PRINTKeeper of the Court
Kevin Crane built his career on Boone County’s most infamous cases. When it comes to his infamy, the jury’s still out.
Samantha Clemens
Kevin Crane, the former Boone County prosecuting attorney, now serves as Circuit Judge.
August 26, 2009 | 12:00 p.m. CST
The triple-murder at Casey’s General Store in 1994 was one of the worst crimes in Boone County history. Around closing time, a man robbed the store and killed three employees. He used a gun. And a hammer. And a screwdriver.
Boone County Prosecuting Attorney Kevin Crane convinced a jury that Ernest Lee Johnson, a drug user who’d spent time in prison, was guilty. Twelve years after the crime, he was trying to persuade another jury that Johnson deserved to die.
1984 — Crane graduates from MU with a degree in speech and communications.
1987 — He earns a law degree from MU.
1987 – 1990 — Crane works as an assistant Attorney General.
1990 – 1992 — Crane’s years working as an assistant prosecutor.
1993 – 1994 — Crane replaces Joe Moseley as Boone County Prosecuting Attorney. Crane gets the job after beating Kenny Hulshof by one vote and earning the local Republican committee’s recommendation for the nomination.
1994 – Crane beats Christine Carpenter in a contentious election to keep his seat as Prosecutor.
2006 — Crane runs unopposed and wins spot as Circuit Judge.
2012 — Crane’s current term as judge will end.
Boone County Prosecuting Attorney Kevin Crane, left, and Columbia Police Chief Randy Boehm talk to ...
Judge Kevin Crane presides over a case at the Boone County Courthouse. Crane ran unopposed ...
The jurors, brought in from Pettis County, didn’t know they were late arrivals to a case that spanned most of Crane’s 14-year tenure as prosecutor. They didn’t know Crane had already convinced two other juries to sentence Johnson to death. And they didn’t know the Missouri Supreme Court had overturned those sentences. The court ordered a new trial to determine Johnson’s penalty, this time considering evidence indicating that he might be mentally retarded. The ruling came shortly after a U.S. Supreme Court decision declared it unconstitutional to execute a mentally retarded person.
But Crane wasn’t buying it. Mental retardation was a ploy by the defense to spare Johnson the death penalty, he thought.
“They’re trying to tell you this looks like wood, and it feels like wood, and it grew up in a pasture, and it got cut down, and now it’s in front of you, and it’s got grains in it, but it’s really steel,” he told the jury. “Don’t believe it, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a bunch of garbage.”
When Crane got the case in 1994, he was a young prosecutor off a contentious election win. Now, in May 2006, he was seasoned and months away from an unopposed victory in an election to become a judge. His trademark theatricality and easy rapport with jurors came through.
“While he was breaking the victims’ skulls with that hammer, he was trying to avoid this day, this moment,” Crane said. “And you know what? … Today, through you, the victims have got the hammer.”
Crane was an unlikely person to be here arguing for death. Voted class clown in high school, he nearly went into acting, a skill set that explains his theatrics in the courtroom. Crane had managed to win an election as a Republican in a county that leans Democrat and to keep his office longer than any of his predecessors — except Joe Moseley, who served 16 years — in the past 50 years.
As a prosecutor, Crane earned his share of criticism from some high-profile cases. But he also won convictions in many serious cases, often earning the respect of defense attorneys along the way.
Now, he wanted to make sure that Johnson went back to death row.
“When, after all the defendant’s criminal history, after his actions in the course of committing three deliberate, premeditated, ghastly, horrible and inhumane murders, when do we finally hold him accountable for his life of crime and these killings? Today,” he told the jury.
Three hours later, the jury came back with three death sentences. The case went to Missouri’s high court a third time, but the court upheld the sentences in a 4 to 3 ruling. Johnson has another appeal pending.
Rock Bridge High School yearbooks from 1978 to 1980 show a different Kevin Crane; he’s performing on stage or running cross-country. Crane was popular and outgoing. He wasn’t afraid to speak up in class, but he wasn’t a disciplinary problem either.
Crane was a performer. “He was an actor, on and off the stage,” says Jim King, assistant principal when Crane was at Rock Bridge.
In fact, Crane’s life nearly went a different direction as a high school upperclassman after he attended a summer acting school in Chicago. One of the people he met suggested he audition for Second City, the comedy group famous for launching the careers of names such as Tina Fey, Mike Meyers and Bill Murray, among many others.
