Shannon Melendi's Killer Colvin Hinton
tiny dancer
*treatment* in prison?
Defendant in Pre-Law Student's Murder Has History of Assault
By R. Robin McDonald
Fulton County Daily Report
08-17-2005
When the 11-year-old disappearance and suspected murder of an Emory
University pre-law student goes to trial this week, the outcome could depend
on whether the defense can keep from the jury the chilling details of the
defendant's past.
Colvin C. "Butch" Hinton III goes on trial for the murder of 19-year-old
Shannon Melendi, who disappeared after last being seen at a DeKalb County,
Ga., softball field where Hinton worked as an umpire. Her body was never
found. While Hinton became a suspect near the beginning of the investigation
and eventually was imprisoned on an unrelated arson conviction, he was not
charged with Melendi's murder until he left prison in December 2003 and
began working as a butcher in a metro Atlanta grocery.
Neither DeKalb prosecutors nor Hinton's defense lawyer, Brenda J. Bernstein,
would comment about the case, citing a broad gag order imposed by DeKalb
Superior Court Judge Anne Workman. But court filings indicate that
prosecutors will attempt to introduce the jury to five women who say they
were victims of violent attacks by Hinton. The court record doesn't indicate
whether Workman will allow their testimony.
Court records in Illinois and Georgia paint a grim picture of Hinton as a
man who preyed on women he knew, obtaining sexual gratification by
kidnapping and imprisoning them.
The most detailed account, found in Illinois court records, involves a
14-year-old girl Hinton lured to a cemetery. The girl, who dated Hinton's
younger brother and attended the Sunday school class Hinton taught,
described how she was tied up, gagged, tossed in the trunk of Hinton's car
and then held captive in his basement. Hinton, then 21, was married and
working in a rural Illinois furniture store.
The girl was rescued after Hinton's pregnant wife heard her screams. Hinton
pleaded guilty but mentally ill to reduced charges of taking indecent
liberties with a child. He served 18 months in prison.
SIMILAR STORIES
The testimony of that teenager and four other women, among them Hinton's
first wife, is eerily similar to what law enforcement authorities have
suggested happened to Melendi after she and Hinton crossed paths at a DeKalb
softball game on March 26, 1994.
Three days after she disappeared, friends searching for the Emory coed
discovered her black Nissan 280SX abandoned at a gas station across the
street from the softball field. The doors were unlocked, the keys still in
the ignition.
Melendi's family in Miami quickly launched a massive public hunt for her.
Fueled, in part, by intense media coverage in Georgia and Florida, dozens of
Atlanta residents and a mobilized Emory campus distributed more than 10,000
fliers seeking information about her disappearance.
On April 6, 11 days after Melendi was last seen, an anonymous male caller
telephoned Emory University's Counseling Center, claiming Melendi was with
him. The caller claimed the college student was unharmed and that "he would
make demands later," according to court records. He also said he had
Melendi's ring.
FBI agents traced the call to a telephone booth near Rex in Clayton County,
not far from Hinton's home. There, they found a ring that Melendi's father
identified as belonging to his daughter. By then, investigators had learned
that Hinton had served prison time in connection with his 1982 attack on the
14-year-old girl.
Court records in that Illinois case also revealed that in 1977, Hinton, who
was then 16, had undergone court-ordered psychiatric counseling in lieu of
incarceration for an attempted rape conviction in Kentucky, stemming from
the kidnapping and imprisonment of a 30-year-old woman he knew.
That was how Hinton first surfaced as a suspect in Melendi's disappearance.
Although law enforcement authorities searched Hinton's Clayton County home
and property and seized some of his belongings in their fruitless hunt for
Melendi, he was not charged at the time in connection with her
disappearance.
After Hinton made a $185,000 insurance claim in connection with a September
1994 house fire, federal authorities charged him with fraud and arson. He
was convicted and served nearly 10 years in prison. Two months after
Hinton's release, in February 2004, DeKalb authorities arrested him and
charged him with Melendi's murder.
FIANCEE BECAME HIS STEPMOTHER
Born in 1960 in Kentucky in the heart of rural Appalachia's coal-mining
country, Hinton was a preacher's kid. His father and namesake, Colvin C.
Hinton Jr., was an insurance salesman and a Baptist preacher, according to a
psychiatric evaluation of the younger Hinton conducted in 1982 after his
arrest involving the 14-year-old girl.
Hinton grew up in Somerset, Ky., where he attended a Baptist school.
Nicknamed "Butch," he was painfully self-conscious and insecure, according
to his 1982 evaluation. He suffered from frequent tension headaches. But his
home life was "orderly and harmonious" until his mother died when Hinton was
14. She had been 19 when she gave birth to her eldest son and was 33 when
she died.
Eight months later, Hinton's father, then 43, remarried. His new wife was
19 -- just five years older than Hinton. And her presence in the household
while Hinton still was grieving generated internal family strife, the
evaluation said.
By the time Hinton was 19, he was engaged to be married. His bride-to-be was
18. Hinton's father, still married to a woman 23 years his junior, "took a
sexual interest" in his eldest son's 18-year-old fiancee. Father and fiancee
soon began having an affair, according to the psychiatric report.
When the elder Hinton's second wife discovered the liaison, she divorced her
husband. Hinton's father then married his young lover. Instead of becoming
Butch Hinton's wife, his fiancee became his stepmother.
