She also testified that she did not know David Marciszewski. Or John Balser. Or Jamie Turner. Or Alex Boone. And that she did not know William Sapp.
The prosecution’s second witness was Susan Palmer, Phree Morrow’s mother, a “streetwise” brunette whose features had hardened over the years. She unsuccessfully fought back tears as she identified the pictures of Phree and Martha, after which she, too, needed a few moments to regain her composure.
She said that she had sent Phree to get her some cigarettes around noon and that the last time she saw Phree and Martha alive was about 3:00 in the afternoon when she and the others left to go swimming.
She testified that she did know David Marciszewski, but only as a casual acquaintance. And that she did know Wanda Marciszewski and John Balser because they had lived next door to her when she lived on Light Street. She did not know Jamie Turner. Or Alex Boone. Or William Sapp.
Not surprisingly, the defense had no questions for these two brokenhearted witnesses.
There was no reason for the prosecutor to ask about J. R. Lilly, Sapp’s brother, since he was not involved, but Susan had known him for about eight years. She made the comment to me, outside the courtroom, “J.R. would do anything for you.”
Jettie shared with me, also outside the courtroom, that she knew Martha was dead when she didn’t come home because “she wouldn’t do that.”
The next witness was nineteen-year-old Keith Casey, a student at the University of Toledo. He testified that on Sunday, August 23, 1992, his family went to a church picnic at Saint Bernard Catholic Church on Lagonda Avenue. He was twelve years old at the time. He and his younger brother rode their bikes to the pond and there they found the bodies of two young girls. They rode their bikes back to the picnic, but they were unable to find their father.
Keith and another boy, Jay Martina, rode their bikes back to that area and that’s when they saw the fire truck and told the firemen. Keith and Jay went with the firemen to the pond and then went back to the church.
On cross-examination, Keith stated that he saw no one else around the bodies.
On the second day of the trial, Clark County deputy coroner Dr. Robert Stewart told the jury that Phree Morrow had suffered at least eight blows and Martha Leach had suffered at least seven blows. Both girls died from blunt trauma, mainly to the head: “We’re talking about the type of force where you would free-fall from a second-floor window—from that height onto a concrete surface.”
He couldn’t determine if the assault on the girls was by more than one person, but he said they could have been injured by more than one weapon. The evidence showed, including the semen, that the girls were sexually molested. No alcohol or drugs were found in their systems.
The next prosecution witness, Marcy Lavelle, testified that at about 4:00 P.M. on the day in question, while driving close to the bakery on East Main Street, she and a friend had seen two little girls lean a bicycle against a newspaper stand and go into Schuler’s. The girls were wearing shorts and summer tops.
She also observed a “gentleman” standing on the sidewalk and another man coming out of the bakery. There was a van parked across the street—a 1970s trashy, glass “paddy wagon” type.
She and her friend had planned to stop at Schuler’s, but her friend said, “Never mind. That guy really looks creepy.”
On further questioning she said the bike she had seen was small and was lavender or purple. She then identified the bicycle in the courtroom as being the one she had seen.
There was also a stipulation that she had previously identified David Marciszewski and John Balser as the two men she had seen outside the bakery.
Two witnesses gave testimony relating to the discovery of Belinda Anderson’s body.
Molly Warner lived on South Fountain Avenue. She testified that Belinda Anderson had been her neighbor when she lived on East Liberty Street and she identified the picture of Belinda.
She related to the jury that on July 8, 1995, she had lived in the house on South Fountain Avenue for about a year and that the house had been vacant for about five years before that. While cleaning out the garage, she picked a door up from the floor and saw a tennis shoe.
Since then, they had the garage torn down. She said she couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.
She said that she did not know William Sapp—except in the news.
Robert Warner told the jurors that he also saw the tennis shoe—toes down, heel up. He identified the picture of Belinda and said that she used to groom their dog when they lived across the street from her on East Liberty Street.
