 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Family ties unbound in murder case
By CARY DAVIS, Times Staff Writer They are family, two brothers and a cousin. But when detectives started asking questions about the murder of a Holiday man, family loyalty disintegrated. The brothers turned on each other. The cousin turned on one of the brothers. But in trying to put someone else's finger on the trigger, all three made the same mistake. Each admitted being at the scene of the August 2000 shooting, court records show. Each said the three went there together, with guns, to rob a drug dealer known as Shorty. That was enough to indict all three -- brothers Glen and John Oyer, and their cousin Ronald Spaulding -- for first-degree murder. Under Florida law, if a person is there, participating in a felony that leads to a homicide, that person can be found guilty of first-degree murder. "The fact is, it doesn't really matter who pulled the trigger," said Assistant State Attorney Mike Halkitis. "They confessed to felony murder. They don't know the law. If they knew the law, they wouldn't tell us this stuff." Court documents, including recently released transcripts of Spaulding's interviews with detectives, show how the defendants' statements turned a foundering investigation with little forensic evidence into what Halkitis called a "pretty strong case." The three defendants, who will be tried separately in the coming months, earned no sympathy from prosecutors for helping to crack the case. The state is seeking the death penalty for all three. Aug. 27, 2000. Robert Dean, 35, was housesitting for his landlord. Around 2:40 a.m., a single shot rang out. A few minutes later, emergency dispatchers took a 911 call: man down. Paramedics and deputies rushed to the scene, but there was nothing they could do for Robert Dean. He had been shot behind his left ear and left for dead on a gravel driveway. Homicide detectives had little to go on. A search of the scene proved futile. Interviews with neighbors didn't help much either. So Pasco sheriff's detectives focused their attention on Dean: Who would want him dead? He seemed an unlikely target. A father of five young girls, Dean worked as a handyman and lived alone in a small rented home. He saved money to help support his daughters, who lived nearby with their grandparents. Dean's wife had left him and the girls seven years earlier. Next, detectives checked out Dean's landlord, Terry Nelson, who lived in a Flora Avenue mobile home on the small corner lot where the murder took place. Nelson was known around the Holiday neighborhood as Shorty. And, according to court documents, word was that Shorty always kept a stash of marijuana and a bundle of cash at his house. Nelson told detectives that he was in Bristol, Tenn., for a stock car race on the night of the murder. He asked Dean to housesit for the weekend. Nelson admitted selling large quantities of marijuana from his house, records show, and gave detectives the names of his clients. But the investigation stalled. After two months, lead detective William Moe had run out of leads. Then, in early November 2000, detectives received a call from a young woman, who said John Oyer wanted to talk. Oyer, then 20, had been released from prison that summer, after serving time for burglary and auto theft. Detectives had talked to Oyer before: He made the first 911 call about Dean's shooting. Detectives visited Oyer in the Pinellas County Jail, where had been held since his arrest weeks earlier on charges of aggravated assault on a police officer and throwing a deadly missile. Oyer implicated his brother Glen, then 21, in Dean's murder, records show. He also named other witnesses. It didn't take detectives long to put together a chilling account of the shooting. Spaulding, 22 at the time, and Glen Oyer agreed to interviews. So did Glen Oyer's 16-year-old girlfriend, Shanna Crager, who said she gave the three defendants a ride to the crime scene. The one constant in all of the interviews: Dean was not the target. Shorty was. According to interview transcripts, Spaulding said Glen Oyer came up with the plan to rob Shorty. Spaulding and the Oyer brothers dressed in black and persuaded Crager to give them a ride in her 1991 red Mercury Capri convertible, records show. All three had handguns, Spaulding said, but Glen Oyer's weapon was the only one loaded. Dean, apparently startled by a noise, came out of the mobile home and confronted the men, Spaulding said. "I told him to freeze," Spaulding told investigators. "That's when it dawned on me that, what the hell are we doing?" Dean "didn't flinch," Spaulding said. "He just, he just looked at me. He didn't resist. He didn't say two words . . . He was like he would have gave us the world . . . "That's when Glen had come around from the side of the trailer, said, "Get down.' No sooner did he tell him to get down, bam." Spaulding said he and Glen Oyer went through Dean's pockets. They found about $4, he said. Spaulding said he asked Glen Oyer why he shot Dean. "Glen said, "I didn't mean to. I had the hammer cocked and I went to pistol-whip him and it went off.' " Crager said Glen Oyer confessed to her a few days after the shooting. "He just told me that he went in there and he shot somebody and found out he only had $4," said Crager, who was not charged. "He was like, "I shot somebody for $4.' " Glen Oyer told a different story. According to records, he pinned the murder on his brother. He said John Oyer struck Dean in the head with a gun and that the weapon fired. Spaulding summed up the crime this way: "A guy's dead because of our stupidity . . . We didn't even know he was there. He didn't deserve it." Angela Dean, 14, said she and her four sisters still struggle to cope with their father's death. "We're doing okay, I guess," Angela said. "It's weird. You wake up in the middle of the night and he's not there." As for the three men accused of killing her father, she said, "I hate them. I want them to get the death penalty."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From today's Pasco Times Letters Jan Glidewell |
