DOUBT
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
In another murder case, Hayne noted
in his report that he had removed
and examined the decedent’s ovaries
and uterus. The victim was a man.
having bitten his girlfriend a few weeks
before she died. That, of course, doesn’t
validate West’s methods. Gates may have
bitten Mabry, but there was no evidence
he bit her on the day she died (indeed,
a competent analyst should have recognized that the marks were weeks old).
And the bite marks weren’t evidence
that he killed her.
In October 1997, Gates’ attorney asked
Humphreys County Circuit Court Judge
Jannie Lewis to suppress West’s testimony, citing the questions about West’s
credibility and about bite-mark evidence
in general. Lewis refused, finding that
there was no reason to doubt West’s
credibility, though Lewis did give Gates
funding to hire his own expert witness.
A few months later, District Attorney
James Powell sent the scrapings taken
from Mabry’s fingernails to the crime lab
in Jackson for DNA testing. Such testing
was more primitive at that time. A DNA
test could exclude someone as a suspect,
but couldn’t yet match someone to biological evidence the way the technology
can today. The tests came back a few
weeks later. Kathy Mabry had scratched
someone in a frantic fight to save her
life, but it wasn’t James Earl Gates. In
fact, it wasn’t any of the men the police
had rounded up as suspects — not even
Douglas Myles, the man with the scratch
on his cheek.
On January 21, 1998, Powell dismissed
the murder charge against Gates. It was
now 10 months after the crime. Memories had faded. Some witnesses had left
town. And Roseman and Jones were back
to square one.
Julie Mae Wilson was crushed when
she heard the news. Her daughter’s killer
was still on the loose, and with so much
time now passed, it seemed unlikely he’d
ever be found. But she was also terrified.
Gates may not have murdered Mabry,
but he had shown he could be a violent
man. He was now free, likely angry, and
almost certainly knew that Wilson had
told the police he beat her daughter,
which is likely what first made him a
suspect. Roseman and Jones told Gates
he wasn’t to go anywhere near Wilson,
her home, or Mabry’s boys without Wilson’s permission.
“We didn’t see him much after that,”
Wilson says. “But those first few weeks,