Does Teresa Lewis Deserve to Die?

FINAL UPDATE:  Teresa Lewis received an injection of lethal chemicals last night at 9 eastern in the Greenville Correctional Center in Jarrat, Virginia.  She was prounounced dead at 9:13 pm. (September 24) 

UPDATE: The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the final appeal made on behalf of Teresa Lewis today (Sept. 22).

by Diane Fanning

On Thursday, the State of Virginia plans to execute a woman for the first time in 98 years. In 2002, Teresa Lewis, who was married and living near Danville, Virginia, in rural Pittsylvania County, had an affair with Matthew Shallenberger. On the night of October 30, Teresa intentionally left a door unlocked when she got into bed with her husband.

Shallenberger and his partner-in-crime Rodney Fuller used that door to enter the trailer, where Teresa lived with her 51-year-old husband Julian and 25-year-old stepson Charles. Shallenberger went to one end of the home and shot the sleeping Julian in the back. At the other end of the trailer, Fuller killed Charles. The motive was $350,000 in insurance money.

After the shooting, Teresa took money from her dying husband's wallet and waited 45 minutes to call police. Despite the delay, Julian was still alive when the deputies arrived and told them, "My wife knows who done this to me." He died moments later.

Shooting men in their sleep is a horrible act. Nonetheless, I am disturbed by the imminent execution of Teresa Lewis. I am not bothered because she's female. After all, although 10 to 12 percent of all homicides are committed by women, they comprise just 2 percent of the population on death row. I believe strongly in equity in the justice system. Justice demands that there should be no gender bias just as there should be no racial bias.

There are three different issues that do trouble me:

1. Teresa Lewis didn't fight the charges; she pleaded guilty before the judge.

It seems illogical to me that someone who admitted guilt would be given a death sentence. It seems the state would want to encourage perpetrators to acknowledge their responsibility. It saves taxpayers money, it saves victims' family members from the anguish of a trial, and it settles the issue in a speedier manner. But when someone does plead guilty and still gets the maximum penalty, it discourages every other killer from making an honest plea.

2. Teresa Lewis did not pull the trigger

Fuller appeared first before the judge. He pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his two co-conspirators. He was given a life sentence. Shallenberger decided to go to trial, but in the middle of the proceedings, he changed his plea to guilty. The same judge said that it wouldn't be fair to give Shallenberger a death sentence when the other killer received life. He gave the second trigger-man the same sentence as the first.

The same judge decided the fate of Teresa Lewis. She pleaded guilty, taking her chances with the judge. Unlike the two men, she had no criminal record, no history of violence and had cooperated with authorities. Nonetheless, the judge sent her to death row saying that she was more culpable because she was the mastermind.

But was she? Before committing suicide, Shallenberger cast doubt on her dominant role in the crime. In an editorial in the Washington Post, author John Grisham wrote that in the sworn affidavit from a private investigator, "Shallenberger described Lewis as not very bright and as someone who could easily be duped into a scheme to kill her husband and stepson for money. According to the investigator, Shallenberger said, 'From the moment I met her, I knew she was someone who could be easily manipulated. From the moment I met her I had a plan for how I could use her to get some money.'"

Shallenberger wanted cash to set up a drug distribution ring and become an accomplished hitman. In a 2003 letter, he wrote: "I met Teresa in a Walmart in Danville, Virginia. From the moment I met her I knew she was someone who could be easily manipulated. Killing Julian and Charles Lewis was entirely my idea. I needed money and Teresa was an easy target."

In a 2004 affidavit, Fuller corroborated that statement: "As between Mrs. Lewis and Shallenberger, Shallenberger was definitely the one in charge of things, not Mrs. Lewis."

3. Teresa Lewis is borderline for mental retardation

Her IQ, tested once at 73 and a second time of 70, places her just above the threshold where the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision would have prohibited her execution. Nonetheless, it is still low enough to indicate that she did not have the mental capacity to plan and execute the scheme. "She does not have the basic skills necessary to organize and lead a conspiracy to commit murder for hire," Grisham wrote.

In addition to her intellectual limitations, three different psychology experts have declared Lewis suffers from "dependent personality disorder," making it difficult for her to carry out even the simplest daily tasks without help. On top of that, Grisham added, a long list of physical ailments, enabled her to develop "an addiction to pain medications and this adversely affected her judgment."

No one is advocating for Teresa's release for prison. They are calling for the commutation of her sentence from death to life. In addition to John Grisham, her clemency plea is supported by Amnesty International, Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights and a number of Christian groups, including the one led by long-time prison chaplain the Reverend Lynn Litchfield.

Governor Bob McDonnell recently refused to give Teresa a stay of execution. All that stands between her and death is a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court.

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Mystery Man: Kerry Cook (Part 2 of 4)

For Independence Day, Women in Crime Ink presents a four-part series written by a man who struggled for 22 years to win his freedom. This is Part 2 of his story. Read Part 1 here.

by Kerry Max Cook

So I was charged with capital murder, for the sexual assault and slaying of a woman I'd met once in my life. Although I played no part in her death, the implications of the accusation meant my life was jeopardized. I wasn't a murderer.

