Solution to killing leaves questions

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Norman Mullins Jr., father of the victim, said, "People are not believing the police version because there is no way it could be completely right. They've ignored all the evidence that has come up sinee they arrested Jack Carmen."

Graham M. LeSturgeon, Columbus director of the Volunteers of America, the man who has researched Carmen's alibi and concluded that he could not have een at the murder site when Christie was killed, thinks the police were "backed into a corner: There was public pressure to catch somebody. They did and then said he was the murderer. They can't back down now even though they're wrongly trying to send an innocent man to prison for life

Benson A. Wolman, executive director of the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union, said, "People don't believe the police because of the evidence which clearly indicates Carmen is innocent. The police could not possibly have taken more advantage of someone with a low IQ than they did in this case which they hurried to an unjust conclusion."

Carmen, who has an IQ of only 55 and who, doctors say, does not comprehend what is happening to him is probably one of the only persons involved in the bizarre case who does not have a theory.

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An intensive three-week Plain Dealer investigation of the case, including interviews with about 50 persons involved, concluded that the questions raised about the official investigation are warranted.

The case, outlined in yesterday's Plain Dealer, has sparked controversy since police arrested Carmen on Aug. 26. Carmen confessed that day, after waiving his rights to remain silent or to have a lawyer present during the six hours of interrogation.

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Through his lawyer, Myron Shwartz, Carmen waived a preliminary hearing, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison on Sept. 3-only eight days after he was arrested.

An ACLU challenge to Shwartz's handling of the case resulted in the assignment of a new lawyer on Sept. 17 and the filing of a motion to set aside the guilty verdict.

That motion, filed by new lawyer Richard C. Addison, a former president of the Columbus Bar Association, was accompanied by the findings of Dr. Charles W. Harding of the Harding Hospital in Worthington.

Dr. Harding concluded that Carmen an outpatient of a state hospital who can neither read nor write did not understand why he was in jail and has a "tendency toward childlike magical thinking."

Dr. Harding's report added fuel to the charges lodged by Carmen's supporters that the confession was meaningless.

"Carmen, eager to please and highly susceptible to suggestion, was led into a false confession," Wolman charged after conferring with lawyers. "There is almost no. credible supporting evidence and I think that what happened was

Associated Press

Henry H. Newell Jr.

everything was built on the confession.

"They knew that he was mentally retarded so the obligation for counsel was even greater, if they questioned him for six hours and came out with a psychologically coerced confession that could never hold up in any credible court hearing."

Deputy Police Chief Donald H. Bryant, however, said, "He was advised of his rights. He was asked if he wanted to eat or to start the questioning. I don't know if he was mentally competent to understand what his rights are. All you can do is explain what his rights are and if he says he understands, we can't get inside his head and really assure ourselves.”

Jesse and Mary Smith, Carmens foster parents until two years ago, ridiculed the confession. Smith, 70, a retired barber, houses Carmen's brother, Kirk, 18, who is also retarded, and several other retarded youths in his Columbus home.

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Mrs. Smith said any experienced questioner could get Carmen to confess to killing John F. Kennedy.

"You come down on him and he'll confess to anything whether he did it or not, and that's for sure," she said.

When Mrs. Smith visited Carmen in jail, he asked her, "Mom, what have they got me for?" She said, “Jack, don't you know?” And he replied, "No, I wasn't drunk. I was drunk one time when they arrested me but they kept me all night and turned me loose."

When informed he was in for murder, she said, Carmen said, "I never hurt nobody."

The Smiths also joined Lesturgeon and others who contend that Carmen could not have been the murderer described by Newell because that assailant was wearing cutoff shorts and no shirt.

The Smiths and associates of Carmen claim he never wore shorts or appeared without a shirt because of an obsession about his

skinny legs and fragile physique.

The Plain Dealer, however, uncovered evidence that indicated Carmen's aversion to shorts was not total and that on rare occasions he did wear short pants.

Descriptions of the assailant's clothes, however, did point out the police haste to convict Carmen. In the court hearing Sept. 3, when Carmen was sentenced, Prosecutor Ronald O'Brien told the judge that police had found three pairs of cutoff shorts discarded behind the Volunteers of America. Despite no evidence to link any of the shorts to Carmen, O'Brien spoke of stains on the shorts, hinting they could be tied to the murder.

What O'Brien did not tell the judge was that the shorts were discarded Saturday morning, hours before the killing. He also did not note that an average of three pairs of cutoffs a day are discarded by the Volunteers of America. "I tried to tell them, but the police just weren't interested in the truth about the pants," said LeSturgeon.

Another key discrepancy in the court appearance was the use of an alleged identification of Carmen by Margaret Barton of Columbus who was in the parking lot the day of the murder and reported seeing the suspected assailant run by her car.

"Mrs. Barton in confronting the defendant seated in the rear of the police cruiser stated that positively this was the man she had seen," O'Brien told the judge.

Mrs. Barton, however, tells a different story.

