The Plain Dealer, Cleveland (Bob Paynter and Sandra Livingston)
Posted 3/1/2006 12:00:00 AM

Taft must decide if doubts justify reprieve for Spirko

Unresolved issues, undisclosed evidence cited in Spirko case

Give me polygraph in Spirko case

Cop, criminal square off in jailhouse duel

A mysterious murder suspect emerges, then disappears

A cold-blooded liar

Taft must decide if doubts justify reprieve for Spirko

October 30, 2005

By Bob Paynter; Projects Editor and Sandra Livingston; Reporter
The Plain Dealer

In the six years since executions resumed in Ohio, Gov. Bob Taft has never founda compelling reason to reject a death-penalty recommendation from the Ohio ParoleBoard.

He’s gotten 19 recommendations from the board – all but one advocatingexecution – and he has followed them every time.

But never before has Taft received a parole board report like the one he gottwo weeks ago in the case of John Spirko, with so many board members expressingsuch profound doubt about whether an inmate was guilty.

After two daylong clemency hearings, the board has twice voted 6-3 againstclemency for Spirko. But after the second hearing on Oct. 12, the three dissentersdidn’t just disagree. They gave Taft a litany of what they described as“compelling factors” that raise doubt about whether Spirko shouldbe executed in a little more than two weeks for the 1982 slaying of Elgin, Ohio,postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger.

In only one other death-penalty case during Taft’s tenure have threedissenters argued for clemency. But their reasons in that case stemmed fromthe inmate’s youth and his parents’ neglect – not from doubtsabout actual guilt.

In Spirko’s case, however, the dissenters raised three basic questionsabout his 1984 conviction. They questioned the quality of the evidence againsthim, the fairness of the prosecution and the credibility of the key investigatorand primary accuser.

But unless Taft or the courts intervene, John Spirko will die Nov. 15.

Unresolved issues, undisclosed evidence cited in Spirko case

October 30, 2005

By Bob Paynter
The Plain Dealer

Three members of the Ohio Parole Board, not convinced that John Spirko committedmurder 23 years ago, asked the state’s lawyers a series of pointed questionsduring Spirko’s Oct. 12 clemency hearing.

Many of the doubts they raised about the case were fueled by information thatwas unknown to the jury that convicted Spirko in 1984 and to many of the appellatecourt judges who have since declined to grant him relief.

Attorneys for the state argued, to the apparent satisfaction of the board majority,that Spirko’s own words — to investigators and to the jury —were enough to convict him of robbing the tiny Elgin post office on Aug. 9,1982, and of kidnapping and fatally stabbing Postmaster Betty Jane Mottingerin the process.

And they produced recent declarations from four of the original jurors thatthey stand by their verdict.

But that wasn’t enough for board members Ellen Venters, Jim Bedra andSandra Mack. "There is too much residual doubt," they told Gov. BobTaft in their dissent, "to execute John Spirko."

Question: Why, when dealing with a lifelong liar like John Spirko, does thestate’s case rely almost exclusively on what Spirko said, not what hedid? “Where is the conduct?”— board member Ellen Venters.

Here’s what’s known: Spirko was a busy man on Aug. 9, 1982 —the day Betty Jane Mottinger disappeared from her Elgin post office —shuttling between various activities in Toledo and Swanton, two hours to thenorth. And prosecutors never provided a timetable showing how he could havesqueezed in a trip to Elgin and back.

Nor did they have any physical evidence linking Spirko to Elgin, Mottingeror the murder scene.

In fact, Spirko never appeared on investigators’ radar until nearly threemonths after the crime, when he contacted them. The career criminal and habitualliar said he had information he wanted to trade in return for lenient treatmentfor his girlfriend and himself in an unrelated case.

In more than a dozen untaped interviews that followed, Spirko told investigatorsa series of gruesome, ever-changing tall tales about what he said he knew aboutthe Mottinger murder.

Investigators tried to chase down Spirko’s many leads but came up withnothing.

They argued that, embedded among the lies, Spirko’s stories containeddetails that showed he knew things only the killer could know — somethingthey say he acknowledged in a letter to his girlfriend. The letter was as filledwith bravado as his interviews.

What’s never been clear is where the details came from. Many had beenreported in various news outlets before Spirko came forward. And others, Spirko’slawyers argue, might have been supplied — deliberately or inadvertently— by investigators.

One of the details was a description of Mottinger’s purse. Spirko firsttold one postal inspector he had seen a canvas "sack." Two days later,Spirko met with another inspector who had earlier gotten a detailed descriptionof Mottinger’s purse from her family. Suddenly, Spirko’s vague descriptionradically changed, matching almost verbatim the one given to the inspector weeksearlier, including a precise recitation of the purse’s dimensions.

Other descriptions, like the victim’s clothing, appear to have been addedlater to an investigator’s notes — in a different handwriting style.

Since none of the key interviews was taped, his attorneys and their expertshave questioned whether some of the details were supplied by investigators.The investigators dispute this.

But Spirko never led them to new information to corroborate his stories, atroubling deficiency, according to a national expert on wrongful convictionswho appeared before the parole board. And there’s plenty that Spirko didn’tknow.

Twice he told investigators he knew nothing about stamps being stolen fromthe post office, although more than $700 worth had been taken.

Twice he told investigators that Mottinger had been stabbed in the back, butthere was no evidence of back wounds.

Spirko twice described the diminutive, 105-pound woman in his stories as "fat."

It was widely reported that her body was found wrapped in a shroud. Prosecutorsclaimed that Spirko knew what the shroud looked like (he said it was "gray")and how Mottinger’s body was wrapped (shroud "flapped . . . end toend over head"). But Spirko didn’t appear to know the most memorablefacts about either.

He said nothing about two concrete blocks wrapped with the body, or about therope and duct tape used to bind the shroud around her neck, waist and legs.And he didn’t appear to know the most obvious detail about the shroud— that it was covered with paint spots, a fact that led every investigatorat the scene to describe it as a painter’s dropcloth.

(A former house painter disclosed in 1997 that the shroud matched the dropclothhe and his boss used on painting jobs that summer, near where Mottinger’sbody was found, and that his boss was involved in the crime. Investigators neverfollowed up on the lead.)

Despite what Spirko said and didn’t say, evidence of what he did theday of the crime tends to undercut the prosecution’s case.

Investigators discovered that Spirko — released two weeks earlier fromprison in Kentucky — met for more than an hour with his parole officerin Toledo, although it’s not clear at what time.

He went to a doctor’s office with his sister that afternoon, also inToledo. He also called the Kentucky prison from Swanton that afternoon to inquireabout his personal belongings. And he signed for a package at the Swanton postoffice.

Conclusions: The board majority said Spirko knew details of the crime and thathe convicted himself with his own words. On matters like the lack of physicalevidence, the content of Spirko’s statements and the quality of his alibi,the majority deferred to the original jury.

Citing the alibi, the dissenters disagreed. With a "plausible" timetablefrom Spirko, and none at all from the state, "we are again left with residualdoubt," they wrote.

Question: Why did the state put John Spirko on trial and not his friend DelaneyGibson, even though both were indicted and the state claimed it had much strongerevidence placing Gibson at the scene of the crime? – board member EllenVenters.

Here’s what’s known: On the morning of Betty Jane Mottinger’skidnapping, Elgin resident Opal Seibert said she saw a clean-shaven strangerstanding outside the post office beside a two-toned car, with one arm restingon top of the open door. She then saw him drive away minutes later, withoutanyone else leaving or entering the car.

Mark Lewis, a truck driver, saw a man in exactly the same position, also besidea two-toned car, about the same time.

Unless two men in identical cars stopped by the Elgin post office at the sametime that morning and stood wedged between car and door in exactly the samemanner, it’s likely that the two witnesses saw the same man, althoughthey described him quite differently.

A few months later, Spirko was wrapping up his final untaped interview withthe primary investigator, Postal Inspector Paul Hartman, when he suddenly –and, until recently, inexplicably – changed his story a final time. Hisbest friend and former cellmate, Delaney Gibson, had killed Mottinger, Spirkonow said, and told him all about it.

Not long after, Lewis picked Spirko’s photo from a lineup, but said hewas only 70 percent sure that was the man he saw that day – hardly beyonda reasonable doubt, even according to the prosecutor.

Seibert picked out an old photo of Gibson. But she said she was 100 percentsure that he was the Elgin stranger – even though Gibson was 20 yearsyounger and half a foot shorter than the man she originally described. She wasnever asked to identify Gibson in person.

Based on Spirko’s stories and Seibert’s memory, both men were indictedon capital murder charges in September 1983.

Over the next several months, Hartman gathered extensive evidence – evidencethat wasn’t disclosed to Spirko or his lawyers for more than a dozen years– indicating that Gibson was nowhere near Elgin the day of the crime andthat he didn’t look anything like the old photo that Seibert picked out.

Investigators noted at the time, in an internal memo, that the interviews ofGibson had gone nowhere. So, just before Spirko’s trial, prosecutors releasedGibson to Kentucky to face noncapital charges there.

When Spirko went on trial – alone – in August 1984, prosecutorsused Seibert’s supposedly unshakeable identification of Gibson to linkSpirko to Elgin on the day of the crime.

Gibson, back in Kentucky, was not available to rebut the claim. Spirko andhis lawyers contend that prosecutors claimed Gibson was in Elgin on the morningof the crime – despite the undisclosed evidence that he was hundreds ofmiles away the night before – simply to convict Spirko.

Ohio authorities have never tried to bring Gibson to trial. After serving timefor a Kentucky murder, Gibson was paroled in 2001. The Mottinger charges againsthim were quietly dropped last year.

At Spirko’s clemency hearing, Venters wanted to know why prosecutorsreleased the 100 percent suspect before putting their 70 percent defendant ontrial. The state’s attorneys said they weren’t involved in the caseat the time and didn’t know.

Spirko’s lawyers say their client stuck to the Gibson story during thetrial – even though it was just as false as the other tales he spun forinvestigators – because he didn’t have the evidence to disprovethe state’s claim that Gibson was there.

Had they been given the evidence that Gibson was nowhere near Elgin that day,they say, Spirko’s final story would have fallen apart, just as all theprevious ones had.

Conclusions: The board majority didn’t agree that prosecutors intentionallywithheld evidence of Gibson’s alibi, and said Spirko’s lawyers madea "strategic decision" not to pursue it.

