His Best Chance to Get Off Death Row Was DNA on the Murder Weapon, but Prosecutors “Contaminated” the Evidence

Long before the 2001 trial started, then-St. Louis County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Keith Larner decided the butcher knife used to kill Felicia Anne Gayle Picus was worthless" as a piece of evidence.

On Wednesday, Larner testified in court that he had concluded there was no additional forensic testing that needed to be done on the murder weapon used in the 1998 killing. The knife handle had been analyzed for fingerprints, but none had been found; blood on the blade matched Picus.

Larner said he saw no problem with his repeated handling of the weapon without using gloves in the months leading up to the trial of Marcellus Williams, who Larner would prosecute and send to death row for the murder. Now, the retired prosecutor was defending his actions during a one-day hearing held as part of an effort to overturn Williams's conviction.

There was nothing to link anybody to the crime on that knife," Larner insisted.

Williams, who is scheduled for execution in September, maintains his innocence. Until last week, the knife was central to proving his claim.

Williams sought testing of the weapon before his 2001 trial, but the judge denied his requests. DNA testing done in 2016 excluded Williams from handling the weapon. Instead, the results revealed unknown male DNA.

This case is about contamination."

Last week, a new round of analysis confirmed that Williams's genetic material was not on the knife, but it could not exclude either Larner or his investigator as the source of the unknown DNA. Whatever DNA might have existed connecting the perpetrator to Picus's murder was irretrievably lost - thanks to the prosecution's handling of the evidence.

Now, the contamination itself would be at the center of current elected county prosecutor Wesley Bell's efforts to overturn Williams's conviction. According to Bell, the state's willful mishandling of the evidence before trial had violated Williams's rights, meaning his conviction and death sentence must be overturned.

This case is about contamination," Matthew Jacober, a special counsel appointed to represent Bell at the hearing, told Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton.

From the witness stand, Larner sparred with one of Williams's lawyers, insisting that his handling of both the murder weapon and the case had been aboveboard. A five-lawyer contingent from Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey's office - which had intervened to block a deal between Williams and prosecutors, leading to Wednesday's hearing - was there to back the former prosecutor. Larner hadn't mishandled the evidence at all, Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane told Hilton. Larner's handling of the evidence without gloves was routine.

To prove Larner's actions constituted a constitutional error that would make Williams's conviction untenable, Bell's office would have to prove the evidence had been mishandled on purpose. And it wasn't, Spillane said. Instead, it was Larner's practice was to not use evidence-saving techniques."

It wasn't bad faith," Spillane said of Larner's actions. It wasn't even negligent."

Now, Hilton is tasked with determining whose version of the truth - and of constitutional error - is correct. His decision on whether Williams's conviction should be overturned is due by September 13, just two weeks before Williams is slated for execution. Should he adopt the attorney general's reasoning, that execution will almost certainly go forward.

Dan Picus came home from work on August 11, 1998, to find his wife murdered. Despite a wealth of physical evidence found at the scene, including the knife, the investigation quickly stalled.

It wasn't until months later, after Picus posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to a conviction, that a jailhouse informant came forward claiming his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, confessed to the crime. Police later secured a second informant, a former girlfriend of Williams's, who also claimed he'd confessed to the murder, though their stories shifted over time and often conflicted with one another.

Despite the informants' accounts, none of the physical evidence at the scene tied Williams to the killing. Their testimony, however, was enough to secure a conviction against Williams.

With each of his appeals denied, Williams was twice on the brink of execution, including in 2015 when the Missouri Supreme Court stepped in and ordered DNA testing on the knife. Although the testing revealed the unknown DNA, the court dismissed the appeal. Ultimately, Williams's execution was reset for September 24.

Meanwhile, Bell's office had started looking at the case and in January 2024 filed a motion to vacate Williams's conviction. In addition to the foreign DNA on the knife and the dubious informant testimony, Bell cited issues with the quality of Williams's legal defense and misconduct by prosecutors whom he argued had struck qualified individuals from the jury pool because they were Black. These factors cast inexorable doubt" on Williams's guilt, he argued.

With Jacober, the special counsel, ready to argue the county's position, the latest DNA analysis - revealing that neither Larner nor his investigator could be excluded from contributing DNA to the knife - had changed the calculation: The weapon, which had been key to proving a wrongful conviction, became useless for identifying the murderer.

Instead, Bell's office struck a deal with Williams on August 21. The prosecutor would concede constitutional error and take the death penalty off the table if Williams agreed to enter a so-called Alford plea that lets Williams acknowledge a strong case against him while maintaining his innocence; the plea would let him to avoid the death penalty by accepting a life sentence, while retaining the right to challenge the arrangement if new evidence comes to light.

Hilton, the judge, agreed with the outcome, as did Dan Picus, who'd told the court he did not want Williams executed. Hilton was slated to resentence Williams the next day.

