BY FRANK GREEN
Nov 24, 2000

One the sorriest chapters in Grundy's history might have ended at 11:38 p.m., May 20, 1992, when Roger Keith Coleman was pronounced dead minutes after denying, for the last time, that he'd raped and murdered Wanda Faye McCoy.

But there are many who believe his last words and the execution have proved a persistent specter for the Coleman-weary population of Grundy.

Now, thanks to some frozen spermatozoa in a California laboratory, advances in DNA testing technology and the meddling of a handful of newspapers from Boston to Richmond, Coleman and Grundy are back in the headlines again.

For the most part, folks here don't doubt Coleman's guilt. But, surprisingly, a lot of them think the new DNA test sought by the newspapers - which might prove conclusively Coleman's guilt or innocence - is a good idea.

Harold Trivett, the mayor, said Coleman clearly was guilty. "He did do it. That's my opinion because I knew the boy." But, he said, if it will prove him guilty, "I think it's a good thing to do the test."

There are some in Grundy, however, who believe the new DNA test being sought has less to do with a former coal miner's guilt or innocence than with a larger struggle over capital punishment.

And a lot could be at stake, not just in Grundy but wherever the death penalty is practiced, says the man who sentenced Coleman to death.

Retired Judge Nicholas Persin chooses his words carefully when discussing the proposed test. "We're always searching for the truth," he said.

But, he asked, "Is it worth looking at it now for certainty, or is it best left alone? How can I answer that without opening up a whole can of worms?

"Can I say that something good won't come of this? No. I can't say that. Something good may well come from it."

Yet, "I think you also have to look at the other side of the coin. It may create a lot of pessimism and a lot of second-guessing on the part of jurors even in the really, really bad cases that merit giving the ultimate punishment," he said.

"It's a tough call," Persin said.

The sun doesn't shine long on Grundy this time of year. The town snakes along the steep ravines of the Levisa Fork and Slate Creek in the Cumberland Plateau about 350 miles and six hours by road from Richmond.

Coal mining is the principal industry. According to Virginia State Police crime records, the Buchanan County seat is a relatively safe place to live for its roughly 1,300 residents. "It's a good place to raise children," said one mother.

But on March 10, 1981, a 19-year-old woman's still-bleeding body was discovered in her Grundy home along Slate Creek by her husband, Brad McCoy, when he came home from work. She had been raped and stabbed and her throat had been cut. There were no witnesses.

The victim's brother-in-law, Roger Keith Coleman, one of her pallbearers, became a suspect. Coleman had been released from prison two years earlier after serving time for an attempted rape. He had married Wanda McCoy's sister in 1980.

In 1982, Coleman was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. The evidence against him included blood and hair samples and his confession to a fellow jail inmate. Coleman had an alibi, but the jury apparently didn't buy it.

During his appeals, Coleman and his lawyers argued he was innocent, and they were able to generate a great deal of media interest in the case, particularly as his execution neared. Among other things, another Grundy resident was said to have confessed to others that he committed the crime, they said.

A DNA test, not available when Coleman was tried, was ordered by Judge Persin in 1990.

The test, conducted by Dr. Edward T. Blake, a DNA expert, showed that Coleman was within 2 percent of the population who could have raped Wanda McCoy. Coupled with blood evidence, it narrowed things down to 0.2 percent, the Virginia attorney general's office argued.

However, Coleman's lawyers contended the DNA test showed that at least two people were involved in the attack.

Finally, then Gov. L. Douglas Wilder offered Coleman a deal: take a polygraph. Coleman took it on the day he was to die and failed.

A state official at Coleman's execution said reporters were present from around the world. There were 50 cameras and 14 satellite trucks in front of the prison the night of the execution. Coleman's case was covered by network television, and he was the first death row inmate to appear on the cover of Time in more than three decades.

The case still is held up by capital punishment opponents as one in which an innocent man might have been executed. A book, "May God Have Mercy" by John C. Tucker, was written about it outlining evidence both for and against Coleman's innocence.

Just last month, Equal Justice, U.S.A., an anti-capital punishment group, released a study that identified 16 cases of individuals in the United States who may have been innocent but were executed anyway. Coleman's is the only Virginia case listed.

Among other things, the study said Coleman's alibi was well-documented; the state's own timeline of the crime made it impossible for Coleman to have been the killer; physical evidence at the scene contradicted the state's theory of what happened; and the informer who testified Coleman had confessed was released from jail soon after.

"Roger Keith Coleman was executed despite compelling evidence of his innocence. Coleman's attorneys had made claims about a biased jury, ineffective assistance of counsel, and exculpatory evidence withheld by the state, all of which would have been constitutional violations," the report asserts.

