In a hearing aimed at negating Scott McLaughlin’s death sentence, family members and a DNA expert testified Monday that a relative of his might also be connected to the killing of his ex-girlfriend.

Lawyers for McLaughlin are presenting new evidence in a claim that he did not have effective legal representation when St. Louis County Circuit Judge Steven H. Goldman sentenced him to death.

McLaughlin, of Wright City, was convicted of abducting Beverly Guenther, 45, of Moscow Mills, from her workplace in Earth City and killing her in November 2003. In 2006, jurors found McLaughlin guilty of first-degree murder, rape and armed criminal action in the guilt phase of his trial but could not agree on punishment. Goldman ordered the capital sentence a month later.

In 1979, Gregory Bowman was convicted in Illinois of killing Ruth Ann Jany and Elizabeth West and was sentenced to two concurrent terms of life imprisonment. In 2001, the convictions were vacated and new trials were ordered on grounds that Bowman’s confessions were coerced. Bowman remained in jail in Illinois until he posted bail in 2007.

Shortly after Bowman’s release from jail, James Rokita, an investigator with the Belleville, Illinois, police department, forwarded Bowman’s DNA profile to the St. Louis County police department. St. Louis County investigators compared Bowman’s DNA profile to the DNA profile extracted from sperm recovered from Rumfelt’s underwear. Bowman’s DNA profile matched the DNA profile of the sperm recovered from Rumfelt’s underwear. Bowman was charged with Rumfelt’s murder.

The State presented evidence that Bowman’s DNA was found in Rumfelt’s underwear. Dr. Mary Case, the St. Louis County medical examiner, testified that the cause of death was strangulation and that Rumfelt was the victim of a probable sexual assault. One of Rumfelt’s friends testified that she saw Rumfelt walking with an unidentified young man on the evening of June 5, 1977. Another friend testified that she saw Rumfelt on the morning of June 6, 1977. Rumfelt’s body was discovered on June 7, 1977. The jury convicted Bowman of first-degree murder.

The prosecution claimed Shockley ambushed Graham while the Sergeant was in his driveway. Graham had investigated a fatal traffic crash in which Shockley reportedly was involved and fled.

More on this story at Missourinet.com

The following description is from a story by Todd C. Frankel, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on March 30, 2005:

Armed with a shotgun, a rifle and fresh directions to a state trooper’s home in the Missouri Ozarks, a 28-year-old man waited for the officer to get off work and then killed him, authorities said Tuesday.

Lance Shockley knew Sgt. Carl D. Graham was looking into his role in a fatal vehicle crash months ago, police said.

Graham was shot March 20 as he stepped out of his cruiser near Van Buren, Mo. He was hit once by a rifle bullet and then at least once by a shotgun blast, authorities said.

Shockley, 28, was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder and armed criminal action, nine days after more than 60 state and federal agents flooded this rural area perhaps best known for its proximity to the Current River.

Shockley was already in custody Tuesday after his arrest March 23 in the fatal accident. He’d been labeled “a person of interest” by the Missouri Highway Patrol in the shooting. Shockley was at the Carter County Courthouse for a hearing in that case when the murder charge was added.

According to a probable cause affidavit, Shockley borrowed his grandmother’s red Pontiac Grand Am on March 20 and that same day asked someone for directions to Graham’s residence. Police said several witnesses spotted a red Grand Am parked on a secluded gravel road just north of the trooper’s home that day.

Shockley owns several firearms, including .223-caliber and .224-caliber rifles and at least one 12-gauge shotgun, according to the affidavit. A search of Shockley’s house in Van Buren turned up a spent .22-caliber shell. A forensics comparison determined it matched a bullet pulled from Graham, police said.

On the night of July 25, 1997, Terrance Anderson went to the Poplar Bluff home of his girlfriend, Abbey Rainwater, with a gun. Earlier in the day, she had told him that she had gotten a restraining order to keep him away from her and their three-month-old daughter and that visitation would be arranged through the court. Anderson kicked in the door, and Abbey’s mother, Debbie, told her to run. Debbie, who was holding the child, got on her knees and begged for her life, but Anderson placed the gun against the back of Debbie’s head and fired it, killing Debbie instantly. Anderson subsequently took the child and went into the front yard. He pointed the gun at the baby’s head and yelled that he would shoot if Abbey did not come out. After Abbey’s father, Stephen, came home, Anderson approached Stephen, began talking to him, and shot Stephen in the forehead, killing him. Anderson still was holding the child at the time.

