Two decades later, questions linger in postmistress slaying

No physical evidence tied the suspect, John Spirko, to the crime. And it was never explained why investigators thought he ended up in Elgin to rob the post office, 70 miles from where he was living near Toledo. Yet he told investigators details of the 1982 slaying, including what clothes and jewelry she was wearing that day.

Months before Spirko is to be executed and 23 years after Betty Jane Mottinger was killed, his lawyers have asked a federal judge to reopen the case.

Defense attorney Alvin Dunn says new information casts doubt on whether Spirko's best friend and former cellmate was in the village the day of the abduction. Prosecutors originally used that sighting to link Spirko to the murder.

Spirko's attorney says former postal investigator Paul Hartman said in a sworn statement that he had decided before the trial that the friend, Delaney Gibson, wasn't involved in the killing. Hartman has since said the statements to Spirko's lawyers were false and he wanted to mislead them.

A message seeking additional comment was left at Hartman's home.

"The state put on a case at trial that was not true and they knew it was not true," Dunn said.

But time is running out. Spirko's execution is set for Sept. 20. He has a final hearing Aug. 23 before the state parole board, which will recommend whether to grant clemency. His appeal is pending before U.S. District Judge James Carr in Toledo.

Mottinger, 48, had worked at the post office in Elgin for just under four years when she disappeared Aug. 9, 1982. Her body was found a month later in a soybean field 50 miles away, wrapped in a paint-splattered cloth. She had been stabbed in the chest and stomach.

Spirko, 59, insists he's innocent. He did not respond to interview request from The Associated Press.

He contacted investigators in October 1982 and offered to trade information about the killing so police would go easy on his girlfriend who was facing charges in an unrelated case.

Spirko testified during his trial that he talked to the authorities because he never thought he would get indicted.

Prosecutors say it was information only the killer could know.

"It wasn't the police or prosecutors who put Spirko in the mix. It was himself," said James Canepa, the state's chief deputy attorney general of criminal justice.

Spirko's lawyers counter that he thought he was telling authorities what they wanted to hear. They say what he knew came from newspapers and lengthy conversations he had with investigators. Some of the details proved true, but others were made up - Spirko had a history of spinning tall tales to police.

Canepa said Spirko knew details about what was in Mottinger's purse and a ring she was wearing, information that never appeared in print. "His best defense now is to say 'I'm a liar'," Canepa said.

Spirko's past won't win him any sympathy. He's spent most of his adult life in prison. Trouble started much earlier. At age 8 he started a fire at a school. He was sent to a reformatory as a teen after getting caught stealing a car.

He faced the death penalty for strangling a 73-year-old woman during a robbery in Covington, Ky., but instead served 12 years in prison before being released. He got out two weeks before Mottinger disappeared.

Previous appeals also centered on Gibson, the former cellmate in Kentucky. Although Spirko was never seen in the Ohio farming village, a witness testified that she saw a clean-shaven man outside the post office the morning of the abduction. The witness later identified him as Gibson from a photograph.

But it was never disclosed that investigators had found photographs showing Gibson with a beard right before and after the murder. They also talked to witnesses and had motel receipts that showed he was in North Carolina the night before the abduction.

Spirko's lawyers found out in 1996 - 14 years after the killing - about the evidence putting Gibson's whereabouts in doubt and asked for a new trial. Several courts, though, denied their appeals that claimed prosecutors withheld the evidence.

The state says whether Gibson was part of the murder doesn't matter. Canepa said federal and state appeals have looked at the question of Gibson's whereabouts and determined that it was Spirko's statements that sealed his conviction.

Both Spirko and Gibson were charged with murdering Mottinger.

Gibson wasn't brought to trial because he was serving time for an unrelated murder in Kentucky. He was released in 2001 but Ohio prosecutors didn't pursue him. Last year they dropped the charges against Gibson, saying the case was too old.

Several other ideas about what happened to Mottinger have been thrown about. Spirko's lawyers said in a 1997 court filing that she may have been killed because she knew about a drug ring operating out of the grain elevator next to the post office.

Another theory came out after a former house painter, John Willier, told an investigator that a group, including his boss, killed Mottinger after going to the post office to pick up drugs sent in the mail.

Willier provided enough details to trigger the curiosity of the investigator, William Latham of the Wyandot County prosecutor's office. Mottinger's body was found near the home of one of the men he implicated. "What he told me had a ring of credibility," Latham said.

All of this has added to speculation among residents of Elgin.

"I can't say if they got the right person," said Phil Bradshaw, who lives just across a pair of railroad tracks from the post office. "But I don't think they got them all."

He thinks Spirko deserves another trial and that Gibson should be tried, too. "It just blows my mind that they're not going after Gibson," he said. "Murder is murder."

About 50 people live in the sleepy outpost hidden in the flat farm fields of northwest Ohio. Only the hum of conveyor belts at a grain elevator interrupts the silence.

There are no stoplights. No grocery. And no school. It's a half-hour drive to the nearest interstate highway.

Not much has changed inside the tiny post office where a photograph of a smiling Betty Jane Mottinger hangs on the wood-paneled wall.

Her desk is still there. So are her scissors and a letter opener.

Chris Carder, whose mother was Mottinger's assistant, believes Spirko was involved somehow but that he wasn't the only one.

"Why her? Why the post office? There's still a lot mystery," Carder said.

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On the Net:

Spirko supporters

Ohio attorney general

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