State says his goal was respect for Klan group
02/17/99
By Lee Hancock / The Dallas Morning News
JASPER, Texas - John William King was a hate-filled
racist who
dragged James Byrd Jr. to death because he
needed a "dramatic "
act to get respect for his new Ku Klux Klan
group, jurors were told
as arguments opened in his capital murder
trial Tuesday.
A bloody trail of evidence - from his cigarette
lighter to his
blood-spattered shoes and his DNA on cigarette
butts - led police to
Mr. King; his racist writings, statements
and tattoos explained why
he committed the June 7 slaying, Jasper County
District Attorney
Guy James Gray told jurors.
"This young man was full of hate, and he has
all kinds of tattoos on
his body that reflect his anger and his hate,"
Mr. Gray told the jury
of 11 whites and one black in a 10-minute
opening statement. "Bill
King needed something dramatic that would
attract media attention
in order to gain what in their warped world
would be respect for his
newly formed gang."
Mr. King, a 24-year-old laborer, is the first
of three defendants to
stand trial for the slaying of Mr. Byrd, a
49-year-old disabled black
man. All face the death penalty if convicted.
Trial dates have not
been set for the other two defendants, Shawn
Allen Berry, 23, of
Jasper, and Lawrence Russell Brewer, 31, of
Sulphur Springs.
As opening arguments and testimony began Tuesday,
security in
the courthouse area was beefed up with several
dozen state troopers
and other officers. Officials had expected
protesters to demonstrate,
but that didn't happen Tuesday.
Mr. Gray told reporters that he would prove
that Mr. King and the
other two ex-convicts carried out the most
vicious racial killing
since the bloodiest days of the civil rights
era "to promote his own
personal hate group."
He said Mr. King's writings, detailing his
effort to organize a Klan
group, suggest that he wanted to be famous
and that he was driven
by something "in the nature of being evil
or satanic."
Mr. King's lawyers declined to give an opening
statement Tuesday
and refused to answer reporters' questions
about their strategy or
the impact of the prosecution's first day.
"I expected a whole lot of bad stuff coming
in today," said defense
attorney C. Haden "Sonny" Cribbs of Beaumont.
Focus on inquiry
Much of Tuesday's testimony focused on the
frantic investigation
that ensued after Mr. Byrd's nude, mangled
body was discovered
at the end of Huff Creek Road. The rural blacktop
lane winds
through one of the county's oldest black neighborhoods
about five
miles northeast of Jasper.
The trail of dried blood that led up Huff Creek
Road to the body
"looked like they'd drug an animal," said
Tommy Robinson, the
first Jasper County sheriff's deputy sent
to the scene on the
morning after an area resident reported finding
a body.
Sheriff Billy Rowles, the prosecution's first
witness, said he
initially thought the torso and severed head
found about a mile apart
on the narrow roadway came from a hit-and-run
victim. He said he
first thought the body had been mangled in
the undercarriage of a
car.
But as he retraced the swerving brown trail
of dried blood over
three miles of asphalt and dirt roads, the
sheriff said, he realized
that it came from something being "dragged
behind some kind of a
vehicle."
Jurors were shown 14 photographs of Mr. Byrd's
body during the
sheriff's testimony. One woman gulped visibly,
and another wiped
her eyes as they flipped through black books
of photos.
The body pictures were not shown to spectators,
but several of Mr.
Byrd's sisters and his daughter, Rene Mullins,
wept silently as they
were described. Ms. Mullins fled the courtroom
weeping as
prosecutors displayed a shredded pair of underwear
that had been
found around her father's ankles.
'More intense'
She declined to comment, but one of her aunts,
Clara Byrd of
Houston, said the day's testimony was "a little
more intense, a little
more graphic" than she and her family had
expected.
Across the aisle, Mr. King's 67-year-old father
also wept silently
during much of the morning's testimony. He
did not return after the
lunch break. "It's just hard to listen to
all they're saying about my
boy," he said.
The defendant showed little reaction. His only
comment during the
day was the words "not guilty, your honor,"
softly spoken in
response to a question from the judge.
Asked about his mood at the end of the trial's
first day, one of Mr.
King's lawyers said he "doesn't like seeing
his writings. But he's a
prolific writer."
Sheriff Rowles testified that investigators
began considering that
the slaying could be a hate crime after they
examined a cigarette
lighter bearing the name "Possum" and a circular
Ku Klux Klan
symbol found where the dragging appeared to
have begun. "We
really started having bad thoughts," he said.
Beer bottles and cigarette butts were recovered
from the same
clearing at the end of the road, where matted
grass and scuff marks
gave the impression that "several people had
been in a fight," he
said.
In his opening statement, Mr. Gray said DNA
evidence showed
that all three defendants smoked cigarettes
in the area where the
dragging began and that one, Mr. Brewer, drank
a beer.
A watch, a wallet, black-and-white tennis shoes
and two shirts later
identified as Mr. Byrd's were found in the
area, along with a nut
driver wrench inscribed with the name "Berry."
