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The defense team could have made more of those same clothes, but didn't. Given the gory nature of the killing, Coleman's clothes should have been splattered with blood. They weren't. Given his need to get out of the McCoy house -- by the prosecution's own scenario, Coleman showered later, not at the McCoy's -- there should have been traces of semen in his underwear and on his wash cloth. There weren't. The prosecution claimed that Coleman waded through a 10-in.-deep creek, a charge it supported by pointing out that the legs of his jeans were wet. But, observes Coleman's uncle, disabled coal miner Roger Lee Coleman, "his long underwear wasn't wet; his socks wasn't wet; the inside of his boots wasn't wet either."
The lawyers also never raised the issue of the blackish-red soil found on Wanda's hands and extending up the sleeves of her sweater, or of her broken fingernails, which were caked with soil. Such details suggest a struggle that might have taken place outdoors. Coleman had no scratches on him; neither did any of the other people questioned immediately after the murder.
These are the sorts of considerations that Coleman might have raised on appeal. But during his first habeas appeal, a pair of pro bono lawyers from Arnold & Porter argued primarily that there was insufficient proof of his guilt. Since then, court after court has rejected Coleman's arguments, maintaining that such details should have been presented in the first appeal. A year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against his petition for an evidentiary hearing because the Washington lawyers filed papers a day too late. "Coleman might very well be innocent, yet the Supreme Court has used this arbitrary rule that he can't take advantage of habeas corpus just because it wasn't technically filed correctly," says Democratic Representative Don Edwards, chairman of the House judiciary subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights. "That is really shocking."
All Coleman has left to argue is his "actual innocence." It is the one legal path -- albeit a narrow one -- that might enable him to circumvent the habeas corpus guidelines that now essentially restrict capital felons to a single federal appeal. Kathleen Behan, his new attorney, has been relentless in developing the innocence argument. She has made more than a dozen trips to Grundy to uncover new evidence and enlist further support. A few months ago, she rented a backhoe to dig up the landfill where Keester Shortridge said he dumped the bloody sheets. For her effort, she was rewarded with a 1-ft. by 2- ft. swatch of the sheet. She has not only lobbied the press for coverage, but has waged a letter-writing campaign to Virginia lawyers, entreating them to write to Governor Wilder and ask for clemency on Coleman's behalf.