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Coleman is not on death row because some witness claimed to see him murder Wanda McCoy. Or because someone saw him enter her house. Or because his fingerprints were found in the house, on her body or on a murder weapon. He is not even in trouble because someone offered a plausible motive for Coleman's wanting his sister-in-law dead. The case against Coleman is built solely on circumstantial evidence: bits of hair, blood, semen that may be his, but then again may not.
Coleman sympathizers find this evidence pretty thin; detractors think it is solid. "I'm not only convinced beyond a reasonable doubt," says Tom Scott, a Grundy attorney who acted as a special prosecutor during Coleman's trial. "I'm convinced beyond every imaginable and conceivable doubt of Coleman's guilt, based on that evidence alone."
It was not as though he had no alibi at all. At the trial, six witnesses vouched for Coleman's movements the night of the murder. He went to a grocery to buy some antacid pills; he reported for work at a coal mine, only to learn that the night shift had been laid off; he picked up his work clothes at the mine, then stopped to chat with a friend; he visited another friend in a trailer park; he went home to his wife. Important testimony came from Philip Vandyke, a friend of Coleman's, who could point to the precise time of their conversation because at its conclusion he punched a time clock. Although Vandyke had no apparent motive to lie on Coleman's behalf and risk being charged with perjury, the prosecution apparently persuaded the jury to disregard his testimony.
In so doing, it opened up a 30-minute gap in Coleman's account. During that time, prosecutors argued, Coleman parked his truck, waded across a creek, climbed a hill the length of three football fields, raped Wanda twice, slit / her throat, then escaped unseen. The prosecutors offered no eyewitnesses and little proof to support this scenario. In a sense, the most important clues in this case may be the ones that were missing. Given the haste with which Coleman would have had to act, he might have been expected to leave telling signs behind. A fingerprint. A footprint. At the very least, there should have been traces of the mud and water that would have clung to his pants after fording waters 10-in. deep. No such evidence was offered.
Absent a motive, murder weapon or witness, the prosecution's case rested on three pieces of evidence. A forensic test demonstrated that one of two types of sperm found on the victim -- the other sperm, the prosecution argued, was that of her husband -- belonged to someone who was a blood type B secretor, meaning that the blood type can be determined by samples of any bodily fluid. Coleman matched the description -- but since roughly 10% of Grundy's population has type B blood, it is likely that others in the town fit the bill. The prosecution also produced brown hairs the same color as Coleman's, lifted from Wanda's red pubic hair. But other hairs picked up when police vacuumed the McCoy's home the night of the murder did not match Coleman's.