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On 8/22/92, Sapp murdered 11-year-old
Martha Leach and 12-year-old Phree Morrow near downtown
Springfield. Sapp raped Martha and Phree and then beat them to
death. Sapp was connected to the rapes and murders through DNA
testing in 1996.
Between 1993 and 1995, Sapp murdered 31-year-old Belinda
Anderson and buried her body in a garage floor. Sapp was also
convicted for the 1993 attempted murder of Hazel Pearson. Sapp
confessed to the crimes against Martha, Phree, Ms. Anderson and
Ms. Pearson.
Sapp received a death sentence for the aggravated murders of
Martha, Phree and Ms. Anderson. At the time of his trial in
1997, Sapp was serving a prison sentence for assaulting and
attempting to rape another Springfield woman in 1993.
State v. Sapp,
Case no. 2003-0135
2nd District Court of Appeals (Clark County)
William Sapp of Springfield appeals his 1999
convictions and death sentences for the rapes and aggravated
murders of 11-year-old Martha Leach and 12-year-old Phree Morrow
in August 1992, and the rape and aggravated murder of Belinda
Anderson in September 1993. At the same trial, Sapp was also
convicted of the rape and attempted murder of another
Springfield woman, Hazel Pearson, in December 1993.
The crimes for which Sapp was convicted went
unsolved until September 1996. In the course of prosecuting Sapp
for the attempted rape of yet another Springfield woman, Una
Timmons, local police learned that Sapp might have been involved
in a homicide in Jacksonville, Florida. After he was convicted
and sentenced for assaulting Timmons, Sapp agreed to be
interviewed by detectives from the Duval County, Fla., Sheriff's
Department.
On Sept. 26, 1996, during his interview with
the Florida officers and after being read his Miranda rights and
waiving them in writing, Sapp admitted that he had sexually
assaulted and attempted to kill a woman in Springfield several
years earlier. The Florida officers informed local detectives,
who then joined the interrogation. During that questioning, Sapp
provided details that matched the unsolved sexual attack and
attempted murder of Hazel Pearson in December 1993.
Because local detectives had linked a unique
“signature” element of the attack on Pearson – the rapist's
careful severing of seam stitches of the victim's jeans with a
knife – with evidence recovered from the unsolved 1992 rape and
murder of Martha Leach and Phree Morrow near downtown
Springfield, detectives obtained samples of Sapp's blood, saliva
and hair for DNA testing. The result was a positive match with
semen recovered from the bodies of both girls.
On April 2, 1997, Sapp agreed to be
transported from the state prison where he was incarcerated to
the Springfield police department for additional questioning.
After being Mirandized and signing a written waiver of his
rights, Sapp was questioned into the evening and continuing the
following morning about the deaths of Martha Leach and Phree
Morrow.
After initially denying involvement and then offering
different versions of events, Sapp was confronted with the DNA
evidence and ultimately confessed not only to a leading role in
the group rape and killing of Leach and Morrow, but also to his
1993 murder of Belinda Anderson, whose body was not discovered
until 1995 because he had buried it inside a neighbor's garage.
Sapp was indicted on multiple counts of rape,
kidnapping and aggravated murder with death penalty
specifications. The trial court denied pretrial defense motions
to sever the charges so that Sapp could be tried separately for
his crimes against each victim. After an eight-day hearing, the
court also denied defense motions to prohibit the prosecution
from introducing statements from Sapp's police interrogations as
evidence, and to prevent the prosecutor from showing the jury
video recordings of Sapp's interrogations.
After the state presented its case, including
extensive evidence from Sapp's police interrogations, the
defense rested without presenting testimony by Sapp or calling
any witnesses. The jury convicted Sapp on all of the rape counts
and all of the aggravated murder charges and death penalty
specifications. After hearing mitigation testimony about Sapp's
childhood abuse by his parents and others and discussing his
treatment and medication for bipolar disorder, the jury found
that the aggravating factors of his crimes outweighed mitigating
factors, and imposed death sentences for each of the three
killings.
Because the murders took place before 1995,
Sapp's case was reviewed by the 2nd District Court of
Appeals, which unanimously affirmed his convictions and death
sentence.
In appealing the lower courts' decisions to
the Supreme Court, attorneys for Sapp ask the justices to vacate
the trial court judgment and remand his case for a new trial
based on 16 allegations of legal and procedural errors. Among
these are claims that:
The trial court erred in denying Sapp's
motions to suppress his statements under interrogation and
the video of his confession because his waivers of the right
to legal counsel and the right to remain silent were not
“voluntary, knowing and intelligent.” They base this
argument on the fact that Sapp was questioned over an
extended period of hours when police were aware that he
suffered from bipolar disorder and was taking strong
medication for that condition. They also argue that, when
the trial court denied Sapp's motion to suppress his
statements to police, the failure of Sapp's trial counsel to
request that the judge provide “findings of fact and
conclusions of law” supporting that decision severely
damaged his ability to later challenge that ruling on
appeal, and constituted ineffective assistance of counsel.
