THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408150036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BURKEVILLE, VA. LENGTH: Long : 204 lines
For two days in July, inmate No. 141990 walked around the Nottoway Correctional Center recreation yard with two large signs pinned to his shirt. ``DON'T ASK,'' read the sign on his chest. I DON'T KNOW S---. ASK GOV. ALLEN,'' said the one on his back.
Edward Honaker was convicted of rape and sent to prison after the victim identified him in a 1985 trial. But DNA tests conducted in March ruled him out as the rapist. The tests, conducted on vaginal swabs and clothing from the victim, also excluded her then-boyfriend. The rapist had to be a third man.
The tests were performed at a California lab. At the request of the chief prosecutor in Nelson County, where Honaker was convicted, the swabs were tested a second time by the Virginia Division of Forensic Science. The results, released in June, were the same: Ed Honaker was not the rapist.
Armed with the test results, along with other evidence - such as the fact that Honaker had undergone a vasectomy seven years before the crime - his lawyers petitioned Gov. George F. Allen for clemency June 24. Persuaded by the evidence, Nelson County Commonwealth's Attorney Phillip Payne joined in the request.
``A prosecutor has several hats to wear,'' Payne says. ``When we think someone has done the dirty deed, we have to be as aggressive as we can. But when there is doubt, when we think we've got an innocent person, the prosecutor has to be just as much of an advocate as the defense lawyer. . . . served.''
Honaker was elated. After almost 10 years of trying, he had succeeded in proving his innocence. His hopes high and his lawyers confident, he gave away his extra clothes, quit his prison welding job and prepared to walk out the gate.
Nearly two months later, nothing has happened.
Now Honaker stares into space, his mouth a stone line, his eyes dim behind tears that won't spill. His voice, when he speaks, has a hard edge. He is tired of waiting.
``I used to be sick of doing time,'' he says. ``Now I'm just exhausted from it. It's hard to be here knowing there's someone out there who can set me free. It's hard getting up every day and wondering if this will be the day. And then it doesn't happen again. And again and again.
``Two, three times a day, I have people coming up to me and asking, `Are you still here?' I'm like, `Yeah, I'm still here. Do I look like I'm gone yet?' That time I put the signs on, everyone pretty much left me alone.''
Allen, say his aides, is reviewing Honaker's case.
``The governor has not made a decision yet,'' spokeswoman Melissa Herring said this week. ``An announcement will be made when he does.''
Ask about the Honaker case on any given day, and the answer is the same: The governor is reviewing it.
Kate Germond, an investigator for Centurion Ministries in New Jersey, who has worked on the Honaker case for two years, has been hearing this since June.
Allen is currently reviewing the case while on vacation in California and Las Vegas.
``This is a story about a governor,'' Germond says. ``The alleged moral father of the Commonwealth of Virginia, who has gone to visit his mother in California for two weeks while refusing to allow an innocent man to visit his mother, whose health is bad, and whom he hasn't seen for six years.
``Without the semen, they have no case. That's the bottom line in all of this . . . This makes me nuts. I hate lies and I hate bulls---. What? What are they reviewing?''
If it hadn't been for this case, Ed Honaker would probably have made it through life without attracting much notoriety. A police officer's son, he was born in West Virginia, the seventh of 10 children. He moved to Roanoke to do welding and carpentry work when he was 22, married and had three children.
Honaker spent the next 10 years hunting, fishing, drinking, getting into bar fights and spending the odd night in jail. In 1984, he and a friend got a two-year sentence for breaking into the house of a man who owed the friend money. Honaker split with his wife the same year and was subsequently hospitalized for depression. That, he says, ``is when everything started to go downhill.''
On June 22, 1984, a 19-year-old Newport News woman and her boyfriend got lost in the dark while driving west on the Blue Ridge Parkway. They pulled onto an overlook, parked their car and decided to go to sleep for the night. A few hours later, a man in camouflage pants and a field jacket knocked on the car window. He had a flashlight and said he was a police officer. When they opened the door, he pulled a gun and demanded the keys to the car.
Ordering the boyfriend to run, the man forced the woman into his truck and drove her to a vacant schoolhouse, where he raped and sodomized her for four hours in the flatbed. Taking breaks to smoke and drink, he talked about Vietnam and someone named ``Lieutenant Kolacky'' who was responsible for getting a lot of his buddies killed. Then he drove the woman to a place near her car and dropped her off. She was found by her boyfriend and a deputy sheriff, who took her to a hospital, where the swabs were made.
The woman and her boyfriend gave descriptions of the rapist that police used to produce two composite sketches. According to a National Park Service report, the boyfriend described a white man, about 6 feet 4 inches and 200-225 pounds, with brown hair and a brown mustache. The man was wearing a large cross and driving a light-colored, possibly yellow Blazer. But the victim ``could only add to the description that the individual was a Vietnam veteran,'' the report said. ``She was not allowed clearly to see the individual during the entire sequence of events.''
Four months later, in October 1984, a Roanoke police officer decided the composites resembled an informal department mug shot of Honaker. The Nelson County Sheriff's Department showed the photo, along with several others, to the victim and her boyfriend. They picked out Honaker. Within days, he was awakened in his bed at Roanoke General Hospital, arrested and taken to Nelson County.
