Suspicions and Stereotypes Complicate Murder Case

In the beginning, there seemed at least to be a grisly simplicity to it.

A sweet-natured 12-year-old girl who was active in her church and did volunteer work at the library was stabbed to death in her bedroom late at night.

Within days, police arrested the girl’s bright but aloof brother and later two of his high school pals as accomplices.

The brother and one of the friends allegedly confessed to police--although both later denied having committed the murder. The second friend denied involvement but provided a “hypothetical” scenario that matched key details of the crime.

The alleged motive was an ancient one: sibling jealousy. Police discovered a story the brother had written about a super-warrior who dreams of killing his sister.

But 16 months later, the murder of Stephanie Crowe is far from solved. There are no longer criminal charges against anyone, and the case has become one of the most complex and controversial murder investigations in decades in San Diego County.

The prosecution of Michael Crowe, now 15, Joshua Treadway, 16, and Aaron Houser, 16, was derailed in January on the eve of Treadway’s trial, when a DNA test found three spots of Stephanie’s blood on a filthy sweatshirt worn the night of the murder by a mentally unstable transient and felon who had been prowling the neighborhood.

Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst dropped charges against Michael Crowe and his friends when he was unable to reconcile the confession of Treadway and other evidence with the discovery of Stephanie’s blood on the sweatshirt worn by Richard Tuite.

Pfingst also ordered a new investigation and warned that the charges might be reinstated, depending on the explanation found for the stains.

“Nobody wanted to believe these kids could do this, including the prosecution and police,” Pfingst said. “Everybody wanted to believe a transient did it, including the prosecution and police, because it fits our stereotypes of the people we label as emotionally ill and who live on the fringes of society. [But] people who have seen [Treadway’s] confession consider it very powerful.”

Even before the DNA evidence, the prosecution’s case had been undercut by a judge’s ruling that nearly all of what the defendants had told police was not admissible because it had been improperly obtained.

Questionable Tactics, Conflicting Views

Beyond the forensics and questionable police tactics, the case centers on conflicting views of suburban teenagers and whether the public is too quick to condemn them or too slow to accept that the boy next door can be a killer.

“Teenagers are the last group that it’s OK to discriminate against,” said Treadway’s attorney, Mary Ellen Attridge, who had demanded the DNA test. “Police built a case against these boys based on the public’s irrational fear of teenagers because of the aberrant acts of very few.”

The youths’ attorneys had long contended that Tuite was the real killer and that police and prosecutors had rushed to judgment to avoid another JonBenet Ramsey case in which authorities were criticized for not being able to solve a high-profile murder of a young girl.

Tuite had been questioned by police the day after the murder and was released after his clothing was seized as possible evidence. Police believed he was incapable of murder.

Tuite’s attorney, Edward Peckham, said his client did not kill Stephanie but merely was in the neighborhood looking, in a befuddled manner, for a former girlfriend. “He’s a mentally ill kid--he can’t defend himself--and they [the teenagers’ attorneys] are taking advantage of the public’s fear of the mentally ill to draw attention away from the confession,” Peckham said.

The teenagers’ parents and lawyers--in federal civil rights lawsuits--have accused police and prosecutors of incompetency, bias and psychological brutality in building a murder case against Treadway, Houser and Crowe.

Even before charges were dropped, the three had support from teachers, a prominent local minister and 30 neighbors who put up their homes as bail after the youths had been jailed at Juvenile Hall for six months awaiting trial as adults.

The three are bright, high-achieving, middle-class students, with no history of violence, criminality or diagnosed mental illness. Crowe’s father works at an auto body shop, Treadway’s is a locksmith, and Houser’s is a retired Navy enlisted man.

The youths indulged in the teenage fads of wearing dark clothing and playing violence-oriented video games, and the role-playing fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons.

Michael Crowe collected tabloid stories about the O.J. Simpson case, and Aaron Houser owned a knife and sword collection and knew how to scrub away blood residue, the grand jury was told. Two experts say one of Houser’s knives is consistent with Stephanie’s wounds (although a defense expert disagrees).

Pfingst said he finds it hard to believe that Tuite, 29, who has since been sent to prison for a bungled burglary, could have entered the Crowe home undetected, without making any noise, killed Stephanie and escaped without leaving any blood, fibers or fingerprints.

Attridge derides this as the “happy transient” theory that ignores the fact Tuite was once arrested for allegedly stabbing a man and that in the days after Stephanie’s murder he was caught saying lewd things to girls.

Police say they first considered Michael Crowe a suspect after he told them he saw that Stephanie’s door closed when he arose about 4 a.m. to get a glass of milk and a Tylenol. By police reckoning, her body had been in the doorway since about midnight, the estimated time of death.

