mine the credibility of the evidence. The state is expected to continue fighting the ruling. Without a gun-bullet match, there’s virtually no case against Woodworth.
The Target continued from page 5 The night of the shooting, local farmer Chris Ruoff says he drove past the Robertson home twice: on a trip into town to drop off his girlfriend, then on his way back, when he spotted a car parked outside the Robertson home around midnight. Investigators also found tire tracks heading east toward town — not west toward the Woodworth home. Deister and Calvert sought to disprove Ruoff’s story in the fall of 1991. They parked Deister’s car in front of the Robertson home one night. After walking up and down the road, they determined that it was too dark to see the car, and Ruoff was either mistaken or lying. Ruoff insisted that he saw the vehicle. So Deister and Calvert asked Ruoff if he had been having an affair with Cathy Robertson. A stunned Ruoff denied it. “It was just stupid,” Ruoff said in court. “You may think I didn’t see anything, but I’d bet a million dollars I did.”
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eister locked onto Woodworth as a prime suspect due to his familiarity with, and proximity to, the Robertson home. Deister spun several theories for a motive: Perhaps Woodworth would kill to get his parents’ attention or maybe, as the private detective said in a 1995 deposition, Woodworth harbored a “sexual fantasy toward Cathy or maybe even his own mother.” Both theories were unsupported by thousands of pages of court documents and various other records filed in the case. Prosecutors later considered other motives. Maybe Woodworth killed so his father could cash in on a $102,000 life-insurance policy on Robertson. Yet prosecutors presented no proof at either trial that Mark Woodworth knew about the policy. Robertson and his wife had also reportedly complained that Mark Woodworth kept the profits from about 60 acres of soy that the teenager planted and harvested himself. Prosecutors wondered if Woodworth might have killed to ensure that he could keep the money. On July 4, 1992, Deister and Calvert showed up at the Woodworths’ home while the teenager was home alone, claiming that they were investigating vandalism of nearby farm equipment. Woodworth went with the investigators to the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office. They took the teenager to a 10-by-10-foot soundproof interrogation room, and Calvert read Woodworth his Miranda rights. Shortly into the four-hour questioning, it became clear that Calvert and Deister weren’t interested in vandalism. “It was obvious they wanted to talk about the murder,” Woodworth says. Deister and Calvert questioned Woodworth about his father’s deteriorating relationship with Lyndel Robertson. Woodworth knew of the lawsuit accusing Robertson of stealing from the family business. He told
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The highway on which the neighbors lived. investigators that his father “kind of made me think that he’s [Lyndel’s] an asshole.” Woodworth allowed the investigators to fingerprint him. Investigators later ran Woodworth’s prints and found a match: a single thumbprint on a .22-caliber box of bullets inside the Robertsons’ shed. Investigators suspected that the bullets in the shed were used in the homicide. At trial, the defense argued that Woodworth target-shot with other farmhands around the property. One witness testified to shooting around the farm with Woodworth in the months before the shooting. Deister and Calvert obtained a warrant for the Ruger six-shooter that Claude Woodworth kept in a nightstand next to his bed. Although investigators recovered bullets from the crime scene, the rounds were badly mangled. So, in August 1992, Lyndel Robertson consented to a risky surgery to remove a slug that had been buried in his liver for nearly two years. Investigators said it was their best chance for a gun-bullet match. But results from the Missouri Highway Patrol crime lab and an independent ballistics analyst in Kansas City were inconclusive. Deister phoned Steve Nicklin, a friend in England who’s a forensic analyst, and asked him to compare the newly recovered bullet with the Woodworth gun. “I really don’t think we will ever have a good case if this firearm can’t be identified as the shooter’s weapon,” Deister wrote in a letter stressing the importance of the results. The U.K. lab’s preliminary report repeated the other expert assessments: A gun-bullet match was “inconclusive.” Deister flew to England to visit Nicklin, and the lab there strengthened its findings in its final report. The gun barrel left scratches on the slug that “strongly suggested” the Woodworth gun fired the bullet, Nicklin later testified. But when pressed, Nicklin admitted that
