Long before the 2001 trial started, then-St. Louis County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Keith Larner decided the butcher knife used to kill Felicia Anne Gayle Picus was “worthless” as a piece of evidence.
On Wednesday, Larner testified in court that he had concluded there was no additional forensic testing that needed to be done on the murder weapon used in the 1998 killing. The knife handle had been analyzed for fingerprints, but none had been found; blood on the blade matched Picus.
Larner said he saw no problem with his repeated handling of the weapon without using gloves in the months leading up to the trial of Marcellus Williams, who Larner would prosecute and send to death row for the murder. Now, the retired prosecutor was defending his actions during a one-day hearing held as part of an effort to overturn Williams’s conviction.
“There was nothing to link anybody to the crime on that knife,” Larner insisted.
Williams, who is scheduled for execution in September, maintains his innocence. Until last week, the knife was central to proving his claim.
Williams sought testing of the weapon before his 2001 trial, but the judge denied his requests. DNA testing done in 2016 excluded Williams from handling the weapon. Instead, the results revealed unknown male DNA.
“This case is about contamination.”
Last week, a new round of analysis confirmed that Williams’s genetic material was not on the knife, but it could not exclude either Larner or his investigator as the source of the unknown DNA. Whatever DNA might have existed connecting the perpetrator to Picus’s murder was irretrievably lost — thanks to the prosecution’s handling of the evidence.
Now, the contamination itself would be at the center of current elected county prosecutor Wesley Bell’s efforts to overturn Williams’s conviction. According to Bell, the state’s willful mishandling of the evidence before trial had violated Williams’s rights, meaning his conviction and death sentence must be overturned.
“This case is about contamination,” Matthew Jacober, a special counsel appointed to represent Bell at the hearing, told Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton.
From the witness stand, Larner sparred with one of Williams’s lawyers, insisting that his handling of both the murder weapon and the case had been aboveboard. A five-lawyer contingent from Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office — which had intervened to block a deal between Williams and prosecutors, leading to Wednesday’s hearing — was there to back the former prosecutor. Larner hadn’t mishandled the evidence at all, Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane told Hilton. Larner’s handling of the evidence without gloves was routine.
To prove Larner’s actions constituted a constitutional error that would make Williams’s conviction untenable, Bell’s office would have to prove the evidence had been mishandled on purpose. And it wasn’t, Spillane said. Instead, it was Larner’s practice was to “not use evidence-saving techniques.”
“It wasn’t bad faith,” Spillane said of Larner’s actions. “It wasn’t even negligent.”
Now, Hilton is tasked with determining whose version of the truth — and of constitutional error — is correct. His decision on whether Williams’s conviction should be overturned is due by September 13, just two weeks before Williams is slated for execution. Should he adopt the attorney general’s reasoning, that execution will almost certainly go forward.
Dan Picus came home from work on August 11, 1998, to find his wife murdered. Despite a wealth of physical evidence found at the scene, including the knife, the investigation quickly stalled.
It wasn’t until months later, after Picus posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to a conviction, that a jailhouse informant came forward claiming his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, confessed to the crime. Police later secured a second informant, a former girlfriend of Williams’s, who also claimed he’d confessed to the murder, though their stories shifted over time and often conflicted with one another.
Despite the informants’ accounts, none of the physical evidence at the scene tied Williams to the killing. Their testimony, however, was enough to secure a conviction against Williams.
With each of his appeals denied, Williams was twice on the brink of execution, including in 2015 when the Missouri Supreme Court stepped in and ordered DNA testing on the knife. Although the testing revealed the unknown DNA, the court dismissed the appeal. Ultimately, Williams’s execution was reset for September 24.
Meanwhile, Bell’s office had started looking at the case and in January 2024 filed a motion to vacate Williams’s conviction. In addition to the foreign DNA on the knife and the dubious informant testimony, Bell cited issues with the quality of Williams’s legal defense and misconduct by prosecutors whom he argued had struck qualified individuals from the jury pool because they were Black. These factors cast “inexorable doubt” on Williams’s guilt, he argued.
With Jacober, the special counsel, ready to argue the county’s position, the latest DNA analysis — revealing that neither Larner nor his investigator could be excluded from contributing DNA to the knife — had changed the calculation: The weapon, which had been key to proving a wrongful conviction, became useless for identifying the murderer.
