Hank Skinner: Case Open

Twila Busby was Hank Skinner’s soul mate. “We just fell together. We just clicked, man,” he says. The two were hardly apart after they met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They would kiss in public and cuddled up on the couch to watch thrillers. They were “sick in love,” Skinner says through a telephone receiver behind a Plexiglas window on Texas’ death row unit in Livingston.

A jury found that Skinner (pictured) was so sick in love that, in a jealous rage, he strangled Busby, bashed in her head and face with an axe handle and then stabbed to death her two mentally disabled adult sons on New Years Eve 1993. He was sentenced to death for the three murders. His execution is scheduled for February 24.

The 47-year-old doesn’t deny he was in the small house in the tiny West Texas town of Pampa on the night of the murders or that the blood on his clothes that night belonged to 41-year-old Busby and her sons. But Skinner and his lawyers say there’s no way he could have killed anyone; he was so loaded on vodka and pills that he was nearly comatose. They argue that his appointed trial attorney, a former district attorney who had previously prosecuted him for theft and assault, failed to adequately investigate other potential suspects. They insist Texas is about to execute an innocent man — and the state has evidence that could prove it.

The night of the murders, police collected, among other items, clippings from Busby’s broken fingernails, a rape kit, two knives from the crime scene, a bloodstained dishtowel and a man’s windbreaker with sweat and hair on it, but most of it has never been DNA-tested. During Skinner’s trial, prosecutors tested some blood and hair from the scene, but not the fingernails, rape kit, knives, towel or windbreaker. Over the last decade, the state has fought Skinner in court to keep it that way. Prosecutors in Gray County and lawyers for the Texas Attorney General’s Office say Skinner had his chance at trial to test the evidence, but he declined, and the jury spoke; now it's time for him to face the consequences. “It’s already been handled,” Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer says. She’s the third DA in Pampa to deal with Skinner, who has sued her in federal court seeking to force release of the DNA. “He doesn’t need to keep trying it over and over and over again. It’s already been handled.”

Skinner’s execution date approaches as Texas faces renewed scrutiny of its famously busy death row and the science used to convict the accused. Since 1973, just 11 death row inmates have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, while more than 440 have been put to death. The New Yorker last year touched off a national debate about how many of those killed might have been innocent by posthumously profiling Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 after a jury convicted him of killing his three young children by arson in 1991. Before Willingham was executed, according to the story, the state ignored expert reports contending that the fire may have been accidental and calling the method used to prove that it was arson "junk science." A Texas Observer story earlier this month revealed that a psychologist the state has relied on to test the mental capacity of more than a dozen death row inmates used faulty methods to boost IQ scores so the men could meet the legal standard for the death penalty. And in Dallas County, maverick District Attorney Craig Watkins has launched a Conviction Integrity Unit that has reviewed more than 400 cases in which DNA from the crime scene was still available to be tested and has discovered at least 15 wrongful convictions.

In Skinner’s case, attorneys argue that prosecutors selectively used DNA testing to put a potentially innocent man on death row, and that the state is manipulating a 2001 law that allows post-conviction DNA testing to keep him on the path to the death chamber. “The case against him is not open and shut, it’s not ironclad,” says attorney Rob Owen, co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Capital Punishment Clinic. “And in a reasonable system, we ought to go the extra mile to rule out the possibility that he is an innocent man before going forward with the execution.”

New Year’s Nightmare

Skinner and Busby had plans that New Year’s Eve. They were supposed to go to a friend’s house together, but Skinner got his celebration started early. By the time the friend stopped by the house to get them, Skinner was already passed out on the couch. He was so intoxicated from a codeine and vodka cocktail that even when the friend yanked repeatedly on his arm and hollered at him, Skinner didn’t budge.

