Burden of Proof

At first, Brad McCoy didn't believe it. He had played sandlot baseball with his brother-in-law and believed Roger had been wrongly accused in the rape case. And there was no bad blood between Roger and Wanda -- she had doted on her little sister and treated Roger like family. Roger had even served as a pallbearer at her funeral. But police said the evidence was persuasive, and Brad quickly came to accept that Coleman was a cold-blooded killer.

The trial opened on March 15, 1982. At a gas station next to the courthouse, someone posted a sign "Time to Bring Back the Hanging Tree." The defense team -- two local lawyers, neither of whom had ever tried a major criminal case -- asked for a change of venue. But presiding Judge Nicholas Persin ruled Coleman could get a fair trial in Grundy.

The prosecution's case was built upon circumstantial evidence -- there were no witnesses to the crime. Brad McCoy testified that Wanda was a timid and anxious person who would have opened her front door at night only to a man she knew and trusted, such as her brother-in-law. The prosecution's forensics expert said three small spots of blood on Coleman's dungarees matched Wanda's blood type, and that two pubic hairs found on her body had similar characteristics to his. The state's serologist said the rapist's semen contained traces of type B blood -- the same as Coleman's and 10 percent of the male population. The pants Coleman handed over to investigators the day after the murder were wet on the bottom 10 inches of each leg. Prosecutors theorized that Coleman had parked his pickup truck across Slate Creek from the McCoy house, committed the deed and then fled across the shallow stream to avoid being seen by neighbors. And they heard from a cellmate, who said Coleman had confessed the crime to him.

Coleman claimed he had an alibi for the time of the murder. After learning that his evening shift had been canceled, he had stopped to shoot the breeze with his good friend Phillip VanDyke, then had gone to a nearby trailer park to pick up an eight-track Supertramp tape he had left at Sandra and Scott Stiltner's place. After that, he said, he went to a public bathhouse in town to shower, as miners customarily did, and change into clean clothes. There simply wasn't time, he insisted, for him to have pulled up near Slate Creek, made his way to Wanda McCoy's house, and raped and killed her before Brad McCoy got home. VanDyke corroborated his story, saying the two men parted company at about 10:30. But Sandra Stiltner testified that Coleman had come and gone from her place at about 10:20, leaving a 45-minute window -- just long enough for a rapist-killer in a hurry, according to the prosecution.

"Bear in mind rapists are women haters, not women lovers," says Thomas Scott, one of the prosecutors. "He didn't go there to engage in foreplay; he went there to kill her. It could have easily occurred in 10 minutes or less."

The trial started on a Monday morning and ended on a Thursday afternoon. The jurors took 3 hours 30 minutes that evening to find Coleman guilty. The next day, they decided on the death penalty.

Judge Persin had never sentenced a man to die before. "I hated it," he recalls. "I knew what I had to do, and it bothered me so much I hardly slept that night." But given the evidence and Coleman's history, the judge says, he believes the verdict and the penalty were correct.

At his sentencing hearing, Coleman told the court he didn't much care whether he lived or died. His wife had filed for divorce. "Last night when the verdict of guilty came back, I lost the only thing that ever meant anything to me, my freedom, my life and my wife, whom I love very much. At this point, the death penalty or life, it doesn't matter. It's up to the Lord now, anyway."

Once he got to death row, however, Roger Coleman changed his mind.

SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE in her small Charlottesville townhouse, Marie Deans smiles softly, recalling the first time she met Coleman on death row. "He was really feeling sorry for himself. You know: 'My life was good, and everything was fine, and now I'm in this situation.' " He told her he was considering dropping his appeal. She listened for a while before losing patience. "Look, Roger," she recalls telling him. "If you're really innocent, I'd think you would want to get out of here rather than be executed."

"He just sat there for a few minutes, and then he got this little grin on his face, and he said, 'Okay, I want to work with you.'"

Deans became involved in prison reform after her mother-in-law was murdered in 1972 by an escaped convict. She and her grieving husband asked themselves why so many people came out of prison even more violent and antisocial than when they went in. The couple started doing volunteer work with inmates, and, when she moved from her native South Carolina to Richmond in early 1983, she opened the Virginia Coalition of Jails and Prisons. She quickly discovered that the state's death row inmates were among the most neglected, and she began counseling them. She hooked them up with lawyers and made sure they filed their appeals. She became fiercely dedicated to one goal: keeping them alive.