Tale of the Tapes

JIM McCLOSKEY

James Buckley, a nineteen-year-old gas station attendant, met a violent death on Sunday, January 2, 1983, while working the graveyard shift at a Vickers service station in Dellwood, Missouri, in the suburbs of St. Louis. Buckley was a high school graduate who attended a local community college and lived with his mother, Gloria. Since June 1982, he had worked all night at Vickers three times a week.

Buckley was found around 2:00 a.m., lying on his back in the inside storage room. He was shot seven times with a .22 caliber rifle at close range, once through the heart and several times in the chest, left arm, and abdomen. He had a deep gash in the top of his head that went through the entire thickness of his scalp.

No weapon was recovered, but pieces from the rifle and its spring were found on the floor by his side, as were several shell casings. Buckley's wallet was missing, and, mysteriously, so was the four-foot crossbar used to secure the storage room's back door from the inside. No forced entry was observed.

No fingerprints or any other physical evidence was found that linked anyone to the crime. Neither the office nor the storage room was unduly disturbed. Money was not taken from the cashier's cage or the office, where $361 lay in an unlocked safe, suggesting that the killers were interrupted in their crime by someone entering the service station. Several small bags of marijuana were found under the cash drawer countertop and in Buckley's car.

Dellwood is a one-square-mile town, one of eighty-eight municipalities that make up St. Louis County, each one with its own police force. Buckley's murder was all over the TV, radio, and newspapers. In the previous eighteen months, a wave of gas station robbery/murders had swept St. Louis. Eleven service stations were hit, with six attendants killed and another wounded. Buckley's became the seventh death.

Dellwood's police department requested activation of the Greater St. Louis Major Case Squad (MCS) to take control of the Buckley murder investigation. The MCS was a multi-jurisdictional task force drawing on detectives throughout the region to provide forensic and investigative services to homicide cases when requested by local police. In the Buckley case the commander of the MCS happened to be a fifteen-year veteran of the tiny Dellwood police force itself, Captain Dan Chapman. Twenty detectives were assigned to Chapman's command. They would work full-time on the case in the ensuing weeks.

During the last hour before Buckley's death, several customers and friends visited the service station. The first was Donald Brunner, Buckley's best friend and former high school classmate. Brunner told police that he got to Vickers around 12:30 a.m. and departed an hour later. During his visit, a friend from high school, Kathy Brockhan, arrived, hoping Buckley would give her some free pot. He told her he had none to give. She left after spending about ten minutes with the two men inside the station. Later, Kathy told police that Brunner and Buckley seemed nervous and hesitant to continue their conversation during her visit. She said Buckley appeared "stoned," but Brunner was "straight." She also said she knew that Buckley purchased marijuana by the pound for $360 to $450 from a wholesaler, whose identity she claimed not to know.

Minutes after Kathy left, two male customers in their early twenties, an Asian and a white man, came in together. Although they were strangers to Buckley, he offered to sell them some pot. They bought "half a dime bag" and departed. Brunner and Buckley then smoked a couple joints in Buckley's car, after which Brunner left for home. It was close to 1:30 a.m.

Between 1:30 a.m. and 1:40 a.m. , two more customers visited the station, looking to buy cigarettes—first Anthony Longo, then Ken Main, who arrived shortly after Longo left. Both of them saw a black man wearing a green army jacket leaning against the cashier's counter across from Buckley, who was inside the cage. Their descriptions of the man differed slightly. Main thought he was between thirty and forty, Longo in his mid-twenties; but both agreed he was tall—between 6'0" and 6'3"—and that he wore his hair in a medium-length Afro. Longo noticed that he was wearing black boots. Longo declined Buckley's offer of weed, thinking it strange he would ask, and departed with his cigarettes. Main, however, saw something else before he left. Buckley was wearing a look of distress. He seemed to be pleading with his eyes for Main to stay.

A few minutes after Main exited, Jim Abernathy, a videographer, came in to purchase cigarettes. This was about 1:40 to 1:45 a.m., and now no one was anywhere to be seen inside the station. It felt eerie to Abernathy. He could see that the door to the storage room was cracked open a tiny bit, and he felt he was being watched. Rather than call out, he quickly left.

Then Ellen Reasonover arrived, a black single mother who had a two-year-old daughter, Charmelle. They both lived with Ellen's mother, Elizabeth. Ellen was twenty-four years old. Her story of what happened that night remains unchanged to this day.

Earlier that evening, around midnight, she had set out from her family's Dellwood apartment to do the family laundry at a local laundromat. She was accustomed to doing the chore at this late hour, because it was easier for her mother to babysit when Ellen's daughter was sleeping. It took her more than two hours to wash and dry the accumulated laundry, some eight loads. When she ran out of coins for the machines, she went to the nearby Vickers for some change and to buy cigarettes, arriving shortly after Abernathy departed.

