New Claim Raised In Spirko Case
A Washington attorney has raised new questions about the credibility of the lead investigator and the prosecutor who sent John Spirko to death row 20 years ago for the 1982 murder of a rural postmaster. Spirko attorney Thomas Hill asserts in a letter to Ohio officials that the investigator, former Postal Inspector Paul Hartman, admitted in a phone conversation last week that he knew a key element in the prosecution's case was false -- and that he told the prosecutor of this conclusion before Spirko's 1984 trial in Van Wert County. In his letter to the Ohio attorney general's office and the Van Wert prosecutor, Hill demanded that every court that has handled Spirko appeals over the last two decades be informed of the Hartman admission by Thursday. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Spirko's final appeal last month, freeing Ohio officials to set his execution date. Hill wrote that Hartman also disclosed last week that he has identified two other people with possible involvement in the murder of postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger. Hill demanded to be told about these suspects. Hartman said Friday that Hill's letter "is not an accurate characterization of my remarks." He declined to elaborate. The attorney general's office said that it would not meet Hill's demands. No new suspects have been identified, officials said, and Hartman has denied ever telling prosecutors that a key part of their 1984 case was false. Former Van Wert Prosecutor Stephen Keister also denied being told that. But Hartman, who retired in 2000, made remarkably similar comments to those quoted in Hill's letter during a lengthy Plain Dealer interview in January. Hartman was the central figure in the Spirko investigation. And his shifting assertions about key elements of the case raise questions about the evidence for which Spirko is soon to be executed. Spirko was a career criminal long before Mottinger was abducted and fatally stabbed on Aug. 19, 1982. But no physical evidence ever linked him to the crime. In fact, Spirko became a suspect only after he contacted federal authorities from his Toledo jail cell, offering to trade information he said he had about the crime in exchange for lenient treatment for himself and his girlfriend on unrelated matters. In more than a dozen jailhouse interviews with Hartman, Spirko spun an ever-changing and mostly discredited series of tales about the crime. In the last of those, Spirko claimed that his best friend and former prison cellmate, Delaney Gibson Jr., had killed Mottinger and told him about it later. The assertion proved pivotal. At Spirko's 1984 trial, Hartman's testimony was critical to the prosecution's strategy of using Gibson to help convict Spirko. Prosecutors argued that Spirko and Gibson robbed the tiny Elgin post office together and then killed Mottinger to cover up their crime. First, using Hartman, prosecutors sought to tie Gibson to Spirko and his tall tales. Then, using an unshakeable eyewitness -- who testified she was sure that Gibson was the clean-shaven stranger she saw in Elgin that morning -- they tried to link both men to the scene of the crime. What prosecutors didn't tell the jury -- or Spirko's lawyers -- is that months earlier Hartman had obtained photographs and witness statements that placed Gibson, with a full beard, more than 500 miles away in North Carolina the night before the crime. In fact, Spirko's lawyers didn't learn of this evidence until 1996, 12 years after Spirko was sentenced to death. In his letter to Ohio authorities, Hill said Hartman admitted last week that he knew the Gibson theory was false, that "Gibson had nothing to do" with the Mottinger murder and that he had repeatedly made his views known to Keister, before and during the trial. Keister, who left the prosecutor's office about 15 years ago, said he doesn't recall Hartman ever telling him that Gibson wasn't involved. Keister denied presenting a false case to the jury. He said he believed that Gibson was involved. "I had no ax to grind with anyone," Keister said. "I just had the evidence, and wherever the evidence was, that's where we went." In representing the state in Spirko's appeals, the attorney general's office has asserted that "there is absolutely no evidence that the prosecution acted in bad faith." It has also argued that Spirko gave Hartman details about the crime that only the killer could have known. Doubt about Gibson's involvement, according to the state's attorneys, does nothing to eliminate Spirko as the killer or to explain his purported knowledge of the crime. State and federal appeals courts have supported all of those arguments. In a written response to Hill, Assistant Ohio Attorney General Charles Wille said Friday that Hartman denied saying that Gibson was not involved in the Mottinger homicide -- either to Hill last week or to Prosecutor Keister in 1984. But Hartman did say it during a taped interview on Jan. 11 with The Plain Dealer. During that interview, Hartman initially dismissed the significance of the once-hidden photographs of a bearded Gibson in North Carolina the night before the crime.
