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Jury debates if confessed serial killer had a 14th victim

PONTIAC, Mich. - The jury began deliberations Tuesday in the murder trial of a confessed serial killer who could be released from prison in less than two years.

Coral Eugene Watts, 51, confessed to killing 13 women more than a quarter-century ago and is accused of stabbing Helen Dutcher to death in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale in 1979.

Watts was given immunity for 12 of the killings in a 1982 plea deal that sent him to prison for 60 years for aggravated burglary. Authorities said he confessed to a 13th slaying in Texas, but charges were never brought in the case.

Because of mandatory release laws and an appeals ruling that lopped more than 35 years off his sentence, he is now set to go free in April 2006.

Jurors, who deliberated for about an hour before recessing Tuesday, have not been told about Watts' impending release. If convicted of Dutcher's slaying, Watts faces a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.

The prosecution's key witness saw Dutcher's attacker from up to 85 feet away, and the defense has questioned his ability to see that far in the dark.

ATLANTA - Crematory operator Ray Brent Marsh, who for years dumped bodies on his north Georgia property and presented families with fake ashes, will plead guilty to criminal charges Friday, prosecutors told family members in a letter.

Ron Cordova, a co-counsel for Marsh, said the agreement calls for a 12-year prison sentence followed by an extended period of probation.

Had he been convicted at trial, Marsh could have faced a prison sentence of 8,000 years on 787 criminal charges of theft and abuse of a corpse.

Responding to an anonymous tip, state officials in 2002 uncovered 334 bodies.

A spokesperson for District Attorney Herbert Franklin would not comment on the letter Tuesday. A judge must approve any agreement before it is valid.

PORTLAND, Ore. - A Portland lawyer was wrongly linked to the Madrid train bombings because a high-ranking supervisor bungled a fingerprint examination and two of his colleagues were too afraid to contradict him, a panel of forensic experts found.

The conclusion shows that human error played a larger role than originally thought in the botched investigation. The FBI had said a hazy and low-resolution fingerprint image caused authorities to connect lawyer Brandon Mayfield to the March 11 terrorist attack that killed 191 people.

Mayfield, a convert to Islam, was arrested in May after the FBI said his fingerprint was found on a bag of detonators. He was held for two weeks before being released, a setback to the Bush administration in the war on terrorism.

The report concluded that the FBI analyst who was first asked to examine the fingerprint was influenced by "the inherent pressure of working an extremely high-profile case." He also felt pressured by the fact that the FBI's database had spit out Mayfield as the fourth most likely match to the print, the report states.

Once the first examiner - described as a highly respected supervisor with many years experience - made up his mind, the other two analysts did not dare challenge him, the report said.

"To disagree was not an expected response," said Robert Stacey, the author of the final report published this month in the Journal of Forensic Identification.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - Fallingwater it was not: From its wind-stripped shingles to an embarrassing overgrowth of weeds and bramble, the erstwhile beach house on Lake Michigan's shore did little to declare itself a creation of the architectural luminary Frank Lloyd Wright.

But that was no reason, say those who would preserve all of Wright's structures, to smash it into oblivion.

The 88-year-old beach house came tumbling down last week - the first Wright building to meet such a fate in more than 30 years - to make way for a four-bedroom home with a two-car garage. The last Wright structure to come down was Milwaukee's Arthur Munkwitz Apartments in 1973.

While there are those who maintain the ramshackle summer cottage in the village of Grand Beach was beyond meaningful repair, to destroy it was akin to shredding a sketch or lesser work of a great painter, said Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

Wright designed more than 1,000 structures, about half of which were built. When he died in 1959, Wright was America's most-celebrated architect.

About 350 of the 400 Wright-designed homes still exist, Scherubel said.

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