Instead, Bell’s office struck a deal with Williams on August 21. The prosecutor would concede constitutional error and take the death penalty off the table if Williams agreed to enter a so-called Alford plea that lets Williams acknowledge a strong case against him while maintaining his innocence; the plea would let him to avoid the death penalty by accepting a life sentence, while retaining the right to challenge the arrangement if new evidence comes to light.
Hilton, the judge, agreed with the outcome, as did Dan Picus, who’d told the court he did not want Williams executed. Hilton was slated to resentence Williams the next day.
The move sparked the attorney general’s intervention. Bailey’s office ran to the Missouri Supreme Court, arguing that Hilton didn’t have the power to agree to such a deal and, essentially, that Williams should face execution. The court sided with Bailey, ordering Hilton to hold a hearing on Bell’s motion to vacate the conviction as originally planned.
Hilton scheduled the hearing for August 28.
Seated at the witness stand on Wednesday afternoon, Larner appeared familiar. Tall with a long face and a birdlike nose, he bore a resemblance to actor Sam Waterston’s character Jack McCoy from the original “Law & Order” TV show. Confident and adamant under questioning, Larner believed that prosecuting Williams was a just cause.
Jonathan Potts, a lawyer working with Williams’s attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project, questioned Larner about the credibility and motivations of the informants he used to link Williams to the murder.
Each informant had a history of multiple encounters with the law and had received $5,000 from Dan Picus in exchange for their testimony. Larner even recommended one of them, Henry Cole, to receive the money before he testified against Williams. Cole came forward primarily for the reward, according to Larner, and to tell the truth.
Larner mentioned that he asked Picus to pay Cole in advance when it seemed like the informant’s commitment to testifying was wavering.
“We gave you the money,” Larner remembered telling Cole as a “promise.” “Please come back for trial.”
Larner dismissed any doubts about the informants, stating that they were the “two strongest witnesses” he had presented in a murder case during his 32-year career as a St. Louis County prosecutor.
Larner became defensive when Potts questioned him about removing Black individuals from the jury pool. Despite eliminating most Black individuals from the panel, Larner claimed he did not violate a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting jury selection based on race.
Potts focused his questioning on Larner’s handling of the murder weapon. Larner mentioned that the knife was collected from the medical examiner’s office, processed for forensics, and securely stored without additional testing conducted by the state.
However, it took over a year before Williams was indicted for the crime, and Larner took on the case.
Larner believed the weapon was “irrelevant” as he was convinced that the killer wore gloves. Larner testified that an investigator informed him about the gloves, and Cole, the informant, claimed Williams mentioned wearing gloves during the killing.
Despite Bailey’s office supporting this belief, there was no concrete evidence to support it. Williams’s ex-girlfriend, the second informant, stated that Williams told her he washed blood off his hands after the murder.
There was no effort to confirm these claims. Larner admitted on Wednesday that he handled the knife on multiple occasions before the trial without wearing gloves.
McGraugh, one of Williams’s trial attorneys at the time, testified that proper precautions should be taken when handling forensic material to avoid contamination. He mentioned that wearing gloves was mandatory when handling evidence related to Williams’s case.
While Larner claimed there was no indication of the defense wanting additional testing on the knife before the trial, court records suggested otherwise. Williams’s other trial attorney, Joseph Green, testified that they requested a trial postponement to conduct forensic testing on the knife after learning that another piece of physical evidence had been destroyed. The request was denied.
Larner denied the defense ever requested DNA testing. He opposed delaying the trial as he believed his case was prepared to proceed.
Judge Hilton inquired whether Larner could have allowed the defense’s request without his boss’s approval. Larner stated that he needed his boss’s approval and that no new evidence would change the outcome.
Under cross-examination, Spillane from the attorney general’s office supported Larner’s testimony. Larner mentioned that he handled evidence after initial forensic testing in most of the cases he prosecuted during his career.
“No one fathomed that the prosecutors would have such disregard.”
Spillane argued that there was no reason to overturn Williams’s conviction. Previous claims of racist jury selection and inadequate defense representation had been rejected by the Missouri Supreme Court.
Potts, in his closing remarks, recalled Williams’s eagerness to have the knife tested. Just as Bell saw it as a path to exoneration, Williams saw it as a way to prove his innocence.
“No one fathomed that the prosecutors would have such disregard,” Potts stated. “For 23 years, the reasonable people in this room thought that was impossible.”
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