Roger Keith Coleman V: In or Out
Paul and I met outside the offices of Arnold & Porter on a mild spring day in late April. We were about to meet Kitty Behan and Sharon Paul to discuss making a film about Roger Keith Coleman who was scheduled to be executed the following week for the rape and murder of Wanda McCoy. By the time we sat waiting in the partner's conference room for Kitty and Sharon to join us I was feeling uneasy. Paul was in his element, about to flush out his prey, and sensing my mood refused to engage in conversation so we sat in stony silence.
I just wasn't convinced anymore that this was really a slam dunk case of a two-hankie film about a guy who was just minding his own business when they strung him up. True, to outsiders this kind of justice may have seemed like a bunch of Appalachian inbreds going after the town hunchback. After all, Coleman was a convicted rapist and he knew the victim, a girl so timid she would never open the door to a stranger, according to her husband, Brad. It was a quick trial - they took only four days to give him the death penalty, which in our complicated legal system (at least for high-profile trials), seemed obscene.
But the more I read, perhaps the more I meditated on the weaving together of the facts of the younger Coleman's life, the more I felt a kinship with the townsfolk who had been sitting on the jury. Although it's entirely possible that someone like Coleman could have gotten a raw deal, this was a small town and the common intuition of those who lived and worked there in close quarters seemed to have quickly isolated the most probable perpetrator and then the evidence fell into place.
The same evidence Kitty Behan was trying now to overturn in her last-ditch bid with a habeas corpus petition (which wasn't going well due to their inability to refute the physical evidence with new results). And this was the part that started to bother me. The common misconception propagated by the media was that the evidence against Coleman was circumstantial (read flimsy). But in Coleman's case summary I found out there was a significant amount of physical evidence as well. The circumstantial factors were that Wanda's husband, Brad, said she would never have opened her door to a stranger and there was no sign of forced entry, so Coleman was one of only a handful of people she would have admitted. Add to that, Coleman had been cut loose from his shift at the mines early and despite a partial alibi was knocking around in the dark for a period of time with no-one to vouch for his whereabouts.
But the real case revolved around the physical evidence: Hair, blood and semen samples were as closely matched to Coleman as was possible in pre-DNA testing days. He had the blood spattered on his pants, the semen and hairs were on Wanda.
What I found most interesting in the end was how Coleman had managed to convince so many people of his innocence. Hard, contradictory evidence was non-existent, there were only hints at the possiblity of other individuals who may or may not have been involved, and although his legal representation was mediocre, it was the case on both sides for there were several slip-ups on the prosecution's side with respect to lost or unexamined fingerprint and soil evidence.
And as for his 1977 rape conviction, his supporters (which now included Amnesty International) seemed to believe his contention that this was just another in a life-long trial of mis-identification (the victim, Brenda Ratcliffe, picked him from a yearbook photo although a witness said he'd been talking to Coleman during the time of the rape). With his sad-sack demeanor it seemed possible he had become a whipping boy of sorts, with one bad luck story tipping another in a long chain of circumstantial dominoes.
I was ruminating about all this when the door to the conference room opened and Kitty walked in followed by a shy, almost waif-like presence, the soon-to-be-martyred Sharon Paul. We stood up to greet them.
Kitty Behan was petite, neatly bobbed with nary a hair out of place, and as expected, brisk and efficient. Sharon, pulled along in her wake, was thin and wan from exhaustion, with a cloud of dark hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She held back a little, looking over at us hesitantly and then focused on me, smiling apologetically. While Paul preened a little and moved in on Kitty like a shark recognizing its own, I lingered over my connection with Sharon. Her hand was tiny and her grasp barely more than a soft glove to squeeze reassuringly. For a brief moment she looked at me and I felt a wave of embarassment, almost as if I'd tricked her into something she would later regret.
"Well...." said Kitty. And we looked each other over.
Which wasn't easy as we'd all sat down in the big leather chairs, like ducks in a row along one side. Paul had positioned himself next to Kitty, no doubt to maintain power eye contact, and I sat at the end, framing Sharon, who seemed fearful to be bookened by two strangers.
Here I was at the tail end of the group, distanced from Kitty's assuring energy, and in my isolation I finally realized that I couldn't make the movie that Sharon and Roger wanted. The same gut instinct that had settled quickly into the jury was now mine as well. He wasn't a victim, he was a guy who had been on a long but inevitable road to the dark end he was facing. I felt certain he really had raped his first victim, opened his pants to another in a dark, deserted library, and in the end in an escalation of desire, cut into Wanda's throat with such force it nearly severed her head. He stalked women and dreamed of pushing himself into their lives and their bodies. He needed the power it gave him, and his victims lived in fear for the days he came close to them on the town streets and gave them the look. The I'll be back for you look, so said Brenda Ratcliffe.
Though the outcry from the national press and the various volunteer justice organizations was loud, no-one from Grundy had joined the fracas. I suspected now it was because they knew their neighbors well, they shared their daily lives and intimacies, shared their fears and their stories, and over time, accepted that Coleman was a bad seed amongst them.
Kitty opened up her briefcase and handed us a large chunk of bound looseleaf paper. "We've made a copy for you of his diary," she said with reverence. I looked over at Sharon who was pulling the papers down away from Paul, toward me. As Kitty went on about the facts of the case with Paul's rapt attention, I hesitantly took the package from Sharon. No longer a person of curious interest, he was now a real presence in the room. And the woman next to me loved him.
