Word: senteney
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Highway Patrolman Leonard Kirkes was convicted of second-degree murder at Carpinteria, Calif, (pop. 2,864), many of his fellow citizens felt that justice had triumphed over long odds. Kirkes was not brought to trial until eight years after the death of his supposed victim, 20-year-old Margaret Senteney, and the trial took place then only because Sheriff John Ross had painfully gathered up snippets and scraps of circumstantial evidence and had fitted them into a damning whole (TIME...
...second jury. His request was finally granted. Once more citizens of Carpinteria crowded the courtroom. Once more bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence were fitted into place. But this time they sounded oddly different. Example: one key prosecution witness (who swore in 1950 that she had seen Margaret Senteney get into Kirkes's car the night of the murder) had since been sent to a mental institution, and doctors testified that she had been mentally disturbed even before her testimony. Last week Leonard Kirkes, a thinner, greyer man, heard the verdict of the second jury: not guilty. After...
...year after Len Kirkes got back to Carpinteria, John Ross was elected sheriff of Santa Barbara county. He and Kirkes would chat together whenever they met, but Ross never took the Senteney murder file off the top of his desk. One day last September, a woman reported that Kirkes had tried to molest her ten-year-old son. The sheriff jailed Kirkes and prayed that some timid murder witnesses might turn up, now that the big ex-cop was locked...
They did. One was a school chum of Margaret Senteney's who had taken a walk on the night of the murder. She had seen Margaret get into a car. "It was Mr. Kirkes' grey car," she said. Another witness, an aged Italian truck farmer, swore to watching the patrolman drive down out of the foothills early on the morning after the murder...
...after listening to Sheriff Ross's evidence and Kirkes' denials, a jury found Kirkes guilty of second-degree murder and recommended no leniency (mandatory penalty: five years to life). John Ross went back to his office in Santa Barbara's stucco courthouse and locked up the Senteney file, which he and Len Kirkes had begun eight years before...