Legal Delays May Let Killer Walk Free : Two Years of Crossed Signals Between El Centro and Houston Jeopardize Case

In the springtime of 1984, William Sam Marshall was looking at a minimum of 20 years in jail. The young drifter had pleaded guilty to murdering a 22-year-old man in Houston, and he had signed a plea-bargain agreement admitting his guilt in the premeditated slaying of a former Navy man in El Centro.

Now, if a California appellate court decision this week withstands a challenge from prosecutors, Marshall, 23, can look forward to leaving the Imperial County Jail soon as a free man, with both murder cases irreversibly dismissed.

Prosecutors in Houston dropped the Texas charge in August, on the understanding that the California case was stronger.

But the 4th District Court of Appeal ruled this week that “procedural snafus” by authorities in El Centro and Houston had allowed the time to lapse within which Imperial County Dist. Atty. Thomas Storey was required to bring Marshall to trial on the California charge of first-degree murder. The three-judge appellate panel ordered that charge dismissed, too.

The decision, which Storey pledged Wednesday to appeal to the California Supreme Court, stemmed from nearly two years of crossed signals between Texas and California authorities.

“We just kind of bumbled into this,” said San Diego attorney Max Foster Ruffcorn, the court-appointed attorney for Marshall in California, who added that he was as surprised as anyone by the sequence of events that brought the admitted killer to the brink of freedom.

Storey said: “He was basically able to put the screws to the system and do what he wants to with it.”

Not Freed Immediately

Even if the ruling is upheld, it could be several months before Marshall is freed. In interviews with The Times, prosecutors in both states related basically the same chronology of his tangled encounter with the courts:

On July 26, 1983, Jarrold Lloyd Rose, 22, was found dead in an open field on the outskirts of Houston, shot once in the back with a deer rifle. Rose and two friends had run into Marshall a few hours earlier during an attempted drug purchase, according to Jack Millin, an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas.

A week earlier, Marshall had been in The rural area near McAllen, Tex., looking to borrow money from acquaintances. A few days after the killing, he was back in McAllen, bragging about killing a guy in Houston, according to Millin.

By early the next month, Marshall had drifted into El Centro. Darrel Gene Helfer, 30, a security guard and convenience-store clerk, befriended him, and Marshall moved into Helfer’s home, Storey said. Days later, Helfer was dead from shotgun wounds and Marshall had disappeared. A warrant was issued for his arrest.

Violation of Parole

Authorities later learned that Marshall had headed east to central Florida, where he was arrested on a Texas parole violation in late December, 1983. He had sold Helfer’s truck as he traveled through the Deep South. Some of Helfer’s possessions were found in Marshall’s room in rural Apopka, Fla., Storey said.

With Marshall wanted in two states, the stage was set for confusion.

He was extradited first to Galveston, Tex., where he was jailed on an earlier assault charge. In the meantime, the Houston grand jury indicted Marshall on a murder charge in Rose’s death.

By May, 1984, his lawyer in Texas, Roger Bridgewater of Houston, had arranged to dispose of the murder cases in both Texas and California.

Marshall pleaded guilty to the murder of Rose and was sentenced May 11 to life in prison--a term that under Texas parole rules requires a minimum of 20 years behind bars, according to Millin. The same day, Marshall signed an agreement with Storey and the Texas prosecutor promising to plead guilty in California to first-degree murder in the death of Helfer. The prosecutors agreed he would serve all his prison time in California.

It was only a matter of days before the deal began to fall apart, according to the lawyers and the recounting of the tale in the appellate court decision.

Texas corrections officials decided that the agreement could not stand. Marshall could serve his time in California only if he entered his plea in El Centro first, they said. He was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea in Texas and was sent to California.

On his arrival in El Centro in September, 1984, Marshall “broke his word and refused to plead guilty to first-degree murder,” according to the appellate court narrative. Storey, unable to produce the witnesses from Georgia and Florida who would be needed for a preliminary hearing in the case, dismissed the charge for the time being and returned Marshall to Texas.

In Houston, proceedings dragged on. Key witnesses against Marshall could not be found, Millin said. Prosecutors in the two states finally decided last summer that they had a better chance of convicting Marshall in Imperial County.

“I talked to the D.A. in California and he said their case was pretty good,” Millin recalled Wednesday. “I said ours was pretty bad.” Harris County dropped its charges against Marshall in August and shipped him back to El Centro.

But according to the appellate court ruling, the delays already had eliminated the possibility of a conviction in California.

The court’s ruling says a 180-day time clock for trying Marshall on the California charge started ticking when he first was returned to El Centro in the fall of 1984. The failure to try him within six months of his initial appearance in the Imperial County Courthouse made the dismissal of the California murder charge mandatory, Judge Don Work ruled in the unanimous appellate court decision.

Ruffcorn acknowledges that Work, a former Imperial County Superior Court judge, probably came to the decision reluctantly. “I think the appeal court picked this case over every square inch to find a way out, because of the result that would happen,” he said. “But they were unable to, because they were stuck the way the law reads. And I think the Supreme Court is going to do the same thing.”

Storey insists that the court ruling contradicts good sense. All the clocks should have stopped running when Marshall went back on his promise to plead guilty in California, said the district attorney, who expects to take heat for the case in his reelection campaign this spring.

“I think justice says he should have returned to where he was when he refused to enter his plea here,” Storey said. “He was basically getting everything and giving nothing.”

Storey declined to assess blame for the mishandling of the prosecutions. “If anything went wrong, it was the system,” he said.

Helfer’s sister, Denise, a Northern California woman who asked that her last name not be used for fear of retribution by Marshall, had only praise for Storey. But she said the apparent bungling of Marshall’s prosecution had embittered her toward the judicial system.

“It’s these kind of people who get to walk,” she said Wednesday. “What the court doesn’t take into consideration is what it has done to the victim. He has no rights. He had no rights when the guy took them away from him. He lost everything he had.

“And the family has no rights. In losing my brother, I lost one of the best friends I ever had. We’re left to suffer every day here on out.”