Jurors to receive instructions on law in homicide case
Fayette County jurors will be instructed on the law this morning in the criminal homicide case of James Francis “Silky” Sullivan. District Attorney Nancy D. Vernon and First Trial Assistant District Attorney Joseph M. George have asked the eight-man, four-woman panel to convict Sullivan, 55, of Grindstone of first-degree murder. That conviction carries with it a mandatory life sentence.
Sullivan’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender David Kaiser, asked the panel to acquit his client, claiming that Sullivan is only being tried for lying about having sex with victim Linda Mae Covach.
Kaiser was referring to DNA evidence that linked Sullivan to 29-year-old Covach.
Barbara Flowers, a state police forensic scientist, testified Tuesday that sperm present in Covach was had a 1 in 37 trillion chance of coming from a white male other than Sullivan.
Prosecutors charged that Sullivan lied to retired state police trooper Edward Hostetler in 1979 when he was questioned about Covach. Sullivan, testified Hostetler on Monday, said that he never dated Covach and had not seen her since 1977 – a year before her body was discovered.
A hunter found Covach’s body near the Hutchinson ball field on Nov. 2, 1978. She was last seen alive on Oct. 31, 1978, around 11 p.m. at the now-defunct R-Lounge in North Union Township.
At the time her body was discovered, a swab was taken of her vagina. Sperm present on that swab was preserved for more than two decades. The state police crime lab started doing DNA analysis around 1995. And, when the Cold Case Squad reviewed the unsolved Covach murder in the coming years, police sent that sperm, and Sullivan’s blood, for analysis.
Kaiser told jurors in his closing remarks that the DNA evidence only shows that Sullivan and Covach had sex.
“People lie about sex every day. It’s a common thing to lie about,” said Kaiser. “You have a television set, everyone knows President Clinton lied about sex with Monica Lewinsky. (Prosecutors) are taking a big leap, asking you to find him guilty of murder for lying about sex.”
Kaiser also asked why police did not file charges sooner if they had several statements from people Sullivan had allegedly confessed to shortly after the murder.
“Were those statements good enough then to bring Mr. Sullivan to trial? No, they weren’t. The commonwealth is basically taking a shot bringing him to trial now (with DNA evidence),” said Kaiser.
Vernon disagreed, lauding the “foresight” of the state police to keep the swabs. She referred to the DNA link as Sullivan’s “fingerprint” at the crime scene.
She also reminded jurors of testimony from Mary Matlock, the woman with whom Sullivan lived at the time Covach was killed. Matlock testified Monday that during a domestic dispute nearly a year after Covach was killed, Sullivan confessed to killing her.
She testified he told her he was defending her honor when Covach told him she thought he was pregnant and was going to tell Matlock. Sullivan, Matlock testified, said he slapped Covach across the face.
“He broke the caps on her teeth and she said she was going to call the cops. She argued with him and that was her downfall,” said Vernon in his closing remarks.
Sullivan, testified Matlock, grabbed a pipe he kept with him in his Oldsmobile Cutlass, and beat Covach with it until she died. Then, Matlock testified, he confessed to dragging her body to a wooded area, where he stayed until Covach died.
Several months after the murder, Sullivan burned his car, testified Matlock.
While Kaiser questioned Matlock’s testimony, calling her a “scorned woman,” Vernon pointed out that Matlock did not know Covach, and would not have known she had capped teeth unless Sullivan told her. Vernon also noted that in newspaper accounts, it was not revealed that Covach had capped teeth.
In addition to closing arguments, jurors also heard testimony from several other witnesses. Sullivan was not one of them, as he opted not to testify in his own behalf.
Clarence Larew, 60, testified that he and Sullivan were friends who hadn’t seen one another for several years when they ran into one another around 1980. During an ensuing conversation, Larew, currently incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution at Cresson, testified that Sullivan admitted killing a woman who worked at the R Lounge.
That is the bar at which Covach worked at the time of her murder.
Larew testified that Sullivan told him that during a physical altercation with Covach, she grabbed his hair and he “flipped out,” killing her.
After Covach’s murder, Larew testified Sullivan told him he left the scene, but started to worry.
“He said he was driving away and he started thinking about TV shows, and fingerprints, so he burned his car,” testified Larew.
Trooper Daniel J. Venick testified that police were unable to determine just who Covach left with the night she was killed, but told jurors that a man was able to identify that she left in an Oldsmobile like Sullivan’s.
As his lone defense witness, Kaiser presented retired trooper Montgomery Goodwin, incarcerated himself for third-degree murder.
Goodwin, who was the lead investigator in the Covach murder, testified that he did not feel there was enough evidence to arrest Sullivan in 1978.
Nearly 14 years ago, Sullivan was found guilty of another, unrelated murder in the kicking and beating death of a 47-year-old Uniontown resident. Sullivan was convicted of third-degree murder in July 1988 for killing Charles Wheeler.
Wheeler’s nude body was found in a dump on March 2, 1987, in a secluded area of Jefferson Township.
A co-defendant, Richard Rayburn of Brownsville was also convicted of third-degree murder for his role in the death.
Sullivan was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in 1988, and had been out on parole. However, he violated parole was returned to the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh, where police arrested him for Covach’s murder.