ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 22, 1996 TAG: 9601220022
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEDFORD
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
note: below
THE GUNS, KNIVES, moonshine stills and other items being stored by the Bedford County Sheriff's Office have become too much to bear.
Maybe that's the rifle Jeanette Elizabeth Swain used to kill her husband after an argument in April 1978.
That old .32-caliber pistol? It might be the gun Charles Edward Jennings used in 1965 when he shot and killed a 67-year-old country store owner as she sat in her car.
And that rusty old knife? Could be the one a Bedford County farmer used when he wounded the county Republican Party chairman during a disagreement over political redistricting in 1966.
The problem is, nobody's sure where a lot of this stuff - almost 200 guns and knives, the odd jug of moonshine and even a sword - came from.
And now it's Bedford County Sheriff Mike Brown's problem. Brown inherited piles of weapons and unlabeled items of evidence when he took office in January. Closets full. Duffel bags full.
Behind one filing cabinet, deputies found evidence and money from a 1982 bank robbery. And in the back of a patrol car was an old, bent kitchen knife speckled with rust.
One of Brown's new administrative officers, Sgt. Rick Wiita, is cataloging all of it. Most of the items, especially the weapons, will be destroyed by court order. Some of them, like an illegal fully automatic rifle that has been retooled to a semi-automatic, will be used by the Sheriff's Office.
"For some of the stuff we have, there's a paper trail on it, but very little," Wiita said.
He pulled out a half-full bottle of Senator's Club blended whiskey with a piece of evidence tape over the cap. "Is this the key piece of evidence that's going to solve the Haysom murders, or was this taken off somebody for drunk and disorderly?'' he asked. "We just don't know. There's no case number, no identifying paperwork, nothing."
However, Wiita is quick to point out that defense attorneys salivating at the idea of mistrials because of breaks in the chain of evidence can wipe off their mouths. A lot of this is old stuff, the flotsam and jetsam of some of Bedford's nastiest robberies and murders and assaults from 20 or 30 years ago.
Wiita hefted an old battle sword thought to have been used in an attack on a deputy some time ago.
"We think that assault on the deputy was pre-Civil War, but we're not sure," joked Administrative Lt. John McCane.
Many of the weapons, in fact, may have come from a cabinet in the Circuit Court Clerk's Office. When Clerk Carol Black took office in 1984, she discovered a cache of guns and knives stored inside a tall, unlocked wardrobe cabinet. The weapons, some of which were tagged as evidence and many of which couldn't be identified by case, apparently accumulated during the 20-year tenure of Clerk H. Page Scott, who died in office in 1982.
The court ordered that the weapons be turned over to the Sheriff's Office, but many or all of them were never destroyed or cataloged, it seems. Or maybe they were. The paperwork might just be incomplete or missing.
"There's nothing sinister" about the piles of unlabeled guns and evidence, Wiita said. "There was just a lack of procedure."
Former Sheriff Carl Wells, who retired last year after 22 years in office, apparently didn't specify rules for how deputies should handle evidence or when it could be destroyed. He didn't have a written policy and procedure manual for deputies until a month before he left office.
Under Brown's administration, deputies who obtain a piece of evidence fill out an evidence form. One copy of the form is attached to the evidence, another goes into a case file, and a third copy is given to the person from whom the item was obtained. The evidence is then locked in a secure area.
Storing the items is another obstacle that's being surmounted by the new Sheriff's Office. Up to now, many miscellaneous pieces of evidence were stored without any particular order in a large maintenance garage in the courtyard across from the county jail.
Among the piles of stuff in the garage, there's a red and yellow plastic Mickey Mouse tricycle sitting across from the wreckage of a confiscated hydroponic marijuana-growing operation.
There are brown cardboard boxes full of sheriff's reports dating back to when Brown was a county deputy in the early '60s. They'll be put on microfiche.
There also are two large iron safes painted black that came from the old jail. Both have 1863 manufacturing dates. One hasn't been opened; no one knows what's inside.
In a locked room, there are practically bales of green and brown marijuana. Clear one-gallon jugs of moonshine sit on a row of shelves, above unlabeled brown paper evidence bags containing various drugs. Upstairs, there are moonshine stills.
There's no telling how long some of it has been there. Brown's policy will be to immediately ask to destroy large amounts of confiscated drugs, keeping only small samples to use for evidence in court, McCane said.
And then there are things like the burgled Beta video player that Wiita and McCane are trying to get owners to reclaim.
Some items that they can't match with the proper owners will become the property of the Sheriff's Office, such as a motorcycle that will be used to assist a boat patrol on Smith Mountain Lake. Other items, such as children's bicycles, already have been given to local charities and youth groups.
Soon, the whole four-car garage will be remodeled. Part of it will become home to the investigations unit, which is crowded into a small, cluttered basement.
The rest will become an evidence lock-up with numbered bins and lockers, and - Brown hopes - a full-time evidence technician to catalog and place bar codes on each item, so it can be scanned into a computer database and tracked when taken from the office for trials or other purposes.
When the evidence is no longer needed, the courts will be consulted on how to dispose of it, Wiita said.
"That's the way it's supposed to be," he said. "So we have a paper trail from the minute a deputy secures a piece of evidence to the time that it's returned to an owner, given to charity or destroyed."
LENGTH: Long : 121 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff Sgt. Rick Wiita of theby CNBBedford County Sheriff's Office shows off confiscated guns and
rifles, a cache that includes automatic weapons. Officials want to
find ways to dispose of items seized over the years. color
2. STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff Sgt. Rick Wiita holds a jug of
moonshine and some marijuana, some of the accumulated evidence he is
sorting. (didn't run in New River.)
3. Cartons of files are stored in a building behind the Bedford
County Sheriff's Office. A company is being hired to put them all on
microfiche as a way to save precious storage space.