But I wasn't an angel either. As a juvenile, I ran away from home a few times, stealing a car or two—usually one to get where I needed to go, and after I ran out of gas, another to get back. One of those cars happened to belong to the sheriff. Definitely the wrong car to steal.

As a result, I wasn’t the most popular person with law enforcement in the small East Texas Town of Jacksonville. Having a police record and a set of fingerprints in the law enforcement database drew attention to me.

At the scene of Linda Edwards' slaying, a policeman found 13 identifiable fingerprints inside the apartment that could have yielded the identity of the killer. “Identifiable” in that each print contained enough points to make a positive identification. But because whoever owned those prints didn’t have a record, police weren’t able to determine the owner. The 13 fingerprints found at the murder scene were destroyed and police and prosecutors settled on me as the suspect.

One of the murder weapons was an orange-handled pair of scissors. On the handle, pressed in blood, the same policeman found a “whorl fingerprint” (left), a type shared by 65% of the people on the planet – including the victim.

But not me.

All ten of my fingers are classified in fingerprint jargon as “tented arches” (right). I don’t have a single whorl digit on any of my ten fingers. Not surprisingly, the policeman dismissed the whorl fingerprint without establishing that person’s identity.

Other evidence was suppressed, bungled, or just plain conveniently lost.

Sworn statements to police, secret grand jury testimony, all told the story of how Linda and I had met out by the pool and I had ended up at her apartment as an invited guest. But the police and the prosecutors hid this critical exculpatory evidence and it wouldn’t be discovered until a new, dedicated defense attorney found it buried in the District Attorney’s files 15 years later.

A drop of blood was found by Linda’s patio door. Maybe it belonged to the killer. You’d think you’d submit it for forensic analysis. But not the police in my trial. They said the reason they didn’t submit if for comparison purposes was because, and this is a direct quote: “It was the same color as the rest of the blood in the apartment.

Then there was the case of the missing ankle stocking. Police and prosecutors contended I had snuck off into the night with one of Linda’s ankle stockings packed full of body parts as a souvenir. But law enforcement never found the stocking.

In Texas, as any other jurisdiction that uses the Death Penalty as a punishment, the crime of murder can be elevated to a capital offense punishable by death if and when the murder occurs during the commission of another felony. In my case one of those underlying felonies the state relied on to make the murder death-penalty worthy was “theft of a stocking.”

Fifteen years later another jury in a separate trial broke open the plastic bag that contained the victim’s blue jeans that had been sealed in a police vault since the first trial. Jurors shook them to determine the victim’s height and out fell the second missing stocking. Apparently it had been shoved up the pant leg of the victim’s jeans.

Evidence at the second trial would show that the prosecution had a win-at-all costs mentality:

• They coached the only eyewitness to the murder, Paula Rudolph, to change her initial eyewitness account of the murderer to implicate me, and guaranteed her new identification would go unchallenged until an ambush at trial when it was too late by making her unavailable to the defense.



• The District Attorney conspired with a policeman to fabricate “expert” testimony to make my fingerprint the killer’s calling card.



• They conspired with the pathologist to change the time the victim died and to create the most inflammatory aspect to the case – missing body parts, carted off in a missing stocking.

• They deliberately suppressed available evidence that Linda and I had known one another and met three days before she was killed.

• Finally, they persuaded a convicted murderer to commit perjury in order to guarantee my conviction. Edward “Shyster” Jackson was dubbed the “Star witness for the State.”

Records ultimately proved that prosecutors made him a secret deal: his freedom from a murder conviction and life sentence in exchange for testimony that I confessed to him while sharing a jail cell that I raped and murdered Linda Edwards. Shyster told the jury that the confession story took place in August. Jail records later established that at that time of the purported confession, I was kept in solitary confinement, unable to talk to any other inmates. Those records mysteriously disappeared without explanation.

It was crazy. It was like I was the main character in a John Grisham novel fighting against a corporation that was out to convict me at all costs to escape any appearance of wrongdoing.

After about my fifteenth year on Death Row and days away from execution, Shyster Jackson finally told the truth on an MSNBC Special Report with Geraldo Rivera: “Deadly Justice.”

I was essentially penniless—the $500 my Mom and dad scraped up to hire an attorney just wasn’t enough. I was powerless to counter a parade of perjury, coached testimony, shady agreements, and inflammatory theories.

In a five-day trial I was found guilty of all charges contained in the indictment, despite absolutely no proof to support the allegations of rape, murder, theft of a stocking, or burglary.

One moment I was in the courtroom crying as I reached out to say goodbye to my mama, daddy, and brother, Doyle Wayne, and the next moment I was being given the execution number 600 and pushed into a five-by-nine-foot concrete tomb.

Kerry Max Cook is the author of CHASING JUSTICE: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit.

The story of Kerry’s struggle continues here tomorrow.

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