Word: coal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...killer. Brad said his shy, reclusive wife, who had been jittery since receiving a series of obscene phone calls the year before, would have opened the door to only three men in town. Police questioned all three and quickly decided on their man: Roger Keith Coleman, then 22, a coal miner married to Wanda's younger sister. Coleman had the misfortune of having a record and lacking a convincing alibi. He had served time from 1977 to 1979 for attempted rape, which helped persuade police that they had found Wanda's killer. A month later, they arrested him. A year...
HERE IS A STORY AS TWISTED AS THE THIN bands of highway that corduroy the mountainous tip of southwestern Virginia, a remote pocket of mining country where the river runs black with coal dust in the spring. This much can be stated with certainty: on the night of March 10, 1981, in the town of Grundy, a young woman named Wanda Fay McCoy was raped, stabbed twice in the chest and slashed across the neck with such force that the gash, 4 in. wide and 2 in. deep, cut almost to her spinal cord. When her husband Brad returned home...
...though he had no alibi at all. At the trial, six witnesses vouched for Coleman's movements the night of the murder. He went to a grocery to buy some antacid pills; he reported for work at a coal mine, only to learn that the night shift had been laid off; he picked up his work clothes at the mine, then stopped to chat with a friend; he visited another friend in a trailer park; he went home to his wife. Important testimony came from Philip Vandyke, a friend of Coleman's, who could point to the precise time...
...experienced defense team might have poked holes through the prosecution's case. But Coleman was a poor coal miner, with no spare cash to hire an attorney. His court-appointed lawyer, Terry Jordan, was just two years out of law school and had tried only one murder case. In Bartleby fashion, Jordan told the judge at the outset that he would "prefer not to" handle the case. It is interesting to note that according to Matney's arrest records, a Terry Jordan represented Matney in an assault and battery hearing scheduled for May 29, 1981; that is the same...
...have been traces of semen in his underwear and on his wash cloth. There weren't. The prosecution claimed that Coleman waded through a 10-in.-deep creek, a charge it supported by pointing out that the legs of his jeans were wet. But, observes Coleman's uncle, disabled coal miner Roger Lee Coleman, "his long underwear wasn't wet; his socks wasn't wet; the inside of his boots wasn't wet either...