicality."

HUSBAND FOUND BODY

Here's how it happened.

Wanda Fay McCoy was home alone that Tuesday night. Somewhat timid and only 19 years old, she spoke on the phone to her husband Brad about 9 p.m. They were expecting a tax-refund check in the mail but it had not arrived, she told him.

Brad's shift ended at 11 p.m. and he arrived home a few minutes later. But something seemed amiss. The front-porch light had been turned off, and Wanda did not come to unlock the door.

He soon found out why. A lamp had been knocked to the floor in the living room, and spots of blood dotted the floor. In the bedroom, he found his wife lying on her back in a pool of blood. She had been raped and her throat slashed with a knife.

Who would kill Wanda McCoy? And how did someone get into the locked house that night?

The police soon had a suspect. Wanda's sister had married Coleman, who, as a high-school senior, had been convicted of an attempted rape. Had he knocked on the door, Wanda would have let him in, Brad told police.

From there, the evidence fell into place for investigators.

Coleman had been scheduled to work the night shift at the coal mine that evening, but his work detail had been canceled. About 10 p.m., he left the mine entrance and did not return home until after 11 p.m.

A semen sample found on the dead body came from someone with a B blood type, which is shared by only 13 percent of the population - and by Roger Coleman. Brad McCoy had type A blood.

Two pubic hairs found on Wanda were said to be "consistent" with Coleman's hairs. A speck of O type blood was found on the jeans that Coleman had turned over to police the next day. Wanda McCoy, along with 45 percent of the population, had O type blood.

The jeans were wet at the bottom. No one in the dozen homes below the McCoy's saw Coleman or his pickup truck that night. Prosecutors theorized that the miner had parked his truck along a main highway, waded through Slate Creek, and then walked the 300 yards uphill to the McCoy house. The wet jeans seemed to confirm the theory.

Coleman also turned over his three-inch pocket knife, which had a tiny dot of blood, too small to determine whether it came from a human or an animal. Police said it was the murder weapon.

QUESTIONS ARISE

Not everything fit. If Coleman had waded the creek, why were there no wet footprints in the house? Wanda had died from a slashing knife wound, so why didn't Coleman have more blood on his clothes?

And her fingernails were broken, investigators noted. They searched Coleman for scratches but found none. And curiously, they found dirt on her fingers and on her abdomen. They had no explanation for that.

During the trial, Coleman took the witness stand and fumbled to explain the blood specks on his jeans and knife. The two county prosecutors characterized the soft-spoken, unemotional young miner as a cold-blooded killer.

Neither of Coleman's court-appointed attorneys had ever tried a major criminal case before. Mostly, they sat and listened.

After four days of testimony, a jury on March 18, 1982, found Coleman guilty of rape and murder. The next day the jurors sentenced him to death.

CONVERTS TURN UP

On Death Row, Coleman maintained his innocence and eventually won a few converts.

Jim McCloskey, a former cleric who investigates unusual death-penalty cases, received a letter from the Virginia inmate and eventually became convinced of Coleman's innocence.

McCloskey is a powerful ally. As head of Centurion Ministries he has succeeded in freeing 12 men and women from Death Row or life imprisonment in 12 years by unearthing evidence of their innocence.

The crime "just doesn't make sense to me," he said. "I can't see that Roger had the motivation or the means to commit that crime."

An uncle, Roger Lee Coleman, has continued to fight for his nephew. Retracing the route, along narrow roads and through the one-way streets of the small town, convinces him that his nephew did not have the time to commit the murder.

"There's no way humanly possible that Roger Keith could have done what they said he done that night," he said.

But a jury heard the evidence and concluded that Coleman indeed had the time to commit the murder. And once a conviction is upheld as final, higher courts are loath to reweigh the facts of a case.

Coleman's attorneys dutifully filed appeals challenging the procedural fairness of the trial, all of which were repeatedly rebuffed.

But in 1990, as the state moved to set a date for the execution, new lawyers representing Coleman finally got a break. They had published in the local weekly newspaper a letter from Coleman urging anyone who had information about the Slate Creek murder to write or call the Washington law firm of Arnold and Porter, which had taken over his case.

WOMEN TELL OF RAPIST

First came an anonymous call. A woman said that in 1987, another man in Grundy had tried to rape her and threatened to kill her, as he said he had done to "that girl on Slate Creek."

Soon, two other women told similar stories and the lawyers persuaded them to come forward and supply court affidavits. They identified the man as Donney Ramey.

When McCloskey investigated further, he received a surprise. In March 1981, Ramey, then 20 years old, lived with his parents. Their house was directly behind the McCoy home, about 90 feet up the hill.

One woman said she had heard Ramey "brag" about the crime.

