Judge denies new trial in kidnapping, killing of North Little Rock veterinarian

Eyewitness account of abduction key in ’79 case, he says

Eugene Pitts
Eugene Pitts

A convicted killer's claim that he's entitled to a new trial after 38 years in prison cannot overcome the fact that an eyewitness saw him abduct a North Little Rock veterinarian at gunpoint, hours before the doctor was found murdered, a Pulaski County circuit judge has ruled.

The finding by Judge Leon Johnson is what prosecutors have been arguing for the past 15 years as 70-year-old Eugene Isaac "Gene" Pitts has tried to overturn the life sentence he received for the January 1979 kidnapping and slaying of 39-year-old Dr. Bernard Jones, a pioneering veterinarian.

"The defendant's argument that there is a reasonable probability that the outcome would be different collapses under the weight of the evidence presented at trial," prosecutors argue in court filings.

Jones, the first black veterinarian to open a practice in the state and the brother of former Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, was found dead in the passenger seat of his brown and yellow Toyota Land Cruiser, about 10 blocks from his Loch Lane home in the Lakewood subdivision.

But Pitts was under arrest even before authorities knew what had happened to Jones because Jones' wife had immediately identified Pitts as the armed kidnapper who had ambushed them. North Little Rock detectives had arrested him within two hours of the abduction.

It would take 12 hours to find Jones' body in the passenger seat of his sport utility vehicle. The veterinarian's hands were tied behind his back, and he'd also been gagged and blindfolded. He had been shot four times in the head at close range.

Barely six months after Pitts' arrest, a Pulaski County jury found him guilty of capital murder but spared him the electric chair, choosing a life sentence instead.

Pitts' conventional appeals in the 1980s and 1990s proved unsuccessful, with the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986 overturning an 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that would have otherwise granted him and three other capital-murder convicts new trials.

His most recent efforts began with a 2001 law passed by the Legislature allowing inmates the opportunity to seek post-conviction DNA testing that had not been available when they stood trial.

But the hairs tested in Pitts' case were found to be either animal fur or of indeterminate origin.

Pitts' second chance to attack his conviction came in 2015 after the FBI and Department of Justice acknowledged that the fiber evidence that had been used at Pitts' trial to link him to a hair found on Jones' pants had been discredited.

Pitts was not alone. The federal review showed that 26 out of 28 FBI examiners in its hair-analysis unit gave scientifically flawed or exaggerated testimony in 257 out of 268 trials -- 96 percent of the time -- over a 20-year span ending in 1999.

FBI analysts regularly claimed they could show whether a hair sample likely belonged to a defendant by microscopically comparing the evidence to strands known to have come from the defendant.

Pitts' argument to the state high court, that he deserved a new trial because of the now-discredited evidence, was endorsed by The Innocence Network and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

In an October 2016 ruling, the Arkansas justices unanimously agreed that his conviction should get another look, sending the case back to circuit court for Johnson to review the evidence and decide whether Pitts was entitled to a new trial.

But the judge in an October hearing ruled that the now-tainted testimony was not significant enough to have made much of an impact in the outcome of the trial when taken into consideration with the eyewitness testimony by Jones' widow. The judge's written ruling, required for Pitts to appeal the finding, is pending.

Benita Jones' identification of Pitts as the masked man who had attacked and bound her was no casual observation, chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson told the judge. The prosecutor described Jones, a 1976 graduate of the University of Arkansas School of Law, as "an extraordinary woman" whose friends included Hillary Clinton.

Although Pitts had a been a good friend of her brother, Jones testified at trial that she and Pitts had only been casually acquainted in law school where he had been a year ahead of her.

She said they knew each other because they were two of about 20 black students at the law school, and that sometimes they would carpool back to Little Rock. She had a car, and Pitts, along with some other students, would sometimes ride with her to share the gas expense.

Jones, 28 at the time, said she had no contact with Pitts after graduation, until January 1978, almost exactly a year before her husband was killed.

For some reason, Pitts had taken to calling her at work. Sometimes he would call her daily; other weeks he would call three or four times. The calls were disturbing, mysterious and sometimes threatening, badgering her to leave her husband, Jones testified.

"He told me that I was going to have to belong to him. I was going to get rid of my husband. He would ask me if I was pregnant," Jones said at trial. "And then like I said, he would go off on this other thing about how I was going to have to pay for what I did to him."

Pitts could never explain to her what she had supposedly done to him, Jones said, telling jurors she tried to avoid the calls and told him to stop calling her. Eventually, she and her co-workers recorded one call to take to authorities.

Shortly after that call, on Valentine's Day 1978, someone anonymously sent her a dozen roses while her husband got a package containing a bullet, his name scratched into the metal.

After Pitts' arrest, the receipt for those roses was found in Pitts' home by police. A handwriting expert told jurors that although he could not say for sure, the handwriting on the bullet was likely that of Pitts.

After receiving the roses, the Joneses went to authorities to have Pitts charged with misdemeanor harassment. Benita Jones said she agreed to a mutual restraining order rather than go through with a trial.

Undisclosed to jurors, the couple endured another mysterious incident five months after the flowers and bullet -- someone set off a bomb at their home. Police were never able to determine who had done it.

Jones told jurors that she had recognized the kidnapper's voice. The day her husband was abducted -- the day after her 28th birthday -- Jones said she'd arrived home to find the front door unlocked, her husband's car keys still in the door.

As she walked into the North Little Rock house and called her husband's name, a masked man put a gun to her head. The intruder walked her upstairs, where she saw her husband laying face down, blindfolded and gagged.

Jones said she quickly realized who the man was, saying she called him by name.

After twice struggling with the assailant over the gun and ending up with the attacker putting the gun to her head, Jones let the man bind her after her husband advised her, "Do whatever he says, babe." Those would be the last words she would ever hear her husband speak.

Police arrived to find the Joneses' Loch Lane home ransacked, with two TV sets, guns, jewelry, coins and money stolen.

The Joneses' Toyota, with Bernard Jones' body and the stolen property, was found by police in the 4400 block of Arlington Drive after a homeowner saw the SUV in front of his home and recognized it from news accounts as the one police were looking for.

It was four days before the couple's second wedding anniversary.

Pitts didn't testify during the weeklong trial. He had told police he was working as a rent collector for a doctor when Jones was killed, and Pitts' father and nephew told jurors that he'd been at their home about the time that Benita Jones was being rescued.

By the time Jones was murdered, Pitts was a law-school dropout with federal convictions for counterfeiting and perjury who'd also had arrests for illegal gun and drug possession.

His federal perjury conviction came in 1973 after he had pleaded guilty to lying in his testimony as an alibi witness for Benita Jones' brother who was on trial, accused of selling LSD. Pitts got 90 days in jail and 21 months on probation.

His counterfeiting conviction came in 1974 after he was found to have used a fake $20 bill to pay for a movie ticket in Fayetteville. Federal agents had found two other bogus bills by his seat, and a fingerprint expert testified that his prints matched one found on one of the bills. In his third year of law school at the time, Pitts represented himself at his January 1974 trial and was sentenced to a year in prison and two more on probation.

Pitts used his federal sentencing hearing to complain about a "negative racist attitude" of some of his law-school professors, telling the judge that those Fayetteville teachers "worked very hard to stifle blacks entering the legal profession."

Jones, now 67, has never attended any of Pitts' hearings. Court records show that she has been incapacitated by mental illness for much of the past 26 years.

Metro on 11/27/2017

Upcoming Events