It is a case that, largely because of the nature of the evidence, took years to file. Repeatedly, investigators were sent back into the field, including to rule out the possibility that one of Garrison’s relatives might have been involved in the strangling of Amy Schallock Hayes, a 16-year-old girl whose decaying body was found in an abandoned Hominy motel two weeks after she was last seen alive – with Garrison.
Mitchondrial DNA analysis is often used to identify war dead or bodies in the Oklahoma City bombing when the more familiar nuclear DNA analysis could not be performed for lack of a sufficient sample, deterioration or another cause. It has never before, however, been used to prosecute anyone for a crime in Osage County.
Nuclear DNA, a highly precise genetic sequencing that can pinpoint an identity with incredible accuracy, is often used in court.
Mitochondrial DNA, however, is far less precise, and only determines that a person shares a mother,
grandmother, great-grandmother and so on with the target mtDNA, as it is called. The maternal DNA analysis has been admitted as evidence in at least 26 states.
Garrison was sent to prison for concealing stolen property 29 days after Hayes’ body was found in 1997 and remained there until January 2005, three years before he was charged with first-degree murder in her death.
Hayes was 16 years old when her decaying body was found strangled in the abandoned Velma’s Motel in Hominy on July 2, 1997. An American flag, torn in two and knotted, was wrapped around her neck three times then used to strangle her, according to the state medical examiner. She was naked, wearing only her shoes, and her body was covered with a piece of egg-crate foam.
She had vanished two weeks earlier as she walked home from a drunken get-together at the home of Dallas King, a witness who, along with John Blow, also present at the gathering, testified that Garrison had followed her when she left “to make sure she got home all right.”
According to King, who testified at the first part of the preliminary hearing in the fall, Hayes arrived at his house around 6 p.m. and became extremely inebriated on alcohol that Garrison supplied.
“She was puking, dry heaving and she didn’t have anything left to puke up,” King testified. Despite her condition, King said, Garrison wanted to go in the house to take a shower with her. “He wanted to go in there and have sex,” King said.
Hayes tried to get a lift home, but no one would give her one because she was vomiting. So she borrowed a dress and a shirt from King’s mother, and headed home on foot. Within minutes, King said, Garrison took off down the street after her, saying he wanted to make sure she got home all right.
Also at the house was John Blow, whose testimony echoed that of King.
Blow said that at one point Hayes passed out face-first in the yard, and added that Garrison was also drunk.
“He was pretty hopped up drunk-wise,” Blow said. “I listened to his drunk ass.”
The next morning, Damon Mashunkashey came banging at King’s door, demanding to know where Hayes, who lived with Mashunkashey in the Hominy Indian Village, was.
No one knew. For two weeks, she was just plain missing. Then her body was found. It had been hot, and her body was putrefied and mummified to the point that many of her organs could not be identified at autopsy, according to the medical examiner’s report. That meant potential evidence had been destroyed.
In the motel room where she lay dead, investigators found several hairs, cigarette butts and other items at the scene, but from the first day she was discovered, Garrison was the prime suspect in the killing.
And it was one pubic hair, found on a pillow case, that implicated him.
“It could be from him or any of his maternal relatives,” said Amy Smuts, a DNA analyst from Texas who tested the public hair in 2000. “It matched him but it could also match a brother or sister or his mother or grandmother. It could not be excluded as being from the same person.”
The lead investigator on the case was now-deceased Sheriff Wes Penland, aided by now-Sheriff Ty Koch. Koch testified that five days after the body was found, he went to the home of Sharon Hopper, Garrison’s mother, to interview her. Garrison was present, and had already invoked his right to have a lawyer, but Koch said he did not ask him to leave while he spoke with Hopper about having her son submitting to a polygraph test and giving a blood sample.
While Koch was talking to Hopper and explaining that if Garrison had never been in the motel such tests could eliminate him as a suspect, Garrison interjected a comment, Koch said.
“Mr. Garrison stated, ‘I ain’t never been in the motel,’” Koch testified.
That spontaneous statement eventually aroused even more suspicion when the lone pubic hair was linked – albeit not with ironclad genetic certainty – Garrison with the motel room.
District Attorney Larry Stuart admitted that the evidence against Garrison is circumstantial, but cautioned that there is more evidence to be presented at trial.
“He made comments of a sexual nature at the house of Dallas KIng, and the victim was found without clothes except for her shoes,” Stuart told Judge John Boggs during the hearing’s closing arguments on Monday. “He was the last person seen with her. He made the comment that he was going to make sure she got home all right.”
Defense attorney L. Wayne Woodyard said that the evidence was “too tenuous to require Mr. Garrison to go through the rigors of a jury trial.”
Woodward elicited evidence from state’s experts that the hair could have been transferred from Garrison to Hayes, who had used the same bathroom at King’s house the very evening she vanished.
Woodward suggested that Koch crossed the line by interviewing Hopper in front of Garrison, enticing him to make a statement.
How often, Woodward asked, had Koch performed interviews like that?
“Probably twice,” Koch replied.
“You were aware that there was the possibility of a response from Mr. Garrison?” Woodward pressed.
“That’s not why I did it,” Koch answered.
The Woodward said that Garrison was a perpetual suspect. “He’s a person of interest in just about every homicide in Hominy, isn’t he?” Woodward asked Koch.
No, Koch replied: Garrison had been a tentative suspect in the 2006 murder of Joanie Goodwin, whose body was found wrapped in barbed wire in Bird Creek in Pawhuska, but he had been ruled out because he had an alibi: He was out of the state when that still-unsolved murder occurred.
Woodward also said that investigators had “singled out” one pubic hair from an array of other evidence, none of which contained Garrison’s DNA, including other hairs and cigarette butts at the scene.
Stuart shrugged that off, saying that the motel was used as a teen party place before it was finally torn down, and the other evidence was simply not pertinent.
Some of Hayes’ family members said that she was a confused but bright girl who, due to divorce, was living away from her relatives. In a sad twist, she was the granddaughter of Jay and Joyce Moles, the Wynona couple who died in a horrendous crash with a state trooper on Dec. 19 in Pawhuska.
“She was not only my family but my best friend,” her cousin Laci Woods wrote. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about her. I always remember how she let me tag along wherever she went even though I was the little cousin. The very first time I saw a shooting star was with Amy. I remember her saying if you see one to always make a wish.
“I can only imagine what a great and wonderful person she would be today. She loved and cared for many. There are many who love, care and miss her today. And who all want the same thing, and that is after 11 years for there to be justice for Amy.”
Woods’ mother, Hayes’ “Aunt” Kay Woods, said she wanted to thank the late Sheriff Penland and Koch for staying on the case for 11 years.
“Amy was a special part of my life,” Kay Woods said. “I love and miss her dearly. But she has her grandparents with her now.
“She’s not alone.”
Amy is greatly missed by all of us. We know that she is in Heaven with mom and dad. We had to start the year out with not one, but two tragedies. I pray that with this trial our family can have peace finally with Amy's death. Again thank you to one and all for your prayers throughout everything. May God Bless You.
Posted by: Mrs. Crystil Cleveland | January 15, 2009 at 11:10 AM