State v. Reay

• Decision Date: 11 February 2009
• Docket Number: No. 24477.,24477.
• Citation: 762 N.W.2d 356,2009 S.D. 10
• Parties: STATE of South Dakota, Plaintiff and Appellee, v. Brad REAY, Defendant and Appellant.
• Court: South Dakota Supreme Court

762 N.W.2d 356

2009 SD 10

STATE of South Dakota, Plaintiff and Appellee, v.Brad REAY, Defendant and Appellant.

No. 24477.

Supreme Court of South Dakota.

Argued October 1, 2008.

Decided February 11, 2009.

Lawrence E. Long, Attorney General, Steven R. Blair, Assistant Attorney General, Pierre, South Dakota, Attorneys for plaintiff and appellee.

Timothy J. Rensch of Rensch Law Office, Rapid City, South Dakota, Attorneys for defendant and appellant.

KONENKAMP, Justice.

[¶ 1.]Defendant appeals his conviction for the murder of his wife.We affirm.

Background

[¶ 2.]Defendant, Brad Reay, his wife, Tamara (Tami), and their daughter, Haylee, lived in Pierre, South Dakota.Defendant was an assistant manager at Wal-Mart.Tami worked in the shoe department at Kmart.She met Brian Clark, who also worked at Kmart.He was married with children.In December 2005, Tami and Brian began an affair.

[¶ 3.]In the first week of February 2006, Tami told defendantshe wanted to date other people: she wanted a divorce.Defendant wanted to work things out.He even called Tami's mother, Bonnie Burns, asking that she help convince Tami to salvage the marriage.Tami would not relent.She suggested a divorce after Haylee's current school year ended.

[¶ 4.]On Tuesday, February 7, 2006, Tami and Brian met at the Fawn Motel.In the afternoon, Tami went to the Georgia Morse Middle School to watch her daughter play basketball.Following basketball and fast food, Tami and Haylee went shopping, and then headed home.Haylee was in bed by 9:00 p.m.Later, in describing that night, Haylee, age thirteen, would tell a jury that while she was awake in bed, defendant opened her bedroom door: "He had a bunch of clothes in his arm and I asked him what he was doing. . . .He just said `nothing'[a]nd he put the clothes down and then came and laid with me."He told her he loved her.She fell quickly back to sleep.When defendant woke her the next morning, Haylee noticed that the laundry machines were running.She asked where her mother was, and defendant responded that she was in bed.Tami and defendant had separate bedrooms.Haylee went to her mother's bedroom, but all she found was an unmade bed.Her mother's cell phone was on the dresser.She looked in the garage and found her mother's car there.She discovered her mother's purse in the kitchen.When she told her father that her mother was not in the house, he replied that she had a boyfriend and she might be at his home.As he drove her to school that morning, defendant told Haylee, "Don't tell anybody [about Tami not being home] because it's personal."Haylee recalled that on the Sunday previous to her mother's disappearance, when she first learned from her parents that they were getting a divorce, her father was "acting weird. . . .He wouldn't eat and he'd just sit in his bed and not talk or anything."

[¶ 5.]Tami commonly telephoned her mother, Bonnie, every day.When Bonnie did not receive a call from Tami on Wednesday, February 8, 2006, she called Haylee at her school.Haylee said that the last time she saw her mother was the previous evening.Bonnie then called Brian at Kmart to ask if he had seen Tami.She was scheduled to work at 10:00 a.m., but failed to show up.Brian called the Pierre Police Department and reported Tami missing.He disclosed to Lieutenant Dave Panzer his affair with Tami and expressed his fear that defendant may have done something to her.

[¶ 6.]Lieutenant Panzer contacted Detective David DeJabet to assist in the missing person investigation.Detective DeJabet sent Detective Troy Swenson to the Georgia Morse Middle School to talk to Haylee.In the meantime, Lieutenant Panzer and Detective DeJabet went to defendant and Tami's home.Lieutenant Panzer knocked on the front door, but nobody answered.Detective DeJabet went to the back door and looked through a window into the garage.He saw a parked black Dodge Durango.He also noticed "a reddish brown stain on the door."

[¶ 7.]With mounting apprehension, Lieutenant Panzer called Patrol Officer Leasa McFarling to watch the house while Detective DeJabet and Lieutenant Panzer met with defendant in the security office at Wal-Mart.The officers explained to defendant that they had concerns that Tami was missing.Defendant told the officers that when he got home the night before, Tami was not there.Defendant said that at 1:00 a.m. he heard a vehicle pull into the driveway.He looked and saw the Durango parked there, without Tami, and another vehicle driving away.Defendant said he pursued the vehicle in the Durango, but without success.

