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CHAPTER 1
South Carolina Law Enforcement Division
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is a state level law enforcement and investigative agency with statewide jurisdiction. SLED was created in 1947 by an executive order issued by then-Governor J. Strom Thurmond at the request of the state's sheriffs and police chiefs. It began its operation with approximately fifteen employees. The governor of South Carolina appoints the chief of SLED. SLED has had four chiefs since it was established in 1947.
SLED's first chief, Joel Davis Townsend, was truly a pioneer in South Carolina law enforcement. At the age of eighteen, he joined the Saluda town police and became chief before he reached the age of twenty. He later served with the Greenwood police force, leaving there to become a deputy United States marshal for the western South Carolina district. In 1929, he became one of the first five members of the South Carolina Highway Patrol and was assigned as chief officer of patrol activities for the First Army maneuvers in 1941. For this work, he received a citation from Lieutenant General Hugh S. Drum and was officially commended by General George S. Patton. In 1942, South Carolina Governor Emile Harley drafted him on a leave-of-absence to become captain of the guard at the South Carolina penitentiary during an emergency. He returned to the Patrol a year later as chief of the State Bureau of Investigation.
Governor J. Strom Thurmond appointed Joel Townsend the chief of the South Carolina State Constabulary in January 1947. The State Constabulary had been in effect since 1935 to enforce the state liquor law and to assist any law enforcement officer in detection of crime and the enforcement of any criminal laws in South Carolina. Upon Mr. Townsend's appointment as chief, the Bureau of Investigation and the Constabulary were consolidated to form the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. After two years as chief, Governor Thurmond appointed Chief Townsend to the South Carolina Industrial Commission, where he served until his death.
Oren Lindsey Brady was the second chief of SLED. He was a native of Landrum, South Carolina. At the age of eighteen, he was a chain gang guard for Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office, and in 1929, Spartanburg County Sheriff N.L. Bennett appointed him day-jailer. Three years later he became chief of detectives for Spartanburg County. In 1941, he had a conversation with two individuals that led to an arrest in a series of murders in Edgefield County. It was during this investigation that he met then-judge for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court of South Carolina, J. Strom Thurmond. After Chief Townsend left SLED in 1949, Governor Thurmond appointed Oren L. Brady chief of SLED. In 1956, Chief Brady's term ended as chief of SLED. He returned to his home county of Spartanburg and continued to serve as a resident SLED agent until his death.
James Preston Strom was the third chief of SLED. He was the son of McCormick County Sheriff Walter Strom. Growing up, he spent a lot of time at the McCormick County jail, and at the age of sixteen he went with deputies to chase bootleggers. He joked a lot about being born with blue lights in his blood, and in 1938, at the age of twenty, he became a deputy, working with his father. He went to work for SLED in 1947 just after SLED was organized and started moving rapidly through the ranks. After eighteen months he was named lieutenant. In 1956, then-Governor George Bell Timmerman appointed him chief of SLED.
Chief Strom created the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy to train law enforcement officers and instituted the first crime laboratory in South Carolina. He organized the first bloodhound tracking team at SLED.
Over the years, Chief Strom became known as the patriarch of law enforcement in South Carolina and was sometimes referred to as the J. Edgar Hoover of South Carolina law enforcement. His belief for the suspect was to make sure he was guilty before you affect his reputation, freedom or his pocketbook.
Leon Gasque, son of Marion County's sheriff, grew up in Marion, South Carolina. Gasque started as a night desk officer at SLED in 1950. He worked his way to agent, and in 1964, he was named captain and appointed SLED's second-in-command to Chief Strom. Chief Strom said, "He is my right-hand man. All of SLED depends on his leadership and his ability to handle major breaking events and criminal investigations."
Captain Gasque died of a heart attack in September 1986 at the age of fifty-four. His last major assignment was being in charge of security arrangements for the National Governor's Conference at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, in August of 1986. He assigned SLED agents to security operations at this conference. I was one of them.
Detective Robert Stewart with the Cheraw, South Carolina, Police Department met Chief Strom in 1972 during an undercover marijuana investigation. In 1975, Chief Strom hired Stewart as a white-collar crime investigator for SLED. In 1979, he was promoted to lieutenant. In January 1987, four months after the death of Captain Gasque, Lieutenant Stewart was named major and promoted to SLED's second-in-command. Chief Strom was reappointed term after term and remained chief for thirty-one years until his death in December 1987.
After the death of Chief Strom, Major Stewart was appointed chief of SLED the following month, January 1988. Chief Stewart has a quiet and confident manner, and as well as his highly professional level with his staff, he also has his personal level. He constantly reminds his agents and personnel, "I always have an open door policy if you need to talk to me." Chief Stewart is highly regarded among all law enforcement officials in the state and with the public.