He also told the jury that a knife had been found on the sanctuary roof of the First Baptist Church (located on the corner of South Fountain Avenue and Miller Street) on the side toward Miller Street. When the roof was torn off, the knife went in with the debris.
On cross-examination Warner said that he had seen the knife.
During one of the breaks in the proceedings, Jettie sympathized with Christine Anderson, Belinda’s mother, about not knowing for almost two years. Christine said, “If Molly hadn’t decided to clean out the garage, Belinda would still be there.”
The prosecution called Robby Detwiler, now twenty-one years old, to the stand on Friday. He said that he did know Wanda Marciszewski; she was his aunt. And David Marciszewski was her husband. And that John Balser was his cousin. And that Willie Jackson, now nineteen years old, was also his cousin. He said he knew Jamie Turner because he used to come over to his aunt’s house on Light Street.
Robby timidly admitted that he had told many different stories because he “didn’t want to face reality.”
He said, “I told a lot of lies. I don’t remember the lies.”
He testified that he had left [the house on Light Street] with Wanda, John, David, Willie, and Boone in an old black van with windows, to go to the crime scene.
He identified William Sapp and said that Sapp was with one of the girls in front of the pond when they got there. John, David, Jamie, and Sapp were “feeling the girls and rubbing them.” He was about ten feet away and Willie was in the parking lot.
Embarrassed, he told the jury that Sapp grabbed his hand and put them on the girls’ “privates.”
Wanda told them to kill the girls. The girls were unconscious and he didn’t hear them say anything. Balser hit one of the girls with a rock. Marciszewski threw a smaller rock off to the side of one of the girls’ heads.
He then saw Sapp with a rock in his hands. When Sapp lifted the large rock over his head, Robby turned away.
Robby admitted that he helped carry the crates.
Sapp told Willie and Robby he would kill them if they told.
“He just killed two girls. What would you think?”
They left in the van and went back to Light Street. Robby said that he listened to the radio and he called his dad the next day and went home. He didn’t tell anyone about Sapp because of the threats.
“I tried to pretend like it never happened.”
On cross-examination Robby testified that he had talked to the police eight or nine times and that he had given testimony to the grand jury twice.
When Officer Chuck Schreiber of the Crime Scene/Evidence Collection Unit took the stand, he testified that he was in his twenty-fourth year on the police force. He had videotaped the crime scne in and around the garage where Belinda Anderson’s body had been found. The videotape of Belinda’s remains being carefully excavated from the shallow grave was played for the jury.
The next witness was Dr. Lee Lehman, a forensic pathologist with the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office. He was deemed by the court to be an expert witness. He testified that Belinda Anderson’s body weighed only sixty pounds when it was found. She had on tennis shoes, a purple top, a bra, and no pants. She had a tattoo of a shooting star on her right ankle and one of a cross on her left ankle.
He told the jury that Belinda’s cheekbone and the bone under her eye were fractured. The back of her head had an H-shaped laceration all the
way through her scalp. There was a 1½-inch bruise on the right side of her chin.
Her voice box was injured and she had broken cartilage in her neck and her neck was also bruised. He testified that she was still alive when these injuries occurred.
He went on to say that she had suffered a broken rib and that she had a two-inch bruise on her right side by her breast.
The cause of death was multiple traumas to her head and neck, a combination of blows. All of the wounds were inflicted upon her before her death except for the broken rib.
There was no semen sample possible because of decomposition. The toxicology tests showed that there was a Valium-type medicine and cocaine in her system.
Deborah Anderson, Belinda’s sister, testified that Belinda was wearing a short-sleeved purple silk top and shorts and sweatpants the last time she saw her.
When the defense attorney cross-examined her, he asked: “Did you tell Belinda not to bring crack into your house?”
Deborah replied: “I thought she was getting back into it.”
The last two witnesses of the day testified about the morning they found Helen Preston near death in the Clark State parking lot by the YMCA.
