The Science of DNA: Roger Keith Coleman and Wanda McCoy

Post-execution DNA testing answers the question of innocence or guilt in a vicious rape-murder.

Time’s May 18, 1992 issue with Roger Coleman (photo source)

“We who seek the truth, especially in criminal justice matters, must live or die by the sword of DNA.” — Jim McCloskey

In its May 18, 1992 issue, Time magazine put a photograph of Virginia inmate Roger Keith Coleman on the cover. Coleman, dressed in a blue work shirt, black pants and tennis shoes, was sitting against a cinderblock wall. His hands are in his lap, his ankles clearly shackled. “THIS MAN MIGHT BE INNOCENT. THIS MAN IS DUE TO DIE” blared the headline about the convicted rapist and murderer who had a scheduled appointment with the Virginia electric chair the same week.

It was this magazine, and the resulting explosion of news coverage, both nationally and internationally, that introduced many to Roger Coleman and his story. Despite Coleman’s repeated statements of innocence, as well as thousands of letters and phone calls that flooded the governor’s office in Richmond and personal pleas for clemency from Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II, Coleman was not given a movie-ready last minute reprieve. A portion of his last words brought death penalty opponents to tears and advocates questioning the system. “An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight. When my innocence is proven, I hope Americans will realize the injustice of the death penalty, as all other civilized countries have.”

Wanda Thompson and Brad McCoy at his prom, 1978 (photo source)

The Crime

It began eleven years earlier, in 1981 in Grundy, a small, working class town thirteen miles from the West Virginia border, fifteen miles from the Kentucky border, sixteen miles from the infamous site of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, and roughly fifty miles from both North Carolina and Tennessee. Grundy is in the heart of the Appalachians, seven hours from Virginia’s capital city of Richmond. A coal mining town, Grundy hardly fit the slogan Virginia would adapt for itself — “Virginia is for Lovers” — or the genteel southern image of colonial style and plantation homes that would dot Williamsburg…