Stabbed to death after attempting to fend off an attack, 19-year-old Rhonda Sue Warford was found in April 1992 in Meade County’s Dead Horse Holler, clutching two strands of gray hair in her right hand.
Microscopic analysis — the testing available at the time — showed only that the hairs didn’t belong to the victim, nor the two men charged with her murder.
Now, 20 years later, Garr Keith Hardin and Jeffrey D. Clark, who were convicted and sentenced to life in prison, will ask the Kentucky Supreme Court on Wednesday to allow DNA testing of the hairs and other evidence they say will show that another man killed Warford.
But Attorney General Jack Conway’s office is opposing the testing, even if the offenders pay for it themselves, saying Kentucky law only allows post-conviction DNA analysis for those sentenced to death.
The state also contends that even if DNA testing showed the hairs belonged to another suspect, it would prove only that a third person may have been involved, rather than exonerating Hardin and Clark.
Warford’s murder was widely reported at the time because police initially thought it was a Satanic ritual sacrifice, a theory later dismissed by prosecution experts.
Kentucky has the most restrictive laws in the nation for post-conviction DNA testing, joining only with Alabama in limiting it to evidence in capital cases. But Alabama allows testing in capital cases for offenders sentenced to life without parole.
Indiana, in contrast, permits DNA testing of evidence after convictions for all serious felonies — if the offender can show a reasonable probability he wouldn’t have been prosecuted or convicted if DNA testing had been done before trial.
Likewise, in Louisville, Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Stengel has a policy of allowing post-conviction DNA testing for any crime, as long as it is “relevant” and the offender pays for it.
Results in cases so far have exonerated two men convicted of rape and another of murder. Stengel says the attorney general’s office should be pushing to make his policy the rule statewide.
“I like Jack,” he said of Conway, “but I would tell them to look at your oath, and your oath is to do justice.”
Allison Martin, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said it couldn’t comment for fear of jeopardizing other cases.
But some Kentucky prosecutors have argued that extending post-conviction DNA testing to other cases could swamp the state crime lab and be prohibitively expensive if the state were forced to pick up the tab.
Lawyers for Clark, 41, who is in Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, and Hardin, 42, who is at Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex, said they wouldn’t comment because of their pending motion. Both were denied parole in 2006 and told they couldn’t apply again until 2014.
Missing in the dead of night
Warford spent April 1, 1992, hanging out with friends in the parking lot of a Kroger at 4211 S. Third St. in Louisville’s South End.
She told her mother that day that a strange man had harassed her, shouting that he wanted to marry her, as she had walked home.
She left home shortly after midnight to rejoin her friends and was never seen alive again.
After Warford’s body was found in Meade County three days later, with a fatal stab wound to her neck, her parents told Meade County Sheriff Joseph Greer that she had been dating Hardin, that he was friends with Clark, and that all three had dabbled in Satanic practices.
Police searched Hardin’s home and found a Satanic Bible and other books encouraging followers to sacrifice small animals, then cattle and horses, and eventually humans.
Although the prosecution’s experts ultimately determined that Warford’s death was not a ritual sacrifice, Commonwealth’s Attorney Kenton R. Smith argued at trial that it was satanically inspired.
He had other circumstantial evidence to work with, according to court records.
Both defendants, he showed, had lied to police when they denied owning knives, and Clark had falsely claimed to be unfamiliar with Meade County.
One of Clark’s ex-girlfriends testified that he had shown her how to kill people by stabbing them with a knife at the base of the skull — just as Warfield had been killed.
Hardin had told police that he warned the victim — as he had his other girlfriends — that he would kill her if he caught her cheating on him.
The prosecution conceded that the gray hairs in Warford’s clenched hand didn’t come from the defendants but suggested they may have fallen from Sheriff Greer when he investigated the crime scene.
And the prosecution showed that a hair found on Warford’s pants, which her mother said she had freshly washed, was microscopically similar to Hardin’s.
Smith also told the jury that Warford’s “fresh” fingerprint was found in Clark’s car, even though he had told police she hadn’t been inside it in four months.
On top of that, a jailhouse informant testified that Clark had twice confessed to the killing while they were housed together in the Meade County Jail.
