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Felicia Anne Gayle Picus was discovered useless in her house, the sufferer of a vicious homicide that devastated her household and rattled her neighbors within the gated group of College Metropolis, Missouri, simply outdoors St. Louis. Police suspected a housebreaking gone mistaken. The scene was replete with forensic proof: There have been bloody footprints and fingerprints, and the homicide weapon — a kitchen knife used to stab Picus — was left lodged in her neck.
That element caught the health worker’s consideration. Weeks earlier, one other lady had been stabbed to loss of life simply a few miles away, and the weapon was left within the sufferer’s physique. Days after Picus’s homicide, the College Metropolis police chief informed the St. Louis Submit-Dispatch that investigators had recognized a “prime suspect,” somebody they stated had been noticed within the space “in latest weeks,” whom they believed had killed earlier than.
However no matter grew to become of that lead is unclear. After Picus’s household posted a $10,000 reward for data resulting in the arrest and conviction of her killer, a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole got here ahead with a narrative about how his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, had confessed to murdering Picus. Quickly, police secured a second informant: Laura Asaro, Williams’s former girlfriend, additionally informed the cops that Williams was liable for the killing. There have been causes to be cautious of their tales. Each informants had been going through jail time for unrelated crimes and stood to learn. Most of the particulars they provided shifted over the course of questioning, whereas others didn’t match the crime. Nonetheless, Williams was charged with Picus’s homicide, convicted, and sentenced to loss of life.
Questions in regards to the investigation and Williams’s guilt have solely mounted within the years because the August 1998 crime. DNA testing on the homicide weapon carried out years after his conviction revealed a partial male profile that might not have come from Williams. On the eve of Williams’s scheduled execution in 2017, then-Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens intervened. He issued an government order that triggered a hardly ever used provision of Missouri legislation, empaneling a board to evaluation the proof, together with DNA, that jurors by no means heard about at trial.
Whereas that evaluation was ongoing for a lot of the final six years, the board by no means submitted a closing report or suggestion to the governor, because the legislation requires. As a substitute, final June, Gov. Mike Parson introduced that he was rescinding his predecessor’s order, successfully dissolving the panel that had been reinvestigating the case.
The query now’s whether or not Missouri legislation permits the governor to easily disappear an ongoing investigation. As a result of the legislation has so hardly ever been used, its contours have by no means been totally litigated, prompting the Midwest Innocence Challenge, which represents Williams, to file a civil lawsuit looking for to invalidate Parson’s order. The state’s legal professional basic balked, arguing that Williams was making an attempt to usurp the governor’s unbiased clemency powers. The AG has requested the Missouri Supreme Courtroom to toss the lawsuit — and clear the way in which for Williams’s execution.
Picus spent a decade as a reporter for the St. Louis Submit-Dispatch, together with on the crime beat, earlier than leaving to deal with philanthropic endeavors. She was an ardent environmentalist and feminist: She persuaded the newspaper to undertake its first recycling program, and a former colleague recalled how she’d advocated for utilizing the time period “personhole” as a substitute of “manhole” in tales.
Diminutive in stature with lengthy hair and a reported fondness for Birkenstocks, Picus was additionally a devoted good friend. She wrote a whole bunch of birthday and vacation playing cards every year — the day she was killed, she had greater than 30 handmade playing cards able to mail. “She was like a central switching system on the phone firm of life,” a childhood good friend and fellow journalist wrote within the Chicago Tribune.
The Submit-Dispatch lined the seek for Picus’s killer because the months with out an arrest wore on, publishing an in depth checklist of things police stated had been stolen from her house, amongst them an previous Apple laptop computer belonging to Picus’s husband, Dan. However it wasn’t till the $10,000 reward was posted that police secured statements from the informants, Cole and Asaro, claiming that Williams had confessed to the homicide. Though the reward was speculated to be paid upon conviction, prosecutors inspired Dan to pay Cole $5,000 upfront when it appeared that his cooperation is perhaps flagging.
