He isn’t innocent. But 35 years on, should he be in MO prison for what he did at 18? | Opinion

There are some innocent people in our Missouri prisons, and Ed Reuscher, who almost everyone calls “Butch,” is not one of them.

But should he still be there for the despicable things he did when he was 18, the year George H.W. Bush was inaugurated and the Berlin Wall came down?

Only if we think that change is impossible, that brain science is irrelevant, and that redemption in this life should be off the table. Year after year, our state lawmakers do take that position. They have never even seriously considered the perennially proposed legislation that would give those handed life sentences without the possibility of parole when they were 18 or 19 a chance — not a guarantee, but a chance — at freedom after 30 years.

The man that self-taught artist Butch Reuscher has become since his arrest 35 years ago shows why I hope they will finally take a real look at the two such bills that have already been proposed this session.

Reuscher spent seven years on death row for his part in the breathtakingly brutal murder of 22-year-old Bobby Wood, who was sound asleep in a friend’s Clay County apartment on Dec. 19, 1989. Around 4 a.m., Reuscher and his 20-year-old co-defendant, Ken Melton, started beating him for no reason that either man can even remember now.

“It was so senseless, and sad,” Melton told me in a phone interview from the Jefferson City Correctional Center, where Reuscher is an inmate as well. The victim “was just there,” out cold on the floor of the place where Melton was staying, too — the “communal party pad” of a friend who was in jail at the time.

“Maybe that was just the perfect place to explode” at the end of a night that had already gone horribly wrong. Melton says he had already shot and wounded two people that evening, one a guy with whom he and several friends, Reuscher included, had been fighting, and the other a woman who just happened to be walking down the street when he fired out the car window. “You think it’s like the movies.”

After that, the plan was to steal Bobby Wood’s black Thunderbird and head for Florida. “There’s nothing I could explain where people could say, ‘Oh, that makes sense,’ ” Melton told me. “We were getting out of town and taking his car,” but “we could have just walked out the door” with his keys.

Instead, Melton said, he beat Wood with a fire extinguisher, a whiskey bottle, a pipe and the butt of a shotgun, then dropped a television on him. “And he was stabbed. That was me. What they said I did, I did.” Court records show that Wood was cut a total of 22 times, in the throat, heart and testicles.

And Reuscher? He hit and kicked Wood “at the beginning,” Melton said. “He hit him a couple of times, and then I don’t remember him on the scene any more.” After all that, the two did take Wood’s car, and promptly wrecked it.

Reuscher, who like Melton had been drinking whiskey all night and abusing steroids for a while, later said Melton had forced his involvement. He told me he was never really sure what he did to Wood.

“But I know I was there,” when Wood was slaughtered, “and I could have done it. I put myself there, I put myself here, and I don’t blame anyone else.”

Conviction, sentence overturned for ineffective lawyer

After a police interrogation that went on for 72 hours — and no, no defense lawyer or parent was ever involved — Reuscher said he was told that if he confessed, he could go home, and so that’s what he did.

In 1996, both Reuscher’s conviction and sentence were overturned because of the ineffective counsel of his original attorney, Robert Duncan, who was later disbarred for tax evasion and died in 1997.

Duncan spoke a total of 18 lines during Reuscher’s trial, and this was his closing argument: “Ladies and gentlemen, he’s 18 years old; what can I say?” Not exactly Paul Newman in “The Verdict,” in other words.

Reuscher’s parents sold their home to pay Duncan. Yet his defense of their son was so indifferent that he never even asked for a copy of the testing that showed that while Melton’s clothes were covered in the victim’s blood, all of the blood on Reuscher’s clothing was his own. Prosecutors never asked for that report either, said Robert Frank Booth, the retired KCPD forensic chemist who did the testing.

“None of the tested stains” on Reuscher’s clothes “were from Robert Wood,” Booth wrote in a 2015 letter to then-Gov. Jay Nixon as part of a clemency petition. “I was never approached about testifying in the trial of Mr. Reuscher, nor was I consulted, questioned or involved by anyone before the trial. … Several years after the conviction, I was contacted about my report. … I will always wonder how Mr. Reuscher’s jury would have weighed testimony about the bloodstains.”

Can you beat someone as violently as Wood was beaten without getting a speck of that person’s DNA on you? No. But, and I say this with respect for the many attorneys I know who are dedicated advocates, it too often takes more money than the Reuschers had — Butch’s dad drove a Wonder Bread truck — to afford a lawyer who would have done the work required to be able to point that out.

The regularity with which I talk to lawyers for people without means who have taken that family’s last dollar and yet neither know nor even pretend to care about the case in question is appalling. The way our criminal justice system works is in a way capricious, and yet so reliably favors those who can afford the best lawyers and experts that we could also say it works exactly as it was designed to do.

Victim’s mother: Death penalty would feel like justice

In 1997, after Reuscher’s conviction had been overturned, he might have gotten a new trial. But unless he pleaded guilty, the prosecutor said, well then the state would go for the death penalty all over again.

At that point, the court did bring together the two families, Reuscher’s and his victim’s, and while Wood’s father said he could accept a sentence of life without parole, Wood’s mother said only the death penalty would feel like justice to her.

