In switch, jury says Lee must die

LINDA SATTER
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Four days after handing a life sentence to terrorist Chevie Kehoe for killing a Searcy County family, a federal jury gave Kehoe's assistant, Danny Lee, a death sentence for the same crime.

The unanimous verdict stunned many, as the prevailing belief throughout the Little Rock federal courts building was that Lee couldn't possibly get a harsher sentence than Kehoe.

But the reasons for the different sentences could be found in verdict forms where jurors indicated factors that turned them in favor of death.

Unlike jurors' findings on Kehoe, they decided that Lee -- described by attorneys as having a "hair-trigger volatility" -- posed a threat of danger to others if kept alive in prison.

In support of that finding, jurors cited Lee's involvement at age 17 in the 1990 throat-slashing death of another youth, Joey Wavra, whom Lee admitted beating and kicking in the head after Wavra urinated on a couch at a party. Lee, now 26, admitted in 1990 to forcing Wavra down a manhole after the beating and then handing a knife to his cousin, a paranoid schizophrenic. The cousin, now serving a life sentence, admitted fatally stabbing Wavra in the sewer in Mustang, Okla.

Justice Department prosecutor Lane Liroff emphasized Friday that Lee got "an incredible deal" and a second chance by being allowed to plea-bargain down to a robbery charge in the Wavra case. But, he said, Lee chose not to use the opportunity to end his life of crime.

Other facts that jurors said proved Lee is "a dangerous man," as Liroff argued, were a 1995 misdemeanor conviction for carrying a concealed weapon and an apparent lack of remorse about the Searcy County murders. Prosecutors contended that the lack of remorse was obvious in Lee's laughing remarks to Kehoe's mother, Gloria Kehoe, that he and her son had put the victims on "a liquid diet."

The victims were Tilly gun dealer William Mueller, 52, his wife, Nancy Mueller, 28, and her 8-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell, all of whom had plastic bags taped tightly around their heads and were then attached to heavy rocks and tossed into the Illinois Bayou near Russellville.

Liroff told jurors in his sentencing-phase closing argument Friday that "we can all agree that if not for Chevie Kehoe, Danny Lee wouldn't have killed the Mueller family. But, if you remember all those guns you saw during this trial, Danny Lee is like one of those guns -- a lethal weapon, loaded and cocked. The only thing Chevie did was point that lethal weapon."

Nancy Mueller's sister, Kimma Gurel, said after the verdict that "what Mr. Liroff said is true. They [Kehoe and Lee] are different people. I think Lee is more volatile and unpredictable. But I think Chevie deserved the death penalty, too."

Lee's mother, Lea Graham of Yukon, Okla., left the courtroom in tears and was held up by two unidentified supporters. Her only comment was "My son is innocent."

Prosecutors Liroff and Robert De La Cruz of Washington, and Dan Stripling of Little Rock, who have been under a gag order throughout the 11-week trial, declined to comment.

Lawyers and both defendants must appear at 9:30 a.m. Monday before the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Eisele, for formal sentencing on the murder charges and so Eisele can impose required life sentences for the men's two other convictions -- racketeering and conspiracy.

Defense attorney Cathleen Compton, who handled Lee's sentencing, also left the courtroom in tears and declined to comment. Her co-counsel, Jack Lassiter, assured reporters that Lee will appeal.

"In light of the sentence that Chevie Kehoe received, I'm struggling to understand that verdict," Lassiter said. "I have just reviewed the verdict forms and I am very confused as to how they could have reached some of the decisions reflected in those forms, in terms of what mitigating circumstances they found and didn't find."

Asked about a note jurors sent to Eisele about three hours into the four-hour deliberations, Lassiter said, "I don't know what to make of that." It said, "We have a juror who does not believe in the death penalty - no matter what the crime!"

In a second note, jurors asked for "more time to discuss it."

Eisele granted that request after denying Liroff's request, in a hearing outside jurors' presence, that the judge interview and possibly replace the juror in question with an alternate.

