"baptismal" photos basis of Flippo appeal
Mothra
remembers it. It's another Man of God gone bad, this time a
fundamentalist Protestant minister named (swear to god) Michael Flippo.
He was convicted of the 1996 bludgeoning murder of his wife, Cheryl, in
Babcock State Park in WV. WV has no death penalty, and Flippo was
sentenced to life w/o parole.
The prosecutors charged that Flippo and a male friend (whose name I
forgot) scoped out Babcock, a beautiful woodland with rustic cabins that
can be rented by the week, the week before he and Cheryl came there,
ostensibly to get away from everything and try to "heal" their marriage.
During the trial we learned that Flippo had problems managing money,
especially other people's money, and that Cheryl had had to have his
name removed from bank accounts and credit cards to try to salvage their
finances. An additional motive was at least hinted at when the state
introduced as evidence photos found in Flippo's briefcase at the crime
scene. The pictures showed Flippo's male friend in various states of
undress. Flippo's story was that he and his friend had gone to Babcock
for a baptismal retreat, and the photos were records of the baptism.
Anyway, Flippo made a 911 call (I assume from the lodge, since the
cabins have no phones) and directed police to the crime scene. Cheryl
had been beaten to death with a stick of firewood, and Flippo showed
cops superficial knife wounds to his lower legs. He said they had been
attacked by an intruder who broke into the cabin, stabbed him in the
legs and knocked him out. When he came to, he found his wife dead. The
jury didn't buy it.
After the trial, as an aside, it was learned that one of the accounts
Flippo had been pilfering was one set up to collect contributions for a
young woman who needed multiple organ transplants. Flippo's church, the
Landmark Church of God, in Nitro (you'll never know how tempting it was
to leave out that comma after "God") WV, was the trustee of the fund and
as pastor Flippo had access to it. He had cleaned it out.
Flippo first appealed to Fayette County circuit court judge John Hatcher
to grant a new trial, suppressing the photos, which the defense said had
been illegally obtained. Hatcher denied the motion. Flippo appealed to
the state supreme court, which refused 5-0 to hear his case. He then
appealed to the US Supreme Court which in Oct. 1999 reversed Hatcher's
decision.
Hatcher now has ordered the state to justify using the photos, which
were seized from an unlocked briefcase during a police search of the
crime scene. The defense has claimed that this was an illegal search.
The SC said that it is possible that the search and the evidence seized
may be admissible if the state can justify what was done.
Martha