The court’s ruling is a partial victory for Dr. Kirk Alan Turner, who was acquitted in 2009 of first-degree murder in the death of his estranged wife, Jennifer Turner, after a highly publicized trial in Davie County. Jennifer Turner was killed Sept. 12, 2007. She was slashed twice in the throat, and her body was found in the shop building at the house on 627 Jack Booe Road where the couple once lived together.
The two had been going through a contentious divorce at the time of Jennifer Turner’s death, and Jennifer Turner had filed a lawsuit against Turner’s girlfriend at the time, claiming she had ruined their marriage.
Turner claimed that he slashed Jennifer Turner with a pocketknife after Jennifer Turner had attacked him with a 7-foot-long spear. The jury found him not guilty based on his self-defense claim.
Turner’s subsequent lawsuit made claims of intentional infliction of emotional distress, abuse of process, malicious prosecution and false imprisonment.
The court said that Turner’s claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress could go to trial but the court dismissed another claim for malicious prosecution. Other claims had previously been dismissed in Forsyth Superior Court. Some justices on the Supreme Court wrote separate opinions in which they argued that the malicious prosecution claim should have gone forward.
Turner had filed the lawsuit in Forsyth Superior Court in November 2011 and then filed an amended complaint in 2012. The lawsuit accused two agents with the State Bureau of Investigation — Duane Deaver and Gerald Thomas — of framing Turner by fabricating blood evidence to shore up the theory by Davie County prosecutors that Turner killed his wife and then staged the crime scene to make it look as if he killed his wife in self-defense.
The lawsuit names as defendants Deaver and Thomas; former SBI director Robin Pendergraft; and two unknown SBI supervisors identified as John Doe and Jane Doe. Judge Stuart Albright dismissed all the claims in the lawsuit in 2013. Then the N.C. Court of Appeals partially overturned Albright’s decision, ruling that the claims of malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress could go to trial.
The N.C. Attorney General’s Office appealed that decision to the N.C. Supreme Court.
“We’re very, very pleased that we have a chance to go forward with this claim and bring to light what happened to him,” John Vermitsky, Turner’s attorney, said last week.
According to a summary in the ruling, Thomas had gone to the crime scene two days after Jennifer Turner’s body was found. He performed a bloodstain analysis of clothing, including a gray T-shirt that Turner had been wearing the day Jennifer Turner died.
He presented his findings two weeks later and said that the shirt “was consistent with a transfer bloodstain pattern” that resulted from a bloody hand being wiped on the shirt. Turner was indicted for first-degree murder on Dec. 13, 2007.
Thomas and Deaver met with Capt. J.D. Hartman, the lead investigator with the Davie County Sheriff’s Office, and a Davie County prosecutor on Jan. 15, 2008.
“During this meeting, defendants Thomas and Deaver and their colleagues theorized that plaintiff killed Jennifer for the purpose of carrying out a scheme to avoid a divorce and subsequent equitable distribution proceeding,” the ruling said. “They additionally theorized that plaintiff stabbed himself with the spear and staged the scene to make the killing look like self-defense.”
Prosecutors argued during the 2009 trial that Turner’s friend, Greg Smithson, who had gone to the house with Turner to pick up items that Smithson had stored on the property, had helped Turner stage the crime scene.
The lawsuit said that after this meeting, Deaver and Thomas conducted further tests, with approval from Pendergraft, to prove the prosecutors’ theory.
Deaver and Thomas videotaped themselves conducting unscientific experiments, according to the lawsuit, to obtain a blood smear from a knife similar to what was on Turner’s shirt. At one point in the video, Deaver is heard saying, “Oh, even better! Holy cow, that was a good one.” He’s also heard saying, “Beautiful! That’s a wrap, baby!”
Thomas then created a second report, according to the opinion, which is based on the allegations in the lawsuit. He replaced the words “consistent with a bloody hand being wiped on the shirt” to “consistent with a pointed object being wiped on the shirt.” That second report “purported to convey the results of the examination as having happened on Sept. 14, 2007,” though it had taken place on Jan. 15, 2008.
In the end, after a months-long trial that was heavily covered by the media, the jury didn’t believe the prosecutors.
“They threw stuff against the wall to see if something would stick, and we felt nothing stuck,” the jury foreman, Landon Potts, said of prosecutors, after the verdict in 2009.
The jury of eight men and four women took seven hours over two days to return a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
The case split Turner’s family, with his son sticking by his side, and his daughter believing that Turner had murdered her mother.
And the work of Deaver and Thomas in Turner’s case were noted in a series of stories that the Raleigh News & Observer did in 2010 on the SBI. Those series of stories showed that SBI agents ignored evidence and tailored their cases to fit prosecutors’ theories.
Deaver became embroiled in controversy for his work in the case of Greg Taylor who was convicted in a 1991 murder.
The N.C. Innocence Commission exonerated Taylor after it was revealed that Deaver hid results in that case. The SBI later fired Deaver.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Thomas was still with the SBI.
N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper also suspended the work of the SBI’s bloodstain analysts and removed Pedergraft as SBI director.
In 2010, Garry Frank, the district attorney for Davie County, said the blood evidence wasn’t the only reason why his office decided to prosecute Turner for the murder of his wife.
“It was the scene, the circumstances. That was the reason why it was presented to the grand jury,” he said in 2010.
Noelle Talley, spokeswoman for the N.C. Attorney General’s Office, had no comment on the state Supreme Court’s ruling.
The case will now go back to Forsyth Superior Court for trial.
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