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July 2, 2009

‘Phantom knife’ forces continuance in Webb City stabbing case

By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

A Jasper County judge granted a continuance of a preliminary hearing Thursday in connection with a stabbing two years ago in Webb City to give the county prosecutor’s office the chance to present additional evidence.

Assistant Prosecutor Theresa Kenney had hoped to see defendant Christopher M. Vaughn, 33, of Joplin, bound over for trial on charges of first-degree assault and armed criminal action without having to call Vaughn’s alleged victim as a witness at the hearing in Jasper County Circuit Court.

The alleged victim, Tony Burton, is serving time in the Missouri Department of Corrections for a parole violation.

Two women who Kenney called to testify as witnesses to the June 16, 2007, stabbing in Webb City acknowledged under cross-examination by defense attorney William Fleischaker that they saw only some portion of the fight between Burton and the defendant, or its aftermath, and that they never saw a knife or sharp instrument involved.

“We have a phantom knife here,” Fleischaker argued after their testimonies. “Nobody saw anybody cut anybody.”

Vaughn is accused of stabbing Burton multiple times in a dispute at an after-bar-hours gathering at the home of an employee of Club 502 in downtown Joplin. The state’s two witnesses, Angela Hudson and Jennifer Mayhan, told the court that Vaughn’s girlfriend was flirting with Burton at the gathering, which provoked Vaughn and led to a fight.

Hudson told the court that she went into a bedroom to lie down about 40 minutes after arriving at the gathering. She testified that she had been in the bedroom about five minutes when the dispute started in a hallway outside, and she got up and looked out of the room to see what was happening.

Vaughn caught Burton with Vaughn’s girlfriend in the bathroom, and a wrestling match between the two men ensued on the floor of the kitchen, Hudson told the court. Hudson said she saw Vaughn get Burton in a headlock in the kitchen, and that the fight proceeded out a door onto a patio and into the yard.

Hudson said she went outside while the fight was still going on in the kitchen and did not see a knife involved. But, Hudson told the court, Burton came stumbling out of the house moments later, bleeding and claiming Vaughn had stabbed him. Hudson said she wound up taking Burton to a hospital in her car after the fight ended. She said he had “slash” wounds to one side of his chest, down both sides of his abdomen, another to his wrist and one across the bridge of his nose.

“He bled all over my back seat,” Hudson said.

Mayhan, Hudson’s friend and Burton’s girlfriend at the time, testified that she heard Burton say: “He stabbed me.”

Her description of the wounds varied slightly from Hudson’s testimony. She said there was one to his chest, another down his side, one across his nose and two small ones on his hand.

Mayhan told the court that Vaughn’s girlfriend started coming on to Burton shortly after they arrived at the gathering with Hudson and a male friend of Burton’s. But she also acknowledged under cross-examination that she never saw a knife or other sharp instrument involved, and that she never actually witnessed the infliction of Burton’s wounds.

She said other men at the gathering held the women who were there back from the combatants during the fight.

Fleischaker objected to both women’s testimonies with respect to what they heard Burton say, arguing that it should be inadmissible hearsay. Kenney countered that it should be allowed as “an excited utterance” of a victim, and the judge agreed.

But, with Fleischaker’s argument that his client should not be bound over “for a knife fight with no knife” appearing to hold some water with Associate Judge Richard Copeland, Kenney asked for a continuance to allow the prosecutor’s office to present additional evidence at a later date. The judge granted the motion and set a resumption of the hearing for July 30.

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