Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009

Jurors stop after 9 hours in the Bowman trial; will return Thursday; murder victim's panties key to convicting or clearing Bowman

CLAYTON -- Jurors deliberated for 9 hours Wednesday in the Gregory Bowman murder trial before they were told to return Thursday morning.

Jurors began deliberations about 12:30 p.m. and stopped at 9:30 p.m.

During deliberations, they asked for a dry erase white board in the afternoon, received their supper and in the early evening asked to see the Power Point presentation shown by DNA expert Margaret Walsh.

The third day of trial Wednesday included a brief defense and closing statements before jurors began deliberations. Both the prosecution and defense agreed during closing arguments that the case hinges on a pair of beige panties in evidence bag 3 C.

Prosecutor Joe Dueker said during his closing remarks that the DNA taken from seminal fluid in those panties was a 1-in-459 trillion match to Bowman and "that's why we know he did it."

Defense lawyer Steve Evans said there's reason to believe that the underwear in the bag aren't the underwear 16-year-old Velda Joy Rumfelt was wearing in the autopsy in June 1977 because no one in the morgue noted the lace adornment on them. The panties in evidence bag 3 C have two strips of lace running from the waistband to the leg band.

Dueker countered that the defense's claim that the panties are different is based on a blurry photo from 32 years ago that was taken at a distance. He also reminded jurors that a detective testified that the panties in bag 3 C were the same panties Rumfelt was wearing when her body was found.

"It must be quite a coincidence that these particular panties with his DNA wound up in this particular box of evidence," Dueker said.

A witness identified Bowman as the man walking with Rumfelt the night she disappeared, although early on she said the suspect was 6 feet tall with blond hair.

Earlier Wednesday morning, the defense lasted a little more than an hour. Bowman did not take the stand in his own defense and his attorneys pointed the finger at another man.

They also for the second time during the trial asked the judge Wednesday for an acquittal. The judge declined.

Bowman is in the third day of trial, charged with raping and strangling a Missouri teen.

If convicted, Bowman faces the death penalty in Missouri. Missouri jurors at his trial have not been told of the two Belleville murders or the abductions of three women tied to Bowman. That would change during the death penalty phase of the trial.

Evidence of the abductions of women from Belleville, Danville and Flora, Ill., can be used. There has been disagreement as to whether the West and Jany murder evidence can be used because he currently is not convicted of those murders.

The trial's third day got under way with Bowman's father and sister on one side of the courtroom and on the other the victim's family including her brother, Dewey Rumfelt, his wife, two of his three sons and their wives.

Bowman was convicted of murdering Elizabeth West, 13, and Ruth Ann Jany, 21, both of Belleville in the late 1970s. When a St. Clair County judge ordered a new trial based on a confession he ruled was improperly obtained, Belleville's former police chief, James Rokita, pushed Missouri cold case investigators and provided Bowman's DNA profile to them.

In 2007 they matched Bowman's DNA to semen left on the underwear prosecutors said was worn by Rumfelt three decades earlier. She was murdered in 1977 and left in a St. Louis County field. Rumfelt was only 5-foot-2 and 105 pounds, according to evidence presented at the trial.

Bowman spent 30 years in prison for the Belleville murders until St. Clair County Associate Judge Richard Aguirre overturned the convictions in 2001. Aguirre found Bowman confessed only to prolong his stay in the St. Clair County Jail as part of an escape plot.

On Wednesday, Bowman was in court wearing a cream pullover and khakis. He has been dressed casually throughout the trial.

Defense attorneys say the general rule is for defendants to wear one step up from what they typically would.

The prosecution took two days to present its case and the defense just more than an hour.