ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 25, 1997 TAG: 9704250050
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: FLOYD
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS THE ROANOKE TIMES
STAFF WRITER LISA K. GARCIA CONTRIBUTED TO THIS STORY.
A friend doubted the murder suspect's story, saying the victim ``was heterosexual - 110 percent.''
Mark Anthony Beavers told a state police investigator he fatally shot a Floyd County man because he made sexual advances, the investigator has testified.
Beavers, 18, made the statement in a West Virginia jail the day after Stanley Harmon's body was found in Harmon's home near Buffalo Mountain, state police Special Agent Randolph Dyer testified Thursday.
After the hour-long hearing in Floyd County General District Court, several charges against Beavers - including capital murder - were certified to a grand jury. The grand jury, which convenes in June, will decide if there's sufficient evidence for Beavers to stand trial. Capital murder carries a potential death sentence.
Harmon, 38, a woodworker, was found dead in his bed the morning of Feb. 19, shot in the head. He had been dead for some time, said Gino Williams, Floyd County's commonwealth's attorney.
Dyer said Beavers was nervous but cooperative as he told of spending Saturday evening, Feb. 15, watching television with Harmon, then taking a rifle from a gun rack in Harmon's living room, loading the weapon and shooting Harmon as the older man slept.
Beavers, a distant relative of Harmon's, said Harmon earlier had made a "sexual advance," Dyer testified. The defendant said he grew progressively angrier about the proposition, according to Dyer.
But a close friend of Harmon's, Ellis Bennett, said he does not believe his friend ever would have made a sexual advance toward any man. Bennett, who lives in Marfrance, W.Va., near Harmon's hometown, said he knew Harmon "real well" for five years during the late '80s and early '90s.
"Anything is possible; but the whole time I knew him, he was heterosexual - 110 percent," Bennett said. "He liked girls."
Beavers, of Quinwood, W.Va., said that after the shooting he took Harmon's pants, containing a wallet with about $75 and keys to Harmon's 1977 Pontiac Firebird, and drove to West Virginia, Dyer testified.
Another man, 21-year-old Jerry McKinney of Rupert, W.Va., was with Beavers at Harmon's house and fled with the defendant to West Virginia, Williams said.
McKinney was not involved with the shooting, but he faces theft charges stemming from the incident, the prosecutor said.
Both men were arrested in Greenbrier County, W.Va., after a lookout was posted for Harmon's car.
A Greenbrier County native, Harmon was described by co-workers at Willis Wood Works as a good worker and soft-spoken. Concerned because Harmon had not shown up for work, they called police Feb. 19.
Investigators went to Harmon's house on Virginia 629 and found his body in his bedroom. They also discovered that his rifle was missing from a living room gun rack, and found an empty .22-caliber bullet box in the kitchen and several spent casings beside a porch.
Between the night of the shooting and his arrest, Beavers told Dyer, he spent time at several friends' trailers in West Virginia, the investigator testified. Then, according to the statement, he cleaned out Harmon's car, buried the contents along with Harmon's pants and the .22-caliber rifle on a remote mountain, and abandoned the car.
Beavers, a tall, thin man with close-cropped sandy hair and a wispy goatee, had been arrested and charged with auto theft when he was interviewed by Dyer in the Greenbrier County Jail.
In addition to capital murder, Beavers faces charges of robbery, grand larceny of a firearm and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
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