The dissenters found the state’s persistence in using Gibson’spurported presence in Elgin to convict Spirko to be another cause for doubt.Earlier, they had described the tactic as "death by association."

"We cannot ignore the possibility that Gibson was 600 miles away whenthe offense was committed," they wrote. "This possibility causes residualdoubt."

Question: Why would the primary investigator and star witness against JohnSpirko "reverse his testimony" by declaring recently that he neverbelieved a key piece of evidence used to convict Spirko in the first place?— board member Jim Bedra.

Here’s what’s known: On at least three occasions in the past 18months — twice in tape-recorded interviews — retired Postal InspectorPaul Hartman disclosed that he never believed that Spirko’s best friend,Delaney Gibson, was involved in Betty Jane Mottinger’s murder and thathe told the prosecutor as much at the time.

The revelation was critical because the prosecution used Gibson’s allegedinvolvement — bolstered by an eyewitness who said she was certain shesaw him outside Mottinger’s tiny post office at 8:30 a.m. the day of thecrime — to help convict Spirko in 1984.

Hartman said he concluded Gibson wasn’t involved in part because of evidencethat he gathered — including dozens of photographs and several witnessstatements — that placed Gibson hundreds of miles from Elgin the eveningbefore the crime. That evidence was not provided to Spirko’s lawyers until13 years after their client’s conviction.

Hartman later claimed under oath that he made these disclosures to "mislead"a reporter and Spirko’s lawyers.

When pressed at Spirko’s clemency hearing two weeks ago, state attorneyssaid they could not explain Hartman’s statements about Gibson’srole.

But one possible explanation lies in a 22-year-old memo that suggests thatit was Hartman who had lured Spirko into implicating Gibson in the first place.

Hartman knew all about Gibson from an extensive background investigation heconducted after learning that the two men had spent time in prison together.

By early 1983, Hartman had already listened to a host of Spirko stories duringmore than a dozen jailhouse interviews, stories that he had tried in vain tocorroborate. Gibson’s name had never come up.

But in one of their last interviews, Hartman acknowledged in an internal memo,he steered their conversation to Bear Branch, the tiny Kentucky hamlet thatboth men knew was Gibson’s home. That’s just the kind of coaxingthat can taint an interrogation, experts say.

Spirko took the bait. The next day, he suddenly changed his story, saying forthe first time that Gibson killed Mottinger and told him all about it.

Coupled with the dubious Gibson identification by the state’s eyewitness,that story — repeated by Spirko from the witness stand — providedthe crux of the state’s case. But questions about the source of the Gibsonstory cast a shadow on other claims Hartman made about Spirko as well.

All of the revelations Spirko was said to have made about the crime —including a purported confession — came during untaped interviews, virtuallyall with Hartman. With several revelations, most notably a description of thevictim’s clothing, the critical details appear to have been added laterto Hartman’s original notes.

Questions have been raised about other details as well.

The state has stressed Spirko’s purported knowledge of the "priedstone" — a tiny rhinestone found to be missing from a $7.99 ringfound on Mottinger’s body.

Given its size and quality, the stone is just as likely to have fallen outduring a struggle as to have been pried out. But the fact that the stone wasmissing was never publicly reported. In his notes and testimony, Hartman saidthat Spirko told him that one of the characters in his stories pried it loose.

But Spirko testified he knew nothing about a stone until Hartman brought itup, quoting the investigator as telling him that the man he was after is "'that stinkin’ son of a bitch that pried that stone out of her ring.'That’s the first time I heard anything about a ring."

Questions about Hartman’s notes also figure in the story of Spirko’spurported confession.

On the last day of Spirko’s trial, Hartman testified that Spirko hadconfessed to him in early 1983 — that during one of their final interviews,Spirko had blurted out: "Lay it all on me. I killed her."

Curiously, Hartman had testified in detail about that interview several daysearlier and had never mentioned any such confession. Nor did any mention ofit appear in sworn statements Hartman made about the evidence in the case.

His interview notes were silent on the matter as well.

"I don’t believe that that is in my notes," Hartman told thejury.

Conclusions: The board majority said it wasn’t convinced that any recentHartman falsehoods proved that he doctored the Spirko interviews or lied duringhis trial testimony.

The dissenters described Hartman’s "apparent deceitful conduct"as "reprehensible," saying it lent credence to claims by Spirko’slawyers that the key witness against their client is not believable.

"We are once again wrought by residual doubt," they wrote.

Key dates in Spirko case

1982

Aug. 9: Postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger, 48, is abducted in Elgin, Ohio.

Sept. 18: Her decomposed body, stabbed repeatedly and wrapped in a painter’sdropcloth, is found in soybean field near Findlay.

Oct. 31: John Spirko contacts authorities, offering information. He gives morethan a dozen jailhouse interviews over next 10 weeks.

1983

Sept 13: Spirko and friend Delaney Gibson are indicted in Mottinger’smurder.

1984

August: Spirko is tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

1997

May: Spirko attorneys obtain undisclosed evidence questioning case.

August: Onetime house painter claims former boss is involved in Mottinger murder;authorities never follow up.

2005

March: U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear Spirko case, capping 15 years offruitless appeals.

Oct. 19: By 6-3 vote, Ohio Parole Board recommends against clemency.

Nov. 15: Spirko is scheduled to die.

October 16, 2005

By Bob Paynter; Projects Editor and Sandra Livingston; Reporter
The Plain Dealer

The former house painter who divulged a 15-year-old secret in 1997 about whomight have killed an Elgin, Ohio, postmaster is challenging federal authoritiesto give him a lie-detector test.

John Willier told a Wyandot County investigator eight years ago that the manhe painted houses with in Findlay in the summer of 1982 was involved in BettyJane Mottinger’s murder that August and threatened to kill him if he evertold. But federal officials have never contacted him about the allegation.

With death-row inmate John Spirko set to be executed next month for Mottinger’smurder, Willier told The Plain Dealer on Friday that he is just as willing totalk to officials now as he was in 1997.

He said he’s just as convinced that the shroud Mottinger’s bodywas wrapped in is the very tarp that his boss, Dale Dingus, used on a paintingjob about the time of the murder.

And he’s just as troubled as Jim Bedra — a member of the Ohio ParoleBoard — that law enforcement officials have never followed up on his assertionsabout Mottinger’s death.

Last week, at Spirko’s second clemency hearing before the parole board,Bedra pressed state officials about why they have never reached out to Willier,even though the information he provided about a possible killer has been knownfor more than eight years.

It’s "very strange," Willier agreed on Friday in a telephoneinterview. "Nobody has got ahold of me."

Mottinger was kidnapped from her tiny, rural post office on Aug. 9, 1982, andwas stabbed at least 13 times. Her body, wrapped in a paint-splattered shroud,was found six weeks later in a soybean field a few hundred yards from the rentedhouse trailer where Willier lived.

He was considered a suspect early in the investigation, but investigators lostinterest in him in late 1982, as they focused on Spirko.

Dingus, Willier’s boss that summer, was running his painting businessout of a barn on U.S. 224, also less than a quarter-mile from the spot whereMottinger’s body was found.

On Aug. 1, 1997, while being questioned on an unrelated matter by William Latham,an investigator for the Wyandot County prosecutor’s office, Willier disclosedthat Dingus was involved in Mottinger’s kidnapping and murder, both ofwhich followed a botched drug pickup by Dingus and others at the Elgin postoffice.

In a letter in December from the Avoyelles Correctional Center in Louisiana,where he was serving a 25-year sentence for rape, Dingus told The Plain Dealerhe had no involvement in Mottinger’s death.

On Friday, Willier said authorities investigating the murder showed him a pieceof the paint-splattered shroud and he recognized it as part of the dropclothhe and Dingus had been using to paint a Findlay house that summer.

"I am 99-point-nine-tenths sure that that tarp came from that paintingjob," Willier said. And, he said, besides the owner of the house, Dinguswas the only one who had access to the tarp.

"That’s the key thing that has me baffled over the years,"Willier said. "Look, if this guy — this John Spirko — if hedon’t know me and I don’t know him and he don’t know Dingusand Dingus don’t know him, how the hell did he get the tarp?"

Willier lives in a small town in Tennessee and works in the cable industry.He declined to discuss the specifics of his 1997 statement to Latham, althoughhe said he stands by it.

But Willier did say he is more than willing to talk to federal authorities— and he’s eager to take a lie-detector test about his assertionsto Latham, both to finally clear his own name and to help reopen the investigation.He said he offered to take a lie-detector test in 1982 to prove he wasn’tinvolved in the murder, but has never been given one.

"I’ve been out of trouble since 1988," Willier said, referringto a past scarred by drug involvement and criminal convictions. "I’mvery clean now. I’m married. I go to church and everything. I just wantthis to leave me alone."

But he also expressed some sympathy for Spirko’s situation.

"I think about it a lot," Willier said. "It has me bothered.Because what if there is an innocent person there. And what if the guy thatactually did it — or guys or whoever — are walking free?"

Parole board member Bedra sounded a similar theme on Wednesday, although notnecessarily on Spirko’s behalf. Bedra described Willier’s storyas a legitimate lead, especially in light of 1984 testimony by a forensic scientistcalled by the defense. The expert testified that paint on the shroud matchedpaint that Willier and Dingus had been applying to Findlay homes that summer.

Bedra challenged state officials to pursue Willier’s story in the interestof justice — for Mottinger and her family.

Everyone agrees that more than one offender was involved, Bedra said. Regardlessof whether Spirko is guilty or innocent, he said, "we can all assume thatone or more offenders is still out there. I think the state missed a windowof opportunity."

Bedra urged officials — especially Van Wert County Prosecutor CharlesKennedy, in whose county the crime occurred — to follow up. "Whoknows what you’ll find?" Bedra said.

It could not be determined if Kennedy plans to heed Bedra’s advice. Hecould not be reached Friday.

Charles Wille, an assistant Ohio attorney general, expressed skepticism atWednesday’s hearing that any evidence could be found now to corroborateWillier’s account.

When asked Friday whether the attorney general’s office would try tofind Willier, spokeswoman Kim Norris said in an e-mail that a federal judgehad already determined that the Willier issues weren’t relevant becausethey didn’t prove Spirko was innocent.

Bedra’s suggestion followed the videotaped testimony of Wyandot Countyinvestigator Latham, who has broken ranks with the law enforcement communityto appear on Spirko’s behalf at both of his clemency hearings.

