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Post by Charlene on Jan 23, 2012 12:49:05 GMT -6
And rightfully so - in this case, justice is a mockery.
On December 14, 1987, around 6:00 am, Edward Large and Mary Smith were found dead, inside a 1975 Cadillac parked on the side of US Hwy 70 near Boswell, Oklahoma. The car's ignition was on and the vehicle had apparently been left on until it ran out of gas. Edward was behind the steering wheel and was shot twice with a small-caliber handgun, once between the shoulder blades and once in the mouth. Mary was seated in the back seat and had been shot three times, in her forehead, cheek and jaw. The murders were apparently the culmination of a long-standing feud between the Large and St. Clair families. Fifteen years prior, Large had been charged but acquitted of shooting Michael St. Clair's brother David after an argument centering around children fighting at school. Mary Smith was apparently just an unintended victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Michael St. Clair was immediately suspected in the Large/Smith murders. His uncles said St. Clair bragged about murdering Edward, saying "I finally killed old Large. The last shot, I shot him near the back where he shot my brother." He also said to his uncle that when he killed Mary Smith, she was looking at him from behind a blanket, like she was playing peep-eye with him. An aunt testified that she was with St. Clair when he committed the murders and that he had used a red flashing light to make Edward Large think he was being pulled over by law enforcement officers. She said he walked up to the car and shot Large as he tried to step out of the vehicle. He told his uncle that he pushed Edward's leg that was hanging out of the car back inside and said, "Ya'll have a good time." Michael had returned to his car, but went back to the Cadillac, leaned inside and shot Mary Smith as she was screaming in fear. He then got back in his Suburban and drove to Durant and dropped his aunt off at her home.
A few years later, St. Clair hired a man to murder his uncle, Ronnie Lee St. Clair. On May 12, 1990, St. Clair and Kelsey forced their way inside Ronnie's residence, armed with a rifle and handgun. They demanded that Ronnie give them $20,000 in cash that they had heard Ronnie had, allegedly to buy cocaine for resale. One or both of them beat Ronnie until he finally took the money out of its hiding place. He then was forced outside to a storage building where he had hidden an ounce of cocaine. The pair then forced Ronnie into his own car, and driven to a Lone Star Gas processing station near Silo, and ordered out of the car. Kelsey emptied the 10-round clip into Ronnie's body, missing only one shot. He was struck in the back, face and back of the head. Both of his wallets were stolen, one containing a large sum on cash. Witnesses saw Kelsey break up the ounce of cocaine into one gram parcels.
The next day, Michael St. Clair told his cousin Raymond, Ronnie's brother, that he knew who killed Ronnie and he said he was going to meet and kill him at 10 pm that night. St. Clair drove to Kelsey's mobile home and retrieved the cocaine and made an appointment to meet Kelsey at 10:00 pm at another Lone Star Gas processing station. Kelsey spent the day partying with friends, then showed up at his cousin's home that evening and asked for a pen and paper and wrote a note. He handed the note to his cousin and said he was meeting a guy at 10:15 pm and as he left, he told his cousin, "If I don't ever see you again, it's OK. It doesn't matter." Kelsey was waiting at the meeting place when St. Clair arrived. He allegedly pulled a gun on St. Clair when he learned he wouldn't be paid for the murder of Ronnie, but couldn't get the gun out of his pocket quickly enough. St. Clair opened fire with a .38 caliber pistol, then shot him behind the ear, to make sure he was dead. St. Clair called his uncle Raymond and said, "The chickens are out of the coop" a pre-arranged phrase. The next morning, Michael drove to Raymond's house and told him that Kelsey had tried to kill him. The note Kelsey had written just moments before being killed was delivered to the sheriff's office. Kelsey had been convicted of murdering a man in 1976 and he served only 11 years in prison. He was the suspect in two additional murders in Oregon and one in Oklahoma in 1957.
In September 1991, while he was awaiting final sentencing for the murders of his uncle and the hit man, St. Clair escaped from a jail in Durant, Oklahoma, accompanied by another inmate, Dennis Gene Reese. Reese was awaiting trial for strangling and beating a woman to death in Oklahoma. After escaping, St. Clair and Reese fled from the facility in a pickup truck stolen from a jail employee and, when that truck soon ran out of gas, stole another pickup truck, a handgun, and some ammunition from the nearby home of Vernon Stephens and fled Oklahoma for the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. St. Clair's then-wife, Bylynn and her brother met the men in Texas and brought them over $1000 in cash, clothing, soap, shampoo, disposable razors, binoculars, a camouflage jacket and a pair of handcuffs. When Reese was subsequently arrested several months later in Las Vegas, Nevada, he confessed to his involvement in an ensuing crime spree.