By nightfall, the sheriff said, his investigators
and Jasper police
had learned that a witness had seen Mr. Byrd
riding in the back of a
gray pickup the previous night. Authorities
had also linked the
name "Berry" to Mr. Berry, a 24-year-old movie
theater manager
who drove an aging gray pickup.
Truck searched
Mr. Berry was known to be living with Mr. King,
an ex-convict
who had acquired the nickname "Possum" in
prison, the sheriff
testified. When Mr. Berry was brought into
the Sheriff's
Department, a search of his gray truck turned
up what appeared to
be blood and a set of engraved tools matching
the wrench found at
the dragging scene, the sheriff said.
"Right then, I knew this country boy was in
trouble," Sheriff
Rowles said.
Before dawn June 8, the sheriff said, he was
headed to Beaumont
to ask for help from the FBI. He said that
would prove to be "the
smartest thing Billy Rowles ever did."
"I'm a brand new sheriff, and I didn't even
know the definition of a
hate crime, but I knew somebody had been murdered
because he
was black. It was a bad murder. I thought
it was a hate crime, and I
was hoping the federal government would come
up here and wade
off into it with us," he said.
Defense attorneys questioned the sheriff and
other law enforcement
witnesses about their evidence-gathering techniques
in what
appeared to be an effort to challenge the
validity of DNA and other
laboratory testing that ties their client
to the slaying.
They also objected repeatedly when prosecutors
tried to introduce
such evidence as the body pictures and Mr.
King's Klan documents
and letters from prison.
Questioning an 18-year-old girl who received
19 prison letters from
Mr. King between 1995 and 1997, they repeatedly
suggested that
their client's racism and extremism did not
begin until he was
behind bars.
The witness, Michele Chapman, acknowledged
that Mr. King's
letters became progressively more racist.
She said he also adopted
the nickname "Possum," the same name found
on the cigarette
lighter at the dragging scene, only after
months behind bars.
Mr. Gray told reporters that the defense might
be launching a
strategy to "blame the penitentiary."
Defense attorneys declined to comment, but
they have subpoenaed
four current or former inmates who served
time with Mr. King.
One is a black man still in an East Texas
prison who wrote The
Dallas Morning News after the Byrd slaying
that Mr. King was a
friend and an honorable man who had been forced
into racism by
brutal prison conditions.
"If he did do what he is accused of, I can
understand why," wrote
the inmate, Roderick Richardson.
Testimony will continue on Wednesday with the
presentation of
DNA evidence. Prosecutors said they also expected
to begin
showing jurors Mr. King's large collection
of racist and "satanic"
tattoos.
Prosecutor offers graphic description of Jasper death
1/26/99
By Lee Hancock / The Dallas Morning News
JASPER, Texas - Jury selection began Monday in the death-penalty trial
of John William
King with prospective jurors flinching at a prosecutor's horrific account
of the dragging
death that Mr. King is accused of masterminding.
Some grimaced and a man wiped his eyes as the prosecutor described James
Byrd Jr.
struggling to keep his head off blacktop and his chained body swinging
behind a pickup
truck "just like a boat pulling a skier behind it."
The June 7 slaying of Mr. Byrd was meant to send a message, Jasper County
prosecutor
Guy James Gray told the hushed jury panel.
"James Byrd, at the time that he was chained in the back of the pickup
truck, was alive. Not
only was he alive - he was conscious," Mr. Gray said. "And he was using
his elbows and
his body in every way he could to keep his head and shoulders above the
pavement."
Only about a third of the 400 people called to jury selection filed into
the Jasper County
courthouse Monday morning. By midmorning, the panel of prospective jurors
was cut to
122 county residents, including 21 blacks. Selecting 12 jurors and two
alternates from that
group - a process that continues Tuesday morning - is expected to take
several weeks.
Mr. King, a 24-year-old laborer, sat quietly, sometimes taking notes and
occasionally
whispering to his lawyer during the mundane process of calling the roll
and excusing
panelists with legal exemptions.
The long sleeves of his blue button-down shirt covered his heavily tattooed
arms, but the
black outline of a satanic pentagram tattoo was visible on the back of
his closely cropped
head as he was led into the courtroom.
He wore no tie at his open collar and his shirt tail was pulled out of
his khaki pants. Beneath
the shirt, officers had concealed a high-voltage, electric-shock security
belt.
Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles said the belt, which can be used to
deliver a 50,000-volt,
eight-second shock to the kidneys, was being used because of Mr. King's
belligerence and
threats to county jailers. Seven police officers, including two Texas Rangers,
were in the
courtroom to watch Mr. King closely, and even more surrounded him as he
entered and left
the courthouse wearing a bulletproof vest.
Mr. King watched expressionless as Mr. Gray described Mr. Byrd's death
and told how his
mutilated body was left at the gates of a black cemetery "as some sort
of a message."