When she arrived, she saw a black male sitting at the cashier's window. When he saw her walking toward him, he disappeared into the back of the station. She banged hard and loudly on the window several times trying to get his attention, to no avail. She later described him as between nineteen and twenty-one years old, very light-skinned, and about 5'6" or 5'7" tall. He wore a black-and-red-checkered fishing-like shirt with a matching hat that he took off when he spotted her.

After a couple of minutes she gave up and returned to her car. It was then that she noticed a car parked beside the building. It was at least ten years old, dark in color—either dark blue or black—and had a distinctive set of tires: white walls on the rims and a silver tire on the trunk. She guessed it was a Cadillac or a Buick. She saw two men leave the station by the side door, one wearing an army jacket, and get in the car. A third person was already in the backseat. As she drove out of the station, she noticed their car also leaving, but behind her. She figured they worked there and had finished for the night.

She then went to a nearby 7-Eleven to get change. Coming out of the store, she saw the light-skinned checkered-shirt man and a friend arrive, exit their car, and walk toward the 7-Eleven. As they passed her, she could tell that the light-skinned man's companion was upset with him. The companion wore a green army jacket, army boots, and jeans. He had a light mustache and beard and short Afro hair. He was between 6'0" and 6'2" tall and about thirty years old, with very red eyes. Soon thereafter, when she returned to the nearby laundromat, she heard police sirens in the direction of Vickers.

Buckley's body was discovered shortly after Ellen and the black men departed Vickers. Several customers had gone inside the station looking for an attendant to fix the gas pumps, which were not working. They discovered the body in the storage room and called the police at 2:01 a.m. The police responded within minutes.

When Ellen woke up later that morning, she saw a report about the murder on the TV news. She was alarmed to learn that the victim, a white man, had been killed close to the time she was at the station. She wondered whether she had seen the killers.

Her mother encouraged her to contact the authorities. She did so reluctantly, calling the Dellwood police at 1:42 a.m. on January 3. Initially nervous about revealing her real name, she identified herself as "Sheila Hill." She was afraid that the killers, if she had seen them, might track her down. It did not occur to her that the police might be the real threat.

Once the police officer who took her call realized the possible importance of her eyewitness account, he asked her to call Captain Chapman, who was heading the investigation, for a more detailed interview. After thinking it over, she finally called Chapman at 10:10 p.m. the next night, January 4, still using the name "Sheila Hill." Chapman recorded the conversation without her knowledge. At the conclusion of what was a lengthy and detailed telephone discussion, he persuaded her to come to the police station right away to look at photos. When he dangled a $3,000 reward in front of her, Ellen declined, telling him to give the money to the victim's family. Money was not her motive. She wanted to help. At 11:30 p.m. she arrived, properly identified herself as Ellen Reasonover, and told her story.

Captain Chapman had her view a photo album containing mug shots of 250 black males. She tentatively identified two men as the ones she saw the night of the murder. Her description of the angry man at the 7-Eleven matched Longo and Main's description of the man they'd each seen speaking to a visibly nervous Buckley shortly before he was killed. All three witnesses said he was wearing a green army jacket and was between 6'0" and 6'3", wearing black boots. Ellen and Main said he was about thirty years old, while Longo estimated his age to be twenty-five or so.

Ellen explained to Chapman why she had used a fictitious name. She thought the two men looked "treacherous," she said, and she didn't want her name in the paper.

The next evening, January 5, Ellen and Ken Main both viewed two lineups, each containing one of the two men whom Ellen had tentatively identified the previous day. One of these men Main also said closely resembled the man with the green army jacket. However, Main was unable to positively identify him or anyone else in either lineup. According to Chapman, Ellen now positively identified one as the light-skinned, checkered-shirt man at the cashier's window but could not identify the other. Ellen, however, insists that she never made a definitive identification of either man in the lineups. As it turned out, both men were in jail when Buckley was killed.

Still trying to help, Ellen told Chapman that the light-skinned suspect could be someone she had met briefly months before at a party, and that her girlfriend who dated him would know his name. Ellen got his name from her friend and gave it to Chapman. The next day, January 6, Ellen picked him out of a photo lineup as the man she saw in the cashier's cage. His name was Willie Love. Love was immediately brought in for questioning.