Lodge Compton, editor and publisher of The Virginia Mountaineer, a weekly Grundy newspaper, believes Coleman was guilty.

He said the slaying "was sensational. It's not our type of murder. Our type of murder is family squabbles, crimes of passion, same as you have in the big city."

Yet, said Compton, "when outside reporters come here, they seem to think that this is the only thing that ever happened here - that it's what we talk about at breakfast every morning.

"It hasn't kept the community on pins and needles for the past 20 years," he said.

Earlier this year, the Boston Globe and Centurion Ministeries - a New-Jersey based organization that helps free innocent inmates - asked Buchanan Circuit Judge Keary Williams for permission to retest the material subjected to DNA testing in 1990.

Advances in DNA testing might now conclusively show whether Coleman was guilty.

According to a July 26 letter from DNA expert Blake to Judge Williams, "the only question that is now unknown is whether the small DNA preparations from this case survived the past 10 years of freezer storage."

"I recommend to the court that this analysis be allowed to proceed so that final closure can be brought to this matter," Blake wrote.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Washington Post and The Virginian-Pilot have joined with the Globe in seeking the new test. The material has been kept frozen in Blake's laboratory in Richmond, Calif.

The Virginia attorney general's office strongly opposes a new test and won an order from Williams to have the material returned to Virginia custody. A hearing on the matters has been set Jan. 9, with Feb. 8 as the backup date.

The requests have made news in Grundy.

Norma Looney, manager of Jackson's Furniture & Hardware, said, "I don't see no harm in it." She believes Coleman was guilty but said "it could be a good thing, if it might help everybody get some closure to it."

Over lunch at the Italian Village on Main Street, Trish Blankenship said, "I try to accept the verdict, but I feel like if there is any doubt that he's guilty they do need to do DNA tests." Her companion, Blanche Thompson, agreed.

"I think they should find the truth, whatever it is," Thompson said.

According to editor Compton, "we've had a couple of articles on it, but there's been no [big] reaction to it. I think people have just been beat to death with it.

"I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think this has anything to do with Roger Coleman's guilt or innocence," Compton said.

Judge Persin remembers it as "a difficult case. Practically all of the evidence was circumstantial. The odds are once a defendant gets convicted purely on circumstantial evidence, the ultimate punishment is not imposed.

"When you have a circumstantial evidence case - where your only option is life or death and there is no smoking gun, no eyewitness, none of that kind of evidence - I just thought . . . that they wouldn't get 12 men and women to agree on the ultimate punishment.

"But they did," said Persin.

On the other hand, as far as Coleman's guilt is concerned, "I don't think a mistake was made in this case.

"The evidence was very compelling. You had to be at the trial and hear the sequence of events and what had happened," Persin said. Coleman had a criminal record - attempted rape - and had not been out of prison long when this happened.

Should the death penalty have been imposed? Persin asked. "Who am I to say? It's difficult when you're sitting in a room and go over evidence and the deceased was raped and her throat slit and left to bleed to death on the floor."

But, "if I had been one of 12 jurors on the case that I tried, simply by the nature of the evidence being totally circumstantial, I probably would have fought very hard for a life sentence," he said.

Years after the trial, in 1990, when a request was made to have Dr. Blake test the sperm, the attorney general's office "violently opposed it. [They] said, 'Judge, you don't have jurisdiction.' I said, 'You're right, but I'm going to order it anyway, because I was the trial judge and I had to sentence him to death."

Persin said he felt an obligation to order the test. "If there's any possibility that the jury was in error in reaching its decision and its recommendation of death . . . I want to know it."

As a judge, Persin said, "that's the only time I did something [knowingly] that I should not have done. I really didn't have jurisdiction." He told the attorney general's office that it could appeal his decision "and you'll get me reversed."

But they chose not to appeal it, so the evidence was sent to Dr. Blake.

Sitting in the law library of the Buchanan Court House earlier this month, Persin said, "I really didn't know this case was going to be resurrected."

"Is it worth it to go through all this again? That's difficult to answer."

Persin has sentenced only one person to death. He believes strongly there needs to be a death penalty. Nevertheless, "the night he was executed I had a terrible time. You know . . . it has to be done. That's our law."

"We are human beings. We try to do the right thing in weighing the evidence. Are mistakes made? Yes. Mistakes are made from time to time.

"If you're examining it in a vacuum," a new test is "a good thing," Persin said.

If a new test is permitted and it shows Coleman was innocent, "then an injustice was done," said Persin.

However, in "every other capital murder case down the road we may be creating an environment where juries may not consider giving the ultimate punishment" in cases where it is deserved, Persin said.

Toying with his glasses which he had set down carefully on the wooden table before him, he said, "It just opens up so many different things that you need to think about."