In Death Row Case, Scientific Data May Finally Get Its Day in Court

Larry Swearingen

CONROE — Sandy and Charles Trotter already suspected the worst.

For 25 days, dozens of police officers, friends and family in slickers and rubber boots had tromped through the damp Piney Woods around Lake Conroe searching for any sign of their 19-year-old daughter, Melissa. Hundreds of fliers were strewn across the suburbs north of Houston. On Christmas Day, Mrs. Trotter had appeared on the local news pleading for anyone with information about their daughter to come forward. Nothing.

Then, on Jan. 2, 1999, hunters in the Sam Houston National Forest happened on a nightmarish scene: a petite woman’s corpse splayed on a mat of leaves, twigs and pine needles, her face badly decomposed, her chest exposed, a green sweater shoved up to her neck, a stark white sock on a foot that had worn the tennis shoe lying next to the body. Her fingernails were still decorated in green and red polish for the holidays. The leg of a pair of pantyhose was knotted around her throat.

Larry Swearingen, an inmate at the Montgomery County Jail and the prime suspect in Melissa Trotter’s disappearance, did not take the news well either. “She was my friend,” he said.

Ms. Trotter had disappeared from Montgomery Community College on Dec. 8, 1998. Mr. Swearingen was among the last people to see her alive. Police arrested him on unrelated outstanding warrants three days after she went missing and immediately fingered him as the culprit. Evidence on her body and a pile of circumstantial evidence implicated Mr. Swearingen. A jury convicted him of kidnapping, raping and killing the teenager and sentenced him to death in 2000.

Since his conviction, though, at least 10 different reports from more than a half-dozen scientists have concluded that Ms. Trotter’s body tells a different story. Their examinations of her internal organs show that she was killed while Mr. Swearingen was behind bars. The inmate’s lawyers have pleaded with courts for years to review the science. So far, those efforts have failed. But after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals last week issued a third stay of execution, Mr. Swearingen, a former electrician and father of five, and his lawyers hope they will get to present their evidence in court and exonerate him.

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Source: The New York Times, August 6, 2011

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