Smooth Talker: Trail of Death, page 14
On the way out of the bar, Luce said, he went over to shake the man’s hand. Winegar smiled as he repeated his story about President Nixon and the jurors laughed.
After Luce stepped down, Winegar was called to the stand to discuss all of his efforts leading up to the DNA testing. He told the jurors that the toughest part of the investigation had been trying to track down 150 witnesses, many of them having died.
Some of those witnesses were in Texas and Louisiana where Winegar, Gero and Napa County DAO investigator Leslie Severe had gone because the prosecutor was going to try to get evidence of “prior bad acts” into the trial. Normally, evidence of a defendant’s previous crimes wouldn’t be admissible at trial. However, in certain instances, particularly dealing with sexual serial killers where the prosecution could show a “common plan or scheme,” higher courts had ruled that such testimony could be used to show the defendant committed his crimes in a similar fashion, including choosing similar victims. In this case, they were showing that he was a robber, a rapist, as well as a murderer.
The Napa County team had interviewed the woman Melanson had raped in 1974. His victim from 1972 had died, and Melanson had fled before he was tried in the case. However, they obtained transcripts of her testimony from the preliminary hearing, hoping to be able to use it. They’d also obtained reports of the rape he’d committed in 1962.
They’d also talked to detectives in Colorado about the Michele Wallace case and obtained the testimony of Chuck Matthews, who had since died, from the trial.
Pursuing all of Melanson’s criminal history, they’d also traveled to Louisiana. About the same time Melanson was indicted in California, they’d heard about the CODIS hit linking him to the murder of Charlotte Sauerwin in Livingston, Parish. So they’d talked to chief of detectives Stanley Carpenter about that case.
While there, they’d also had a chance to meet Vince LeJeune, the fiancé of the victim who for many years had been the chief suspect. He told Severe that his life had been “ruined.” And Winegar couldn’t believe how he’d been treated.
After testifying about his efforts leading up to the DNA, Winegar was asked to step down, subject to recall for his testimony later about his interview with Melanson. Gero had then called Michele Terra to the stand to testify about the DNA tests.
After the initial hit, Terra had been asked to test the rest of the evidence—nearly fifty items—to see if there would be anymore connections. It wasn’t just to see if there would be more links to Melanson; the prosecution also had to make sure the defense attorney couldn’t accuse them of not having tested evidence that could have pointed to another suspect. But there were not more matches.
During her cross examination of Terra, Wilensky had challenged the DNA results from the towel as weak and also contaminated. Both of which Terra conceded, though on redirect by Gero, she contended that it wouldn’t change her findings, especially not the absolutely certain hit from the cigarette butt.
Napa Police Detective Don Winegar, Napa District Attorney’s investigator Leslie Severe, and Napa County Deputy District Attorney Paul Gero made sure Melanson was convicted for the murder of Anita Andrews. Photo courtesy of the Napa County District Attorney’s Office.
On the third day of trial, the jurors walked across the street to Fagiani’s to view the scene of the crime. They were accompanied by Judge Guadangni in his black robe, the attorneys, three bailiffs, and a court reporter, as well as Winegar and Severe. Melanson had declined to be rolled across the street in his wheelchair.
The bar had finally been sold to a developer who was renovating the interior with plans to reopen as Fagiani’s. Extensive remodeling was already underway when the jurors walked through the doors, but Gero had brought the black and white photographs of the interior as it appeared on the morning Andrews’ body was found.
Going into the bar it was as if stepping back into time. Winegar was thankful that Muriel Fagiani had kept the bar basically in the same condition. And here the jury was able to view the crime scene, just as she’d planned.
After his interview with Melanson, the one person he’d most looked forward to talking to was Muriel Fagiani. It was going to be his moment, when the hard-working detective got to tell the victim’s sister that he’d solved the case.
Not letting on that he had big news, he’d called Muriel and asked her to come to the office for an update. When she arrived, he sat her down in a chair and solemnly announced, “We have a suspect.” He told her about Roy Melanson and the evidence against him and waited for what he thought would be an emotional outpouring of gratitude and relief.