Cole and Asaro had been the spine of the prosecution’s case at Williams’s trial in the summertime of 2001. The state painted a harrowing image of the assault on Picus and solid Williams as a ruthless killer. There was no bodily proof, nonetheless, to again up the informants’ claims. Asaro claimed that Williams had scratches on his face the day of the homicide, but no overseas DNA was recovered from below Picus’s fingernails. Cole stated Williams’s garments had been bloody and that he’d stolen a shirt to cowl the stains when he left Picus’s home, but no garments had been lacking from the house. Bloody shoeprints discovered on the scene had been a special measurement than Williams’s ft. Fingerprints lifted by investigators had been deemed unusable by the state after which destroyed earlier than the protection had an opportunity to research them.
There was, nonetheless, the Apple laptop computer, which police in the end recovered. In response to Asaro, Williams gave his grandfather’s neighbor the pc in trade for crack cocaine. At trial, the person denied that account. He’d paid Williams for the laptop computer, he stated. Williams informed him that he’d gotten the pc from Asaro and was promoting it for her. Prosecutors objected to this testimony, so the jury by no means heard it. Asaro and the person who acquired the pc have since died.
Like Cole and Asaro, Williams had a rap sheet. He’d been sentenced to many years in jail for theft and housebreaking by the point of the homicide trial. In response to the Submit-Dispatch, the jury deliberated for lower than 90 minutes, “together with lunch,” earlier than deciding that Williams needs to be sentenced to die for Picus’s homicide.
Marcellus Williams in an undated picture.
Attorneys for Williams sought to conduct DNA testing previous to his trial, however the circuit court docket choose refused. It wasn’t till 2015 that Williams was granted permission to check the homicide weapon, which revealed a male DNA profile that didn’t match Williams. Nonetheless, the Missouri Supreme Courtroom dismissed the brand new proof and set Williams’s execution for August 22, 2017.
The Midwest Innocence Challenge turned to Greitens, asking that he halt the execution and convene a board of inquiry to analyze the case. On the day Williams was set to die, Greitens issued an government order granting the request.
A five-member board could be set as much as “assess the credibility and weight of all proof” within the case, Greitens’s order learn. The board was given subpoena energy and tasked with preserving the data it collected in “strict confidence.” The order required the board to make a closing report and suggestion to the governor “as as to if or not Williams needs to be executed or his sentence of loss of life commuted.”
Greitens appointed 5 retired judges to the investigation, they usually set to work. Within the years that adopted, the Midwest Innocence Challenge supplied the board with a number of knowledge and options for traces of inquiry — persevering with effectively after Greitens resigned amid a swirl of controversies the next 12 months and Parson assumed workplace.
That’s till Parson issued his personal government order on June 29, 2023, rescinding Greitens’s order. Whereas Parson acknowledged that his predecessor had required a report from the board of inquiry concerning its investigation, the governor made no point out of any findings.
“This board was established almost six years in the past, and it’s time to transfer ahead,” he stated. “We may stall and delay for an additional six years, deferring justice, leaving a sufferer’s household in limbo, and fixing nothing. This administration received’t do this.”
In 1963, the Missouri legislature handed a number of legal justice reforms, together with one aimed toward avoiding wrongful executions. The state’s structure already empowered the governor to grant reprieves, commutations, and pardons, however lawmakers added new authorities, permitting the governor, “in his discretion,” to nominate a board of inquiry tasked with gathering data bearing on whether or not an individual “condemned to loss of life” ought to actually be executed. Lawmakers set a number of particular parameters, together with that the board “shall” difficulty a closing report. The legislation handed that summer time and has by no means been amended.