Jim Wilson* told the jury that when he first saw Helen on December 8, 1993, “I thought she got hit by a train.” From a distance she “looked like a clown.” Then he realized that her throat had been “sliced from ear to ear.” He indicated to the jurors, using his thumb and index finger, that the wound to her neck was about 1½-inches wide.
She had rocks embedded in her face, which was swollen black and blue. “One eye stayed wide open.”
He said that she had on a shirt, but no pants, and she smelled like urine.
She was sitting on the curb in the parking lot, and when he approached her, she said, “Help me.” He asked if she had been raped and she nodded her head yes.
He found out later that he had met Helen on a couple of occasions.
“It was like something you’d seen from a movie. It was hard to recognize her at first. She was beat so bad.”
Corey Heaton* testified that he saw Helen sitting on an “island” in Clark State’s parking lot and that she had been “beat to a pulp.”
When the trial resumed on Monday, September 27, 1999, Helen Preston limped to the witness stand. The jurors were shown photographs depicting the injuries to her head and face and the stab wound to her abdomen.
Helen told the jury: “It doesn’t look like me.”
Schumaker asked her to step down and stand in front of the jury box and lift her head, so the jury could see the dreadful five-inch scar across her throat.
She testified that she was thirty-eight years old and lived on South Limestone Street at the time of the attack. She remembered leaving John’s Bar after having a fight with her boyfriend. The next thing she remembered was crawling to the railroad tracks near the YMCA. She also remembered waking up in the hospital and seeing some of her toes missing.
As Helen testified, she cautiously glanced at William Sapp from time to time, but she said she had no memory of the person who assaulted her.
It was easy to see that Helen had once been a pretty woman. Sadly, even though plastic surgery had done wonders, it was also easy to see that she would always be disfigured. Each and every time she looked in the mirror—and each and every time she caught someone staring at her—she would be reminded. During his confession Sapp had said “There’s somebody out there walking around right now, with my heart signature on them. . . .”
Sergeant Barry Eggers testified that although Helen Preston was badly beaten, she kept trying to tell him details about her attacker by holding her hands as if looking through binoculars. He believed she was trying to tell him that the person who assaulted her wore glasses.
Ernest Whitehead, one of the paramedics who responded to the call for help that morning, told the jurors that it was difficult to tell what race Helen was because of her condition: “Her body was too black and blue. Her face was extremely covered with blood. She had numerous cuts. She was completely disfigured. Her body was beaten upon to the point where we couldn’t tell, from any observations we made, what color she was.”
He also said the wound to her throat was so severe he could see her trachea.
The next witness was Dr. William O. Smith, a neurological surgeon, who was also deemed to be an expert witness. He testified that Helen Preston was brought to the emergency room of Community Hospital in the late morning of December 8, 1993. She had been exposed to freezing temperatures for several hours. The worst injuries were to her head and face. She had an opened and depressed skull fracture behind her right ear, which caused pressure on the brain. He lifted pieces of bone out of the fracture and put them back.
Dr. Smith told the jurors that Helen’s cheekbones were so badly fractured that they were “free floating”—no longer connected. Her jawbone had multiple fractures and she had a five-inch cut across her throat. She also had a deep wound at the base of her nose.
He also stated that she had a stab wound in her upper abdomen. She had gangrene from frostbite; her toes were turning black. Her face had to be reconstructed and they had to remove some of her toes.
The doctor testified that Helen had been close to death and the hypothermia probably saved her life. He called her recovery “almost miraculous.”
He went on to say that her memory of the attack was “nonexistent.” The worse the trauma and the longer someone is unconscious, the worse the amnesia.
Officer Schreiber took the stand again, this time to testify regarding Helen Preston. He described the scene where Helen was found as a grassy island in the parking lot near a loading dock. Among the items collected at the crime scene: a cigarette butt, a pair of socks, a piece of paper, broken cigarettes, Helen’s cut-up jeans, white tennis shoes, broken dentures, broken bricks, and leaves and twigs with blood on them. They also took swabs of blood from underneath the nearby loading dock.