By then, Hinton had committed his first attempted rape. Hinton had been 16
when he held his 30-year-old victim against her will and tried to rape her,
according to court records in Illinois and Georgia. "It was thought that the
death of his mother ... had a causal connection" with the attempted rape, a
psychiatrist noted, and Hinton served no time for the incident, undergoing
court-ordered psychiatric counseling instead.
After his father remarried, Hinton dropped out of college and resettled in
Kewanee, a small Illinois farm town north of Peoria, where he went to work
first in a local cemetery and then in a furniture store.
On Aug. 18, 1981, one month before Hinton's 21st birthday, he married a
19-year-old Kewanee woman. Within three months, she was pregnant.
Between 1981 and 1982, Hinton would attack and sexually assault three more
women, according to DeKalb and Illinois court records, including his wife
and one of her relatives. Two he would also kidnap or imprison, according to
court records.
'I JUST FEEL CRAZY'
Details of the kidnapping of the 14-year-old offer insight into impulses
that drove Hinton to plan the attack and single out the teenager as his
victim. Hinton told authorities: "Something just came over me, and like a
different person came inside me," a feeling that made him want "to go do
some bodily harm to someone."
In that frame of mind, Hinton said he immediately thought of the 14-year-old
he had taught in Sunday school. So he called the girl and told her that his
brother had just won $125,000 in the Tennessee lottery and wanted to see
her. Could the two brothers meet her around 5 p.m.?
"She was real excited and stuff," Hinton told investigators. "But you know
it was a whole lie. My brother wasn't going to be there or nothing like
that. It was just a lot of plot to get her there. I just wanted to get her
there. Like I said, something came in me just to do something."
The girl rode her bike to meet Hinton on a gravel road on the edge of town.
It was her birthday, and she was going to a slumber party later that night.
Hinton made an excuse for his brother's absence and persuaded the girl to
sneak out and meet him later that night at the town cemetery. He made her
promise to tell no one. "You have to promise this because nobody knows about
him winning all this money except for the family and the newspapers down
there," the teenager recalled Hinton saying.
Dusk was falling when the girl arrived at the cemetery several hours later.
She was there waiting when Hinton pulled up, alone, in his 1973 Ford Galaxy.
The girl hopped into the front seat, and Hinton showed her a small box and
told her it was a gift from his brother. "I knew he [Hinton's brother] had
just won all this money, and I thought, maybe, it was a diamond ring," she
later told police.
Hinton asked her to turn her back and put her hand behind her so that he
could "put it on for you." When she did, Hinton bound and gagged her,
looping a rope around her neck and then knotting it around her feet so that
she would strangle if she struggled.
"Something's happening," he told her. "I don't know what's wrong. ... I just
feel crazy."
When she resisted, she said he warned her: "I ought to waste you right now."
The teenager recalled that Hinton pulled a knife, pressed it to her throat
and, later, "told me to be quiet or that he might kill me like he did to the
other two."
Hinton tossed the teenager into his car trunk and then smuggled her into the
basement of his house, where he trussed her with tape, twine, rope and metal
clasps so tightly that her limbs began to swell and she could barely
breathe. Once there, he attempted, but failed, to rape her.
The teenager was still captive in the basement when Hinton's wife came home
that night. When the girl managed to break partially free of her bonds,
Hinton's wife heard her screams.
After Hinton's wife discovered the teenager, whom she knew from church, and
untied her, Hinton pleaded with the girl not to tell on him.
"I am so truly sorry," he said. "I just can't believe this. ... I can't
believe I would ever do this. ... I just felt that at 3 o'clock this
afternoon that I wanted to hurt somebody, and the only person that I could
think of was you."
Then he begged the teenager, "Don't tell. Don't tell."
Later, he would tell police he couldn't explain his behavior. Hinton
insisted that the man who had attacked the teenager "wasn't me. ... I don't
know what it was because I was never like that before. ... I don't know what
it was that came over me."
First charged with aggravated kidnapping and aggravated taking indecent
liberties with a minor, Hinton was allowed to plead guilty but mentally ill
on Dec. 1, 1982, to reduced charges of taking indecent liberties with a
child and unlawful restraint. He was sentenced to four years in prison and
served 18 months.
'THE GREATEST OF REMORSE'
Dr. Werner Tuteur, the psychiatrist who interviewed Hinton while he was
awaiting sentencing, found him to be "extremely polite, respectful and
cooperative." Hinton, the psychiatrist said, also demonstrated "the greatest
of remorse" for his actions. His fingernails were "chewed to the quick, a
sign of extreme anxiety."
Tuteur described Hinton as "a very insecure and inadequate person who all
his life had difficulties in making decisions. He is extremely introspective
and preoccupied with himself." The psychiatrist said Hinton was troubled by
his mother's death seven years earlier, the attempted rape when he was 16
and the father who deprived him of his original fiancee.
The psychiatrist added that while Hinton's judgment "is in no way
disturbed," the emotional imprint left by his father's third marriage had
"acquired such depth that admittedly he [Hinton] had a need to 'prove his
power.'"
Tuteur diagnosed Hinton as suffering from "a severe personality disorder"
that left him moody, emotionally unstable and with a poor self-image. Hinton
had "a need for self-assertion," the psychiatrist said, "as, unfortunately,
happened in this case."
Tuteur called Hinton an intelligent, religious person and said that with
proper treatment, it was unlikely he would attack women again.
Hinton "has the best intentions to control his behavior in the future."
Imprisonment, Tuteur offered, "would accomplish very little considering the
defendant's insecurity and inadequacy. It would merely make him feel more
inadequate, and relapses would be possible upon his re-entry into society."
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