So Busby went without him. Friends at the party said Busby’s intoxicated uncle, Robert Donnell, began stalking her there. The two had a predatory incestuous relationship, according to several people who have testified in Skinner's case. A private investigator who looked into Donnell’s past found a long criminal history, including convictions for vehicle theft, embezzlement and burglary. He had served prison time, usually carried a large knife and told stories about having killed a man in a pool hall fight in Oklahoma. Busby’s friends described him as “scary” and said she had called them several times over the years to protect her from his frightening advances.

Agitated by Donnell’s come-ons at the party, Busby left for home — the last time anyone admits to having seen Busby alive. Donnell left the party shortly after, witnesses said, and there has never been a full accounting of his whereabouts that night.

Neighbors called police just before midnight when Busby’s 22-year-old son, Elwin “Scooter” Caler, showed up on their porch in his underwear, bleeding from multiple stab wounds. Police followed a trail of blood back to Busby’s house and walked in on a grisly scene. She was sprawled on the living room floor, her face and head beaten to a pulp; blood was splattered across the room. Her other son, 20-year-old Randy Busby, lay dead in his bunk bed, stabbed three times in the back.

Immediately, Gray County Sheriff Randy Stubblefield identified Skinner as the primary suspect. He sent deputies to look for him in the attic and called in a dog to sniff out a crawl space below the house. They arrested him blocks away hiding at a frightened former girlfriend’s house, blood on his clothes, a deep gash in his hand.

The State’s Case

Andrea Reed, the ex-girlfriend, was the state’s star witness during the 1995 murder trial in Fort Worth (it was moved because of the presumably prejudicial attention the crime received in Pampa). Reed said Skinner was an alcoholic and a drug user. A recovering addict herself, she had sponsored him and Busby in AA but tried to stay away from Skinner, she said, because he had fallen off the wagon.

The night of the murders, she told jurors, Skinner showed up at her trailer house banging on the front door, intoxicated and disoriented, with blood on his clothes and his hand cut. He told her he had been shot in the gut and stabbed in the shoulder, chest and arm. He ordered her to stitch up his hand, she said, and threatened to kill her if she called the police. “I told him the only thing I had was fishing line. And he had to get the fishing line, and I brought the Ambesol to deaden it,” Reed testified. “And he kept heating and bending needles.”

As Reed attempted to stitch his wound, Skinner told her wild stories about how he’d gotten injured. First he said he had been drinking vodka and smoking crack with Busby when “some Mexicans” came to the front door brandishing knives. At another point in the more than three hours he spent at her house, Skinner told Reed that he had caught Busby in bed with her ex-husband. He started to tell yet another story about a man breaking into the house, Reed said, but he didn’t finish that one. Then, after swearing her to secrecy, Skinner told Reed he thought he had killed Busby. “He said he thought he had kicked her to death,” she told the jury.

John Mann, then the Gray County District Attorney, showed jurors DNA testing on blood that covered swaths of Skinner’s clothes, and on blood and hair from Randy Busby’s bedding and body. The DNA put Skinner in the house at the time of the murders. His bloody palm prints were also found at the scene.

Though toxicology tests indicated Skinner had nearly lethal levels of drugs and alcohol in his system, the prosecution argued the habitual user had enough tolerance that he would have been capable of killing Busby and the boys. After all, he had the physical strength to walk several blocks to hide out at Reed’s house and the mental clarity to keep her from calling the police.

The jury condemned Skinner to death in less than two hours.

“Hellfighters”

Skinner grew up in Virginia and moved to Pampa in 1981 after divorcing his first wife. He wanted a clean start and had heard good things about the oil business. “I’d seen [“Hellfighters”] with John Wayne, Boots and Coots, Red Adair and all that, you know. And so, man, I wanted to come out here to Texas,” he says. A jack-of-all-trades, Skinner says he made good money doing everything from welding to drywall and working on cars. He also did paralegal work for a local criminal attorney, helping out friends who'd gotten tossed in the clink. That, he says, is how he made enemies in the Pampa law enforcement community.

