Kezer wins day in court

Exactly 14 years after Joshua C. Kezer served the first day of a 60-year prison sentence for the 1992 murder of Angela Mischelle Lawless, a Cole County judge decided he deserves another day in court.

On Monday, Cole County Circuit Judge Richard G. Callahan granted Kezer an evidentiary hearing, to function as a bench trial, set for Dec. 2 and Dec. 3 in Jefferson City, said Charles Weiss, Kezer's attorney.

"It'll be like a trial. We will present witnesses and evidence," Weiss said.

Callahan granted the hearing after both Weiss and lawyers from the Missouri State Attorney General's Office described their sides of the case during a review Monday afternoon.

"I'm happy. It's one step closer to the truth," Kezer said in a prepared statement.

So far, Kezer, now 33, has not been present at any of three case reviews held in Cole County Circuit Court since Weiss filed a habeus motion in April alleging his client was wrongly convicted.

Under the rules governing habeus motions, Kezer, currently incarcerated at Jefferson City Correctional Center, has a right to attend the evidentiary hearing, Weiss said.

Lawless was killed in November 1992 in Benton, Mo.

Scott County Sheriff Rick Walter reopened the murder investigation in 2006, believing other people may have been involved.

Since then, the case against Kezer has fallen apart, Walter said Monday.

Physical evidence found at the crime scene — including fingerprints, blood typing and DNA — never matched Kezer, and recently Callahan granted a motion ordering the Missouri State Highway Patrol to enter the DNA profiles into CODIS, the database for convicted felons.

Mark T. Abbott, whose testimony placed Kezer near the crime scene, and whose description of the person he saw changed several times, said in a letter to the Southeast Missourian he might have identified the wrong man when he picked Kezer out of a photo lineup.

A handwriting analysis recently performed on a police report verified a statement Abbott gave to a Scott City officer 10 days after the murder, naming the man he saw near the crime scene as someone other than Kezer. Kezer's trial attorneys never saw that report.

Several witnesses have since given written statements to Kezer's attorneys saying others have confessed to the murder.

"There are people on both sides of the fence that don't want this case reopened," Walter said.

Though forensic evidence indicated Lawless may have been killed by more than one person, recent information has led Walter to believe that even more people could have been involved than he originally thought, he said.

It's no longer just a murder investigation, he said, but declined to elaborate.

The attorney general's office opposed the evidentiary hearing, arguing in a motion that it was not necessary because much of the evidence exculpating Kezer consisted of hearsay.

The attorney general's office declined to comment on Callahan's decision to grant the hearing or their reasons for opposing it.

bdicosmo@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 245

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