On Monday morning (March 8), the Special Master appointed to review the case of Missouri death row inmate Reginald Clemons was informed of crucial new evidence.
In a fax from the office of Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, Judge Michael Manners was informed that a rape kit and three laboratory reports had been discovered by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and turned over to Koster’s office.
This would have to be evidence collected from the corpse identified as Julie Kerry. Clemons was convicted as an accomplice in the 1991 murders of Julie and Robin Kerry, who allegedly were raped then thrown from the Chain of Rocks Bridge. The body of Robin Kerry was never recovered.
The letter to Manners states that the “State of Missouri requests that a hearing be scheduled to determine an appropriate protocol for the testing and dissemination of the test results of the biological evidence in question.”
A spokesperson for the court said Manners may have an order on this late Friday or next week.
In a pretrial motion, Clemons’ defense attorneys in his 1993 jury trial requested any evidence collected from the corpse of Julie Kerry, but none was provided by prosecutor Nels C. Moss.
In the letter faxed to Judge Manners on Monday, Stephen D. Hawke of the Missouri Attorney General’s Office said that on March 2, 2010, Moss “informed two assistant attorneys general that he had recently been told of the existence of a rape kit located at the St. Louis Police Department Crime Lab. Mr. Moss stated that he had no prior knowledge of this rape kit, raising the inference that the evidence had not been previously disclosed as part of the state’s case against Mr. Clemons.”
Police Chief Daniel Isom said to the best of his knowledge any evidence the police department had was shared with prosecutors, according to routine procedure, though this is an old case suddenly brought back to life by the appointment of the Special Master.
Multiple police sources, speaking on background, said they did not believe Moss when he said he had “no prior knowledge” of evidence as sensitive to his case as a rape kit and lab reports. The Chain of Rocks case was one of the most widely publicized and closely scrutinized trials of the decade in St. Louis.
Clemons never has been tried for the charges of rape, though those charges – and testimony about the alleged rapes – were presented as evidence in his trial on the charges of murder as an accomplice. Further, the untried charges of rape were allowed as a “sentence enhancer” when Moss argued to the jury that they should sentence Clemons to death – as they did.
On the day Clemons was sentenced to death, Moss’ star witness, Thomas Cummins, received $150,000 in a settlement with the St. Louis police. Cummins is a cousin of the Kerry girls who confessed to a role in their deaths before Clemons or his three codefendants were interrogated or charged.
Cummins claimed that his confession was coerced. Clemons and his codefendants also claimed that their confessions were coerced, alleging very similar abuse on the part of St. Louis detectives. The day after he was interrogated by police, Clemons was seen by a judge who ordered him sent to an emergency room for medical treatment of injuries.
There is no record of Clemons being injured when he entered police custody. Transcripts of his police interrogation contain no mention of previous injuries. Had Clemons shown wounds when he was interviewed, detectives could have used them against him as evidence that he had been involved in violent acts on the brigde. They made no such claims in the questioning.
Clemons’ allegation of police abuse was not allowed as evidence in his murder trial. His confession – which he claimed was beaten out of him – was permitted in court.
Clemons said detectives first tried to get him to confess to murder, but he never relented. He said he did finally confess to rape to stop the beating, but only because he thought the physical evidence would show he was innocent.
‘Nothing could be made out’
On June 30, 2009, Manners was appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court as Special Master with full subpoena powers to gather new evidence in the Clemons case and make a recommendation to the Court in response to Clemons’ most recent writ of habeas corpus.
The same Court had set an execution date of June 17, 2009 for Clemons, before a federal court issued a stay of execution while it ruled on a procedural matter. That federal appeal concerns the State of Missouri’s competence in administering its execution protocols without inflicting cruel or unusual punishment.
Also in June, while being interrogated by Redditt Hudson of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, Moss disclosed on The Charles Jaco Show that he once had in his possession clothing and other physical evidence retrieved from the body of Julie Kerry.
Moss told Hudson that if Clemons’ defense had asked for the evidence, “it was theirs.” In fact, they had asked for it specifically in the pre-trial motion to compel discovery, which was hand-delivered to Moss’ office on January 15, 1993 and signed as received by someone in his office.
In the interview with Hudson and Jaco, Moss also implied that evidence from Julie Kerry’s corpse had been tested and that he was aware of the test results. Moss said, “What was left on her was so water-soaked that nothing could be made out.”
This claim is at variance with what he told the State of Missouri in his March 2, 2010 deposition, according to the letter faxed this morning to Manners, when Moss said he had “no prior knowledge” of the evidence.
A police department source, speaking on background, said the allegedly newly discovered evidence matches the descriptions Moss gave to Hudson and Jaco. This source said the evidence consists of the rape kit, clothing from Julie Kerry and a pair of shorts obtained from Clemons’ codefendant Marlin Gray, who was executed by the State of Missouri in 2005.
This source said the lab reports matched the claims made by Moss on television (“nothing could be made out”) – that they produced no incriminating evidence.
Sunshine Law requests for the lab reports to the police department and attorney general had not been fulfilled at press time.
Of the other two codefendants, Antonio Richardson is serving life without parole, after his death sentence was commuted because it was handed out by the judge after the jury deadlocked. Daniel Winfrey, who cooperated with the prosecution (and the only codefendant who was not African-American), was freed on parole in 2007.
A hearing on the Clemons case has been set for May 10.