ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 20, 1996 TAG: 9611200084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY STAFF WRITER
For the second time this month, a Virginia death row inmate is asking the governor for clemency based on the possibility that the state's main witness lied in court.
Ronald Bennett, 42, is scheduled to die Thursday for the murder of Anne Vaden, a Chesterfield County woman who was tied up, stabbed, choked and beaten to death in her apartment in 1985.
The only evidence that linked Bennett to the crime was testimony from his ex-wife and his cousin. The ex-wife recanted her testimony in a videotaped statement in 1994, saying she watched the crime take place and lied at Bennett's trial to protect herself. A year later, she recanted the recantation.
The circumstances of the case echo those surrounding that of Joseph Patrick Payne, who was scheduled to die Nov. 7 for the 1985 murder of a prison inmate.
Gov. George Allen commuted Payne's sentence to life based on evidence that the state's main witness in the case lied, and may have committed the crime himself.
Like Bennett's ex-wife, the witness in the Payne case, Robert ``Dirty Smitty'' Smith, recanted his trial testimony, then recanted his recantation.
Anne Vaden was murdered Nov. 16, 1985. Police had no real leads in the case for more than a year, until Bennett's ex-wife, Mary, talked about the killing during a drinking spree with a friend in California in December 1986.
The friend alerted police, and Mary Bennett fingered her ex-husband, who had done maintenance work at the victim's apartment complex.
At Bennett's trial in late 1987, Mary Bennett testified that she, Bennett, and Bennett's cousin, Kenneth Harris, had spent the night of the murder drinking and using cocaine. Bennett left her and Harris in a dope house in the Church Hill section of Richmond, and did not return home until 7 the next morning, she said.
When he arrived, she testified, he was covered with blood and told her ``he had just killed a girl at the Boulders apartments.''
Harris also testified, giving a similar version of events.
But in an affidavit videotaped in Spokane, Wash., in August 1994, Mary Bennett - by this time remarried and calling herself Mary Stroh - said she lied at the trial.
What really happened on the night of the murder, she told Bennett's attorney and an investigator, was that she and Harris went out looking for Bennett and ended up in Vaden's apartment.
As she looked on, Stroh said, Harris murdered Vaden, hitting her with a Scotch whisky bottle and ``something'' he got from the kitchen.
On the videotape, Stroh is a middle-aged woman with dark hair, penciled eyebrows and hands twisting nervously on the table in front of her. She said she lied at the trial because she was ``scared'' and because ``Ron had always told me if I ever got into real, real trouble, to put it on him. That he would do the time and that he would get through it.
``And that's exactly what I did. I just put different people in different places, and that's when the whole nightmare really hit.
``I never in a million years thought Ron would be convicted. And never given the death sentence. Never.''
After the trial, Stroh said, she moved to Washington state and ``buried my head in the sand and tried to forget.''
She had hoped, she said, that Bennett would somehow ``get out of'' his predicament. When he did not, she was ``grateful'' when Bennett's investigators tracked her down and gave her a chance to tell the truth.
But less than a year after the videotape was made, Stroh again announced that she had lied.
She made up the story on the videotape, she told the investigators, to try to save Bennett from execution.
Bennett's attorney, Donald Lee Jr., said Tuesday he was not surprised when Stroh recanted her recantation.
``In the videotape, she admits to being present at a capital crime, which is a very serious thing and something that someone would not do lightly,'' he said. ``Given the possible consequences of that, it's not surprising that she now disclaims it.
``But I think this is powerful evidence. She has made a sworn statement placing herself at the scene of a capital murder and exonerating Ron Bennett.''
Lee has asked the governor to grant clemency to Bennett. Allen has had the videotape since Thursday, Lee said.
Bennett is one of six men scheduled for execution before Christmas. The others are: Gregory Warren Beaver, Dec. 5; Larry Stout, Dec. 10; Lem Tuggle, Dec. 12; Ronald Hoke, Dec. 16; and Joseph O'Dell, Dec.18.
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