
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 20, 1995                   TAG: 9506200099
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MARION                                LENGTH: Medium

MISSING BODY POSES PROBLEM

Criminal law experts say prosecutors will have a tough time proving that a Smyth County man killed a woman whose body was never found.

There have been only two successful murder prosecutions reported in the state appellate court system in which the victim's body was never found, said criminal law professor Roger Groot of Washington & Lee University Law School.

``In any homicide case, the commonwealth has the burden of proving the victim was once alive and is now dead,'' Groot said. ``They are going to have a problem proving the victim is dead.''

Roger Dale Dunford, 44, of Chilhowie, was charged June 9 with the first-degree murder of Barbara Jean Paulley Hunt of Marion. He is being held in the Smyth County Jail in lieu of $225,000 bond.

Richard Bonnie, a criminal law professor at the University of Virginia, said that without a corpse prosecutors need to be armed with solid evidence that proves a murder took place.

Law enforcement officials indicated for many years that Hunt was simply a missing person - which could mean little physical evidence was initially gathered. The recent probe of her death that led to the arrest began just nine months ago.

The first successfully prosecuted murder case in the state in which no body was found involved the death of a Radford University student from Coeburn, Groot said.

Stephen Matteson Epperly is serving life in prison for the first-degree murder of 18-year-old Gina Hall in 1980. Hall was killed at a cabin on Claytor Lake in Pulaski County, but her body was never found.

However, in the Hall case, police found extensive physical evidence that the woman had been killed - including her bloody clothes and traces of her blood and hair at the Claytor Lake cabin.

The Virginia Supreme Court affirmed Epperly's conviction in 1982, saying prosecutors had proved Hall was dead and that Epperly was responsible. The high court ruled that, in the absence of a dead body, prosecutors must either produce a witness to the killing, some identifiable remains of the victim or a confession that is backed up by circumstantial evidence of a violent death.

by CNB