Latham has said he found Willier’s story far more credible than the prosecutiontheory that put Spirko on death row.

No physical evidence implicated Spirko, and nothing was found to link the lifelongcriminal and admitted con man to Elgin, Mottinger or the area outside Findlaywhere her body was found.

In fact, investigators had never heard of Spirko until he came forward, sayinghe had information about the crime he wanted to trade for lenient treatmentfor himself and his girlfriend in an unrelated case.

Spirko was convicted largely on the basis of his own testimony and a seriesof jailhouse interviews he gave to former postal inspector Paul Hartman. Duringboth, state attorneys say, he revealed details about the case that only thekiller could know — an assertion his attorneys vigorously dispute.

Spirko’s lawyers offered an alternative theory at the 1984 trial thatMottinger was murdered in Willier’s trailer. Dingus was also living theretemporarily about that time.

Latham has said that Willier’s story, coupled with recent challengesto Hartman’s credibility and the quality of the evidence, raises questionsabout whether Spirko had anything to do with the Mottinger slaying.

Although he alerted the U.S. Postal Inspection Service about Willier’saccount several times by phone eight years ago, Latham said no attempt has beenmade to follow up.

Recently filed court documents show that Latham’s calls in 1997 inspireda flurry of memos between postal officials in Washington and Cleveland, whereHartman was based at the time.

The documents had been in Hartman’s files, which were made public onlyrecently, after a federal judge’s order.

According to the memos, postal officials in Washington seemed ready to cometo Ohio to interview Willier.

But Hartman, the investigator most responsible for putting Spirko on deathrow, was dismissive of the Willier story, telling his boss in one September1997 memo that "this whole thing sounds like a defense ploy to me."

Describing Willier at the time as a "goofy, 19-year-old kid," Hartmansaid a fellow investigator described him as so unreliable "that even ifyou knew it was raining, and Willier told you it was, you’d have to lookout the window just to verify the fact for yourself."

In fact, Hartman wrote, "I read this as an ex-convict trying to do a favorfor Spirko, a convict; and that Willier has a beef with Dingus."

Still, after speaking with Latham, Hartman recommended that if the Washingtoninvestigators wanted to interview Willier they "bring along the polygraphexaminer, so that we can work this out and get to the bottom of the entire matter."

But after he spoke to Hartman on Sept. 9, 1997, Latham said he never heardfrom postal authorities.

Latham met with Willier again, along with Spirko’s attorneys, two yearslater and reported that no one had contacted Willier either.

Willier said on Friday that he has heard nothing from anyone since.

He said he initially talked to Latham in hopes of bringing attention to theissues because things didn’t seem right. Now he would like to clarifythem for good and move on.

"Just to clear people’s minds, hey, let’s get it on. Let’sdo this lie-detector test and then leave me alone from then on for the restof my life."

Plain Dealer news researcher Jo Ellen Corrigan contributed to this story.

Cop, criminal square off in jailhouse duel

January 25, 2005

By Bob Paynter
The Plain Dealer

Previously: New evidence put a major crimp in the prosecution's case againstJohn George Spirko Jr. in the murder of a rural Ohio postmaster. But the juryand Spirko's lawyers never saw the evidence. It stayed buried in a private filedrawer for more than a decade. After a federal judge forced the evidence intothe open, the spotlight focused more sharply on the lead investigator in thecase. Last of three parts.

A pair of movie-star look-alikes waged a war of wits inside the Lucas CountyJail as 1982 came to a close.

Day after day, hour after hour, the lifelong con man - with more than a passingresemblance to Nick Nolte - played high-stakes cat and mouse with the veteranpostal inspector with a likeness, it was said at the time, to Robert Redford.

Both were highly motivated.

Each was hell-bent on getting the other to play into his hands in what hadbecome a baffling investigation into the murder of 48-year-old Betty Jane Mottinger,the postmaster in a tiny village in western Ohio.

John Spirko was a career criminal only recently paroled from a Kentucky prison,with a long history of trying to manipulate curious cops. He was angling toplay investigator Paul Hartman for a sap.

Spirko had found himself back in jail on Toledo-area assault charges in lateOctober 1982, a few months after Mottinger was abducted 100 miles away in Elgin,and five weeks after her body was found. Spirko called officials after readingnewspaper stories about the sputtering Mottinger investigation.

He figured he could get lenient treatment on the Toledo cases for his girlfriendand himself by saying he had information about the unsolved murder.

Spirko's plan was to tantalize Hartman with lurid, hard-to-prove tales aboutMottinger's death - hooking him just long enough to keep his girlfriend outof jail and his own prison time to a minimum.

No hard evidence ever linked Spirko to the crime. Nothing in the months-longinvestigation pointed to him. And the stories he told Hartman were full of grossfabrications and out-and-out lies.

But the investigator had a role in mind for Spirko as well.

Hartman had never been so deeply involved in a homicide investigation in his11 years as a postal inspector, although he had interviewed thousands of suspectsin lesser cases. He concluded fairly quickly that Spirko was involved "upto his ass" in the Mottinger slaying or knew who was.

Hartman's job was to keep Spirko talking, on the chance that he would eitherhelp solve a crime that had confounded postal authorities for months, or implicatehimself in the process.

The two men met at least a dozen times in three weeks, often for four, five,six hours or more.

For the most part, there were no witnesses to these conversations. No videocameras. No tape recorders. No stenographers. Just Spirko and Hartman. Criminaland cop. Nolte and Redford.

And based largely on the fruits of those interviews, Spirko was eventuallyconvicted of kidnapping and murdering the rural postmaster and is now on deathrow. He is awaiting execution - barring an intervention by the U.S. SupremeCourt or Gov. Bob Taft - that's likely to come this year.

With his deft handling of Spirko, Hartman was almost single-handedly responsiblefor closing a case that had frustrated dozens of his colleagues, who collectivelyspent thousands of hours interviewing more than 3,000 people in 37 states, identifyingand eventually discarding nearly 100 suspects along the way.

Whether he actually solved the Mottinger murder, however, is another matter.

Hartman produced what became the most tangible link between Spirko and thescene of the crime. That came in the form of Delaney Gibson Jr., Spirko's formercellmate and best friend, who was identified by an unwavering eyewitness asthe mysterious stranger seen hanging around outside the post office in tinyElgin, Ohio, moments before Mottinger was abducted.

Not only did Hartman stumble upon Gibson's photo in Spirko's prison scrapbook,he also succeeded - in their final session together - in getting Spirko to tellhim that Gibson kidnapped the woman during a robbery, raped her, killed herand then told Spirko about it later.

That was the last in a string of whoppers that Spirko told Hartman.

When evidence later established that Gibson almost certainly was nowhere nearElgin that day - evidence that was never shared with Spirko's jury - the informationapparently was buried in a private file drawer and kept from Spirko's attorneysfor more than a decade.

And in the late 1990s, when Spirko's attorneys used that newly discovered informationto argue that the prosecution had presented a false case to the jury, Hartmantook center stage once again.

The state responded to the new round of appeals by asserting that Gibson'salleged role in the crime was meaningless - despite the considerable effortexpended to prove it - and that the eyewitness testimony putting him in Elginwas immaterial.

The real foundation of the state's case, the argument continued, was the collectionof "statements" that Spirko made, statements that purportedly includeda handful of "intimate details" that only the killer could have known- because they supposedly were never made public.

It's an argument, adopted nearly verbatim by a succession of appeals-courtjudges over the last seven years, that defers to the largely unchallenged trialassertions of Hartman, the man Spirko first encountered in November 1982 inthe Lucas County Jail.

But a detailed examination of those assertions, the notes of Hartman's interviewswith Spirko and the independent evidence in the case shows that the veteraninvestigator was wrong on several of his claims and may have overstated others.

And the condition of Hartman's notes raises questions about how some of themore damaging "intimate details" got there in the first place.

Hartman laid out his "intimate details" theory - the essence of whichhas been repeated in court decisions denying Spirko's appeals - in a sworn statementon Feb. 1, 1983, three weeks after his final session with Spirko.

Among the details Hartman cited was Spirko's revelation that Mottinger's bodyhad been wrapped "in a part of a curtain."

"Public disclosure has not been made that the subject shroud was, in fact,a portion of a curtain," Hartman asserted.

But that's wrong.

It had been publicly disclosed - right under Spirko's nose - and right whenhe was formulating his plan to trade information about the Mottinger case forleniency.

Just 11 days before Spirko called federal authorities with his proposal fora deal, The Blade in Toledo reported what was described as a significant breakin the case on the front page of its local news section.

The shroud around Mottinger's body had been identified as a theater curtain,postal inspectors announced, that "at some time had been cut from a largerpiece." The Blade even reported the fragment's precise dimensions.

At least twice in the next week -just days before Spirko reached out to authorities- The Blade described the shroud as "a remnant of a theater curtain."

When prosecutors pressed him during his trial on how he knew about the torncurtain, Spirko replied, "I believe I read that in the paper."

Among other "intimate details" that "have not been releasedto the news media," Hartman cited the location of stab wounds on Mottinger'sbody, that Mottinger had been wearing a blouse and slacks when she was abductedand that her purse had been taken along with post-office proceeds during therobbery.

But those details had been in news reports as well.

In fact, almost from the beginning, postal inspectors left little to the public'simagination in this case.

Mottinger's clothing, for instance, had been described in the press in considerabledetail (light colored or white blouse with a design on the front and dark slacks).And Ohio newspapers from Van Wert, to Lima and Toledo - not to mention wireservices that also fed radio and television reports - had also disclosed thefollowing: what was believed stolen from the post office (less than $50 in cash,stamps and money orders); how Mottinger died (stabbed at least 13 times in thechest); where and how her body was found (wrapped in a tarp - later identifiedas a curtain - in a soybean field near the Blanchard River in Hancock County,just outside Findlay, roughly 50 miles from Elgin.)

Still, Spirko told postal inspectors at least twice that Mottinger had beenstabbed in the back - even though she wasn't - and that he knew nothing aboutstamps having been taken from the post office.

Spirko also twice described Mottinger as a "fat bitch," even thoughshe weighed just over 100 pounds.

Several of Spirko's other descriptions also don't jibe with the facts.

For instance, Hartman said that Spirko's description of the shroud "matchesexactly" the material Mottinger's body was wrapped in.

Hartman's notes indicate that Spirko described the shroud as a "gray curtain"made of a heavy "canvas type material."

