Witnesses and new evidence run counter to those presented at a man's homicide trial in 1986.
By DAVID KARP
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 24, 2001
TAMPA -- Fourteen years ago, prosecutor Joe Episcopo stood before a jury at the end of Rudolph Holton's murder trial.
Episcopo's work during the trial garnered little attention then, even though the killing was particularly gruesome. A 17-year-old woman was sexually assaulted, strangled and set on fire in an abandoned drug house.
As Episcopo built to a dramatic close, he reviewed the evidence in what was largely a circumstantial case: A jailhouse inmate had said Holton confessed; a witness had seen Holton go into the drug house with a woman; a piece of hair that might have been Holton's had been found in the woman's mouth.
"Ladies and gentleman, that's our case," Episcopo said. "We don't apologize for it."
Maybe not, but more than a decade later prosecutors are having to defend it. In a three-day hearing last week:
A jailhouse informant who testified in 1986 that Holton confessed said last week that he had lied during the trail.
A witness who testified that he saw Holton with a girl outside the drug house said he had lied too.
The hair on the victim, which Episcopo implied might be Holton's, actually came from the murdered woman, new DNA tests show.
Holton's defense lawyers also found a witness who testified last week that another man who visited the drug house had admitted to killing the victim, Katrina Ann Graddy, a drug addict who worked as a prostitute.
Ten days before her death, Graddy filed a police report accusing that man of raping her. She would die later after being raped.
"They told me to come and tell the truth," the witness, Donald Smith, said in court last week about his new testimony. "The man is innocent."
Circuit Judge Daniel Perry, who heard the new testimony, stepped down from the bench at one point, put on latex gloves and looked through evidence. Perry later asked for DNA tests on hair found in a bag across the street from the crime scene.
Prosecutors already agreed last year to give Holton a new sentencing hearing because former Judge Harry Lee Coe, who presided over the trial, made basic mistakes in the case. That hearing has not been set yet.
Last week, defense attorneys argued Holton should get a new trial. Judge Perry is expected to decide later this year whether to grant a new trial.
When Holton was arrested in 1986, he was hardly a sympathetic figure. Then 33, he had been convicted of at least 13 crimes, mainly burglaries and drug charges. But he didn't have a record of violence.
When detectives first interviewed him, he lied about being in the drug house. Later, police told him they had found his fingerprint on a cigarette pack inside the house. He insisted the print couldn't have been his.
It was, but the fingerprint alone wouldn't have been enough to convict Holton of murder. Scores of drug users, including Holton, used the house. What hurt Holton were the witnesses.
At his trial, resident Carrie Nelson said she saw Holton alone near the drug house at 11 p.m. the night of the murder. She knew Holton because he had robbed her four times.
But last week, one of Nelson's friends, Elease Moore, 63, said Nelson had made up her story to stop Holton the robberies. Nelson, who is now dead, said she had lied, Moore said.
"She was going to get even with him," Moore testified.
Another key witnesses was Johnny Lee Newsome, who testified at Holton's trial that he had seen him outside the drug house at 11 p.m. on the night of the murder with a girl.
"I didn't see him that night," Newsome acknowledged last week. Newsome, who was on probation, lied to keep police from investigating him, he said.
"I was scared," he said. "I thought the police would get me for something I was doing."
Flemnie Birkins, a jailhouse informer who testified in 1986 that Holton had confessed to the murder, also acknowledged fabricating testimony.
"I told (the detective) what he wanted to hear," Birkins said. "I used it to my advantage."
At the trial, Episcopo portrayed Birkins as an honest man, appalled by the crime, who had not made a deal with prosecutors.
"This is a horrible crime that even a fellow black inmate will not tolerate," Episcopo told the jury, which had no African-Americans on it.
Episcopo also suggested that the hair found in the victim's mouth belonged to Holton.
An FBI agent had testified that the hair belonged to a black person, but he couldn't prove it was Holton. The only other possibility?
The hair belonged to the victim. But Episcopo discarded that idea.
"We can say they are not her hairs," Episcopo told the jury. "How are hairs down there going to get in her mouth? . . . I would just defy anybody to tell me how those are her hairs, how she got them."
DNA tests completed last year show that the hairs were, in fact, the victim's.