Clear-cut Spirko case now has many holes

The status:
Parole board will decide this week whether to reconsider its recommendation that Gov. Taft shouldn't spare the life of convicted killer John Spirko.

• The crime: Spirko was convicted of the 1982 murder of Betty Jane Mottinger
• The controversy: A prosecutor is accused of misrepresenting evidence, and the defense says a faulty eyewitness identification of Spirko's friend was used to implicate him. Also, prosecutors say Spirko knew details only the killer would know, but the defense says many facts had been in newspapers.

It may seem like an open-and-shut case. But as Spirko's Sept. 20 execution date approaches, the case against him is getting increasingly muddy.

On Friday, Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro suggested that the state parole board reopen clemency proceedings after news reports showed Petro's senior deputy misrepresented evidence that the parole board relied upon to recommend 6-3 against leniency for Spirko.

Defense attorneys have asked the parole board to scrap its recommendation to Gov. Bob Taft, convene a new clemency hearing and ask the Ohio Supreme Court to delay the execution to give Taft time to decide whether to grant clemency or a reprieve. The board is likely to decide this week whether to rehear the case.

At Spirko's Aug. 23 clemency hearing, Tim Prichard, Petro's senior deputy, argued against leniency, calling Spirko "an unrepentant, evil, manipulative man."

A career criminal with a prior murder conviction who has been in trouble with the law since he was 10, Spirko, 59, is an odd poster boy for innocence.

Yet a lot of influential people are questioning whether the state of Ohio is on the verge of putting an innocent man to death.

"I believe that John Spirko may very well have been unjustly convicted," said former FBI Director William S. Sessions in a letter urging that Gov. Bob Taft commute Spirko's death sentence.

Sessions is one of four retired federal judges who question Spirko's conviction. The Ohio Supreme Court and the parole board couldn't reach unanimous decisions on the case. A sheriff's investigator testified before the parole board on Spirko's behalf. And editorialists for several Ohio newspapers, including the Dayton Daily News, are sounding alarms about the planned execution.

At Spirko's trial, authorities made the case that he and his best friend, Delaney Gibson, robbed the Elgin post office in Van Wert County in the false belief that it was loaded with money, then abducted and killed Mottinger to cover up the crime.

Spirko's defense boils down to this:

• There's no physical evidence linking him to the abduction and stabbing death of Mottinger, 48.
• A witness identified Spirko's friend Gibson as the man she saw outside Mottinger's post office the morning of the kidnapping, and prosecutors used Gibson's presence to implicate Spirko. But another key prosecution witness, former U.S. Postal Inspector Paul Hartman, stated this year that even before Spirko's trial he told a prosecutor he didn't believe Gibson was involved. Gibson was indicted but never tried and the state finally dropped charges in May 2004.
• Spirko's conviction was partially due to two jailhouse snitches who testified in exchange for leniency, then recanted claims that Spirko bragged about killing Mottinger.
• Between October 1982 and March 1983, Spirko gave 20 falsehood-laden interviews, finally implicating Gibson and himself. He was quoted as saying, "Lay it all on me. I killed her." But Spirko didn't sign any statements, and the defense contends investigators may have put non-public crime details in his mouth. The interviews weren't taped.
• Authorities failed to adequately investigate other suspects, the defense says.

"Janie" Mottinger, a mother of three who had just met her first baby grandchild, disappeared from the Elgin post office Aug. 9, 1982.

Six weeks later, her badly decomposed body was found in a bean field, wrapped in an old theater curtain. Slashes in her clothing revealed she had been stabbed more than a dozen times.

John Spirko wasn't on investigators' radar scope until he put himself there in October 1982. Jailed on an unrelated felonious assault charge, Spirko offered to provide information on the Mottinger case in exchange for leniency for himself and his girlfriend, who had tried to slip him some hacksaw blades.

In some stories he told the motive was robbery; in others, the killers silenced the postmaster after they tried to pick up a parcel containing drugs. Spirko took authorities to a house in Cygnet where he said the killers raped and murdered Mottinger, but he couldn't describe the floor plan and officials found no evidence at the house.

But amid the lies, said Prichard, the deputy attorney general, Spirko shared crime details that hadn't been made public. The curtain had been cut or torn and the top was drawn down over Mottinger's head. The stone had been pried out of her ring. Spirko described her missing purse and had seen internal postal documents among the robbery proceeds.

"He had intimate knowledge of the crime and he had no explanation for it," Prichard said. "That's what convict(ed) John Spirko."

But Steven Drizin, legal director for the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University law school, said Spirko made "tons of mistakes" in describing the crime, and interviews by Hartman, the postal inspector, were poorly documented.

Drizin said Hartman "contaminated" Spirko's statements by asking leading questions. Non-public details were suspiciously inscribed in Hartman's notes in different handwriting or jotted in above the lines, he said.

Defense attorney Thomas Hill of Washington, D.C., said Hartman used leading questions to get Spirko to implicate Delaney Gibson.

Spirko and Gibson were both convicted killers who met in the 1970s while in prison in Kentucky. Gibson had been released from prison, was a fugitive on a new crime and was doing migrant work in North Carolina, when Mottinger was abducted.

In August 1982, Spirko had just been paroled from Kentucky for a 1969 murder and was living with his sister near Toledo. His sister said she was with him when he visited his parole officer the morning of the abduction. The parole officer said he saw Spirko that day, but couldn't say when.

Hartman learned about Spirko's friendship with Gibson and, in January 1983, Hartman dropped a reference to Gibson's tiny hometown, Bear Branch, Ky. After that, Spirko started talking about Gibson, finally accusing him of Mottinger's murder.

Authorities went back to two witnesses who each saw a man outside the post office the morning of the abduction. They showed the witnesses new photo lineups which included pictures of Spirko and a clean-shaven Gibson. Truck driver Mark Lewis was "reasonably sure" he'd seen Spirko in Elgin that morning. Opal Seibert positively identified the Gibson photo.

But Hartman learned that Seibert's identification was problematic. Gibson's wife said relatives had visited her and Delaney in North Carolina on Aug. 7 and 8 ? and she had photos of a bearded Gibson to prove it. The photos, Hartman learned, were developed in North Carolina on Aug. 10. A receipt showed Gibson patronized an auto shop there that weekend. Margie Gibson's work records showed she and Gibson picked tomatoes on Aug. 10.

Gibson would have had to shave his beard and drive through the night to Elgin to kidnap Mottinger. Prosecutors didn't turn over the Gibson photos to Spirko's lawyers until 1997.

Prichard said the defense in 1984 didn't seek to establish Gibson's alibi, because Gibson's guilt was Spirko's best defense: At trial, Spirko said Gibson was the one who gave him details of the crime.

Hill, however, contends prosecutors went to trial with a Gibson/Spirko theory they knew wasn't true. If Seibert hadn't placed Gibson at the scene, the other evidence wouldn't have been sufficient to convict Spirko.

But Kent Mottinger, the victim's son, said the real breakdown of the system is that Kentucky didn't execute Spirko for his first murder, that of 73-year-old Myra Ashcroft in 1969.

"Mom's blood is on the head of Spirko and those who had released him (from) that Kentucky prison," Mottinger told the parole board. "If after all of this you still don't know that Spirko's execution should be carried out, I have one last suggestion for you. Take him and introduce him to your family."

Contact Tom Beyerlein at 225-2264.