ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 1, 1996 TAG: 9612020064
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
THIS MONTH'S HEARING hinges upon whether or not the Sheriff's Office withheld information from Soering's defense.
Ricky Gardner spent five years making sure Jens Soering was put behind bars for the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Now, the Bedford County investigator wants to make sure he stays there.
Attorney Gail Marshall is staking her reputation on proving Gardner wrong. She believes Soering is innocent, a victim of poor representation and bad evidence, and she wants to help set him free.
The two are on opposite sides of the most publicized murder case in Western Virginia history - a case returning to Bedford County Circuit Court for an appeals hearing this month, six years after Soering's conviction.
The Dec. 9 hearing hinges on whether or not the Sheriff's Office withheld information from Soering's defense about a traffic stop in which a Buck knife reportedly was confiscated from two drifters near the Haysom home shortly after their bodies were discovered.
The drifters later were arrested for stabbing to death a Roanoke vagrant and are serving life sentences for that murder.
Gardner and the Sheriff's Office have said they had no paperwork or knowledge about the knife, but Marshall contends there was information and that it would have helped Soering's defense.
The knife has been kept in the personal possession of a former deputy who claims to have confiscated it. It recently was sent to state forensic labs to determine if it could have been the weapon that killed the Haysoms, but no human blood was found on it.
While the hearing this month will focus on that one issue, both Gardner and Marshall cite plenty of evidence that they say proves their beliefs in Soering's guilt or innocence.
And both are eager to make their cases.
* * *
In April 1985, Gardner was a 29-year-old Bedford native who had been working at the Sheriff's Office six years. He recently had been promoted to investigator, and the Haysom case was his first murder case.
After other leads withered, his investigation focused on Soering, who eventually fled across Europe and Asia with his former girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom, the daughter of the slain couple.
Gardner flew to London to interrogate Soering when he and Haysom finally were arrested in 1986. It was a pivotal moment in the investigator's life.
Administrative Lieutenant John McCane "gives me a hard time about it," Gardner said. "He introduces me, `This is Ricky. He worked the Haysom case. I think that's the only case he ever worked.'''
These days, Gardner, 41, is the head of investigations at the sheriff's office. He's been subpoenaed to testify at Soering's appeals hearing.
Inside his office are various trophies from the investigation: A photo of him in an English bobby's uniform taken at the police station in London hangs on the wall behind his desk, and on a shelf sits a bobby's helmet. Books and newspaper clippings about the murders and Soering's trial also are on display.
Soering continues to proclaim his innocence. He says his former girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom - and accomplices unknown to him - killed her parents. In fact, Soering even wrote a letter to her last week asking her to confess to "her true role" in the murders.
"What else is he going to say?" Gardner asked. "The problem I've got is, he confessed twice. There's no doubt in my mind he killed them. I'm sure he killed them."
When police searched Soering's and Haysom's apartment in England, several letters were found written by the two describing a plot to murder Haysom's parents. In interviews in 1986, Soering confessed to Gardner that he had committed the murders.
"I fell in love with a girl; we talked about killing her parents and I did it," Soering said.
Soering also later confessed to authorities in West Germany, his home nation. He has said that he falsely confessed to Gardner and British police to save Haysom from the electric chair because he thought he would be tried in Germany, which has no death penalty.
And he said he confessed to German officials because he hoped to give them evidence so they could try him there, instead of in Virginia, where Soering had been indicted for capital murder.
* * *
Marshall knows a little something about false confessions.
The 55-year-old lawyer was a deputy state attorney general for eight years, and spent a year in charge of criminal cases, during which she reviewed cases that were coming up for execution. One of those cases was that of Earl Washington Jr., a Fauquier County man sentenced to death in 1982 for stabbing to death and raping a Culpeper woman.
"He had no [prior] criminal record. He was picked up and he confessed, but I read his confession, and I said, `This just doesn't jibe,''' Marshall said. For one thing, he had the victim's race wrong and he mistakenly said no one else was present at the murder, when the victim's children were there. She thought Washington, a mildly retarded man, made the false confession in an effort to please his interrogators.
Marshall requested a DNA test. On the basis of that test, which showed that Washington's sperm did not match a sample taken from the murder scene, Washington's sentence was commuted from death to life.
"What I was taught vividly in the Earl Washington case was that mistakes can be made. The system is fallible [and] maybe the ultimate penalty should not be what we're exacting," Marshall said.
She says there are similar discrepancies in Soering's confessions.
For instance, Soering told Gardner and the British investigators that Nancy Haysom was wearing jeans. But she was in fact wearing "a very long, flowery housedress, not anything you'd confuse with blue jeans," said Marshall, town attorney for Orange who also teaches occasional classes at the law school at the University of Virginia.
Marshall initially agreed to review Soering's case in 1994 because Soering's father is a friend of a friend, but she soon became convinced of Soering's innocence and agreed to represent him - for a reduced rate.
In addition to her belief that the evidence doesn't prove Soering's guilt, she also thinks he didn't get a fair trial. One of Soering's attorneys, she points out, has admitted to having emotional problems at the time of the trial, and has since had his law license suspended for charges related to an earlier appeal sought by Soering.
Marshall also is critical of Judge William Sweeney's refusal to recuse himself at Soering's 1990 trial or the upcoming hearing, despite the fact that Sweeney had prior acquaintance with the victims and made comments to a reporter about Soering's role in the murders before hearing his trial.
She says if this - Soering's final appeal on the state level - fails, she's committed to taking his case to federal courts, where she's more hopeful of arguing her claims of Soering's ineffectual legal representation and her beliefs that his constitutional rights were violated during questioning in England.
* * *
Ricky Gardner isn't happy about the possibility of seeing Jens Soering again in Bedford County Circuit Court next week. "He's not a celebrity. Some people are trying to make him into Elvis or something, but they have to remember that he killed two people. He's a convicted double murderer, and that's all he is."
As for Marshall, she says Soering doesn't fit the profile of a murderer, and for good reason.
"Jens was never really involved in drugs. He never smoked, he hardly drank, he was never involved with the police before and he never had any violent behavior," she said.
Elizabeth Haysom's "life was entirely different. The kind of things she could bring herself to do were obviously very different and obviously she had a much deeper reaction to her parents than Jens."
LENGTH: Long : 138 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshots) Gardner, Marshallby CNB