Of course, his hard drinking and partying ways also caught the attention of local officials. He had a history of committing petty crimes and had been prosecuted for car theft and assault. “I look at everything as an opportunity, and I live life like an adventure," Skinner says. "Somehow or another, man, I irritate people with my lifestyle,” Police turned to him as a suspect in the murders because it was convenient, Skinner says, and “because I was a pain in their ass.”

Skinner contends he was unconscious on the couch, still reeling from the effects of the liquor and the pills, when the murderer attacked his girlfriend and her sons. His blood alcohol content was .24 — three times the legal level of intoxication, .08. Toxicology tests showed Busby was also drunk at the time of the murder and that she struggled mightily, breaking her fingernails as she tried to fend of her attacker. And her boys, though mentally challenged, were physically huge. Caler was more than six-feet tall and weighed more than 220 pounds; Skinner is only five-eight. “This whole case is nothing but a pack of lies from the beginning to the end,” Skinner says.

The way he tells it now, a bleeding and dying Caler managed to rouse him from his chemical-induced lethargy, probably by splashing water in his face. Startled, Skinner says he fell off the couch onto shards of glass from a light fixture the killer broke while wielding the axe handle against Busby. That’s how he got the cut. “It hurt me so bad I jerked my hand back, and when I did I fell the rest of the way,” he says, displaying the scar on the palm of his hand. “And when I was laying flat on the floor, that’s when I saw my girlfriend and what was done to her."

With the ailing Caler propping him up, Skinner says, he left the house to look for help. Caler went to a nearby neighbor’s house, while Skinner headed for the party to get help from the men there. In his stupor, Skinner says he could only walk a few steps before he would fall to the ground. Then he would crawl and try to walk again, only to fall back down and crawl a little farther. He only made it as far as Reed’s house, he says.

Skinner says Reed helped him willingly that night and that he never threatened her. And in a 1997 affidavit, Reed recanted her incriminating trial testimony. She claimed she was intimidated into testifying against Skinner by the police, who told her, she said, that she could face charges if she had helped him. She said Skinner didn’t threaten to kill her and was too intoxicated to carry out such a threat or to have murdered three people. “I believe that his statement about kicking Twila to death was just a drunken fantasy, like the other violent stories that he told me to explain how he was injured,” Reed wrote.

Skinner has always proclaimed his innocence, but state and federal courts have rejected 15 years of his pleadings. Still, as his execution date draws near, Skinner and his advocates continue to wage a legal fight for additional DNA testing. Only then, they say, will Texas know whether Skinner or a third person was the real killer. “They have no right to kill me,” Skinner says, “because I’m innocent, innocent, innocent.”

Visit Hank Skinner's Website

Source: The Texas Tribune, January 28, 2010

Case Open: The Investigation

[Editor's note: Hank Skinner is set to be executed for a 1993 murder he's always maintained he didn't commit. He wants the state to test whether his DNA matches evidence found at the crime scene, but prosecutors say the time to contest his conviction has come and gone. Now he has less than a month to change their minds. We told the story of the murders and his conviction and sentencing in the first part of this story.]

It makes sense to Greg Jonsson that police in Pampa set their sights on Hank Skinner when they found Skinner's girlfriend and her two sons violently murdered on New Year’s Eve in 1993. Skinner was a hard-drinking, hard-partying guy who had seen the inside of a jail cell more than a few times. He was in the house at the time of the killings, he had blood all over his clothes, and police found him hiding out in an ex-girlfriend’s house. “If I was a police officer, I would have looked at Hank Skinner, too,” says Jonsson, one of eight Northwestern University students who traveled from Illinois to Texas to investigate the case in 2000.

A decade later, Jonsson worries the authorities decided too quickly that Skinner was their man. “I didn’t come away knowing he’s innocent, but I didn’t come away knowing he’s guilty,” Jonsson says. “You’d hope that was the case with someone about to be put to death.”

Skinner is scheduled to be executed on February 24 for the murders of Twila Busby and her two mentally disabled adult sons. Skinner and his lawyers insist he was too intoxicated from liquor and pills that New Year’s Eve to have killed three people, and they contend his defense lawyer — a former district attorney who had previously prosecuted Skinner for theft and assault — did a shoddy job representing him at trial. They’ve been pleading with the state for 15 years to release DNA evidence they believe could exonerate Skinner and keep Texas from killing an innocent man.

