State v. Boothe
| Decision Date | 11 February 1963 |
| Docket Number | No. 2,No. 49148,49148,2 |
| Citation | 364 S.W.2d 569 |
| Parties | STATE of Missouri, Respondent, v. Raymond Joseph BOOTHE, Appellant |
| Court | Missouri Supreme Court |
R. B. Kirwan, Kansas City, for appellant.
Thomas F. Eagleton, Atty. Gen., Martin M. Lipsitz, Sp. Asst. Atty. Gen., Jefferson City, for respondent.
Defendant has appealed from a judgment whereby he was sentenced to imprisonment for four years for burglary in the second degree. The case was tried before the court without a jury by express agreement of defendant. The 'one complaint' of defendant on this appeal is that 'there is no evidence that connects him with this burglary.' Defendant did not offer any evidence. We shall set forth the evidence of the State in considerable detail.
At 6:05 o'clock of the evening of January 31, 1961, Earl Barnhart, the general manager of the Clark Retread Service at Warrensburg, Missouri, closed the place of business, and in doing so checked the rear and west sides of the building. About 8:05 o'clock that evening Leonard Medlin, a master sergeant at a nearby Air Force Base, who previously had worked part time at Clarks, arrived at the shop to work on a radio. Through a window he saw a man in the building, later identified as James Harley Higdon, standing under a light where 'they normally parked trucks at night.' When Higdon saw Sergeant Medlin he yelled 'Oh' and then 'ran and scrambled through the rear window in the sliding door' on the south side of the building. Sergeant Medlin crossed the street to a service station and called the police. He then saw Higdon and another man, identified as defendant, come out of an alley from behind Schein Truck Lines' Warehouse, which was the building east of the Clark building, and walk to a 1951 Chrysler automobile and drive away. The Chrysler was parked 'not more than five feet' from, and 'almost in front of the west door,' of the building. Sergeant Medlin followed the Chrysler a short distance, and observed its license number which he gave to the police, and a short time later a patrolman stopped and arrested Higdon and defendant a few miles south of Warrensburg while in a 1951 Chrysler which had the same license number as that reported by Sergeant Medlin.
In the trial of the case several photographs of the building occupied by Clark Retread Service were admitted in evidence, and the witnesses, to a great extent, testified in relation to these photographs which have not been filed with this court as a part of the transcript. This has resulted in some difficulty in determining precisely the location of the doors in the building and their relation to certain footprints found in mud near the building. The following is what we gather from the testimony.
When Earl Barnhart and the police officers arrived it was discovered that in the front or west door the window pane next to the door latch had been broken out. The 'latch on the door was open,' but in order to open the door a key was necessary and apparently this door had not been opened. 'Adjacent to and west' of this door there were two sets of freshly made foot prints in some soft mud, and it appeared that 'someone had approached the door, stepped down and gone to the south around the building.' On the south side of the building, a window had been broken out of a large sliding door, and it was out of this window that Sergeant Medlin saw Higdon leave the building. The police took samples of the mud 'fron the edge of the foot prints' and also took samples of the glass from the two doors. When Higdon and appellant were arrested their shoes were muddy. All the above mentioned samples and the shoes of Higdon and defendant were sent to the laboratory of the Missouri State Highway Patrol where they were examined by a qualified chemist and laboratory technician. Gravitation and density tests made of the mud samples from the edge of the footprints and of mud samples taken from the shoes of defendant and Higdon revealed that the samples were 'basically the same.' In addition, in the mud samples taken from the shoes of Higdon and defendant there was 'some glass' which 'by general appearance' looked to be the same as the glass samples taken from the area of the door. However, the technician could not say 'without any doubt' that the mud on defendant's shoes and the mud taken from the footprints were 'identically the same,' or that the glass in the mud on the shoes was 'identical with the glass samples found at the door.'
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...circumstances. However, the cases of State v. Ross, 507 S.W.2d 348 (Mo.1974); State v. Fields, 442 S.W.2d 30 (Mo.1969); and State v. Boothe, 364 S.W.2d 569 (Mo.1963) are persuasive. We hold that the evidence meets the required tests and is sufficient to support the The defendant claims erro......
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State v. Thomas, 51006
...been committed and that the defendant was a participant in the crime. State v. Durham, Mo., 367 S.W.2d 619, 621-622[2-5]; State v. Boothe, Mo., 364 S.W.2d 569, 571; State v. Wall, 339 Mo. 111, 96 S.W.2d 36, 39; State v. Young, 345 Mo. 407, 133 S.W.2d 404, The defendant also contends that th......
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State v. McGlathery, 52173
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State v. Hodges, KCD29914
...evidence does not preclude a reasonable hypothesis of innocence and therefore is not sufficient to support a conviction. State v. Boothe, 364 S.W.2d 569 (Mo.1963); State v. Walker, 365 S.W.2d 597 (Mo.1963); State v. Ramsey, 368 S.W.2d 413 (Mo.1963); State v. Morse, 503 S.W.2d 450 (Mo.App.19......