But Crane didn’t want to leave home for Chicago or New York. He’d been born and raised in Boone County, the son of a rural mail carrier and a librarian, and he represents the sixth generation of Boone County Cranes. He chose to stay close to home and earned a bachelor’s degree in speech and communication in 1984, then a law degree in 1987, both from MU.
Still, he says, sometimes he reflects on his decision. “If I had another life, I’d probably see what would happen if I took that direction,” he says. “Maybe I would have been Jack Nicholson, or maybe I would have been serving hot dogs at the street corner.”
On election night in 1994, Kevin Crane stood on another stage: the top of the bar at the restaurant where he was having his victory rally. He’d just won the prosecutor’s office, a spot he would hold for the next 12 years. Crane addressed his supporters from atop the bar and wore a button that his opponent, Christine Carpenter, had given him. It read: “Thank God this election is over.”
Both Carpenter and Crane were good campaigners. They took part in more than 10 public debates, including one on live TV. The attention was unprecedented for a local race for prosecutor, says Carpenter, who is now an associate circuit judge. “I think we both had the kind of personalities that people liked to listen to us,” she says.
Crane enjoyed the incumbent’s advantage. After law school, he’d worked as an assistant attorney general and discovered his zeal for trial work as a member of the Special Litigation Division.
In 1990, Boone County Prosecutor Joe Moseley hired Crane as an assistant prosecutor. When Moseley left in 1992 to run for state senate, Crane sought the nomination to finish Moseley’s term. State law dictated that the parties’ local committees vote on whom to recommend to the governor. With Republican John Ashcroft in office, the Boone County Republican Central Committee’s choice was almost certain to get the job. Crane jockeyed for support against Kenny Hulshof, who would later be elected to Congress and run for governor. In what Crane calls a turning point in his career, he edged Hulshof by one vote, and the committee recommended him for the nomination.
Crane’s two years as prosecutor, though, meant he had a record on which he could be challenged in the 1994 race. A key case involved embezzlement.
In August 1993, a local defense attorney approached Crane with an unusual proposition. He had a client who was stealing from MU, he said. Crane could have her name if he agreed to file just one stealing charge and not push for a harsher sentence. But Crane waited, hoping university auditors and investigators would ferret out the thief. By October, they still hadn’t. They didn’t even know how much money was missing. After much deliberation, Crane signed the agreement and got the thief’s name: Christy Tutin, an administrative assistant.
The surprise came when investigators discovered the scope of the embezzlement — more than $660,000 from 1988 to 1993.
It was an embarrassment for the university, but Crane also became a target. He was letting Tutin off easy, some said. Others, including Carpenter, criticized Crane for seeming to deny publicly the existence of a plea deal, even after signing the agreement with Tutin’s lawyer in October.
“The point of Tutin was that the prosecuting attorney was not candid when he made statements regarding that case,” Carpenter told the Columbia Daily Tribune during the 1994 campaign. “I really feel he saw this as an opportunity to score big ... and to solidify his position as the prosecutor. And it went sour on him.”
Tutin eventually pleaded guilty and received a seven-year state sentence and a two-year federal sentence, but she served only a small portion of that time. She also had to pay restitution. Despite the clamor over the Tutin case, Crane won 57 percent of the vote in 1994.
Carpenter and Crane now consider themselves friends, and their offices are side by side. “We can yell at each other whenever, though Kevin doesn’t need to,” Carpenter says. “You can hear him anywhere.”
The body of 72-year-old Anna Norton floated down the Missouri River and into Kevin Crane’s jurisdiction in January 1993. The investigation led to a young insurance salesman named Eric Beishline, whom authorities came to believe was robbing and killing elderly victims using chloroform.
In what Crane remembers as his first big case as prosecutor, he earned a first-degree murder conviction of Beishline in Norton’s death. He sought the death penalty, but the jury opted for life in prison without parole after hearing testimony about Beishline’s education, family background and cocaine use.
Today, Crane contends that Beishline is a serial killer, a suggestion Daniel Gralike, who was Beishline’s lawyer, calls “a stretch” considering Beishline was convicted of only one killing. Still, Gralike says, the case convinced him that Crane was a great trial attorney. “I left with immeasurable respect for Kevin,” he says.
Other defense attorneys have similar opinions. “I always felt like Kevin was fair and reasonable and saw both sides of the situation,” says local defense attorney Dan Viets, who worked with Crane in 2006.
