Edition: U.S. / Global

Still on Death Row, Despite Mounting Doubts

Published: July 8, 2002

Less than 48 hours after police found Dorothy Edwards dead in her bedroom closet, they arrested a 23-year-old man who had done chores around her house. Four months later, the man, Edward Lee Elmore, was sentenced to death for the sexual assault and murder of Mrs. Edwards, a wealthy, socially prominent 75-year-old widow.

Mr. Elmore has been on death row for 20 years. Though he was convicted by two juries -- his first conviction was overturned on technical grounds -- he has always maintained his innocence. His lawyers argue that he was framed by investigators who planted evidence and lied in court. They also say they have DNA evidence that casts doubt on Mr. Elmore's guilt.

One might expect such contentions from defense lawyers. But further doubts about Mr. Elmore's convictions have been raised by others, including the medical examiner whose autopsy report was critical in his arrest and conviction, who now says she has reservations about how the state used her findings. A retired F.B.I. forensics expert, hired by South Carolina, calls a state report that linked Mr. Elmore to the crime ''a fraud.''

In the last month, the national debate on the death penalty has taken on new force, driven by Supreme Court rulings barring the execution of the mentally retarded and saying that death sentences must be imposed by juries, not judges.

The decisions are part of a continuing reconsideration of the death penalty. As DNA testing has exonerated prisoners on death rows around the country, governors of two states, Illinois and Maryland, have declared moratoriums on executions. On July 1, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the current federal death penalty law was unconstitutional, citing the growing number of exonerations of death row inmates through DNA and other evidence. In the last three years, 24 death row inmates in 14 states have been given new trials or freed altogether, often on the basis of DNA evidence, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington advocacy group critical of the death penalty.

In the shadow of these changes are death row prisoners like Mr. Elmore. Though doubts about his guilt have been raised over the years -- including the lawyers' assertions about the DNA testing of evidence that the state said it had lost -- Mr. Elmore, who has an I.Q. of 75 and a fifth-grade education, has not been able to get a new trial.

Officials in the South Carolina attorney general's office, which has been handling the appeals in the Elmore case, declined to be interviewed for this article, and would not allow investigators to discuss it.

Dorothy Edwards was found dead in her home on Jan. 18, 1982, by James M. Holloway, her next-door neighbor of 36 years in Greenwood, a small town in western South Carolina. According to his trial testimony, Mr. Holloway walked to Mrs. Edwards's house around noon that day, knocked on the back door and, hearing no answer, went in.

Mr. Holloway, who was 66 at the time, said that he saw spots of blood on the kitchen floor. When he walked into Mrs. Edwards's bedroom, he said, he saw blood on the carpet and in the bathroom and noticed the closet door ajar.

He said he left to get a neighbor, Mildred Clark, and returned with her. Back in the bedroom, Mr. Holloway testified, he pulled on a pair of work gloves and opened the closet. Inside was the corpse.

Mr. Holloway -- who has since died, as has Mrs. Clark -- then called the police.

The officers concluded that because there was no sign of forced entry, Mrs. Edwards must have known her killer. A diamond ring and other jewelry were left in the bedroom, and ''large amounts of silver'' were untouched, a police report said.

Mr. Holloway told the police that they would probably find the murderer if they looked in Mrs. Edwards's checkbook, records show. There they found that she had paid Mr. Elmore $43 for doing yard work and washing windows.

Based on Mr. Holloway's statements and a fingerprint of Mr. Elmore's found near Mrs. Edwards's back door, the police picked up Mr. Elmore.

The jurors heard from Mr. Holloway; from investigators who said they had found Mr. Elmore's pubic hairs on Mrs. Edwards's bed; from a jailhouse informer who said Mr. Elmore had admitted to the crime; and from the medical examiner, whose testimony helped support the prosecution's contention that the crime had probably occurred at a time for which Mr. Elmore had no alibi. The evidence at both trials was largely the same.

As time has passed, though, that evidence has become less solid. The prison informer later testified under oath that he had lied at Mr. Elmore's trials. Mr. Elmore's lawyers say that his fingerprint on the back door could have been left long before the crime. Questions also remain about two other keystones of the prosecution's case: that Mr. Elmore lacked an alibi, and that hairs found at the crime scene were his.

The prosecutor at Mr. Elmore's first trial, William Townes Jones III, told the jury that the medical examiner had found ''Negroid'' hair on Mrs. Edwards's abdomen. Mr. Elmore is black.

But in a recent interview, the medical examiner, Dr. Sandra E. Conradi, said this had never been her conclusion, and could not have been.

Dr. Conradi's autopsy report said there was ''dark-colored, tightly curled'' hair on Mrs. Edwards's abdomen. This did not necessarily mean the hair was from a black person, she said.

''A lot of men have dark curly hair,'' Dr. Conradi said in an interview at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where she is a professor of anatomic pathology.

Questions about whether the hairs came from a black person went unchallenged at Mr. Elmore's trials. The evidence had disappeared.