Camden County Getting National Attention, Not Good For Sheriff

From the Denver Post:
trashing the truth


Key evidence goes missing in Georgia church murders

By Susan Greene Denver Post Staff Writer

Article Last Updated: 07/24/2007 09:05:58 PM MDT


Sheriff's deputies were so eager to solve the murders of a southern Georgia church deacon and his wife that they sent a key piece of evidence - a pair of eyeglasses - to "Unsolved Mysteries" to film on TV.
As the state's lead investigator on the case tells it, the glasses were never returned.
"They're still laying out there in a studio somewhere in TV-land," said former Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent Joe Gregory.
Without the glasses or most physical evidence from the crime scene, Camden County officials still convicted Dennis Perry, who enjoyed 20/20 vision and had no need for a prescription to correct extreme far-sightedness.
Twenty-two years after the murders, it remains itself an unsolved mystery whose
face the glasses fell off and whether Perry - now serving two life sentences - really killed Harold and Thelma Swain.
One evening in March 1985, a stranger interrupted bible study at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Spring Bluff, Georgia, and asked to speak with Harold Swain, a leader in the local African-American community.
The white young man with shoulder-length hair scuffled with Swain, then shot him fatally in the chest and head, witnesses said. Thelma Swain ran to help her husband and also was shot dead.
In the bloody vestibule sheriff's deputies found the pair of metal glasses, its right ear piece wrapped in tape, its frame pocked with what appeared to be welding spatter and its hinges holding two Caucasian hairs. Because it didn't belong to either victim, investigators concluded it must have been the shooter's.
The case remained cold when "Unsolved Mysteries" filmed a segment about it in 1988. As Gregory tells it, producers "contacted Sheriff Bill Smith and wanted those glasses" for the show.
"Without asking anybody, he just up and sent them out there which totally broke the chain of custody in this case," Gregory said.
Smith, who is still sheriff, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Gregory said he never saw the glasses after host Robert Stack appeared on camera holding them in his bare hands.
"These are the glasses found on that night . Were they dropped by the killer?" said Stack, his voice gravelly and grave.
The show triggered hundreds of tips.
One came from Camden County resident Jane Beaver who said a composite sketch of the shooter looked like Dennis Perry, a boy her daughter used to date. Beaver said that Perry had phoned her daughter the weekend before the murder to say he was visiting his grandparents' home in the Swains' neighborhood.
Investigators initially cleared Perry as a suspect after establishing that he was at work hours away near Atlanta the day of the killings. Also, Vanzola Williams - the witness who got the best look at the shooter - did not pick him out of a photo line-up.
Instead, she pointed to another suspect, Donnie Barrentine.
Perry "didn't do it, plain and simple, and that's why we cleared him," Gregory said.
"Unsolved Mysteries" went into re-runs and Beaver continued through the 1990s calling the show's phone center pointing at Perry. She also went further, showing his picture to the church ladies who were the main witnesses to the murders.
Thirteen years after the killings, Sheriff Smith hired a special investigator to work exclusively on solving the cold case.
Following Beaver's lead, investigator Dale Bundy pursued Perry as a suspect. Bundy said Perry admitted to the murders the day of his arrest.
Perry tells it differently.
"Dale Bundy started elaborating the story, with me saying 'I don't know.' He was trying to put words in my mouth," he said.
Bundy declined comment.
Sheriff's deputies have no tapes showing Perry confessed, according courtroom testimony.
And by the time of his trial, they could not account for the missing glasses.
"They remain, as of this moment, not any longer in existence," Chief Assistant District Attorney John Johnson wrote in 2001.
Robert Stack died in 2003. An "Unsolved Mysteries" producer told The Post she doesn't know what happened to the glasses or whether the pair on TV were actual evidence or a prop.
Had the glasses been preserved, they likely would have pointed to the Swains' killer, Gregory and others say.
Johnson, the prosecutor, downplays the importance of the glasses, saying, "They might, they might not have had anything to do with the case."
Also missing were a metal phone box with visible fingerprints investigators believe the shooter left when he cut the phone lines outside the church; a mirror from the church vestibule; tapes of witness interviews; photos of the crime scene; photos of police line-ups; and investigators' notes documenting that Perry had been at work six hours away the day of the murders.
"It's physically impossible to be at two places at one time. Even if he had a jet plane at his disposal he couldn't have done it," Gregory said.
At trial, Jane Beaver's daughter, Carol Ann, poked holes in her mother's testimony by saying she didn't know whether Perry was in Camden County the week of the murders, 13 years earlier. She testified that Bundy "was insinuating I knew more than I did and I didn't know anything."
The jury never heard the evidence that may have helped Perry most.
The hairs caught in the mysterious glasses had been preserved and tested for DNA before trial. Results showed no match to Perry. His lawyers didn't enter them into evidence because they also didn't match Barrentine, the alternate suspect on whom they based their defense strategy.
Vanzola Williams identified the North Florida man out of a lineup shortly after the murders. And three witnesses testified that, shortly after the shootings, Barrentine bragged at a party about having killed a black couple in a South Georgia church.
Though Barrentine was the prime suspect the year of the murders, District Attorney Glenn Thomas wouldn't grant a warrant for his arrest because he deemed the witnesses at the party to be "dope-heads and prostitutes."
Before Perry's trial, prosecutors gave Barrentine immunity in exchange for his testimony, in which he said he didn't kill the Swains.
Five years later, Johnson said he "can't remember" why he wrote in the immunity grant that "Donnie Barrentine was a witness to the death of Harold and Thelma Swain" and that Barrentine "was present at the scene."
"At this point, I can't answer that question," he said. "We wrote it that way and we went forward with it. That's all I can tell you at this point."
Before trial, Perry refused a plea deal offering him reduced charges of voluntary manslaughter and 12 years in prison. Then he was convicted, facing execution until he agreed to two life sentences in exchange for waiving his rights to all appeals.
"Everything was snatched out from under me," said Perry, who lost his construction business, his double-wide mobile home and his wife.
Now serving his seventh year behind bars, Perry, 45, is unable to stem the flow of his tears.
"I can't believe I'm sitting here getting choked up about...glasses," he said, sobbing in his prison whites. "But how do they lose evidence in a capital case? How do whole boxes of evidence slip through their fingers?"
Susan Greene can be reached at 303-954-1589 or at sgreene@denverpost.com.

Comment on this story at http://www.denverpost.com/ci_6453430?source=bb

Dr. Chua supporters here is another innocent man, Yet the Sheriff did not stand up for him