“I didn’t always agree with him — in fact, I probably more often disagreed with him — but I respected the positions he took,” says Cyndy Short, a defense attorney who encountered Crane when she was handling capital cases in the public defender’s office.
Crane’s comfort performing for a jury and his knack for putting people at ease with a well-placed joke made him an effective prosecutor. “He really likes to throw in the country stuff, which is totally fake,” Carpenter says. “If you didn’t know Kevin, you’d think he was the biggest country bumpkin, but he’s not. He likes to come out with these goofy phrases about hogs.”
Crane acknowledges he was at least a little nervous about following a well-regarded prosecutor such as Moseley, but he worked his way out of Moseley’s shadow with long hours and dramatic cases. Hundred-hour weeks were common. “I missed my second son’s first steps,” he says. “I’ve had to go in Christmas mornings.”
Crane’s approach to the death penalty proved one of the clearest distinctions between him and his predecessor. Moseley was personally opposed to it. He left it to his assistants to analyze cases that might qualify, and, if Moseley got a conviction on such a case, an assistant would handle the penalty phase of the trial.
Crane argued for the death penalty in a number of cases, and jurors sometimes agreed. Nonetheless, Crane sees securing a death sentence as one of the toughest challenges a prosecutor can face. “Any case where you’re seeking the death penalty, it’s extremely difficult because you’re basically asking people to do something that they would never ordinarily do,” he says.
In 1998, Kevin Crane lay on the courtroom floor as he delivered his closing argument. “Try, try just taking your wrists during deliberations and crossing them and lay down, and see how that feels,” he told the jury. “Imagine your hands are tied up.”
He wanted them to feel the way 81-year-old Dorothy Martin felt in her last moments. The jurors had already decided that Bernard Rhodes had killed her. Now, as they considered his punishment, Crane wanted them to remember how Martin had died — beaten and bound, with a bag over her head.
“And ladies and gentlemen, you’re on the floor … with your hands behind your back, and this guy is beating you,” he continued after an objection by the defense was overruled. “Your nose is broken. Every time you take a breath, your broken rib hurts. And finally, after you’re back over on your face, he comes over, and he pulls your head back so hard it snaps your neck. Hold your breath. For as long as you can. Hold it for 30 seconds. Imagine it’s your last one.”
The argument won Crane both a death sentence from the jury and, a year later, a rebuke from the Missouri Supreme Court. Asking the jurors to put themselves in the victim’s place, thus “unduly infecting the jury’s decision with passion, was grossly improper,” the court ruled.
After the court overturned the death sentence, Martin’s elderly sister didn’t want to go through the process again, so Rhodes received a life sentence without parole. “If I knew it was going to get reversed on that, I wouldn’t have done it,” Crane says of his closing argument. “I was wrapped up in it — thought that was appropriate.”
Crane’s conduct is also a key point in an appeal of one of the most publicized cases in recent Boone County history. In 2005, he won a conviction of Ryan Ferguson for the murder of Columbia Daily Tribune sports editor Kent Heitholt. No physical evidence linked Ferguson to the crime, but one of his friends, Chuck Erickson, pleaded guilty to the murder and testified against Ferguson, who received a 40-year prison sentence. Both Ferguson and Erickson were Rock Bridge students at the time of the murder. Erickson’s credibility remains a controversial issue. He says he initially blocked the murder from his memory and recalled details only years later.
In July 2008, Crane was called to testify at a hearing to determine whether Ferguson deserved another trial because his attorneys were ineffective. An appeal by Ferguson claims that Crane withheld key evidence. In addition, Shawna Ornt, an eyewitness, testified at the hearing that Crane intimidated her in meetings before Ferguson’s trial. She was cleaning the Tribune building the night of the murder — Halloween 2001 — and she saw two men in the parking lot where the body was found. She testified that she told Crane the men weren’t Ferguson and Erickson.
“He just kept telling me that the composite and they look alike, and so it had to be him,” Ornt testified. Crane was “trying to get me to say, ‘yes,’” she said, “and I told him I wasn’t going to.” Crane says that never happened. “I think she may have come in thinking I was going to make her say that was the guy and go, ‘Well, here’s this picture, and by God…’” he says, banging his desk in a mock bad-cop routine. “Somehow that got twisted.”
