By TIM GRANT
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 10, 1999
TAMPA -- In his first interview with detectives, Ray Lamar Johnston was so relaxed that he talked about his golf game and his involvement with the Brandon Chamber of Commerce while answering questions about the murder of Leanne Coryell.
Yet, when asked what happened to an ATM card he was photographed using shortly after Coryell's death, Johnston claimed he was so nervous about talking to the detectives that he threw it out the car window while driving to the station.
"He stated he did this because he panicked," said Detective Ernie Walters in a taped interview that jurors were shown Tuesday. Walters, a lead investigator in the case, died this year.
Johnston, 44, is on trial on a charge of first-degree murder. He is accused of abducting Coryell from her Northdale apartment on Aug. 19, 1997, and driving her to a deserted area behind a church on Ragg Road, where she was robbed, raped, beaten and strangled.
If Johnston is convicted, prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.
From the beginning, Johnston has maintained that he and Coryell were friends and that he had lent money to the 30-year-old dental assistant.
He told detectives he met Coryell at Malio's about 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 19, 1997. Then about 7:30 p.m., Johnston said, they went to a Carrabba's restaurant on N Dale Mabry Highway. That is where, according to Johnston, she gave him her ATM card and PIN number so he could withdraw $1,200 she had borrowed from him.
Records and testimony from co-workers show Coryell didn't leave work until 8:40 p.m. A manager at Malio's restaurant testified that Johnston was a regular patron and he remembered seeing him the night of the murder. But the manager, Michael Swinson, told jurors he had never seen Coryell.
The state's case against Johnston relies heavily on his own statements to police, videotape of Johnston using Coryell's card and footprints matching Johnston's at the crime scene. What prosecutors lack, however, is physical evidence such as hairs, blood or DNA linking Johnston to the murder.
Also, unless Johnston takes the stand the jury won't hear about his long record of convictions for rape, kidnapping and armed robbery. Johnston has spent 24 years in prison in three states.
The day began Wednesday with Johnston confidently walking into the courtroom with a broad smile. Although family members of Johnston have sat through two days of the trial, Johnston has mostly avoided eye contact with them, and they have made no comments to reporters.
As prosecutors sought to show jurors the brutal manner in which Coryell died, much of the evidence was painful to Coryell's family. Her mother, Sandra Morris, dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Her father, Tom Morris, choked back tears as jurors were shown the bruised and naked body of their daughter lying face-down in the shallow pond behind St. Timothy's Catholic Church.
Hillsborough County associate medical examiner Russell Vega explicitly described how Coryell was whipped on the buttocks with her own belt, beaten about the face by someone's fist, raped as her hands were tied with her bra and choked from behind with her assailant's bare hands.
During his testimony, Vega discounted a witness' claim that when Coryell's body was first discovered she was wearing panties and a dress hiked above her waist. If state witness John Debnar is correct, that would have suggested someone touched the body in the 20 minutes between when it was discovered by Debnar and police arrived.
Vega said the body was dragged by its feet into the pond. And based on the drag marks, Vega said, there were no panties on the body and Coryell could not have been wearing a dress.
The trial continues today.
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