That same afternoon, the police interviewed an employee of the Dellwood Dairy Queen who had previously reported that two suspicious black males were in and out of the Dairy Queen three times over a two-hour period on December 31, a day and a half before the murder. The employee described one as light-skinned, wearing a beige raincoat, the other as around 6'2" and thirty years old, wearing a green fatigue army jacket. When shown a photo array of ten men, the employee selected Willie Love's photo, saying, "This picture looks like the guy with the beige raincoat." She was asked to sign and date the photo.

The Dairy Queen was located around the corner from Vickers. It stands to reason that these two men were probably the men Ellen saw at Vickers and at the 7-Eleven. The man in the green army jacket at the Dairy Queen fit the description of the man Longo and Main saw speaking to Buckley right before he was shot. And the Dairy Queen employee's identification of Willie Love lent credibility to Ellen's identification of him as the light-skinned companion of the man in the green army jacket.

But that evening, Love was administered a psychological voice stress test, a computer-based examination supposedly able to measure stress in a person's voice as an indicator of deception. Although occasionally used by St. Louis County law enforcement, this test is considered to be highly unreliable by criminal justice experts and is not allowed as evidence in any courtroom. Nonetheless, on the basis of this test, the examiner said that Love had nothing to do with Buckley's death. The same examiner administered the test to Ellen within an hour of Love's and determined that Ellen was a truthful witness.

Love's alibi also checked out. He was cleared and released from custody the morning of January 7.

Earlier, Buckley's friend Brunner had been polygraphed. The polygraph cleared him of the killing, but the polygrapher told MCS that in his opinion Brunner might very well know who did it and why. Brunner's response to two questions—"Do you know who shot Jim Buckley?" and "Do you know why Buckley was killed?"—were significantly indicative of deception. In fact, Brunner admitted that he and Buckley sold marijuana together and that they had a "common problem" related to their drug business.

Four other acquaintances of Buckley and Brunner told police that the two men dealt marijuana together. Another man, whose phone number was in Buckley's pocket when he was killed, Louis Montgomery, told police the morning after the crime that "Brunner and Buckley were partners at times in the purchase of large quantities of marijuana." MCS had a powerful lead. But Chapman was heading in another direction. He dismissed the idea that these two nineteen-year-olds could be involved in a serious drug business, and so Buckley's possible drug connections were never fully investigated.

Chapman's new direction was Ellen. He was suspicious of her incorrect identification of Willie Love (even though the Dairy Queen employee had identified his photo, too). He decided that Ellen might have come forward not because she wanted to help, but because she was trying to distract the police from her own involvement in Buckley's murder.

Several factors had poisoned his imagination. For one, Ellen had volunteered to him that when she had exited the Vickers station onto the street, she saw a police car traveling in her direction. She slowed down to get behind it, since she had a bad taillight on her 1970 AMC Hornet. This gave Chapman the idea that Ellen had come forward to the police out of fear that the police officer who had passed her at Vickers would identify her when he learned of the homicide there. This was a stretch, since it assumed that the officer in the patrol car would have noticed Ellen's vehicle and taken the time to remember her before he even knew that a crime had been committed.

Second, in the first telephone conversation Chapman had with Ellen, she volunteered that she had worked the all-night shift at another Vickers station for seven months in 1978. She offered this fact even though it came with baggage. The manager at the station, whose dating advances she had rejected, had accused her of stealing $106. She had denied the accusation and been cleared by the St. Louis County prosecutor's office after an investigation.

Chapman also glommed on to the fact that Ellen's two older brothers, Steven and Mark, had criminal backgrounds. In 1979, Steven was found innocent by reason of insanity in the fatal shooting of his girlfriend and her sister. He had been committed to a state hospital, where he was still residing in 1983. Mark was convicted in 1981 for the attempted robbery of a grocery store and received a sixteen-year sentence as a repeat offender. One can only surmise that Chapman came to believe that Ellen, like her brothers, was a "bad seed," despite the fact that she had no criminal record of her own.

Finally, it came to Chapman's attention that Stanley White, a man Ellen had recently dated, had been arrested a week earlier, on December 29, for smashing her car windows while intoxicated. Since then, Ellen had severed their relationship and refused to see him. The police report of this incident indicated that the vehicle White was in at the time of his arrest—a vehicle that wasn't even his but belonged to a friend—was similar to the car Ellen had seen near the scene of the Vickers murder. It was a dark blue 1974 Buick with a continental kit.

White was brought in for questioning at 10:30 p.m. on January 6. The MCS believed that if Ellen killed Buckley, she must have had male accomplices to subdue him. White fit the description of the man in the army coat in that he was over six feet tall with a slender build. Additionally, according to the police, his alibi did not check out.

