ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702240094
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
THE EVIDENCE against Christopher Saul was overwhelming - but the man he killed was gay. Would that have mattered to a jury?
Christopher Wilson kept a copy of Lee Iacocca's autobiography among his automotive tools. It was an inspiration to the 26-year-old auto mechanic, who lingered over elusive car problems as if they were puzzles in the Sunday newspaper.
"If you wanted to get in touch with him, you'd call him at the shop," recalled his mother, Mary Wilson.
His skills instilled loyalty in his customers. One who lived near General Imports Automotive Service in Southwest Roanoke County sometimes brought Wilson snacks when she saw him working late. Another customer recalled Wilson picking up his Jaguar in Hillsville on a Sunday, unfazed by the 70-mile drive.
"He had a certain innocence about him," said Judy Lawrence, who used to bring her Chrysler Lebaron to him. "He always had this cute little smile. You wanted to trust him."
When colleagues found Wilson the morning of Jan. 2, 1996, he was lying face down on the concrete floor in his work bay. The front pockets of his jeans had been turned inside out.
Two holes were torn in the back of his skull. A blow to his back and right side had smashed his liver and a kidney. The injuries bore the impressions of the murder weapons - a crescent wrench and a metal hood jack.
The killer had taken Wilson's car, wallet and checkbook.
The morning of Wilson's closed-casket funeral, police arrested Christopher Saul and charged him with capital murder.
For their son's 19-year-old killer, Mary and Jerry Wilson wanted the most severe punishment: life in prison or death.
But their son was gay. And his lifestyle, they were told, would be a potential liability if the case went to a jury.
When prosecutors suggested a plea agreement, the Wilsons had reservations. Why, they wondered, should they be forced to watch their son's sexual life publicized in order to receive justice? Eventually, though, the Wilsons went along.
Saul pleaded no contest to first-degree murder and robbery. A judge sentenced him to 42 years in prison.
"At first we felt like we let Chris down," Jerry Wilson said.
"I don't think we let him down; I think the justice system did," Mary Wilson said. "We were told [defense lawyers] would use everything they could to drag his name through the mud. We didn't want that. At that point I didn't know which way to turn."
Their decision haunts the Wilsons, particularly since police had more than 50 pieces of evidence they say implicated Saul in the killing.
"Several pieces of any of that was enough to convict," said Roanoke County Detective Jeff Herrick, lead investigator on the case. "Unfortunately, even though we're in 1997, there was a fear that based on his lifestyle, a jury would believe he got what he deserved."
Investigators believe Wilson was killed for his car, a silver-and-black 1985 Chrysler Laser. Their theory is that Christopher Saul needed transportation to Moneta so he could pick up friends and return to Roanoke for a New Year's Day party. Wilson was a convenient victim.
Defense lawyers contend their client was unwittingly lured into a homosexual encounter. They say Saul accepted a ride with Wilson - even though the two were not acquainted - in the hopes of going to a party with him. When Wilson made a sexual advance, they say, Saul reacted uncontrollably.
"He was married for a year with two, twin boys and going through problems," said William Cleaveland, one of Saul's lawyers. "Chris Wilson picked him up with one thing on his mind. That didn't connect with Saul until he was in the garage. When he made the sexual advance, Saul lost it."
Legal strategists call it the "panic defense" - an explosive reaction by a heterosexual man to a gay advance. Nationally, it has become a popular defense in murder cases where the victims are gay, said David Buckel, a staff lawyer at LAMBDA Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, a gay and lesbian civil rights organization.
The theory presumes that violence is an understandable reaction to a proposition from a gay man.
But if the murder victim were straight, would the reaction be viewed differently? After all, women get these types of sexual advances every day, Buckel said.
"Are we going to allow them to raise that defense?" he asked. "Somehow straight men are able to raise that defense because they fear being the object of sexual desire."
In a perfect world, a victim's lifestyle is not relevant to a case, experts say. But juries don't render verdicts in a vacuum. Issues such as whether a victim placed himself in a vulnerable position can diminish a jury's sympathy, and, consequently, its sentence.
In California, a prosecutor recently asked a jury to hand down a death sentence after convicting a man of torturing, then shooting to death, a banker. Jurors refused, sentencing him to life instead.
The victim was gay and had picked up his killer in an adult bookstore, said Scott Sundby, professor of law at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. He has studied the way juries deliberate capital-murder cases and interviewed the jurors in California after they rendered their sentence.
"In some sense they felt the victim had brought it on himself," he said. "If it was not for that aspect, there's no doubt in my mind that the jury would have returned a death sentence."
Prosecutors faced a similar hurdle in Wilson's case. Striking an agreement with Saul eliminated any risk of going before a jury, which could have reduced the charge to second-degree murder or manslaughter. The death penalty was an unlikely option because Saul did not have a violent criminal record, Roanoke County Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Randy Leach said.
In 1987, Roanoke County prosecutors struck a bargain in a capital-murder case involving a gay victim and defendant. Timothy Wayne Spradlin stopped his jury trial and skirted a possible death sentence by pleading guilty to capital murder and robbery. Prosecutors said the bargain assured Spradlin would serve a significant prison sentence.
