On Friday, a diverse St. Louis jury found Rico Paul guilty of killing Paul Reiter, the longtime circulation manager of The St. Louis American. After a few hours of deliberation, the jury found Paul, 21, guilty of first-degree murder, first-degree attempted robbery and armed criminal action. Sentencing is set for September 17.
Melissa Gilliam successfully argued the case for the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, and Mathew Waltz of the Missouri State Public Defender Office provided able defense.
Reiter interrupted Paul and an accomplice in the act of robbing Reiter’s next door neighbor in the 5000 block of Idaho on the morning of May 9, 2011. Reiter yelled that he would call the police if they didn’t stop the burglary, and Paul responded by fatally shooting Reiter, 58, who died clutching his cell phone with 911 dialed but not called.
The prosecution’s best evidence was the defendant’s videotaped confession, made the day after the crimes were committed. The way the video recording was made and published to the jury made it all but impossible to refute or discount it as evidence.
Paul sits alone in the interview room. He does not look as if any harm has come to him. Detective Dan Fox and Detective Dan Sweeney enter, sit politely and read Paul his Miranda rights. Paul consents to doing the interview without a lawyer present. The detectives then ask him questions about the crimes.
The tone of their questioning is insistent but respectful. When Paul asks to speak to Sweeney alone, the other detective leaves the room. When Paul asks for another suspect to be included in the interview, Sweeney leaves him alone with the video still recording as he goes to check.
By the time Sweeney had obtained from Paul a complete confession to attempted burglary and shooting the good Samaritan neighbor, there is about an hour of uninterrupted viewing of Paul in the interview room. He says he understands his rights, he never asks for a lawyer, he is never threatened or assaulted in any way – and he confesses to the same evidence the police had collected from the crime scene.
The youth rattled off a series of specific crime scene details that the detectives had not mentioned and only someone who was there would know. The gun he said he used shoots the same caliber as the bullet that killed the neighbor. He said only one shot was fired, which was true. He even stood and mimicked the way he had to lean up in order to shoot down over the tall wooden fence that separates the home he was burglarizing from the home of the neighbor.
After he confesses, Paul is left alone. A friend who was brought in for questioning along with him is sitting in the adjacent interview room. Paul then yells to his friend in the next room, “They got witnesses on me – it’s too late, bruh,” which confirms the confession.
In his closing defense of Paul, Mathew Waltz, the public defender, tried to raise reasonable doubt in the jurors regarding some conflicting details in the evidence.
Eyewitness neighbors across the alley, who lived to testify, picked Paul out of a police lineup two days after the crimes were committed and testified that he had a male accomplice. These witnesses were sure that Paul was the burglar and shooter, but they underestimated his height and weight.
The male accomplice they witnessed does not match Paul’s confession, which was that he attempted the burglary with a 15-year-old girl accomplice.
That discrepancy is accounted for in the videotape of Paul’s confession. In other comments yelled to the next room, he seems to be telling his friend that he is confessing, but not implicating the friend.
“I got you, blood,” Paul assures his friend. “You hear me?”
No accomplice has been arrested or charged in the case.
