Published: March 05, 2006 04:20 pm      

What's next for convicted Camm?

A look ahead and a look back at the most recent trial

BOONVILLE — Two trials, 24 jurors, four months and nearly $2 million — that’s what it took to put former Indiana State Trooper David Camm in jail for the murders of his wife and two children.

But, it’s not over yet, his attorneys and family vowed Friday, following Camm’s second conviction on the charges in four years.

“We’ll never, ever stop,” said his lead defense attorney Katharine “Kitty” Liell. She said she and her co-counsel, Stacy Uliana, would be spending this weekend at the Warrick County jail with their client.

Sam Lockhart, who has led the large family’s effort to free his nephew, echoed Liell, saying earlier if the verdict was guilty he would sell whatever he had to continue the fight.

Several family members have taken out second mortgages on their homes and pitched in other ways to help fund the defense team’s efforts.

The defense plans to appeal the guilty verdict on the basis of the following items, Liell said: The exclusion of part of a tape in which Charles Boney alluded to being at the murder scene and committing the murders, exclusion of the evidence of Boney’s foot fetish as a motive for the murders, allowing prosecutors to allege Camm molested his daughter without any evidence of that, and striking women from the jury without reason during jury selection.

Floyd County Prosecutor Keith Henderson said he wasn’t overly concerned because he believes an appeal would be denied.

“Judge Aylsworth ran a very tight ship. I see no grounds for appeal,” Henderson said Friday.

“The Court of Appeals said we had to be more likely than not” of the molestation before being allowed to argue Camm had molested his daughter. “Once the medical evidence came in, I could argue it. I couldn’t talk about what the grandmother discovered before,” he said, referring to Janice Renn’s statements that her granddaughter had complained of vaginal irritation at least twice, once just days before the murders.

It took jurors more than 43 hours over four days to reach a unanimous guilty verdict late Friday.

Henderson speculated most jurors had decided on a guilty verdict early in deliberations, but had to convince a couple of holdouts that Camm had shot his family in 2000.

“Down the road I’d expect us to be able to speak to the jury” and find out what was happening in the jury room during the four days of deliberations, Henderson said. For now, though, Judge Robert Aylsworth has warned jurors are not to be contacted.

On Monday, Camm will be back in a Warrick County courtroom for a hearing in which the jury will consider sentencing him to life without parole.

Henderson will have to prove aggravating circumstances in the murders in order for a life without parole sentence to be handed down. The jury can also leave sentencing to Aylsworth, who will issue a decision within 30 days. He could issue life without parole, or choose a term of between 45-195 years. Under Indiana law, a prisoner only has to serve half of his sentence before being eligible for parole.

At the least, Camm would be 64 years old when released, and at most he would spend the rest of his natural life in prison.

Kim Renn Camm, 36, and her children were fatally shot as they returned home one evening from dance and swim class. They were killed in the garage of their Georgetown home while Camm, 41, was alleged to be playing basketball with 11 people at a nearby church gym.

Three days later, State Police arrested their former colleague, who had left the department four months before the murders to work for his uncle’s waterproofing business.

Camm was arrested largely based on a blood stain expert’s belief that there was high-velocity blood spatter on his shirt proving he was within 4 feet of the shootings. Several defense blood stain experts testified that the blood was caused by Camm brushing against his daughter when he pulled his son from the family’s vehicle when he found them shot.

After a nine-week trial and three days of deliberations, Camm was found guilty in 2002. But in November 2004, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that Camm’s jury had been biased by testimony from a dozen women with which he had affairs or had flirted with during his 11-year marriage.

The firmly-worded court ruling set limits about what type of evidence could and couldn’t be presented on both sides. Henderson couldn’t link Camm to the molestation without strong evidence, while Liell couldn’t present damning evidence against Boney, Camm’s co-defendant.

Boney, who Liell said had 11 prior convictions, was released from jail three months before the murders. The defense wanted to tell the jury about Boney’s criminal history — which included charges of stalking and assaulting women, brought on, Boney admitted, by his violent obsession with women’s feet and legs. But the appellate court’s decision prevented that information from being allowed.

It wasn’t until last year that anyone in the case had heard of Boney. In February 2005, DNA left on a sweatshirt found at the murder scene and an unknown palm print were linked to Boney.

After telling investigators several different versions of events, he settled on this: He met Camm on a New Albany basketball court just after his release from prison. Initially, Camm tried to encourage Boney to keep his life on track, but later asked if he knew anyone who could provide an untraceable gun. Boney said he took the gun to Camm’s rural home, but didn’t know what he was intending to do with it. Standing outside the garage, Boney told police, he heard arguing and then shots fired. He looked, saw the murder victims and fled as Camm tried to shoot him also.

Camm said he had never heard of Boney. The defense believes Boney may have spotted Kim Camm at her sister’s meat market, two blocks from where Boney was living with his mother, just days before the murders and became obsessed with her. He may have intended to only assault and rob her, as he had done with several previous women, but when something went wrong he gunned down the family.

If Liell has her way, we’ll be hearing a lot more about Boney in the future.

For now, the Renn family just wants to move on, saying they believe Kim, Brad and Jill can finally rest.

But for the Camm-Lockhart family, the nightmare continues.





MORE REACTION FRIDAY NIGHT



“I didn’t do it ... I didn’t do it,” David Camm mouthed, shaking his head, after the verdict was read.



“He didn’t want to be married anymore. ... He didn’t want the baggage of a family,” Floyd County Prosecutor Keith Henderson said, trying to explain part of Camm’s motive.



“We’re not done, we’ll be back,” said an emotional Sam Lockhart, David Camm’s uncle.



“We will be strong. We will not stop and we will continue on our way,” said Katharine “Kitty” Liell, lead defense attorney.



“I just felt a ton of relief. It was a happy thing to hear when that man said guilty,” Kim Camm’s father Frank Renn said following the verdict.



“I don’t like my job ... I don’t like my job anymore,” defense attorney Stacy Uliana said with tears streaming down her face.



“This has been a difficult case for everyone, including all the folks who work with me. We’ve invested our time and our emotions. I felt we presented a good case and it’s been the investigation I’ve ever been involved in,” Keith Henderson said.



“There’s no question in my mind that David Camm murdered his family,” Keith Henderson said.