Evidence of Murder (24 page)

 

 

It was Friday, almost the weekend that Jeff Ashton and Ted Culhan were anticipating, hoping to get away for a trip home to Orlando.

“Well, Jeff, it looks like we’re going to be stuck here working all weekend.”

“Yeah, I had that feeling. If we plan to finish presenting our case on Monday, Wesley will start with his witnesses and his technical experts, so we have to be prepared.” Ashton sighed. “And I was so looking forward to a change of pace, time to clear my mind.”

“Oh, well, it will soon be over and we can go home to stay,” Culhan comforted.

“I can hardly wait.”

In the wrap-up of the state’s case on Monday, February 1, 1999, Jeff Ashton, after securing permission from Judge Perry to show it to the jury, nodded to the bailiff to start the videotaped television interview conducted by TV reporter Steve Olson with Huggins while he was incarcerated in the Seminole County Jail.

Huggins on the videotape was quite a contrast from the defendant who sat here on trial neatly dressed in a conservative blue suit, white shirt and subdued necktie, his hair trimmed and combed.

The jury watched with rapt attention as the defendant asserted that he didn’t think he killed Carla Larson because “I’m not that kind of a guy.” They heard him talk about his blackouts from his medications coupled with drug and alcohol abuse. And they listened attentively as he said, “Inside myself I feel I didn’t kill her.”

When the tape concluded, the courtroom was still. The jury automatically turned to look at John Huggins as he sat quietly with his head lowered. His expression remained bland, unreadable.

Ted Culhan rose and announced that the state rested.

Defense lawyer Bob Wesley stood before the jury, confidently asserting that his client, John Huggins, was innocent of the crime of which he was accused and now being tried.

As his attorney began to present the defense’s evidence, Huggins sat silently, watching everything with full attention.

The crowded, almost to capacity, courtroom listened as Wesley presented a forensic scientist who contended that hairs found with the body of Carla Larson did not match hair from John Huggins, the accused. The implication was that the hairs might belong to Huggins’s friend Kevin Smith, who the defense was hinting was the real killer.

A wave of reacting comments drifted across the room and the judge rapped for order and quiet.

ASA Jeff Ashton made the point that the defense never compared hair from Smith to the hair found at the murder scene. He also contended that the absence of Huggins’s hair at the murder scene did not prove that he was not there.

By presenting nine expert witnesses over Monday and Tuesday, February 1 and 2, Wesley and King tried to convince the jury that Kevin Smith of Cocoa Beach could be the killer. They said Smith resembled the early drawings of the possible killer. They also made note of the fact that Smith had the radar detector from the Larson vehicle.

Wesley said, “And there’s nothing to support what Kevin Smith says, except Kevin Smith.”

The defense team continued to stress the lack of physical evidence to link Huggins to the crime. There were no fingerprints, no DNA, no hair, no proof of any connection that their client had anything to do with it.

In their presentation the defense concentrated on instilling reasonable doubt into the minds of the jurors. If the jury bought that premise, John Huggins conceivably could walk away from the murder charge.

The defense attorneys tried to cast doubt on Angel Huggins’s testimony about the time that she said her husband was gone from the motel on June 10, 1997.

The onlookers were curious about how the defense would explain away the prosecution’s key evidence of Carla Larson’s jewelry found at Huggins’s mother-in-law’s house, but the defense skirted the issue and finally rested.

Closing arguments were set for the next day, Wednesday, February 3. The judge, after admonishing the jury about discussing the case with anyone, told them to bring a packed bag, because if they did not reach a verdict by the end of the day, they would be sequestered in a hotel.

The following morning, Jeff Ashton wore a conservative blue suit, and his lightly gray streaked brown hair was carefully combed. As his bright brown eyes panned across the faces of the jurors, he began in a confident voice: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have listened to the case of the prosecution. . . .”

He went into a long review of the tragic, brutal murder of a lovely young wife and mother, who had the misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Step by step, Ashton outlined the state’s case, recalling the statements of the witnesses who saw the accused driving the white Ford Explorer that belonged to the victim, the fact that the defendant was in the area where Carla Larson was last seen, and citing her jewelry, which was found in the shed behind Huggins’s mother-in-law’s home, tying it directly to the accused.

In his dramatic closing Ashton declared absolutely that the man who killed Carla Larson was the man seated at the defense table, defendant John Huggins. Jeff pointed directly at him. Huggins stared back at him, unblinking, impassive.

The defense’s presentation of its case alluded to a frame-up of Huggins by his estranged wife, Angel, and his friend Kevin Smith.

Jeff Ashton scoffed at that argument. “I haven’t heard a conspiracy theory like that since I took my children to see
The X Files
movie,” he asserted to the jury.

Following the conclusion of this day in court, Kevin Smith was contacted at his home in Cocoa Beach, where he said that he was disgusted being called a killer and that he was shocked to learn that he was being blamed for something that he didn’t do. He couldn’t believe his friend John was doing this to him.

After the judge’s instructions to the jury, the nine-woman, three-man panel began its deliberations.

