Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 17, 1993 TAG: 9303170300
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
MURDER CASE BUILT ON DETAIL
THE SMALLEST DETAILS - fingerprints on a crossword puzzle, sweat in the headband of a blood-stained cap - are being used to link a transient to the killing of a Wythe County postmaster.
Jimmy Lawrence Nance was a drifter who roamed the country, finding odd jobs or selling a truckload of furniture whenever he ran out of money.
Except for one day in September, the federal government alleges, when Nance - broke again and looking for cash - slashed the throat of a postmaster and emptied her purse as she lay bleeding on the floor of the Crockett post office.
As Nance's murder trial began Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, prosecutors outlined a case that rests on circumstantial evidence and DNA testing that found small but incriminating details - including matching Nance's sweat to that on the headband of a blood-stained baseball cap.
Nance, 42, faces a sentence of life in prison without parole if a jury convicts him of killing Donna Stevenson.
Although neither an eyewitness nor a murder weapon ever was found, prosecutors have subpoenaed more than 40 witnesses to build a circumstantial case against Nance.
In telling jurors how he expects the evidence to come together, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Eckert quoted from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak with a most miraculous organ."
Defense attorney Jonathan Apgar said it a different way: "The government's entire case," he told the jury, "is based on circumstance, speculation, guesswork and maybes."
Stevenson, 49, had worked for 20 years in the tiny post office at Crockett, a community west of Wytheville.
Georganna Davidson, a factory worker who lived nearby, testified Tuesday that she stopped by the post office on her way home the afternoon of Sept. 18.
When no one answered her calls, she looked over the counter and saw Stevenson's body on the floor. Stevenson had been beaten in the head with a blunt instrument and cut across the neck.
Not long after police and postal inspectors arrived at the scene, Nance became a suspect.
Other workers had seen him hanging around the post office that day, a week or so after he had sold a bedroom suite to Stevenson from the back of his furniture truck.
Eckert said one witness is expected to testify that Nance seemed impressed that Stevenson pulled cash from her pocketbook to pay the $1,300 bill.
"For a country woman, that lady sure carried a lot of money," he reportedly said.
Five hours after Stevenson's body was discovered, police caught up with Nance at the Marion bus station. Under the driver's seat of his car, they found photographs of Stevenson's two young nieces - pictures she was said to have always kept in her purse.
Also found was a blood-stained hat, T-shirt and shoes. Eckert told the jury that DNA testing could not identify the blood as Stevenson's. But it narrowed it down to 11 percent of the Caucasian population, including Stevenson.
Apgar and co-counsel Deborah Caldwell-Bono are expected to call their own DNA expert to say the figure is closer to 25 percent. "All the might and power of the FBI labs can't come down here and say that it was Donna Stevenson's blood," Apgar said.
But the DNA testing also is expected to match Nance's sweat with that on the hat, Eckert said.
Under questioning from police, Nance said he had been in North Carolina for much of the day of the killing. But a witness placed him in a Wythe County restaurant, remembering that he sat working a newspaper crossword puzzle.
Investigators tracked down the paper and sent it off to a federal lab, where Nance's fingerprints were found on it.
Defense attorneys want the jury to focus on another piece of evidence - a clump of hair belonging to neither Nance nor Stevenson that was found at the crime scene.
Testing showed the hair was from an American Indian, and Apgar suggested that it may have come from a suspicious man known only as "the Chief."
Although "the Chief" was spotted near the post office in a car that matched a description given to police, Apgar said investigators "turned a blind eye" to the lead because they were too concerned with Nance.
Apgar did not say in his opening arguments whether the jury will hear testimony from Nance, a man with hollow cheekbones framed by thick hair and a moustache. The trial, which is being held in federal court because the killing happened on government property, is scheduled to last through the week.
Chris Marshall, a postal carrier at Crockett, testified that Stevenson had seemed worried about Nance's hanging around when he last saw her - just hours before she died.
As he left the post office, Marshall looked at the license plate on Nance's car. In a description that he later gave to police, Marshall remembered the numbers on the plate, but not the letters.
He didn't pay that much attention, he said, because Crockett was not a place were people suspect strangers of murder. "I figured I was overreacting, just by looking at the tags," he said.