Chapter Fourteen:KathyKohm:The Evidence

    

 Chapter 14 

    Lt. George Lewallen was waiting for the autopsy report now. Spencer County prosecutors were also interested to find out what the medical examiner had found.  What kind of evidence was still there on the girl’s body after two months in a wet and warm Indiana spring?  

    Unfortunately her body was too decomposed to determine if a sexual assault had taken place by detecting the presence of semen.  Typically investigators would look for semen and determine if it came from a secretor or a non-secretor.  This would narrow down the suspect list.  They would look for hairs and fibers as well. 

    Kathy was found fully clothed. However her underwear was not on her body but instead stuffed into her pocket.  Investigators felt that this pointed to possible sexual assault.  Her shoes and socks were on her feet.  Curiously her shell earrings and the ring that had been on her finger were gone.  It was not valuable jewelry and hardly worth stealing but it was gone nonetheless.

    She had suffered blunt force trauma to her head. The killer had also shot her in the head.  Perhaps the perpetrator had hit her in the head during the initial abduction from the street?  Perhaps he hit her with something during the attack.

    Spencer County Prosecutors were hoping for ironclad evidence.  They needed hard proof that put Stanton Gash with Kathy.  This was 1981 and it would be six years before DNA testing would advance to the point that anyone would be convicted using DNA evidence.

    In the United Kingdom in 1987, scientists were first asked if they could apply their DNA research to a criminal case. That use had not occurred to the researchers. The first case in the United States would also come in 1987.  But this was 1981 and the technology just did not exist yet.

    Prosecutors also looked toward ballistic evidence.  Maybe the bullet found in Kathy’s skull could be positively linked to Gash.  It was the same caliber as both of the weapons recovered from his home after all.  The slug recovered from Kathy’s skull at autopsy was determined to be too degraded to be conclusively tied to any particular .22 caliber gun.  

    The brand of ammunition at Gash’s house at the time of the search also did not match the type that was recovered from Kathy.  A skeptical person might say that he could have thrown out all his old ammunition and purchased more in a different brand.  He might have but investigators could not find proof of a purchase of this type. There were no cameras in stores in those days. Most people paid cash so that would not raise eyebrows. 

     Prosecutors saw that they had no choice but decline to prosecute the crime at this time.  It was frustrating for police, Kathy’s family, friends and the public.  It was infuriating. There was a mountain of circumstantial evidence. But there was no smoking gun, no viable semen to test, no fingerprints or bloodstains in his car.  Holding off on prosecution was disappointing but was the wisest course of action. Even with a mountain of circumstantial evidence there is no guarantee that a jury would not have some small doubt. 

    Today we all have watched enough Dateline, Law and Order and other courtroom dramas to know that a jury must find a defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. You have to convince all twelve jurors. It would only take one skeptical juror to sink the case. A hung jury happens when one juror will not vote with the rest of the jury. Prosecutors knew that they really only had one chance to get this right.  Double jeopardy says that a defendant cannot be tried twice for the same crime. Prosecutors have to walk into court knowing they have a slam dunk case.       

    Prosecutors really had no choice but to wait and see if investigators could gather more evidence, maybe a witness would come forward. Perhaps there would be a new unforeseen development.  They wanted to see justice done for Kathy but the overwhelming solid evidence that they needed; evidence that directly tied Gash to this crime just was not there.