Holes in the case
In their Supreme Court brief, lawyers for Hardin and Clark say the case was weaker than it seemed — so much so that Circuit Judge Sam Monarch said on the record in chambers after the verdict that he hadn’t expected a conviction.
No witnesses saw Clark or Hardin with the victim the night of the crime, and no direct forensic evidence linked either of them to it, said the appellate lawyers, Jason Kreag of the Innocence Project in New York for Hardin and Linda Smith of the Department of Public Advocacy’s Innocence Project in Frankfort for Clark.
One of the commonwealth’s witnesses admitted it is impossible to “time date” a fingerprint, proving there was no way to know if Warford’s print in Clark’s car was recent.
And the jailhouse snitch’s testimony was discredited when a letter was discovered after trial in which he pleaded with another inmate to corroborate his testimony “with enough —-” so they will “let me out.”
Lawyers for Clark and Hardin also presented alibi witnesses who insisted they saw the pair in Louisville before and after the murder — and that they couldn’t have gotten to and from Meade County between those times.
But the attorneys say the best evidence would be DNA testing of the hairs found in Warford’s hand.
In their brief, they say they expect the DNA will be a match to a convicted felon who had been paroled from prison before the murder and allegedly told his girlfriend that he killed Warford.
The lawyers cite an affidavit taken in May 2009 from another woman, E. Nicole Madison of Louisville, who said the girlfriend told her about the man’s confession shortly after Warford’s murder.
Madison, who testified about the confession before a special Meade County grand jury after the murder, says in the affidavit that she is “firmly convinced” Hardin and Clark didn’t commit the crime.
Madison says in the affidavit that she was threatened in 1992 when she testified and identifies the alternate suspect only as “John Doe” out of concern for her safety. But Kreag and Smith say in their brief that he is James G. Whitely, who allegedly confessed to his girlfriend.
In an interview with The Courier-Journal, Whitely, 47, who lives in Oldham County, denied any involvement in the murder and said he didn’t know Warford.
Whitely, who was convicted of manufacturing methamphetamine in 2006 and assaulting his wife in 2010, said, “I ain’t killed nothing in my —- life but fish.”
No need for DNA
In an interview, Smith, who retired in 2008 as commonwealth’s attorney, said authorities investigated Madison’s allegations.
“We chased that lead, and it went absolutely nowhere,” he said.
In January 2010, Monarch, by then a senior judge, rejected a motion to order DNA testing of the hair strands, in part because he said trial lawyers for Hardin and Clark knew about Whitely but elected not to point to him as a suspect — possibly because he had red hair, not gray.
Monarch also said the jury knew the hairs found in Warford’s hand didn’t belong to the defendants but still convicted them.
“Assuming the DNA analysis would confirm what was known prior to the time of trial, this would not be anything new,” he wrote.
Echoing that opinion, Assistant Attorney General Perry Ryan says in the state’s brief that Clark and Hardin have failed to show that a DNA test would have “compelled an acquittal.”
But in their brief and interviews, Smith and Kreag said if the hairs had been linked by DNA to a specific person — one who had supposedly confessed to the crime and had a criminal record — the defendants probably would not have been convicted.
The lawyers also are seeking DNA testing of biological material found under Warford’s fingernails, as well as the hair found on her pants that an expert said resembled Hardin’s.
“If this was a cold case, or a new case, the first thing police would do today is DNA tests of all this physical evidence,” Kreag said.
Kreag and Linda Smith say they hope the Supreme Court will use the case to issue clear directions on when post-conviction DNA testing should be granted.
But Kenton Smith, the ex-prosecutor who is now in private practice, said in an interview that he has no doubt justice was done.
“We absolutely got the right guy,” he said.
And Mary Warford, the victim’s mother, said she thinks Hardin and Clark are “fishing for straws.”
“They are behind bars where they belong, and they should stay there,” she said. “They killed our daughter.”
Their lawyers, however, say the case has the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction, including discredited snitch testimony, and they say they hope the Supreme Court will use it to issue clear directions on when post-conviction DNA testing should be granted.
“Such a statement,” they say in their brief, “would go a long way toward ensuring that actual perpetrators are punished and innocent people do not linger in prison for crime they did not commit.”
Andrew Wolfson, Courier-Journal