Edwards v. State

• Decision Date: 15 June 1951
• Docket Number: No. 147,147
• Citation: 81 A.2d 631,198 Md. 132
• Parties: , 26 A.L.R.2d 874 EDWARDS v. STATE.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

Page 132

198 Md. 132

81 A.2d 631, 26 A.L.R.2d 874

EDWARDS v. STATE.

No. 147.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

June 15, 1951.

Wm. J. McWilliams and Ridgely P. Melvin, Jr., both of Annapolis, for appellant.

Robert M. Thomas, Asst. Atty. Gen (Hall Hammond, Atty. Gen., and Anselm Sodaro, State's Atty. of Baltimore City, Baltimore, and Jas. C. Morton, Jr., State's Atty. for Anne Arundel Co., of Annapolis, on the brief), for appellee.

Before MARBURY, C. J., and DELAPLAINE, COLLINS, GRASON, HENDERSON and MARKELL, JJ.

DELAPLAINE, Judge.

Thomas Alexander Edwards, appellant, a Negro, 23 years old, was indicted by the grand jury of Anne Arundel County for the murders of John H. Mahlan and Mary C. Kline, of Glen Burnie, on September 17, 1948. The cases were removed to the Criminal Court of Baltimore, where he has been tried twice. At the first trial, which was held in February, 1949, he was found guilty of murder in the first degree and was sentenced to be hanged. The Court of Appeals reversed the judgments on the ground that appellant's confessions were obtained by offering an inducement to him and therefore were improperly admitted in evidence. Edwards v. State, Md., 71 A.2d 487. At the second trial, which was held in June, 1950, he was again found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to be hanged. On the present appeals his main contention is that the evidence was not sufficient to sustain the convictions.

The record shows that Mahlan, 25, took Miss Kline, 18, for a ride in his Pontiac sedan on Friday evening, September 17, 1948, about 9:15 o'clock, and they did not return. On Saturday morning about 7 o'clock a Pontiac sedan was seen in a bean field along the Old Annapolis Road several hundred yards north of the Mountain Road. A garage man at Lipin's Corner notified the Anne Arundel County Police and three officers went promptly to the scene. They found the right side of the front seat and the floor in the back of the automobile soaked with blood. There was a bullet hole in the right front window and another in the left front window. There were also fragments of a buillet on the floor in front of the front seat. A woman's shoe was wedged under the rear of the front seat. Chief John H. Souers who arrived about 8 o'clock, observed footprints leading from the automobile. He followed them for about 250 feet until they were lost in the weeds near the little stream that runs through the field. The girl's father, John Edward Kline, identified the automobile as Mahlan's and the shoe as his daughter's. Kline made a search along the stream, and when he reached the two-plank bridge on the path leading to the Negro settlement of Freetown, he found Mahlan's motor vehicle operator's license torn into five pieces. Two of the pieces were on the bridge and the other three were on the ground.

On Sunday, September 19, Ernest Geisler, of Severna Park, one of many persons who searted for incriminating articles, found a bunch of keys in a hole more than a foot deep near the bridge. The keys were Mahlan's. The theory of the State is that the murderer abandoned the automobile and fled across the field toward the bridge, and tore up the operator's license evidently intending the pieces to fall in the stream, but in his haste dropped them and the keys on the ground.

On Monday afternoon, September 20, the bodies of Mahlan and Miss Kline were found by George Aisquith, a road worker, in a clearing about 175 feet from the Chesterfield Road near its intersection with the Defense Highway. This place was about 26 miles from the place where the automobile had been abandoned. There was no clothing on Miss Kline's body from the waist down except a shoe on her right foot. It was found at the autopsy that a bullet had entered the back of her head. Her left index finger had been nearly cut off by a bullet. On the right side of her head there was a hemorrhage, which indicated the probability that a heavy blow had been struck. There were also bruises on both knees. A bullet had entered Mahlan's left temple.

The bullets which were extracted from the two heads and also the fragments of the bullet found on the floor of the automobile were sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington for examination with the object of determining the type of weapon from which they were fired. In making the barrel of a pistol, a hole is drilled through a bar of metal, and after the hole has been finished a rifle cutter is passed through the barrel with a twisting motion, so that it cuts and scrapes away a thin shaving of the metal as it goes, thus leaving in the barrel a spiral of grooves. The spaces between these grooves are called lands. When the pistol is fired, these grooves and lands leave their marks upon the bullet.

