Days before Missouri man’s execution, jurors see new evidence that raises doubts
By Luke Nozicka
The Kansas City Star
May 12, 2020
As Walter Barton’s May 19 execution approaches, three jurors who voted to convict him of murder say findings that contradict the state’s strongest evidence would have influenced their consideration of his guilt.
One of them, the foreman, said had he heard testimony countering to state’s bloodstain-pattern analyst at Barton’s 2006 trial, he would have been “uncomfortable” recommending the death penalty.
The three were among 12 Cass County jurors who found Barton guilty of murder in the 1991 killing of 81-year-old Gladys Kuehler. She was found stabbed more than 50 times at a mobile home park she managed in Ozark, south of Springfield.
In April and early May, the three jurors signed affidavits after reading the findings of a bloodstain-pattern analyst retained by Barton’s current defense team. His conclusions supported Barton’s version of events, which the jurors indicated was “compelling.”
The blood spatter presented at trial was the prosecution’s “strongest evidence” against Barton, the jurors agreed. They did not think his defense did much to counter the state’s expert. In the years since, the forensic discipline has faced scrutiny over its reliability.
Barton went on trial five times from 1993 to 2006, a rarity in death penalty cases. He has maintained his innocence.
“It is a nightmare because the original case against Mr. Barton was a close one,” said his attorney, Frederick Duchardt Jr. “It is a worse nightmare because evidence, never heard by the jury who rendered judgment, undermines the key evidence used to convict.”
A frequent visitor of the mobile home park, Barton was with the victim’s granddaughter and a neighbor on the evening of Oct. 9, 1991, as they checked on Kuehler. They found her dead in her blood-drenched bedroom.
When officers questioned Barton, they noticed small stains thought to be blood on his clothing. He told police he must have gotten the victim’s blood on him when he pulled Kuehler’s granddaughter away from the body and slipped.
The granddaughter initially confirmed Barton pulled her from the body, but she later testified Barton never entered the bedroom, according to court documents.
Barton was charged with first-degree murder. At trial, the case against him included testimony from William Newhouse, the state’s expert who opined that three small bloodstains found on Barton’s clothing were the result of impact spatter ejected by a blow to the victim. One stain was tested for DNA, which revealed Kuehler’s blood.
Barton’s lawyers did not retain a similar analyst at his final trial. Instead, they broadly tried to discredit the field of interpreting bloodstains as “junk science,” Barton’s current attorneys wrote in a recent petition.
Duchardt in 2015 asked another crime scene analyst, Lawrence Renner, to examine the evidence, which included the shirt, blue jeans and boots Barton wore on the day Kuehler was found.
In what Duchardt called a “bombshell opinion,” Renner’s findings contradicted the earlier conclusions, saying the stains were not impact stain patterns. He opined they were transfer stains, meaning they got on Barton’s shirt when it touched existing bloodstains.
Renner disagreed with the assessment that one of the stains resulted from “high-medium to high energy impact.” In an affidavit, he wrote he did not think “any experienced blood spatter expert could reach such a conclusion” from the stain.
Whoever killed Kuehler — who had also been sexually assaulted and cut across the throat — could not have been wearing Barton’s clothes because they would have had far, far more bloodstains on them, Renner wrote.
After recently reading Renner’s affidavit, three of the jurors said his conclusions would have affected their deliberations.
The jury, the three affidavits also stated, was not in unanimous support of Barton’s guilt when deliberations began. At the trial, one of the jurors had “serious questions” about Barton’s guilt, his attorney wrote in a request seeking to halt the execution.
The Missouri Attorney General’s Office last week asked a court to reject Barton’s recent federal petition.
Barton’s evidence was not new and did “not come close” to showing no reasonable juror would vote to convict him, the office said. It noted the state Supreme Court in April denied his request for a hearing to argue he is innocent and impaired by a brain injury.
While the competing opinion about the bloodstains may have been “useful” to counter the state’s expert, Missouri’s highest court wrote, the testimony “does not exculpate him or inculpate another.”
Barton was sentenced to die three years before a groundbreaking 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences, which found conclusions made by bloodstain-pattern analysts are generally “more subjective than scientific.”
“The uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous,” its authors concluded.
The jailhouse informant
The other key piece of evidence against Barton, his lawyer said, came from a jailhouse informant. She testified Barton told her he would kill her “like he killed that old lady.”
That witness, who then went by Katherine Allen, had 29 convictions on her record, including for forgery and fraud, according to Barton’s attorney, Duchardt.
He has said Allen had criminal charges in Cass County dropped in exchange for her testimony against Barton.
Since then, Barton’s defense team has learned Allen — described by them as a “woman of many aliases” — was indicted in 2016 under another name, Catherine Demaree, according to Duchardt.
Demaree was sentenced in 2017 to more than five years in federal prison for defrauding financial institutions and people, including victims from Indiana and an elderly woman from Dallas County, Missouri, who advertised for home health aid. Prosecutors said she stole the woman’s Social Security card and driver’s license, which she had when she was arrested in southeastern Kansas.
Federal prosecutors in Indiana have called Demaree a “life-long perpetrator of fraud and identity theft schemes.” They said she has used more than 30 aliases throughout her life.
Other evidence against Barton included testimony that his mood changed after the killing and his statements to police about when he last saw Kuehler were inconsistent. There was also testimony Barton answered the victim’s telephone on the afternoon of the murder.
Once inside the victim’s trailer, Barton discouraged her granddaughter from going down a hallway to check on her and, after she was found, Barton comforted the granddaughter, saying he was “so sorry,” according to testimony.
Kuehler had also written a $50 check to Barton on the day she died. It was found days later in a ditch. Its significance has been debated.
Two of Barton’s trials ended in mistrials, one of which stemmed from a jury deadlocked over his guilt. Two of his convictions were overturned. His final trial was moved to Cass County, which ended in conviction. At the penalty phase, prosecutors noted Barton had two previous felony assault convictions, one of which stemmed from a gas station robbery.
The jury recommended Barton be executed — his third death sentence.
When the state Supreme Court in 2007 affirmed Barton’s conviction and sentence in a 4 to 3 decision, the majority called the circumstantial evidence “strong.” They said it placed Barton with the victim during the “small window of time” when she was killed.
The dissenters, however, said the only physical evidence tying Barton to the killing was the bloodstain on his shirt.
“The evidence is certainly not overwhelming,” Judge Michael Wolff wrote in a summary. “The state has, over the years, bolstered its rather meager case with evidence of the jailhouse snitch, as well as ‘blood spatter’ expert testimony.”
Barton’s trials had also been plagued by prosecutorial misconduct, Wolff wrote. There was a trail, he said, of “mishaps and misdeeds that, taken together, reflect poorly on the criminal justice system.”
First execution since pandemic
Barton is set to be put to death at the prison in Bonne Terre, about 60 miles southwest of St. Louis. He would be the first person executed in the U.S. since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.
Other states, such as Texas, have delayed executions because of the risks of spreading COVID-19.
Duchardt said Gov. Mike Parson may not have the time to consider clemency because of the attention he must pay to dealing with the outbreak. The execution itself, he said, could violate social distancing rules Parson imposed on the state.
Parson is not planning to halt Barton’s execution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported May 5.
Missouri’s statewide stay-at-home order has expired.
During the execution, the viewing areas for witnesses will be restricted to 10 or fewer people in accordance with social distancing guidelines, said Karen Pojmann, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Corrections.
“We plan to limit the number of witnesses in each room and space them out within each room,” Pojmann said. “We have ample access to hand sanitizer, fabric face masks and other supplies, as needed.”
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