Nine years ago today, Joan Harmon and her three kids walked into an AT&T store in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to inquire about unlocking a phone. She handed the phone to a store employee, who took it to the back for further examination. Joan waited patiently for the employee to return. When they did return, they informed Joan that the phone belonged to Pamela Phillips, a woman who had been murdered six weeks earlier. The employee also told Joan that they had notified the police. Upon hearing that news, Joan and her three kids left the store.
The officer who received the call from the AT&T employee was Deputy Scott Noisworthy. Deputy Noisworthy did what any competent investigator would do and headed to the AT&T store to retrieve the phone and review surveillance video in hopes of identifying the woman who had entered the store. On his way to the AT&T store, Deputy Noisworthy received a phone call from another officer, Ed Stokes, who notified him that his brother and Joan’s boyfriend, William Stokes, wanted to speak to a detective about the homicide case. While reviewing the surveillance footage in the store, he received a call from Joan Harmon. Here is Deputy Noisworthy’s written report of that conversation.
While I was still inside the store, Joan called my cell phone and begin to tell me the story of how she came into contact with [it]. She stated that her son was outside “several days ago” and found the phone in a case next to a tree. She said they tried to “get into the phone” but was unable to. According to her, while they were out shopping they brought the phone to the store to see who the owner was.
Deputy Noisworthy identified Joan as the person in the surveillance video. He had just taken a phone call from someone who had a direct connection to two people who had recently been murdered and listened to a bogus story about her son finding the phone next to a tree in her front yard. What does he do next? He decides to drive by Joan’s house. Yep, she has a tree in her front yard. Story checks out. He doesn’t request a search warrant for Joan’s residence. He doesn’t interview Joan. As far as we know, he doesn’t interview Joan’s son, EJ, to see if their stories match. I don’t know if he ever called William Stokes back to find out what he had to say and why he had called shortly after Joan made the mistake of bringing evidence from a murder scene to an AT&T store. I’m not even sure if he called the phone company to get a report about the phone’s location since the murders.
A few days pass, and Joan visits the sheriff’s office in person. Here is his report of that visit.
Joan Martin came to the Sheriff’s and again told the story about how she came into contact with the phone. She stated that after her son found the phone, they tried to get into the phone by trying the unlock code and at some point it went to the “apple logo” She also provided a pink and grey case that she said the phone was in when her son found it. It was placed in a evidence bag and secured also.
At some point, detectives learn that Pam’s phone has been reset to its factory settings. What little digital examination they did on the phone revealed no data. There are two ways to reset a phone back to the factory settings. One way is if someone makes ten repeated attempts to get into a phone. Joan admitted that this is what had happened with her comment about seeing the Apple logo.
If Deputy Noisworthy, or anyone working the triple homicide, had done even a cursory evaluation of this critical piece of evidence, they should have realized that Joan’s story made absolutely no sense. Let’s say that you find a cell phone in your yard. You have no idea who it belongs to. You might try to turn it on and see if you can determine its owner. But once you turn it on and see that it requires a password, would you make so many attempts to get into it that you inadvertently reset it to its factory settings? Would you bring the phone into the AT&T store fully charged? Without the case they supposedely found it in?
Prosecutor Barbara Whaley, who laughed at the idea that there was some grand conspiracy against Kit Martin, had no problem coming up with a convoluted story of Kit throwing the phone into Joan’s front yard the night of the murders in an attempt to frame her. She had the whole thing written out in her PowerPoint presentation during her closing argument. It involved Kit driving one car to Rosetown road and setting it on fire, then walking the four miles back to the Phillips’s house, then jumping into Ed Dansereaus’s car and driving it to Elkton where Joan lived to throw the phone in her front yard, then driving back to Pembroke and parking Ed’s car four blocks away in a parking lot next to the highway, and then walking the four blocks back home, and then slipping into bed with no one in the house noticing.
Barbara Whaely’s scenario was so ludicrous that she couldn’t even bring herself to repeat it to the jury. She skipped over it in her presentation. I don’t know if any jurors even discussed this obvious nonsense. They certainly didn’t put two and two together when they learned that Pam’s phone showed movement later in the day after the murders.
