Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 20, 1990 TAG: 9007200363
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONICA DAVEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: COLONIAL HEIGHTS LENGTH: Medium
Massello, who had determined that the woman died from injuries suffered in a traffic accident, heard from her husband, who had tracked down Massello's home number in Roanoke.
James Hicks had only one question, according to Massello.
He wanted to know whether the doctor planned to change his mind in any way about the accidental nature of Lena Hicks' death.
Massello, who had been asked by sheriff's investigators to reconsider the ruling, told Hicks that he had yet to make a firm conclusion.
Not long after, Massello ruled Lena Hicks' death a homicide.
On Thursday, Massello said that James Hicks' phone inquiry had struck him as unusual.
"I'd never had a phone call like this before," Massello told jurors on the second day of Hicks' trial. Hicks is charged with hiring someone to kill his wife and make the death look like a traffic accident.
Using testimony from Massello and others Thursday, Commonwealth's Attorney Neil Vener tried to show jurors that far from acting like a grieving widower, Hicks' behavior in the days after the death fit that of a nervous killer trying to cover his tracks.
Hicks tried to keep tabs on the status of the investigation and cover up evidence that could incriminate him, according to Vener.
Earlier on the day Hicks placed the call to Massello, the former Campbell County school administrator was seen standing along the road near the ravine where his wife's body had been found inside her car.
Around noon Jan. 15, Johnny Rhodes saw Hicks standing on Lawyers Road. Hicks' Campbell County School Board car was parked on the shoulder.
Rhodes said Hicks was looking into the woods, in the direction where Campbell County sheriff's officials were at that moment continuing to investigate the scene of the death.
"They would not have been able to see" Hicks watching them, said Rhodes, an acquaintance of Hicks who happened along the stretch of road at the same time.
A few days before that, Hicks had painted the walls of his two-car garage in Evington.
Authorities allege that Hicks paid Reuben Gregory Barksdale $900 to bludgeon Lena Hicks to death with a hammer inside that garage.
An expert on blood and the patterns it makes testified Thursday that the garage ceiling was covered with barely visible spots of blood apparently caused by the "backswing" of a weapon covered in blood.
Based on the pattern, the expert would have expected the walls to also be dotted with blood, but they weren't, he said.
A day after his wife's body was found, Hicks arose early to paint the walls white, Lena Hicks' sister testified.
Hicks' defense attorneys, though, say the paint job had nothing to do with covering up splattered blood. Hicks, whose hobby was refurbishing homes, painted everything, all the time, A. David Hawkins has told the jury. After his wife's death, painting the garage was "a form of therapy," Hawkins said.
Hicks, 44, has pleaded innocent to the murder-for-hire charge. His attorneys say Barksdale, 29, was acting alone when he killed Lena Hicks during a foiled robbery attempt.
Hicks looked at the ground and sometimes covered his eyes Thursday as Vener presented jurors gruesome photographs of Lena Hicks' body.
Massello told jurors that a tremendous amount of force had to have been used to break Lena Hicks' skull and drive it into her brain. "Bits of brain," Massello told the jurors, came out of her head.
Over defense objections that the photographs would be prejudicial and inflammatory, Circuit Judge J. Samuel Johnston Jr. allowed them to be used as evidence.
"These are vivid and grotesque," Johnston said. But the jury is "entitled to see what happened to the victim."
One juror glanced momentarily at the first photograph, before turning her eyes away from the rest. As she grew more pale and uncomfortable, Johnston asked the juror if she needed a break.
After a 20-minute recess, the 68-year-old retired waitress told the judge that the photographs had not made her ill.
While at home, she had accidentally gotten a few whiffs of a chemical used to kill bugs, she said.
Pressed by Johnston, the juror insisted that the graphic pictures were not the problem. "I can take a lot; believe me." B3 B1 HICKS Hicks
by CNB