strongernow
05-24-2004, 07:57 PM
(see actual flyer attached)
Emotions run high as board ponders parole for convict
By BILL TORPY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/22/04
REIDSVILLE — The newspaper ad carries a photo of a smiling convict. "Convicted MURDERER of our mother," the caption reads.
Keller Wilcox is up for parole again. And he still shows no remorse, says the family of the victim, Hellen Hanks. They want him to stay in prison and have placed the recurring ad in The Valdosta Daily Times, most recently on May 2. The 35-year-old mother of three, who worked as secretary to Wilcox's father, was killed in 1972, her body stuffed into a box and probably dismembered.
"Do you want this convicted killer living in your community?" the ad asks.
When asked in person, Wilcox entertains the question with a wince. He is at the center of an escalating parole battle and prefers to avoid controversy.
One afternoon last week, he sat at a table in the prison firehouse near Georgia State Prison, his gray shirt crisp, his hands folded, his sad green eyes fixed in concentration. "I want to go home, to live in my house," he said. "I'm ready to put an end to this travesty."
Wilcox, convicted and sentenced to life in prison after a sensational trial in 1982, has been classified as a minimum-security inmate since 1987. He lives and works in the firehouse, which sits outside the prison gates. He recently learned to use the Jaws of Life to extract car wreck victims. He mentors young prisoners. His life is much like any other firefighter's, but instead of 24 hours on duty and 48 off, Wilcox can't leave.
He has standing job offers and a place to live: his late parents' elegant French-style home, which sits vacant and is tended by a family friend. Wilcox's lawyers say he has done everything the state Board of Pardons and Paroles wants a candidate for release to do except express remorse. He says he can't admit to a crime he didn't commit. He says he's "doing someone else's time."
The parole board is deciding whether Wilcox, 53, should go free. It's the first time since 1996 that he has been considered for parole. And he fears that if he's denied, he might not get another hearing for another eight years.
His urgency is evident: Wilcox has hired former Georgia Attorney General Mike Bowers and former DeKalb County District Attorney J. Tom Morgan. The lawyers, in a letter to the five-member parole board, call the case a "true tragedy" in which an innocent man has spent more than 20 years in prison.
The Hanks family is waging its own campaign. They have run the newspaper ad several times and have told reporters how Wilcox, a rich kid they say had the world handed to him, devastated their family. Worse, they say, he remains defiant.
"Who's to say he won't hurt anyone else?" asks Russell Spivey, a Middle Georgia prosecutor who is married to Hellen Hanks' daughter Penny. "He may be more dangerous if he convinced himself he did nothing wrong."
Both sides have flooded the parole board with letters. Those advocating Wilcox's release include doctors, ministers and civic leaders. A parole official called the response overwhelming and said Friday that the board would extend its original May deadline for making a decision so that members could pore through the voluminous file, nearly 8 inches thick.
A fortuitous discovery
Marilyn Kemper, one of several former Wilcox neighbors who have written the board advocating his release, doesn't see him as a threat, though she's not sure whether he's a murderer or not. "Half the town thinks he did it, half doesn't," Kemper said.
The case has fueled rumor and debate in Valdosta since Aug. 31, 1972, when Hanks disappeared from Wilcox Outdoor Advertising, where she worked in the office. Many saw the disappearance — her purse was left at the office, the door was ajar — as a case of a discontented wife running off.
Hanks' family never believed that. They thought something awful had occurred. Still, they wondered. Daughter Lucy said she carried her mother's driver's license for years, asking strangers if they had seen her. Daughter Penny once followed a woman in a grocery store, thinking it might be her mother, Spivey said.
In 1980, a plow clearing land near Valdosta snagged a wooden box that contained bones. Six inches deeper and the box would have remained undisturbed. Prosecutors later told the jury that the discovery was due to "providence."
Police arrested Keller Wilcox, described in newspaper reports as "the scion of an aristocratic and wealthy family." His father, E.K. "Foxy" Wilcox, also was arrested and charged with helping his son dispose of the body.
The trial was sensational. One news story reported that a white-haired bailiff was nearly trampled by spectators rushing to get seats. Hanks was described as "the attractive bookkeeper." News reports mentioned a "six-figure" retainer paid Wilcox's attorney, famed Georgia defense lawyer Bobby Lee Cook.
Testimony recanted
Testimony indicated Hanks was strangled and her legs were sawed off to fit her body into the box, a kind used by Wilcox Advertising. Witnesses said Wilcox, at age 21, had inappropriately touched Hanks, although police reports at the time of her disappearance didn't mention that. A deaf hairdresser testified that she had read the victim's lips as saying, "I'm scared of the Wilcox boy."