"You can easily shave a beard," Hartman said, indicating that Gibson had time to drive through the night to Elgin . When asked why the Gibson alibi was never disclosed to the jury, Hartman said, "I'm not the prosecutor." But then, almost as an aside, Hartman added: "I did not believe that Gibson was involved" in the murder. "I know I explained to Steve Keister that I had developed an alibi for Delaney Gibson. I know that," Hartman said. "And it was my belief that Gibson didn't have anything to do with it." When asked during the interview about a sworn statement he made in 1996 that Gibson was involved, Hartman said he didn't remember making it. Two weeks after the January interview, The Plain Dealer published a three-part series raising questions about the evidence and the outcome of Spirko's trial. Among other things, the newspaper found that many of the facts Spirko purportedly knew about the crime had been published in local newspapers before Spirko spoke with investigators. Many others were wrong or could not be verified by investigators. Now, Hartman's shifting views on Gibson's role raise even more questions -- about the integrity of the prosecution and the credibility of Hartman's investigation. Records show, for instance, that it was Hartman who coaxed Spirko into implicating Gibson in the first place -- by steering their final conversation to tiny Bear Branch, Ky., Gibson's hometown. And a dozen years after the trial, in an effort to keep Spirko's lawyers from unearthing the Gibson photographs from North Carolina, Hartman declared -- under penalty of perjury -- that Gibson was involved in the homicide and that opening the government's files could jeopardize his future prosecution. Although Gibson was indicted along with Spirko in the Mottinger case, no attempt was ever made to prosecute him. Incarcerated in Kentucky in the mid-1980s on several murder charges, Gibson was freed on parole in 2001. Charles Kennedy, the current Van Wert prosecutor, quietly dismissed all charges against Gibson last May, telling reporters that too much time had passed to bring him to trial.
Given Hartman's role in establishing the Gibson evidence, his recent assertions raise questions about the rest of the evidence against Spirko as well -- virtually all of which came from Hartman. With his deft handling of Spirko during the jailhouse interviews, Hartman was almost single-handedly responsible for closing a case that had frustrated investigators for months. No fingerprints linked Spirko to the crime. No weapon was recovered, no loot found. So, in addition to the Gibson connection, the key to the prosecution's case was Hartman's claim that Spirko had told him intimate details about the crime. Since none of the Spirko interviews was taped, and since Spirko was never asked to sign a statement, the only source for what was said during those sessions was Hartman. A Plain Dealer examination in January of Hartman's handwritten notes showed that in several critical instances -- including purported descriptions of Mottinger's purse and clothing -- the intimate details that Spirko is alleged to have uttered were clearly added after the original notes were written, sometimes in a completely different handwriting style. Hartman has said that any changes to his notes were only innocent corrections. In his court testimony, Hartman also went to considerable lengths to tie Gibson to the crime. Hartman told the jury that Spirko said Gibson had confessed to killing Mottinger and that Spirko saw loot and other evidence in Gibson's car. Hartman said he found photos of Gibson in Spirko's scrapbook and Gibson phone numbers in Spirko's wallet. And, Hartman told the jury, "of specific importance to me" was a reference Spirko had made to a gun that Gibson purportedly showed him when he was confessing to the crime. Gibson had pulled a ".357 magnum w/ ivory handles out of duffel bag," Spirko told Hartman on Jan. 12, 1982, according to the investigator's cursive notes. When Gibson was arrested on an unrelated matter three months later, a .357 Magnum was recovered in his home. Much was made of that fact during Spirko's trial, even though no gun was involved in Mottinger's slaying. Gibson's gun also had wood handles, not the ivory handles Spirko mentioned. But it was chrome plated. And in his trial testimony, Hartman told the jury that "chrome plated" was part of Spirko's description as well. As with many of the other intimate details prosecutors relied on, however, Hartman's handwritten notes raise more questions. Inserted above the cursive description of the gun -- etched in block, upper-case, printed letters -- is the word "CHROME." Bob Paynter is projects editor at The Plain Dealer. To reach these Plain Dealer reporters: slivingston@plaind.com 216-999-4453 bpaynter@plaind.com 216-999-4820 © 2005 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.
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