Ronald Clark says witnesses were silent about the 1994 fatal shooting

Ronald Clark never figured he would be charged with murder, much less convicted. After all, he had witnesses.

But many of them never spoke up.

“A lot of people, they didn’t want to get in between the two families. They stayed silent,” he said during a phone interview with the Southeast Missourian from the prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri, where he is serving a life sentence.

Ronald Clark, 43, sits in the recreation area of the Missouri prison at Bonne Terre earlier in 2019. He is serving a life sentence in connection with a 25-year-old fatal shooting in Charleston, Missouri. He hopes new evidence will set him free. Photo submitted by Jamina Lowery, Clark's fiancee

Now 43, Clark has spent a quarter century behind bars for the Nov. 8, 1994, fatal shooting of Alvin Ray Spence, 21, in Charleston, Missouri.

“It was self-defense because he pulled the gun on me. I saw the opportunity to wrestle with him to try to get the gun away,” Clark said.

Clark said he pulled the gun away from Spence as “we were getting ready to go to the ground; he got shot.”

He said there were more than 100 people in the vicinity at the time of the shooting.

But many of those who witnessed the incident never testified or were never contacted by police, he said.

“For the most part, a lot of people basically stayed out of it because they actually knew what happened. They figured I wasn’t going to prison in no way,” Clark said.

“As soon as it happened, I went to the police station and turned myself in and told them exactly what had happened,” he recalled.

But after years behind bars, Clark said he is frustrated and angry over his continued incarceration.

He said it has taken all this time for witnesses to finally come forward on his behalf as his attorney, Mark Abbott, seeks to file an appeal with the Missouri Supreme Court in an effort to set him free.

A jury in 1995 found Clark guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action.

Clark and Spence were fighting outside a community center when the shooting occurred.

Clark said Spence pulled a gun and he attempted to grab it from him. Prosecutors argued it was Clark who pulled the gun.

Clark was 18, a football player at Charleston High School, when the shooting occurred at the old Lincoln School, which had been converted into a community center. Clark described it as “a hangout spot.”

According to Clark, Spence was drunk and started yelling at him about an earlier fight, which had occurred between Spence’s cousin and Clark’s brother.

Clark said Spence was “threatening to do something to my brother. I said, ‘You are not going to do nothing about my brother.’”

Clark said he had a few witnesses who testified in his behalf. But the prosecutor brought in a jacket alleged to have been worn by Spence in an effort to show Spence had been shot from several feet away.

“They had to find some way to get a conviction by showing my witnesses were lying,” Clark said.

He said he doesn’t believe the jacket was Spence’s, but rather one that looked like it.

Clark said he would not have been convicted without the surprise, last-minute evidence introduced by the prosecutor and allowed by the judge.

“I could have lived with a manslaughter conviction because somebody did lose their life,” he said.

If he been convicted of the lesser charge, he would already be out of prison, Clark said.

Now he hopes new testimony will allow him to leave prison.

“All I want is my freedom back,” he said.

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