THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 7, 1994 TAG: 9412070472
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JOE JACKSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
A circuit judge ended the 23-year criminal career of Melvin Walter Reed on Tuesday when he sentenced him to life without parole for the April 20 murder of his next-door neighbor.
Reed, 40, faced a jury trial next week for the murder and rape of 18-year-old Stacey L. Amos, who was killed shortly after her Navy husband had deployed. Reed was charged with capital murder, rape, sodomy and robbery. Prosecutors, who sought the death penalty, believed they had an ironclad case.
Then, on Tuesday, Reed entered a plea agreement in which he pleaded guilty to all four charges. In exchange for the state's promise that it would not seek the death penalty, Reed agreed to spend the rest of his life in prison. State law provides for life without parole for defendants with histories of two or more unrelated convictions for violent crime.
His conviction put the capstone on a career that began in 1971 when he went AWOL from the Army. It spanned the East Coast and included 15 criminal charges. Three previous convictions for armed robbery made the no-parole sentence possible.
It was his sexual obsession for Amos that led to murder.
Amos and her husband, a sailor stationed aboard the aircraft carrier Roosevelt, had been married about a year when they moved into an apartment at 124 Birmingham Ave., near Wards Corner, in late 1993. In March of this year, Reed moved into a friend's apartment next door. He had been released from jail only a few months earlier.
Almost immediately, Reed began telling friends that he meant to have sex with Amos, whether or not she was married. Two weeks before Amos' murder, her husband went to sea.
On the night of April 19, Reed told a friend that he was still obsessed with Amos. The friend advised him to drop the matter. But at 4 a.m. the next morning, Reed took a large carving knife from his landlord's kitchen and knocked on Amos' door.
She let him in. He raped and sodomized her, took her wedding ring and stabbed her 17 times. During the fight he was cut above his left eye. Neighbors later told police they heard her screams between 4 and 4:30 a.m., but no one called 911, prosecutors said.
Blood covered Reed's clothes and the knife, so he tried to hide the evidence, records show. He stripped off his bloody ``Virginia Lottery'' T-shirt, stuffed it in a plastic bag and placed the bag in a Dumpster between the two apartments. He returned to his apartment, cleaned the knife, tried to rinse the bloodstains from his sweatsuit, then went to bed.
At 8:30 a.m., a friend of Amos' knocked on her door. Spotting a pool of blood in the living room, the friend ran to the apartment where Reed was sleeping and roused Reed's landlord, who called police. After learning from several neighbors that Reed had repeatedly mentioned his sexual obsession for Amos, detectives woke Reed, interrogated him and charged him with the crime.
DNA tests from sperm and blood samples pointed to Reed as the killer.
It was not the first time Reed collided with the law. In January 1973, he was charged in Washington with robbery, records show. In March 1974, he was convicted of two counts of robbery in Okaloosa County, Florida, and sentenced to seven years. In February 1980, he was convicted in Hampton of robbery and sentenced to 11 years.
Records indicate he came to Norfolk by at least 1990, when he was convicted of petty larceny. On March 8 of that year, he was the lookout in a convenience store robbery on Granby Street and was arrested soon afterward. A little more than a year later, he was convicted and sentenced to five years.
Reed was released on parole on Dec. 28, 1992. He failed to report to his parole officer and, on May 5, 1993, was sentenced to six months in jail for the parole violation. He had recently been released when he moved into the apartment next to Stacey Amos.
It was his most violent crime for which he would be charged and convicted. Yet authorities suspect him of at least one more.
During Reed's court appearances, court officials noticed a teardrop tattooed near the corner of one of Reed's eyes. Such a tattoo is a sign in prison that an inmate has killed or seriously injured another person, deputies said.
Yet court records do not reflect that he ever killed or seriously injured anyone but Stacey Amos. She is officially the first to be maimed or killed by his hand.
KEYWORDS: MURDER STABBING TRIAL SENTENCING by CNB