THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 4, 1995 TAG: 9505040370
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANGELITA PLEMMER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
Jurors in the trial of a businessman who is charged with arranging his wife's killing heard a secretly taped conversation Wednesday in which alleged triggerman Marlon Williams describes the November 1993 slaying.
On the tape, Williams tells this story:
On a borrowed bicycle, he sped three times past the modest brick ranch home in Geneva Shores where Helen Bedsole lived with her new roommate, Geraldine Jones, and her two dogs.
On his final lap, he ditched the bike in some nearby woods and walked up the front steps of the Shore Road home.
Bedsole was in the kitchen eating chicken as Williams quietly reached for his gun and cocked it at the front door.
Williams broke the door handle, punched a fist through the glass and ripped open the door of the three-bedroom home.
In a daze, Bedsole stood in the kitchen, clutching a chicken bone, as Williams grabbed her head and fired his Colt .380 twice - once in the head, once in the neck.
Bedsole, a 44-year-old C & P Telephone employee and the mother of two, was found dead by her roommate, who returned a short time later.
Her husband, Clark Bedsole, is accused of paying Williams $4,000 to kill her because they were undergoing a nasty divorce and he was unhappy with the settlement.
His trial on capital murder and firearms charges began Monday. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.
Williams is scheduled to be tried next month on capital murder and firearms charges.
Williams was asked to testify on Tuesday but refused, invoking his constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment. On the stand, he pushed the microphone away from his face and swiveled back in forth in his chair, looking intently at Clark Bedsole, who sat beside his lawyers.
But on Wednesday, jurors listened and followed a typed transcript of Williams' taped conversation, which police recorded after an informant agreed to help capture Helen Bedsole's killer.
On the 40-minute tape, Williams tells the informant that Helen Besole ``was getting ready to get half'' of her husband's assets.
The informant, who sold drugs with Williams, could not be named or photographed because of a court order to protect his safety.
Police said that the informant, contacted them, believing that Williams had used the informant's gun to commit the killing and that Williams was hatching another scheme to kill a former Suffolk girlfriend's family. Police said the informant alleged that he sold crack cocaine daily to Clark Bedsole.
The informant agreed to have his car wired by police in exchange for $5,000 and immunity from drug charges involved in the case.
Clark Bedsole, owner of Clark Electric in Deep Creek, is expected to testify today. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
``There's really no reason for anybody to be killed,'' said Bedsole's attorney, Robert Byrum. ``He'd already agreed to give her half of what he had.''
``There's not going to be one physical piece of evidence . . . to connect Mr. Bedsole to this crime,'' Byrum said.
During a pause in the proceedings, Clark Bedsole mouthed the words ``I love you'' to his daughter, who sat feet behind him and his lawyers in the courtroom. Other family members sat on the opposite side of the courtroom behind prosecutors.
In the divorce petition she had filed in 1992, Helen Bedsole had accused her husband of adultery.
`` `If I could hire somebody to kill her and get rid of her, I'd do it' - he said those prophetic words,'' Commonwealth's Attorney David Williams, who is prosecuting the case, said during his opening arguments Monday.
According to Helen Bedsole's family, friends and court records, the couple had separated several times and Helen Bedsole had filed for divorce years earlier. Their history of domestic abuse and troubled marriage led police to believe that Clark Bedsole was linked to the slaying.
KEYWORDS: MURDER TRIAL MURDER FOR HIRE by CNB