Prosecutors in Gray County and lawyers for the Texas Attorney General’s Office argue that Skinner had his chance in 1995 to have the DNA tested at his original trial. “There were 12 people that sat in the jury and they listened to the evidence and they found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer, the third Pampa DA to deal with the case.

Protess’s Probe

Northwestern University professor David Protess got acquainted with Hank Skinner in 2000 as then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was running for president. Protess teaches a journalism class in which students investigate inmates’ innocence claims. The work of his students led to the exoneration of 11 Illinois inmates, including five who were on death row, between 1996 and 2000. The Republian governor of Illinois during that period, George Ryan, cited their work when, in January 2000, he declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois.

Amid rising national questions about the death penalty that were largely raised by the students’ investigations, Bush was defending Texas’ death chamber, the busiest in the nation. He insisted that Texas had not and would not kill an innocent person under his watch.

To test that proposition, Protess sent a crew of eight journalism students to Texas to investigate Skinner’s case. They spent time in Pampa, interviewed residents about the heinous murders and visited Skinner on death row. Today, they say they came away with more questions than answers about what happened to Busby and her sons. And they have grave lingering concerns about the state's plans to execute Skinner.

Jonsson, now a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was a senior at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism when he visited Pampa. “It’s just small, like a rough-around-the-edges town,” Jonsson says, nursing a cup of coffee at a St. Louis coffee house and recalling his first and only time in Texas. He and his classmates interviewed Andrea Reed, the state’s star witness, who at trial testified that Skinner admitted to killing Busby. They talked to the widow of Robert Donnell, Busby's uncle, who had an incestuous relationship with her and stalked her at a party the night of the murders. They visited friends and neighbors of Skinner and the victims. They dug through case files, reviewed evidence and tried to reconstruct the case to see whether their investigation led to the same conclusion as the jury. “We didn’t come in thinking he’s innocent,” Jonsson says. “We did come in thinking it’s possible mistakes were made.”

The students came away with three big questions. First, why didn't law enforcement more fully investigate Donnell as a suspect? Second, why didn't Skinner’s lawyers test what they saw as crucial DNA evidence from the crime scene: Busby's fingernail clippings, a rape kit, two knives, a bloodstained dish towel and a man’s windbreaker with hair and sweat on it. “There was a pile of it here that hadn’t been tested,” Jonsson says. “That was sort of disconcerting.” Third, what about the potential conflict of interest with the lawyer appointed to represent Skinner at trial? Harold Comer was a former Gray County District Attorney who had previously prosecuted Skinner for car theft and assault.

Donnell was already dead by the time the Northwestern students got to Pampa: He died of massive head injuries in a wreck on Interstate 40 in Oklahoma in January 1997. But they interviewed his widow, who said he became violent when he drank. Others in the community claimed Donnell had raped Busby. They said he often wore a windbreaker similar to the one found at the crime scene. Neighbors also reported seeing Donnell cleaning his truck with a hose and stripping the carpet from it within a week of the murders.

During the trial, though, jurors heard little about Donnell’s violent past. They heard nothing about his sudden desire to have a tidy vehicle. And neither prosecutors nor Skinner’s attorney tested DNA on the fingernail clippings or the windbreaker or the rape kit or the knives found at the scene, which could have revealed whether Donnell, or another person, could be implicated in the crime.

The students also interviewed Reed, Skinner’s ex-girlfriend. Skinner spent about three hours at her house before police arrested him the night of the murders. When they interviewed her, Jonsson says, she explained that she felt intimidated by police and worried that she could somehow be implicated in the crime if she didn’t testify against Skinner. In 1997, she recanted her incriminating testimony, writing in an affidavit that she had lied at trial, and that Skinner’s admission that he kicked Busby to death was one of several fantastic stories he made up in his drunken stupor the night of the murders. “She’d basically been given guidelines for what she was going to say” at trial, Jonsson says. “To us, she seemed sincere.”

