State v. Keadle
| Decision Date | 08 July 2022 |
| Docket Number | S-20-580 |
| Citation | 311 Neb. 919 |
| Parties | State of Nebraska, appellee, v. Joshua W. Keadle, appellant. |
| Court | Nebraska Supreme Court |
1. Convictions: Evidence: Appeal and Error. Regardless of whether the evidence is direct, circumstantial, or a combination thereof, and regardless of whether the issue is labeled as a failure to direct a verdict, insufficiency of the evidence, or failure to prove a prima facie case, the standard is the same: In reviewing a criminal conviction, an appellate court does not resolve conflicts in the evidence pass on the credibility of witnesses, or reweigh the evidence; such matters are for the finder of fact, and a conviction will be affirmed, in the absence of prejudicial error, if the evidence admitted at trial, viewed and construed most favorably to the State, is sufficient to support the conviction. The relevant question for an appellate court is whether, after viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
2. Criminal Law: Appeal and Error. The "corpus delicti" is the body or substance of the crime-the fact that a crime has been committed, without regard to the identity of the person committing it.
3. Criminal Law: Words and Phrases. The corpus delicti requirement is composed of two elements: the fact or result forming the basis of a charge and the existence of a criminal agency as the cause thereof.
4. Criminal Law: Circumstantial Evidence: Proof. Nebraska requires that the corpus delicti of a crime must be established by evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but it may be proved by either direct or circumstantial evidence.
5. Circumstantial Evidence: Words and Phrases. Circumstantial evidence is evidence which, without going directly to prove the existence of a fact, gives rise to a logical inference that such fact exists.
6. Convictions: Confessions: Evidence: Proof. A criminal conviction cannot be sustained solely upon a defendant's extrajudicial admission or voluntary confession, but either or both are competent evidence of corpus delicti and may, with corroborative evidence of facts and circumstances, establish the corpus delicti and guilty participation of the defendant.
7. Criminal Law: Homicide: Proof. In homicide cases, the corpus delicti requirement is not established until it is proved that a human being is dead and that the death occurred as a result of the criminal agency of another.
8. ____: ____: ____. The body of a missing person is not required to prove the corpus delicti for homicide.
9. Homicide: Circumstantial Evidence. The failure to recover a body may, itself, be circumstantial evidence of the corpus delicti of homicide, because it is highly unlikely that a person who dies from natural causes will successfully dispose of his or her own body.
10. ____: ____. In the absence of a body, confession, or other direct evidence of death, circumstantial evidence may be sufficient to support a conviction for murder.
11. ____: ____. There is no reason to treat the crime of murder differently from other crimes when considering the use of circumstantial evidence to establish their commission, and the presence or absence of a particular item of evidence is not controlling. The question is whether from all of the evidence it can reasonably be inferred that death occurred and that it was caused by a criminal agency.
12. Convictions: Circumstantial Evidence. Under Nebraska law, the accused's rule has no application when reviewing the sufficiency of circumstantial evidence to support a criminal conviction, and it has no application when reviewing the sufficiency of circumstantial evidence to support corpus delicti.
Appeal from the District Court for Gage County: Ricky A. Schreiner Judge.
Jeffery A. Pickens, of Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy, for appellant.
Douglas J. Peterson, Attorney General, and Melissa R. Vincent for appellee.
Tyler Thomas, a student at Peru State College (PSC) in Peru Nebraska, has been missing since the early morning hours of December 3, 2010. Her body has never been found. Joshua W. Keadle is the last person known to have seen Thomas alive. In 2017, Keadle was charged with first degree murder in connection with Thomas' disappearance. A jury found Keadle guilty of second degree murder, and he was sentenced to prison. Keadle appeals, assigning only that the evidence adduced at trial was insufficient to establish the corpus delicti of homicide. Finding no merit to this assignment, we affirm.