Liroff argued that if a juror couldn't follow the law and consider a death sentence, after earlier promising to do so, it was grounds for removal. Eisele said he didn't want to invade the jury process at that late stage, particularly when the other jurors may have misread their fellow juror's thoughts.

Verdict forms read aloud in the courtroom also revealed that prosecutors proved Lee -- but not Kehoe -- had the intent to kill when they committed the murders on Jan. 11, 1996.

Evidence during the trial showed the men disguised themselves as federal agents, broke into the Mueller home and then lay in wait for the family to return. The men then robbed Bill Mueller of cash and a large cache of weapons, and murdered the whole family.

Prosecutors argued during the trial that Kehoe and Lee wanted the weapons for their terroristic anti-government group aimed at setting up a whites-only nation and that Kehoe also was motivated to silence Mueller before he could alert authorities to the group's existence.

The one victim that Lee didn't intend to kill, jurors found, was Sarah Powell. The finding was likely based on Gloria Kehoe's testimony that her son told her Lee couldn't go through with Sarah's murder, so Kehoe had to do it.

On Monday, the same jury had found that prosecutors didn't prove Kehoe intentionally killed the victims. Instead, jurors decided, prosecutors proved Kehoe engaged in violence that he knew carried a great risk of death, and in the process, killed the family. They found that Lee also met that criteria.

In nonunanimous findings, jurors said Lee's defense team proved only five of 14 proposed "mitigating factors" -- those that favor a lighter sentence.

Of those factors, three jurors cited the fact that Kehoe, who was equally culpable, got life. Six cited the emotional and physical abuse and lack of parental guidance that Lee suffered as a child. Three jurors said that others involved in the racketeering scheme received less or no punishment, and two noted that Kehoe's father, Kirby Kehoe, had a hand in planning the burglary that led to the Muellers' deaths. One person agreed with defense attorneys that Lee needs a structured environment and would benefit from that in prison.

Jurors unanimously rejected other proposed mitigative factors, including that Lee suffered from neurological impairments that could have been corrected when he was a child if he had received proper medication, that he had a brain dysfunction and that he was a follower under Kehoe's influence.

At Compton's request, Eisele polled each of the jurors individually to assure that each agreed with the death sentence. The panel included six black women, one white woman, three black men and two white men. All certified in writing that the race, sex, national origin and beliefs of the defendants and victims played no part in their decision.

Before jurors went out to deliberate, Compton argued that a life sentence was more appropriate than the death partly because Lee was deprived of nurturing as a child and thus was easily influenced by an adult, Bobby Norton, who befriended the teen-ager while "heading up a horribly racist group."

"Danny so wanted to be a part of somebody that he let Bobby Norton take him in, put his arm around him, train him and let him call him Dad," she said.

Compton also argued that Lee's violent outbursts were never effectively treated in the years he spent "lost in the shuffle" of various juvenile and treatment facilities.

Liroff told jurors that in looking at Lee's past, "what's striking is that he clearly has a love of violence. There are the absolute sheer number of times he's engaged in this behavior."

Though Lee may have been, to some extent, "a lost child looking for identity," Liroff said, Lee nonetheless "is a man without a conscience. And a man without a conscience is a dangerous man because he does not care who he harms."

Reminding jurors of Lee's threats to kill Pulaski County jailer Nancy Cummings while on trial in this case, Liroff said that "the moment he wanted something" and didn't get it, "there was that hot lightning flash that exposes the real Danny Lee."

With that history, he asked jurors, "who is going to be the next Nancy Cummings? And will he or she be so lucky?"

Liroff also cited reports that Lee had assaulted his sister and mother --they denied it -- and then assaulted his pregnant girlfriend. That, Liroff said, "is a man dedicated to violence."

Pointing to Sarah Powell's tiny black T-shirt with a kitten embroidered on the front, Liroff said, "It sits there as a grim reminder of the horror of Danny Lee."     

This article was published on Saturday, May 15, 1999