[¶ 8.]Lieutenant Panzer and Detective DeJabet then asked if defendant would meet them at defendant's home to see if Tami had returned.Defendant agreed and accepted a ride with the officers.Officer McFarling was still at the home when Lieutenant Panzer, Detective DeJabet, and defendant arrived.Detective Troy Swenson showed up shortly thereafter.Lieutenant Panzer asked defendant for written consent to search his home and vehicles.He consented, and Detectives Swenson and DeJabet and Lieutenant Panzer entered the residence together.Defendant waited outside.During the search, the officers saw what appeared to be a blood droplet on the garage floor.They also smelled a strong odor of cleaning solution coming from the Dodge Durango.Detective DeJabet suspected homicide.He directed the officers to stop the search while a search warrant was obtained.

[¶ 9.]Defendant was taken to the police station, where he was interviewed by Detective Swenson, Lieutenant DeJabet, and Division of Criminal Investigation AgentGuy DiBenedetto.The interview lasted five hours.Defendant repeatedly denied doing anything to Tami and denied knowing anything concerning her whereabouts.

[¶ 10.]As defendant was being interviewed, Special Agent Michael Braley, a crime scene investigator, along with other law enforcement officers, executed a search warrant on defendant's home and vehicles.The search revealed that the Dodge Durango had been freshly cleaned and that there was fresh laundry on defendant's bed and in the washer and dryer.Swabbed samples were taken from the blood spot on the garage floor, the washer, certain walls, a light switch, trim, a bed, and Tami's dresser.After defendant's interview, he was arrested for first degree murder and taken to the Hughes County Jail.

[¶ 11.]Two days later, a pilot flying a National Guard helicopter spotted a body by the emergency spillway at Oahe Dam.It was Tami.Her body, nude, throat slashed, had been stabbed over thirty times.A knife-riddled t-shirt and bloody gloves were nearby.She was taken to Rapid City for an autopsy, where a pathologist, Dr. Donald Habbe, obtained her fingernail scrapings, DNA samples, rectal and vaginal swabs, and blood samples.

[¶ 12.]While defendant was in custody awaiting trial, he carried on various conversations and correspondence with his twin brother, Bret.These were monitored by the Hughes County Jail.Bill Dodge, the administrator at the jail, released the recorded conversations and photocopied correspondence to Agent DiBenedetto and Hughes County Sheriff, Mike Leidholt.In one such correspondence was a map drawn by defendant, purporting to tell Bret where the good fishing spots were around Oahe Dam.Using this map and other information gathered during defendant's conversations with Bret, Agent Braley and the Watertown Search and Rescue Team, aided by a bloodhound and cadaver dog, uncovered three City of Pierre garbage bags containing bloody linens, rubber gloves, bloody blankets, panties, a bloody tarp, and a box of condoms with one missing.The garbage bags were hidden in a row of juniper hedges, vegetation similar to what law enforcement officers collected from the bottom of defendant's shoes.Also, the garbage bags were the same type as those found in defendant's garage.

[¶ 13.]During another monitored exchange between defendant and his brother, defendant had Bret hand copy a letter defendant had written.After copying the letter to a notebook, Bret left the jail.Later that day he was apprehended in Spearfish, South Dakota, and a warrant was issued to search his car.His notebook was confiscated.Bret told the officers that he had copied a letter from defendant and sent it to four people as directed by defendant.¹The following day, the Attorney General's office received four anonymous letters, supposedly written by a cousin of Tami's killer, disclosing an unknown detail: Tami was "raped, lost rubber in ass."After seeing these letters, Agent DiBenedetto asked the pathologist, Dr. Habbe, to re-examine Tami's body, which was still in the morgue in Rapid City.The examination revealed that a condom was in fact in her rectum.

[¶ 14.]Defendant was indicted for first degree murder or in the alternative first degree manslaughter.The jury trial lasted two and a half weeks.During the trial, defendant objected to the admission of numerous pieces of evidence, ranging from knives, clothing, tarps, letters, documents, allegedly bloody bed sheets, and swabs of spots purportedly containing blood.Defendant argued that the State failed to establish a sufficient chain of custody because it did not offer testimony from the custodian at the State Crime Lab responsible for the care and custody of the evidence.According to defendant, the State's chain of custody evidence did not prove that the evidence remained in an unaltered state.The court, however, concluded that a sufficient chain of custody was established and admitted the evidence.

[¶ 15.]Defendant also objected when the State attempted to argue that, although it never compared Haylee's DNA to the DNA collected, it could exclude the presence of Haylee's DNA because the State knew the DNA profiles of her parents.According to defendant, the opinion that the presence of a child's DNA could be excluded based on the parents' DNA profiles was an opinion not...