The jury was out for four hours, coming back with a verdict of guilty on all counts.

John Huggins seemed to have no visible reaction when the verdict was read. Onlookers staring at him marveled, and one said, “He looks like he expected it.”

The jury would return the following Tuesday to begin the sentencing phase and to make its recommendation.

When the jury announced the verdict, the mothers of Jim and Carla wept. The families were emotionally drained from the stress of the trial. The guilty verdict was small comfort after their terrible loss, but there was some satisfaction that the perpetrator of the horrendous trauma Carla suffered would be punished. And maybe they could finally have some closure.

“It still really doesn’t change a whole lot,” said Jim Larson. “It’s not like the movies, where Carla gets up and we go home and we get to be happy. I want to move on to the next step. If we can put another one on death row for the Larson family, maybe they’ll start a wing for us,” he said bitterly, referring to Danny Rolling, who is on death row for killing Sonja Larson and four other students in Gainesville, Florida, in 1990.

Carla’s mother, Phyllis Thomas, said, “It is a relief to know this sad human being will get what he has coming to him.”

In the hearing on Tuesday to determine what penalty should be imposed on the convicted John Huggins, Carla Larson’s family members were allowed to talk about what her loss meant to them and to the community.

They were not permitted, however, to mention the crime or what penalty they might suggest.

The defense attorneys proposed that the convicted Huggins should receive life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, rather than the death penalty.

Bob Wesley and Tyrone King argued that Huggins could minister to prison inmates. “He did much missionary work in Haiti, helped the homeless and donated money and cars to charity,” Tyrone King pleaded passionately.

The jury listened carefully to all arguments, then deliberated for more than two hours, after which they voted eight to four that Huggins be executed.

Huggins sat frozen, again no reaction showing on his face, shocked silent.

Judge Perry stated that he would render his decision on Friday, February 26, 1999.

On that Friday, in the crowded Orange County Courthouse in downtown Orlando, the black-robed Judge Belvin Perry entered and took his seat behind the expansive mahogany bench.

With an austere expression on his face, the judge acknowledged the prosecution and the defense, whereupon the bailiff announced, “This court is in session.” A grim quiet settled over the courtroom while the judge shifted his fourteen-page sentence order that lay before him.

“One could only imagine,” he said in a deep, somber voice, “the alarm, the anxiety, the apprehension, the fright and the terror that Carla Larson felt as she was forced to ride to her demise.”

Perry paused, and the family and friends of the deceased blotted the tears that welled in their eyes.

“What fear and horror she must have felt when she was forced to walk from her vehicle into the wooded area . . . Carla Larson’s own death march to Bataan.”

The judge stopped again, wanting his portrait in words to affect the courtroom audience.

“No one can truly know,” he continued, “the emotional strain and physical pain she had to endure as she struggled to breathe, as the defendant strangled her to death.”

After the judge completed the thirty-minute, most compelling speech of his professional career, he asked the convicted Huggins to stand before him at the bench.

In grim prison attire, shackled hand and foot, the convicted killer stood like a frozen bleached statue before the judge, in whose hands was his right to live or die.

Judge Perry looked down at the career criminal who stood before him, thinking back to the fact that both his and Huggins’s fathers had been police officers serving in Winter Park, Florida, a small, exclusive city adjacent to the city of Orlando. He thought,
It’s amazing. Our fathers were both lawmen, and here I’m a judge and this fellow has no respect for law or decency, has a record a mile long. And now it’s my duty to sentence him.

“John Steven Huggins,” Judge Belvin Perry began, his voice cutting through the still of the courtroom like a razor-sharp blade, “you have forfeited your right to live at all.... You shall be put to death in the electric chair by having electrical current passed through your body . . . until you are rendered dead.”

Judge Perry paused. The people in the overcrowded courtroom seemed to have stopped breathing to absorb the judge’s pronouncement of death.

The judge continued his speech. “John Steven Huggins, may Almighty God have mercy on your soul.”

Court was adjourned and officers from the courtroom led the expressionless Huggins away.

Subsequent to the death sentence for John Huggins, the attention of the defense attorneys focused on the automatic appeal to the Florida Supreme Court.

Then came a surprise twist. Within weeks following the conviction, Preston Ausley, an engineer at the Orange County Courthouse, contacted attorney Bob Wesley and informed him that before Huggins’s trial, he had approached the state attorney’s office, giving them some important information.

Ausley explained, “I informed investigators that a blond woman driving a Ford Explorer cut me off in traffic a day after that Larson lady’s disappearance.” He explained that he was very bad with dates and came to the conclusion that he encountered Carla Ann Larson’s vehicle on June 11, 1997, by verifying the date through other sources. He added that he wrote down a partial license plate number, which was verified within one digit of Carla’s Ford Explorer.

Somehow in the transmission of Ausley’s account to the investigators, the written report stated that Ausley saw a “man” driving the Explorer. This information was included in Lead Sheet 302 in the evidence file, then turned over to the defense during discovery.