As soon as he was brought into the Dellwood station that night, White was placed in a lineup attended by Ken Main, one of the witnesses from the night of the murder. Main wrote in a statement at the conclusion of the lineup that "number 4's [Stanley White's] build reminds me of the man I saw and his profile reminds me of the man, but I only glanced at him at Vickers and I can't be sure it's him." He later said that he only saw the man's full face for "not even a second."

The next day, the police had Main hypnotized by a professional hypnotist. He told the same thing to the hypnotist—that "I just glanced up at the face." At one point during hypnosis, he used the word "nigger" when referring to the black man he'd seen at Vickers, revealing a racial bias.

But Main's uncertainty about the identification disappeared after he asked to have White lean on a counter in the police building so that he could observe him in the same profile he'd observed at Vickers. Now, in a post-hypnotic interview with the hypnotist and an MCS detective, Main claimed that he was "99% positive" that White was the man he'd seen wearing the green army jacket. Interestingly, it appears that the police may have rewarded Main for his help in resolving the Vickers case. Main testified at Ellen's trial that he was recently hired by the St. Louis County Sheriff's Department. Soon after the trial, one of Ellen's trial attorneys was surprised to see him in a deputy sheriff's uniform in a county courtroom. One can only wonder if this new job was a reward for serving as an important witness at Ellen's trial.

At 11:15 p.m. , White flunked a psychological voice stress test and was promptly arrested for the capital murder of Buckley. He was placed in a Dellwood jail cell. But on the morning of January 7, Anthony Longo, who had been in Vickers within minutes of Main, was unable to identify White or anyone else in a lineup.

Ellen was now given a second psychological stress test, this one administered by a different detective from the one who had passed her only the night before. According to this detective, Ellen flunked the test. Suddenly, Ellen, a well-meaning witness, became the authorities' chief suspect. To her astonishment, she was arrested on January 7 at 1:00 p.m. for capital murder.

Ellen was placed in a Dellwood jail cell next to her old boyfriend, Stanley White, the man who had smashed her car windows in a drunken rage. They spent the rest of the day into the evening in their respective cells, side by side, wondering what the hell was going on, angry and confused about being suspects in the Buckley murder.

Around 9:00 p.m. that night, Ellen was transferred to a larger jail in Jennings, a nearby town, and placed in a cell with two black women, Rose Carol Jolliff and Marquita Butler. Surprisingly, the next morning, January 8, White and Ellen were both released. While Chapman believed they were guilty, he recognized that Main's identification of White was problematic, and he still had not a shred of evidence against Ellen.

Once free, Ellen thought the police had finally come to their senses; the nightmare was over and she could go about her life. She proceeded to do just that. On January 23, she married Glen Baldwin, an air force serviceman who had loved her ever since they first met two years earlier. He was a decent man, and Ellen, who initially did not share his feelings, thought she could grow to love him. She also wanted her daughter to have a father figure. Charmelle's father, whom Ellen had adored, had been fatally shot seven months earlier.

Unfortunately for Ellen, the same day that she was allowed to go home, one of her two cellmates in Jennings, thirty-one-year-old Rose Carol Jolliff, set her sights on making a deal with the authorities to get a lighter sentence. She told the jailer that she had information related to the Vickers service station homicide.

Jolliff had a long rap sheet dating back to 1975, consisting of charges that included heroin possession, stealing, check forgeries, and numerous counts of passing bad checks. In 1975, she had received a six-month sentence in a federal lockup for altering a U.S. Treasury check. In August 1982, she got ninety days in the St. Louis County jail for a bad check charge. In early January 1983, when she was briefly housed with Ellen, she was awaiting disposition on the charges in a September 1982 indictment, three felony counts of bad checks in St. Louis County. The charges could have sent her away for five years or more as a persistent offender. Up until then, Jolliff had played the system cleverly and managed to avoid a dreaded state prison sentence. She was determined to keep it that way. Indeed, it is possible that Ellen was moved from the Dellwood jail for an overnight stay in the Jennings jail by the police in the hope that Jolliff would offer testimony against Ellen as part of a deal.

Three MCS detectives taped their interview with Jolliff. In bits and pieces, Jolliff claimed that Ellen had told her that she shot the Vickers gas station attendant because she feared he would recognize her, since she lived nearby. Ellen allegedly said she had two accomplices during the robbery, Robert McIntosh and Stanley White, and that McIntosh was her pimp and White was her boyfriend. Jolliff reported that Ellen said one of the men was supposed to distract the attendant at the cashier's window so he wouldn't see her. When he did see her, she had "to get rid of him." She shot him with the rifle seven times. She added that, since Ellen had worked at a Vickers several years ago, she knew the setup. Ellen had said she wasn't going to give up McIntosh or White to the police.