Instead, she’d looked at him with a blank face and said, “It won’t bring her back.” But she did want to know if she could go talk to Melanson and ask him why he murdered her sister.
At first, Winegar was stunned by her reaction. Then he got it. For him, the case had been a challenge, a cold case detectives’ dream; sure he got deep satisfaction knowing that a killer who had committed a heinous crime so many years ago was going to face justice, but that was his job.
Sitting in front of him, however, was an old woman who had lived with the emotional toll of her sister’s murder for 35 years. She’d walked into the storeroom and saw the blood and the body. She’d lived with the thought that the killer might still be in Napa, even a neighbor or someone she passed on the street. Instead of spending Christmases and birthdays with her sister, she’d spent the last three decades trying not to let her murder be forgotten.
It was his job to find out who did it. It was more important to her to know why.
Unfortunately, she would never know. Not that anyone expected Melanson to take the stand and explain his actions, but Muriel had died December 9, 2010,
As the jurors walked through the bar where Muriel had spent much of her childhood, the last place she’d seen her sister alive, Winegar wondered how Melanson ever got to that little bar from Orange, Texas.
After the tour, Judge Guadangni adjourned court for the weekend. They picked up again on Monday with the jury watching and listening to the 40-minute interview between Winegar and Melanson at the Fort Lyon Correctional Facility. They were also given a transcript to make it easier to follow.
There was one last thing he’d asked of Melanson before they parted that day. He asked him to sign his name on a piece of paper. The reason became clear in court when Gero introduced a copy of the gas credit card receipt from Sacramento in 1974. It wasn’t a very good copy, the original had been lost, and a Napa Police Department handwriting expert could not conclude with certainty that it matched the signature Melanson had given Winegar. But it was “similar” and appeared that the man who signed the receipt was trying to disguise his writing.
The handwriting analysis was not a smoking gun, perhaps, but another piece of the puzzle. Especially when added to the DNA evidence, as well as the testimony of Janet Lipsey, a criminalist with the Napa Police Department. Following Winegar to the stand, she told the jurors that more than a dozen fingerprints had been found on bottles at the bar that matched Melanson’s.
On Tuesday, Gero began calling the witnesses who were the victims of “all that shit” from his past that Melanson told Winegar he was trying to forget. Prior to the trial, the prosecutor had asked Judge Guadangni to allow seven examples of prior bad acts into evidence, including the murder of Charlotte Sauerwin, and the disappearance of Pauline Klumpp.
Defense attorney Wilensky had, of course, fought the admission of any of the priors. But Guadangni decided to allow testimony for four: the rapes Melanson committed in Texas, as well as evidence from the murder of Michele Wallace.
The victim from the 1962 rape had not been called to testify on the stand. However, Gero was allowed to have Severe read information into the record, noting that Melanson had been convicted and sentenced for the crime.
Much more dramatic, the victim of the rape in 1974, now in her 50s, appeared on the witness stand to describe the ordeal she’d gone through when just 17 years old. She looked at Melanson the entire time as she testified.
Then in graphic detail, she told the jurors about how she’d been raped in Texas and Louisiana for several days before she’d talked “the old cowboy” into letting her go. Throughout her torment, she said, the defendant had threatened to kill her. “I thought I was going to die.”
Gero had then gone into the Michele Wallace case by having Napa County deputy district attorney Scott Young read Chuck Matthews’ testimony from the trial. Then former undersheriff Steve Fry and Pueblo detective Jimmy Smalley testified from the stand.
Throughout the testimony of his past victims, as well as the police detectives, Melanson sat without showing any emotion. He occasionally leaned over to speak to his attorney, but that was the extent of his reaction.
Nor did he show any emotion the next day when Gero wrapped up the People’s case by having Leslie Severe read the preliminary testimony given by the 1972 victim who Melanson raped and brutalized after offering to help her with a flat tire. The woman had since died never having fully recovered from the trauma.