The trial court erred in
not granting Sapp's motion to sever the charges so he could
be tried separately for each of the killings and for the
attempted murder of Pearson. By allowing the prosecution to
use evidence of Sapp's actions in the Leach-Morrow crimes to
bolster its case against him in the Anderson and Pearson
crimes, and vice versa, they argue, the trial court allowed
the state to introduce “other acts” evidence that strongly
prejudiced the jury to believe Sapp was guilty when much of
that evidence would not have been admissible if each crime
had been tried separately. They also contend that Sapp
received ineffective assistance of counsel when his trial
lawyers failed to move again to sever the charges at the end
of the state's case, thereby waiving the issue for later
appeals except under a demanding “plain error” standard.
The trial court erred in
allowing Sapp to be tried and convicted on a capital murder
specification that his crimes were committed as part of a
“course of conduct” because there were substantial
differences in the times, circumstances, weapons and victims
involved in the aggravated murders and attempted murder with
which he was charged.
Prosecutors representing the state respond
that:
Sapp was clearly advised of his Miranda
rights before each interrogation session, stated that he
understood those rights and was waiving them voluntarily,
and signed a written waiver. They say the record shows the
trial court gave careful consideration to the defense
arguments regarding Sapp's mental status and medication,
conducted an extended hearing, and ruled in accordance with
established precedents that Sapp's waivers were valid and
his statements to police were therefore admissible.
The same “other acts”
evidence admitted at Sapp's joint trial for the Leach-Morrow
and Anderson murders and the Pearson attempted murder would
have been admissible in all three trials if the crimes had
been tried separately, the state contends. This is so, they
say, because evidence regarding a defendant's other acts may
be admitted to show his “motive, intent, plan or identity,”
and the evidence in question established Sapp's motive and
intent and identified him by virtue of a “signature” element
as the perpetrator of all three crimes.
The trial court acted
within its proper discretion in trying the two aggravated
murder charges and attempted murder charge against Sapp in a
single trial because the crimes were “of the same or similar
character” and because they were “part of a course of
criminal conduct” in which Sapp found or took female victims
to a remote location, raped them and then brutally beat them
to death, hid the bodies and disposed of other evidence at
the scene to cover up his crimes.
Death Penalty Affirmed for
Springfield Serial Killer
2003-0135. State v. Sapp, 2004-Ohio-7008.
Clark App. No. 99CA84, 2002-Ohio-6863. Judgment affirmed.
The Supreme Court of Ohio today unanimously
affirmed the convictions and death sentence of William Sapp of
Springfield for the August 1992 kidnapping, rape and aggravated
murders of Phree Morrow and Martha Leach and the September 1993
assault and murder of Belinda Anderson. The court also upheld Sapp's
conviction for the December 1993 kidnapping, rape and attempted
murder of Hazel Peterson. All of the crimes took place in
Springfield.
In upholding one of several death penalty
specifications in the case, the Court approved and adopted a test
set forth in a 1992 North Carolina decision, State v. Cummings
. The Cummings decision held that in order to
establish that a murder was part of a “course of conduct involving
the purposeful killing or attempt to kill two or more persons,” the
state must demonstrate “some factual link” or “discern some
connection, common scheme or some pattern or psychological thread”
that ties two or more killings together.
The crimes for which Sapp was convicted went
unsolved until September 1996. In the course of prosecuting Sapp for
the attempted rape of yet another local woman, Una Timmons,
Springfield police learned that he might have been involved in a
homicide in Jacksonville, Florida. After he was convicted and
sentenced for assaulting Timmons, Sapp agreed to be interviewed by
detectives from the Duval County, Fla., Sheriff's Department.
During his interview with the Florida officers,
Sapp admitted that he had sexually assaulted and attempted to kill a
woman in Springfield several years earlier. He ultimately provided
details that matched the unsolved sexual attack and attempted murder
of Hazel Pearson in December 1993.
Because local detectives had linked a unique
“signature” element of the attack on Pearson – the rapist's
painstaking severing of seam stitches of the victim's jeans with a
knife – with evidence recovered from the unsolved 1992 rape and
murder of 11-year-old Martha Leach and 12-year-old Phree Morrow near
downtown Springfield, detectives obtained samples of Sapp's blood,
saliva and hair for DNA testing. The result was a positive match
with genetic material recovered from the bodies of both girls.
After initially denying involvement and then
offering different versions of events, Sapp was confronted with the
DNA evidence and ultimately confessed not only to a leading role in
the group rape and killing of Leach and Morrow, but also to the
unsolved murder of Belinda Anderson, who had disappeared from her
sister's home in September 1993 but whose body was not discovered
until 1995 because it had been buried inside a neighbor's abandoned
garage.