But everyone who is known to have seen it - investigators who found the body,pathologists conducting Mottinger's autopsy and forensics experts doing testsfor both the prosecution and the defense - described the shroud the same way:as a painter's drop cloth.

The cloth was covered with paint smears and spots, literally thousands of them,according to a prosecutor, who said they represented "probably about everycolor in the rainbow."

And yet, in his description, Spirko never even hinted at paint.

Asked about the omission in an interview recently, Hartman dismissed the paintspots as "minutiae."

"It looked like a gray shroud to me, as I remember it."

Hartman also asserted that Spirko's description of how the slain postmasterwas wrapped "matches exactly the manner in which the body was preparedfor disposal."

In his Dec. 15, 1982, interview, Spirko said he watched as a fictional bandof thugs - all either cleared or never identified by authorities - killed Mottingerand wrapped her body in the shroud. According to Hartman's notes, Spirko saidthey "rolled body onto curtain/flapped curtain end to end over head."

Prosecutors argued during Spirko's 1984 trial that this description was soprecise that only the killer could have given it.

As with many of Hartman's assertions, Spirko denied at trial that he ever saidit. But even if he did, he somehow left out these facts:

- That after Mottinger was rolled into the shroud, it was attached to her bodyfrom the outside with a cord, tied around both her neck and waist.

- That the shroud was further secured from the outside with duct tape, stretchedaround the body's midsection and legs.

- That inside the shroud, pressed against the body's abdomen and legs, weretwo concrete blocks.

Spirko mentioned none of those seemingly noteworthy details, according to Hartman'snotes. "To me," Hartman said in a recent interview, "the noteworthydetail was that she was put in it [the shroud] in that fashion."

Despite such vagaries and inaccuracies, several other "intimate details"cited by Hartman do correspond to facts in the case.

But the way they appear - coupled with the way the interviews were conducted- raise questions about how some of the most significant details found theirway into the investigator's notes in the first place.

Among those is the matter of the "pried stone."

During his interview with Hartman on Dec. 9, 1982, Spirko digressed into atale about the exploits of his cast of characters during a Florida drug robbery- an episode that had little if anything to do with the Mottinger case.

But at the very end, under a heading labeled "Miscellaneous info,"Hartman's notes indicate that Spirko suddenly blurted out that Rooster - oneof his fictional characters - had pried a stone loose from a ring on Mottinger'sfinger after killing her.

This was significant because a tiny, $7.99 "pinky ring" was the onlyjewelry found on Mottinger's body, a detail that apparently never was revealedto the public. And the ring's single rhinestone, not much bigger than the tipof a ballpoint pen, was missing. How it came to be missing was never independentlyestablished.

Prosecutors later argued that the mere fact that it was gone could only havebeen known by the killer and, as a result, was evidence of Spirko's guilt.

But that information was obviously known by investigators as well. And that'sexactly where Spirko testified he got it - during hours of give-and-take chatterwith Hartman.

"I will never forget the exact words he used," Spirko said of Hartman,during his trial testimony.

"I gave him a couple of fictitious names. And he says, 'The one I wantto get a hold of . . . [is] that stinkin' son-of-a-bitch that pried that stoneout of her ring.' That's the first time I heard anything about a ring."

Hartman denied at trial that he ever suggested information. And Spirko's reputationfor truthfulness is hardly sterling.

But it's impossible to tell where that piece of information - or any other- actually came from, because of the way the interviews were conducted. It'salso impossible to know what questions Hartman asked, whether Spirko's answerswere recorded accurately or what was said between the two men that wasn't writtendown.

Not one of their sessions was tape recorded. Spirko was never asked to writea statement - or to sign any of Hartman's notes - to vouch for the accuracyof any of the accounts. And he was never asked to initial additions or deletions,a standard procedure for validating edited documents.

The technique appears to fall short of accepted police standards, even forthe time.

Today, deep into the age of DNA evidence, more police agencies are requiringvideo or audio recordings of suspect interrogations - especially in homicidecases - because so many documented cases of wrongful convictions have involvedfaulty confessions.

Researchers say these often occur when investigators, in the process of questioningor prodding their suspects, either deliberately or inadvertently reveal criticalinformation that later shows up in a suspect's statement.

Of the 18 death-row inmates exonerated in Illinois alone, half were originallyconvicted based on what turned out to be false confessions or witness statements,said Steven Drizin, staff attorney for the Center on Wrongful Convictions andprofessor at Northwestern University School of Law.

Notes of even the best police interrogators have been shown to contain significanterrors when compared with tape recordings, Drizin said. Notes are also notoriousfor omitting critical details. "That's why you need taped interrogations,"he said.

Hartman testified that he never used a tape recorder while interviewing suspects.He said it hampered his efforts to establish rapport.

He acknowledged on cross-examination that his notes of the Spirko interviewsare not verbatim accounts of everything that was said. Rather, Hartman said,they are "my interpretation, as it were, of the words."

And in a recent interview, Hartman said that police officers typically don'task suspects to initial or sign notes of conversations. In 28 years as a postalinspector, he said, he never did.

But in Spirko's trial, Hartman's notes of more than a dozen conversations werepresented as the defendant's "statements." And standards for handlingthose have been in place for half a century.

John E. Reid & Associates, Inc., a Chicago firm that trains thousands oflaw enforcement, government and private investigators every year, is consideredone of the nation's leading authorities on investigative techniques.

The traditional procedure for documenting a suspect's version of events isto have him write and sign a statement, said Reid's president, Joseph Buckley,or to have the investigator write a summary of their conversation and have thesuspect read and sign it.

"In some cases, you might have a stenographer come in and take it downin shorthand - where it's a question-and-answer process. Then, she would gotype it up, the suspect would read it and sign it," Buckley said.

"That hasn't changed," he said. "That has been the case fordecades. Forty years. Fifty years."

The purpose, Buckley said, is credibility.

Without a written, signed statement, he said, the validity of the informationbecomes a matter of whom the jury believes - the police officer or the defendant.

Hartman did none of those things in his interviews with Spirko. Given Spirko'srecord, credibility with a jury wasn't likely to be an issue.

It would be cop over criminal every time.

A curious fact raises another question about Hartman's interview tactics. Inseveral instances in which Spirko is alleged to have uttered "intimatedetails" about the case, those very details were added after the originalnotes were written.

That's definitely the case in one of only two references in the notes to the"pried stone." And it's possible the other was added later as well,according to two documents experts asked to examine portions of Hartman's handwrittennotes.

There's no way to tell from the documents whether the critical informationwas added minutes, hours or even days after the original notes were written.Nor is it possible to tell what prompted the additions.

Hartman disputes that he made any significant additions to his notes.

What is certain, however, is that Spirko never initialed the changes to verifythat he was the source of the information.

The most significant examples, in addition to the "pried stone,"include Spirko's alleged description of Mottinger's purse and of the clothingthe postmaster was wearing when she was killed. Both are among the "intimatedetails" cited by Hartman.

When he first reached out to federal investigators in October 1982, Spirkosaid that he knew the identities of three men involved in the crime and that,while at a party in the Toledo area, he had seen a bag that might have containedloot from the robbery.

Spirko described it merely as a sack, made of cloth or canvas, according tonotes of that preliminary interview with a different investigator.

By his first interview with Hartman, however, the sack had morphed into a cream-coloredbag with "loop handles" and "brown trim around edges," accordingto Hartman's notes, a description that matched Mottinger's missing purse. That'sthe description Hartman read to the jury.

But the investigator's handwritten notes show that the words "loop"and "brown trim around edges" were all added sometime after the originalnotes about the bag were written.

Again, experts say, it's not possible to tell when the additions were made.

The same thing happened with the description of Mottinger's clothing.

In an interview with Hartman on Dec. 10, 1982, Spirko indicated that he hadseen Mottinger alive in the basement of a "safe house" after she hadbeen kidnapped.

"The defendant described the victim's clothing, indicating that the postmasterhad been wearing dark slacks, a light yellow blouse, which buttoned in the frontand bearing a print design," Hartman told the jury.

Spirko insisted at trial that it was Hartman who supplied those details.

And a glance at the investigator's handwritten notes reveals that the entiredescription - "dark slacks, light yellow blouse, button front, print design"- was added after the original notes were written, and in a different handwritingstyle.

Again, no way to tell when.

Hartman insisted recently that he had added nothing to his notes, that anychanges were nothing more than innocent corrections.

"All these notes were written contemporaneously. They were written duringthe interviews," he said. "What happened is, obviously, in the courseof writing the notes, I went back and added these little notations."

On Aug. 17, 1984, a week after his original testimony, Hartman was called backto the witness stand on the last day of Spirko's trial. He denied promptingor suggesting any information in his interviews with Spirko.

"For me to have done those things would have violated seriously soundinvestigative procedure and would have completely destroyed the integrity ofthe investigation," he testified.

But just a few moments later, while still on the stand, Hartman made the mostdramatic addition of all to the notes of his interviews with Spirko.

Asked if Spirko ever actually admitted killing Betty Jane Mottinger, a detailconspicuously absent from his notes and earlier testimony, Hartman said that,as a matter of fact, he had.

Defense attorney Ed Hatcher was stunned.

"Would you like to tell me when he told you that?" Hatcher asked.

"He stated that to me . . . on January 11th of 1983," Hartman replied,the date of his second-to-last session with Spirko.

In an internal memo written sometime after that interview, Hartman assertedthat Spirko said to him that day: "Lay it all on me. I killed her."

But defense attorneys had never heard such a claim before.

In fact, in at least two sworn statements made after the Jan. 11 interview- statements in which he summarized his theory of Spirko's involvement - Hartmanhad mentioned nothing of the sort. Likewise in his testimony - and cross-examination- about the Jan. 11 interview.

And the notes of Hartman's interview for that day - which he had earlier testifiedwere "accurate in all respects" - contained nothing even close tosuch an admission.

Hatcher pressed him on the notes: "Well, let's take a look and see, OK,on that date. You would have written that down, wouldn't you?"

The investigator calmly replied, "I don't believe that that is in my notes."

Hartman, who retired from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in early 2000,after nearly three decades in law enforcement, said recently that he didn'tneed notes to recall the encounter.

"I didn't need to write that down to know that he said it," Hartmansaid in an interview at his Medina County home. "I remembered it then.I remember it now."

And he remains just as certain that Spirko deserves to die for killing BettyJane Mottinger.

