Word: wanda
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They didn't have to wait long. Grundy police did not initially find any evidence of forced entry into the McCoy house, so they assumed Wanda must have opened the door to her 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...
...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, he discovered Wanda lying on the floor in a warm pool...
...trial through the press, the tactic is understandable: the courts have so far failed Coleman miserably. It is quite possible he will die, the victim of a justice system so bent on streamlining procedures and clearing dockets that the question of whether or not he actually murdered Wanda McCoy has become a subsidiary consideration...
Coleman is not on death row because some witness claimed to see him murder Wanda McCoy. Or because someone saw him enter her house. Or because his fingerprints were found in the house, on her body or on a murder weapon. He is not even in trouble because someone offered a plausible motive for Coleman's wanting his sister-in-law dead. The case against Coleman is built solely on circumstantial evidence: bits of hair, blood, semen that may be his, but then again...
...doing, it opened up a 30-minute gap in Coleman's account. During that time, prosecutors argued, Coleman parked his truck, waded across a creek, climbed a hill the length of three football fields, raped Wanda twice, slit / her throat, then escaped unseen. The prosecutors offered no eyewitnesses and little proof to support this scenario. In a sense, the most important clues in this case may be the ones that were missing. Given the haste with which Coleman would have had to act, he might have been expected to leave telling signs behind. A fingerprint. A footprint. At the very...