"The understanding we have with [the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency] is that if there's a public safety situation, they will fax those warrant requests to us, " the parole commission's Hutchison said.
Barlow testified that he and his supervisor reached Kelly on his cell phone Sept. 5, urging him to surrender to police. Kelly hung up on him, Barlow testified.
"It's a day we will always remember when the rest of the world forgets," Carol Smith wrote on the first anniversary of the slayings of her daughter, Erika, and Erika's father, Greg Russell.
(Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)
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Kelly was arrested late that night, after police officers spotted him on foot in College Park, gave chase and, this time, caught him.
Maintaining His Innocence
Kelly has maintained his innocence in handwritten court motions, as well as telephone interviews and letters to The Washington Post.
He has said he was at other locations the nights of the killings. The only person who can vouch for him has moved to California and cannot be found, he said.
"I didn't come out there and go on a rampage," he said in a telephone interview from the maximum security ward of Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup late last year. "I didn't kill nobody. . . . Killing people, robbing people? Look at me since I was 19. . . . I've never been charged with robbing or shooting somebody."
Kelly said that he was attempting to start up a discount clothing store, one that eventually would rival Wal-Mart, when police arrested and beat him during the June 10 arrest in Prince George's County. He said that incident led police to blame him for the later crimes.
His father, Roosevelt Kelly, told a psychologist examining Kelly that his son loved children and said that "the thing he's charged with, no, that's not him at all."
Kelly's court-appointed attorney in Montgomery County, Mary Siegfried, has bolstered Kelly's contention that police and prosecutors are trying to frame him. Russell, the murder victim, she wrote in a letter to Roosevelt Kelly, "must have something to hide."
"[The police] already have Anthony's DNA, so it wouldn't be too hard to plant it on something," she wrote in a letter. "Review the bible they say belonged to the deceased, . . . if it was really their's, which I doubt, their DNA should be somewhere on it."
A Case's Profile Fades
In the two years since that night, the case of Anthony Kelly has faded from the headlines. There are days when Carol Smith and her relatives have been the only spectators for court hearings.
This spring, she was stunned when Montgomery County Circuit Judge Durke G. Thompson declared Kelly to be incompetent to face the charges against him. The 63-page psychiatric evaluation of Kelly from the staff at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital -- "the longest and most involved report of evaluation in the recent history of Perkins," the judge wrote -- set off a series of contentious hearings.
According to the hospital staff, Kelly's worries about a government conspiracy to frame him have spiraled into full-blown delusions. At the same time, the psychologists acknowledge that he does not suffer from paranoid schizophrenia or mental retardation; he knows who everyone in the courtroom is and what their roles are.
"But, ultimately, he believes the death penalty or conviction is not a threat to him because he thinks the whole process is a means to make him tell them who actually did it," Angela Kim-Lee, director of pretrial services at Perkins, said in an interview. "That's what we thought was delusional."
Deputy State's Attorney John J. McCarthy fought that evaluation hard. Putting witness after witness on the stand who said Kelly appeared fine, McCarthy strove to show that Kelly's worries of a conspiracy were mere repetitions of things his own attorney has told him.
"He's not delusional -- he's repeating what his own lawyer said," McCarthy told the judge.
Thompson disagreed, and the case has stalemated. There will be no trial until the court finds that Kelly's mental condition has changed, and it is not clear how, or when, that might transpire.
Meanwhile, Paul A. Quander Jr., director of Court Services and Offender Supervision, has defended his agency's conduct in the Kelly case. In a letter dated Aug. 8, 2003 to D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), who questioned the handling of the case, Quander said that he believes "our agency responded to Mr. Kelly's conduct in an appropriate and timely manner."
Agency officials have declined to release their file on Kelly, citing federal privacy rules. In an interview this year, Quander said that his agency had noticed "some things could be done better" and made changes after the case. But he declined to specify what actions were taken. Barlow continues to handle parole cases, and Quander declined to say whether Barlow had been disciplined.
"There are no guarantees that I, as director of this agency, can give that people on supervision won't violate the law despite our best efforts," Quander said.
Love and Remembrance
Sometimes late at night, in the eye-fluttering moments that lie between wakefulness and sleep, Carol Smith can almost see Greg Russell and their child again, as if they somehow can still be found on the edges of passing time.
On the first anniversary of the slayings, dismayed by how the case had faded from public attention, she placed a death notice in the newspaper.
"Today is a day of remembrance and many sad regrets. It's a day we will always remember when the rest of the world forgets," she wrote.
In the notice, she included a picture of Erika and Greg, taken at Erika's last piano recital, at which she played "The Donkey." Erika is beaming, sitting up straight with good piano-playing posture, her long, dark hair falling over her shoulders. Greg, his arm around the child, can't keep a proud smile from sneaking across his face.
They look happy, a girl and her dad, having fun in the last summer of their lives.
