GRUNDY — Eight years have passed since his ashes were scattered from a mountain ridge high above the stone courthouse where he was sentenced to death. But his last words still haunt this town.
“An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight,” Roger Keith Coleman said from the electric chair the night of May 20, 1992.
Today in Grundy and Buchanan County, a coal-studded spur of Southwest Virginia wedged between Kentucky and West Virginia, many residents say they are convinced Coleman raped and murdered his sister-in-law nearly two decades ago.
In a small town where strangers are scarce, the word of 12 jurors goes a long way.
But a group that works to free the wrongly convicted is still raising questions.
The answer may lie in genetic evidence stored in the freezer of a California laboratory, new DNA technology and a Buchanan County judge’s decision on whether to have the evidence tested.
Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey organization that investigated Coleman’s case and remains convinced of his innocence, has been joined by four newspapers in petitioning the court for additional DNA tests to resolve the question of guilt or innocence once and for all.
More is at stake here than the reputation of a dead man or the patience of a Coleman-weary community.
Never has there been absolute, scientific proof that an innocent man was executed in the United States, according to Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.
If the tests were to exonerate Coleman posthumously, Dieter said, it could have a profound impact on public sentiment at a time when national debate is raging on capital punishment.
When litigation continues past an execution, Dieter said, “it’s really sort of the court of public opinion that these things will get decided in, rather than a court of law.”
That is exactly what concerns Tom Scott, a Grundy lawyer who helped prove Coleman’s guilt to a jury in 1982. Scott said the request for DNA testing could revive what he considered a one-sided presentation of the case during a national media blitz in the months before Coleman was executed.
“Coleman, in my opinion, became America’s capital punishment poster boy,” Scott said. “I think the death penalty opponents and the media seized the opportunity to use Mr. Coleman and his case to advance their view that capital punishment is wrong.”
A Jan. 9 hearing has been scheduled for Judge Keary Williams to consider requests for DNA testing made by Centurion Ministries, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the Richmond Times Dispatch and The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk.
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In the winter of 1981, Brad and Wanda McCoy lived in a small frame house they rented on the banks of Slate Creek.
Wanda McCoy, 19, was a shy woman who associated only with family and a few friends, a trait police would rely on heavily after the events of March 10, 1981.
That night, McCoy followed her usual routine of watching television behind a locked door while waiting for her husband to come home from his night job at a nearby coal company parts shop.
They talked on the telephone about 9 p.m. Everything seemed fine, Brad McCoy would later recall.
When he arrived home shortly after 11 p.m., McCoy found his wife’s partially nude body lying face up in the bedroom. A large pool of blood around her head told McCoy she was dead.
An autopsy later provided the details: Someone had raped Wanda McCoy, stabbed her twice in the chest, and nearly decapitated her with a gaping slash wound to her neck.
“I still have times that I can picture that in my mind,” Brad McCoy said recently during an interview held, at his request, at an Abingdon church where his brother is pastor. “I’m not sure that will ever be totally wiped away from my mind.”
Roger Coleman, who was 22 at the time and married to Wanda McCoy’s younger sister, was charged with capital murder five weeks later.
Recently, at his Grundy law office down the street from the courthouse, Tom Scott ticked off the evidence against Coleman as if he had just tried the case the week before:
There was no sign of forced entry into the home, and Coleman was one of just three people Wanda McCoy would have allowed inside.
Coleman had type B blood, which is found in about 10 percent of the population – and which was also matched to the sperm taken from Wanda McCoy’s body. Small bloodstains found on his blue jeans matched the victim’s blood type.
A forensic scientist testified that a pubic hair found on the victim was similar to Coleman’s.
Coleman had recently served a 2-year prison sentence for attempted rape. He was also facing a charge of exposing himself to two employees at the Buchanan County Library. That was dropped once the jury returned a death sentence.
A jailhouse informant testified that Coleman had confessed to the killing while awaiting trial.
And in 1990, DNA testing not available at the time of the trial was conducted at the request of Coleman’s attorneys. It showed that the genetic makeup found in the sperm sample could have come from just 2 percent of the population – a group that included Coleman.
Prosecutors said that when Coleman’s blood type was factored into the equation, the pool of possible suspects shrunk to just 0.2 percent of the male population.
But Centurion Ministries questions those findings. It says new, more precise technology can be used to examine evidence that remains in the laboratory of a California scientist who conducted the 1990 tests.
The petition, filed in September, infuriates Brad McCoy.
“I never really thought about them coming back and opening this up again,” he said. “Basically, you’re opening hurt back up to me. You finally find a little bit of peace of mind for a while and you hope that it will continue. And it has up until now. But it brings a lot of things back.”
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Getting from one spot to another in Buchanan County is often an uphill trek. The place where Roger Keith Coleman grew up is no exception.
Less than a mile from the house where Wanda McCoy was killed, a single-lane road winds up a mountain for as long as the terrain allows. As the mountain grows steeper, the road reverses directions so abruptly that making the turn is impossible.
