COLUMBIA, S.C. — A South Carolina judge threw out the case on Friday murder charges to a father and stepmother, saying there was no new evidence they killed their five-year-old child in 1989.
Circuit Judge Roger Young ruled that the original detective on the case changed his interpretations of the evidence and with more than two dozen witnesses dead or unable to testify in the 35-year-old case, the couple could not present a fair defense and question. witnesses who claimed to have made incriminating statements.
Justin Turner was found dead in March 1989 in a closet in an RV behind his home in Berkeley County. He had been strangled.
Investigators immediately believed the murder scene had been staged and caught his father, Victor Lee Turner, and stepmother, Megan R. Turner, in lies, Berkeley County Sheriff Duane Lewis said at a January news conference where he filed murder charges against them both announced. in the cold case.
Megan Turner was also charged with murder in 1990, but a grand jury declined to indict her.
Defense attorneys pointed out after the couple’s arrest that serial killer Richard Evonitz was stationed on a U.S. Navy ship in nearby Charleston at the time of the murder and the evidence, and that the method used in the boy’s case matched three other kidnappings and murders of children in Virginia. Evonitz was connected, according to the Virginia School of Law’s Innocence Project.
Evonitz committed suicide while police were watching him in 2002. His body was cremated, likely making it impossible to match his DNA to evidence in the South Carolina case and further hampering the Turners’ ability to defend themselves, attorney Shaun Kent said. a preliminary hearing in March.
The detective who investigated the case in 1989 was rehired by the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office in 2021 to review cold cases. He testified that investigators were able to use new technology to determine whether small fibers from a ligature found in the home shortly after the boy’s disappearance matched those on the boy’s shirt.
The use of a microscope should not count as new evidence to get prosecutors to reopen the case, Kent said during the hearing WCSC TV.
‘Evidence hasn’t been there for 35 years. It won’t come up today,” Kent said.
When they arrested the couple this year, officers changed their theory about how the boy was killed, saying he had been strangled with a collar attached to a leash instead of just the leash. The new theory came only after agents purchased a collar and tested it with a mannequin, defense attorneys said.
The judge pointed out that the collar and dog would have been available in 1989, but not anymore. The collar was not found even when investigators dug up the dog’s remains, the defense said.
Justin Turner’s body was found two days after he was reported missing, when investigators cited strange statements and behavior in the couple’s arrest, such as Victor Turner entering the RV while a TV camera filmed him and seconds later saying he had found the body among the many cupboards and drawers in the camper. the camper.
The couple asked officers what might happen if a family member harmed the boy, and others said Megan Turner proposed a big fight with her stepson before he died and she won.
The fact that more than twenty witnesses who worked on the case in 1989 can no longer testify today is not fair to the couple, the judge ruled.
“This is circumstantial evidence that partly depends on allegedly incriminating statements made to third parties. The unavailability of these witnesses for cross-examination would be highly detrimental to the defense,” Young wrote.
Prosecutors said they had no grounds to challenge Young’s ruling and lamented mistakes investigators made in collecting and preserving evidence 35 years ago.
“It is rare that prosecutors can say that there was nothing more that could have been done to conduct a more thorough investigation, but in this case we know that Sheriff Lewis and his team of investigators did everything they could to find truth and justice,” attorney Scarlett Wilson wrote in a statement.
