A Sister's Plea: Test the DNA

By Adam Cohen/Hanover, Va.

Sheila Knox sits in her backyard on a gravel road on the outskirts of Richmond, Va., and flips through old photographs of her brother Joseph O'Dell. It's hardly a typical family album. There's Bubba, as she calls him, in a schoolboy outfit, leaning up against his baby sister. Then a grownup Bubba hugging her when she visited him on Christmas Day at a Florida prison. And finally Bubba shortly before the Commonwealth of Virginia executed him by lethal injection. Knox believes they killed the wrong man. And she knows the state now has the tools to prove whether or not she is right. Says Knox, fighting tears: "I want closure."

The O'Dell saga began 14 years ago in a muddy field across the street from the County Line, a Virginia Beach honky-tonk. There the police found the lifeless body of Helen Schartner, 44, a secretary. Her head had been smashed by blows from a handgun, and she had been strangled until her neck snapped.

O'Dell, a machinist with an ugly rap sheet, was arrested and charged with rape and capital murder. He had been seen at the County Line the evening Schartner was killed, though not with her. Later he'd walked into a convenience store with blood on his face, hands and clothes--the result, he said, of a fight at another bar. There were no witnesses to the killing. But circumstantial evidence--including tire tracks consistent with those from O'Dell's car and tests of the blood on his clothing--seemed to link him to the crime.

O'Dell was convicted in 1986 and sentenced to death. In his 11 years on death row, supporters managed to persuade institutions as far afield as the Italian Parliament and the Pope to raise doubts about his guilt. They pointed to evidence that the crucial blood test may have been botched and that O'Dell may have been bloodied, as he claimed, in a brawl elsewhere. But prosecutors insisted the case against him was solid, and after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his last appeal by a 5-to-4 vote in July 1997, O'Dell was executed.

Death usually forecloses further appeals. But O'Dell's supporters are trying to force prosecutors to turn over never tested sperm that was taken from the victim's body. At the time of O'Dell's trial, the samples weren't large enough to test, but advances in DNA technology now permit smaller amounts to be analyzed. O'Dell's supporters say testing is the only way to resolve whether O'Dell was guilty.

Prosecutors say, however, that state law allows them to destroy the sperm, which currently sits in an evidence locker in the Virginia Beach circuit-court clerk's office. Otherwise, relatives of "every executed inmate in Virginia would want to have his DNA evidence tested after the fact," says David Botkins, spokesman for the state's attorney general. A trial-court judge last month ruled that the evidence can be destroyed without testing, but an appeal is headed for the Virginia Supreme Court.

O'Dell's side says the dispute raises a larger question: Shouldn't the state do everything it can to learn whether it is executing the right person? So far, DNA evidence has exonerated 63 people in U.S. prisons, including several on death row. The latest is Calvin Johnson, released last Tuesday after serving 16 years of a life sentence in Georgia for a murder that a DNA test now shows he didn't commit. But in the O'Dell case, says Paul Enzinna, a lawyer for the dead man's supporters, "the state is saying, 'We want to destroy the evidence for the sole purpose of preventing the public from getting information about it.'"

If the state is forced to permit the DNA test, there is a good chance it will prove O'Dell's guilt. Knox is eager to believe the best about her brother: that a 1975 kidnapping conviction was probably a setup, that his fatal knifing of a fellow inmate was self-defense. But to less loving eyes, O'Dell seems like a man who might well have been capable of killing Schartner. All the more reason, says Knox, that the state should hand over the evidence. "Let's test it and find out."