According to Reese, after hiding out in Dallas for a few days, the men boarded a Greyhound bus bound for the Pacific Northwest but disembarked in Denver, Colorado, where St. Clair kidnapped a man, Timothy Keeling, and took his vehicle, again, a pickup truck, and St. Clair and Reese began driving back towards Texas. Timothy Keeling was 22 and was a paramedic. St. Clair and Reese saw a for sale sign on his white, customized pickup truck and approached Tim as he was leaving a grocery store and asked if they could take it for a test drive. Reese drove, St. Clair sat on the passenger side and Tim sat between them. As they left the parking lot, St. Clair pointed a .357 magnum revolver at Tim and handcuffed him. They drove through the night and Tim was talking to his kidnappers, praying for them. He showed them a photo of his infant daughter, scared for his life. While driving through New Mexico, but approaching the Texas border, St. Clair used the pretext of needing to stop to urinate along the roadside to coax Tim into getting out of the truck. St. Clair used the stolen handgun to execute Keeling in the desert, shooting him twice. When St. Clair returned to the truck, he told Reese that killing people was like killing dogs, that after you kill the first one, the next one is easy. Reese said St. Clair was happy and smiling when he said this. As they were driving on after murdering Tim Keeling, St. Clair went through Tim's wallet. He removed the photograph of Tim's 18-month-old daughter and tore it up and threw it out of the window. He said the reason he murdered Tim Keeling before crossing the border into Texas was because Texas enforces its death penalty law.
The men then drove Keeling's pickup truck to Denton, Texas, Lafayette, Louisiana and Shreveport, Louisiana before ending up in New Orleans, Louisiana. They went to a nightclub called Mud Bugs. They then drove north though Arkansas and Tennessee before ending up in Hardin County, Kentucky. They spotted a red Ford Ranger pickup truck at a rest stop where St. Clair kidnapped another man, Frances C. Brady and handcuffed him. The men then set fire to Keeling's pickup truck in order to destroy any incriminating evidence. Again, Reese drove and St. Clair sat in the passenger side with their victim between them. Reese said Frank Brady, a distillery employee, talked nonstop and was "worried and scared." After driving for around an hour and a half, St. Clair marched Frank into the woods and used his handgun to execute Brady, again two shots in the head, in a secluded area of Bullitt County, Kentucky. Frank Brady was the father of three daughters and had four grandchildren at the time of his brutal murder. His fifth grandchild was born six weeks after he died. Frank's handcuffed body was found on October 8, 1991. Reese said St. Clair had lost his handcuff key so he had to leave Frank handcuffed after he shot him. Shortly thereafter, when Kentucky State Trooper Herbert Bennett initiated a traffic stop of Brady's vehicle, which St. Clair and Reese were then driving, St. Clair fired shots from his handgun that struck Trooper Bennett's cruiser; and during an ensuing flight, initially in Brady's pickup and subsequently on foot, Reese was able to split away from St. Clair and had no further contact with him prior to his arrest.
St. Clair was arrested in Dec 1991 hiding in an upstairs bedroom at the home of his brother Hansel, in Oklahoma. The case was profiled on America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries. In February 1992, a Bullitt County Grand Jury returned an indictment that charged that “on or about the 6th day of October, 1991, in Bullitt County, Kentucky, Dennis Reese and Michael St. Clair did commit capital murder by shooting Frances C. Brady with a pistol.” Reese entered into a plea agreement with the Commonwealth and agreed to testify against St. Clair. St. Clair pled not guilty and his case was tried before a jury in August and September 1998. At trial, St. Clair employed an alibi defense and contended that, although he had accompanied Reese to New Orleans for a few days after their initial flight to Dallas, the men had parted ways upon their return to Dallas, and soon thereafter he returned to Oklahoma where he hid out on the farm of a family friend until shortly before he was recaptured in December 1991. St. Clair denied accompanying Reese to Colorado or New Mexico and further denied that he had ever been in Kentucky. Accordingly, the primary issue for jury resolution at trial was whether St. Clair or someone else - specifically Reese and/or an unidentified accomplice - had murdered Brady.
The state's theory of the case was that St. Clair himself shot and killed Brady. In addition to Reese's testimony, the state proved its case through (1) Trooper Bennett's identification of St. Clair as the man who had fired two shots in his direction on the night of the murder; (2) another man's identification of St. Clair and Reese as being in possession of a vehicle similar to Brady's vehicle at a gas station/convenience store in the area; (3) testimony relating to telephone calls made to St. Clair's friends and relatives back in Oklahoma from a payphone located at this same gas station/convenience store; (4) testimony identifying items found in Kentucky, on the victim's person and in his pickup truck, as similar to or the same items that St. Clair's then-wife had given to St. Clair and Reese when she met them in Texas; (5) a jailhouse informant, Scott Kincaid , who testified that St. Clair had admitted his involvement in the crime; (6) ballistics evidence demonstrating that the same handgun could have fired the shots that killed both Keeling and Brady and damaged Trooper Bennett's cruiser and bullet composition evidence suggesting that bullets from the same box killed Keeling and Brady; and (7) testimony to the effect that St. Clair's fingerprints were found both on items recovered from inside the Brady vehicle and on the outside door of the same vehicle. Reese was sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for at least 25 years.
After St. Clair was sentenced to death, the court allowed a second sentencing trial after a 1998 law added Life Without Parole as a sentencing option in Kentucky. The second jury also returned a death sentence, as did a third, in October 2011. St. Clair mocks the justice system, calling himself the $5 million man. In an interview with a local newspaper, St. Clair said, "Since May 11, 1995, I've been housed in Kentucky at the taxpayers' expense, hee ha. Now, here it is 2010, April 12, and I AM NOT DEAD."
Frank Brady's daughter, Melanie Brady Drury, is outraged by the delays in this case. Frank's widow Merle said she is ready and willing to go to another trial and has not lost faith. Three years after Frank's murder, tragedy again struck this family when his daughter Melisa Maureen Brady Sloan disappeared in Orlando, Florida under very suspicious circumstances.
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