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The move sparked the attorney general's intervention. Bailey's office ran to the Missouri Supreme Court, arguing that Hilton didn't have the power to agree to such a deal and, essentially, that Williams should face execution. The court sided with Bailey, ordering Hilton to hold a hearing on Bell's motion to vacate the conviction as originally planned. Hilton set the hearing for August 28.

Sitting at the witness stand on Wednesday afternoon, Larner cut a familiar figure. Lanky with a long face and birdlike nose, he resembled actor Sam Waterston's district attorney character Jack McCoy from the original Law & Order" TV show. Under questioning, he was self-assured and insistent that his cause in prosecuting Williams was a righteous pursuit.

Jonathan Potts, a lawyer working with Williams's attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project, asked Larner about the motivations and credibility of the snitches he'd used to tie Williams to the murder.

Each had a history of repeated run-ins with the law, and each had collected $5,000 from Dan Picus in exchange for their testimony. Larner had even advocated for one, a man named Henry Cole, to receive the money months before he'd testified against Williams. Cole came forward predominately for the reward," Larner said, and to tell the truth."

Larner said he asked Picus to pay Cole in advance after it became clear the snitch's commitment to testifying was wavering.

We gave you the money," Larner recalled Wednesday of his promise" to Cole. Please come back for trial."

Larner dismissed any notion that anything questionable had occurred. He said the informants were the two strongest witnesses" he had produced in a murder case during his nearly 32-year career as a St. Louis County prosecutor.

Larner bristled when Potts pressed him about his reasons for striking Black people from the jury pool. Although Larner eliminated all but one Black person from the panel, he insisted he hadn't run afoul of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that rejecting jurors based on race is unconstitutional.

In his motion to vacate Williams's conviction, Bell pointed to several instances where it appeared Larner did just that. In one case, Larner rejected a Black man he said looked very similar" to Williams. Pressed on the instance, Larner doubled down. They looked like brothers, like familial brothers, not like Black people," Larner said. They were both young Black men, but that's not why they were similar."

Much of Pott's questioning focused on Larner's handling of the murder weapon. Larner said the knife was collected from the medical examiner's office, carefully packaged and processed for forensics, then repackaged and securely stored. The state then summarily concluded no additional testing would be conducted, Larner said.

Still, it would be more than a year before Williams was indicted for the crime and Larner was assigned to the case.

Larner said he readily concluded that the weapon was irrelevant" because he was sure the killer had worn gloves. Larner testified that an investigator had told him about the gloves, and Cole, the informant, claimed Williams said he wore a pair during the killing.

Although Bailey's office has parroted this line, there is nothing concrete to back it up. The second informant, Williams's ex-girlfriend, said Williams told her that, after the murder, he washed blood off his hands.

Nobody bothered to pin any of it down. Instead, Larner admitted on Wednesday that in the months before Williams's trial, he handled the knife on at least five occasions without wearing gloves of his own.

Larner's repeated handling of the weapon before trial came as a surprise to one of Williams's then-trial attorneys, Christopher McGraugh. Now a circuit judge in the city of St. Louis, McGraugh testified on Wednesday that, back in 2001, it was well known that handling forensic material without precautions could contaminate the evidence. He said that when he handled evidence related to Williams's case, he'd been required to wear gloves.

Though Larner claimed there was no indication before trial that the defense wanted any additional testing on the knife, court records show otherwise. Williams's other trial attorney, Joseph Green, who is also now a sitting circuit court judge, testified that when the lawyers learned another piece of physical evidence had been destroyed, they filed a motion to postpone the trial, in part so they could do forensic testing of the knife. The request was rejected.

Larner denied during the hearing that the defense ever sought DNA testing. Wrong, wrong!" he exclaimed. He said he opposed the defense's motion to postpone the trial because his case was ready to go.

Judge Hilton had a question of his own for Larner: Could the prosecutor have consented to the defense request? Not without the approval of his boss, Larner said. Besides, there was no additional evidence" anyone was going to obtain that would prove anything.

Under cross-examination, Spillane, from the attorney general's office, did his best to prop up Larner's testimony. In how many of the cases he prosecuted over his nearly 32-year career had Larner handled the evidence after initial forensic testing was done, Spillane asked. Larner replied, Probably all of them."

No one fathomed that the prosecutors would have such disregard."

Spillane told Hilton that there was no reason to vacate Williams's conviction. His claims about the racist jury selection and deficient defense lawyering had been previously considered by the Missouri Supreme Court and denied.

The only thing that was new was Bell's claim that the evidence had been mishandled, he argued, but even that was nonsense - since Bell couldn't prove the prosecution had contaminated the knife on purpose.

In his closing remarks, Potts recalled how eager Williams was for the knife to be tested. Just as Bell had seen it as a key to exoneration, Williams viewed the knife as an opportunity to definitively prove he hadn't been at the crime scene.

No one fathomed that the prosecutors would have such disregard," Potts said. For 23 years, the reasonable people in this room thought that was impossible."

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