Though it has been on the books for 60 years, the supply has solely been invoked 3 times, together with within the Marcellus Williams case. In 1997, then-Gov. Mel Carnahan stayed the execution of William Boliek, who had been sentenced to die for murdering a witness to a theft in Kansas Metropolis, and ordered a board of inquiry to look into the case. The board submitted its report back to Carnahan, however the governor didn’t act on it earlier than he was killed in a aircraft crash — which means the case was by no means resolved. The Missouri Supreme Courtroom subsequently dominated that Carnahan was the one one who may elevate the keep, which means Boliek may by no means be executed. He stays on Missouri’s loss of life row.
In an August 2023 civil lawsuit filed in Cole County, the place the state capital is situated, the Midwest Innocence Challenge drew on this historical past to argue that Parson had violated the legislation by dissolving Greitens’s board earlier than it had fulfilled its statutory obligation to offer a report and suggestion in Williams’s case.
As soon as the statute was triggered, the governor was sure to uphold its provisions. Parson’s order prematurely dissolving the board exceeded the facility granted to his workplace by the legislature some 60 years in the past, the attorneys argued. “All Mr. Williams is asking is for the board of inquiry to have the ability to full its work and difficulty a report and suggestion, making certain that a minimum of one authorities entity lastly hears all of the proof of his innocence,” stated Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the Midwest Innocence Challenge’s government director. As soon as the method is full, Parson can do what he desires, she added. “However till that point, Mr. Williams has a proper to this course of that was began by Gov. Greitens exactly out of the priority that Missouri might execute an harmless particular person.”
Missouri Legal professional Basic Andrew Bailey throughout a Home Homeland Safety Committee listening to on Jan. 10, 2024.
Legal professional Basic Andrew Bailey sought to have the lawsuit dismissed outright, however in November, Circuit Courtroom Choose S. Cotton Walker concluded that it ought to proceed. The statute didn’t expressly give Parson the authority to dissolve the board, and Williams had an curiosity within the course of enjoying out in line with the legislation, he wrote. “There’s a basic distinction between the governor’s authority to nominate a board in his discretion and the board’s ongoing existence being discretionary.”
Bailey appealed to the Missouri Supreme Courtroom, arguing that the circuit court docket couldn’t inform the governor what to do in issues of clemency. For the reason that board of inquiry statute references the governor’s constitutional powers over clemency, Bailey argued, interfering along with his capacity to dissolve the board was the identical as interfering along with his clemency powers. Williams was making an attempt to make use of the court docket to “hijack” Parson’s authority, he wrote.
The Midwest Innocence Challenge argued that Bailey’s place was a crimson herring: Williams was not trying to intrude with Parson’s authority on issues of clemency; he was merely asking that the governor be required to observe the statute in his decision-making. To search out in any other case could be violating the separation of powers within the different path: permitting the governor to rewrite a decades-old act of the legislature. The governor’s place, the attorneys wrote, “has it backward.”
“The governor’s clemency energy exists for the general public good, not his personal,” the protection transient reads. “Because of this, a board of inquiry serves the general public, not the governor, and that board ‘shall’ make a report and suggestion for the governor’s consideration earlier than he makes a closing clemency resolution.”
There isn’t a timeline for the Missouri Supreme Courtroom to rule.
In the meantime, the Conviction and Incident Assessment Unit on the St. Louis County Prosecuting Legal professional’s Workplace has additionally reached out to the court docket, asking that it chorus from setting a date for Williams’s execution for “an preliminary interval of six months.” The workplace has additionally been investigating Williams’s case and wishes extra time to determine whether or not it should search to vacate his sentence by itself — an influence granted to state prosecutors below a more recent, but additionally hardly ever used, Missouri legislation.
Marcellus Williams stays grateful to Greitens for staying his execution and invoking the board of inquiry statute. He informed the Kansas Metropolis Star that he grew up “mainly like a typical misguided” youth, bouncing out and in of juvenile detention. He had simply began serving a 20-year sentence for robbing a doughnut store when he was charged with Picus’s killing. He knew he hadn’t carried out it and stated that regardless of his expertise with the legal justice system, he thought the error could be found and corrected. “You continue to have this naivete proper there that you simply’re probably not recognizing who you’re up in opposition to.”
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