Motorists must back up for about 100 yards to another switchback, go forward for a stretch, then back up again to reach the driveway of Coleman’s uncle, Roger Lee Coleman.
As a cold rain pelted the ridge, Coleman pointed to an outcrop where, three days after the execution, loved ones scattered his nephew’s ashes to the wind. Roger Keith Coleman had requested that his remains be left here, where he loved to hunt and roam the woods as a teen-ager.
The fact that Virginia’s attorney general is fighting the request for additional DNA testing comes as no surprise to Roger Lee Coleman. “I believe they executed an innocent man and it’s going to come out on them,” he said.
It was in Coleman’s mobile home that Jim McCloskey, founder and director of Centurion Ministries, spent many nights in the late 1980s while investigating the case.
On one of his trips to Grundy, McCloskey found a woman who said in an affidavit that she heard another man confess to killing McCoy. Later, one day after she gave an interview to Roanoke television station WDBJ, the woman died of what was determined to be a drug overdose.
Other witnesses also fed McCloskey incriminating tips about the man, who was never charged and later won an out-of-court settlement from the Washington, D.C., law firm that handled Coleman’s appeal, for going public with his name.
McCloskey also chipped away at other parts of the state’s circumstantial case.
He found evidence of a pry mark on the door of McCoy’s house, casting doubt on the commonwealth’s theory that Wanda McCoy let her killer inside.
He spoke to a relative of the jailhouse informant, who told him the man admitted he contrived his testimony about Coleman’s confession.
He raised questions about the reliability of forensic testing that matched hair and blood samples taken from the crime scene to Coleman.
He retraced the route Coleman took after getting laid off from his coal-mining job the night of the killing, questioning whether Coleman could have committed the crime within the time frame outlined by prosecutors.
Despite the new information that McCloskey dug up, Coleman’s appeals were cut short when an attorney missed a filing deadline by one day.
“We’ve all heard of people who get off because of a technicality,” Coleman attorney Kathleen Behan told reporters at the time. “Roger is going to be executed because of one.”
However, new evidence in the case was reviewed by then-Gov. Douglas Wilder, who rejected a clemency request after Coleman flunked a polygraph test the day of his execution. Also, although Coleman had missed his deadline, a federal judge reviewed the evidence and found it lacking.
While McCloskey raised many questions, there was never any clear, scientific evidence that exonerated Coleman. Even Dieter, of the anti-capital punishment Death Penalty Information Center, says he thinks the odds are against Coleman being cleared.
Now is the perfect time to find out, McCloskey said.
“It’s like a fruit on a tree,” he said. “Just reach up and pluck the fruit down and do this up-to-date, sophisticated, contemporary DNA testing to establish the truth of the matter once and for all.”
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Grundy is a two-traffic-light town of about 1,300 residents. It is best known for steep mountain walls that can channel killing floods through the town, a perennial state championship wrestling team and a dying coal industry that has saddled the county with the second-highest unemployment rate in the state.
And, it seems to some people, it is known for Roger Keith Coleman.
Shortly before he was executed, Coleman appeared on the cover of Time magazine. “This man may be innocent,” the headline proclaimed. “This man is due to die.” Other national publications covered the case as well.
Players on both sides of the case made television appearances on “Larry King Live” and news shows from “Good Morning America” to “Nightline.”
John Tucker, a Chicago defense attorney who now lives in Virginia, wrote a book about the case titled “May God Have Mercy.”
Some Buchanan County residents believe the media accounts glossed over evidence incriminating Coleman. They felt their community was portrayed as a biased, backwoods county more interested in a hanging than a fair trial.
A Newsweek article, for example, said “the courthouse should have had a big top” when Coleman was tried.
“The community just got beat to death by the national media,” said Lodge Compton, editor of the Virginia Mountaineer, Buchanan County’s weekly newspaper. “It left a sore spot, no question about it.”
News of the case being reopened hasn’t caused much of a stir in the community, Compton said. His paper has carried a few articles, but there have been no letters to the editor and not much public discussion.
“Outsiders seem to be the only ones with an interest in the case,” he said.
Yet some people here have no problems with the testing being done.
“If the boy didn’t do it, I think his name should be cleared,” said Dolores Wolford, owner of Grundy Dry Cleaning. But like most residents interviewed recently, Wolford didn’t expect any new revelations from the tests.
Nicholas Persin, the retired Circuit Court judge who presided over Coleman’s trial, said the question of whether to allow more testing is “a really tough call.”
“You’re always searching for the truth, and you never give up in the quest,” said Persin, who ordered the DNA testing in 1990 that, at least in the eyes of prosecutors, confirmed Coleman’s guilt.
But if such testing were used to question every conviction, he said, it could have a chilling effect on juries.
“My fear is what it may do with a jury who gets in the jury room with an egregious case and they say ‘so do we have to be absolutely sure?’ as opposed to being convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“There’s a lot to consider here. This opens up a whole can of worms and who knows where it will end,” he said. “There’s got to be finality at some point.”