Jolliff was never asked to give a written statement detailing Ellen's alleged confession. However, she told the police to talk to her other cellmate at Jennings, Marquita Butler. In Jolliff's telling, Butler had heard Ellen's confession, too.

Ellen had a very different recollection of her jailhouse conversation with Jolliff. It was Jolliff who had brought up Robert McIntosh, asking Ellen if she knew him. Ellen had said that she and McIntosh had been classmates in middle school, but she hadn't seen him since. The idea that he was her pimp was not only absurd, it was pure projection—McIntosh was Jolliff's pimp. Jolliff had told Ellen she was angry at him for not bailing her out of jail. Perhaps that was why she decided to implicate him in the murder of James Buckley.

Armed with Jolliff's account, Captain Chapman and the St. Louis County trial prosecutor, Steven Goldman, made a run at Jolliff's cellmate, Marquita Butler. Goldman had her brought into his office on January 9. According to a police report, she "failed to corroborate the statement provided by Jolliff" and "refused to cooperate any further." But that didn't deter Chapman. After several attempts to locate her upon her release, he was finally able to speak with her by telephone in a taped conversation on January 13. She told Chapman that she was broke and needed money. Twice, he mentioned that a substantial award was on offer, making it clear that if she cooperated and helped convict Ellen, "you'll get seven thousand dollars."

Marquita finally gave in. She told Chapman that Ellen had confessed to participating in the Vickers robbery, but that it was Ellen's boyfriend who had shot the attendant. Marquita claimed that Ellen said she stayed in the car the whole time. Her accomplices didn't intend to kill him, but the victim knew them; and they had to do it so he couldn't identify them.

But then Marquita's conscience got the better of her and in the same conversation she retracted the lies. In an affidavit she gave to Centurion years later, she said that the police gave her the names of men she had never heard of (Stanley White and Robert McIntosh) and got angry with her when she refused to cooperate any further. They were "mean and rude to me…and made me feel little and small." Because she told the truth, Marquita did not receive any part of the $7,000 reward.

Meanwhile, believing she was in the clear, Ellen was busy at home with Charmelle and her husband, Glen, celebrating their marriage before he returned to Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle. She and Charmelle planned to join him there later. The St. Louis police, however, were far from finished with her. One month to the day she and Stanley White were released from jail, she was hit with an entirely new set of charges. "They took me away from home and I never came back again," Ellen recalls.

On February 8, 1983, the police descended on her apartment and arrested her for a "till tap," or theft of cash from the cashbox of a Sunoco station in Creve Coeur, a small unincorporated town in St. Louis County. Ellen was stunned. She had never heard of Creve Coeur and was at a loss to understand these new accusations.

The missing link, unsurprisingly, was the investigative zeal of Captain Chapman. After hearing about the Sunoco robbery and learning that the suspects included a black woman along with two black men, he hightailed it over to Creve Coeur, a town outside his jurisdiction, with a pair of photo arrays to show around. In a statement to the county police, the gas station's manager, Chuck Zeiter, had originally described the female suspect as young—twenty-five to thirty years old—fairly tall and heavily built—about 5'10" and 150 to 160 pounds—and having dark skin and short, curly brown hair. When Chapman arrived, with the photos, in spite of the differences between Ellen's physical appearance and his original description of the thief, Zeiter identified twenty-four-year-old Ellen—only 135 pounds, with light skin and black hair—as the female thief. Shortly afterward, at Chapman's invitation, Zeiter viewed a pair of live police lineups and fingered Ellen and Stanley White as the perpetrators.

White was arrested immediately and charged with "stealing over $150." Ultimately, however, Zeiter told the police that he wasn't exactly sure it was White. Two weeks later, the charges against White were dismissed. Once again, he was set free and never bothered again on the matter. The same was not true for Ellen.

On February 9, she was placed in a holding cell at the county courthouse to await arraignment on the Sunoco stealing charge. Here, she had the misfortune of being put in the same cell as Mary Lyner. Like Rose Jolliff, Lyner was a career criminal looking for a deal to lighten her sentence and avoid prison.

Prior to her arrest on November 18, 1982, Lyner was, in the words of her arresting police officer, Sgt. Ronald Klein, the kingpin of one of the largest credit card theft rings in St. Louis history. When Sergeant Klein arrested Lyner in her apartment, besides finding her in a drug-induced stupor moaning for another fix, he found hundreds of stolen credit cards and checkbooks and a closet full of stolen purses. During his investigation, which included lengthy interviews with Lyner, Sergeant Klein tracked down at least $350,000 in fraudulent purchases. Lyner and her boyfriend would purchase things like TV sets, cameras, VCRs, and other high-priced items with the stolen credit cards and checks, then sell them on the black market and use the money to feed their all-consuming heroin habit. At one point Sergeant Klein stopped counting; he estimated that if he tracked down all their purchases, they would have exceeded a million dollars. He characterized Lyner as a "major criminal and a severely addicted junkie with a $1,000-a-day habit." The last Klein heard concerning the disposition of Lyner's crimes was that the city had turned the prosecution over to St. Louis County. He assumed she would get thirty years in the pen.