In March, a Roanoke, Va., television station broadcast an interview with Teresa Horn, the first woman to implicate Ramey. "He told me if I didn't shut up, he would do me like he did to the woman on Slate Creek," she said, recounting the 1987 incident. When pressed further, she continued: "He looked at the ground and said, `I did kill Wanda McCoy.' "

The day after that interview was taped, Teresa Horn was found dead of a drug overdose. She had suffered from severe back pain after an auto accident, and police said they saw no evidence of foul play in her death.

Two other women who have recently given lawyers statements implicating Ramey say they do not want their names divulged.

Through his lawyer, Ramey has denied any involvement in the crime. He also submitted a sworn statement denying that he made any such statement to Horn and calling her a known liar.

Ramey's parents also said that their son was home and in bed at 10 p.m. the night of the McCoy murder. Moreover, he has type A blood, which should eliminate him as a suspect, they say.

A second anonymous call from Grundy gave McCloskey another lead. A few days after the murder, a local man whose son was a friend of Donney Ramey and his brother Michael found a plastic garbage can in the back of his pick-up truck. Inside it he found a bloody sheet, a flashlight, a pair of scissors and two Van Heusen cowboy shirts.

MCCLOSKEY'S THEORY

The sheet had "more blood than a person could lose without having to go to the hospital," said Nell Shortridge, who reported the bag and its contents to a county sheriff. But she said he never inquired further about the items and they were eventually thrown into a landfill.

From this, McCloskey has devised his own theory of the murder.

"I've thought all along there were two killers. I don't think one person could have subdued her," he said in an interview.

He theorizes that Wanda walked outside that night to take the garbage to the trash can and was assaulted by two men. He also believes that the deep, slashing wound that killed her came from something larger than a three-inch pocket knife - such as pair of scissors. McCloskey says he suspects the Ramey brothers.

LAWYERS WAIT TOO LONG

In 1986, Coleman's lawyers bungled by filing an appeal one day late. Under Virginia law, lawyers must appeal within 30 days of the date when a judge stamps an order as final. The attorneys thought it was 30 days from the time the court clerk stamped the order as final. They were late because of that misunderstanding.

As a result, the Virginia courts barred Coleman from further appeals. Last June, the Supreme Court on a 6-3 vote ruled that a "procedural default" in a state court bars a defendant from appealing in a federal court.

But the court opinion did not close the door entirely. A prisoner such as Coleman can get a federal judge to reopen his case if he can "demonstrate that failure to consider the claims will result in a fundamental miscarriage of justice," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Legal experts are not sure just what that means.

Two weeks ago, Coleman's lawyers filed a 124-page brief in the federal courts in Virginia asking for a new trial and asserting that his execution would represent a "fundamental miscarriage of justice."

"Mr. Coleman's evidence of innocence is too compelling to ignore," they argue.

But an exasperated Virginia attorney general says that he has heard it all before. Coleman's lawyers have set loose "an avalanche of contrived claims masquerading as `newly discovered evidence,' " said Virginia Assistant Attorney General Donald Curry, in his legal response to the new appeal. The courts, he said, should "state firmly and unequivocally that `enough is enough.' "

DNA TEST QUESTIONED

Coleman supporters say several pieces of evidence uncovered since his trial point to his innocence. They also dispute the results of a DNA test that indicates with more certainty than the blood-typing that Coleman raped his sister-in-law.

McCloskey said in a news conference that the examiner used an unreliable technique in drawing his conclusion from the DNA.

But for each point McCloskey raised during the news conference, the lead prosecutor, Michael McGlothlin, issued a rebuttal based on trial testimony and other evidence gathered at the time of the murder and afterward.

McGlothlin said Donney Ramey, the neighbor McCloskey said had been named as a rapist by three women, was eliminated as a suspect in McCoy's death by the DNA test. He said Ramey has passed a lie-detector test, something Coleman has refused to take.

McCloskey said Coleman didn't have enough time to kill McCoy from the time he left a friend shortly before 10:41 p.m. and the time his family said he got home that night, 11:05. In between, he said, he went to a trailer park and retrieved a cassette tape he had lent out and then went to a bath house to clean up from wearing his miner's uniform.

McCoy's husband found his wife's body when he arrived home from work about 11:15.

Again, McGlothlin said there was more to the story. The former prosecutor said Coleman was seen at the trailer park at 10:20 p.m., which meant he would have left his friend earlier than he said.

Coleman has recently had his case profiled in The New York Times and Newsweek magazine. He is also featured in a sympathetic article in this week's Time magazine.

Since his transfer to Death Row on May 1, Coleman has spent the bulk of his days giving interviews and making television appearances to journalists from across Virginia and the nation and from several foreign countries.

-- Material by Ronnie Crocker of the Newport News (Va.) News Daily Press has been included in this report.