Spradlin was convicted of shooting to death Raymond Elliott Jr. on the Blue Ridge Parkway during a struggle, then stealing Elliott's car. Spradlin received two life sentences. Because he was sentenced under the old parole laws, he will serve at least 30 years in prison.
Saul's agreement placed his sentence - a maximum of two life terms - in the hands of a judge. Roanoke County Circuit Judge Roy Willett sent him to prison for 42 years, more than three years above the average state sentence for first-degree murder convictions, according to statistics from the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission. Saul, who is now 20, could be released for good behavior after 35 years under the new no-parole law.
With an agreement, "we could soften the impact of Chris Wilson's lifestyle and his choices being raked over the public coals," Leach said. "Roanoke County juries are typically conservative. They would have been appalled at the beating. [But] I don't know how a jury would react to [Wilson's homosexuality]. It scares me. A jury might let it be more of an issue than it should have been."
Saul's attorneys, Cleaveland and Jack Gregory, said Wilson's homosexuality would have been an issue only in explaining how the victim and the defendant got to the garage.
"We never discussed a character assassination of Chris Wilson," Cleaveland said. "Clearly, it is inappropriate when someone's life is taken. There were a lot of people who thought highly of Chris Wilson. It would have been a mistake to try and assassinate that."
But when Leach and Herrick talked with defense lawyers before entering into the agreement, they were left with no doubt that Wilson's homosexuality would be a cornerstone of Saul's case. They said they were told that issues such as Wilson's gay lifestyle, his romantic relationships and the risk he took in picking up a stranger at night could all become issues if the case went before a jury.
When told of that scenario, Wilson's parents struggled. In the end, at the urging of their oldest son, Bill Wilson, they gave up the fight.
"If we would have gone with a jury, the defense would have discredited him as much as they could have," said Bill Wilson, who lives in Maryland. "The only thing the defendant had was to make Chris look bad."
Christopher Wilson came out to his parents when he was 19.
"It didn't bother me," Mary Wilson said. "Some people are different. It was his life; his choice. I told him we'd always be there for him. We'd always love him."
His friends say he did not conceal his sexual preference, nor did he flaunt it.
Wilson's friend Larry Payne, the last person known to have seen him before his murder, said Wilson was known to "cruise" parks in search of men for sex and had been cautioned that it was dangerous. Hustlers looking for fast money frequent these pickup spots.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers believe Wilson picked up Saul somewhere in Southeast Roanoke on New Year's night 1995. No one has said why Wilson picked him up, but Saul's defense lawyers say he was not hitchhiking.
From there, the facts of the case are in dispute.
Investigators believe Wilson took Saul immediately back to the garage. There, they believe, Saul hit him from behind, possibly because Wilson did not want to drive him to Moneta.
Police found Saul's fingerprints on Wilson's car and automated teller slips that indicate he had tried to make withdrawals with Wilson's bank card. They found Wilson's blood on Saul's hat and jacket.
They were unable to get prints from the murder weapons. The wrench was too dirty and the metal hood jack was recovered from a creek near Saul's Southeast Roanoke home.
Saul has never spoken about the murder to police or during his court hearings. Roanoke County-Salem Jail officials denied a request to interview Saul for this story because he was under lockdown supervision for participating in a disturbance.
Saul "was a 19-year-old kid who had a history of a broken home, he was pretty much a follower, who was under a lot of pressure," Cleaveland said.
"[But] we were dealing with a very brutal beating that resulted in death. There was nothing we could say to justify that beating."
Mary Wilson didn't know how badly her son had been beaten until several months after his death. Her oldest son had tried to hide the details to minimize the pain for his mother.
But one day, she picked up some papers on the kitchen table in her Dublin home. The page looked like a medical form. She saw her son's name and realized she was staring at his autopsy report.
A subsequent report filed by investigators was even more graphic. It revealed Wilson had been hit three times as he fell to the floor. Once down, his killer hit him twice more, at one point stepping on his back.
"No matter what you are, you don't deserve that kind of beating," she said.
Those close to Christopher Wilson believe a jury would have been able to look past his homosexuality.
"They had the parents [believing] that Roanoke County juries are so conservative," said Bill Wheeling, another friend of Wilson's. "When you look at the manner that Chris was killed, that was all [the jury] needed to know."
Wilson wasn't ashamed of his homosexuality, and keeping it from a jury denied a part of who he was, said others. And it assumed that jurors would be prejudiced.
"They should have laid out all the cards to the community," Payne said. "I don't think the defense had a foot to stand on .... I hope the Roanoke Valley looks back on this case and finds a young man who was murdered by someone who, quite frankly, was slapped on the wrist."
LENGTH: Long : 204 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STAFF. 1. Christopher Wilson, in his high schoolby CNBgraduation photo in his parents' Dublin home. 2. (headshot) Saul.
color. KEYWORDS: ROMUR