Trial begins for former narcotics detective

A jury from St. Louis will decide whether former Cape Girardeau police detective Paul Tipler violated the law or if he is, as his attorney claims, merely a cop who didn't always follow procedure.

Tipler is charged with stealing from the Cape Girardeau Police Department, distributing drugs, tampering with evidence and patronizing prostitutes while working as a narcotics detective.

Each of the drug charges carries a maximum sentence of 15 years.

During Tuesday's first day of the trial before Circuit Judge John Heisserer in Cape Girardeau, two former confidential police informants said Tipler paid them for sex and in one case billed the police department.

Tipler was fired in December 2002 following an internal investigation by the Cape Girardeau police and a criminal investigation by the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

In his opening statement, special prosecutor Kevin Zoellner of the Missouri attorney general's office told the jury Tipler "crossed the line and violated his oath as a police officer."

Tipler's attorney, Steve Wilson, portrayed him as an officer who might not have always done things by the book but had done nothing criminal. He said Tipler grew up in a family of 15 children and wanted to be a police officer because he saw what drugs did to two of his sisters.

Like other narcotics detectives, Tipler worked with confidential informants, people who become informants instead of facing criminal prosecution. Those people, he said, might lie about a police officer.

Two of Tipler's informants, Chandra Edmonds and Elizabeth Albritton, testified that they became informants to avoid prosecution for other crimes and to earn money to feed their drug habits.

Edmonds claimed that after she made some drug buys for Tipler as an informant, she told him on one occasion that she had no other information for him but that she could help in other ways, implying sexual favors. She testified she said that because she knew he was patronizing other prostitutes.

After she performed oral sex on him, Edmonds said, Tipler drove to an ATM machine at a bank, withdrew $30, then asked her to sign a police department receipt so he could be reimbursed for the amount he paid her for the sex. On the form he wrote that he paid her for information. She said she signed the receipt without reading it.

Albritton testified that Tipler once paid her for sex when he saw her on the street, asking her, "Are you as good as people say you are?" She said another sexual favor involved Tipler letting her get away with having drug paraphernalia in her possession.

Police testimony outlined how drug buys are supposed to be made, with the informant searched before and after each buy to make sure they have no drugs or cash on them. Detective Bradley Smith testified that if a woman police officer is not available to search a female informant, the buy is postponed until one is available. Both women claimed that Tipler worked alone and said they were not searched, only given a tape recorder to record the transaction.

Both women testified that they have since been through drug treatment and are clean. Both have since married. Edmonds has had a child. Both testified that they have turned their lives around.

Internal investigation

Corroborating their testimony were witnesses from the police department who verified that on the night Edmonds said she signed the receipt form for the oral sex, bank records from the Wood & Huston Bank where Tipler has an account indicate a $30 withdrawal. Tipler denied to investigators that he paid for sex.

In testimony about the $750 Tipler is accused of appropriating from the department's drug fund, Lt. Mark Majoros said Tipler's receipts and entries into the ledger used to keep track of the money did not add up. Majoros and Lt. Tracy Lemonds, Tipler's immediate supervisor, said only the narcotics officers and Lemonds have access to the cash, which is kept in a locked box in a locked file cabinet in Lemonds' office.

Wilson countered that the issue isn't so much a matter of missing money but possibly inaccurate record keeping. Under Wilson's questioning, Majoros and Lemonds said that they trusted the officers and didn't audit the account as often as they should have, perhaps every three or four months. Majoros said Tipler was given every opportunity to bring in receipts and was even given credit for some buys for which he had no receipts.

Once suspicions about Tipler surfaced, he was put on suspension and his locker was searched. Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Phillip Gregory, one of two officers who conducted the special investigation, described the locker as "a mess." In it, the patrol investigators found several hundred dollars' worth of crack cocaine and marijuana. Tipler had written in his reports that the drugs had been placed in the evidence lockers, a statement evidence technicians disputed with their own paper trail.Wilson said Tipler considered the drugs unimportant since he couldn't make a case in their seizure. Because the drugs were found in an electrical box outside a residence and not in the residence, ownership could not be proven, Wilson said.

Wilson argued that if the drugs were important to a case, police would have been looking for them.

"Did anyone say, 'We have been looking for that evidence for two years'?" he asked Gregory. "Did anyone ever suggest to you the prosecution could not be pursued because they could not find this stuff?"

Tipler also denied to investigators knowing where a handgun with a defaced number came from, but said in a taped interview with highway patrol Sgt. Jeff Heath that if it was in his locker, he must have put it there.

Zoellner plans to wrap up his case against Tipler today. Wilson then will call his defense witnesses. Heisserer told the jury he expects to give them the case by midday.

The sequestered jury was brought in from St. Louis because Wilson asked Heisserer last August to bring potential jurors from a county with a larger black population. Tipler, who is black, would end up with a jury consisting of at least a few black members, Wilson said.

The 12-member jury is composed of four men and eight women. Five of the jury members are black.

lredeffer@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 160