Man hopes DNA clears him in wife’s death
Brad Dicken | The Chronicle-Telegram
ELYRIA — Clarence Weaver has maintained his innocence since the 1991 murder of his wife.
Now the convicted killer is hopeful that DNA evidence will clear him.
The Ohio Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence in an effort to clear convicts who maintain their innocence, is asking Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge to order testing in Weaver’s case in the hope that it will clear the 73-year-old inmate housed at Madison Correctional Institution.
This isn’t the first time that Weaver has tried to prove his innocence using post-conviction DNA testing. A similar effort failed in 2004 when Burge’s predecessor, retired Judge Lynett McGough, refused to grant his request in early 2005.
Prosecutors said at the time that they could not locate the rape kit that was performed on Helen Weaver during her autopsy, but Burge said there was never an order to destroy evidence in the case, and the list of evidence the judge ordered Elyria police to provide to him Tuesday appears complete.
Jennifer Bergeron, an attorney with the Innocence Project, said the evidence may still exist, despite what prosecutors claimed four years ago.
Clarence Weaver said he found his wife’s body in the couple’s Elyria apartment after returning from work. He called police, who determined that she had been strangled and sexually assaulted.
Police initially didn’t treat her death as a homicide, according to Bergeron’s request to Burge for the DNA testing. She wrote that police didn’t treat the area as a crime scene and didn’t start seriously collecting evidence until days later, after the apartment had been cleaned.
Bergeron also suggests that a viable alternative suspect exists in the case — Gilbert Glass Jr., an upstairs neighbor of the Weavers now serving a 15 to 40 years prison sentence for a similar sexual assault a few years after Helen Weaver was killed.
Glass was a key witness in the case against Weaver, saying he saw him hurrying away from his apartment on his way to work the morning Helen Weaver’s body was found. But Bergeron said that Glass was late to work himself that day and had ample opportunity to attack and kill the woman.
Bergeron also raises questions about the testimony of other witnesses, including disgraced former Summit County Coroner William Cox, who determined that Helen Weaver had been murdered the night before she was found. Bergeron also questions the about-face done by Clarence Weaver’s former girlfriend, Elizabeth Campbell, who changed her story under questioning by police after long denying Clarence Weaver could have killed his wife.
County Prosecutor Dennis Will said he hasn’t decided whether to oppose the motion for DNA testing in the case, but for testing to make a difference, it would have to be a definitive piece of evidence.
“My understanding is the thing he was asking to be tested, which was a rape kit, didn’t exist,” Will said.
Bergeron said she doesn’t see a reason why prosecutors would oppose the idea of clearing a potentially innocent man, especially because a private Ohio DNA lab has offered to pick up the tab for this case and others that the Innocence Project is working on. Even if testing finds that Weaver has been lying about his innocence, prosecutors have nothing to lose, she said.
Weaver, who is eligible for parole in December 2009, has never wavered in his insistence that he’s innocent, she said.
“He’s always been very adamant,” Bergeron said.
Contact Brad Dicken at 329-7147 or bdicken@chroniclet.com.
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Filed by Brad Dicken | The Chronicle-Telegram July 23rd, 2008 in Top Stories. Popularity: 5% |
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