The jury deliberated on the verdict from around 10:30 p.m. to 2:56 p.m. and came back with a guilty verdict for Mark Gillman, 26, of Omar.
Following lunch, the jury returned and asked Logan County Circuit Judge Roger Perry to explain the five possible verdicts possible - guilty of first degree murder; guilty of second degree murder; guilty of voluntary manslaughter; guilty of involuntary manslaughter or not guilty.
Prior to the jury's return with the verdict, extra security was stationed around the courtroom and Logan County Sheriff's Deputy Sonja Porter cautioned spectators that if they disrupted the courtroom with emotional outbursts they could be taken into custody.
When Judge Perry announced that the jury had found Gillman guilty of murder in the second degree, the defendant was calm and there were no outbursts inside the courtroom.
The defense attorney asked that the eight-woman and four-man jury be polled and the jurors then exited.
Perry revoked Gillman's bond and placed him into the custody of Logan County Sheriff's Deputy N.M. Booth.
Perry said a sentencing date will be set later and members of Gillman's family were dismissed from the courtroom first, followed by members of Pelfrey's family. Gillman faces a possible sentence of 10-40 years in prison when sentenced on August 28 at 9 a.m.
The day's proceedings started around 9:30 a.m. when Judge Perry instructed the jurors on the law, explaining that they had to decide the facts of the case based on testimony and evidence presented in court, not on sympathy or prejudice or public opinion.
The attorneys then made their closing arguments.
Assistant Prosecutor Jerry White said the victim may not have been a saint but she did not deserve to be brutally murdered. "She was a human being, deserving of life," White said, noting that Gillman's agitated comments on the stand when he called Pelfrey a crack whore "were troubling." White said Pelfrey's family and friends testified that she was a loving and kind person who did not deserve to be killed over a comment.
White said troopers were called by phone to the crime scene and were not dispatched over a 911 radio broadcast. White said that in different statements Gillman made remarks about the crime scene indicating knowledge that some of the officers did not know at the time and that only the murderer could have known, such as the fact the body they had found belonged to a woman and had been covered with tin.
Gillman lived close to the crime scene and knew a body had been found there, which was not common knowledge, and officers also became suspicious when he made different comments indicating guilt. Gillman told West Virginia State Police Trooper Holbert that he drove past the crime scene and saw smoke coming from it, but did not know a body was there. He told Trooper Perdue he was guilty in the presence of other officers and later said he was only 50/50 guilty. Gillman told Sgt. Casto that he met Pelfrey with three guys and that he passed out when they went to party and woke up at the crime scene. Later, he told Trooper Vance he picked Pelfrey up alone and hit her when she laughed at his genitalia, whereupon he struck her with a stick.
White said no evidence existed that tied Ada Sloane to the crime scene or murder.
Defense Attorney Susan Van Zant said the jury had heard a lot of witnesses and that some statements contradicted each other or changed but one thing never changed - DNA.
Two expert witnesses from the WVSP crime lab testified that there was no DNA tying Gillman to the victim or crime scene and that DNA recovered from Pelfrey's body showed she had sex within hours of being murdered, and that DNA belonged to somebody else, not Gillman.
"Who is this third person?" Van Zant asked, arguing the police only spent five days investigating the crime before deciding Gillman was the top suspect. She said Gillman was tricked and coerced into making a false confession and the WVSP did not reopen the case and check for DNA from Pelfrey's boyfriend or from the man who had been thrown out of Patty Maynard's apartment.
"If they had canvassed all of Pine Creek, they would have found dozens of red gas cans, but they stopped at the first house they came to," she said, arguing there was no testing the gas in the cans recovered with the burned area at the crime scene and that the state could not prove Gillman was guilty, only that he had made a statement. "If he had something to hide, why leave those gas cans laying out there five days later?"
Van Zant said the defendant was similar to the victim in that he also was a foster child who lived a hard life and had taken special education classes in school, and that somebody else actually wrote the confession down which Gilman signed.
She said Ada Sloane had also confessed to the murder, but the WVSP did not test the stained mattress at Patty Maynard's house for DNA, despite three witnesses saying they were blood stains, and Sloane's confession to killing Mary. "There were three pages of items from Mark Gillman they tested," Van Zant said. She said numerous witnesses testified that with work, a party at his brother's and the death of another brother, Gillman could not have committed the crime and gone back to cover it up.
Van Zant said that over a dozen officers combed the crime scene and came up with no physical evidence to tie Gillman to it. She said tire tracks from the crime scene were not matched to Gillman's van either.
"Who killed Mary Pelfrey?" Van Zant asked, saying the state had not proven Mark Gillman did, and that Pelfrey had been seen with other men around New Year's Eve in Logan County.
On rebuttal, Jerry White said there was no proof that whoever had sex with Pelfrey killed her and argued that Dr. Bobby Miller's statement about red flags could be disproven as Gillman was sober the day he gave his confession and was not high.
"It makes a nice story," White said of the claim that the confession was coerced, noting that even Gillman did not claim he had been abused by police. White said Gilman knew the body was a dead girl when police didn't and that he knew other details about the crime scene that only the murderer could have known.
"He slapped her, he beat her with a stick and he went back and burned her. Is that what a normal person would do? Does that show remorse?"
White said Gillman wanted sex and when something went wrong, he got mad the way he had on the jury stand Wednesday.
Post a Comment