Once Ellen was removed from the cell, Lyner told a jailer that Ellen had talked to her about her crimes. This prompted the St. Louis County trial prosecutor, Steven Goldman, to visit her at the county jail. It was during this visit that Lyner implicated Ellen in both the Sunoco theft and the Buckley murder. She claimed to Goldman that as soon as Ellen arrived in the courthouse holding cell, she sat down next to Lyner and blurted out, "Those mother-fuckers picked me out of a lineup. I told him we should have blown their brains out."

Lyner said Ellen told her, "We robbed a gas station and killed a man. You know, that Vickers station. I stay right down the street from there." Following this, Lyner and Goldman made a deal: He would recommend that she receive a one-year sentence in the county jail for all of her pending charges, including five felony forgery charges, if she cooperated with the State and testified against Ellen at the Sunoco and the Vickers trials, both of which would be tried by Goldman.

Lyner kept her end of the bargain, as would Goldman. She, along with Zeiter, testified at the Sunoco trial in mid-July 1983. Zeiter identified Ellen as the woman who stole $423 from his station's cashbox. Lyner told the jury what Ellen had allegedly said to her on February 9 about getting picked out of a lineup and having told her accomplice that they should have killed the witnesses. Prior to the Sunoco trial, Lyner was released on her own recognizance pending disposition of the charges against her from Sergeant Klein's 1982 arrest and her five felony forgery charges. Ellen was convicted and sentenced to seven years. Prior to sentencing her, the judge asked Ellen if there was any reason why he should not proceed with the sentence. She responded, "Because I am innocent."

The Sunoco "till tap" conviction gave Goldman exactly what he wanted. It would now be very hard for Ellen to testify in her own defense at the Vickers trial, because the Sunoco conviction would have an obvious prejudicial effect on the jury. With the Sunoco conviction, Goldman had laid the foundation for the real prize—a capital murder conviction in the Vickers case, and a possible death sentence.

Four months later, in late November 1983, the State of Missouri put Ellen Reasonover on trial for the slaying of James Buckley. The prosecutor was fully aware that there was no physical evidence tying Ellen to the murder, no eyewitness who had seen her at Vickers that night, and no taped confession. His capital murder case would rely solely on the testimony of two career criminals who had been offered incentives to lie.

One of the State's two star witnesses was Mary Lyner. As she had in the Sunoco case, Lyner told the jury about Ellen's alleged jailhouse confession. By the time of the trial, Lyner had secured a secretarial position at a law firm. She was well educated and well spoken on the witness stand. She also happened to be white, as were all the jurors. On cross, she admitted her twelve prior felony convictions since 1978—the forgery, stealing, and passing of bad checks. She further conceded that, as a persistent offender, she could be sentenced to ninety years in prison for her five pending forgery cases. Her life, it should have been clear to all, was in prosecutor Goldman's hands.

As damning as this was, Ellen's defense attorneys were missing a key piece of impeachment material hiding in plain sight. Two years previously, in 1981, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had published a five-part biographical series on Lyner with her permission and full participation. The paper, however, had disguised her identity, calling her "Anne."

She was raised in an affluent middle-class home and spoiled by her mother and a father who was an executive for the prestigious Chase Park Plaza hotel in St. Louis. She graduated from Webster University magna cum laude in 1971. She became a successful real estate agent living in the western suburbs of St. Louis with a husband and young daughter. In 1975, at the age of twenty-seven, divorced and bored with the real estate business, she joined Archway House, a drug treatment facility, as a counselor to make use of her college social work degree.

There, she fell head over heels in love with one of her clients, a recovering heroin addict who was on probation for robbery. "Bowled over" by him, it didn't take long before she let him move into her apartment. He persuaded her to try heroin with the rationale that she would then better understand the euphoric feeling felt by its users, which would enable her to be a more effective drug counselor. Before she knew it, she was hooked. By the middle of 1977, the two of them were unemployed with a collective $250-a-day heroin habit financed by her savings and the sale of her assets.

