Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, October 20, 1995                   TAG: 9510200049
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: VIRGINIA   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TRICKERY ALLEGED IN SLAYING CONFESSION

A drifter's confession that he beat a Roanoke woman to death during a three-state crime spree should not be used against him in court because police "tricked" him into talking, his lawyer argued Thursday.

Paul D. Thompson initially refused to talk about the death of Virgie Green - who was struck in the head with a blunt instrument and stuffed in the trunk of a car behind her Old Southwest home - when police approached him in November as he was being held in Texas on unrelated charges.

"I said no, get the hell out of my face," Thompson testified Thursday in Roanoke Circuit Court.

Although Thompson, 26, ended up confessing to killing both Green and an elderly man in West Virginia in later statements to police, defense attorney Jonathan Apgar argued that those statements should be thrown out.

Once someone invokes his constitutional right not to talk to police, he said, authorities are not allowed to reinitiate contact with the suspect. A Florida detective did just that, Apgar said, when he questioned Thompson a second time while taking his photograph for a line-up.

"I think Mr. Thompson was tricked into talking about it, and once so tricked continued to do so because he thought the damage had already been done," Apgar told Judge Clifford Weckstein.

Weckstein delayed a decision on the motion, giving lawyers 14 days to file written arguments.

Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Greg Phillips defended the manner in which police obtained the confessions, arguing that Thompson's prior arrests made him intimately familiar with the interrogation process, and that he willfully waived his rights and made a legal statement.

"We don't have a case where Paul Thompson was beaten with a rubber hose," Phillips said.

According to testimony, Thompson made several statements - to Roanoke Detective Neil Tolrud about Green's death last October, and to Florida detective Paul Martin about the attempted murder of a man near Tampa several days later. Thompson has since been convicted of the Florida crime and faces a murder charge in West Virginia.

The only details about Green's killing released Thursday came in a brief written statement introduced as evidence.

"I hit her with a piece of steel wrapped in a wash cloth," Thompson said in the signed statement. "I hit her in the back of the neck, then hit her about 10 more times."

"I wrapped her head in two trash bags and her body in a blue and brown blanket. We put her body in the trunk of a blue car."

Thompson's traveling companion and former cellmate in a West Virginia prison, 28-year-old David McKeone, has already been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the killing.

At a trial in June, McKeone testified that Green, 44, befriended them and invited them to stay at her Woods Avenue home. But after becoming concerned that Green would report them to police, Thompson hit her in the head as she sat playing cards in her home, according to McKeone's testimony.

Thompson, who faces the death penalty if convicted of killing and robbing Green, is scheduled for trial in December.