“She said I didn’t cry,” when the two families sat across from one another, “so I must not be sorry,” said Reuscher’s mother Debbie, who has cried plenty both before and since that day. “Of course she felt that way, and probably still does,” Reuscher told me. “That was her baby.”

Debbie Reuscher’s 53-year-old baby is not who he was in 1989. But even in his early years behind bars, the other death row inmates made fun of him for pursuing his GED; why would he bother? Because he owed his parents that much, he said, and also because he was done with wasting his time.

“As soon as I got here,” Reuscher told me, “I thought, I’m going to be productive. I’m not going to lay around and get worse, or lay around and be just a number.”

He had always had a supportive, close family, including three younger siblings who grew up visiting him regularly. To better understand the system, his mother went back to school and became an investigator for the Jackson County Public Defender’s Office.

Charged in assault of teen hitchhiker

Butch Reuscher had really only gone wrong during his year of steroid addiction, but he inflicted a lot of harm that year.

In June of 1989, he was charged with sodomy — and lest you wonder, as I initially did, whether maybe this was a case of cops criminalizing some same-sex fooling around, it wasn’t. When I asked Butch about what happened that night, he said exactly what the police report did: He and a friend had picked up a 15-year-old hitchhiker, then beat and sexually assaulted him. Reuscher told me he would have raped him, too, if the cops hadn’t shown up when they did.

The victim could not identify him, so the judge said that if he could stay out of trouble for just two weeks after his December 1989 hearing, well then those charges would be dropped. Only, it was on the 13th day that Wood was killed.

“My lawyer said if you plead guilty” to the sodomy charge, Reuscher said, “then they won’t convict you of murder.” Instead, because of that “prior” sodomy conviction, and the shootings earlier that night, he was looking at a first-degree rather than a second-degree murder charge.

Both the shootings and the murder were attributed to Reuscher as well as Melton after authorities said that a polygraph — always controversial, and increasingly discredited as junk science — suggested that Melton’s statement taking full responsibility for the shootings wasn’t truthful.

Helps run art room at prison

“He should never have caught that case,” said Reuscher’s longtime friend, Sister Lenora Pipes, a Sister of Mercy who met him when she was working at the county jail in Liberty. He helped her run the GED program there, she said, and they still talk every couple of weeks, “mostly about Scripture.”

She told me he’s currently trying to help a terminally ill inmate “get more centered” and make peace with God in the time he has left. “He’s a positive influence, but he shouldn’t be in there.”

So why should Reuscher get even a chance at a second chance?

Not because he’s such a talented artist and art teacher, though he is, and effectively runs the art room at the prison.

Not because he works in prison hospice, or because he paints portraits for crime victims, or even because he has friends who are nuns and lawmakers. “I love Butch,” says state Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern. “He lives every day with purpose, and the chance of someone like Butch reoffending is next to zero.”

He should get that chance because he’s changed, but also because granting second chances would make us who we say we are.

“Obviously, we can’t take away the past. I’d give my left arm to take it all back,” Reuscher said. Since that’s impossible, “I’d like people to look at who we are now, and what we’ve done since we’ve been here.” If he did get out, he said, he’d return to his family, continue with his art, and go to work for his uncle’s asphalt company.

I called the man who prosecuted him, former Clay County prosecuting attorney Michael Reardon, to see what he thought. First, he asked me to refresh his memory about the case. But when I had just started to do that, he stopped me.

“You’re leaving something out,” he told me. Namely, that Reuscher had confessed, and what’s more, told police that he had been the first to hit Wood, with a fire extinguisher. “We have a statement, and that’s the reason he was convicted,” he said. “That’s the evidence.”

If it really had gone down that way, then Wood’s blood would have been on Reuscher as well as on Melton. But I’m not leaving anything out, and told Reardon what Reuscher said about being promised he could go home if he confessed.

“The police do a lot of things to get people to make statements,” he answered. “But this was in the middle of his statement,” and so not something he said right after anything the police might have promised him. “My perception of it was that it was a joint venture” between Reuscher and Melton.

Does he think it possible that Reuscher is a different person today?

“I do a lot of criminal defense work now,” Reardon said, and “that’s an argument I make” all the time. So see, we’re all different 35 years on.

“I’m not too crazy about life without parole for someone that age,” Reardon said, and “there comes a point in time,” when on a case-by-case basis, legislation ought to make parole for those in that situation possible.

Former police officers object to parole reform

I noticed when I read the two current bills written with Butch Reuscher in mind — House Bills 2204 and 2127 — that they would actually have to be amended to apply to him, because he does have the two prior felony convictions.

But Missouri state Rep. Ian Mackey, who has once again introduced one of those bills, 2127, said the major roadblock to parole reform is the handful of former police officers in the Missouri House who argue that to support second chances is to be soft on crime.

“This was a Republican bill in the day,” he said, “but now anyone who ‘goes rogue’ ” and agrees that such legislation makes sense can count on getting a primary opponent claiming they want more murderers out on the street.

I reached out to all of the former officers I know of who serve in the Missouri House — state Reps. Barry Hovis, Jeff Myers, Ron Copeland and Lane Roberts — to better understand their opposition, and none of them responded. If they ever do, I’ll be happy to update this column.

Meanwhile, I can only hope that our state updates its thinking on throwing away those who’ve made serious mistakes before their brains have fully developed.