Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 6, 1990 TAG: 9003062293
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B2 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: RONNIE CROCKER NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS AND TIMES-HERALD
DATELINE: NEW LENGTH: Medium
Circuit Court Clerk Rex Davis and Deputy Clerk Gary Anderson spent most of the day last Tuesday emptying the two closet-sized vaults used to store evidence from completed criminal trials. Most of the items will be destroyed; the rest will be transferred to the new city courthouse.
Davis found the blood-covered blouse under a cabinet, wrapped in a 1938 edition of the Daily Press.
The Confederate bill fell out of a stack of ledgers in a musty file cabinet.
Although state law allows evidence in criminal cases to be destroyed after all appeals are exhausted, that law hasn't been used often in Newport News, said Davis. He began working in the 41-year-old courthouse in 1971, and said the cleanup was the first destruction of evidence he's seen there.
"You could crack the door of the vault open and hold it open with one hand while you threw the new evidence on top of the stack," he said. "It had been that way for probably 10 years. The evidence went into the vault and stayed there forever."
In addition to the blouse and the bill, Davis and Anderson dug out about 300 handguns and about as many knives, as well as other evidence chronicling more than a half-century of crime in the city.
They include a variety of illegal drugs. Davis said he could track the popularity of different types of drugs through the years by looking at the date on the evidence tags.
Most of the evidence found in the vault was still tagged, but other items had nothing linking them to any particular case, such as the blood-stained blouse, which was taken to the city landfill.
Another item to be destroyed is a handgun believed used in the 1978 robbery and beating death of Muriel Hatchell. It was introduced at the capital-murder trial of Frank J. Coppola, who died in the state's electric chair in 1982.
Some of the evidence will be saved, Davis said.
He called the local commander of the American Legion to have him pick up a bag of $32.20 in coins from a 1963 criminal case. The passage of time had obscured the nature of the offense.
"The tag just said `Property of American Legion,"' Davis said.
Paul Wilcox, a city coin dealer, said the dimes, quarters and half-dollars in the bag could be worth up to 3 1/2 times their face value because they contain 90 percent silver, unlike the coins of the same denominations made after 1964.
The nickels are worth a nickel apiece, he said. For cash and coins whose ownership cannot be determined - including several thousand dollars - the recipient will be the state Literary Fund, which provides low-interest loans for public school construction.
Also in the vaults were numerous other records, letters and ledgers, many from around the turn of the century. Documents dated prior to 1913 must be turned over to the state archives in Richmond, Davis said.
One item likely to stay in the clerk's office as a souvenir, however, is a folded, partially decayed $100 bill from the Confederate States of America. Davis found the note while cleaning out a cabinet.
"It came out of an area that probably hasn't been opened in 40 years," he said. Wilcox said the bill could be worth $1 or thousands of dollars, depending on its condition.
Future generations rummaging through the new courthouse's evidence lockers probably won't find such treasures.
Davis said he has instituted a new system that will prevent such pileups of evidence in the future. Each of the city's three Circuit judges has a clerk assigned to them. Each of those clerks will have an evidence locker in the new courthouse.
They will be required to keep track of the evidence from their courts and turn it over for destruction at regular intervals. The new system, Davis said, should prevent any future trips down memory lane.
by CNB