Comer, Skinner’s court-appointed attorney, failed to find and fight for evidence that could have vindicated Skinner at the trial, says professor Protess. “My students found on one trip to Pampa … more information than the former prosecutor did,” he says. And no wonder, he says, when the very lawyer who had worked to convict Skinner twice before was now expected to defend his innocence. Comer was the DA in Pampa from 1988 until 1992, when he resigned. That same year, the State Bar of Texas suspended Comer for mishandling public money from a seized drug fund. “He basically didn’t put up a defense,” Protess says.

Emily Probst, another of Protess’s students, interviewed Skinner on death row and spent time investigating the case in Pampa. She came away not convinced that Skinner was innocent but persuaded that too many questions remained unanswered to condemn the man to death. “I still feel like the full truth in this story is untold,” says Probst, who is now a producer for CNN’s investigative and documentary unit.

The students’ investigation and Associated Press reporting on the case drew national attention in 2000 to Pampa and Gray County District Attorney John Mann, who succeeded Comer and prosecuted Skinner. Facing national scrutiny, Mann agreed to test more of the DNA collected from the crime scene.

Mann, who has since died, sent blood from a notebook at the crime scene, hair from Busby’s hands, bloodstained gauze and other items to private testing company Gene Screen Inc., in Dallas. The knives, Busby’s fingernail clippings and rape kit, the windbreaker and bloody dishtowel were not tested. When Skinner’s appellate lawyers requested additional testing, according to a 2000 Associated Press story, Mann said, “Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.” But they never did get it, and the report from Gene Screen’s tests provided little new information about Skinner or any other potential suspects.

Court fight

Since 1998, Skinner has filed appeal after appeal seeking to prove that his defense was inadequate and begging the courts to force testing of the additional DNA. Each time, the courts have ruled against him.

In a July 2009 opinion, justices on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said that Comer provided constitutionally adequate representation for Skinner. The court said Comer did present Donnell as a potential suspect to jurors, and although he did not dig up all the evidence Protess’s students found, the attorney performed within legal standards. Skinner has appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Contacted at his home recently, Comer, who is still a practicing lawyer in Pampa, says he was proud of the case he built for Skinner and disappointed that jurors sentenced him to death. “My opinion as a lawyer was the evidence was insufficient to convict him. I still feel that way,” Comer says. His defense of Skinner in 1995 was based on convincing jurors that the state did not have enough evidence to prove he was the killer. What little DNA testing the prosecutor had done was incriminating, showing that Skinner was at the scene the night of the murders. Comer didn’t want to take the risk of poking holes in his own case by testing more evidence that might come back with Skinner’s DNA. “I’m not new at this. I’ve tried four or five capital cases. I’ve been at it 50 years, so I have an instinct, or a feeling, for what’s good for my client,” Comer says. “I don’t second-guess that decision at all.” He says he respects the decision of Skinner’s new attorneys, Rob Owen co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Capital Punishment Clinic and Doug Robinson of Washington, D.C., to go after the DNA. But he doesn’t agree with it. “I guess the proof’s in the pudding. If the courts allow the testing, and it does come out exculpatory, we got egg on our face,” Comer says, “but I still would have made the same decision.

So far, though, the courts have not allowed additional DNA testing. When legislators in 2001 passed a law allowing for post-conviction DNA testing in cases where such evidence existed but had never been examined, Skinner hoped the measure would finally force the state to turn everything over. The law allows for testing in cases where technology wasn’t available at the time of the trial or where untested evidence has the potential to exonerate. State and federal courts so far have ruled that Skinner’s case doesn’t meet those guidelines.