As the voices faded away, I opened the typewritten pages and began to read.
Next: Coleman's writings reveal a window into a complicated soul.
I just wasn't convinced anymore that this was really a slam dunk case of a two-hankie film about a guy who was just minding his own business when they strung him up. True, to outsiders this kind of justice may have seemed like a bunch of Appalachian inbreds going after the town hunchback. After all, Coleman was a convicted rapist and he knew the victim, a girl so timid she would never open the door to a stranger, according to her husband, Brad. It was a quick trial - they took only four days to give him the death penalty, which in our complicated legal system (at least for high-profile trials), seemed obscene.
But the more I read, perhaps the more I meditated on the weaving together of the facts of the younger Coleman's life, the more I felt a kinship with the townsfolk who had been sitting on the jury. Although it's entirely possible that someone like Coleman could have gotten a raw deal, this was a small town and the common intuition of those who lived and worked there in close quarters seemed to have quickly isolated the most probable perpetrator and then the evidence fell into place.
The same evidence Kitty Behan was trying now to overturn in her last-ditch bid with a habeas corpus petition (which wasn't going well due to their inability to refute the physical evidence with new results). And this was the part that started to bother me. The common misconception propagated by the media was that the evidence against Coleman was circumstantial (read flimsy). But in Coleman's case summary I found out there was a significant amount of physical evidence as well. The circumstantial factors were that Wanda's husband, Brad, said she would never have opened her door to a stranger and there was no sign of forced entry, so Coleman was one of only a handful of people she would have admitted. Add to that, Coleman had been cut loose from his shift at the mines early and despite a partial alibi was knocking around in the dark for a period of time with no-one to vouch for his whereabouts.
But the real case revolved around the physical evidence: Hair, blood and semen samples were as closely matched to Coleman as was possible in pre-DNA testing days. He had the blood spattered on his pants, the semen and hairs were on Wanda.
What I found most interesting in the end was how Coleman had managed to convince so many people of his innocence. Hard, contradictory evidence was non-existent, there were only hints at the possiblity of other individuals who may or may not have been involved, and although his legal representation was mediocre, it was the case on both sides for there were several slip-ups on the prosecution's side with respect to lost or unexamined fingerprint and soil evidence.
And as for his 1977 rape conviction, his supporters (which now included Amnesty International) seemed to believe his contention that this was just another in a life-long trial of mis-identification (the victim, Brenda Ratcliffe, picked him from a yearbook photo although a witness said he'd been talking to Coleman during the time of the rape). With his sad-sack demeanor it seemed possible he had become a whipping boy of sorts, with one bad luck story tipping another in a long chain of circumstantial dominoes.
I was ruminating about all this when the door to the conference room opened and Kitty walked in followed by a shy, almost waif-like presence, the soon-to-be-martyred Sharon Paul. We stood up to greet them.
Kitty Behan was petite, neatly bobbed with nary a hair out of place, and as expected, brisk and efficient. Sharon, pulled along in her wake, was thin and wan from exhaustion, with a cloud of dark hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She held back a little, looking over at us hesitantly and then focused on me, smiling apologetically. While Paul preened a little and moved in on Kitty like a shark recognizing its own, I lingered over my connection with Sharon. Her hand was tiny and her grasp barely more than a soft glove to squeeze reassuringly. For a brief moment she looked at me and I felt a wave of embarassment, almost as if I'd tricked her into something she would later regret.
"Well...." said Kitty. And we looked each other over.
Which wasn't easy as we'd all sat down in the big leather chairs, like ducks in a row along one side. Paul had positioned himself next to Kitty, no doubt to maintain power eye contact, and I sat at the end, framing Sharon, who seemed fearful to be bookened by two strangers.
Here I was at the tail end of the group, distanced from Kitty's assuring energy, and in my isolation I finally realized that I couldn't make the movie that Sharon and Roger wanted. The same gut instinct that had settled quickly into the jury was now mine as well. He wasn't a victim, he was a guy who had been on a long but inevitable road to the dark end he was facing. I felt certain he really had raped his first victim, opened his pants to another in a dark, deserted library, and in the end in an escalation of desire, cut into Wanda's throat with such force it nearly severed her head. He stalked women and dreamed of pushing himself into their lives and their bodies. He needed the power it gave him, and his victims lived in fear for the days he came close to them on the town streets and gave them the look. The I'll be back for you look, so said Brenda Ratcliffe.
Though the outcry from the national press and the various volunteer justice organizations was loud, no-one from Grundy had joined the fracas. I suspected now it was because they knew their neighbors well, they shared their daily lives and intimacies, shared their fears and their stories, and over time, accepted that Coleman was a bad seed amongst them.
Kitty opened up her briefcase and handed us a large chunk of bound looseleaf paper. "We've made a copy for you of his diary," she said with reverence. I looked over at Sharon who was pulling the papers down away from Paul, toward me. As Kitty went on about the facts of the case with Paul's rapt attention, I hesitantly took the package from Sharon. No longer a person of curious interest, he was now a real presence in the room. And the woman next to me loved him.
As the voices faded away, I opened the typewritten pages and began to read.
Next: Coleman's writings reveal a window into a complicated soul.
posted by vallie at 3:32 PM
<< Home