State v. Bennett
| Decision Date | 25 June 2020 |
| Docket Number | 35297-8-III |
| Court | Washington Court of Appeals |
| Parties | STATE OF WASHINGTON, Respondent, v. CHAD GERRIT BENNETT, Appellant. |
UNPUBLISHED OPINION
Chad Bennett appeals his 2017 conviction and 660-month exceptional sentence for the second degree intentional murder of his 82-year-old landlord, Lucille Moore. We find no prejudicial error and affirm.
Lucille Moore owned and rented out several homes in her Ephrata neighborhood. In late July 2014, she rented a house to Chad Bennett, then age 24, and married with four children. Mr Bennett was employed as a farm worker for C & C Farms owned by the Cobb family.
On September 7, 2014, Mr. Bennett went to Ms. Moore's house to pay his rent. According to Bennett, he was there three times that day: first at around 12:30 p.m. to pay rent second to pay the remainder of his deposit, and third at around 1:00 p.m. to retrieve his wallet, which he had inadvertently left behind.
On the morning of September 8, 2014, Moore's neighbor, Joyce Andersen, found Ms. Moore lying on the floor with a pillow over her face and her shirt soaked with blood. Ms. Andersen called police, who saw a slash across Moore's throat and confirmed she was dead. Forensic pathologist Dr. Eric Kiesel later determined Moore had sustained multiple significant head injuries, was likely manually strangled, had received two shallow cuts and a stab wound to her neck, and was stabbed 17 times in her chest, 11 of which penetrated her heart.
Detective Todd Hufman was the lead detective. He set forth details of his investigation in a probable cause statement. Hufman enlisted the Washington State Patrol (WSP) Crime Scene Response Team (CSRT) to help process the scene. CRST's team leader, forensic scientist Trevor Allen, worked with Hufman to prioritize collection of items that could contain deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) evidence. Among those items sent for testing were the blood-stained pillow, a swab of a bloodstain located on a kitchen cabinet door, and a cigarette butt found on the floor near Moore's body.
Ms Andersen told investigators she had last seen Moore on Saturday, September 6, around 7:30 p.m. Moore's daughter Wendy Swain, reported last speaking to her September 6, around 2:30 p.m. Moore's pastor confirmed she had attended Sunday church services on September 7, from 9:00-10:15 a.m. Moore declined a lunch date with Ms. Andersen that day, saying she needed to be at her house around 12:30 p.m. because her tenants from 106 G Street NE (Chad and Trisha Bennett) were coming over to pay their delinquent rent.
Detective Hufman contacted Chad Bennett. Bennett said he went to Moore's residence on Sunday, September 7, between noon and 1:00 p.m. and paid his rent. In later interviews, Bennett told Hufman he had been to Moore's house three times after 10:30 a.m. that day-first to pay rent, second to pay money still owing on the deposit, and third to retrieve his wallet after Moore called and told him that he had left it. He also gave various descriptions of his activities and whereabouts throughout that day. Bennett agreed to give a DNA sample. Ultimately, investigators determined Bennett was the last known person to have seen Moore alive on September 7.
WSP Crime Laboratory forensic scientist Anna Wilson reported DNA test findings on November 21, 2014. DNA matching Chad Bennett's was present on the cigarette butt, with a 1 in 1.1 sextillion probability of selecting an unrelated individual at random with a matching profile. The bloodstain swab from the kitchen cabinet matched Bennett's Y-STR DNA typing profile. Neither he nor any of his paternal male relatives could be excluded as a donor. The profile is not expected to occur more frequently than 1 in 8, 600 males in the United States population. One area of the pillow contained a mixture of three male individuals, with the major contributor matching Bennett's Y-STR DNA typing profile. Again, neither he nor any of his paternal male relatives could be excluded as a donor, and the profile is not expected to occur more frequently than 1 in 8, 600 males in the United States population. A second area on the top side of the pillow contained two DNA profiles, one from the victim. The other profile matched Bennett's DNA, with an estimated 1 in 50 billion probability of selecting an unrelated individual at random from the United States population with a matching profile.
Bennett was arrested on November 25, 2014, and charged with first degree murder.
