"Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream." -- Judge Learned Hand, 1923
HERE IS A STORY AS TWISTED AS THE THIN bands of highway that corduroy the mountainous tip of southwestern Virginia, a remote pocket of mining country where the river runs black with coal dust in the spring. This much can be stated with certainty: on the night of March 10, 1981, in the town of Grundy, a young woman named Wanda Fay McCoy was raped, stabbed twice in the chest and slashed across the neck with such force that the gash, 4 in. wide and 2 in. deep, cut almost to her spinal cord. When her husband Brad returned home, he discovered Wanda lying on the floor in a warm pool of blood. Her cable-knit sweater was hiked up around her neck and her indigo underpants shoved down around her left foot.
The brutality of the murder so stunned the people of Grundy (pop. 1,300) that from that time on, townspeople began to lock their doors at night. No one expected to sleep very well until the murderer was found.
They didn't have to wait long. Grundy police did not initially find any evidence of forced entry into the McCoy house, so they assumed Wanda must have opened the door to her killer. Brad said his shy, reclusive wife, who had been jittery since receiving a series of obscene phone calls the year before, would have opened the door to only three men in town. Police questioned all three and quickly decided on their man: Roger Keith Coleman, then 22, a coal miner married to Wanda's younger sister. Coleman had the misfortune of having a record and lacking a convincing alibi. He had served time from 1977 to 1979 for attempted rape, which helped persuade police that they had found Wanda's killer. A month later, they arrested him. A year later, there was a four-day trial. The evidence -- or lack of it -- raised doubts about his guilt. But after three hours of jury deliberation, Coleman was found guilty of rape and murder, and sentenced to death.
In the decade since then, Coleman has steadfastly maintained his innocence. He has also nearly exhausted his avenues of appeal. Barring a last-minute federal court intervention or a grant of clemency by Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder, Coleman, now 33, will be executed on May 20 by a high-voltage wave of electricity that will wipe out his nervous system, followed by a low-voltage shock designed to finish the job. It is a prospect that Coleman says leaves him "anxious, of course."
His current pro bono attorneys at the high-priced, high-powered Washington firm of Arnold & Porter have waged a canny campaign to draw media attention to Coleman's case. Their efforts, launched in 1984 and now spearheaded by a 28- year-old associate named Kathleen Behan, were given a boost when independent investigator Jim McCloskey turned his attention to Coleman in 1988. McCloskey is renowned for tracking down lost or overlooked evidence that has often led to the freeing of convicted murderers.
If, in essence, Coleman's supporters have sought to stage a new trial through the press, the tactic is understandable: the courts have so far failed Coleman miserably. It is quite possible he will die, the victim of a justice system so bent on streamlining procedures and clearing dockets that the question of whether or not he actually murdered Wanda McCoy has become a subsidiary consideration.