Prosecutors said her clothing had been cut off. They hinted that there was a rape. The star prosecution witnesses, two elderly black men who were longtime Wilcox employees, told police they had helped bury the body. But the men had been threatened by police detectives, who told them they faced the electric chair and might even get lynched. One recanted during the trial, the other two years later. But prosecutors said the men knew facts that only those who buried the body would know.
A jury deliberated less than two hours before convicting Keller Wilcox in January 1982.
"In hindsight, Bobby Lee [Cook] should have asked for a change of venue," Morgan said. "It was the 'Rich boy kills the Christian country girl who comes to town to make a better life for herself.' "
The elder Wilcox and the two employees were never prosecuted.
The 1972 crime doesn't make sense, said Morgan, himself a longtime prosecutor, "He goes and kills his dad's secretary and then goes to a party thrown for him and his new wife?"
Wilcox was divorced from his first wife in 1979 and was married to another woman during his 1982 trial. Wilcox says they divorced amicably in 1989.
In 1985, a federal judge threw out the conviction, citing the witness intimidation. Bowers was then Georgia's attorney general, and his office appealed the ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The conviction was reinstated in 1987.
'Disgusting' campaign
Even if Wilcox is guilty, Morgan claims that he already has spent more time in prison than most prisoners with no prior convictions who were convicted of a killing with no aggravating factors, such as an armed robbery or rape committed during the crime.
Spivey, the prosecutor married to Hanks' daughter, said the courts had addressed all those issues.
"What has changed here? Nothing," Spivey said. "There is no new evidence here. They are being paid, and well paid, to advocate for this guy. That's the only thing here."
The parole effort has elevated the emotions of those involved, even the lawyers. Spivey calls Bowers' and Morgan's parole campaign "disgusting."
"You have to have some principles other than you wave some money in your face and you change your tune," Spivey declared. "This is why Shakespeare said, 'First, let's kill all the lawyers.' "
"I can sleep at night," counters Morgan.
Wilcox is eager for the parole board decision, but he tries to remain low-key. If expectations get too high, he'll be crushed emotionally if he's turned down.
"You have to stay grounded," he says.
So he waits. As does the family of Hellen Hanks.
Emotions run high as board ponders parole for convict
By BILL TORPY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/22/04
REIDSVILLE — The newspaper ad carries a photo of a smiling convict. "Convicted MURDERER of our mother," the caption reads.
Keller Wilcox is up for parole again. And he still shows no remorse, says the family of the victim, Hellen Hanks. They want him to stay in prison and have placed the recurring ad in The Valdosta Daily Times, most recently on May 2. The 35-year-old mother of three, who worked as secretary to Wilcox's father, was killed in 1972, her body stuffed into a box and probably dismembered.
"Do you want this convicted killer living in your community?" the ad asks.
When asked in person, Wilcox entertains the question with a wince. He is at the center of an escalating parole battle and prefers to avoid controversy.
One afternoon last week, he sat at a table in the prison firehouse near Georgia State Prison, his gray shirt crisp, his hands folded, his sad green eyes fixed in concentration. "I want to go home, to live in my house," he said. "I'm ready to put an end to this travesty."
Wilcox, convicted and sentenced to life in prison after a sensational trial in 1982, has been classified as a minimum-security inmate since 1987. He lives and works in the firehouse, which sits outside the prison gates. He recently learned to use the Jaws of Life to extract car wreck victims. He mentors young prisoners. His life is much like any other firefighter's, but instead of 24 hours on duty and 48 off, Wilcox can't leave.
He has standing job offers and a place to live: his late parents' elegant French-style home, which sits vacant and is tended by a family friend. Wilcox's lawyers say he has done everything the state Board of Pardons and Paroles wants a candidate for release to do except express remorse. He says he can't admit to a crime he didn't commit. He says he's "doing someone else's time."
The parole board is deciding whether Wilcox, 53, should go free. It's the first time since 1996 that he has been considered for parole. And he fears that if he's denied, he might not get another hearing for another eight years.
His urgency is evident: Wilcox has hired former Georgia Attorney General Mike Bowers and former DeKalb County District Attorney J. Tom Morgan. The lawyers, in a letter to the five-member parole board, call the case a "true tragedy" in which an innocent man has spent more than 20 years in prison.
The Hanks family is waging its own campaign. They have run the newspaper ad several times and have told reporters how Wilcox, a rich kid they say had the world handed to him, devastated their family. Worse, they say, he remains defiant.
