You may recall a recent column expressing my disbelief over how potentially vital evidence from a 20-year-old Carroll County homicide could have vanished after a sheriff's deputy traveled from Berryville to the state Crime Laboratory specifically to retrieve it.
I've since learned a lot more about this appalling case.
Records and transcripts have convinced me that the 1996 conviction of Belynda Goff of Berryville was a travesty. I've yet to see or read one piece of physical evidence that convince me she should have been convicted.
The saga began at 9 p.m. on June 11, 1994, when Stephen Goff left their apartment after receiving a phone call. He told Belynda he was going out for cigarettes. Belynda, who had recently had a hysterectomy, took some painkillers and she and her 3-year-old son went to bed. She awoke to an alarm sometime around 4:30 a.m. and discovered her husband lying face up in a corner beside the front door with blood on his face and indentations in the sheet rock around his head.
The doctor who performed the autopsy later testified that Stephen died from multiple blunt-force injuries to the front and back of the head. The beating was so violent that blood splatter appeared in "two directions of force." Police found hairs in his hands and on his shirt.
That night, Belynda immediately summoned help and remained on the line until the first paramedic arrived. He was able to shove Stephen's sprawled body aside enough to enter the front room. A video of police conducting a search at the scene that evening shows Belynda immediately became the sole suspect.
Two claw hammers were discovered in a closet. But according to a Crime Lab analysis, neither one contained a trace of blood. Nonetheless, those hammers would be introduced as evidence at Belynda's trial when she was charged with murder a full year after Stephen's death. Witnesses from the crime laboratory didn't link any physical evidence to Belynda. Its findings contradicted testimony by investigator Archie Rousey, who testified that another investigator supposedly discovered enough blood to run "down his hand" in the shower drain. The Crime Lab analyst who conducted DNA testing on that sample--which matched Stephen--testified that she was afraid to destroy the "minute" amount of "genetic material" found where Stephen had showered hours earlier.
A year before the crime, Stephen had been trying to recruit Belynda's brother, Chris Lindley, into an arson-for-hire ring. Just days before the murder, Stephen told Chris his life had been threatened. A year later, Belynda's home would be burned to the ground in a still-unsolved arson. She refused a plea bargain and continues to insist she'd never plead guilty to a crime she didn't commit.
The Innocence Project of New York has been aghast enough by Belynda's case to take it on. Staff attorney Karen Thompson told me: "The circumstantial evidence used against Belynda did not show guilt. Instead, evidence pointing to alternate perpetrators who are at large and may have killed again was ignored while Belynda remains behind bars."
Thompson cited glaring gaps in the case including failing to call Lindley to testify about the arson ring, or the multiple witnesses who saw men with bats sitting in a truck outside Belynda's home the evening before Stephen's body was found. One neighbor was so alarmed that she reported the incident to police that night and again after the murder.
Potential key witnesses on Belynda's behalf were disallowed at the trial. The primary evidence used? A witness who testified that Belynda once told her she would bash Stephen's head in if he kept cheating on her. But that witness' own husband, who wasn't allowed to testify, says Belynda is innocent, saying his wife was a jealous gossip who admitted to him that she'd traded her testimony to erase a bad-check charge.
Michael West, a private investigator with Arkansas Investigations, told me he was troubled to discover that possible exculpatory evidence turned up missing after he conducted a court-ordered search instructing the sheriff's office to produce it. "The evidence that should have been at the sheriff's department and that a deputy went to the Crime Lab where records show he retrieved it never was logged in back in Carroll County. We don't know what happened to it."
Gov. Mike Beebe's office thus far has received over 2,000 letters of support for gubernatorial clemency in Belynda's case.
I speak on this woman's behalf only because 20 years later, many buried truths remain so obvious. I hope incoming Gov. Asa Hutchinson, as a former U.S. attorney with integrity, top U.S. law enforcement leader and a defense attorney will take a careful look and do the right thing after 20 years of what many out here are convinced was a wrongful conviction based on zero physical evidence. Don't take my word for it.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com.
Editorial on 12/06/2014