Skinner’s first motion for post-conviction DNA testing was denied, and on appeal the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that new testing was unlikely to show anything different from previous DNA tests that put Skinner at the scene of the crime. Skinner filed a second request for DNA testing in 2007, citing new legal developments and evidence that Gene Screen’s DNA tests in 2000 were flawed. Again, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied the motion. The court said Skinner was at fault for not having requested testing of the DNA at his original trial in 1995. Skinner then sued current Gray County D.A. Switzer, hoping a federal court would force her to turn over the DNA. “The fact of the matter is he had very good trial attorneys, and they made decisions and strategies at the time that the courts have upheld and said, ‘Yes, that is good trial strategy,’” Switzer says. “There are steps in place that he could have employed and some of which he did employ, and they’ve been handled.” A federal judge dismissed the case against Switzer this month, and Skinner attorney Rob Owen says he plans to appeal.

When legislators adopted the 2001 post-conviction DNA law, they worried the measure would start a flood of requests for testing. State Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, who wrote the bill, says guidelines were implemented to ensure fairness and prevent abuse in the system. John Bradley, chairman of the Texas Forensic Science Commission and the Williamson County District Attorney, says Skinner’s case is a perfect example of why those criteria are necessary. “There’s 155,000 people in prison,” he says. “If you change the rules so you can having testing any time, you’re going to get 155,000 applications tomorrow, because what have they got to lose?”

Owen says he is hopeful the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene in Skinner’s case. “It’s about a one-in-100 shot,” he says. The decision not to test the DNA back in 1995 was one ex-prosecutor Comer made, Owen says, and Skinner shouldn’t be executed for a wrong that could be righted now. “There was good reason to doubt Hank’s guilt even then, and the concerns have only grown,” he says. Besides, he wonders, what has Texas got to lose? If the DNA tests don’t exonerate Skinner, the execution can go forward as planned. If the evidence proves he didn’t do it, then Texas avoids killing an innocent man. “The idea that we’re going to not find out, that’s … irresponsible,” he says.

As the February 24 execution date draws near, Skinner says he’s beginning to tire of this 15-year fight to prove his innocence. He’s tried to accept the possibility that needles filled with a lethal chemical concoction will take him to his end. But, he says he can’t. “Every time I try to think about them trying to kill me, I just think next, well, I didn’t do it.”

Source: The Texas Tribune, January 29, 2010


TO SUPPORT HANK'S CLEMENCY PETITION:

The clemency petition is seeking a commutation of Hank's death sentence to life in prison in order to enable him to prove his innocence and seek a pardon.

The letters can be mailed in support of his clemency petition starting February 4th and to arrive no later than February 17th.

Please write the following reference "Attention: Hank Skinner Case - #999143" on each page of your letter (as well as the covering page if you send it by fax) and on the front of the envelope.

Clemency Section

Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles

8610 Shoal Creek Blvd.

Austin, TX 78757-6814

USA

Fax (512) 467-0945

DO NOT SEND YOUR LETTER TO INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE BOARD, IT WOULD SIDETRACK YOUR LETTER AND IT MIGHT NOT EVEN REACH THE BOARD IN GOOD TIME TO BE CONSIDERED.

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

All the details of the case are available on the website, however, here are some of the points you can raise:

Hank was sentenced to die on the basis of a perjured testimony and circumstancial evidence.

The accusation theory relied on that one witness, who later recanted and explained how she was threatened to make a false statement to the police and give a deposition at trial which was based on a script supplied by the district attorney's office.

The little forensic analysis done before his trial excluded him as the killer.

The additional and minimum testing done during his post conviction appeals excluded him too.

The available scientific evidence proves his physical incapacitation at the time of the crime.

The important quantity of evidence remaining to be tested is essential to reveal the truth about his innocence.

His motions for DNA testing have been denied although he has always offered to pay for the costs.

The state of Texas has a very poor record in terms of wrongful convictions and DNA exonerations.

The interest of justice is to find out the truth and to not execute an innocent.

The state is withholding the untested evidence that can prove Hank's innocence.

The commutation of his death sentence is the only way for justice to be served.

For more information about the case, visit: http://www.hankskinner.org/