Some of SLED's accomplishments under Chief Stewart's leadership include the SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team's upgrade with state-of-the-art equipment and the establishment of DNA (CODIS — Combined DNA Index System), fingerprint (AFIS — Automated Fingerprint Identification System) and firearms (IBIS — Integrated Ballistics Identification System) computer databases.
SLED is now staffed with over 300 sworn agents and over 150 support personnel. Investigative services, the basic foundation of SLED, works an ever-increasing load of criminal investigations and provides technical services and manpower assistance to local, state and federal entities throughout the state on request. The departments and units that make up investigative services are separated into functional areas to provide specialized services. Agents reside in all forty-six counties of the state so they are readily available when needed. Agents also work out of SLED headquarters in Columbia and stand ready to respond twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Along with my duties as supervisory agent of the SLED Photography Department, I assisted with special assignments, such as security, crowd control and prisoner extraditions.
Ku Klux Klan marches were frequent in South Carolina in the '70s and '80s. Agents walked the entire route with the marchers. I photographed the event from start to finish and assisted with crowd control and security.
An ongoing assignment was photographically documenting the burning of marijuana that was seized during SLED drug investigations.
A very memorable assignment was being a part of SLED's security detail during Pope John Paul II's visit to Columbia in 1989.
Some assignments proved a little challenging. On one of South Carolina's below-freezing days, I assisted SLED investigators with a case of possible stolen state property on a golf course. I crawled through icy water in a drainage ditch in order to get inside a culvert to photograph a South Carolina state stamp on the interior of the culvert.
Prisoner extraditions carried me to many states in the United States. I flew into the airport in Sioux City, Iowa, in September 1989 where only two months before United Airlines flight 232 had crash-landed on the same runway. On the return trip from Iowa with a prisoner, the pilot announced that Hurricane Hugo was right below us in the Atlantic Ocean, and the projected path would be a direct hit to South Carolina. And a direct hit it was. On September 22, 1989, Hurricane Hugo devastated the entire state of South Carolina.
In 1990, a full-service, state-of-the-art forensic services laboratory was opened and located next to the original headquarters building. Before the new seventy thousand square-foot laboratory was built, forensic services were performed in about ten thousand square feet of space located in the basement of the headquarters building. The forensic laboratory provides the state of South Carolina with capabilities to perform analysis of forensic evidence with the highest degree and competence. It is staffed with skilled forensic experts to furnish the state with expert testimony on the analyses performed.
SLED received accreditation by the Commission on Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) and the American Society of Crime Lab Directors (ASCLD) in 1994.
In 2003, Governor Mark Sanford assigned SLED as lead terrorism response agency for the state of South Carolina.
CHAPTER 2
Forensic Photography
Forensic means "of scientific techniques of crime investigations."
Evidence is anything that has been left, removed, altered or contaminated during the commission of a crime.
Forensic photography is an essential tool for criminal investigations. It records the visible and in some cases the invisible evidence discovered at the crime scene. Photographic evidence can be stored indefinitely and retrieved when needed.
Photographs of the crime scene are documented records of the scene as it was first observed. They take the crime scene into the courtroom and graphically depict the same condition in which the assailant left it.
The crime scene photographer uses a three-step process: taking overall views of the entire scene, a mid-range shot of important areas to show locations of items and a close-up to show key details of items. Placing inch or centimeter scales in the mid-range and close-up shots is imperative so that the actual size is documented regardless of the amount of reduction or enlargement. The scales are used when printing photographs to exact (1:1) size for comparison of known evidence to possible suspects. It is important to take multiple shots of everything during the initial processing. Crime scene photography cannot be exactly redone after the scene has been processed.
Photographs are highly relevant in capital punishment trials to illustrate precisely the aggravating circumstances (serious conditions of a crime) that they are intended to show by revealing the pre-mortem and postmortem physical torture the victim endured.
The SLED Crime Scene Unit responds to the crime scene. The crime scene investigators photograph the scene and collect evidence. Additional evidence is collected from the victim and suspect when available. The forensic photographer works in conjunction with the crime scene investigators with photo documentation of the evidence. In essence, the forensic photographer's work begins at the crime scene, working as the middleman between the investigators and the court system.
The SLED Photography Lab provides photography assistance to all units of SLED and to all law enforcement agencies in South Carolina. This is not simple point and shoot photography. This is the application of specialized photographic equipment, techniques, lighting and exact exposures to capture maximum quality details of evidence on film.