Gero pointed out that Melanson had not been convicted in that case because he’d jumped bail and hid until his arrest for raping the other woman in 1974. Leaving the jury with that thought in mind, he rested the People’s case.
Wilensky only called one witness for the defense. Its own DNA expert, Norah Rudin, who testified that the male DNA found on the bloody towel were “weak” and “very weak.” The idea was to challenge the prosecution contention that Melanson used the towel to wipe his hands after washing the screwdriver off in the sink.
After that Wilensky rested her case as well. It was time for closing arguments.
Using a PowerPoint presentation, Gero reviewed the evidence: the testimony of the twenty witnesses, as well as Melanson’s own statements, and the physical evidence including the DNA, fingerprints and handwriting analysis.
He urged the jurors to use their common sense as they considered the evidence. Melanson “planned” to rape Andrews, he said, which was why he shielded his face and turned his back on Luce and his friends.
Gero grew animated as he described how Andrews fought for her life. Imitating a stabbing motion, he demonstrated over and over how Melanson used the screwdriver to kill her. “This was a violent, violent way to go,” he said.
Then when questioned by Winegar, the defendant had repeatedly denied even knowing where Napa was, much less having been to the bar. “He swore on his mother’s grave,” said Gero who replayed parts of the interview to make his points.
“He lied because he’s guilty,” Gero concluded before asking the jurors to find Melanson guilty of first degree murder.
Defense attorney Wilensky countered by conceding that Melanson was in the bar that night. But he was just a drifter who didn’t remember all of the places he stopped on his travels. She pointed out that in 1974 Napa was not the busy tourist destination that it had become. It was just another spot on the road to her client.
Wilensky attacked the DNA evidence as weak, and the handwriting analysis as inconclusive. She didn’t address Melanson’s prior history for rape. But she did repeat his mantra that no cause of death had ever been established for Michele Wallace.
Apparently forgetting that she’d already conceded that Melanson was in the bar, she questioned how Luce could recall meeting him after 36 years. “You don’t know what happened,” she told the jurors. Some “creep” might have entered the bar after Melanson left and killed Andrews.
When Wilensky finished, Gero stood up for his rebuttal remarks. He derided Wilensky’s theory as “Some Other Dude Did It.” He said it was possible, “but not reasonable.”
Sarcasm dripping with every word, Gero called Melanson “the truth-teller” who despite all the evidence of his prior crimes would “never do something like that” and had never been to Napa or smoked a cigarette as an adult.
And how did Melanson leave town if it wasn’t in Andrews’ Cadillac? He then ended his statement asking the jurors one more time for a guilty verdict.
Late on Friday afternoon, after two days of deliberations, the jury notified Guadangni that they had reached a verdict. With everyone assembled in the courtroom, waiting for the judge to read the verdict, Winegar felt his heart racing. It was all coming down to this moment. Not just all the work he’d put into the case, but 37 years of other detectives chasing leads down rabbit holes, the efforts of criminalists like Barnett and Terra.
There was also Muriel and Anita’s daughter, Donna, who had lived in such fear that the killer roamed the streets of Napa that she’d moved to Hawaii and tried to live an anonymous life. And there was the community of Napa that had watched their town grow around a constant reminder that violent crime could strike anyone without notice or reason.
He was anxious. Juries could be fickle or just not see things the way a police officer or prosecutor did. They might look at Melanson and see an old man sitting in a wheelchair, not a remorseless, cold-blooded killer. However, he didn’t need to worry, the jury found Roy Melanson guilty of murder.
As he had throughout the trial, Roy Melanson showed no reaction to the guilty verdict. It was as if he expected it or hardly had anything to do with him; after all, he’d spent most of his “full, not good” life in prison.
