Wichita man guilty of capital murder, rape in 2014 park attack where woman was lit on fire

A Wichita man charged with beating, sexually assaulting and burning a 36-year-old newly engaged mother walking through Fairmount Park at night in 2014 was convicted Thursday afternoon of capital murder and rape after a weeklong trial.

A Sedgwick County jury deliberated for about 3 1/2 hours before finding Cornell McNeal guilty in the Nov. 14, 2014, attack that killed Letitia Davis of Wichita.

McNeal, 34, is expected to receive life in prison without parole when he is sentenced by Sedgwick County District Judge Jeffrey Goering on Aug. 18. For years, prosecutors planned to ask jurors to impose the death penalty if McNeal was convicted of capital murder.

But this spring, as the trial date loomed, prosecutors reversed course and told the court they would no longer seek it, court records show.

Outside of the courtroom Thursday, Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett said he was pleased with Thursday’s verdict and felt “particularly happy” for Davis’ family “who’s waited a very long time for this day.”

He said he made the decision to pull the death penalty off of the table because Davis’ family “just couldn’t do it anymore.”

“They wanted this done, and I totally sympathize with them. It is gut-wrenching to put families through,” Bennett said.

The nearly eight-year wait for trial is one of the longest in Sedgwick County in recent years; questions about McNeal’s competency to stand trial, pandemic-fueled court closures, appellate court rulings and the extra requirements demanded of lawyers defending death-penalty cases all contributed to the unusually long delay.

Life in prison without parole “is all they really wanted,” Bennett said of Davis’ family.

Jeffrey Donnelly, Davis’ father, said Thursday after the verdict that the wait had been difficult, but his family “got the result we were hoping for.”

He said he feels relieved McNeal “is off the streets and won’t harm anybody else.”

“She (Davis) finally is at peace,” Donnelly said through tears.

“To have this behind us, it’s been a long time coming.”

Defense attorney Peter Conley, who spent the trial trying to discredit the state’s investigation, declined to comment on the verdict and said McNeal’s family wouldn’t want to comment, either.

McNeal sat motionless as the judge read the jury’s findings aloud. He had pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied involvement in Davis’ death in a recorded police interview shown in court this week. But he did not take the witness stand.

A few people, including McNeal’s brother and sister, cried silently in the courtroom gallery as the judge thanked jurors for their service and sent them home. The trial started July 6.

The convictions come nearly eight years after McNeal was arrested and charged with attacking Davis in the park, 1647 N. Yale, after she left a friend’s house, where Donnelly said his daughter had likely gone to celebrate a new job.

Prosecutors during the trial called to the witness stand several firefighters, paramedics, police officers, doctors and others who found Davis naked and bloodied in a ring of fire in the grass and helped treat her in her final days.

In his post-verdict comments, Bennett also said Thursday he called more medical and forensic experts than in any other case who provided “heavy scientific testimony” that jurors had to wade through.

Davis suffered burns to about 70% of her body after she was beaten, raped and doused with a flammable liquid and lit on fire by a man she told first responders she didn’t know, according to testimony given in court.

She died from burn complications after an eight-day stay in the hospital.

Bennett in his closing arguments Thursday morning told jurors that McNeal encountered Davis at the park while he was “on the prowl” after having stopped at a nearby bar where he walked off with a woman’s cigarette lighter. He told jurors McNeal knocked Davis down — possibly with a punch to her head — and then slammed her face repeatedly on the ground before raping her and setting her on fire.

Evidence, he said, including Davis’ own account of the attack and the semen found on her body, placed McNeal squarely at the crime scene. Earlier in the week, a doctor testified that a DNA analysis matched the semen to McNeal with a certainty of 1 in 56 quintillion, a number much larger than the world’s population.

“Science is hard to overlook. It doesn’t take sides,” Bennett told jurors before urging them to convict McNeal of capital murder.

“The beating she took, stripping her nude, lighting her on fire, was this a spontaneous act? Not hardly,” he said.

Conley argued in his closing remarks that the DNA showed only that McNeal had sex with Davis but didn’t prove he’d raped her, set her on fire and left her for dead.

He told jurors there was “logistical difficulty” in one person committing such a crime in the short time frame investigators gave and suggested Davis was “dumped” in the park after someone else assaulted her at a different location.

“By who, we don’t know” because Wichita police failed to fully investigate leads that cast suspicion on other possible suspects, he said.

He also told jurors Davis was intoxicated the night of the attack and suffered brain injuries that were bad enough to affect her memory and ability to relay facts accurately.

“If there’s a single reasonable doubt that the state has the wrong person, then you have to let him (McNeal) go home,” Conley said.

Bennett, who had the final comments for the jury before they began deliberating, rejected the notion that what Davis told first responders about her attacker was wrong.

He acknowledged that she had brain damage from the attack but said she was conscious and answering questions in the immediate aftermath, including correctly giving her name, birth date and details about her medical history to first responders.

Bennett also shot down the idea that Davis had a drug addiction and that anyone but McNeal had killed her.

“There’s only one person who left DNA at the scene. Cornell McNeal,” he said.