This morning, everybody troops wearily back to the Monroe County Courthouse to await a verdict that most were sure would come last night.
The jury left. An hour went by. Two hours went by. Three.
Then Chris Coleman’s uncle murmured to me, by the soda machine, “There’s so much more to this than the spectators realize.”
I spent the rest of the evening trying to give the possibility credence. Something inadmissible in court that would exonerate Chris Coleman in a flash? I went over every detail with my skeptical husband. I read through all my notes.
In closing argument, Jim Stern tried to argue that "this investigation isn’t over! There's many things that should have been done." He would’ve done better to argue that it was overkill. The Columbia Police Department had plenty of solid forensic reasons to believe they’d found the murderer within a few hours of discovering the bodies—yet they followed up on about 350 leads, traveled to Arkansas, consulted dozens of experts. The defense also said what’s been worrying Monroe Countians for two years now: that the case is entirely circumstantial. But short of an eyewitness—which is fairly rare in a homicide—what else could it be?
Stern apologized ahead of time in case he misremembered any of the prosecution, then proceeded to project, onto a screen, a yellow scrap of notepaper with his own math computations about how many degrees Sheri Coleman’s body would have dropped each hour, therefore how long she might have been dead. He quoted forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden as agreeing with him that this calculation was accurate because Baden began his response with “hypothetically”—but omitted what Baden went on to say, that the temperature of the body doesn’t begin dropping for an hour or two.
Stern claimed “there’s some kind of hostility there” because Justin Barlow, then a detective with the Columbia Police Department, had waved to his neighbor Chris Coleman twice, five years before the murders, and after getting no wave in reply, hadn’t bothered to wave again. And Stern hammered home again and again how cooperative Chris Coleman had been, starting with the fact that it was he who notified the police of his suspicions (when he was five minutes from home himself, after allegedly worrying himself sick but adding an extra cardio workout, then taking 14 minutes to arrive). Stern said Chris "has the least motive to kill them"—but never explained why. He insisted it was still possible that someone could have gotten access to Chris Coleman's laptop (on several occasions, after presumably Chris turned it on for them himself).
One of Rev. Ron Coleman’s parishioners told me she’s been writing to Chris for two years and knows in her heart that he is innocent, because, “after two years, people break”—and he hasn’t. I wanted all along to agree with her. As one of the retired Waterloo residents who came for the trial said, "I want to be able to tell my grandkids that man didn't kill his little boys."
But if there was more we didn’t know, I’d like to know why the defense was just reaching for straws yesterday afternoon.