"Who's to say he won't hurt anyone else?" asks Russell Spivey, a Middle Georgia prosecutor who is married to Hellen Hanks' daughter Penny. "He may be more dangerous if he convinced himself he did nothing wrong."
Both sides have flooded the parole board with letters. Those advocating Wilcox's release include doctors, ministers and civic leaders. A parole official called the response overwhelming and said Friday that the board would extend its original May deadline for making a decision so that members could pore through the voluminous file, nearly 8 inches thick.
A fortuitous discovery
Marilyn Kemper, one of several former Wilcox neighbors who have written the board advocating his release, doesn't see him as a threat, though she's not sure whether he's a murderer or not. "Half the town thinks he did it, half doesn't," Kemper said.
The case has fueled rumor and debate in Valdosta since Aug. 31, 1972, when Hanks disappeared from Wilcox Outdoor Advertising, where she worked in the office. Many saw the disappearance — her purse was left at the office, the door was ajar — as a case of a discontented wife running off.
Hanks' family never believed that. They thought something awful had occurred. Still, they wondered. Daughter Lucy said she carried her mother's driver's license for years, asking strangers if they had seen her. Daughter Penny once followed a woman in a grocery store, thinking it might be her mother, Spivey said.
In 1980, a plow clearing land near Valdosta snagged a wooden box that contained bones. Six inches deeper and the box would have remained undisturbed. Prosecutors later told the jury that the discovery was due to "providence."
Police arrested Keller Wilcox, described in newspaper reports as "the scion of an aristocratic and wealthy family." His father, E.K. "Foxy" Wilcox, also was arrested and charged with helping his son dispose of the body.
The trial was sensational. One news story reported that a white-haired bailiff was nearly trampled by spectators rushing to get seats. Hanks was described as "the attractive bookkeeper." News reports mentioned a "six-figure" retainer paid Wilcox's attorney, famed Georgia defense lawyer Bobby Lee Cook.
Testimony recanted
Testimony indicated Hanks was strangled and her legs were sawed off to fit her body into the box, a kind used by Wilcox Advertising. Witnesses said Wilcox, at age 21, had inappropriately touched Hanks, although police reports at the time of her disappearance didn't mention that. A deaf hairdresser testified that she had read the victim's lips as saying, "I'm scared of the Wilcox boy."
Prosecutors said her clothing had been cut off. They hinted that there was a rape. The star prosecution witnesses, two elderly black men who were longtime Wilcox employees, told police they had helped bury the body. But the men had been threatened by police detectives, who told them they faced the electric chair and might even get lynched. One recanted during the trial, the other two years later. But prosecutors said the men knew facts that only those who buried the body would know.
A jury deliberated less than two hours before convicting Keller Wilcox in January 1982.
"In hindsight, Bobby Lee [Cook] should have asked for a change of venue," Morgan said. "It was the 'Rich boy kills the Christian country girl who comes to town to make a better life for herself.' "
The elder Wilcox and the two employees were never prosecuted.
The 1972 crime doesn't make sense, said Morgan, himself a longtime prosecutor, "He goes and kills his dad's secretary and then goes to a party thrown for him and his new wife?"
Wilcox was divorced from his first wife in 1979 and was married to another woman during his 1982 trial. Wilcox says they divorced amicably in 1989.
In 1985, a federal judge threw out the conviction, citing the witness intimidation. Bowers was then Georgia's attorney general, and his office appealed the ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The conviction was reinstated in 1987.
'Disgusting' campaign
Even if Wilcox is guilty, Morgan claims that he already has spent more time in prison than most prisoners with no prior convictions who were convicted of a killing with no aggravating factors, such as an armed robbery or rape committed during the crime.
Spivey, the prosecutor married to Hanks' daughter, said the courts had addressed all those issues.
"What has changed here? Nothing," Spivey said. "There is no new evidence here. They are being paid, and well paid, to advocate for this guy. That's the only thing here."
The parole effort has elevated the emotions of those involved, even the lawyers. Spivey calls Bowers' and Morgan's parole campaign "disgusting."
"You have to have some principles other than you wave some money in your face and you change your tune," Spivey declared. "This is why Shakespeare said, 'First, let's kill all the lawyers.' "
"I can sleep at night," counters Morgan.
Wilcox is eager for the parole board decision, but he tries to remain low-key. If expectations get too high, he'll be crushed emotionally if he's turned down.
"You have to stay grounded," he says.
So he waits. As does the family of Hellen Hanks.