Anderson was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and was tried in Cape Girardeau County on a change of venue from Butler County. The jury found him guilty of both counts and recommended that he be sentenced to death for killing Debbie Rainwater and to life in prison without the possibility of probation or parole for killing Stephen Rainwater.

The court imposed the recommended sentences, and Anderson appeals.

After the evening news broadcast the victim’s disappearance, the owner of a motel near Camdenton recognized the victim’s picture as the woman who checked into a room with Mr. Zink.  The motel owner provided the police with Mr. Zink’s motel registration card, and, using this information, the police apprehended Mr. Zink at his home. After police showed him evidence that placed him near the scene of the abduction, Mr. Zink waived his rights under Miranda v. Arizona,1 and confessed to killing and burying the victim.  He led police straight to the spot in a cemetery where he said he buried the victim’s body, and the police discovered the body positioned just as Mr. Zink had described.  Pathologists found that the victim’s neck was broken, she sustained injuries consistent with strangulation and being tied up, and she had eight broken ribs and between 50 and 100 blunt force injuries.  Semen found in the victim’s anus matched Mr. Zink’s DNA, hair samples taken from Mr. Zink’s truck matched the victim’s hair, and paint left on the victim’s car from the accident matched paint from Mr. Zink’s truck.

In two videotaped confessions, Mr. Zink described the murder in detail.  He said that he rear-ended the victim’s car on an exit ramp.  In one confession, Mr. Zink told police that the victim voluntarily left the accident scene with him in his truck but later threatened to call police if he did not return her to her vehicle.  In another confession, he said that he gave the victim no choice but to get in his truck, but that she willingly went with him after she was in the truck.

After he drove the victim around in his truck, they stayed for a short time at the motel near Camdenton.  Mr. Zink then decided to kill the victim because he was worried he would go back to prison if she called the police.  He took her to the cemetery and tied her to a tree.  He told her to look-up, and then he broke her neck.  He strangled her with his hands, and then with a rope, and stuffed her mouth with mud and leaves.  He looked for a spot to bury her and then dragged her body to that spot with the rope.  Because he was worried that she might revive, he stated that he stabbed the back of her neck with a knife to cut her spinal cord.  He then covered the body with leaves, went home to get a shovel, and came back to the cemetery and covered the body with dirt.

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On November 7, 2008, Carman L. Deck was sentenced for a third time to death for the 1996 fatal shootings of an elderly couple from De Soto. Two previous death sentences for Deck, now 43, had been overturned on appeal. The death sentence was imposed today at Hillsboro by Jefferson County Circuit Judge Gary Kramer, who accepted the recommendation of a jury that heard the arguments for the death penalty in September.

Case Facts: In June 1996, Deck planned a burglary with his mothers boy friend, Jim Boliek, to help Boliek obtain money for a trip to Oklahoma. Deck targeted James and Zelma Long, the victims in this case, because he had known the Longs’ grandson and had accompanied him to the Longs’ home in DeSoto, Missouri, where the grandson had stolen money from a safe. The original plan was to break into the Longs’ home on a Sunday while the Longs were at church. In preparation for the burglary, Deck and Boliek drove to DeSoto several times to canvass the area.

On Monday, July 8, 1996, Boliek told Deck that he and Deck’s mother wanted to leave for Oklahoma on Friday, and he gave Deck his .22 caliber High Standard automatic loading pistol. That Monday evening, Deck and his sister, Tonia Cummings, drove in her car to rural Jefferson County, near DeSoto, and parked on a back road, waiting for nightfall. Around nine o’clock, Deck and Cummings pulled into the Longs’ driveway.

Deck and Cummings knocked on the door and Zelma Long answered. Deck asked for directions to Laguana Palma, whereupon Mrs. Long invited them into the house. As she explained the directions and as Mr. Long wrote them down, Deck walked toward the front door and pulled the pistol from his waistband. He then turned around and ordered the Longs to go lie face down on their bed, and they complied without a struggle.

Next, Deck told Mr. Long to open the safe, but because he did not know the combination, Mrs. Long opened it instead. She gave Deck the papers and jewelry inside and then told Deck she had two hundred dollars in her purse in the kitchen. Deck sent her into the kitchen and she brought the money back to him. Mr. Long then told Deck that a canister on top of the television contained money, so Deck took the canister, as well. Hoping to avoid harm, Mr. Long even offered to write a check.