there was still “not enough detail to form a conclusive association.” In October 1993, Woodworth was indicted for murder. After a polygraph test, the examiner accused Woodworth of lying. The exa m iner, according to records, told Woodworth that there were only two scenarios: He was either a coldblooded killer or he was pressured into shooting his neighbors. Woodworth claims that the examiner pulled his chair close, stared into his eyes, and began poking him hard in the leg with his index finger. “You could get the death penalty for this,” Woodworth recalls the examiner telling him. “They’ll execute you.” Woodworth’s reply hung over both of his trials: “Well, we all have to die someday.” In his case review years later, Judge Oxenhandler left little doubt as to his thoughts about Deister and the integrity of his investigation. Oxenhandler bristled that Deister was “clandestinely” given access to an active criminal case file and tried to lobby a forensic expert. According to Oxenhandler, Deister “disclosed and deep-sixed witness testimony as deemed necessary to keep tune with the theme of his investigation: Woodworth did it.” Deister’s conduct is central to the state’s case as prosecutors, for a third time, work to convict Woodworth. The case was assigned to Platte County Circuit Court Judge Owens Lee Hull Jr. when the Missouri Attorney General’s Office filed to retry Woodworth in early 2013. In April, Hull ruled to exclude the ballistics evidence from Woodworth’s third trial, squarely blaming Deister’s “odious” handling of the evidence. Hull characterized Deister and Calvert’s work as a “wildcat investigation.” He added: “There has been an egregious, flagrant, and cavalier disregard of evidentiary procedures and process.” In November, a Missouri Court of Appeals three-judge panel affirmed Hull’s order to exclude the ballistics from any future trial. In court, prosecutors from the AG’s office argued that a jury, and not a judge, should deter-
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y the fall of 1993, Lyndel Robertson was fighting against time. He wanted Mark Woodworth charged, not just for murder but also for felony assault — the statute of limitations was set to lapse within months. Robertson urged longtime county prosecutor Doug Roberts to file charges. The prosecutor refused, citing a lack of evidence. So Robertson contacted Kenneth Lewis, Livingston County’s presiding circuit court judge, hoping to sidestep the prosecutor. In a September 1993 letter, Robertson begged the judge to convene a grand jury, calling the prosecutor inexperienced and unable to handle high-profile cases. Five days later, Robertson got his grand jury. The county prosecutor later sent Lewis a letter saying that the victim’s family mistook his “desire to make a thorough review of all the reports with this case with lack of enthusiasm.” The prosecutor continued: “I can understand his [Lyndel Robertson’s] frustration, but recall that soon after this crime, Mr. Robertson was adamant that we charge another young man,” referencing Thomure. “Had his decision been rubber-stamped by this office, an innocent person might have been prosecuted.” The prosecutor recused himself. With the local prosecutor out of the way, Lewis turned to the Attorney General’s Office, which sent its star prosecutor: Kenny Hulshof. Hulshof, who would go on to serve six terms in Congress, had traveled the state, assisting on high-profile cases. But in recent years, due to Hulshof’s conduct in court, appellate judges have freed two men, whom he helped convict of murder, and have commuted several death sentences to life without parole. In a letter to Hulshof, Lewis wrote: “To say that Doug Roberts had been uncooperative would be a monumental understatement.” Lewis scoffed that Roberts had “boycotted” the grand jury proceedings, even though the prosecutor had already recused himself. Lewis also referred to the statute of limitations that would soon run out: “I felt we could wait no longer for Mr. Roberts to act.” In his review of the case, Judge Oxenhandler wrote a stinging rebuke of Lewis, noting that the judge had “lost sight of his judicial sense of fairness. In effect, he became a prosecutor.”
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ale Whiteside has no doubt about Woodworth’s innocence. “That boy didn’t do nothing,” says Whiteside, 83, a Republican who represented Livingston County in the Missouri Legislature for a decade. Since Woodworth’s first conviction in 1995, Whiteside has been an continued on page 8 january 9-15, 2014
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