Although Lyner made several attempts to escape his spell and return to the "straight" world, he would always reappear and convince her to let him back into her life. The last time was in October 1980. She had lost her most recent job when the company moved to Dallas, and he had just been released from prison after a two-year stretch for robbery. They soon began their daily life of credit card thievery and crimes of deception, which included stealing purses out of offices and forging bad checks. That two-year crime spree ended with her arrest in November 1982 by Sergeant Klein. As she told the Post-Dispatch, she was a "smooth talker" and "knew how to tell a good story." She could talk her way into and out of any situation. As an example, she told of the time she went into a high-end store and convinced a salesperson that she was Mrs. August A. Busch III—wife of the then-president of the Anheuser-Busch Companies and a member of St. Louis royalty. She walked out with a $5,000 piece of jewelry without having to show identification.

Now, in exchange for her false and damning testimony against Ellen, Lyner was rewarded with a sentence of one year in the county jail for the entirety of her crimes, per her arrangement with Goldman. Neither the jury nor Ellen's trial attorneys knew about Lyner's theft of hundreds of credit cards and checks, or that she had headed up one of the biggest criminal operations in St. Louis.

Rose Jolliff also testified at Ellen's trial. Earlier, Goldman had promised Jolliff's public defender that he "would not burn her" if she continued to cooperate in the Reasonover case. He didn't. On December 1, Jolliff told the jury about Ellen's supposed "confession" at the jailhouse and said Ellen's accomplices had been Stanley White and Robert McIntosh. As soon as she'd concluded her testimony, Jolliff was escorted to another courtroom, where she pled guilty to the September 1982 indictment of three felony bad check charges and received "bench probation" of six months. Such a light sentence was unheard-of for a persistent offender like Rose Jolliff, who was now free to return to her South Bend, Indiana, home unsupervised. This sneaky arrangement was never revealed to the defense. Once again, Ellen's defense lawyers and the jury were in the dark. Jolliff had told the jury that she was not testifying in exchange for a reduced sentence in the 1982 bad check case.

At trial, Ken Main and Anthony Longo identified two different black males as the man they saw leaning against the counter wearing a green Army jacket and speaking with Buckley. Ken Main identified Stanley White as the man; Anthony Longo identified Robert McIntosh. Longo had identified McIntosh earlier in the year at a lineup. No evidence was presented to show that McIntosh and White even knew each other. In fact, they had never met.

Despite the fact that Main and Longo disagreed about the identity of the man they saw, Prosecutor Goldman characterized them to the jury as "really good identification witnesses." He told them that Buckley was "abducted right there by Stanley White, [Ellen's] boyfriend, and Robert McIntosh." He added that Buckley was "distracted at the window by Stanley White and Robert McIntosh and there is no way that Rose Jolliff isn't telling you exactly the truth in this case. The identifications, what they do," he added misleadingly, "is corroborate the names [Jolliff] gave of the two people who have been identified." How the man in the green army jacket could be two different people and yet the witnesses be "really good" boggles the mind.

What the jury did not know is that neither White nor McIntosh was ever charged or prosecuted for any involvement in the murder or robbery of Buckley. They were used as straw men to strengthen the case against Ellen, to tell a better story at trial. Years after the conviction, Chapman conceded to Centurion that he didn't have confidence in either identification.

Ellen's defense attorneys were privately retained and represented Ellen at both trials. They, and the few witnesses they presented, were ill-prepared. They did very little investigation, if any. Ellen's mother, Elizabeth, testified that Ellen went to the laundromat the night of January 1 with dirty bags of laundry, and the next morning the laundry was clean. She also said that she encouraged Ellen to tell the police what she saw at the Vickers station. Elizabeth's friend Dewey Williams, who stayed at the house the night of January 1, told the jury that he and Elizabeth arrived home from a party at midnight, and that he helped Ellen carry the laundry bags out to her car about that time. He estimated that Ellen returned home from doing the laundry at about 2:00 a.m.

Inexplicably, the defense attorneys did not attempt to interview Ellen's other cellmates besides Jolliff and Lyner, nor did they bring in Dellwood police officer Marsha Vogt, who had testified at a pre-trial hearing. At that hearing and in a police report, Vogt related that Goldman and Chapman had wired her up and placed her in Ellen's holdover cell on February 25, 1983, in an undercover capacity, to see if Ellen would make any incriminating statements. While in the cell, Ellen told her that she was in jail for a theft she didn't commit; and this was the first time she'd ever been arrested.

Twenty minutes after Vogt showed up to eavesdrop, Chapman had appeared with news for Ellen: She was being charged with capital murder. Chapman pulled Ellen out of the cell for an interview. When she returned to the cell, she was crying and told Vogt that they were saying she'd killed "some big guy and broke a gun stock over his head." She went on to explain what she had seen at Vickers and the 7-Eleven that night, exactly what she originally told Chapman. As always, she proclaimed her innocence. Vogt recorded every word of the conversation. Later, the police claimed that the recording was unusable on account of a malfunction. Because Ellen's trial attorneys failed to bring Vogt in to testify, the jury did not get to hear her story, so opposite to those told by Jolliff and Lyner.

