Youngstown Daily Legal News

Death row inmate loses appeal for new trial from 1991 murder

ANNIE YAMSON
Special to the Legal News
Published: January 8, 2016

A recent opinion released by the 1st District Court of Appeals denied relief once again to Jeffrey Wogenstahl who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1991 abduction and brutal murder of 10-year-old Amber Garrett.

Wogenstahl was convicted in 1993 upon jury verdicts finding him guilty of aggravated burglary, kidnapping and aggravated murder in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas. Since then, he has unsuccessfully challenged his convictions in appeals to the 1st District, the Ohio Supreme Court and several federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court.

In January 2014, Wogenstahl filed two motions in the common pleas court: a motion for leave to move for a new trial and a motion for a new trial.

The denial of those motions became the subject of Wogenstahl’s most recent action in which he appealed the judgment to the 1st District court.

“We hold that Wogenstahl should have been granted leave to move for a new trial but that he was not prejudiced because a new trial was not warranted,” Presiding Judge Penelope Cunningham wrote in the opinion she authored on behalf of the reviewing court.

In its review of the proceedings, the appellate panel recounted the facts and circumstances that led to Wogenstahl’s conviction.

According to its summary, in the early morning hours of Nov. 24, 1991, Amber Garrett went missing from the apartment she shared in Harrison with her mother, Peggy Garrett, and Peggy’s four other children.

Three days later, Amber’s body was found in a wooded area off the side of a road in nearby West Harrison, IN.

A police investigation eventually uncovered the suspicious circumstances surrounding Amber’s disappearance, specifically, that Wogenstahl lured Peggy’s 16-year-old son Eric Horn, who was babysitting Amber and the other kids that evening, several blocks away from home and stranded him around 3 a.m.

Horn walked home and found the door to the apartment open and Amber missing.

Wogenstahl was a suspect in the ensuing police investigation from the beginning. Several witnesses claimed that they saw him and his dark brown 1978 Oldsmobile Omega on the morning that Amber went missing.

Passing drivers testified to seeing the car parked on the side of the road in West Harrison and Wogenstahl taking something out of the trunk, and a convenience store clerk testified that she saw Wogenstahl cleaning the interior of the vehicle at a car wash.

Police found Wogenstahl’s brown leather jacket, which he was wearing the night of the murder, to be soaking wet with a discolored lining. Wogenstahl claimed that his cat urinated on it.

When asked why Wogenstahl lured Horn away and then left him to walk home, he claimed that he was “messing” with Horn’s head and that he went straight home afterwards.

Eventually, a witness showed police where he had seen Wogenstahl and his car parked on the side of the road.

Amber’s body was found down a steep embankment in a heavily wooded and overgrown area. She had superficial knife wounds to the base of her neck, 11 stab wounds to her chest and neck and a number of blunt-force injuries to her head. Postmortem scratches indicated that she had been killed elsewhere and then carried through the area’s dense vegetation where her body was abandoned.

Wogenstahl’s vehicle was found to be exceptionally clean with the exception of a very small bloodstain that was consistent with Amber’s blood.

A metal handle from a car jack was missing and criminalists found plant material, including thorns, in Wogenstahl’s leather jacket.

A fellow inmate of Wogenstahl’s at the Hamilton County Justice Center testified at trial that Wogenstahl gave him a detailed account of Amber’s abduction and murder.

One piece of evidence, however, became the subject of Wogenstahl’s motion for a new trial: a single pubic hair found in Amber’s underpants.

Special Agent Douglas Deedrick testified that he conducted a microscopic comparison of the hair to samples taken from Wogenstahl and members of Amber’s family. At the time, DNA testing on hair samples was unavailable.

On the stand, Deedrick stated, “It’s reasonable for me to believe the hair did come from Jeffrey Wogenstahl, although I cannot say positively.”

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice, in partnership with the Innocence Project, asked the FBI to review lab reports and testimony presented before the 2000 advent of routine DNA testing for the purpose of identifying statements that were “invalid” in the sense that they did not meet the “agreed-upon scientific standards.”

In other words, the FBI was not to review the science behind microscopic comparison, but any statements made at trial that could have been prejudicial.

From that review, the FBI concluded that Deedrick’s trial testimony included statements that were “inappropriate” in that they “exceeded the limits of the science” of microscopic hair comparison analysis.

But the court of appeals found that the conclusion did not warrant a new trial for Wogenstahl.

“We cannot say that Wogenstahl was prejudiced by the denial of leave,” Cunningham wrote. “Even if he had been afforded leave to move for a new trial, the record does not disclose a strong probability that the newly discovered evidence would change the outcome if a new trial were granted.”

Wogenstahl claimed that the DOJ correspondence “invalidated” the science underlying microscopic hair comparison analysis and effectively “removed the linchpin to the state’s case against him.”

But the court of appeals pointed out that neither the DOJ’s correspondence nor the FBI review ever disavowed the science, only some of Deedrick’s trial testimony.

Either way, it reiterated its position from Wogenstahl’s 2004 appeal that the evidence in favor of guilt was plentiful, even without Deedrick’s statements.

“Even without the (pubic hair) testimony, the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates his guilt of aggravated burglary, kidnapping and aggravated murder in Amber’s abduction and murder,” Cunningham wrote.

“Because the record does not disclose a strong probability that the newly discovered evidence would change the outcome if a new trial were granted, the common pleas court did not abuse its discretion in not granting Wogenstahl a new trial based on that evidence.”

Judges Patrick DeWine and Peter Stautberg joined Cunningham to form the majority.

Wogenstahl’s execution is scheduled for September 2017, though the state has currently halted the process for all death row inmates in the face of an execution drug shortage.

The case is cited State v. Wogenstahl, 2015-Ohio-5346.

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