WAYNESVILLE, Mo. — Detective Brian Martin interviewed David W. Spears a day after Spears reportedly confessed to another investigator that he had participated in the rape and murder of Rowan Ford.

Martin, a Barry County sheriff’s investigator, wanted to know firsthand from the 9-year-old girl’s stepfather: Did he kill her?

“I can’t say that I didn’t,” Spears told Martin, according to a transcript of the interview that was presented at a hearing Monday in Pulaski County Circuit Court in Waynesville.

Martin pressed him to be more clear.

“Any way that you look at it, I didn’t save her,” Spears told him. “I might as well have (killed her).”

Spears’ responses to Martin’s questions on Nov. 10, 2007 — one day after Spears reportedly admitted to Chief Deputy Chris Jennings of the Newton County Sheriff’s Department that he had joined his friend Chris L. Collings in the rape and murder of the girl — were telling in the opinion of an expert witness who testified for several hours Monday on a defense motion to exclude the purported confession from trial.

False confession?

Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of San Francisco and an expert on police interrogations and the obtaining of false confessions, told the court that he interviewed Spears one year ago and reviewed case documents. He said he believes that Spears falsely confessed to Jennings after about a week of accusatory interrogations during which investigators used a number of coercive techniques that various studies associate with the obtaining of false confessions.

Leo said he thinks Spears gradually came to internalize a belief that he must have committed the crime even though he had no memory of it, and this produced a false confession. Leo told the court that the interview with Martin one day later shows that Spears still had no memory of committing the rape and murder of the girl, just as he had maintained all along under questioning before the reported confession.

The hearing concluded Monday without Elizabeth Bock, the assistant attorney general prosecuting the case, getting an opportunity to cross-examine Leo. Circuit Judge Tracy Storie set another hearing for July 26 to conclude the pretrial matter.

Motion to suppress

The motion to suppress Spears’ confession has been the subject of three previous hearings in April and May. The judge will decide the issue after the final hearing in July. Spears’ case is scheduled to go to trial in August of next year.

Authorities say that Spears, 27, and Collings, 34, each confessed to the rape and murder of the girl the night of Nov. 2-3, 2007. They are charged with first-degree murder, forcible rape and statutory rape.

The co-defendants are being tried separately in Pulaski and Phelps counties on changes of venue from Barry County. The state is seeking the death penalty for both men.

Court documents allege that Collings abducted the girl from her home in Stella and took her to his residence in Barry County after the two defendants and a third man had been out drinking together. Spears is accused of going to Collings’ home later in the night, witnessing the sexual assault of Rowan and joining in. Both men purportedly confessed to having strangled her with a rope or cord.

Cynthia Dryden, Spears’ attorney, who works for the capital litigation division of the state public defender’s office, told the court that there is no evidence other than his confession that Spears either raped or killed the girl.

“As far as I’m aware, that is the only evidence there is in this case,” she said.

There is no trace evidence of the girl’s body having been inside the Chevrolet Suburban that Spears purportedly drove to Collings’ home, she said. That is significant because in his confession, Spears reportedly told Jennings that the men hauled the girl’s body in the Suburban to dispose of her down a sinkhole in McDonald County. On the other hand, Dryden said, there is trace evidence of Rowan having been in Collings’ pickup truck.

Bock, the prosecutor, told the judge that the defense is well aware that there is other evidence in the case, and that Dryden was simply “grandstanding” with her comment to the contrary.

“We couldn’t get this far if we didn’t have anything,” Bock said.

Taped portion

Dryden told the court that only a small concluding portion of Jennings’ interrogation of Spears on Nov. 9, 2007, was taped. She said the portion during which he purportedly confessed to certain details of the crime was not recorded. Nor were several other interrogations of him by investigators in the days leading up to his confession, she said.

There are five tapes of telephone conversations her client had with Mark Bridges, the Newton County coroner and a former sheriff who Spears knew. There also are recordings of two “ride-alongs” that Spears took with Bridges before his arrest and alleged confession.

Leo, the law professor, said investigators lied to Spears, telling him that his own mother believed he had committed the crime and that Collings had implicated him in his confession.

Leo testified that during the “ride-alongs” with Bridges and in the final interrogation by Jennings, investigators actually fed Spears details of the crime that had the end effect of “contaminating” the validity of his purported confession.





Defense



The defense maintains that investigators coerced a false confession from David Spears by confronting him with false evidence, making both implicit and explicit threats, and minimizing the consequences of telling them “the truth” while maximizing the consequences if he did not.