At 6:30 a.m. their grandmother discovered Stephanie’s body, and when police arrived minutes later, they found the dead girl’s door wide open and her head and shoulders thrust into the narrow hallway that separated her room from Michael’s. She had apparently tried futilely to crawl for help.

Stephanie had been stabbed nine times. On the window sill were the words “kill, kill,” from the game Dungeons & Dragons.

Attorneys for the three teenagers assert that the body was inadvertently moved into the hallway when Stephanie’s hysterical parents tried to revive her. The prosecution rejoinder is that the body was so stiffened by rigor mortis and so matted to the carpet with blood that the parents’ explanation--which helps bolster their son’s story--cannot be believed.

A task force of Escondido police and district attorney’s investigators, backed by the FBI, is trying to find evidence to support the idea that Tuite is the killer, find an explanation for the bloodstains on Tuite’s sweatshirt, or find additional evidence to support the original charges.

If charges are reinstated against Treadway, who had been set to be the first defendant to stand trial, the prosecution’s major evidence against him will be a two-hour videotaped confession to police, which he has since renounced. His attorney will need to show that the confession, implicating all three, was coerced and false.

Attridge is ready with a sociology professor from UC Berkeley who will testify that the police techniques were akin to those used in cases in which suspects make false confessions after unbearable pressure. Attridge is betting that jurors would be appalled at the videotapes.

“They broke these boys,” said attorney Paul Blake, who represented Crowe. “It was something right out of ‘Darkness at Noon,’ ” the Arthur Koestler novel about a totalitarian state.

Pfingst replies that it is illogical to think that all three teenagers could be coerced by different interrogators into making false statements that agree on major details. He also alleges that Treadway’s confession has details only one of the participants would know.

Each of the three suspects was subjected to more than one lengthy interrogation before being arrested. They were never physically menaced. Except for that, however, a review of videotapes and transcripts shows that the interrogation techniques could have been taken straight from popular TV cop series. For example:

* The police told lies to the teenagers. Officers told them that there was massive evidence against them and that their buddies were squealing. The police implied that if the teenagers confessed, they would get a better deal, maybe even avoid prison.

* The teenagers were given water and soft drinks. Everyone who watches cop shows knows that a suspect who needs to urinate is often much more cooperative.

* The police would not take no for an answer. Crowe denied being involved in the murder more than 80 times.

* When the teenagers asked to see their parents, the requests were delayed or ignored. (In other police departments, all questioning is halted when a teenager asks for a parent.)

* Two of the teenagers were hooked up to a so-called “voice stress analyzer” that allegedly can detect lies. When they denied guilt, they were told the machine said they were lying. (The FBI calls the machine worthless.)

* Interrogators played the classic good cop/bad cop routine. One would act fatherly, while the other would use sarcasm. Two of the teenagers began weeping.

“The cops used grown-up techniques on kids,” said Tuite attorney Peckham.

Teenagers Didn’t Ask for a Lawyer

None of the teenagers or their families asked for an attorney, a fact they now regret.

There is no indication that police thought they were doing anything wrong. If they had, asks Lt. John Houchin, the Escondido police spokesman, why would they have videotaped the lengthy sessions?

Still, the techniques struck Superior Court Judge John Thompson as excessive.

Thompson ruled that Houser had not been given a proper Miranda warning about his right to remain silent and have an attorney, and thus his “hypothetical” description of how Stephanie could have been murdered was inadmissible.

Similarly, Thompson ruled that Crowe’s confession--including his outburst of anger at his sister after being told (falsely) by police that his parents blamed him for the murder--had been obtained through coercion and was inadmissible.

The judge ruled that the first six hours of Treadway’s second interrogation--which came 12 days after the first one--were inadmissible. But he ruled that the final two hours were made voluntarily and could be used by prosecutors.

A finding of coercion is subjective. The law says that a confession is coerced if the police used techniques to “override the will” of the defendant, a standard open to case-by-case interpretation depending on the age and intelligence of the suspect.

If Treadway’s confession was true, the three teenagers had plotted the crime during lunch breaks at high school and Treadway acted as lookout while Houser and Crowe did the stabbing around midnight on Jan. 20, 1998.

“I knew that Aaron and Michael had gone in there and Stephanie was dead,” Treadway told police. “And the only explanation I got was that they pretty much worked together but Aaron took care of most of the business, as he referred to it.”

Media coverage of the case in San Diego County has been intense, with each side seeking to grab the high moral ground.

“I am convinced that Richard Tuite is the killer and the police won’t admit it because it will leave them open to civil liability for having charged the boys,” attorney Attridge said. “He’ll get out of prison in a few months and the real tragedy is that he could kill another little girl unless the cops and prosecutors admit their mistake.”

Prosecutors see it differently.

“What I keep thinking about at night is the confession, plus Stephanie’s body,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Summer Stephan, the lead prosecutor. “I picture her crawling to that doorway. I can’t get that out of my mind. I want justice for our girl.”