Key Witness in Spirko Case Passes Polygraph Pointing to Alternative Suspect

John Willier first gave an Ohio law enforcement officer detailed information about the crime in 1997 and offered to be polygraphed. Remarkably, officials handling the case ignored his offer. "Since authorities refused to pursue it, we had to check out Willier's story," said Prof. Steven Drizin, legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. "If he is telling the truth, the wrong man is going to be executed. We now have another good reason to believe him."

The polygraph examination was conducted on Oct. 26 by Robert Campbell, a 33-year veteran of the FBI and their Regional Polygraph Examiner and a past President of the Tennessee Polygraph Association. The report concludes that Willier's responses "were not indicative of deception" on statements he made describing how Dale Dingus, his former employer, threatened him at gunpoint not to go to authorities with information Willier had about Dingus's involvement in the Mottinger crime. Willier was also deemed truthful in his insistence that Spirko was unknown to him and uninvolved. John Spirko has never been connected with either Dale Dingus or John Willier.

During questioning about an unrelated investigation in 1997, Willier told Wyandot County Investigator Bill Latham something had been weighing heavily on him, and then suddenly identified Dale Dingus as the man responsible for the murder of Betty Mottinger in 1982. Willier had worked for Dingus as a house painter at that time, and Mottinger's body was found wrapped in a painter's drop cloth covered with paint spatters.

Willier led Latham to the farmhouse on Dingus's property where Dingus said the murder occurred. The soybean field where the body was discovered was a short distance away from the farmhouse and right between the Dingus property and Willier's trailer. Additionally, Willier had once positively identified a piece of the tarp in which the body was wrapped as part of the drop cloth he had used with Dingus at a particular painting job, and comparisons done in 1984 concluded that paint on the tarp was consistent with that used for a job Dingus and Willier did shortly before the Mottinger murder. Finally, Willier's neighbor at the time reported seeing Willier with two other men and a woman that fit Mottinger's description in a brown car in front of Willier's trailer the day after she was abducted. The neighbor, described by investigators at the time as very credible, saw the driver of the car turn and slap the women in the back seat.

No physical evidence connected Spirko to the crime scene. Following the FBI's recent refusal to conduct forensic testing, Spirko's lawyers continue to demand that the authorities conduct DNA testing on the drop cloth, or provide access to the cloth for DNA testing that could definitively corroborate Willier's story and exonerate Spirko. "It is unconscionable that this execution could go forward without using modern DNA technology in an effort to answer these critical questions," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. "Governor Taft must have all the facts, but remarkably critical evidence remains untested."

John Spirko is scheduled to be executed on Nov. 15, despite strongly worded dissents from three members of the Ohio Parole Board, and despite a prosecution that dissenting 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ronald Gillman said rests "on a foundation of sand." Gov. Taft is currently deciding whether to grant some form of clemency, which could include commutation of the death sentence to life, or a temporary reprieve to allow additional forensic testing and investigation