Lighting is extremely critical when photographing evidence. How much light, the direction of the light and how it falls on the evidence are major factors in capturing the evidence on film. Lighting can bring out fine details that are not seen with normal viewing, but too much or too little light can also cause crucial details to be lost. The developed negative will sometimes reveal even more detailed definition of the evidence than what is seen through the lens of the camera.
Basic evidence photography protocol is a good starting point for the preliminary photography set-up, but most of the time the photographer has to be creative in achieving the maximum quality results, inventing his own little tricks to capture the images.
I would eat, sleep and breathe in the midst of the evidence from start to finish. Some evidence I would work with all day long, sleep on it overnight and come back to the next morning. Unlike crime scene photography, which you only get one shot at, photography performed in the lab can be redone.
Each piece of evidence in a case is totally unique to that case and all are crucial pieces of the puzzle, no matter how large or how small.
Such was a case of a body found in a creek in South Carolina about one hundred yards from the North Carolina-South Carolina state line. I photographed the subject's right thumb for ridge detail. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the body was the father of a national sports figure. Events soon surfaced in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the body was identified through dental records as James Jordan, father of Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan. The photograph of the right thumb ridge detail was matched to Mr. Jordan's known right thumbprint.
Forensic photographers testify in court.
Over a period of ten years, defendant farm worker Warren Douglas Manning was tried five times for the kidnapping, armed robbery and murder of South Carolina State Trooper, First Class George Radford.
In Dillon County in 1988, Trooper Radford stopped Manning for a defective headlight. He radioed the dispatcher for a driver's license check on Manning that showed that Manning was driving under suspension. Trooper Radford's body was found the next day in his patrol car that was partly submerged in a farm pond several miles from where he stopped Manning. He had been shot in the head with his .357-caliber service revolver. The revolver was found in a tobacco barn behind Manning's house. Manning worked near the pond where Trooper Radford's body was found.
Each time this case went to court, two sets of crime scene photos were printed: one for the state and one for the defense. The photos were not printed until the solicitor and the defense attorney requested them, so they were printed at different times.
The first trial was in 1989. Manning was convicted and sentenced to death. The South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the verdict because the judge misled the jury about the meaning of reasonable doubt.
The second trial in 1993 ended in a mistrial because of a hung jury.
The third trial was in 1995. During testimony, the defense attorney observed that the close-up photos of the gun in the tobacco barn in his set of photos were facing the opposite direction of the photos of the gun in the solicitor's set of photos.
I testified to the inconsistency of the photographs of the gun. The two sets of photographs were printed at different times, and when the defense attorney's set was printed the negative strip that included the frames of the close-up of the gun was placed in the photo enlarger upside down. This caused the photos of the gun to be reversed. Testimony cleared the inconsistency, and the trial proceeded.
Manning was convicted and again received the death sentence. The South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the verdict because the judge improperly allowed a jury to be picked in another county before the court attempted to seat a jury in Dillon County.
The fourth trial in 1999 also ended in a mistrial because of a hung jury.
The fifth trial was later in 1999. Warren Douglas Manning was acquitted because jurors said there was lack of evidence to convict. He walked out of the courtroom a free man.
Although forensic photographers do not always have personal contact with the victims or suspects and are not in the center of the media coverage on a case, their work with the physical evidence proves vital to an investigation.
CHAPTER 3
South Carolina Death Penalty
South Carolina laws were inherited from the common law of England. As far back as colonial days there were many offenses punishable by death.
Murder is the killing of another with malice aforethought, either express or implied.
In 1869, Act 91 was passed abolishing capital punishment in South Carolina in all cases except willful murder.
In 1894, Act 91 was amended to include the provision in each case that if the person is found guilty of murder, the jury may find a special verdict recommending him or her to the mercy of the court, whereupon the punishment shall be reduced to imprisonment with hard labor during the whole lifetime of the prisoner.
That law remained in effect until 1972, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that a case in Georgia (Furman v. Georgia) constituted cruel and unusual punishment and violated the Constitution. The Furman case, in effect, declared most death penalty statutes to be unconstitutional, and capital punishment laws were abolished in thirty-five states, including South Carolina. Death sentences were removed for all prisoners on death row and they were given life imprisonment. This brought executions in the United States to a halt. In South Carolina, eleven men on death row had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
In 1974, the South Carolina General Assembly passed a statute that gave a mandatory death sentence to the crime of murder committed while in the commission of such aggravating circumstances as rape, kidnapping, armed robbery and physical torture.
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Excerpted from "Carolina Crimes"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Rita Y. Shuler.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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