"It is my belief that he did it," Hartman said. "If and whenthey execute him, I will have no qualms. No qualms."

Just days after Hartman's final appearance on the witness stand 20 years ago,Spirko addressed the postal inspector's assertions in a remarkable statementto the jury.

But first, with his conviction freshly on the books, Spirko asked the juryto recommend the death penalty. Even while insisting he was innocent.

"I have never seen Betty Mottinger in my life," he said. "Idid not kill Betty Jane Mottinger. I did not kidnap Betty Jane Mottinger. But,I have been convicted for it.

"From what I have heard, a lady that went to work, bothered no one, hada family, a husband that loved her, she was cruelly taken away, brutally murdered.She didn't get no appeal. Nobody gave her that right. Instead, they just stabbedher to death. They probably still out there now laughin' about it; laughin'because I got convicted of it. But she deserved justice, and if that means me,then that's the way it should be. I'm convicted, I should die. It's simple;simple arithmetic."

Spirko blamed no one but himself for his predicament. "I started all this"by reaching out to authorities in the first place, he said. "I put myselfin this position."

But then he turned to his battle of wits with the postal inspector.

"I don't actually hold no animosity towards Paul Hartman," Spirkotold the jury. "But he did not tell you the truth, not about the statements.

"Why? I can't tell you why. But who am I . . . to call the governmentliars, the state liars, when I'm a known liar?

"My chances of gettin' up there and telling the truth were nil. But Idid tell you the truth. That's the hell of this whole thing. I have told youthe truth.

"I feel one thing. I might be bound for hell, but I know Paul Hartmanwill be right on my tail end. And him and I is going to have a go-around inhell. You can believe that."

January 24, 2005

By Bob Paynter
The Plain Dealer

A cold-blooded liar

Previously: By late October 1982, frustrated investigators had followed hundredsof dead-end leads in the August murder of a rural Ohio postmaster. Then, outof the blue, career criminal John George Spirko Jr. called them and offeredto help. Not much of what he told them added up. But it was enough to send himto death row.

Second of three parts.

A brown-and-cinnamon sedan eased down Main Street, a misnamed little side lanejutting southward from Ohio 81, and glided to a stop in front of the nondescript,metal-sided blockhouse that served as the Elgin post office.

Betty Jane Mottinger, postmaster for four years, had arrived moments earlierfrom Ohio City, 10 miles to the northwest, and was already inside.

From her home across the street, Opal Seibert eyed the two-tone vehicle asit crept into town that day. The 30-year resident of Elgin recognized everyface for miles around and knew at once when a car or truck didn’t belong.This was one of those times.

Sipping coffee in her breezeway, Seibert glanced at the kitchen clock. It wasexactly 8:30 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 9, 1982.

A lean, clean-shaven stranger stepped slowly from the car and peered around,in all directions, as if to see if anyone was watching. He wore a long-sleeveblue work shirt and glasses. His dark hair was combed straight back.

The man stood there for several minutes, wedged between the car door and theroof, his left arm draped on the door. Seibert’s eyes locked onto himfrom her breezeway.

She never lost sight of the man, except for a few seconds when her view wasblocked by a passing truck. And as the truck cleared the post office, the stranger— back behind the wheel — drove off to the south.

Seibert saw no one else in the car as it arrived. She saw no one entering thepost office or leaving it and no one else in the car as it pulled away.

Yet five months later, her unwavering memory of that clear, summer morningin Elgin provided a critical key to cracking the most senseless and horrificcrime in Elgin’s history — the abduction and murder of the 48-year-oldpostmaster, wife and mother of three.

It was Seibert’s sturdy recall that finally gave frustrated investigatorstheir ace in the hole and made her a star witness in the 1984 trial that sentJohn George Spirko Jr. to death row.

More than a dozen years passed before the government was forced to reveal evidencethat raised serious doubts about the quality of Seibert’s memory —and about the reliability of the postal inspectors investigating the case, thetactics of the prosecutors presenting it to the jury and the caliber of thejustice they produced.

By that time, however, Seibert was long dead and Spirko had squandered yearson fruitless appeals. Today, the 58-year-old career criminal, who has spentall but a handful of his adult years behind bars, is nearing the end of theline.

Barring last-minute relief by the U.S. Supreme Court or Ohio Gov. Bob Taft,Spirko will likely be executed this year.

But a litany of questions has cropped up about how this bizarre and bewilderingcase was put together. And some of the most troubling center on just who OpalSeibert saw on that sunny August morning 22 years ago.

In the beginning, her memory promised to be of limited value.

She witnessed no crime. And when combined with what others saw, Seibert’saccount only contributed to a confused, almost kaleidoscopic portrait of thesupposed killer.

Mark Lewis, for instance, who was leaving the Elgin Grain Co. that morningwith a Toledo-bound truckload of wheat, said he also noticed the man standingoutside the post office. Like Seibert’s stranger, the man was wedged betweenthe door and the body of a brownish two-tone sedan, his left arm resting onthe door, his right on the rooftop. But there the similarities end.

Lewis’ stranger was a husky, slightly pot-bellied man, about 240 pounds,with sandy brown or reddish hair and possibly a light mustache. And insteadof long-sleeve and blue, the shirt Lewis remembered him wearing was short-sleeveand green. With orange stripes. About the only feature Lewis and Seibert sawin common was the glasses.

Others in town that morning described other scenarios. But Seibert’smemory seemed the firmest. And because of fortuitous developments unfolding95 miles to the north in a Lucas County jail cell, her stock in one of the biggestinvestigations in Van Wert County history would suddenly rise in January 1983.

By that point, John Spirko had been filling the ear of Postal Inspector PaulHartman for more than six weeks with a steady diet of captivating stories aboutthe Mottinger mystery.

Spirko had come forward in late 1982 offering a deal. He was in jail on a pairof unrelated assault charges. In return for lenient treatment for himself andhis girlfriend, Spirko volunteered to divulge information about the unsolvedpostmaster case that he said he picked up at a party.

He had no known connection to Elgin or to Mottinger. Investigators had neverheard of him. And much of what he eventually told them turned out to be unprovableor downright wrong.

But with their high-profile investigation going nowhere, they leapt at thisnew opportunity.

Given Spirko’s lengthy and violent criminal record, investigators suspectedalmost from the day he came forward that he might be involved in Mottinger’sdeath.

Records show they subpoenaed phone records for Spirko and his family and orderedtheir mail tracked weeks before he started telling Hartman his stories.

And early on in their relationship, the postal inspector struck what eventuallylooked like pay dirt while searching through Spirko’s prison scrapbooksat his sister’s home in a Toledo suburb.

Along with dozens of other photos of Spirko’s prison buddies, Hartmanseized a snapshot of a man who just might pass for Opal Seibert’s dark-hairedstranger.

The portrait seemed innocent enough. A slight, calm-looking young man in aT-shirt and jeans gazed benignly into the camera as he gently stroked a kitten.But it was the résumé behind the photograph that sparked the imagination.

If John Spirko’s rap sheet made him an enticing prospect in the Mottingercase, then Delaney Gibson Jr.’s made him a prosecutor’s dream. Hewas everything Spirko was. And more.

And he had an almost mythical aura about him, a near legendary capacity toengage in criminal mayhem one day, only to vanish the next.

Gibson and Spirko were cellmates in Kentucky in the late 1970s, when both servedtime for homicides. Both were paroled — Spirko in July 1982, Gibson fiveyears earlier. And when postal inspectors happened upon Gibson’s photographin late 1982, he had been on the run for more than a year for two other murders.

Gibson was born in 1950 in the mountains of Leslie County, in the coal fieldregion of southeastern Kentucky. He turned to violence early.

At 16, Gibson and a roving band of friends abducted a 17-year-old girl at gunpointfrom a disabled vehicle by the side of a Leslie County highway, hauled her offto the hills and raped her.

He got 15 years.

Gibson stabbed Alfred Metcalf to death in nearby Clay County in September 1972,one month after getting paroled on the rape. He pleaded guilty to voluntarymanslaughter, was sentenced to another 15 years and wound up as Spirko’scellmate at the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville.

Paroled again in late 1977, Gibson returned to Leslie County, where he killedMilton David Couch with a pistol in the summer of 1980. Eight months later,he did the same to R.T. Gray a few miles down the road in Manchester.

Gibson was convicted of the Couch murder on March 26, 1981. But the next day,while awaiting sentencing, he escaped from the Leslie County Jail in Hyden anddisappeared.

That was Gibson’s status — at large, whereabouts unknown —when investigators in the Mottinger case first ran across his picture in Spirko’sphoto album.

They assembled more photographs — taken by Kentucky authorities yearsearlier when Gibson was in custody there — and went to see Opal Seibertin January 1983.

"That’s the person I saw," she told them. No doubt about it.

After months of frustration, postal inspectors thought they had finally foundtheir way in the Mottinger killing.

Spirko was shooting off his mouth about the case from his Toledo jail cell.Now they had his murderous former cellmate positively identified as the dark-hairedstranger hanging around the Elgin post office on the morning that Mottingerdisappeared.

The Gibson factor changed everything, including Spirko’s story line.

His entire relationship with Paul Hartman had been based on lies. No one disputesthat. In fact, Spirko later testified, that was the whole point.

The idea was to spin enough intriguing yarns about the Mottinger case to keepinvestigators in thrall until his girlfriend was safely on probation and hisown five-year sentence for a pair of unrelated assault charges was set in stone.Those were his goals for coming forward in the first place.

He had been telling Hartman for weeks about a gang of crazed dopers who kidnappedMottinger while trying to retrieve a package of drugs from the post office,brutalized her at a country "safe house" and then stabbed her repeatedlyand dumped her body in a Hancock County beanfield.

Much of what he related about the circumstances and manner of Mottinger’sdeath had been widely reported in the western Ohio press for months. And Spirko’snarratives were jammed with fabrications — including his entire cast ofcharacters — and with grisly details that no one could verify.

But in January 1983, apparently armed with the new Gibson card and ready toplay it, Hartman got Spirko to jettison his gang of dopers, disavow everythinghe had said before and alter his shifting story in a way that would break openthe Mottinger investigation.

Hartman denied in a recent interview that he ever coaxed Spirko into anything.

But it’s clear from investigative documents that on Jan. 11, 1983, Hartmanconfronted Spirko with the emerging Gibson theory — at least indirectly— by steering their conversation toward Bear Branch, the tiny mountaincommunity in eastern Kentucky that Gibson called home.

