26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered
in her Alliance, Ohio home on April 1st, 1999.
Numerous police officers, neighbors, family members and the chief of
police, who brought a civilian in to the crime scene to view the body,
trampled the crime scene. A
count from police reports indicates that 107 sets of feet walked over the
crime scene before it was cordoned off.
No testing for DNA was done.
Why? Because, according
to the criminalists involved with the case, no one requested it be done.
Experts did not analyze bloody footprints.
Why? No one requested it
be done. No fingerprints were
recovered from the scene except two belonging to the victim.
Despite the fact that she and four of her children lived in the home.
Ms. Layne did not fight her assailant.
Her throat was cut from behind in her dining room.
Her killer then led her, supporting her from behind, into the living
room and placed her on the floor.
The assistant coroner, P.S.S. Murthy,
testified that he didn't know if a sexual assault kit was used, and didn't
know if the victim was cut right to left, or left to right.
He had no record of a body temperature being taken to establish time
of death. The victim's body was discovered at 12:30 p.m. on April 1st.
Dr. Murthy placed the time of death at 'sometime after 7 p.m.’ on March
31st, a 17 1/2 hour window.
The coroner testified when pressed by prosecutor’s, that he felt that
the victim, after suffering the massive injury to her throat, could have
moved about her house and even said few words, due to 10-12 seconds of blood
remaining in her brain, despite the massive cut to her throat.
Many suspect names were given to police,
including the name of a former police officer who had reportedly been
harassing Yvonne. Yet from the
beginning, police told family members that David was their #1 suspect.
There was nothing to connect David to the murder.
He had, in fact, been in a class with many alibi witnesses on the
night of the murder, and with family members and at work the following day.
Detectives considered the motive to commit the crime was court ordered child support
payments, following newly established paternity.
David Thorne and Yvonne Layne dated briefly
in late 1995 to early 1996. David was unaware
he had fathered a child until the fall of 1998, when the child was nearly
two years old. Paternity
testing was ordered for two possible candidates, but only David reported for
testing. He was
conclusively determined to be the father of one of the victim's five
children, Brandon.
David began visiting with his child even
before the results were finalized, stocking his home with furniture and
supplies for Brandon. He and
Yvonne, by all accounts, got along well and had an amicable relationship.
Together they worked out a mutually agreeable visitation schedule.
In April 1999, Yvonne was murdered.
In July of 1999, police arrested David Thorne for the murder of
Yvonne Layne. He was charged
with complicity to aggravated murder/ murder for hire.
Police had arrested an 18-year-old acquaintance of David's earlier
that day, and told him that David had implicated him in the murder.
The man, Joseph Wilkes , according to the police summary of the
interview, "sat quiet and stunned".
He had no way of knowing at the time that the detectives were lying
to him. That, in fact, David
had not said anything to them concerning Joseph Wilkes.
He did not know that they had arrested Joseph Wilkes, and was not 'in
the next room' giving a statement while police interrogated Wilkes.
In fact, David was not at the police station at all.
Wilkes, however, believed the officers.
He stated in a deposition taken on October 17, 2002, that "I figured
if I'm about to go down for something that he's about to tell on me for,
then he's coming with me."
Officers, according to Wilkes, showed him
crime scene photos, then offered him a deal.
If he testified against David Thorne and said he had been hired by
David to kill Yvonne, Joe wouldn't get the death penalty.
Wilkes' court appointed attorney, according to the 2002 statement,
urged him to accept the deal. That
"if I didn't, that I would see death row".
A confession was given.
David was anxious to prove his innocence.
His family mortgaged their home and hired criminal defense attorney
Jeffrey Haupt. Their family
attorney gave them his name.
He, in turn, brought in attorney George Keith to assist him.
Haupt met David for the first time when he
entered the courtroom to represent him at his indictment hearing.
He called no experts to testify at trial, and in fact called only one
trial witness. A local man who
saw Joseph Wilkes purchase the knife he mentioned in his confession.
He purchased this knife in May, many weeks after the murder.
After the conviction, during the mitigation phase of the trial, Haupt
called David’s child support attorney and the attorney for the Child Support
Enforcement Agency. Both
attorneys testified that David and Yvonne got along well during the
proceedings.
Joseph Wilkes testified at David’s trial
that he killed Yvonne and that David paid him $300.00 to do it.
He told the story several times, changing the amount of money he said
he was paid each time.
Prosecutor’s produced bank records from four months before the murder,
showing that one of several withdrawals David made was for $300.00.
Wilkes said variations of ‘I don’t know’ or
“I don’t recall’ 138 times during his trial testimony.
Joseph Wilkes rented a motel room on March
31st. He testified
that he got the room to be in town for the murder. The motel was 3.9 miles
from the home of Yvonne Layne.
