The Wrongful Conviction of Byron Case

Case Synopsis

In the fall of 1997, Anastasia WitbolsFeugen, eighteen years old, was shot and killed in Lincoln Cemetery, located in an unincorporated area between Kansas City and Independence, Missouri. Her body was found by a Sheriff's Deputy in the early morning hours of October twenty-third, with a large gunshot wound to the face. She had last been seen in the company of Justin Bruton, her on-and, off-again boyfriend, Byron Case and his then-girlfriend. The four of them had met at a Dairy Queen nearby, and were on their way to Justin's condominium, about twenty minutes away, in his hunter-green Honda Civic, when Anastasia, upset by the argument she was having with Justin, angrily exited the car at a stop light and began walking quickly away. With little apparent thought, her home being a mere five-minute drive away, Justin simply drove off. The cemetery in which her body was found eight hours later was less than a half-mile from the intersection where she last saw her friends. No time of death was ever determined. No bullets or shell casings were ever found at the scene, and her body is presumed to have fallen where she was shot. The Jackson County Sheriff's Department, which headed up the investigation, never named a suspect, not even when Justin's body was found the following afternoon, more than seventy miles away, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot blast to the head. The case was considered unsolved for almost four years.

In September of 2000, Byron's ex-girlfriend reported to a counselor at the drug rehab center she'd checked into that she had witnessed the murder of her friend Anastasia years earlier, and that it had been her then-boyfriend, Byron Case, who had pulled the trigger. A previous story, given to a different drug counselor during a prior stint in rehab, had been similar, implicating Justin Bruton as the killer. The difference was that, in the second version of the story, the alleged murderer was alive: authorities had to be notified.

With a supposed eyewitness testimony, the Sheriff's Department moved forward with renewed vigor, encouraging Byron's ex-girlfriend to elicit a confession from him with a telephone recording device. After numerous fruitless attempts, a so-called "tacit admission" was achieved during a largely incomprehensible conversation on June 5th, 2001, when Byron's ex-girlfriend reached him at 11:30 P.M. and deliriously ill (a 101° fever and diagnoses of strep throat was recorded in a medical exam the following morning). It carried sufficient weight, in light of the vagaries of Kelly's testimony, for a warrant to be issued and an indictment handed down.

The ensuing four-day trial was marred by errors, both technical and strategic; Byron Case was ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action. He received two life sentences, one without the possibility for parole. He was just twenty-three years old.