Spirko recalled recently from death row that Hartman was far more blunt thanthat.

As he started with his usual doper story for the day, Spirko said, Hartmanwas "lookin' at me and he’s smilin’ across the table. Thenhe says, 'you’re full of shit. We know who was there. We know who waswith you: Delaney Gibson.' "

Spirko said he scoffed at the claim. But Hartman persisted: " 'We’vegot eyewitnesses.' "

"I don’t remember that," Hartman said recently.

But both men agreed at the time that Spirko would sleep on the new development.And sure enough, the next day — Jan. 12, 1983 — he concocted anentirely new story, a radical departure from everything he’d said before.

Yes, Spirko told Hartman, it was Delaney Gibson who had killed the Elgin postmasterafter all.

During a robbery, Spirko said, Gibson and two cronies had kidnapped Mottinger,raped her and stabbed her to death by the side of a road so she couldn’tidentify them. Then they told him all about it a few days later.

That was the last story Spirko ever told Hartman.

It was almost certainly a lie as well. Just like the others. But together withSeibert’s identification, the new story gave the authorities all theyfelt they needed: Two months later, Luann Smith — the girlfriend Spirkohad been trying to keep out of prison — was given 18 months to five yearsat Marysville for helping with his failed jail break the previous October. Anda few weeks after that, postal authorities declared that the Mottinger murderhad been "resolved."

But months passed before indictments were handed down. And nearly a year anda half went by before Spirko was brought to trial.

Delaney Gibson proved a mysterious and elusive quarry, with an uncanny knackfor suddenly showing up and disappearing at pivotal moments.

By the time Spirko did go to trial in August 1984, Gibson had become littlemore than a trick up the prosecution’s sleeve.

The first complication in the investigators’ new theory arose three monthsafter Spirko’s last chat with Hartman. A bearded Gibson — stillon the lam for his two Kentucky murders — was arrested in April 1983 inCanton, N.C., near where he was working incognito as a tomato picker with atroupe of migrant farm workers.

Postal inspectors in the Mottinger case descended on Asheville, N.C., whereGibson was locked up in the Buncombe County Jail.

He promptly told them that his itinerary since escaping from jail in 1981 hadincluded no stops in Ohio, much less Elgin. His wife, Margie, vouched for that.

And both insisted that Gibson had sported the full beard throughout 1982, afact that might complicate efforts to portray him as Seibert’s clean-shavenstranger.

Gibson’s supervisor also said Gibson had worn a beard that whole year.If he had ever shaved it, Juan Flores said, he didn’t remember when thatmight have been.

Still, the beard was hardly definitive. Gibson’s family and friends couldbe lying; he could have grown it since the August crime.

And besides, the whole problem became conveniently moot a few months later,after Gibson was shipped back to Kentucky to face his murder charges.

On Aug. 7, 1983, Gibson and several other inmates overpowered a guard and heescaped again, this time from the Clay County Jail.

Just a month later, with Gibson at large and not likely to be available fortrial, a Van Wert County grand jury indicted him — along with Spirko —on charges of kidnapping and aggravated murder in the Mottinger case.

But more complications — big ones — soon arose.

Seven days before Christmas in 1983, the FBI arrested Gibson at the John’sII Motel outside Montgomery, Ala., and charged him with unlawful flight fromthe Kentucky murder charges.

Their wild card suddenly back in play, postal inspectors pounced once again— this time on tiny Bear Branch, where Margie Gibson had taken refugewhile her husband was on the lam.

For the first time, Hartman asked her about Delaney’s whereabouts onthe morning of Aug. 9, 1982. Margie Gibson told him a story that would twistthe working theory on the Mottinger case into a pretzel.

Margie told Hartman that she, Delaney and her sister and brother-in-law, Brendaand Michael Bentley, were with their children near the North Carolina migrantcamp from Saturday, Aug. 7, until about 6:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 8.

If true, that would put Gibson roughly 500 miles away from Elgin on the eveningbefore the crime.

Hartman immediately contacted Bentley, who confirmed the story. Worse, he hadreceipts documenting activities during the visit.

Worse still, he had photographs. Lots of them. Of Gibson, sporting the fullbeard that he and his friends had spoken of months earlier.

Over the next few weeks, Hartman shuttled between towns in Kentucky and NorthCarolina doing interviews and gathering receipts that only compounded the problem.

On Jan. 11, 1984, he obtained 18 photographs from Margie Gibson showing Delaney,herself, their young son and the Bentleys driving go-carts at a North Carolinaamusement park that weekend and dining at a McDonald’s in Candler, N.C.

Hartman went to Candler. Sure enough, it was the McDonald’s in the photos.

He obtained 40 more photographs from the Bentleys, showing basically the samethings. Then he called Maloney’s Department Store, near the Bentleys’home in Ary, Ky., and confirmed that they had dropped off their film for processingon Aug. 10, 1982.

In photo after photo, there he was: fugitive Delaney Gibson, with a full beardand a thick mop of dark, curly hair, enjoying a family vacation in Maggie Valley,N.C., the night before witness Opal Seibert’s clean-shaven stranger slippedquietly into Elgin.

Certainly, it was mathematically possible.

But to complete the scenario, Gibson would have had to straighten his hair,comb it straight back, shave his beard and drive at least nine hours throughthe night to Elgin — assuming he knew how to navigate the herky-jerkycountry roads to get there — so he could cruise by Seibert’s houseat exactly 8:30 on Monday morning.

Then, after kidnapping and murdering Mottinger, he would have to return tohis tomato-picking crew and regrow his beard without his boss ever noticingthat he’d shaved it off.

Clearly, this was a problem.

It’s unclear now who made the decision. But the apparent solution wasto stick the fresh photographs in a private file drawer, apparently separatefrom other investigative documents, where they remained hidden for the next13 years.

The new photographs apparently were never shown to Seibert.

It’s also unclear whether Van Wert prosecutor Stephen Keister ever sawthem.

Prosecutors are required by law to tell defense attorneys about significantevidence that might help their client. Four months before Spirko’s trial,Keister did reveal the following: that a Michael Bentley had stated that Gibsonwas in North Carolina the weekend before the Mottinger killing and "thatpictures are purported to have been taken of the weekend in question."

Twice over the next three months, Spirko’s attorneys demanded to see"all statements of Michael Bentley." Those statements would have alertedthem to receipts documenting the weekend visit and would have proved that thephotos were far more than "purported." Dozens had been handed overto Hartman.

And the photos would have shown that Gibson almost certainly was not Seibert’sclean-shaven stranger.

But the defense demands went unmet. No photos or Bentley statements were forthcoming.And Gibson — incredibly — was soon unavailable for questioning.

Keister and postal officials decided not to hold him in the Mottinger case.Less than three months before Spirko’s trial was to begin, they releasedGibson to authorities in Kentucky.

And on July 9, 1984, true to form, Gibson pulled a knife on a deputy at theBell County Jail and vanished yet again.

Spirko went to trial as scheduled in early August — without his allegedaccomplice. Prosecutors called Seibert to the witness stand as planned. Andshe delivered with rock-solid certainty.

"That there is his face," Seibert testified, as she pulled a years-oldpicture of a clean-shaven Delaney Gibson from a photo array.

"He had a different hairdo, but that's him," Seibert said. "Idon’t forget a face."

Keister zeroed in on that certitude in his arguments to the jury.

There had been other witnesses. Prosecutors produced two prisoners who saidSpirko had admitted to them that he killed Mottinger. Both later recanted, accordingto court documents filed by the defense.

And truck driver Mark Lewis testified that Spirko might have been the Elginstranger — even though Spirko is blond, looks nothing like Gibson, andweighed roughly 60 pounds less than the man Lewis originally described.

Lewis said he was about "70 percent" sure. But he was so shaky onthe witness stand that no one asked him to identify the man at the defendant’stable. And even Keister acknowledged it would be "silly" to arguethat 70 percent is beyond a reasonable doubt.

But Seibert was another matter. She was 100 percent sure, Keister told thejurors. And together with Spirko’s stories, Keister argued, Seibert’scertainty validated Lewis and made his testimony more than a "70 percentsituation."

Spirko and Gibson robbed the post office together and killed Mottinger together,the prosecutor argued. Of those whose photos were shown to Lewis and Seibert,Spirko and Gibson "were the only persons . . . that had any personal connection,"Keister said. "These two were the most important persons to each other,the best friends in the whole world."

One of them, Spirko, had said things to Hartman that only the killer couldhave known, Keister argued. And the other, Gibson, the defendant’s closestfriend, was positively identified at the scene of the crime. No question.

The prosecutor showed jurors a Kentucky prison photo from the late 1970s showingGibson’s bare-chinned profile. Then he held up an artist’s rendering— also in profile — of Seibert’s clean-shaven stranger, drawntwo days after the crime.

"This is a picture of Delaney Gibson," Keister said, pointing toone. "There is a profile of Delaney Gibson," he said of the other."I submit to you, it is almost as if the person who made this drawing backon Aug. 11, 1982, had this picture from which to make the drawing.

"You make the comparison. That identification is there. Delaney Gibsonwas there that morning."

Keister, in a recent interview, declined to discuss any aspect of the Spirkocase, citing the passage of time. "It’s been 20 years," saidthe former prosecutor, who left office in 1988. "My memory is fading. Anda lot of things have been over the dam."

It wasn’t until the summer of 1997 — 13 years later — thatJohn Spirko and his attorneys first saw the Gibson vacation photos and otherevidence detailing that weekend in North Carolina.

They had been trying to bore into the Mottinger investigative files since shortlyafter the trial. But postal authorities fought them every step of the way.

A court-brokered agreement finally gave Spirko access to previously undisclosedfiles in 1996. And for the first time, his attorneys discovered several referencesto the vacation photos. But no actual pictures. They weren’t in the investigativefiles and postal officials said they couldn’t find them.

After a federal judge ordered the missing photos released, postal authoritiesproduced them the next year, just weeks after promising to look for them inHartman’s personal "desk file."

Asked recently if that’s where they were found, Hartman said, "Idon’t believe so." Does he know where they were? "I have noidea." He said he originally put the photos in the investigative case file,"along with everything else."

Meanwhile, in the more than two decades since Gibson was indicted for aggravatedmurder, Van Wert and federal authorities have never attempted to bring him totrial.