Deck again ordered the Longs to lie on their stomachs on the bed, with their faces to the side. For ten minutes or so, while the Longs begged for their lives, Deck stood at the foot of the bed trying to decide what to do. Cummings, who bad been a lookout at the front door, decided time was running short and ran out the door to the car. Deck put the gun to Mr. Long’s head and fired twice into his temple, just above his ear and just behind his forehead. Then Deck put the gun to Mrs. Long’s head and shot her twice, once in the back of the head and once above the ear. Both of the Longs died from the gunshots.

After the shooting, Deck grabbed the money and left the house. While fleeing in the car, Cummings complained of stomach pains, so Deck took her to Jefferson Memorial Hospital, where she was admitted. Deck gave her about two hundred fifty dollars of the Lung’s money and then drove back to St. Louis County. Based on a tip from an informant earlier that same day, St. Louis County Police Officer Vince Wood was dispatched to the apartment complex where Deck and Cummings lived. Officer Wood confronted Deck late that night after he observed him driving the car into the apartment parking lot with the headlights turned off. During a search for weapons, Officer Wood found a pistol concealed under the front seat of the car and, then, placed Deck under arrest. Deck later gave a full account of the murders in oral, written and audio taped statements.

The officer found the bodies of Rowe, 28, and her three children, daughters: Alexus Conley, 10, and AcQreya Conley, 6; and her son, Tyrese Conley, 5. They had been shot.

Taylor had boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Lambert International Field to Ontario, Calif., on the morning of Nov. 26, 2004. He claimed the victims were still alive when he left. Witnesses and phone records indicated Taylor had already murdered them before his departure. From California, Taylor had traveled to Texas, Alabama and Kentucky before police and federal marshals caught him in the back of a car in Madisonville.

A speck of blood on one of three pair of Taylor’s specatacles police found in his luggage matched Rowe’s blood, a DNA test later revealed.

Case facts courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Shot in the head and chest, McEntee still managed to get his car in gear and drive it about 200 feet before he crashed into a tree. Some neighbors tried to help the stricken officer, others called police and McEntee managed to get out of the police car. Kevin Johnson returned, fired three more shots and killed him.

Two hours earlier, Johnson’s younger half-brother, Joseph “Bam Bam’ Long collapsed at the house of Johnson’s grandmother. Police and paramedics arrived. “Bam Bam’ was taken to a hospital where he died of a congenital heart condition, an autopsy later revealed. Johnson was upset over his brother’s death. He testified he was in a trance when he shot McEntee.

Case facts courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Case Facts: Todd Franklin had been a witness against two members of McFadden’s gang, the “6 Deuces,’ and they had gone to jail. On the evening of July 3, 2002, in the 6200 block of Lexington Avenue in Pine Lawn, a St. Louis suburb, two young men chased Franklin, 19, to a house where men were working. The suspects were later identified by the witnesses as McFadden and Michael Douglas, now serving a lengthy prison sentence.

Witnesses said Douglas shot Franklin and then McFadden fired shots into the prone body of the victim after McFadden took the handgun from Douglas and complained that Franklin was still alive.

On May 15, 2003, just a few blocks from the scene of Franklin’s death 10 months earlier, Leslie Addison, 18, was fatally shot after an argument with McFadden in which he told her to get out of Pine Lawn. McFadden was the boyfriend of Leslie’s sister, Eva Addison, with whom he had a child.

Eva Addison was hiding in bushes when she saw her sister plead for her life and then saw McFadden shoot her. The victim had been shot under the chin and alongside the head.

Case facts courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Before her death, Guenther, 45, of Moscow Mills, Mo., had filed written statements of domestic violence in Lincoln County against a former boyfriend with whom she had broken up that summer. She wrote that she had been repeatedly harassed by phone and in person by Scott McLaughlin, and at one point, she said, he had jumped out of bushes at her on the Earth City lot. A hearing on her domestic violence allegations was set for Nov. 21, 2003, the morning after her disappeance.

On the night she disappeared, a worried neighbor at her mobile home park called her boss, who called police and they found Guenther’s pickup truck on the parking lot where she worked, along with a trail of blood. Guenther was already dead when her killer raped her, an autopsy showed.

McLaughlin, 33, of Wright City, admitted the murder in audiotaped and videotaped statements to police but never admitted the sexual assault on either an alive or dead victim. He led police to her corpse after his confessions.

Case facts courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch