OR, Linda Stangels, freed from prison today
Mark Fenster
Despite conviction, a mystery remains
02/24/03
ASHBEL S. GREEN
There are two vastly different Linda Stangels: the framed
ex-cheerleader and the callous killer.
The first Linda is living a nightmare, a Midwestern girl imprisoned
more than 1,300 miles from home after Oregon police coerced her into a
false confession. This Linda inspired a retired NASA rocket scientist
to spend thousands of dollars trying to free her.
The other Linda pushed her boyfriend off a cliff on the Oregon Coast
and later complained that his scream was "annoying." This Linda
behaved badly in prison, earning several stretches in solitary
confinement for sexual contact with other inmates.
Few people would have heard of either if "NBC Dateline" hadn't plucked
her 1997 Clatsop County trial from obscurity and asked millions of
viewers to vote on the Internet for which version they believed:
Linda the innocent victim or Linda the bad girl?
Whichever she is, Linda Stangel is getting out of prison today.
He never came back On the evening of Nov. 12, 1995, 23-year-old Linda
Stangel called Bev Jones to say Jones' son, David Wahl, was missing.
Stangel and Wahl, 27, had been dating for about a year. Stangel told
Jones and her husband, Tom, that she and Wahl had driven to Ecola
State Park near Cannon Beach. Wahl got out of the car, walked away and
never came back, Stangel said.
The police organized a search, but after four days, the only trace of
Wahl was an empty beer can.
Two weeks later, a headless body washed up on the Washington shore. It
took authorities nearly six months to determine that it was Wahl.
At the time, investigators wrote it off as a suicide, but the Joneses
thought otherwise.
"He wasn't suicidal," Bev Jones said. "And I just felt I wasn't
getting the full story from (Stangel)."
Stangel told Jones that Wahl walked off at 11:30 a.m., but she didn't
call police for more than eight hours. And she drove off in Wahl's van
with his wallet and keys, Bev Jones said.
The Joneses grew more suspicious when, a week after Wahl disappeared,
Stangel moved back to Walker, Minn., where she had grown up and been a
high school cheerleader. She took a bunch of his clothes, Bev Jones
said.
Although the Clatsop County sheriff's office had closed the case,
Jones persuaded the Oregon State Police to reopen it.
The detectives and the Joneses devised a plan to get Stangel back to
Oregon: One of Wahl's sisters called her, offering to pay for an
airplane ticket so Stangel could attend a memorial service for Wahl in
July.
After Stangel arrived, two state police detectives showed up with
questions about Wahl's disappearance. At their request, Stangel
retraced the route to Ecola State Park.
Then, Stangel and the detectives walked along a path to a cliff.
It was that cliff, she told them, on which she and Wahl were standing
when he pretended to push her, even though he knew she was afraid of
heights. She pushed back angrily, and he fell.
She repeated her story in greater detail in two subsequent
tape-recorded interviews that day in the detectives' car in the
parking lot of the park and at a motel in Portland.
A Clatsop County grand jury indicted her for manslaughter and she went
to trial in early 1997.
Afraid of heights Stangel's defense was remarkably simple: She didn't
push Wahl; she wasn't even on the cliff.
Rather, she said, the police pressured her to accompany them along the
trail even after she told them she was afraid of heights. When they
reached the precipice, Stangel said, she grew more panicked, and the
detectives badgered her to admit that she pushed Wahl.
Stangel declined a request for an interview by The Oregonian, but
spoke to "Dateline."
"They told me that Dave had fallen from some place high. They were
telling me it was an accident, nothing was going to happen. That's
when I began to think of some way to get out of this situation," she
said. "Because I knew I had to tell them something or I wasn't leaving
this place."
Stangel said she finally broke down and told them what they wanted to
hear.
Testifying on her behalf was Richard Ofshe, a professor of sociology
the University of California at Berkeley and one of the nation's
preeminent experts on false confessions.
Ofshe said the police subjected Stangel to a type of "run-of-the-mill
illegal interrogation that I've seen produce false confessions all
over the country."
"It's the vulnerable, it's the naive, it's often very good people that
get caught in this trap. People who are in the criminal justice system
learn not to trust the police. It's the less experienced, the
non-streetwise who are more vulnerable," he said.
If Stangel's defense required the jury to think her confession was
false, Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis asked them to
accept that it was true.
The jury did, convicting Stangel of second-degree manslaughter, which
is defined as recklessly killing someone.
She got the statutory minimum prison term of six years and three
months.
Although Court TV covered Stangel's trial, the case probably would
have been forgotten by all but a few dedicated cable viewers and those
directly involved.
Then "Dateline" decided to do a show on the case.
Making the big time Dennis Murphy, a "Dateline" correspondent, said
his producer chose the Stangel trial from several Court TV offerings.
There were questions about her guilt: whether she was even on the
cliff; if so, whether she pushed Wahl on purpose. Also, Murphy said,
Stangel and Wahl were an attractive middle-class couple with broad
appeal.
"Beyond that, it had this terrific sense of place -- the coast of
Oregon, the wildly scenic area," he said.
"Dateline" also offered a twist.
In a first for the newsmagazine show, "Dateline" asked viewers to use
the Internet to vote on whether they thought Wahl's death was a case
of manslaughter or suicide.
The interactive episode was broadcast in July 1999 and was a ratings
smash, drawing 12.6 million viewers -- more than any other program
that week, Murphy said.
The verdict: 58 percent to 42 percent -- guilty.
Watching from his Maryland home, Peter Burr disagreed with the
majority of viewers.
The retired deputy director of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
thought the case against Stangel was weak. He contacted Stangel's
defense attorney and ordered transcripts of the trial.
"The more I read (about) it, the more I realized something was really
wrong," Burr said. "After a while, it became obvious that she was
innocent."
Burr ended up contacting Stangel in prison and making a stunning
offer: He would pay for her appeal, hiring Lawrence Matasar, one of
one the best criminal defense lawyers in the state.
Although the appeal failed, Burr is among a group of core Stangel
supporters who think she is the victim of an incredible injustice. Not
only did police pressure her into a false confession, they say, but
the jury did not hear two crucial pieces of evidence.
First, Stangel's attorney said she passed a lie-detector test, but
Oregon law does not allow such tests in court because they are
considered unreliable.
In addition, the jury did not learn that Alan Corson, one of the two
state police detectives, had also investigated a 1990 Portland-area
slaying solved by a confession that was later determined to be false.
The judge in the Stangel trial ruled that Corson's participation in
the previous case was irrelevant, a decision upheld by the Oregon
Court of Appeals.
Mother is still bitter Wahl's supporters are as passionate as
Stangel's.
His mother, Bev Jones, said Stangel got off easy.
"She's only 29 years old, and now she's going to do whatever she
wants," Jones said. "She's got her whole life ahead of her. David's
gone. They put drug pushers in prison a lot longer than killing a
person."
Jones is particularly upset about Stangel's behavior after pushing
Wahl off the cliff. In her confession, Stangel described the scream as
"annoying."
"She was cold and callous," said Jones.
Then Stangel covered it up, Jones said. "I don't think she had any
remorse at that point," she said.
Marquis agrees.
"If she had come down off that hill crying and run to the police and
said, 'There's been a terrible accident, my boyfriend and I got into a
spat and I pushed him,' I don't know if a grand jury would have even
indicted her," he said.
Although Stangel is free, she faces three years of post-prison
supervision. Oregon authorities have agreed to send her back to her
hometown in Minnesota to serve it.
Stangel's mother, Retta Freeman, said her daughter doesn't have any
plans yet.
"She just wants to get it all be behind her, and so do I," Freeman
said. "We just have to move forward."
Burr said he thinks she'll do just fine in life.
"She's got a very positive outlook on things. She's going to have a
lot of support in her home town and her family," he said.
Marquis isn't so sure, pointing to her continued bad behavior in
prison, where she racked up nine major violations, several involving
inmate sexual contact, and a total of four months in administrative
segregation.
"Am I worried about Linda Stangel killing someone in the future? No,"
Marquis said. But, "I think she's a totally self-absorbed individual,
and she's probably going to get into trouble with the law again."
Ashbel "Tony" Green: 503-221-8202; tony...@news.oregonian.com
tiny dancer
"Mark Fenster" <Fenster_2...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:b5e42449.03022...@posting.google.com...
> OR, Linda Stangels, freed from prison today
>
> Despite conviction, a mystery remains
> 02/24/03
> ASHBEL S. GREEN
>
> There are two vastly different Linda Stangels: the framed
> ex-cheerleader and the callous killer.
Okay, so what did you believe?? I never believed she killed him, just
didn't buy it.........
td
Mark Fenster
> "Mark Fenster" <Fenster_2...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:b5e42449.03022...@posting.google.com...
> > OR, Linda Stangels, freed from prison today
> >
> > Despite conviction, a mystery remains
> > 02/24/03
> > ASHBEL S. GREEN
> >
> > There are two vastly different Linda Stangels: the framed
> > ex-cheerleader and the callous killer.
>
>
> Okay, so what did you believe?? I never believed she killed him, just
> didn't buy it.........
>
> td
Tiny,
I agree with you. I see three big issues with Linda Stangels'
conviction:
(1) False confessions. There have been a number of threads on false
confessions on atc in the last few months. Anne Warfield had a number
of posts on this topic.
Some excerpts:
A videotaped confession unraveled due to DNA evidence:
In the first case of a videotaped murder confession unraveling in Cook
County, a man who was recorded saying he stabbed his mother was freed
on Friday after DNA tests linked another man to the crime.
Bell said he confessed falsely only after detectives yelled at him,
told him he failed a lie-detector test and roughed him up. He had been
held for more than two days.
***********************
Lori Roscetti case
Cline said the four men convicted of the crime in 1988 and cleared
last month were not involved in any way, even though detectives had
said two of them confessed to the assault and murder.
Other cases:
Chicago Police Detective Kenneth Boudreau helped obtain a confession
from a man who, records show, was in jail
when the murder occurred. He has obtained a confession from a man
accused of two murders, but both cases were undermined by DNA
evidence.
He helped to get confessions from two mentally retarded teenagers for
two separate murder cases, but they both were acquitted. And he got
the confession of a 13-year-old with severe learning disabilities who
experts said could not understand his rights.
Additionally, there were the false confessions of the central park
jogger case and other high profile alleged crimes. Thanks to Anne,
and other contributors to this newsgroup, readers of this newsgroup
are aware of the problem of false confessions. However, I don't think
jurors in general are as aware of the false confession problem as we
are. A juror may think "why would somebody confess to something they
didn't do".
(3) Educational level seems to be a predictor to whether a person will
falsely confess to a crime she/he didn't do. In the cases mentioned
above, none of the people who confessed to a crime they didn't commit
had a degree higher than a high school diploma. The people involved
may have been naïve when dealing with police. Coupled with high
pressure police, naïve but innocent people may confess to crimes they
didn't commit.
In this case, I think we had an example of very heavy handed police
tactics, combined with a naïve and not well educated person, creating
a favorable condition for a false confession.
(4) Lastly, one does not have to agree that David Wahl was murdered
(his parents' contention) or committed suicide (Clatsop police's first
determination on the case). David Wahl was drunk, walking along a
cliff on the Oregon Coast in November, the start of the Oregon's rainy
season. David Wahl could have slipped and fallen to his death.
tiny dancer
Basically my reasoning also...........knowing Linda's background of her
father up and leaving many times.........after fights and disagreements, or
simply to cool off.........I thought it very easy to imagine her reasoning,
plus she was young and immature in her thinking........ And I don't for a
minute think she accompanied him up on that trail........ You're right,
they both had been drinking heavily the whole previous night..........and
the next day also.........I'm of the opinion he fell to his death
accidentally....... Was there anything locally about what she did after
leaving prison? I'd imagine she headed back to Minnesota.........
Thanks for the update, by the way........I felt sorry for her and wondered
when she would be getting out.
td
Mark Fenster
[big snip]
>
> Basically my reasoning also...........knowing Linda's background of her
> father up and leaving many times.........after fights and disagreements, or
> simply to cool off.........I thought it very easy to imagine her reasoning,
> plus she was young and immature in her thinking........ And I don't for a
> minute think she accompanied him up on that trail........ You're right,
> they both had been drinking heavily the whole previous night..........and
> the next day also.........I'm of the opinion he fell to his death
> accidentally....... Was there anything locally about what she did after
> leaving prison? I'd imagine she headed back to Minnesota.........
>
> Thanks for the update, by the way........I felt sorry for her and wondered
> when she would be getting out.
>
> td
Tiny,
Not much additional info on Linda...below, from the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune...she is heading to Walker Minnesota, but she might not
have gotten there yet.
Minnesota native finishes prison term for killing boyfriend
Associated Press
Published Feb. 25, 2003 CLIF25
ASTORIA, ORE. -- Linda Stangel, who was convicted of manslaughter for
pushing her boyfriend off a cliff in Oregon, planned to return to her
native Walker, Minn., upon her release from prison Monday.
Rest of article deleted...the rest of the article is repeat of a prior
article in thread.
cjax...@gmail.com
cjax...@gmail.com
zumbaamy...@gmail.com
She owns the Erberts and Gerberts sub shop in Bemidji, MN now.