In a signed statement obtained by The Plain Dealer, Mrs. Barton detailed her efforts to tell police that Carmen was definitely not the man she saw the day of the murder.

Describing how police had her identify Carmen, Mrs. Barton related what happened when she joined police with Carmen at the murder site the night he was arrested:

'Two detectives were in the back seat with a man in the middle. I could hardly see the suspect in the middle ... (the detective) said they were now going to stop,

take Carmen out of the car, and walk him up the sidewalk.

"He was handcuffed. They walked him up the walk with his back to me, having him turn his head slightly I said in size and weight, he came close to the man I had seen Saturday, but I would have to see his face and his eyes from the front. He asked me why. I told him that I had two boys and I would never want anyone to judge them so unfairly. I also asked him why I was not called for a lineup. He replied, 'We don't have enough time.'

"He told me not to worry, as 'this one' does not know anything. He made a motion pointing his finger around his ear as if to say Carmen was crazy.

"At 7:50 p.m., another detective appeared, quite excited, and the one standing with me said, 'What are we going to do now?' The other detective said, 'We are going to take him to the murder scene; he is ready to confess.''

The next morning, she said, she saw Carmen's picture on television and realized he was not the man she saw the day of the murder. She said she repeatedly called police but said she had difficulty getting police to listen to her.

Police explained her change by saying she talked to persons at the Volunteers of America who were maintaining Carmen was with them at the time of the killing.

"She backed off her original identification, saying that a person can't be in two places at the same time, because of what the people at the Volunteers of America said," Bryant said. "Then our investigation showed that the fellow down at the Volunteers of America was in error."

"That fellow" at the Volunteers of America is LeSturgeon, who said he never met Mrs. Barton until after she changed her story.

"This is so frustrating," she said. "The police just won't admit they could have made a mistake. Their refusal to believe our story, instead believing a convicted criminal, is ridiculous."

Police have dismissed the LeSturgeon alibi because the officials at the Volunteers changed

the times at which they told police they had seen Jack Carmen the day of the murder.

"They completely ignored us. Jack was seen here at times that would make it impossible for him to be there," LeSturgeon said. "Police say we changed our stories. We did. But we changed them only to refine the time and, in fact, if we did anything, it was detrimental to Jack because we backed up the time."

No matter which version of the LeSturgeon alibi is accepted, Carmen, who did not have a car, would have been unable to be at the murder site in time to have killed Christie Mullins, The Plain Dealer investigation concluded.

The man the police chose to believe instead of LeSturgeon was "Junior" Newell, the witness, who has come under increasing criticism from neighbors.

Part of the suspicion of Newell is based on disclosure that he has a criminal record. Newell, 25, said it was unfair to bring his record up "because that was all a long time ago, when I was a juvenile.”

The latest addition on his record was April 10, 1974, when he was arrested for discharging a weapon. When he was a juvenile, he served 52 months in the Alabama Boys Industrial School, escaped, was captured and sent to a reformatory in Arkansas. Again he escaped, but surrendered.

Newell has been convicted of arson, intimidating a witness, burning property to defraud and curfew violations. He spent time in the Ohio Reformatory at Mansfield and Lebanon Correctional Institution. He was paroled from Lebanon in 1971.

When his story was challenged, Newell agreed to take a polygraph test. After the test began, however, he vomited on the machine, ending the questioning.

"It was within three or four days after the murder and I hadn't slept or anything since," he said. "I was really sick and had a cold or the flu. They said there really weren't no need for me to take it again."

Newell vehemently denied a charge made by his neighbor, James S. Foster, 42, the criminal

justice coordinator for Southeast Ohio for the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.

Foster, a deputy sheriff in several Ohio counties and a former Columbus policeman, told The Plain Dealer he was told by Newell that the Newells were taken by police to view Carmen while Mrs. Barton was trying to ⚫identify the suspect.

Newell denied that he saw Carmen before he and his wife picked him out of a police lineup.

Foster's role in the investigation has provided one of the strange twists in the Mullins case. When Foster, a black, moved into the neighborhood in 1969, Mullins was one of the protesting neighbors who posted picket signs demanding an all-white area.

The two men did not talk until the day after the killing. Since then they have talked frequently and have become stanch allies in the search for the killer of the girl.

"Newell has a false image of me," Foster said. "He thought at one time he could really confide in me because he told me he was affiliated with the CIA and the FBI. He patted me on the back and called me brother. But I'm not that stupid.

"The more I talked to Newell, the more shaky I got on him. He'd say one thing tonight and something altogether different tomorrow. So I began to get a little leery of him. He made several statements that did not make sense."

According to Foster, Newell particularly shocked Mullins within a week of the killing of Christie by persistently asking the girl's father, "What was Christie's bra size? How big was she?”

Asked to confirm that Newell asked the questions, Mullins said, "I just can't answer. I have to save some things for court if there is a trial."

Newell denied ever saying he was in the CIA or the FBI. He said he is a vice president and salesman for Custom Aluminum Siding Co.

NEXT: The victims' father and friends.