Robert A. Frazier, special agent of the F.B.I. assigned to the laboratory, found that each of the bullets had faint rifling characteristics with no definitely defined dimensions or physical characteristics. While the rifling characteristics were not distinct, he found that the bullets had streaks faintly indicating that the weapon which fired them had been rifled with six lands and grooves turned in a right-hand or clockwise direction.

On Sunday afternoon, September 26, 1948, Carl Phelps, a Prince George's County farmer, found an empty cartridge case in the weeds where Miss Kline's body had lain. He gave the cartridge case to Mr. and Mrs. Russell Wade, of Millersville, and they immediately went to the Ferndale Police Station and turned it over to Chief Souers. The Chief examined it, put it in an envelope, and locked it in the safe. The next morning he handed the envelope to Officer Praley with instructions to take it to the F.B.I. in Washington. Frazier received the cartridge case on September 27 and designated it Q-4. On September 28 Officer Praley got it back from the laboratory and returned it to Chief Souers, who again locked it in the safe. On October 7 Chief Souers again delegated Officer Praley to take it to the F.B.I. laboratory. Frazier returned it to Sergeant Meade on November 10. It was thereafter in the custody of Chief Souers until the first trial.

On October 10 Officer Praley, accompanied by two other officers, went to appellant's home along Marley Creek near Freetown to look for empty cartridge cases, and they found one in the yard. On the following day he took it to the F.B.I., where it was designated as Q-12. It was a 9-millimeter short cartridge case, commonly known as .380-caliber. On October 18 the F.B.I. reported: 'No microscopic marks were present on this cartridge case for comparison with the cartridge case found near the body of Miss Kline.'

On September 20 David Weishwar, of Millersville, found three unfired cartridges in a root beer bottle near appellant's home. The bottle was under a bag of crab shells in a pine bush about ten feet from the Marley Neck Road. He turned the cartridges over to the police. Robert M. Zimmers, special agent of the F.B.I. assigned to the laboratory, found that all three bullets were Czechoslovakian. By spectrographic examination he compared the three bullets with the bullets extracted from the bodies of the victims and found that they were of the same chemical composition and identical in all observable characteristics.

On October 9 appellant, who was known to be the owner of a pistol, was arrested as a suspect. On October 12, when he was interrogated by State and Baltimore City police at the Ferndale Police Station, he claimed that on the night when the murders were committed he went to a moving picture show in Baltimore. When he was asked where his pistol was, he said that he had sold it in August to one of the workmen at the American Sugar Refinery in Baltimore, where he was employed. The officers took him to the plant, but he could not find the man who he said had bought his pistol. He was released on October 12 and given two weeks to find the purchaser.

Appellant was arrested the second time on October 25, and was held in custody about two hours.

On November 8 he was arrested the third time and taken to the Waterloo Barracks of the Maryland State Police for further interrogation. There it was found that he had previously lied to the police, for he now admitted that he had never sold his pistol. He asked Sergeant Cassidy what would happen if they found his gun. Cassidy told him: 'The gun would be sent to where there would be a scientific examination made of it. It would depend on that examination as to just what would happen.' Appellant finally decided to tell where his pistol was. He said that he had put it in the bottom of the cupboard in the kitchen of the house of his brother James where he lived. The officers went there and found the pistol where he said it was. It was a Czechoslovakian pistol of 9-millimeter short caliber, known as .380-caliber.

While in custody at the Waterloo Barracks, appellant also told the police that they could find a box of .380-caliber cartridges in the attic above his bedroom. The officers went there again and found the cartridges.

On November 9 Officer Praley took appellant's pistol to the F.B.I. He also took again the cartridge case found in appellant's yard. This time the cartridge case was designated Q-23. Frazier found (1) that the cartridge case picked up where Miss Kline's body had lain matched a test cartridge fired from the pistol as to firingpin impressions, and (2) that the cartridge case picked up in appellant's yard also matched a test cartridge fired from the pistol. The F.B.I. thereupon made the determination that the two cartridge cases were fired from the same weapon.

Appellant contended that the cartridge case found where Miss Kline's body had lain should not have been admitted in evidence. It is a settled rule that an instrument of crime found at or near the place of the crime need not be positively identified as the instrument used in the commission of the crime before it may be admitted in...