Officials in dispute over comparing bullets

When Scott County Sheriff Rick Walter and detective Branden Caid received information from witnesses that the same gun used in the 1992 homicide of Angela M. Lawless in Benton, Mo., may have been the murder weapon in a 1994 murder-for-hire case, they asked the Southeast Missouri Regional Crime Lab to compare ballistic analysis reports to check for similarities.

They were shown the reports in 2006 and told that the two bullets had the same number of land and groove impressions left by the barrel of the gun and were similar enough to warrant further testing, Walter said.

The Lawless investigation was reopened in 2006 by Walter, who had never been convinced that evidence linking Joshua C. Kezer to the crime was solid. Kezer was convicted of the murder in 1994.

Richard Clay was convicted of the New Madrid, Mo., murder of Randy Martindale several years later and is awaiting execution.

The murder weapons, believed to be .380-caliber semiautomatic handguns, were never found in either case, and Walter hoped that having a tool mark examiner analyze the bullets in both cases might shed light on whether they were connected.

After learning of the similarities, Caid said he wrote to the New Madrid County prosecutor requesting the bullets in the Martindale case be released for testing.

The request was met with resistance when local and state law enforcement agencies became tangled in a dispute, citing lack of communication and an unwillingness to disrupt the chain of custody of evidence in a death row case.

Recently, crime lab supervisor Pam Johnson told the Southeast Missourian that after reviewing the same reports shown to Walter and Caid, crime lab officials realized the bullets actually have opposite twists, or impressions distinctive to the manufacturer made in the rifling of the barrel, effectively ruling out the possibility that they could have been fired from the same weapon.

If one of the bullets has a right twist and the other a left twist, there would be no point in further testing, said David Warren, tool mark examiner for the lab.

Johnson said she doesn't remember what Walter and Caid were told but said that it's possible lab officials may have been mistakenly looking at a ballistics report from a test fired gun in one of the cases rather than comparing the reports from the actual bullets.

Charles Weiss, attorney for Kezer, said he doesn't understand the resistance to comparing both bullets and settling the issue once and for all.

"There's no rational explanation for it. Let's just test it," Weiss said.

Walter said he was not contacted by anyone from the crime lab notifying him of the discovery.

bdicosmo@semissourian.com

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