When the Law Tells Time: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? : Husband Convicted of Murder 12 Years After Wife Died From Shattered Skull

The coroner concluded that Donna Howard, former rodeo trick rider and one-time best-dressed junior cowgirl, died after a horse’s kick shattered her skull into 19 pieces.

That is what Donna’s husband, Noyes Russell Howard, said he believed that bloody, icy January day in 1975, and that is the explanation accepted by the Yakima County sheriff and prosecutor.

But Donna’s family, particularly her devoted younger sister, Bobbi Bennett, did not believe it. And nearly 12 years after a death twice ruled accidental, in a case twice declined for prosecution, a Yakima County Superior Court jury said it did not believe it either.

The Verdict

The panel decided it was not a hoof that cracked her skull, but a hammer. It was not one of her beloved horses that killed 42-year-old Donna Howard. It was her husband.

“It’s a miracle,” Bennett said. “The reason there’s justice today is because Christ cared about Donna.”

“I’m outraged,” said Howard, 56, who was sentenced Dec. 4 to life in prison. “We’ve tried to pin down where we thought this went wrong.”

The verdict raised a haunting question: Is the agonizing wait for justice finally over--or just beginning?

Was a guilty man free while his murdered wife’s family spent years of heartache and thousands of dollars persuading authorities to listen to their suspicions? Or has an innocent man been wrongly convicted of first-degree murder?

“It really says something about the system,” said Greg Canova, the senior assistant state attorney general who prosecuted the case. “It shouldn’t have taken this long to find the truth.”

“The system failed in a couple of ways,” said public defender Susan Hahn. “It failed because I can’t see how there was enough evidence to convince 12 people Russ Howard was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And it failed because I don’t think he’s guilty.”

The story really begins in the middle of the Depression along the upper edge of the fertile Yakima Valley, renowned for its Washington state apples. Three-year-old Donna Bennett has a newborn sister, Blodwyn, nicknamed Bobbi. They grow up close, sharing a love of horses, cowboys and rodeos. Donna is a natural equestrian, standing fearlessly on horseback at age 3, winning the “best-dressed junior cowgirl” title in the Ellensburg Rodeo parade at 5.

After high school, the sisters work as trick riders at eastern Washington rodeos, thrilling audiences with their act. Friends remember them as visions on horseback, a couple of real knockouts in cowboy hats and satiny shirts. Especially Donna, with her easy smile and enormous brown eyes, eyes picked by the local newspaper as the prettiest in the Ellensburg High School class of 1950.

That is the way she looked when she met Russ Howard, not the cowboy her sister wanted for her, but a maverick of another sort, fun-loving and hard-drinking.

‘He Was Fun and Crazy’

“He was fun, and he was crazy,” said Fay Moss, a friend of Donna’s since the fifth grade. “I could see how she could be attracted to him.”

Still, his drinking bothered the teetotaling Donna. Her friends say that is why she delayed her wedding to Howard, a state agriculture worker, and waited until her 30s to have their daughters, Lisa and Marilyn.

“I think she really cared and really wanted this marriage to go,” Moss said. “But she wanted things to be right, to raise a family in the right atmosphere.”

By 1974, however, that atmosphere was so heavy with tension that the proud, private Donna began revealing bits of her burden to her family and friends.

“Donna was always the kind that never complained,” Moss said. “But this one time in late December (of 1974) I said to her, ‘Donna, how are you, really?’ She just broke down and cried and said, ‘Not good. Just not good.’ ”

Howard would later say frustration over his wife’s changing sexual needs led him to have affairs with at least eight other women in their 15-year marriage. No one is sure whether Donna knew or simply suspected, but she did consult a divorce lawyer. She changed her mind, apparently worried about supporting her young daughters alone, but friends and family speculate that she was about to change her mind again.

Attack on Donna Reported

“In mid-December, Donna called me and told me Russ had struck her twice in the head and practically knocked her unconscious, and she had called the sheriff’s office,” Bennett said. “I was positive in my heart that she was going to go ahead and get the divorce.”

She never got the chance. Less than a month later, Donna Howard was lying dead on the frozen ground in a horse shed on the couple’s property. The Bennetts were stunned, disbelieving. Her husband was devastated.

“I don’t know how you describe something like that,” Howard said. “(I felt) a combination of grief and rage, not knowing where to vent the rage.”

Lisa Howard Rapp, who was 10 years old at the time of her mother’s death, remembers what it was like. “Probably the hardest part, aside from adjusting to the fact we didn’t have a mom anymore, was seeing my dad go through that. We’d never ever seen him cry before, and he just cried and cried. He was torn apart.”

The county coroner, Richard Muzzall, a local surgeon who had gone to school with the Bennett sisters, performed a partial autopsy on Donna. The main injury was consistent with a horse kick, he decided. A second wound, a smaller, more symmetrical injury to the top of the skull, at first puzzled Muzzall, but a visit to the scene solved the mystery. The kick, the coroner determined, had propelled Donna onto the jagged end of a railroad tie lying in the shed.

