ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 10, 1996 TAG: 9612100127
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEDFORD
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
There were no cameras in the courtroom and no crowds waiting outside Monday when Jens Soering returned to Bedford County for an appeal hearing, six years after his conviction for the murders of Boonsboro couple Derek and Nancy Haysom.
The first day of Soering's appeal in Circuit Court was subdued in contrast to the media frenzy caused by his 1990 trial. Few spectators came to see the former University of Virginia honor student maintain his innocence in the infamous 1985 stabbings.
The court was less than half full, and most of the people there were reporters.
There were no startling revelations, though there was testimony from a long-awaited witness: former Bedford County deputy George Anderson.
Soering is seeking a new trial based on his claim that prosecutors withheld evidence about a traffic stop Anderson made shortly after the Haysom murders.
Anderson testified that he stopped two men walking on the U.S. 460 bypass east of Bedford late one night, several days after the Haysoms' bodies were found. "They were acting a little suspicious and a little nervous," he said, so he asked them to empty their pockets on the hood of the car and then he questioned each man separately in the back seat of his patrol car.
One of the men said they had been to Lynchburg to see a girl and were on their way to Roanoke, but the second man contradicted the story. Anderson said he was suspicious, but that he released them because he had no evidence of wrongdoing.
About two weeks later, Anderson said, he was putting something in the back seat of his patrol car when he noticed something brass sticking out from under the seat. He pulled out a large folding Buck knife.
Anderson said he later saw an article about the murder of a Roanoke vagrant, and recognized the men arrested for the killing as the two drifters he had stopped. He said he then became suspicious that the drifters may have hid the knife in his car and also that they may have been involved in the Haysom murders.
His suspicions, he said, were largely based on the knife, the proximity of time to the murders, and the fact that the men were carrying a tan tablecloth and a nylon travel bag. Anderson said he thought at the time that such items were missing from the Haysom home.
However, Gardner and former investigator Steve Rush, who worked on the murders, testified that no such items were reported missing.
State medical examiners testified that the knife was "consistent" with the type of knife used in the Haysom murders, and even demonstrated that the Buck knife was sturdier and sharper than a steak knife, suggested at Soering's trial to be the weapon. Deputy Attorney General John McLees noted that a state lab test last month found no traces of blood on the knife.
Soering's attorney, Gail Marshall, contends the evidence would have produced a reasonable doubt in jurors' minds and could have changed their verdict.
"The evidence which the defense did not have, tended to support the viable possibility that these two men had the capability, means and opportunity to commit these horrendous crimes," Marshall said during her opening statement. "Obviously, the defense should have had the opportunity to present this material."
McLees argued that the prosecution didn't intentionally withhold any information and had, in fact, entered the two drifters' fingerprints into evidence at Soering's trial as prints that were compared to and eliminated as sources of unidentified prints found at the murder scene.
"Certainly if the defense was unaware of who these two men were or why their fingerprints were submitted, they could have asked," McLees said in his opening statement.
McLees made several other arguments in his attempt to debunk Marshall's statement.
Among the evidence he introduced was information that the two men wore size 10 to 12 shoes, much larger than the bloody sock prints found at the crime scene.
McLees also pointed to differences in the murders and the motives.
The vagrant killed by the two drifters was robbed for a few dollars. Nothing except a fork was taken from the Haysom home, Gardner and Rush testified, and Nancy Haysom's purse was left behind with more than $100 in cash.
State medical examiners further testified that the vagrant's throat was not slashed as the Haysoms' were, and the Haysoms were not sexually mutilated like the vagrant.
Soering, serving a double life sentence at Keen Mountain Correctional Center, says he falsely confessed to the killings to save his ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom, from the electric chair. He claims Elizabeth killed her parents, possibly with an accomplice.
Closing arguments in the appeal will be heard today, but a ruling is not expected from Judge William Sweeney until later.
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON Staff. Jens Soering, a German diplomat'sby CNBson, asked a judge in Bedford on Monday to overturn his murder
convictions. color.