Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 14, 1992 TAG: 9203140329
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Associated Press
DATELINE: GRUNDY LENGTH: Medium
The witness, Teresa Horn, 23, had implicated another man in the 1981 rape-murder of Wanda McCoy in Buchanan County. McCoy's brother-in-law, Roger Coleman, was convicted and is awaiting execution for the crime.
Horn's boyfriend found her unconscious March 6 in their mobile home in Buchanan County, state police said. Police still are not sure what caused her death.
"It appears to have been a drug overdose," said state police Special Agent Roger Owens. "But that's just preliminary. We won't know anything positive until the results of an autopsy and a ruling."
State police Special Agent W.F. Parker said he has not found anything suspicious about Horn's death.
"There was no physical evidence to indicate foul play," he said, adding that Horn's body had no visible marks or wounds.
An autopsy in Roanoke failed to reveal the cause of Horn's death. Police are awaiting blood tests to determine whether drugs or alcohol could have been the cause.
The incident is the latest in a series of events that Coleman's attorneys say has put an innocent man on the verge of execution.
Coleman, now 33, was arrested five weeks after the March 10, 1981, murder of McCoy, the sister of Coleman's wife. In what his current attorneys say was an inflammatory atmosphere in Grundy in Coleman 1982, a jury convicted Coleman and recommended that he should die.
Evidence against him included testimony that the man who raped McCoy had the same blood type as Coleman. Only 10 percent of the population has that blood type.
The pants that Coleman said he was wearing the night of the murder had blood on them of the same type as McCoy. About 45 percent of the population has blood of her type.
Before sentencing Coleman to death, the jury learned that he had been convicted in 1977 of attempting to rape a 36-year-old woman at gunpoint.
The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the conviction but agreed with defense attorneys that it was based on "circumstantial evidence."
Because a subsequent appeal challenging Coleman's conviction was filed a day late by his then-attorney, the state Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court have since refused to review the case.
"On all this new evidence, Mr. Coleman has never had his day in court," said one of his attorneys, Kathleen Behan of the Washington firm of Arnold & Porter.
The day before Horn's death, she had talked with Behan and anchor-reporter Keith Humphry of Roanoke's WDBJ-TV.
In the taped interview, Horn said a man who tried to rape her in the spring of 1987 in a Grundy-area house told her during the attack and during two later chance meetings that he had killed McCoy.
Horn didn't report the attempted rape to police because she feared retribution from the man, Behan said. Also, at the time of the sexual assault, Horn was not aware of McCoy's murder.
The man that Horn says assaulted her lived in the Grundy area at the time of McCoy's murder.
McCoy, 19, was raped and stabbed and her throat was slashed in her home along Slate Creek in Grundy.
Horn told Coleman's attorneys that when the man tried to rape her, she screamed for help. The man told her, "Shut up or I'll do you like I did that woman on Slate Creek."
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB