Edward Griffith was in jail, charged with killing his wife. As his trial approached, DNA tests linked evidence to another man.
By MARCUS FRANKLIN
Published January 10, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Edward Griffith's murder trial was supposed to begin next week.
For the past year, he had insisted that he wasn't the man who strangled his wife with the cord from a motel lamp, but his court-appointed attorney exploded in anger and told him he needed to stop fighting the charges and confess.
"That really crushed me. I lost all hope," Griffith, 37, said. "I thought I was going to be doing a lot of time for a murder I didn't commit."
Then in December, with the trial weeks away, Griffith's attorney visited him in the Pinellas County Jail. He brought hope: Authorities were conducting DNA tests on hair and blood samples, Griffith said.
"When he told me it was like a great weight was lifted off my shoulders," Griffith said.
Thursday night, Griffith was released from jail, almost a year to the day after he was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in the death of his wife, Ann Griffith, 42. He still faces a charge of possession of a controlled substance.
The DNA belonged to Leo Richard Berube, a 35-year-old convicted sex offender of St. Petersburg. Police arrested him this week, and he's being held without bail in the Pinellas County Jail on a first-degree murder charge.
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Edward and Ann Griffith spent the first days of 2003 in a haze. They were smoking crack, as much as they could get their hands on.
About 3 a.m. on Jan. 4, Edward Griffith was hiding in the bathroom of room 114 at the La Mark Charles Motel in Pinellas Park. Out in the bedroom area, his wife of 14 years was turning a trick, he said.
They'd lost their jobs, their home, and their son, now 12, was living with his sister.
Griffith always waited in the bathroom. Just in case a john gave her trouble. A few times he had to come out because a customer refused to pay, or refused to leave or wanted more than his money bought, Griffith said.
"We were in a bad situation," he said. "She was doing things she wasn't supposed to be doing. Our whole life was in shambles."
As Griffith waited in the bathroom that fatal January morning, he heard "one banging noise" but didn't think much of it, he said Friday night. When he came out of the bathroom later, he found his wife lying on the bed, her neck red with bruises.
"I really wasn't aware she was in any danger," Griffith said. "She never called out."
Two days after his wife's murder and one day before her funeral, authorities arrested Griffith and charged him in her death.
Bruce Bartlett, the chief assistant Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney, said Griffith is no longer a suspect in the murder, but he said neither his office nor police made a mistake in charging him.
"He had every opportunity to explain what was going on in that motel room, and he didn't do it," he said Friday.
Griffith said he couldn't.
"I was up for three days. We were so high and up for so long ... I couldn't distinguish the days. I don't remember most of what I told them."
Griffith said he was shocked to learn some of the things he had said to police, but one thing comes back to him clearly: "If I did it, I don't remember."
Pasco-Pinellas Public Defender Bob Dillinger did not return calls Friday. It was unclear why it took a year for the DNA test results to come back, although there is a backlog in processing DNA evidence at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Griffith said that in his first hours of freedom he has been spending time with his son and his 22-year-old stepson, and the rest of his family. They watched movies together on his first night home.
But he said his release does little to quell the guilt he feels about his wife's death.
"I do feel I failed her because I was supposed to protect her," Griffith said. "I let her down. I let her die."