Case Closed--Almost

Case closed--for everyone except Bennett and her parents. Their uneasy feeling that something was wrong crystallized into dogged determination two weeks later when Bennett heard about Howard’s girlfriend, a woman he had been seeing before Donna’s death.

“It was like a light went on,” she said. “From then on, I knew that Dr. Muzzall didn’t know what he was talking about and that we had to get some help.”

An investigator hired by the family kept them apprised of Howard’s personal life. A month after Donna Howard’s death, the other woman moved in with him. Within five months, Russ and Karen (Pepper) Howard were married.

The information infuriated Bennett, who continued to search for someone to review the original autopsy. She sought out Thomas Noguchi, then Los Angeles chief medical examiner, after reading about him in a magazine at a beauty parlor. He and another forensic pathologist agreed that the original autopsy report was incomplete. Donna Howard’s body was exhumed, but a second autopsy almost two years after her death seemed to confirm the original.

For Bennett, who turned to religion a month after her sister’s death, the exhausting crusade was far from over. She read voraciously and telephoned or wrote to anyone she thought could help. She prayed and looked for signs that she was doing the right thing. Over the years, the family spent $10,000 on the case.

“Some people might say it took over my life,” Bennett said. “I made up my mind that I was not going to let her go until they did something.”

Ex-Wife Provides Key

Help came from an unexpected quarter. In July, 1980, Pepper Howard, then divorced from Russ and angry over his refusal to return some furniture, told authorities that her ex-husband had confided to her his plan to kill Donna and later described exactly what had happened.

“He told me that he hit her three times with a hammer. He said he thought he could do it with one (blow), and it didn’t work,” she said.

She said that Howard insisted that they marry because a wife cannot testify against her husband. “I figured that they would have this thing in court before we ever had a chance to get married,” Pepper Howard said. “But they didn’t.”

The Yakima County prosecutor’s office determined that marital privilege made most of Pepper Howard’s allegations inadmissible in court. That fact, plus the two autopsy reports, added up to insufficient evidence, prosecutor Jeff Sullivan decided.

At Bennett’s urging, then-Gov. John Spellman asked the attorney general’s office to investigate the case. It was one of two on Greg Canova’s desk when he took over the office’s new special investigative unit in 1981.

“The first thing that jumped out at me and my investigator was the total inadequacy of the original autopsy,” Canova said. “The fact that followed logically from that was that there had been no investigation by the Yakima County sheriff’s office.”

Howard Laughs at Probers

Howard said he thinks he antagonized the investigators by laughing at them when they came to talk to him.

“I was amused,” he said. “I never dreamed it would get this far, that anybody would take Bobbi or Pepper seriously.”

On Nov. 8, 1984, the state attorney general’s office charged him with first-degree murder.

Attorneys Susan Hahn and Wes Raber, appointed to defend Howard, faced immediate frustration. Missing evidence might not hurt their client, but it could not be used to help him, either.

Donna’s clothing and blood-stained blankets that had covered her body had been destroyed. Blood-spattered boards found near Donna’s head had been repainted and removed. The railroad tie had become part of a fence, the offending end anchored in cement.

“The only tangible physical evidence was Mrs. Howard’s skull, which had been shipped all over the country to who knows how many people, and eight (death scene) photographs,” Hahn said.

The state’s experts who examined the reconstructed skull concluded that the massive crushing in the back of Donna’s head might have been caused by a hammer, but the injury to the top definitely was. Defense experts disagreed, but they could not absolutely eliminate the possibility that a hammer was used.

‘Best Explanation’

“Our position was, (the injury) does look like a hammer (caused it),” Hahn said. “But that’s not the only thing that could cause that kind of injury, and the explanation that was originally given was still the best explanation.”

The trial lasted seven days. The jury deliberated nine hours.

“I had a feeling the jury wanted to find a way to find the man innocent,” foreman Phillip Kooser said. “Then there was the feeling as one juror said: ‘I know he did it, but. . . . ‘ We talked about what would follow that ‘but.’ There was nothing there.”

Bennett, who clutched a silver cross throughout the trial, received word of the guilty verdict at her mother’s home.

“We cried and just kind of went crazy. I’m still in shock from the whole thing,” she said. “I think I’ve thought about this every day for the last 11 1/2 years. I feel free at last.”

Bobbi Bennett’s liberation is Russ Howard’s imprisonment. He waits in jail while his attorneys appeal, a process that could take two years. His life sentence carries a mandatory 20-year term; he could be paroled after serving 13 years and eight months.

‘I’m Innocent’

“We’re all optimistic. Because I’m innocent,” Howard said. “And there are people on the other side of the prison bars doing everything they can to get this straightened out.”

His daughters stand fast in his corner, true believers in his innocence.

“The only thing I think that would ever convince me is if he told me he did it. I think I would have a hard time believing it even then,” said Lisa Howard Rapp, who visits her father daily.

“I don’t want to do (what Bobbi did). I don’t want to live my life for this. But I don’t want to see my dad sitting in jail for something he didn’t do, either,” she said.

“He’s not guilty. In the end, he’ll get out, and it will be all over with. And they won’t ever be able to bring it up again.”