In the fall of 2010, Thomas was a 19-year-old student attending PSC. She lived on campus in a coed dormitory (dorm). On the evening of December 2, 2010, Thomas attended a series of parties, consumed alcohol, and became visibly intoxicated. After getting into an argument with friends at one of the parties, Thomas was asked to leave. She declined a ride back to her dorm, and instead left the party on foot, heading in the direction of campus. She also made statements about wanting to go back to Omaha, Nebraska, and walking there if necessary. The weather was cold, and Thomas was not wearing a coat.
Thomas was seen by others walking on the PSC campus between 1 and 1:30 a.m. on December 3, 2010, but she never made it back to her dorm. At approximately 1:25 a.m., several of Thomas' friends received text messages from Thomas' phone indicating that Thomas did not know where she was. The last such message was sent and received at 1:28 a.m., prompting Thomas' friends to begin searching for her, without success. After a couple of hours, her friends contacted law enforcement to report Thomas missing. Law enforcement searched for Thomas without success. Organized search efforts continued for the next several days.
PSC conducted a room-by-room search of the dorm complex, but Thomas was not located. Thomas' purse was found in her dorm room, along with her driver's license, birth certificate, Social Security card, keys, debit cards, a gift card, and a check from PSC in the amount of $1,104.22.
Officers from the Nemaha County sheriff's office and Nebraska State Patrol, along with hundreds of volunteers, searched for Thomas on the ground. Helicopters searched from the air. A search of the Missouri River was conducted using divers and sonar. Law enforcement disseminated information about Thomas' disappearance on a national scale, including entering her information in the National Crime Information Center database and the database of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. A DNA profile for Thomas was developed from some of her personal belongings and entered into a national DNA database used to identify missing persons.
Thomas has never been located. Her cell phone has never been found. Friends and family who had regular contact with Thomas before her disappearance have not heard from her since. According to a credit report, Thomas' only financial activity since her disappearance has been a failure to pay student loans.
Keadle was also a student at PSC in the fall of 2010. At the time Thomas disappeared, Keadle was living in the same coed dorm complex as Thomas and their suites were near one another. There was evidence that Keadle and Thomas did not get along. PSC students observed Keadle and Thomas get into "heated arguments]" with each other, and multiple students claim to have heard Keadle use derogatory terms when referring to Thomas. During the investigation of Thomas' disappearance, law enforcement interviewed Keadle several times. The admissibility of those interviews is not at issue.
The first such interview occurred on December 4, 2010, when Keadle spoke with a Nebraska State Patrol trooper about his whereabouts the night Thomas disappeared. Keadle told the trooper that on the evening of December 2, he drove with friends to Nebraska City, Nebraska, to see a movie, which ended shortly after midnight on December 3. Keadle and his friends drove back to Peru, picked up some additional friends, and headed back to the dorm complex to "hang out." Keadle said that while driving back, he saw Thomas walking in the direction of the dorm complex sometime between 1:10 and 1:15 a.m. and that she appeared to be intoxicated.
Keadle told the trooper that after arriving at the dorm complex, he separated from his friends because he was not feeling well. He returned to his dorm to use the restroom, after which he noticed a light coming from a nearby dorm room. He knocked on the door and two female students answered. They told Keadle about receiving a text message from Thomas saying she was lost, and they indicated they were going out to search for her.
On December 5, 2010, an investigator visited with Keadle in his dorm room and asked Keadle to provide a written statement detailing his activities from 5 p.m. on December 2 until he went to sleep on December 3. Keadle complied, and he produced a written statement which was largely consistent with what he had told the trooper the day before. The investigator then asked some followup questions about Keadle's and Thomas' relationship. Keadle told the investigator that he and Thomas did not get along. When asked where he thought Thomas was, Keadle responded that he thought Thomas was in Omaha and was fine.
On December 6, 2010, law enforcement conducted a recorded interview with Keadle, in which he generally recounted the same version of events that he provided previously. When investigators asked Keadle whether there was a reason he would have left campus around the time Thomas disappeared Keadle denied leaving his...
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