By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 2, 2006

Marion Fye's body may never be found. But a D.C. Superior Court jury decided yesterday that police had found the man who killed the 36-year-old mother more than two years ago.

Jurors convicted Fye's boyfriend, Harold Austin, of killing her just after Thanksgiving in 2003. Not since the early 1980s had the U.S. attorney's office in Washington sought to try someone for murder without having found the victim's body.

Even with an incriminating statement that Austin made to police, the case against him depended on establishing that Fye was indeed dead and that Austin, despite his denial of guilt, had killed her.

Austin, 33, who served several years in prison for robbery, had moved in with Fye and her family a few months earlier at their home in the unit block of V Street NE.

No one witnessed the slaying and apparently no one saw the corpse, but some of Fye's children testified that they heard an argument and a gunshot in the home and that they never saw their mother again. Blood that could have been Fye's was found splattered on the underside of a mattress.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Thomas A. DiBiase and Tonya Sulia convinced the jury that Austin shot and killed Fye and that the body was disposed of. He was convicted of second-degree murder and related charges.

Because this was his third felony conviction, Austin faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison when he is sentenced April 7 by Judge Erik P. Christian.

Christian took the unusual step yesterday of locking the doors to the courtroom as soon as the lawyers in the case were present. The Washington Post was unable to observe the proceedings, and a victim's advocate assigned to the case from the U.S. attorney's office also was left waiting in the corridor while the verdict was delivered.

Leah Gurowitz, a court spokeswoman, said Christian intended to keep out people being screened as jurors in an unrelated case to be tried in his courtroom. But blocking access to the public is rare in U.S. courts, particularly in criminal trials. Until the verdict, Austin's trial had been open.

Christian, a former federal prosecutor and former deputy mayor for public safety, is in his second month on the court's Felony 1 calendar, which hears homicides and sexual assaults. Yesterday's closed verdict was another in a series of incidents in which he has exerted tight control over his courtroom.

Last week, according to people who were in his courtroom, the judge had a spectator taken into custody after the man was heard mumbling during a proceeding. From the bench, the judge told the man to leave. When he didn't immediately respond, the judge ordered marshals to take the man -- who was in court to observe a relative's hearing -- to the cell block and have him tested for drugs, the witnesses said. The man was held for several hours.

In October, Christian had a lawyer for the D.C. Public Defender Service taken into custody after they sparred over the lawyer's contention that Christian was not allowing her to be heard on key issues. The judge called her allegation "absurd," and the lawyer, Gladys Weatherspoon, replied that the "whole thing" was absurd. Weatherspoon was released a short time later after the director of the defender service was summoned to meet with Christian.