Reynolds v. State

• Decision Date: 03 May 1972
• Docket Number: No. 44841,44841
• Parties: Edith REYNOLDS, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas, Appellee.
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Page 866

489 S.W.2d 866

Edith REYNOLDS, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas, Appellee.

No. 44841.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

May 3, 1972.

Rehearing Denied Nov. 8, 1972.

Second Rehearing Denied Feb. 21, 1973.

Arturo C. Gonzales, Del Rio, for appellant.

John F. Pettit, Dist. Atty., Brackettville, and Jim D. Vollers, State's Atty., and Robert A. Huttash, Asst. State's Atty., Austin, for the State.

OPINION

ODOM, Judge.

This appeal is taken from a conviction for the offense of murder. The punishment was assessed by the jury at life imprisonment.

Appellant challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to support the conviction. She argues that the state's case is based upon the testimony of an accomplice witness whose testimony is not corroborated.

On December 9, 1969, Joe Sandoval, an employee of the Texas Highway Department, was mowing grass beside Farm Road 693, at a point approximately two miles southwest of Brackettville, when he discovered the body of a deceased adult male. The body had decomposed to the extent that an identification was not made, and no identification papers were found near the body.

Local law enforcement authorities were immediately notified, and the body was removed to Del Rio, where an autopsy was conducted. Jack Mercer, a fingerprint expert with the Department of Public Safety, was also contacted. Mercer took fingerprints and sent one copy to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. These fingerprints established the identity of the deceased as James R. Reynolds, the husband of appellant.

Dr. Ruben C. Santos, the Chief Bexar County Medical Examiner, performed an autopsy on the body of James R. Reynolds on December 11, 1969. The autopsy report signed by Dr. Santos and introduced into evidence, relates that death resulted from '. . . multiple head injuries (blows caused by blunt instrument with force) with multiple depressed fractures of the skull, brain injury and throat injury, probably due to manual strangulation.' Dr. Santos also concluded in his report that the death 'more likely occurred about the 4th or 5th day of December, 1969.'

The deceased was a sergeant in the United States Air Force. On November 26, 1969, he had been scheduled to board a plane at Laughlin Air Force Base for his new duty station in Vietnam. He had missed this flight, and the Air Force had immediately notified the Del Rio Police Department that he was missing. Included in the missing persons report was a description of Sergeant Reynolds' automobile, a blue 1968 Chevrolet Impala bearing Texas license number HRN 264.

On that same day, Officer Tom Birtrong, of the Del Rio Police Department, received a call from his dispatcher that a vehicle was presumed abandoned under the San Felipe Creek Bridge on Highway 277. Officer Birtrong investigated the report and found a blue 1968 Chevrolet stuck in the mud under the bridge. He ran a check on the registration of such vehicle and found that it was registered in appellant's name.

On the night of December 9, 1969, a meeting was held at the officer of Texas Ranger Grady Sessums in Del Rio to discuss the investigation. In attendance at that meeting were Ranger Sessums, Ranger Sergeant John Woods, and Kinney County Sheriff J. A. Sheedy. The meeting was held prior to the identification of the body, and it was learned at that time that a watch and two rings which had been taken from the body might possibly belong to the deceased. This tentative identification of these items coupled with the Air Force missing persons report led Ranger Sessums to call on appellant.

Appellant was at this time in the hospital at Laughlin Air Force Base, where she had been admitted for an apparent overdose of pills in an attempt to commit suicide. ¹ Ranger Sessums located appellant in the hospital, and on December 10, 1969, went there to talk with her. At the time of this first discussion with appellant, she was under no suspicion. She identified the watch and rings as being of the type owned by her husband. She was asked if she would give her permission for the officers to check her residence, a mobile trailer, to obtain fingerprints of her husband so that they could be checked with the prints taken from the body. Permission was given, and officers retrieved shaving lotion bottles and a hair oil bottle from the bathroom cabinet for the purpose of fingerprint tests and comparisons.

On December 11, 1969, Sessums again visited appellant at the hospital. She was told that her husband's body had been identified. She was also given her 'statutory warning' at this time. ² After having been warned of her rights, she was asked if she would consent to another search of the trailer for more clues. Once again appellant consented to the search of her trailerhouse. She also consented to a search of her automobile.

