Did he do it?

By Emilie Lounsberry

PRINCETON - Just before Roger Keith Coleman was executed in Virginia in the spring of 1992, Jim McCloskey made him a promise: to continue efforts to prove Coleman's innocence.

It has taken nearly 14 years, but McCloskey kept his word, and this week advanced DNA testing could show conclusively whether Coleman raped and murdered his sister-in-law, Wanda McCoy, in a tiny Appalachian coal town back in 1981.

If the tests demonstrate that Coleman was not the killer, it would mark the first time in America that scientific evidence has shown that an innocent man was put to death.

"I think he's going to get exonerated," said McCloskey, executive director of Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit organization here that works to free prisoners it believes have been convicted of murders or rapes they did not commit.

Thomas R. Scott Jr., who helped prosecute the case, said he was hoping that the tests - which he believes will implicate Coleman - would bring peace to McCoy's family. "They've never had closure - that's for 25 years," he said.

The case is being watched closely by people on both sides of the capital-punishment debate - and by residents of Grundy, Va., the small town in the southwestern part of the state where McCoy was raped, stabbed and nearly decapitated.

No one is watching more anxiously than McCloskey, who persuaded Gov. Mark R. Warner to allow the testing.

"I have never in my life - and I'm 63 - been so excited and full of anticipation, but nervous at the same time," McCloskey said in an interview this week at Centurion Ministries' modest offices a few blocks from Princeton University.

For many in Grundy, the case has been like a wound that just won't heal.

"Hopefully, this will end it," said Lodge Compton, editor and publisher of the local paper, the Virginia Mountaineer. He said most people in town did not need the DNA results to confirm Coleman's guilt.

Since 1983, McCloskey's group has won the release of about three dozen prisoners, including four from Philadelphia, by reinvestigating the crimes and pressing the cases in court.

Even with all that success, the Coleman case stands out because McCloskey was unable to stop the execution.

After Coleman's death, McCloskey pressed on as DNA technology became more sophisticated. Centurion Ministries and several newspapers went to court in 2001 seeking retesting of semen removed from McCoy's body. The Virginia Supreme Court refused in 2002, so McCloskey turned to the governor.

Last week, Warner said he ordered the testing - which began last month - because technological advances could provide forensic certainty that was not available when Coleman was convicted in 1982.

The results are expected before Warner, a Democrat who is considering a presidential run in 2008, leaves office Saturday.

Even before Coleman went to the electric chair, the case had been the focus of international attention. Coleman gave interviews from death row, the case made the cover of Time magazine, and Pope John Paul II urged that the execution be called off.

Post-execution DNA testing has not been an issue so far in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. Only three executions have taken place in Pennsylvania since capital punishment was reinstated in 1978, and all three death-row inmates stopped their appeals. New Jersey has not executed anyone since 1963.

The slow pace of executions in Pennsylvania bought time for a Philadelphia man, Nicholas Yarris, as DNA testing became more sophisticated and finally led to his release in 2004. He had spent 22 years on death row for a 1981 rape and murder in Delaware County.

Coleman, a coal miner who was a pallbearer at McCoy's funeral, always insisted that he had nothing to do with the killing, which took place between 10 and 11 p.m. on March 10, 1981.

He said he left the mine about 10 that night, stopped to talk to a friend, drove to a trailer park to visit another friend, and then was home by 11:05.

McCloskey said Coleman's whereabouts can be verified for all but about the last 15 to 20 minutes of that time. He said he did not believe Coleman had the time to get from the trailer park to McCoy's house, carry out the crime, clean himself up, and then drive home to his wife, who was McCoy's sister.

"If he did this, he's got to be a Ninja, a magician," McCloskey said. "He simply didn't have the time."

Scott said there was compelling evidence that pointed to Coleman, who had previously been convicted of an attempted rape.

He said there was no sign of forcible entry, leading investigators to believe that McCoy knew her killer; pubic hair found on her body was consistent with Coleman's hair; blood on Coleman's clothing - tiny specks of type O - was the same type as the victim's; and both the assailant and Coleman had type-B blood.

Scott said the evidence actually got stronger after the trial. He said a 1990 DNA test placed Coleman within 2 percent of the population that could have produced the semen.

McCloskey thinks the new testing will clear Coleman.

He said he first interviewed Coleman in 1988, believed there was a chance he was innocent, and then spent four years interviewing witnesses in an investigation that Centurion Ministries said ultimately pointed to the involvement of others.

McCloskey spent five hours with Coleman until just a half-hour before the execution, and it was then that he told Coleman he would never give up.

"I promised him that night I would do everything I could to prove his innocence," McCloskey said.

He said it was possible the test might show that Coleman was the killer.

"All of us in the criminal-justice system who care about the truth and do everything we humanly can to secure the truth, we all live and die by the sword of DNA," McCloskey said.

But if the tests show that Coleman was not the killer, he said, it could lead to the end of capital punishment in America.

"If that is done, Roger Coleman will not have died in vain."