Ferguson’s family and others in the community maintain his innocence, but to Crane, Erickson’s testimony was damning. He asks: Why would he confess and send himself to prison for 25 years if he didn’t do it? “At a bare minimum, you had a guy going, ‘I did it, and he did it with me,’” Crane says.
In December 2008, Crane, Now wearing a black robe, looked down from his elevated seat in one of Boone County’s newly renovated courtrooms. For the past two days, he’d presided over a child pornography trial during which jurors had watched graphic videos of children having sex. They had just returned two guilty verdicts.
“Ladies and gentleman, this has been a tough case right before Christmas,” he told the jurors. “I know it’s something you’re probably never going to forget.”
Crane had broken tense moments at the trial with humor as he compared the new courtroom, with its flat-screen monitors, to a sports bar. His performance impressed some who questioned whether he would be able to adjust to his new role on the bench. Carpenter says it was important for Crane “to realize that he couldn’t go for the laughs like he used to.”
Crane acknowledges that he had some concerns of his own going in. “I thought that I would have more trouble with the passive role,” he says. “I was concerned going in that defense attorneys would think that I couldn’t be in the middle, that I couldn’t take off the prosecutor’s hat.”
Still, there have been learning experiences. Last June, the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District said Crane erred in granting summary judgment for two companies in an automobile accident case. In December, the same appellate court ruled that Crane was wrong to accept an inconsistent jury verdict. “You’re learning something every day,” he says.
Crane reclines in his office chair, with his feet kicked up on the desk. Behind him, toy soldiers guard the bookshelves — he likes military history — and his computer’s screensaver scrolls the names of his four children.
Crane says he’s content with life as a judge. His name came up in 2007 as a possible replacement for Hulshof in Congress, but Crane says, “The stereotypical political position is not something I’m particularly cut out for.”
Crane still runs into people from his past. His high school principal, Wayne Walker, still raves about Crane’s performance in Man of La Mancha 30 years ago.
“If you would have listed the different things for his future, prosecutor would probably be at the bottom of the list,” Walker says. “I wouldn’t even have thought of him becoming a lawyer, much less a prosecutor and now a judge. Now every time I see him, I just shake my head and smile, and he laughs.”
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If you want to see the real Judge Crane testify in court under oath watch the following news link. You will be see and hear Judge Crane tell Judge Asel and The Defense Attorney and the court that he can not tell the color of Charles Erickson’s hair from a color photograph the judge is holding in his hand.
Charles Erickson is the person setting down in front of Dallas Mallory who is wearing some sort of police uniform.
http://www.kmiz.com/news/story.php?id=11...
This next link shows you the photograph the same photograph Judge Crane looked at while under oath in which he claims he cannot tell the color of Erickson’s hair.
Judge Crane does not seem to be telling the truth. What color do you think Charles Erickson’s hair is in this photograph? Everyone that has seen this photograph has agreed the hair is black.
This is a clear example of Judge Crane lying under oath to support and protect his earlier position in reference to Erickson’s hair color.
http://www.freeryanferguson.com/Evidence...
You be the Judge what color do you think Erickson’s hair is in this photograph?
Posted by Bill Ferguson on Aug 27, 2009 at 3:37 a.m. (Report Comment)
It's no wonder that Prosecutor Crane's wife left him for another women once one considers his pass behavior
Posted by will Smith on Aug 27, 2009 at 3:04 p.m. (Report Comment)
From the sounds of it lying about the color of Erickson's hair was only one of the dishonest things Kevin Crane did involving the Ferguson trial. He also lied to the jury in his closing argument when he told them there wasn't a hair in the victim's hand. And much worse than this was when he concealed information by failing to tell the defense team that Shawna Ornt had told him several times prior to the trial that the two boys she had seen in the parking lot the night of the murder WERE NOT Erickson or Ferguson. This is considered a Brady violation which is a very serious federal charge. I would think it might be easy to fool the public some of the time, but I wouldn't be surprised if eventually Crane's unethical behavior comes back to haunt him.
Posted by Hope Gentry on Aug 27, 2009 at 11:03 p.m. (Report Comment)
I went to high school at Andrean with Eric Beischline. He was a psychopath in high school. I was not surprised to hear he was in jail for murder, just sorry for the victim's families.
I am glad Crane was able to successfully prosecute Eric. He got away with a lot in high school, which eventually set him up for feeling he could get away with just about anything.
Posted by catie sterling on Jan 8, 2010 at 5:49 p.m. (Report Comment)