On December 12, 1969, appellant's daughter, Linda Beryl Smith, came to the Department of Public Safety Office and volunteered information concerning the death of her step-father. ³ In her written statement she accused appellant of having murdered the deceased.

A search of appellant's trailer was conducted on December 13, 1969. Numerous items were seized, including whiskey bottles, a bedside table, a steel hammer, a bone fragment, and blood and hair specimens from a bedsheet, the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. The automobile ⁴ was searched, and more blood stains were discovered. Samples of these blood stains were forwarded to the Department of Public Safety laboratory. Analysis of these stains revealed that these were blood type A, which matched the blood type of the deceased.

On August 3, 1970, prior to appellant's trial, Linda Beryl Smith was granted immunity. She testified at appellant's trial and was declared by the court, in the charge to the jury, to be an accomplice witness as a matter of law.

Linda Beryl Smith's testimony reveals that she was living with appellant and the deceased on November 25, 1969. At 10:30 P.M. on that evening, she returned home from a date and saw the deceased asleep in his bedroom and appellant lying on the couch in the living room. She talked with appellant who told her that she 'had somebody flying in to get rid of J.R. ⁵ . . . get rid of him.' The alleged killer, a man named Monte Goode, was flying in that night and was scheduled to arrive in Del Rio at 2:00 A.M. The witness testified that she was not surprised by these statements by her mother, since appellant had been making statements like that for about four years and since she was always talking about getting rid of her husband when she was 'drinking real heavily.' Appellant having been drinking heavily that evening, the daughter 'half-way believed her and half-way didn't.'

At approximately 2:30 A.M. on November 26, 1969, Witness Smith was awakened upon hearing the deceased make a 'coughing, gagging, and a choking sound.' When she got out of bed to ascertain what was wrong, appellant told her to get back in her room. A few minutes later she again saw appellant, who appeared to be sober and 'real scared.' She heard the back door of the trailerhouse upon and, looking out a window, observed appellant, dressed in an orange plaid coat and pajamas, and a man, who she could not clearly see, place a blanket-covered body in the trunk of the family car. The pair returned to the trailer for a brief period and then left again, driving away in the car. The witness stated that, as soon as the couple had departed, she went into the deceased's bedroom. There she found a trail of blood leading from the bed to the bathroom and a puddle of blood in the bathtub. The deceased was nowhere to be seen, the telephone in the deceased's bedroom was gone, and the blanket on his bed was missing. She then returned to her room and went back to sleep.

At approximately 6:00 A.M., the witness was again awakened, this time by the appellant's teturn. The pants of appellant's pajamas were wet, and she had crawled into bed with her daughter in an attempt to go to sleep. Witness Smith asked her if she had drowned the deceased, and appellant's response was that she had killed him with a hammer. Upon being asked where they had placed the body, the response was 'that they had dumped him on the side of the road,' the road in question being the one from Brackettville to Eagle Pass. Further questioning elicited the statement from appellant that she had killed her husband for the insurance money and that Monte Goode was to get $10,000.00 for his part in the crime. The car had been abandoned when '. . . it bogged down because she was washing the trunk of the car out, and she said she threw the blanket in the creek, and the hammer, and the telephone she threw it out in the weeds beside the creek . . ..' ⁶ The witness was warned not to mention the incident to anyone.

Mother and daughter then proceeded to clean the apartment. Appellant changed the sheets on the deceased's bed and sprayed the bedside table with silver spray paint to cover blood stains. Linda Beryl Smith scrubbed the bathroom to remove blood stains and disposed of appellant's keys. She testified that these actions were performed in order to conceal the crime and aid her mother. She also took the orange plaid coat, which her mother had worn, to the cleaners. ⁷ She left instructions to remove the bloodstains on the coat and placed it in her mother's name. The coat in question belonged to the daughter (Linda Beryl Smith).

Witness Smith further testified that she did not tell the story of the murder before she did because she wanted to help her mother and because she feared that, if she told it, Goode would return and kill her. She admitted that she had been granted immunity from prosecution. She stated that she had previously told June Slaven about the incident and that she and Slaven had driven out to the country on December 6, to look for the body. They did not find it. She further testified that she did not realize that she was the secondary...