Mr. King's father, Ronald King, cried and stirred in his wheelchair, breaking
the hushed
silence in the crowded courtroom with the rattle of his oxygen bottle as
the prosecutor
described the killing.
Mr. Gray said the killers chose not to hide the body in thick woods nearby,
where it would
have gone undiscovered for weeks.
And they stopped their truck and "lingered for some time" after Mr. Byrd's
head and right
arm were ripped from his body by a roadside culvert. They then resumed
driving. "We know
because there is a pool of blood right at that spot," he said.
The body was dumped about a mile farther down the road.
High stakes
The defendant put his head in his hands and stared downward as his court-appointed
lawyers
talked about the trial's life-or-death stakes for "this young boy."
Mr. King's lawyers barely raised the prospect that Mr. King might not be
convicted,
mentioning it briefly twice. But they spent almost half of their 30-minute
presentation
detailing the death penalty and the lethal injection method used to carry
it out in Texas.
"Murder is a bad thing. You take a human life. But we're gonna talk about
whether we take a
second," defense attorney C. Haden "Sonny" Cribbs told prospective jurors.
"It is our
objective to present a defense, whatever is necessary legally to save his
life."
Mr. Cribbs also told jurors that they could decide that Mr. King was guilty
of murder only
instead of the combination of murder and kidnapping that prosecutors have
alleged. A
murder must be committed during the commission of another crime to qualify
for the death
penalty.
Clue to defense
That may be a hint of a defense argument to come: that Mr. Byrd was willingly
with whoever
killed him and died when a brawl between drunken ex-convicts got out of
hand.
Mr. Byrd, 49 and disabled, had served time in Texas prisons and had a criminal
record of
petty theft, forgeries and drunkenness. Mr. Gray acknowledged in his Monday
statement to
prospective jurors that Mr. Byrd was drunk on the night of his death.
Mr. King had been released from state prison several months before the
slaying after serving
time for burglary. A second man accused in the slaying, Lawrence Russell
Brewer, was Mr.
King's prison cellmate, and a third, Shawn Allen Berry, had a felony burglary
conviction.
Trial dates for Mr. Brewer, 31, of Sulphur Springs and Mr. Berry, 23, of
Jasper have not
bee set.
All three have denied involvement, and Mr. King has said Mr. Berry could
have killed Mr.
Byrd alone in a soured drug deal.
Mr. Berry told police just after the slaying that Mr. King instigated it
in a racist rage after the
three men had been out for a night of beer drinking. He said Mr. King was
infuriated that
Mr. Berry stopped and offered Mr. Byrd a ride home.
Authorities have said they believe that Mr. King was trying to organize
a racist gang in
Jasper at the time and had long talked of committing a violent racist act.
He and Mr. Brewer belonged to a small racist prison gang known as the Confederate
Knights of America. While there, both obtained extensive white supremacist
tattoos. Mr.
King's include Nazi symbols, Klan emblems and the profile of a lynched
black man.
Eyes of the world
The worldwide attention that has focused on Jasper and local residents'
horror at the crime
was clearly on the minds of both sides in the case, as well as many prospective
jurors.
One elderly black woman, dressed in Sunday clothes and a fancy hat, nervously
admitted
that she had been to see Huff Creek Road, where Mr. Byrd was dragged.
Several nodded when Mr. Gray asked if they were scared at the prospect
of being involved
in a case that has drawn so much media to the southeast Texas community.
Later, Mr. Gray
told reporters that he believes such fears were responsible for a larger
number of no-shows
than usual among residents called for the jury panel.
"It's a bad case, but it's just a bad murder case, and we're going to handle
it just as normal
as we know how. At least inside these doors," Mr. Gray told prospective
jurors.
Outside the courthouse, residents said the square and surrounding downtown
area was
surprisingly normal despite Monday's media presence. Dozens of reporters
and cameramen
milled on the courthouse lawn, and six satellite trucks lined one side
of the courthouse
square.
Just outside the century-old stucco courthouse, the Jasper Chamber of Commerce
set up a
tent to dispense free bottled water, maps and tourism information to the
media.
Pleasantly normal
But Chamber of Commerce Director Diane Domenech said she was pleased at
the absence of
protesters, hate-group members or even heavier-than-usual car traffic.
"It's not nearly as bad as we thought. You can even find parking places," she said.
The courthouse itself was heavily guarded. A bomb-sniffing dog was brought
in from Fort
Polk, La., for an early-morning sweep of the building, and dozens of local
police, sheriff's
deputies and deputy U.S. marshals searched bags and manned metal detectors
at each
entrance.
One prospective juror was arrested Monday and charged with carrying a concealed
weapon
after officers found a small revolver in her purse. The 62-year-old woman,
who was
dismissed from the panel, was released later on a $5,000 bond. Authorities
said they
believed the woman had forgotten the pistol was in her purse until it was
discovered at the
courthouse.
The case resumes Tuesday with questioning of individual jury panelists.
Seven have been
called to appear.
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