Four months after Spirko was sentenced to death, the FBI arrested Gibson again.This time, agents found him hiding in the false ceiling of his father-in-law’sattic, in Bear Branch.

He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the twoKentucky murders from the early 1980s.

But Ohio authorities didn’t place a holder on Gibson to keep him fromescaping justice in the Mottinger case if he should ever get out of prison.

And so, when Kentucky released Gibson on parole in December 1998, he walkedaway a free man — despite the pending indictment.

The next June, Gibson was returned to prison for violating an order to stayout of Clay County, Ky.

But he was paroled again in the summer of 2001, and he has been free ever since,living in Louisville, Ky.

On May 17, 2004, the same day a federal appeals court denied Spirko’snext-to-last appeal for relief, Van Wert County authorities dismissed the kidnappingand aggravated murder charges against Gibson.

He declined to return phone messages left with his sister in Bear Branch.

In 1997, Spirko’s attorneys launched a new round of angry appeals basedon the Gibson vacation photos. They argued that prosecutors had not only withheldkey evidence, but had knowingly presented a false case to the jury.

One federal judge seemed to agree last May, writing that the case against Spirko— built on a "foundation of sand" — left "considerabledoubt" about whether he had been lawfully condemned.

Judge Ronald Lee Gilman, of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, noted the"complete absence" of physical evidence against Spirko and other weaknessesin the case. He concluded that if the Gibson photos had not been withheld, thestate’s star witness and its case would have been seriously underminedand Spirko might have been acquitted.

But Gilman was outvoted 2-1 by his colleagues on the 6th Circuit panel, andthe full court declined to take up the matter three months later.

With the exception of Gilman, state and federal appeals-court judges have largelyadopted the state’s counterargument.

The state’s attorneys responded to the new round of Spirko appeals byradically downsizing the stature of one star witness — Opal Seibert —and the role her clean-shaven stranger played in the case.

And in the process, they elevated the stature of another: Postal InspectorPaul Hartman. It was Hartman, during the jailhouse interviews, who producedthe really critical evidence that doomed John Spirko, they argued.

But a close look at that evidence suggests that, for whatever reason, not everythingthat Paul Hartman said in this case was correct.

A cold-blooded liar

January 23, 2005

By Bob Paynter

The Plain Dealer

With tiny Elgin, Ohio, buried under a mid-January ice storm, the man convictedof kidnapping and killing its postmaster 22 years ago was preparing his finalappeal. John George Spirko Jr. asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to sparehis life. A Plain Dealer investigation raises questions about the evidence thatsent him to death row for the murder of Betty Jane Mottinger. First of threeparts.

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It’s no surprise that John George Spirko Jr. landed in a Toledo- areajail cell in early October 1982 . . . just months after being paroled from aKentucky prison for murder ... just days after getting the snot beat out ofhim in a bloody bar fight by a gang of bikers ... and just hours after wavinga sawed-off shotgun in Theresa Fabbro’s face in a failed attempt to trackdown and take revenge on his attackers.

Nor was it especially remarkable that, once again behind bars, Spirko cookedup a pair of exotic schemes–contrived in the volatile psyche of a lifelongliar–to wriggle his way out of this new patch of trouble.

That’s the way the 36-year-old ex-con had lived his entire life.

Thirteen years earlier, while in custody in Flint, Mich., after another barroombrawl, a 23-year-old Spirko embarrassed a veteran homicide detective by concoctinga detailed, convincing and altogether phony confession to a series of coed murdersthen filling the local newspapers. Spirko simply wanted to get out of his jailcell for a few hours of coffee and conversation, he later admitted. Furtherinvestigation showed that he had nothing to do with what came to be known as"The Michigan Murders."

So, it’s little wonder that Spirko’s imagination sprang to lifeagain in October 1982, as he faced a felonious-assault charge for the shotgun-wavingincident.

But this time, his elaborate flourishes produced far more ominous results –for himself, and possibly for the citizens of Ohio.

In just six weeks, John Spirko talked himself right onto Ohio’s deathrow.

And unless the U.S. Supreme Court or Gov. Bob Taft intervenes, the citizensof Ohio are likely to face the prospect later this year of executing a man fora murder that he very possibly had nothing to do with.

Spirko, now 58, evokes little sympathy. His life of crime and record of spectacularmendacity leave him virtually without credibility. "I’m convictable,'he said from death row with a shrug.

But a months-long Plain Dealer examination of the evidence in his case –promptedin part by an extraordinary decision last May by the Van WertCounty prosecutor– leads to two conclusions:

- John Spirko’s mercurial imagination– and not much else –has brought him to the brink of execution.

- Spirko wasn’t the only player in this case to display a casual regardfor the truth.

In late 1982 and early 1983, in more than a dozen jailhouse interviews intendedto buy himself a short sentence on his new assault charges, Spirko spun forauthorities a series of tall tales about the 1982 abduction and murder of BettyJane Mottinger, the postmaster in Elgin, Ohio, a hamlet of 96 souls not farfrom the Indiana border.

Spirko’s graphic, detailed stories attributed the crime to an ever-changingtroupe of vaguely identified dopers, barflies and bikers that he said he knewfrom Toledo-area taverns. The stories – laced with contradictions, fabricationsand factual errors – were almost totally discredited.

Police argued that they contained bits of truth, however. And the stories eventuallyformed the nucleus of a criminal prosecution that over the next two years gotSpirko convicted of kidnapping and aggravated murder in the Mottinger case,making him only the second man sentenced to death in Van Wert County in morethan a century.

But the robbery of the Elgin post office, and the abduction and slaying of itspostmaster, almost certainly didn’t happen the way police and prosecutorssaid it did, either.

Compelling evidence that they presented to the jury about a mysterious strangerin Elgin on the day of the crime – information that had all but clinchedtheir case against Spirko – almost certainly was wrong. And they knewit.

Some of the least ambiguous evidence they collected during nearly two yearsof investigation contradicted key elements of their case.

But prosecutors did not reveal that evidence to Spirko’s lawyers.

Nor did they share it with the jury.

In fact, it stayed buried in a file drawer – until legal action forcedit into the light – for more than a dozen years after Spirko was condemnedto die.

Someone kidnapped Betty Jane Mottinger and robbed her tiny post office at thestart of business on Aug. 9, 1982 – a crystal clear Monday morning.

All of western Ohio was shocked by such news coming from Elgin, a burg so quietand remote that old-timers remembered no crimes at all being reported theresince World War II.

Elgin is little more than a crossroads in the vast agricultural flatness ofJohn Deere’s America. Twenty-two miles due west of Lima, it’s onthe way to nowhere. Blink twice along Ohio 81 and you’re already throughit.

The post office is even easier to miss. Housed in a squat, metal-sided hut about60 yards south of the two-lane highway, the operation was so spare at the timethat it had neither a telephone nor running water. It’s tucked in theshadow of the grain bins and silos of what in the summer of 1982 was the ElginGrain Co., the village’s sole reason for being.

On the morning of Aug. 9, residents reported seeing a dark-haired stranger standingoutside the post office beside a brown, two-tone sedan– possibly a MonteCarlo or a Buick. But nobody witnessed the crime.

Few promising leads had developed by Sept. 19, when shock turned suddenly tohorror.

Authorities found Mottinger’s skeletal remains wrapped in a paint-splatteredcurtain and dumped in a soybean field 50 miles from Elgin near the banks ofthe Blanchard River, just outside Findlay. The body was so badly decomposedfrom the summer heat that dental records were required to identify the slainpostmaster.

Investigators concluded from cut marks to the front of her clothing that Mottingerhad been stabbed 13 to 17 times in the chest.

Dozens of postal inspectors – agents of the U.S.Postal Inspection Service,which investigates crimes against post-office employees or property –had descended on the small towns and villages around Elgin right after the kidnapping.They redoubled their efforts now.

But the story of John Spirko’s journey onto death row didn’t startthere. Despite weeks of searching, investigators didn’t find a singleclue pointing in his direction.

No, Spirko’s saga began in the Toledo suburb of Swanton – 105 milesnorth and a world away from Elgin – on Oct.9, 1982. That’s the nightSpirko was arrested and jailed after harassing Theresa Fabbro with a shotgunin the parking lot of the Longbranch Saloon, one of his favorite watering holes.It was two days after his bloody whipping at the hands of the gang of bikers.

Out of prison for just two months, Spirko now faced a felonious-assault chargethat almost certainly would send him back. His swaggering imagination set towork. And it eventually led to his undoing.

First, Spirko talked his girlfriend, Luann Smith, into hiding $500, a changeof clothes and a new 12-gauge pump shotgun inside her 1974 Cutlass and leavingthe car around the corner from the jail.

Then he persuaded her to smuggle in two tungsten steel hacksaw blades. And onOct. 26, after luring a guard to his cell and smacking him in the head withan 8-inch section of iron sawed from his jail bars, Spirko got caught tryingto escape. Suddenly, he faced another felonious-assault charge.

Only this time, his girlfriend faced prison time for helping.

Spirko’s calculating mind continued to churn. As in Michigan a dozen yearsearlier, crime stories in the local newspaper apparently helped to spawn anotherbright idea.

That very week, The Blade in Toledo was publishing story after story about developmentsin what had been a futile effort to solve the Elgin postmaster’s murder.

Investigators had been pinning most of their hopes on an obvious suspect. Atthe time of the crime, Marion "Sonny" Baumgardner was on parole fora similar post-office robbery seven years earlier in Dupont, Ohio, just 30 milesfrom Elgin. The postmaster in that robbery– also a woman – had beentied up during the crime but had not been seriously injured.

Baumgardner bore an uncanny resemblance to an artist’s sketch of the strangerseen in Elgin on the morning Mottinger disappeared, and one witness thoughthis photo looked like the man.

But Baumgardner had eluded policefor weeks. Then, on Oct. 29, on its front page,TheBlade reported a crushing blow to investigators. Baumgardner had been arrested,but he had an ironclad alibi for Aug. 9. Witnesses saw him at work that day– in Pasadena, Texas. Baumgardner was cleared of all involvement in theElgin case.

And after nearly three months, with the trail now cold, investigators were backto "square one."

But to Spirko, then weighing his legal options in the Lucas County Jail, thenews served as inspiration.

Investigators weren’t looking for him; they had no reason to. He calledthem. On Oct. 31, just two days after the Baumgardner news.