After a six-day trial, on December 2, 1983, Ellen was convicted of capital murder. All this because she came forward with information she thought might be helpful to the police in their investigation. If she had not reached out to the police, they never would have known of her existence.

The next day, the jury had the onerous task of deciding Ellen's punishment. Two options were available—a life sentence without the possibility of parole for fifty years, or death by lethal gas. In his summation at trial, Goldman had vouched for Lyner's and Jolliff's credibility, claiming that Lyner "couldn't possibly make those statements up" and Jolliff got "absolutely nothing for testifying here. There is no reason for her to lie." Now, at the sentencing stage, in his final argument to the twelve jurors, Goldman argued forcefully and repeatedly for the death penalty.

He told them that "Ellen Reasonover gunned down Jim Buckley in the back room…You have to believe that she was the gun person…She stood next to him with a fully loaded rifle…She is the one that killed him. The evidence shows she is the actual killer." He then capped off his closing remarks with a supposition as ludicrous as it was erroneous: "Somewhere in Ellen Reasonover's life she decided that killing a person is like taking a drink of water." (Six months later, Goldman was less certain that Ellen was the shooter. Even though he had implored the jury to issue her a death sentence, he told The Washington Post for a front-page story on questions surrounding Ellen's conviction, "I wouldn't have felt comfortable [asking for the death penalty] unless I thought she was guilty or at least involved in the murder if not the actual killer. ")

The prosecutor's plea for the death sentence was preceded by Ellen's plea for mercy. She told the jury, "I'm innocent. I have been framed. I was locked up ten months for nothing. Taken me away from my family. All I tried to do was to be a good citizen. And I have a little girl and a mother and I love my family very much and there is no way in this world I would go out in the streets and do anything wrong. So this kind of thing that happened to me, happened to my family."

After deliberating for just over three hours, the jury was unable to achieve unanimity on a death sentence. Consequently, the judge sentenced Ellen to life without the possibility of parole for fifty years. The vote was eleven to one for death. Juror Donna Ellis cast the lone dissenting vote.

She saved Ellen's life.

—

Centurion took up Ellen's case in 1993. By then, all of her state and federal appeals had been denied. After her conviction, Ellen had reached out in desperation to the NAACP. George Hairston, a leading NAACP attorney in New York City, had served pro bono as her federal appeals attorney. Now he asked Centurion to take on what he knew would be an extensive investigation. Centurion retained the Kansas City law firm of Wyrsch her mother, Elizabeth; her eighteen-year-old daughter, Charmelle; and her two sisters, Hilda and Valerie. Her legal team, along with hordes of supporters and reporters, were also there for the big moment. The juror Donna Ellis, whose lone vote in 1983 had saved Ellen's life, appeared in the media with Ellen. Recognizing that Ellen needed some peace and tranquility, Donna and her husband invited Ellen to live with them. Ellen stayed at their home for six months until she felt capable of living on her own again with Charmelle. Donna and Ellen remained good friends until Donna's death in 2014.

After her liberation, Ellen brought a lawsuit against the City of Dellwood, alleging civil rights violations and wrongful imprisonment. The City of Dellwood settled the case before trial, paying Ellen $4.5 million after legal fees. She was also graced with the arrival of two grandchildren—Harlem and Jour'nee.

For a stretch of five years in the 2000s, Ellen suffered from fibromyalgia, a painful and debilitating chronic disorder. Thankfully, it disappeared as mysteriously as it came upon her. On August 3, 2024, she will celebrate her silver anniversary of freedom. She is sixty-six and lives comfortably and in reasonably good health near her sisters. She and Glen long ago amicably divorced, but remained the best of friends until he died in 2020. Her mother died in 2011. Ellen loves her grandchildren and looks forward to their frequent visits.

Mary Lyner didn't live to see Ellen's exoneration. Nearly a decade before Judge Hamilton took up Ellen's case, Lyner jumped off the balcony of a high-rise apartment she shared with her mother, while her mother and her daughter were in the next room. She was forty-two when she died. Her best friend, Virginia Druhe, a trusted confidante of the Lyner family, in an affidavit filed with Judge Hamilton, described Mary as a person "capable of great deception who lived her life by telling lies boldly and frequently."

Former Dellwood chief of police Dan Chapman died in 2014.

Steven Goldman retired in 2016 after serving twenty-eight years as a St. Louis County judge.

The two black men Ellen saw at Vickers and then at the 7-Eleven have never been identified. The murder of James Buckley remains unsolved.