M. Chris Fabricant - Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System

and the

AMERICAN CRIMINALJUSTICE SYSTEM

M. CHRIS FABRICANT

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Published by Akashic Books

All rights reserved

2022 M. Chris Fabricant

ISBN: 978-1-63614-030-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945696

First printing

Akashic Books

Brooklyn, New York, USA

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For

Keith Allen Harward,

Steven Mark Chaney,

and Eddie Lee Howard

Virginia v. Keith Allen Harward

&

the Rise of Junk Science

Newport News, Virginia

On a warm September evening in 1982, twenty-two-year-old Teresa Perron was home alone with her three children, all under four years old, the youngest still an infant. It had been a typical late summer day for the young mother: an afternoon at the community pool, a mountain of laundry, spaghetti, piles of dishes. She was ready for the kids to wind down. After dinner, she turned on the television and laid a sleeping bag out on the living floor, hoping theyd fall asleep. One by one, they did. Although Teresa was tiny, under five feet tall and only seventy-five pounds, the kids were still small enough for her to carry them upstairs. She tucked them in and went to bed down the hall. Her husband Jesse was working a late-night shift at the navy base nearby and wouldnt be home for hours.

Teresa felt uneasy. She couldnt sleep. There had been a moment earlier that afternoon that she couldnt put out of her mind. Shed passed a sailor hitchhiking by the side of the road. When she didnt stop and give him a ride, hed yelled Bitch! through her open window. Then, later in the afternoon, Teresa had been hanging laundry out to dry in the backyard when she noticed a man in a navy uniform standing by the back gate. It wasnt unusual to spot a sailor in Newport News; thousands of enlisted men were stationed at the base. But this man seemed familiar, maybe the hitchhiker. He was openly staring at her and didnt break eye contact when she looked back at him. Instinctively, Teresa called her children back inside the house and closed the door behind her.

She gave up on sleep after an hour or so and decided to go downstairs to secure the back door with a wooden beam, locking Jesse out of his usual entrance. Sometime after 10 p.m., she dozed off on the living room couch.

A knock on the front door woke her. It was a little after midnight. It must be Jesse. She heard his voice through the door and hurried to let him in. The young couple spent a few minutes together, chatting, sharing a cigarette. After a while Teresa went back upstairs to bed, put at ease by the presence of her husband, their kids in bed down the hall. Later she heard Jesse taking a shower and felt his damp body beside hers as he climbed into bed and the couple fell into an exhausted sleep.

About an hour later, a thumping sound jolted Teresa awake again. She opened her eyes, and there was a man in a navy uniform standing over her bed wielding a crowbar. He brought it above his shoulder and smashed it down on Jesses head, spraying blood across the bedroom. With his free arm, the intruder yanked Teresa out of the bed and pinned her to the floor under his boot. Gravely wounded, Jesse stirred and the sailor brought the crowbar down on him again, warning Teresa to keep quiet, that he wasnt going to kill him, just knock him out. Jesse was helpless to stop him. The sounds of a brief struggle gave way to the sound of thumping as he succumbed.

The sailor dropped the crowbar on the floor next to Teresa. He reached for her, tore off her nightshirt, then raped and sodomized her while her husband lay dying in their bed. When he had finished, the man warned her that he would attack her children next if she didnt keep quiet and do what he wanted. He pulled her to her feet and put his arm around her neck in a choke hold. Using a spare diaper as a blindfold, the sailor steered Teresa by the neck from behind out of the bedroom and toward the stairway.

Downstairs, the house was silent and dark. She recognized the smell of Ivory soap from the sailors arm and could feel his breath in her ear as they moved into the familys kitchen, where he told Teresa to get him a Pepsi from the fridge. In the darkened living room, the sailor asked Teresa whether she smoked. She got her cigarettes from the side table and the sailor lit one up for her and another for himself. The two sat in the dark smoking together, his arm around her neck the entire time. Minutes crept by. He put his cigarette out in the empty Pepsi bottle, and came for her. On the sleeping bag still out on the living room floor, he raped her again; moved her to the couch and sodomized her there. During the last assault he repeatedly bit her thighs, leaving several painful bite marks.

Teresa never cried out. She did not resist. She endured the agony of the brutal rape, the pain of the vicious biting, in silent tears. Afterward, the sailor sat on the couch smoking cigarettes in the dark with Teresa lying at his feet, curled up on the floor waiting for what was next. Finally, he told her to get into the sleeping bag and zipped it over her head. She gave him directions to Norfolk when asked and could hear him rummaging through her purse before leaving through the back door, out onto Warwick Boulevard and into the darkness.

* * *

Quiet through the entire ordeal, Teresas three kids were still asleep upstairs. Their father was dead. Their mother remained burrowed inside the sleeping bag until she was sure the sailor was gone, then went upstairs to get her rifle and call the police.

Squad cars arrived, along with an ambulance. At the hospital, the usual protocols were followed. A doctor administered a rape kit to preserve biological evidence. The bite marks, red and swollen, up and down her thighs, were documented with dozens of photographs. Over the haze of the next few days, Teresa viewed hundreds of mug shots of potential suspects, but it was useless. She could not make an identification. What she could recall was that the intruder was white, clean-shaven, about the size of her late husband, 5'10", 150 pounds, and that his uniform had three nested Vs on the sleeve. The military insignia indicated to investigators that the sailors rank was Ensign 3 or below, likely an enlisted man from the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier dry-docked at the navy base.

There were thousands of suspects.

Crime scene investigators processed the house for evidence, dusting for fingerprints, preserving the cigarette butts, the couch cushion, the diaper. Neighbors were interviewed but nobody had seen or heard anything, no leads were developed. The first piece of promising information came from an interview with the night watchman at the 50th Street entrance to the navy base. Hed seen a young, white sailor with a blood-spattered uniform return to base between 4:30 and 5 a.m., about the time the assailant should have arrived if hed returned immediately after the attack. A tracking dog sniffed the diaper from the assault and followed that lead from the Perrons house to the 50th Street entrance.