Subsequently on February 1, 1999, the day after seeing Angel Huggins on television during coverage of John Huggins’s trial in Jacksonville, Preston Ausley contacted the state attorney’s office again. He gave a taped interview to an investigator there, with more details about the woman driver. Ausley said that when he saw Angel Huggins on television, it struck him that she resembled the white female with blond hair he saw driving the white truck, with a license plate that matched Carla Larson’s within one digit, on the morning of June 11, 1997, on International Drive in Orlando.

After he gave his statement to Investigator Pat Guice, he was asked to return the next day so that the attorneys, who were at that very time in Jacksonville prosecuting the Huggins case, could speak with him by telephone.

The next morning, Jeff Ashton in Jacksonville spoke to Ausley via telephone. After their conversation, ASA Ashton determined that Ausley’s name and information were already given to the defense in Lead Sheet 302. Therefore, Ashton did not turn the interview tape over to defense.

After defense counsel Tyrone King studied Ausley’s statement, he reported the situation to Judge Perry.

The judge appraised the facts, and after studying all aspects, he found that the state violated the dictates of a Brady violation, in that the government possessed evidence favorable to the defendant and didn’t turn it over to the defense.

After serious consideration Judge Perry threw out Huggins’s conviction and death sentence.

This decision upset the prosecution, and Jeff Ashton appealed Perry’s decision to the Florida Supreme Court.

In early June 2001, in an unexpected ruling, the Florida Supreme Court upheld Judge Perry’s decision overturning the verdict. The court ruled in a seven-to-nothing opinion that the information provided by Ausley clearly conflicted with Ms. Huggins’s testimony at trial. It could have been used to impeach Angel Huggins, the state’s star witness. Angel insisted that she did not ride or get into the truck. The state supreme court ruled that had the jury been presented with Ausley’s statement of seeing a woman resembling Angel driving the Ford Explorer, Angel’s testimony concerning the truck could have been severely undermined.

The state asserted that it did not suppress the information, and contended that it turned Lead Sheet 302 over to the defense.

Meanwhile, defense counsel Bob Wesley stated that he had plans to file a motion with the state supreme court to prevent any retrial. The defense lawyer would cite “protection from double jeopardy.” Wesley’s argument would be that “the state should be barred from a second trial, because its misconduct led to a reversal.”

The powerhouse lawyer said that he was concerned that Huggins could not get a fair trial after so much time had passed. He stressed that “it’s a horrible disadvantage. We showed our cards, the state created an error and the only impact is that they think they can do it all over again.”

Later in June 2001, the Florida Supreme Court, on the strength of the dispute regarding the evidence withheld, ordered a retrial of John Huggins.

In complying with the high court, Judge Belvin Perry set December 6 as the new trial date, which he ordered to be held in Osceola County, Florida, just eighteen miles from Orlando.

In his reaction to the developments of a new trial, which he hoped to avoid, defense counsel Bob Wesley offered, with a concerned smile, that his case might benefit from a jury familiar with the area.

Wesley also said he wanted ASA Jeff Ashton, who, he said, made the error, removed from the case. “It’s not fair for Mr. Huggins that the state caused an error and then has the benefit of a new trial. If you don’t play by the rules, you shouldn’t get to play again.”

In court Judge Perry announced that Bob Wesley, who since was elected to his position of Orange/Osceola public defender (with a staff of more than eighty lawyers working under his direction), could continue to represent Huggins.

As the weeks rolled along, the general interest in the case mounted. On Thursday, August 23, 2001, John Huggins, the accused, with sheared hair, cleanly shaven, looking reserved in his red-and-white-striped jail uniform and trimmed down a bit in weight, appeared in court with attorney Wesley at his side.

Standing obediently and politely before the bench of Judge Belvin Perry, the career criminal stated that he was there to complain about prosecutor Jeff Ashton. He presented a bailiff with a two-page letter for the judge. It read, “I assert this matter causes a grave personal conflict between myself and Jeff Ashton, and I urge you to bar him from doing any further work on this case in hopes I may receive a fair trial this time.”

Chief ASA Bill Vose, of Orange County/Osceola County, appearing for the state, rose and addressed the court. In a potent response to the defendant, the capable professional flatly stated, “Assistant State Attorney Ashton has shown no prejudice against the accused.”

In a speedy response the judge agreed. He ruled that Jeff Ashton could remain on the case for the second trial, scheduled to begin December 6, 2001.

Then looking directly at Vose, he added, “I hope that you will assign an additional prosecutor to the case.” He smiled, nodding for the ASA’s endorsement. Enjoying the spotlight for the moment, Perry added, “It’s like riding in a car without a spare tire. I hope the state attorney’s office, in its infinite wisdom, will travel with a spare tire.”

Vose stated that he was pleased with the judge’s decision, expressing his confidence that Jeff Ashton was the best-qualified prosecutor. Vose waited moments for his appraisal to sink in, and then continued, “We’re concerned about the defendant getting a fair trial and the best way is to get the most experienced prosecutor.” He paused and added, “While the defendant may not think so, we think Jeff Ashton is the best person.”