Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 8, 1994 TAG: 9408110043
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: LUMBERTON, N.C. LENGTH: Long
The truth about James Jordan must wait.
In the year since his death, there's been no trial, no preliminary hearing, not even an arraignment for the two Robeson County teen-agers charged in the killing of the father of a basketball legend.
Michael Jordan says only that he misses his dad. Attorneys and investigators are forbidden to discuss the case publicly; they speak through documents piling up in four thick court files, and for the first time they have a judge appointed to hear their many motions.
Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks of Fayetteville stepped into the case 11/2 weeks ago, just before the case took its most intriguing twist.
At 5:54 p.m. on Friday, July 29, defense attorneys filed a court document suggesting that somewhere, somehow, James Jordan is alive.
The attorneys raised vague notions of a faked death.
And serious financial problems.
And a paternity suit in Illinois.
And they claim there's no proof that the decomposed corpse found floating in a Marlboro County, S.C., creek a year ago was that of Jordan, 56.
The documents, among hundreds, offered the most perplexing development yet in a case that started as sensational, then settled into the methodical gathering of facts.
Court files 93-CRS-15291 and 93-CRS-15288 will grow fat and tattered by the time Larry Martin Demery and Daniel Andre Green, both 19, face a jury. They're expected to go to trial no earlier than January, sources say.
Demery and Green wait in separate cells in the Robeson County Jail as one set of lawyers works to defend them and another seeks to put them to death.
James Jordan was driving home to Union County after attending a friend's funeral in Wilmington, where he and his wife, Deloris, had raised their children. At 3:30 in the morning, he pulled over in his red Lexus to nap on the side of U.S. 74 in Lumberton, 130 miles east of Charlotte. As Jordan slept, robbers ambushed him, shot him once in the chest, drove his body to South Carolina and dumped it in a creek near McColl.
Authorities said dental records confirmed the body was Jordan's.
Defense attorneys suggest that James Jordan is alive.
Woodberry Bowen and public defender Angus Thompson, who represent Green, suggested in a series of motions in July that Jordan faced such ``precarious'' financial problems with the IRS, the North Carolina Revenue Department, banks and credit-card companies that he faked his own death.
``It is not unreasonable or unrealistic that Mr. Jordan may have purposely and voluntarily disappeared and that the body which was discovered is not the body of James Jordan,'' one motion says.
``James Jordan was involved both personally and perhaps in a business way with a person or persons from Chicago and ... was involved in gambling to excess and beyond his means.''
Jordan and other family members owned three sporting goods stores in the Charlotte area: Flight 23 By Jordan. They also owned JVL Enterprises Inc. in Rock Hill, S.C., which made T-shirts, socks and shorts. Business associates have said Jordan paid bills late or not at all and lost contracts because of it.
Lawyers are examining records of seven credit-card accounts with Visa, Citicorp, American Express and Amoco.
And they say JVL Enterprises owes the IRS more than $40,000.
Without detail, another motion mentions an ``embarrassing'' paternity suit in Illinois.
In March, an article in GQ magazine argued that Demery and Green are being railroaded. The article specifically questioned inconsistencies in James Jordan sightings.
Helen Norris, a clerk at the DJ Mini Mart convenience store on U.S. 17 in Brunswick County, has said she would ``bet my life'' that she saw Jordan and two males in her store on or after July 26, 1993 - three days after authorities said Jordan was shot.
It also was reported that Jordan had called his Rock Hill business on July 26.
And Deloris Jordan has said her husband called her that day, too.
They are all simply wrong, investigators have said.
Further examination of the body is impossible. A South Carolina coroner had it cremated as a ``John Doe'' the day after the autopsy because no one had identified or claimed it.
In recent motions, defense attorneys question whether prosecutors have evidence proving that Jordan's dental records match the dead man's - alleging that prosecutors either are withholding evidence or have none.
Demery and Green still haven't even had an arraignment, in which they'd plead guilty or not guilty.
Their charges are among 42,610 felonies pending statewide as of June 30, and they compete for attorneys' time in a county backlogged with violent cases.
Authorities have said some of the 33 people being held on murder charges at the county jail have awaited trial more than two years.
Prosecutors say a gag order on attorneys and investigators prohibits them from discussing what's taking so long in the Jordan case. They get so many phone calls every week from reporters across the country that they're jumpy.
``There's been a lot of misinformation put out,'' says District Attorney Richard Townsend, ``but unfortunately I'm not in a position to clear it up.''
by CNB