In February 1998 he and Sergeant Michael Haytas watched the videotapes of Sapp’s confession. As a result, they were able to locate the weapon used on Helen: a piece of steel cable (rebar), which was found in a catch basin in the Clark State parking lot.
A sheriff’s deputy who had been on duty on the fifth floor of the jail on April 17, 1997, testified about a conversation he had overheard between Sapp and another inmate, Tony Hanover*.
Because of Sapp’s leg shackles, Hanover was heard to say, “You must be somebody important.”
Sapp replied, “Yeah, I guess.”
The deputy also testified that Sapp said, “I’m going to make national news.”
Hanover asked Sapp: “What’d you do?”
Sapp answered, “Killed several people, but mostly it’s about two little girls.”
On cross-examination the deputy admitted that he didn’t write a memo regarding what he had overheard until July 2, 1998, over a year later.
At the end of the day, there was a stipulation that DNA tests conducted by the FBI revealed Sapp’s DNA matched the semen that was recovered from the bodies of Martha Leach and Phree Morrow.
On Tuesday, a former inmate of the Clark County Jail, Clint Sothard*, testified that the previous summer he had been in jail on a probation violation. He told the jurors that during his incarceration he was housed across from Sapp on the fifth floor of the jail.
According to Sothard, Sapp talked to him about the assault on Helen Preston and the murders of Phree Morrow, Martha Leach, and Belinda Anderson, and he also told him that whenever he got the urge to kill someone, he acted on it.
When the prosecutor asked Sothard why he had come forward, he explained: “I’ve got a daughter who just turned thirteen. If he did to my daughter what he did to those girls, there wouldn’t be enough room in this world for both of us.”
He also told the jury that he heard Sapp talking to himself late at night.
When Mr. Lieberman cross-examined him, Sothard admitted that he “didn’t like it” when he was written up beca
use Sapp reported to the jailers that he had medication in his cell.
Detective Robert Hinson of Jacksonville, Florida, told the jury that Sapp had mentioned an attack on a Springfield woman to him. Sapp blamed it on an alter ego named Bob. However, they were unsuccessful when they tried to get Bob to come out and talk to them.
He went on to say that he believed Sapp needed psychological help.
When the questioning turned briefly to Sapp’s abuse as a child, William Sapp became angry and patted the stun belt—hidden from view under his shirt—and asked the deputy if it was activated. He was assured that it was.
On his way out of the courtroom, Sapp was heard to say, “Why don’t they leave sleeping dogs lie?”
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I was a good mother to Martha. I’ve never done drugs. . . . I don’t drink. . . . If Susie wanted to drink, that was her business. . . . Didn’t give him the right to kill Phree.
—Jettie Willoughby Whitt
On Wednesday, day six of the trial, Schumaker called Lieutenant Steve Moody to the witness stand. Through his testimony, the videotapes of Sapp’s confession were introduced into evidence and played for the jurors.
Sapp’s only response to seeing himself on the large screen was to become agitated when his childhood was being discussed and to turn away when he saw himself crying. Although, most of the time, he looked bored or half asleep, he watched with great interest when the questioning turned to how he had cut the pants and left his “signature.”
It took almost five days to view all of the videotapes.
At the conclusion, the following Tuesday afternoon, Lieutenant Moody testified that Sapp told him, “I had to make sure you had your act together.”
Sapp also told Moody: “Tell Jimmy Boy (John Balser) it’s okay to tell.”
When Schumaker questioned Lieutenant Moody about the techniques used in the interview of Sapp, he explained to the jurors that the cabinet was “to keep Sapp off balance.” He and Sergeant Graeber talked about Sapp’s past with his mother “to get him talking again.”
Hometown Killer Page 30