Spirko got word to federal authorities that he knew something about the Mottingercase. He wanted to cut a deal: Information in return for leniency. For himselfand his girlfriend.

His call was like a thunderbolt. Investigators had never heard of Spirko.

But that doesn’t mean he didn’t inspire suspicion. His credentialswere perfect.

In 1982, Spirko was tall, lean and heavily tattooed – with a dagger onone forearm, the Grim Reaper on the other. He had a rap sheet that stretchedback to the second grade, when records in Toledo show that he ran away –the first of many times – and started a fire at a school.

His father, a 300-pound autoworker with an artificial leg, had a violent temperand a tendency to pummel his wife and children during alcoholic rants. Spirkowas tagged early on as an incorrigible child with a growing reputation for vilelanguage, impulsive violence and serial lying.

He was convicted of arson, theft, breaking and entering, forgery, interstatetransportation of a stolen car and murder – all by the age of 24. Andat 36, he had spent all but a few years of his adult life behind bars.

Spirko was paroled from the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville just 13days before the Mottinger kidnapping. He had served 12 years of a life sentencefor strangling 72-year-old Myra Ashcraft in her Covington, Ky., home while heand his then-girlfriend were stealing her jewelry.

The vote of a single juror reportedly had spared him the death penalty.

On top of all that, Spirko was cocky, fancied himself uncommonly clever, hada big mouth and wasn’t very careful about using it.

The new tipster laid out the conditions for his deal right from the start.

First, Spirko demanded probation for his girlfriend, Luann Smith, who had neverbeen in legal trouble until he dragged her into his doomed escape attempt.

Next, he wanted kid-glove treatment for himself.

If he couldn’t get his two felonious assault charges dropped – unlikely,he was told, because a jail guard was among the victims – Spirko insistedon doing no more than five years.

And he demanded placement in the federal witness-protection program so he couldserve his time in a federal prison.

In return, Spirko would tell authorities everything he knew about the Mottingercase.

The feds agreed.

They promised to recommend probation for Smith and to meet his other demands.And within weeks, as a newly protected witness, Spirko was transferred to thefederal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan.

For his part, Spirko started to lay out for investigators a shifting, contradictory,ever-evolving but consistently horrifying series of accounts of what might havehappened to Betty Jane Mottinger four months earlier – accounts he saidhe heard about at several Toledo-area parties.

Spirko attributed the crime to a vividly drawn cast of characters – aband of dope-shooting, whiskey-guzzling, obscenity-spewing bikers, barfliesand slackers with colorful but hard-to-verify street names like Rooster, Dinoand Dirty Dan.

His stories featured detailed scripts – reminiscent of drive-in slasherflicks –studded with coarse dialogue and detailed descriptions of sickeningbrutality.

Spirko started spinning his tales Nov.29, 1982, in the first of at least 15interviews with Postal Inspector Paul Hartman,who was based at the time in Cleveland.The players often changed from interview to interview, and their roles in thedrama shifted from one account to another.

But, in essence, Spirko’s narrative boiled down to this: A band of viciouslosers snatched Mottinger from her tiny post office during what was either arobbery or the botched pickup of a package of mailed drugs, depending on theversion.They shoved her into the trunk or the back seat of a car and whiskedher off to a “safe house” in the country.

There, they held her prisoner for several hours or several days – boundon a couch in the living room, confined to an upstairs bedroom or tied to apole in the basement. They taunted her, beat her up, dragged her around by thehair, forced her to perform oral sex and took turns raping her.

Then, as she screamed and flailed and kicked in self defense, they stabbed herto death so furiously that blood sprayed onto the floor.

Finally, they wrapped her body in a curtain, drove off and dumped it in a soybeanfield.

Spirko started off telling Hartman that he first heard about the robbery andmurder at a party – and that he’d seen the loot in a bag. But Hartmangrew increasingly impatient with his inability to confirm any of the accounts.Spirko responded by changing them around and adding still more detail –putting himself closer to the action with each new story.

At first, he had simply heard about the crime from others. Later versions hadhim witnessing various atrocities and even the murder itself. And, in one account,he even had himself holding Mottinger down (in a cornfield in this version),trying to keep her quiet, when Rooster suddenly stabbed her to death.

The rationale behind the evolving accounts was simple, at least in Spirko’scontorted logic. With his girlfriend still not sentenced, he had to keep investigatorsinterested long enough to get what he wanted – probation for her.

"I didn’t really care because I didn’t do nothin'," Spirkotestified during his1984 trial. "So I didn’t figure I’d getindicted."

Spirko said he kept feeding Hartman new versions because "he wouldn’tsettle for nothin’ else. I would tell him one story and . . . the nextday, he would come back for another story. And the more I told the more deeperI got into it, you know. And finally he told me one time, he said 'either youdid it,' or, he says, 'or you know who did it.' I don’t know if thosewere his exact words, but it was something to that effect."

Spirko’s stories are horrifying, even to an emotionally detached readermore than 22 years later. But they are also shot through with contradictions,fabrications and what appear to be wild guesses – many of them wrong –about the facts of the case.

For one thing, virtually all of the characters in Spirko’s dramas wereeither fictitious or not involved – with either Spirko or the crime. (Spirkosaid he made up the names, based on people he knew from prison. Investigatorsmaintain they were able to identify several, but eventually cleared them all.)

And there’s not a shred of evidence that any of the stories ever happened.

Except for the fact that Mottinger had been stabbed more than a dozen timesand that her shroud-wrapped body had been dumped in a Hancock County beanfield– details that were known to anyone in western Ohio who had read a newspaperor watched TV – Spirko’s stories easily could have been fiction.

It’s possible, for instance, that Mottinger was sexually abused. It’sjust as possible she wasn’t. Her body was so badly decomposed that theprosecution’s forensics experts didn’t even test her clothing forbodily fluids.

And while it’s possible she died in a bloodbath at an isolated farmhouse,investigators could find no evidence of that either.

At one point, they thought they had identified the "safe house" thatSpirko had spoken of – a vacant farmhouse near Interstate 75 in Cygnet,Ohio. Postal inspectors descended onto the place in December 1982 and spentthree days taking it apart from stem to stern.

They hauled out bedsheets, pillowcases, napkins, trash, magazines, work gloves,matchbooks and drapery cords.They lifted fingerprints from throughout the house,pulled up carpet samples and dug for bloodstains in the weather-stripping aroundthe back door.

They found nothing. Not a drop of blood, not a workable print, not a telltalehair. Not one piece of evidence suggesting that a homicide happened there. Allthey got for their trouble was a $600 bill for damage from the angry owner.

Investigators failed to verify much of anything in Spirko’s tales. Prosecutorsargued during Spirko’s 1984 trial that his stories contained several morselsof information that only the killer could have known. Notes of the conversationsSpirko had with Hartman leave considerable doubt about that.

But what’s striking is how much Spirko didn’t appear to know aboutthe crime, or somehow failed to mention to Hartman.

Things, for instance, like the loot: Spirko apparently knew nothing about themost obvious items taken during the abduction and robbery.

In addition to $43.86 from the cash drawer and a few money orders, the Elginpost-office robbers took virtually every stamp in the place – more than$700 worth.

And yet during his interviews with Hartman, Spirko specifically said –at least twice – that he never saw any stamps among the stolen items.

Spirko also told Hartman that Mottinger was wearing a gold watch and a goldnecklace when she was killed and that he had seen both in the bag of loot.

But in their testimony, Mottinger’s family and a co-worker didn’trecall her wearing either. When asked about her jewelry, they said that shetypically wore three rings – a wedding band, something they describedas a "mother’s ring" and a tiny pinky ring which, aside fromher clothing, was the only personal item found on Mottinger’s body.

Spirko said nothing to Hartman about any rings being taken from the victim.Spirko also seemed ignorant about what Mottinger looked like, about how shedied and about how her body was prepared for disposal.

Despite hours of interviews over six weeks, no evidence exists that Hartmanever asked Spirko to describe the victim. If he did, it’s not reflectedin his notes. On two occasions, however, Spirko spontaneously referred to Mottingeras a "fat bitch."

But it’s hard to imagine how "fat" would come to mind for someonewho had actually seen her. Mottinger was just over 5 feet tall, weighed 104pounds and was described by friends as "tiny" or "petite."

Spirko also told Hartman that Mottinger’s hands were bound behind herback with duct tape when she was killed. But her hands were not bound –with anything – when her body was found.

And he twice told investigators that Mottinger had been stabbed in the back,something her killer would surely know was wrong. She was stabbed in the chest.Investigators found no evidence of wounds to her back.

But that’s not all they failed to find.

Investigators found no Spirko link to Mottinger, no connection to Elgin or tothe Findlay area, where her body was found, and no reliable evidence that hehad ever been to either place.

Nor did they find a convincing motive. Prosecutors never tried to explain, forinstance, why a fresh parolee looking for a place to rob would leave a treasurechest of possibilities like Toledo just after dawn on a Monday morning to scouran unfamiliar rural countryside for a one-room post office that did less than$3,000 in business a year and never kept more than $50 in the safe.

And they never produced a more logical explanation than Spirko’s for whyhe came forward in the first place. Why would a man who was guilty of murder,but had escaped even the hint of detection, voluntarily reach out to police– and risk the death penalty – to bargain down his sentence on anassault charge?

Finally, investigators found no physical evidence linking Spirko to the crime.

No prints.

No murder weapon.

No loot.

And no car for kidnapping and transporting the victim.

In fact, through all his hours of interviews, Spirko gave investigators virtuallyno evidence in the Mottinger case that they didn’t have before they methim.

Except for two things:

The stories, which Hartman recounted for the jury – without regard tofact or fiction – in gruesome detail, and to devastating effect.

And Delaney Gibson Jr.

That may well have been enough.

Gibson and Spirko became best friends while sharing a Kentucky prison cell inthe late 1970s.

Although he never set foot in the courtroom, Gibson gave prosecutors an evenmore delectable suspect than Spirko himself.

And Gibson provided them a critical key to cracking the case – the onlystrong evidence they ever developed that appeared to link Spirko, albeit indirectly,to Elgin on the day Betty Jane Mottinger disappeared.

Both men were indicted on charges of kidnapping and stabbing the 48-year-oldmother of three.

An "eyewitness" testified that she saw Gibson in Elgin on that clearAugust morning 22 years ago.

No ifs, ands or buts.

Nine men and three women convicted Spirko on Aug. 22, 1984.

But they never heard the whole story.