On December 16, 2014, the court entered an omnibus order directing the State to provide the defense with "[a]ll photographs, police reports, lab reports, witness statements, audio and video recordings and State's witness list . . . by December 29, 2014." Clerk's Papers (CP) at 2245. Trial was originally set for January 22, 2015, but was continued several times throughout 2015 and into the first half of 2016.
Meanwhile, on December 2, 2014, Detective Hufman began receiving recordings of Bennett's jail calls. A recorded message at the beginning of each call informed the persons on the line that the call was subject to recording and monitoring. Hufman eventually accumulated more than 250 hours of Bennett's recorded jail calls over the next 18 months.
Until April 2016, the parties had anticipated the trial would be held in September of that year. In April, defense counsel David Bustamante was occupied in an unrelated homicide trial and, after that trial, would need ample time to review the State's evidence in Bennett's case. However, four days after the unrelated trial concluded on April 21, the State learned Bennett was now demanding an immediate trial. On May 13, the court set trial for June 8, with a speedy trial expiration date of July 8. On May 31, the court continued the trial to July 7, 2016.
On June 1, 2016, Bustamante conducted a pretrial interview with crime lab forensic scientist, Anna Wilson. Deputy prosecutor Edward Owens and the State's in-house investigator, Dan Dale, were also present. During the interview, Wilson told Bustamante that she was just assigned a new request to test Moore's blood-soaked shirt. Bustamante responded, "Oh, good." CP at 203. The shirt had been collected as evidence in September 2014, but Wilson believed it was too blood soaked to likely yield any DNA other than Moore's. She thought the massive amount of female DNA would likely mask any male DNA. Due to the crime lab's resource limitations, it chose other items for testing that it considered more likely to identify the killer.
The new request to test the shirt came from Owens after he and Dale learned from Wilson in a late May interview that Bennett was an unusually "heavy shedder" of his DNA, meaning he left more DNA on items he touched than most persons would. CP at 281. Dale, a former trooper with the WSP, asked whether that would make it more likely Bennett's DNA could be recovered from Moore's blood-saturated shirt. Considering the high amount of Bennett's DNA present on the blood-stained pillow, Wilson concluded there was a greater chance the shirt would yield useful evidence than originally believed. She agreed to test the shirt.
In a June 6, 2016 pretrial hearing, Bustamante told the court he approved testing the shirt because he believed the results might exonerate Bennett, but he was otherwise concerned about the timing and ability of his defense DNA expert, Dr. Randell Libby, to review the results in advance of the July 7 trial. He did not, however, object to the late testing.
Wilson produced the DNA test results on June 29, 2016. DNA obtained from several areas on the front of the shirt showed a mixture consistent with three male individuals, with the partial major Y-STR profile matching Bennett. Neither he nor any of his paternal male relatives could be excluded as the donor. In one area of the shirt, the profile is not expected to occur more frequently than 1 in 9, 400 male individuals in the United States population. In other areas of the shirt, including around the puncture holes, the profile is not expected to occur more frequently than 1 in 75 male individuals in the United States population. Other potential suspects, including Wendy Swain's boyfriend John Rehfield, Ricky Swain, and Guy Austin (Moore's former boyfriend) were excluded as contributors of any DNA on the shirt. There was no male DNA detected on the neck area of the shirt. The test procedure consumed the entire DNA sample, as agreed to in advance by the defense.
Meanwhile, Detective Hufman had been listening to recordings of Bennett's jail calls but he was nine months behind due to time constraints. In late April 2016, he started listening to the recordings of Bennett's calls made between December 2, 2014, and January 27, 2015. Sometime after June 6, 2016, he heard for the first time a late 2014 conversation in which Bennett cautioned his wife Trisha that they needed to keep their stories straight. Hufman notified the prosecutor's office and, on June 15, delivered a report and a copy of all of the recordings he had reviewed to that date. All the while- since December 2014-Hufman did not want Bennett to know law enforcement was reviewing his calls, so he unilaterally decided to withhold the recordings from the prosecution. For this reason, Bustamante was not apprised of the recordings until the prosecutor gave him a compact disc (CD) containing over 200 hours' worth of calls on June 17, 2016.
On July 1, 2016, Bennett moved to dismiss the charge for governmental mismanagement under CrR 8.3(b), alleging the State had untimely tested the shirt it had in its possession since September 2014 and that it violated the omnibus order by deliberately withholding over 200 hours of recorded phone calls until June...
To continue reading
Request your trial