He testified that he walked to the house, killed her, and then walked back
down State Street to his motel room.
The murder was very bloody, and the killer, according to the
post-conviction report of Brent Turvey,
would have been covered in blood. No one
reported seeing a man walking down State Street in Alliance with blood on
him. Motel employees did not
report seeing a man in bloody clothes.
A couple in the café court of the Carnation
Mall the night of March 31st, Chris Campbell and Rose Mohr,
testified that Joe approached them, and after a few words, pulled out a
knife. Rose said Wilkes told
them he was in town to kill a girl, and that a guy had hired him to do it.
Chris testified that Joe told them that a girl had hired him and paid
for a motel room for him to stay in. At trial, Chris changed his
testimony to say that Joe pulled out a knife, and didn’t tell them
anything about a murder, but seeing the knife made him know what Joe
intended to use it for. At the end of Campbell’s police statement, when
asked if he had anything further to say, Campbell said no.
He then stated that he remembered Joe mentioning his ‘trainer’, but
didn’t know his name. David
took a martial arts class and Wilkes liked to tell people that David was his
trainer. Many friends of David
were willing to testify that this was not true. Campbell’s court testimony
changed to include that he not only knew that David was the trainer he
suddenly remembered when being interviewed by police, but also where he
lived and what his other interests were.
Prosecutor’s produced phone records at
trial to show that there were many telephone calls between Joseph Wilkes and
David Thorne. Joseph Wilkes
called David several times up until March 27th, including 11
calls on the 27th.
He had been asked to leave the place he was staying and was looking for a
ride. Prosecutor’s called an
Ameritech employee who testified that these calls were made.
He also testified that, in his opinion, the calls were answered by an
answering machine.
In July 2001, Wilkes signed an affidavit
stating that he did not kill Yvonne Layne, and that David Thorne did not
hire him to kill her. He stated
and has maintained that police yelled at him and told him that “all that was
needed to convict me of this crime was a statement made against me…. and
that I would be put to death.... that if I would testify against David
Thorne, that I would be spared the death penalty…I was willing to make this
deal to save my own life.”
Wilkes goes on to say that “The statements
I made against David Thorne are false….The statements I made against David
Thorne, both before and during his trial, were based on information given to
me by the detectives….the detectives ‘told me what to say and how I did it
and was showing me pictures (trial transcripts)’.…’They came to me.
They were the ones that stated to me (trial transcripts).’”
All appeals were denied.
Martin Yant, a post-conviction
expert and a member of the board of directors of
Truth in Justice, was hired to assist with the post-conviction motion.
The motion was filed and amended three times, all without the
prosecution or Judge responding.
Over a year after the last amendment, a request was filed for the
Judge to answer. The
post-conviction defense was permitted to have the crime scene photos and to
view the evidence for the first time.
David was granted a post-conviction
hearing. The Defense
hired a handwriting expert and a forensic scientist.
The forensic scientist, Brent
Turvey, examined the crime scene photos and the documentation.
He determined that none of the events as
Wilkes described them were supported by the crime scene photos or the
documentation.
Turvey states that the Judge,
the prosecution and the defense all allowed Joseph Wilkes to confess to a
crime that did not occur.
At David’s original trial, Joe testified
that he sat to Yvonne’s left on the couch in her living room, reached around
her and cut her throat. He said
she jumped up, ran across the room, turned around and looked at him, said
“Why did you do this to me?” then fell down and died.
He has since recanted.
Expert Brent Turvey concludes that
crime scene photos show she was cut from behind, as she was standing, in her
dining room, and was supported by the killer into the living room and
placed on the floor. She did
not move around on her own. He
unequivocally states that the killer staged the crime scene.
Handwriting expert
Michael Robertson testified that a
business card produced by prosecution trial witness Rose Mohr, which
originally led police to Joseph Wilkes, was not written by Joe as Rose
testified. It had Joe’s first
name and pager number written on it.
He could not rule Rose Mohr out as the
person
who wrote on the card.
The Judge, in his post-conviction opinion,
discounted testimony given at the hearing by the forensic
scientist, the handwriting expert, and Joe's
minister.
He discounted the testimony of an eyewitness discovered by the
post-conviction investigators.
This witness, George Hale, saw someone exit the front door of the victim’s
home before the body was discovered.
He gave a clear description of the man to police.
They ignored his statement and did not inform the trial defense.
When Hale was shown a line up by post-conviction investigators, he
did not pick Joe Wilkes or David Thorne as the man he saw exiting the house.
The Judge, in his opinion, stated that
because Joe confessed, “who cares about the blood splatter, who cares about
blood stains on couch pillow cases, and who cares about bloody footprints.”
David was convicted on January 25th,
2000. He was sentenced to life
without the possibility of parole.
He is innocent.
