The 1995 beating of Jill Marker, a clerk at the Silk Plant Forest store, should not be reinvestigated, an internal committee of Winston-Salem police officials and the city’s public-safety attorney is recommending.
“The committee has determined that there are no further viable avenues of investigation,” police Chief Scott Cunningham wrote in the report. “Therefore the case and investigation should remain closed.”
A citizens committee that examined the case for 18 months issued a report in 2009 that found no confidence in the police investigation. The citizens committee voted 7-2 to approve a statement that there was no credible evidence that Kalvin Michael Smith, who was convicted in the attack, was at the store on the day that Marker was severely beaten around her head with a blunt object that was never recovered.
Marker was pregnant at the time and gave birth to a son while in a coma. She is now blind and living under 24-hour care in Ohio.
The internal committee of police officials and the public-safety attorney concluded that the original investigation into Marker’s beating could have been better documented. But the committee said that “There is no evidence that the Winston-Salem Police Department or any of its personnel conducted themselves improperly, or that the investigation was fatally flawed.”
Supporters of Smith, who has maintained his innocence, called the internal committee’s report a joke.
“It’s the most audacious distortion of the case facts yet produced,” said Jet Hollander, one of Smith’s supporters. “This is not about really revealing what happened. This is about splicing and cutting and obfuscating in such a way as to tell a story. Their argument is not going to hold up.”
Cunningham declined to comment on the report. He said in an e-mail message that it would be inappropriate to make comments before discussing the report with the city council.
“For now, the report speaks for itself,” Cunningham wrote.
City officials created the internal committee — which included Cunningham, the city’s public-safety attorney, two police captains and a police lieutenant — to evaluate the citizens committee’s recommendations. The internal committee spent about a year looking at the case.
Smith is serving 23 to 29 years in prison; he is appealing his conviction in federal court.
The Innocence Project at Duke University has been working with Smith since 2003; a Winston-Salem Journal series in 2004 also raised numerous questions about the case.
Among the internal committee’s other findings:
• Parts of the original investigation “were not performed at the level of today’s standards,” and some did not meet standards in place in 1995.
• Investigators could have taken different steps that would have made the investigation more reliable.
• Winston-Salem police “diligently followed up” on leads in a timely manner, “and followed each lead to a logical conclusion.”
One of the men police considered as a suspect was a white man named Kenneth Lamoureux, who knew Marker from when she worked at a local day-care center and whom three witnesses identified as having been in the store not long before Marker was assaulted. Lamoureux moved to Charlotte in April 1996 and was never interviewed again.
The report says that police Detective Don Williams ruled out Lamoureux after interviewing Marker at a hospital in Ohio in November 1996 and receiving what he considered to be a positive response from Marker that her attacker was black. Williams wound up arresting Smith, who is black, in April 1997.
Jim Coleman, a faculty adviser to the Duke Innocence Project, said the report was a waste of the city’s time.
“We had a citizens-committee review this, led by two veteran police detectives, and they issued a scathing indictment of the investigation,” Coleman said. “This is an internal investigation by a police department that’s been embarrassed by the investigation in this case, by the deficiencies in this case, and basically they’re protecting themselves and their own.”
Cunningham will make a presentation to the council’s public-safety committee at 6:30 p.m. Monday at City Hall. The meeting is open to the public.
lgraff@wsjournal.com
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