Then on October 27, any hope Melanson had of ever leaving prison if the parole board in Colorado let him go when he was eligible the next year, vanished. Guadangni sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole. He was going to be sent back to Colorado, but should that state ever release him, he’d be returned to the California Department of Corrections to serve his sentence.[1]
[1] In 2012, Paul Gero, 40, chief deputy district attorney in the Napa County district attorney’s office, was named “Outstanding Prosecutor of the Year” by the California District Attorneys Association at its annual gathering. The award noted his successful prosecution of Melanson.
EPILOGUE
As of the writing of this book, Roy Melanson is incarcerated at the Sterling Correctional Facility in Colorado. He continues to maintain his innocence for “all that shit” he’s been trying to forget, either describing it as “misunderstandings,” violations of his civil rights, law enforcement “prejudice” against him, and in the case of Michele Wallace, an illegal conviction based on his contention there was no established cause of death.
A jailhouse lawyer with a lot of time on his hands, Melanson has filed numerous appeals both himself and through various attorneys at one time or another. All his contentions, including about the Wallace conviction which was heard by the Colorado Supreme Court, have been rejected. That includes an appeal of his conviction for the Andrews case in which his attorney contended that the judgment must be reversed because (1) evidence of several uncharged offenses was erroneously admitted at trial; (2) this case should have been dismissed for pre-charging delay; and (3) a photographic line-up was impermissibly suggestive.
The California Court of Appeals responded in April 2013: “We reject these contentions and affirm the judgment.”
Attempts to interview Melanson first for the author’s 2002 book NO STONE UNTURNED, which described history and work of NecroSearch International including on the Wallace case, as well as for this book were ignored.
Another attempt to ask him questions through Matthew Watts, a producer with the Epic Mysteries television program on Investigation Discovery with whom the author was collaborating, was initially agreed to by Melanson. However, he said he would only discuss the Wallace case and no others, which was not acceptable to the author. In any event, even that interview was eventually nixed by the prison administration.
While he fights justice, the fact of the matter is that the “full, not good life” of Roy Melanson destroyed and damaged so many others. The easy victims to identify are those he raped and murdered that we know about, as well as their family members and friends. But not a single person working in law enforcement interviewed for this book believes that Melanson has been identified and held responsible for all of his violent crimes.
Detectives like Don Winegar, who left the Napa County Police Department in 2012 and now works part-time for the Napa County DAO, wonder about all those gaps in the timelines they meticulously put together for their cases. The horrible honest truth is that whenever Roy Melanson was free, he attacked women, and to believe that just because not all of his crimes were reported or linked to him is to ignore his pattern of behavior.
Potential cases against Melanson come up from time to time like putrid gas rising to the surface of swamp water. In October 2012, two investigators from Grand Junction, Colorado interviewed him in prison about a young woman from Salt Lake City whose body was found in their jurisdiction in 1974. Salt Lake City lies between California and Colorado. Melanson admitted to the investigators that he passed through Salt Lake City at that time but that was as far as they got.
In the meantime, in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, there is an active warrant for Melanson’s arrest for the murder of Charlotte Sauerwin, and a detainer should he ever be released from custody in Colorado and California. However, because of his age, the other sentences, and the costs of extradition, trials and appeals, he won’t be tried in Louisiana barring his release.
Still, the only way Melanson should be leaving prison is when his cold, evil heart stops beating.
“There’s a special place in hell for him,” Detective Stanley Carpenter of the Livingston Parish SO said.
It brings little consolation to Vince LeJeune. He refuses to feel sorry for himself despite living most of his life under that cloud of suspicion. However, he notes that no one who turned their back on him has ever offered an apology, including Kernie Foster. “Never even a ‘hey, I was just doing my job,’ which I could understand,” he said.
When the investigators from Napa County talked to him, Leslie Severe told him he was lucky he wasn’t in prison, wrongfully convicted, from the boxes of evidence she’d seen. He asked to see those boxes himself. It was clear the police had followed him for years, interviewing anyone he came into contact with. “There were maybe 15 to 30 pages dealing with other leads and information,” he said. “All the rest of it, boxes and boxes, was about me.”
