LANCASTER, Pa. — By midmorning on the first day of Lisa Michelle Lambert's federal habeas corpus hearing, U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell already could be seen displaying alarm over what he was hearing.
From the lawyers' briefs alone, he'd read enough to persuade him to grant Lisa's request for this uncommon federal review of a state murder conviction. He'd read enough to suspect that just possibly,Lisa Lambert, although sentenced to life without parole, hadn't killed Laurie Show over a teenage romantic rivalry. He'd read enough to surmise that just maybe, Lisa's boyfriend, Lawrence "Butch" Yunkin, along with a girl named Tabitha Buck, had killed Laurie.
Now, he was listening to evidence that served only to deepen his concerns regarding Lancaster County's prosecution of Lisa.
It was March 31. Computers, boxes of documents and piles of papers filled the small hearing room on the fifth floor of the federal courthouse in downtown Philadelphia. Lisa's parents sat in the first row, Laurie Show's behind them. Reporters and court personnel occupied the jury box. On the stand, an expert witness for Lisa's side, Northwestern University speech professor Charles Larson, was testifying.
Contrary to the autopsy report, Larson believed--as did three emergency medical technicians and the Philadelphia medical examiner--that Laurie Show's left carotid artery had been severed by whoever slashed her throat. This, he explained, left her unable to say "Michelle did it," as Laurie's mother, Hazel, had claimed. Her vocal tract was "destroyed," her left brain hemisphere "dying." She was "totally incapable of speech."
How, asked Lisa's attorney, Christina Rainville, could two doctors have signed an autopsy report saying that the carotid arteries weren't "involved"?
Those two doctors were both Lancaster County physicians, one the part-time coroner, the other an ear-nose-and-throat specialist.
"I don't think they were telling the truth," Larson replied.
Dalzell peered over gold wire-rimmed bifocals at the witness. "Oh," he said. "Well, OK."
So it went, hour by hour, for 15 days.
That this hearing was even being held appalled most in Lancaster County, about 75 miles west of Philadelphia. In the 1991 killing of Laurie Show, Lisa had already been found guilty of first-degree murder, Tabitha Buck of second-degree, Butch Yunkin of third-degree. Now here was Lisa, claiming her innocence, claiming all sorts of prosecutorial abuse. Now here was Lisa, seeking a federal order freeing her because the state had illegally imprisoned her.