At the time, Honaker figured it was no big deal. They would realize their mistake and let him go.
``I figured I would go up there and then the next day there'd be a lineup and the lady would say, `I don't see the guy,' and then I'd be back home the next day,'' he says. ``That was 10 years ago. I haven't been home yet.''
Honaker's two-day trial took place in Lovingston in February 1985. He was confident of acquittal. For one thing, he had never been to Vietnam. For another, he was right-handed, and the witnesses had described the attacker as left-handed.
His fingerprints didn't match the prints lifted from the car. His Blazer was blue, not yellow. He was 5-11, not 6-4. And the crucifix police had confiscated from among his belongings was small - not large like the cross described in the report. Finally, there was the irrefutable fact of his vasectomy. Sperm had been found on the vaginal swabs taken from the victim, and Honaker could not produce sperm.
He had only two things to worry about: The victim identified him in court, and a state criminologist testified that it was ``unlikely'' that a hair found on the victim's shorts ``would match anyone other than the defendant.''
``I guess I was gullible and naive,'' says Honaker now, ``but I really thought the jury would find me innocent.
``One of the deputies told me when the jury was out, he said, `Eddie, I'm going over to the jail and pack your stuff because I've sat through two days of this and I know there's no way that jury can convict you.' When they said, `Guilty,' I felt my knees get weak. In your wildest dreams, I don't think you can imagine that happening to you. But now I believe it can happen to anyone.''
Honaker got three life sentences plus 24 years.
Eight years later, Honaker asked Centurion Ministries for help. The Princeton, N.J., organization, which works to free the imprisoned innocent, had the hair on the victim's shorts reanalyzed by a leading forensic hair expert. He found that it did not match Honaker's.
Then Kate Germond, while leafing through Honaker's file in the Clerk of the Circuit Court's office in Lovingston, came across a bill for hypnosis. Six days after the rape, she discovered, a deputy sheriff had taken the victim and her boyfriend to a doctor who hypnotized them. According to Honaker's petition for clemency, the hypnotist ``distinctly remembers the case because (the victim) could not remember seeing the face of her attacker until she was hypnotized and, under hypnosis, dramatically described the moment when she looked into her attacker's face.''
Germond knew that testimony about hypnotically enhanced memories has been considered inadmissible and unreliable in Virginia since 1974. She also knew that Honaker and his defense attorney had never been told about the hypnosis. Although fashionable as an investigative technique during the 1960s and 1970s, the use of hypnosis in criminal cases has since been largely abandoned.
``The popular conception of hypnosis is completely at odds with reality,'' says Stephen B. Bright, a defense attorney who founded the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.
``The truth is that the accuracy of an identification is greatly reduced if the victim was under stress (during the crime).
``In fact, stress greatly diminishes the chance that you will recognize a stranger a second time. . . The popular conception is, you just hypnotize someone and the mind plays back the crime like a videotape. But that's completely inaccurate. What happens is you confabulate in response to suggestion and then you remember what you confabulated. And the worst thing about it is that you then become positive in regard to what you remember. You have a certainty that you never had before.''
The California lab that performed the DNA tests on the evidence from Honaker's trial is the same lab that did the DNA analysis on evidence from the trial of Virginia serial killer Timothy Spencer. Spencer was executed this year on the strength of that evidence. Jennifer Mihalovich, a criminologist who worked on both cases at the lab, says the analysis of the Honaker evidence is ``more conclusive'' than the analysis of the Spencer evidence because it is ``exclusive'' rather than ``inclusive.''
``An exclusion means 100 percent certainty,'' she says. ``With Honaker, we don't have any doubts at all. With inclusion, which is what we did with Timothy Spencer, it's a percentage. Like one in a million.''
If Allen had no problem executing Spencer on the strength of inclusive DNA evidence, say Honaker's advocates, he should have even less of a problem letting Honaker out of prison. Yet that is where Honaker remains.
``It appears that Gov. Allen and the officials there in Virginia are literally guilty of false imprisonment in continuing to hold this person once this evidence has come out,'' Bright says. ``He should not spend another day in prison.''
``It breaks my heart,'' Germond says. ``I hear it (hopelessness) in his voice. It's hollow and thin.''
Even Payne, the prosecutor, is mystified.
``I can't presume to offer any explanation or reason for how the governor's office is proceeding,'' he says.
``The Virginia Supreme Court has accepted DNA evidence. And as you're aware, we have executed a man relying heavily on DNA evidence. If we are going to convict on the basis of that evidence, I think we have to exonerate as well.''
At Nottoway, Honaker tries not to let himself dream about freedom.
``I'm not going to set myself up with this big scene and have it never happen,'' he says. ``I've had so many letdowns in the past 10 years, with this court saying no, and that court saying no . . .
``But I do look forward to stepping out of the gate and taking a breath of just free air. To driving in the car without handcuffs, without shackles. And if I want to stop by the store and get a Coke, I can.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN/Staff
KEYWORDS: RAPE SEX CRIME DNA by CNB