Sapp was indicted on multiple counts of rape,
kidnapping and aggravated murder with death penalty specifications.
The trial court denied pretrial defense motions to sever the charges
so that Sapp could be tried separately for his crimes against each
victim. After an eight-day hearing, the court also denied defense
motions to prohibit the prosecution from introducing statements from
Sapp's police interrogations as evidence, and to prevent the
prosecutor from showing the jury video recordings of Sapp's
interrogations.
The jury convicted Sapp on all of the rape and
aggravated murder counts, and on all death penalty specifications,
including a finding that the murders had been committed during a
“course of conduct involving the killings of two or more people.”
After hearing mitigation testimony about Sapp's childhood abuse by
his parents and others and his treatment and medication for bipolar
disorder and depression, the jury found that the aggravating factors
of his crimes outweighed mitigating factors, and imposed death
sentences for each of the three killings. The 2nd
District Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court's convictions and
sentence.
Writing for the Court in today's decision,
Justice Francis E. Sweeney Sr. overruled or held as harmless all 16
assignments of trial court error advanced by Sapp's attorneys as
grounds to overturn his convictions or modify his death sentence.
In affirming the trial court's finding on the
“course of conduct” death penalty specification, Justice Sweeney
rejected Sapp's argument that the 12 months that elapsed between the
deaths of Phree and Martha and the killing of Anderson and the
different circumstances surrounding the two crimes should have
precluded the jury from finding that the crimes were part of the
same course of conduct.
Citing the Cummings decision from North
Carolina and a Texas case, Corwin v. State , Justice
Sweeney wrote that the amount of time elapsed between offenses “is a
relevant factor” in considering a course-of-conduct charge, but
“does not necessarily determine whether the offenses form a course
of conduct.” In State v. Cummings , he noted, the jury
found that “two murders 26 months apart were part of the same course
of conduct, because they had a common modus operandi, ‘similar if
not identical motivations,' and the victims were sisters. And in
Corwin v. State … the court held that a defendant's actions in
abducting, raping, and killing or attempting to kill five women ‘in
more or less the same way' over 13 years could reasonably be found
to constitute a course of conduct.”
While Sapp pointed to differences in the ages of
the victims, physical settings, weapons used and other circumstances
of his assaults on Phree and Martha, Anderson and Pearson, Justice
Sweeney wrote that there were also striking similarities in the
crimes, highlighted by what Sapp himself had called “signing his
name” by removing the pants of the victims by slitting the seams
with a knife. He also noted that each of the victims had been raped
and left nude below the waist, each was battered in the head with an
object picked up at the crime scene, and each suffered a fractured
skull.
Justice Sweeney also noted that Sapp's statements
to a fellow prisoner that “whenever he got … the taste for blood …
he always went out (and) took care of his problems,” also indicated
that he committed all three attacks for pleasure, “to gratify his
recurring ‘taste for blood.' … Under the totality of the
circumstances, we find that the evidence in this case was legally
sufficient to prove that the murder of Anderson and the attempted
murder of Pearson were part of a single ‘course of conduct involving
the more than one intentional killing or attempted killing.”
Among numerous other claims of error rejected or
held to be non-prejudicial, the justices found that the trial court
did not err in denying Sapp's motion to sever the charges against
him and conduct separate trials for his crimes against each victim.
Quoting from this Court's opinion in
State v. Benner (1988), Justice Sweeney
wrote that “if Sapp's motion had been granted … ‘the evidence of all
the offenses would have been admissible in each trial' … Because
‘each [murder] or attempted [murder] was relevant to the course-of-conduct
specification,' evidence relating to each of the murders and
attempted murders would have been admissible at separate trials of
the Morrow-Leach murders and the Anderson murder.”
Justice Sweeney's opinion was joined by Chief
Justice Thomas J. Moyer and Justices Alice Robie Resnick, Evelyn
Lundberg Stratton, Maureen O'Connor and Terrence O'Donnell.
Justice Paul E. Pfeifer entered a separate
opinion concurring with the majority affirmance of Sapp's
convictions and death sentence specifications arising from the
murders of Phree Morrow and Martha Leach. He disagreed, however,
with the majority finding that the killing of Belinda Anderson was
part of a single “course of conduct.”
“The murder of Anderson occurred over a year
after and was not related in any way to the murders of Morrow and
Leach,” wrote Justice Pfeifer. Citing his own dissent in an earlier
capital case, State v. Scott , he wrote that, “(i)n this
case, as in Scott , ‘there was ample evidence to support [an]other
death penalty specification, rendering the course-of-conduct
specification unnecessary.'”
