Murder investigation called ‘comically slapdash’

ASHEVILLE – Attorneys for three Buncombe County men convicted of involvement in a murder they say they had nothing to do with filed court papers Tuesday seeking to clear their names.

Larry Jerome Williams Jr., Damian Mills and Teddy Lamont Isbell are asking a judge to overturn their convictions in the Sept. 18, 2000, shotgun slaying of Walter Rodney Bowman.

The motions for appropriate relief filed with the court accuse District Attorney Ron Moore and investigators with the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office of withholding crucial DNA evidence that would have cleared the defendants.

The investigation into Bowman’s murder “produced results which alternated between comically slapdash and carefully contrived,” attorney Brad Searson said in Williams’ motion.

Denying the motions to overturn the convictions would “result in a fundamental miscarriage of justice” in violation of the U.S. Constitution, state the documents directed to Alan Thornburg, the county’s senior resident Superior Court judge.

Moore said Tuesday he couldn’t comment on a pending case.

The motions claim three other men who were never investigated were the ones who actually killed Bowman, and the evidence against them includes DNA on bandanas the intruders wore over their faces during the home invasion in Fairview and a confession one made to a federal drug agent.

Two co-defendants in the case, Kenneth Kagonyera and Robert Wilcoxson, were freed in September 2011 after each spent nearly 11 years in prison. A special panel of judges ruled at the conclusion of a hearing in the Buncombe County Courthouse there was clear and convincing evidence they weren’t involving in killing Bowman even though they pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

But the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission in December ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to support claims by Williams, Mills and Isbell that they were innocent of Bowman’s slaying. The vote by the eight-member panel had to be unanimous to send the case to the three-judge panel.

Six defendants originally were charged with first-degree murder in Bowman’s death.

Williams and Mills pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, with Williams spending nearly nine years in prison and Mills serving eight years. Isbell spent three and a half years in jail after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit armed robbery. A sixth suspect in Bowman’s slaying, Aaron Brewton, had his murder charge dropped by the District Attorney’s Office.

Like Kagonyera and Wilcoxson, Williams testified at their hearing that he repeatedly denied involvement in Bowman’s murder during repeated interrogations but eventually gave in to confusion and fear of spending the rest of his life in prison.

Williams was just 16 when he was questioned by then-Sheriff Bobby Medford. Even his mother urged him to plead guilty, he testified.

“I was forced to say it when I really didn’t want to,” he said in court. “(Medford) said I could face life without parole if I didn’t comply. I was scared.”

The decision to free Kagonyera and Wilcoxson marked just the second case in North Carolina in which convictions were overturned under the law that created the Innocence Inquiry Commission in 2006.

Key to their exoneration was evidence that DNA from saliva on bandanas found near the Bowman crime scene didn’t match the profiles of any of the men charged with his murder.

Defense attorneys said Moore never passed along a lab report showing the DNA didn’t match any of the suspects. Moore has said he maintained an “open file” policy that gave lawyers access to the information and that he found the evidence inconclusive. The motions state lawyers didn’t have direct access to the files and had to rely on the District Attorney’s Office to turn over copies of evidence items.

There also was testimony that federal convict Robert Rutherford confessed to a drug agent in 2003 to the Bowman home invasion and named Lacy “J.J.” Pickens and Bradford Summey as his accomplices.

The motions filed Tuesday claim that Buncombe County investigators and Moore “simply ignored this crucial exculpatory evidence, despite the fact that other witness statements and physical evidence that law enforcement had in its possession corroborated Rutherford’s confession.”

The three men also had been named in a Crimestoppers tip to authorities shortly after Bowman was killed.

Then in 2007, a test confirmed that DNA from Summey was found on one of the bandanas.

“The odds that someone other than Summey was the contributor of the DNA in the bandana were calculated by the SBI as more than one in one trillion,” the motions state. “In short, the DNA match established that Bradford Summey had worn over his face the bandana that was used in the Bowman homicide.”

Summey was released from prison in 2011 after serving four years for a string of convenience store holdups in the Asheville area. He has testified in court that he had nothing to do with the slaying. Pickens was killed by an Asheville police officer while trying to elude arrest in 2006.

Mills is represented by Marion attorney Frank Goldsmith and Isbell by Asheville lawyer Steve Cash.