Kezer case report questioned

A former Scott City police officer has found himself in the middle of Angela Mischelle Lawless' re-opened murder case, and now -- like many of the witnesses in the case some 16 years ago -- his story appears to have changed.

The state of Missouri answered motions presented by Joshua C. Kezer's attorney Monday, and a judge set a court date for July 28 to rule on those motions as part of a wrongful incarceration case.

The biggest revelation coming from Monday's court proceedings was the state's assertion that a former police officer has changed his position on a report he allegedly filed 10 days after Lawless was found dead Nov. 8, 1992.

In the report, central to the defense's case, then-Scott City police officer Bobby Wooten wrote that a key witness in the trial, Mark Abbott, singled out a person he knew, not Kezer, as the person he saw at the crime scene. Abbott later identified Kezer in a photo line-up.

The report came to light after the case was reopened in 2006 by Scott County Sheriff Rick Walter, who was involved in the case from the beginning but was never convinced Kezer was the person who committed the murder.

The report believed to be by Wooten was found by detective Branden Caid, hired by Scott County to look into the Lawless case. Kezer's original defense attorneys both said they never knew the report existed.

Court law requires evidence to be shared with the defense, and the discovery of the report -- along with other testimony collected since the conviction -- put the trial's legality in question.

Caid said Wooten told him he remembered taking Abbott's statement. In January, Wooten signed a declaration for Charles Weiss, Kezer's current attorney, saying the report was his and that he remembered turning it over to then-sheriff Bill Ferrell a few days after talking with Abbott.

According to arguments presented by the state Monday, however, Wooten's story changed May 15 and Wooten denied any memory of the interview with Abbott. According to an interview memorandum written by an investigator with the attorney general's office, Wooten said the report looked like one he would have made, but he didn't think the signature was his.

"It's probably the most significant piece of evidence in the case," Weiss said about the report.

In an interview after the hearing, Weiss said he's not surprised Wooten may not remember the report, but "there's no question in my mind it was his report."

Police reports show that investigators questioned the suspect that Abbott named the day after the report was dated.

The suspect's name "didn't fall out of the sky," Weiss said. Both Walter and Caid said they questioned Wooten about the report in 2006, and they said Wooten claimed he remembered taking the report and giving it to Ferrell.

The state maintains that most of the new evidence showing Kezer's innocence is hearsay and inadmissible, but in another key development Monday, the state said it will not oppose a motion to test ballistics evidence retrieved at the scene with evidence from a murder in New Madrid County, Weiss said. Cole County Circuit Judge Richard G. Callahan will rule on that and other motions, including one to enter blood evidence in the case into the national database.

The state's motion cites the testimony of three jailhouse informants who testified at trial, implicating Kezer and saying they heard him confess to the murder.

The first of the informants, Shawn Mangus, also testified that he was coerced by David Rosener, Kezer's trial attorney, into later recanting his statement and writing letters supporting that recantation. Rosener denied coercing Mangus and said he confronted him with a statement from a fourth informant, Charles Weissinger, saying the two of them and a third witness, Steve Grah, made up the story.

Weissinger testified for the defense at Kezer's trial and said the three men had concocted the story in exchange for leniency on their own sentences. Mangus testified that Kezer confessed the crime at a party at the home of a mutual acquaintance, who told police the party could not have occurred at her residence at that time because she had vacated the apartment two months earlier.

bdicosmo@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 245

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