Wayne DuMond

Wayne Eugene DuMond (September 10, 1949 – August 31, 2005) was an American criminal convicted of murder and rape.

On August 8, 1972, DuMond was charged with murder in Lawton, Oklahoma.

He committed the crime with help from two other men.

DuMond used the 17-year-old daughter of one of his accomplices to entice the victim to an isolated location, where DuMond and his accomplices beat him to death with a claw hammer.

Prosecutors did not charge DuMond after he agreed to testify against the two others, though he admitted in court that he was among those who attacked the murder victim.

On October 19, 1973, DuMond was charged with molesting a teenage girl in the parking lot of a shopping center in Tacoma, Washington.

The second-degree assault charge resulted in a five-year deferred sentence and mandatory drug counseling during the five-year probation.

On September 28, 1976, DuMond was charged with raping a woman in DeWitt, Arkansas.

The charges were dropped before trial with the condition he undergo counseling.

DuMond received his second sexual assault conviction from a rape perpetrated in Forrest City, Arkansas in 1984.

The victim, Ashley Stevens, was a 17-year-old cheerleader and a third cousin of then-Governor Bill Clinton.

"During a photographic show-up, the victim indicated that Ricky White resembled the assailant. However, White was working in another part of the state on the day of the rape, and she did not identify him as the rapist at a one-person lineup. Later, Walter Stevenson, who matched the assailant's description and worked near a restaurant which the victim frequented, was placed in a lineup. She did not identify Stevenson as her assailant. Woodcutters working near the area of her home on the date of the rape were also brought in for lineups but none were recognized by the victim. On approximately October 29, 1984, the victim observed DuMond driving a pick-up truck on a Forrest City street and immediately identified him as the perpetrator of the crime. DuMond was taken into custody, placed in a lineup, and identified by her as the man who kidnapped and raped her."

The victim would later tell Governor Mike Huckabee, in a personal meeting at which she, her family, and the prosecuting attorney in the case pleaded with him to reverse his decision to release DuMond, "This is how close I was to Wayne DuMond. I will never forget his face. And now I don't want you ever to forget my face."

In March 1985, after his arrest but before his trial, DuMond claimed he was attacked in his home by two men and castrated.

No arrests were made in the incident.

Phil Ostermann, the Arkansas State Police investigator who handled the castration case, noted in his report that Dr. Jeff Whitfield of the Elvis Presley Trauma Center in Memphis examined DuMond after the incident, and was asked by DuMond's wife whether it was possible the castration was self-inflicted.

Whitfield responded that it was possible, and he had noted similar cases of self-mutilation in the past.

Fletcher Long, the attorney who prosecuted DuMond for the rape of Ashley Stevens, was skeptical that DuMond could have castrated himself, but he also doubted DuMond's account because there was no evidence of a struggle, or that he had been tied up (which should have left ligature marks), and there was a two-thirds-empty half-gallon bottle of Jim Beam whiskey at the scene of the supposed assault.

While in prison, DuMond successfully sued the St. Francis County and Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, who publicly displayed DuMond's severed testicles and later flushed them down the toilet.

DuMond was sentenced to life plus 20 years in prison.

After Clinton was elected president, a right-wing campaign alleged that Clinton had framed DuMond for rape.

Prominent among those pushing for DuMond to be pardoned were Guy Reel, author of Unequal Justice: Wayne DuMond, Bill Clinton, and the Politics of Rape in Arkansas; Steve Dunleavy of the New York Post; and Jay Cole, Baptist pastor for the Mission Fellowship Bible Church in Fayetteville, who had championed DuMond's cause for more than a decade on his radio show.

Many of the arguments advanced by DuMond's supporters have since been shown to be incorrect.

Dunleavy claimed that:

Dunleavy also referred to the young woman, a minor at the time of the assault, as the "so-called victim", and asserted "that rape never happened".

At the time of the trial, only ABO blood typing evidence was presented, which indicated that DuMond, along with 28 percent of the population, could have produced the semen.

In 1987 the victim's jeans were given to an expert, Dr. Moses Schanfield.

Using protein-based immunoglobulin allotyping, a technique less specific than current standard DNA tests, Schanfield examined a semen spot on the jeans.

Dunleavy claimed Schanfield told him, "No way, zip, nada. No way DuMond was the donor of that sperm. Not in a million years."

However, the court documents do not accord with that.

In DuMond vs. Lockhart, the Court wrote:

"Dr. Schanfield had genetic allotyping performed on the semen found on the victim's pant leg. Schanfield concluded that based on the test, there was a ninety-nine plus percent probability that DuMond was not the rapist because the semen lacked a genetic marker which DuMond possessed. However, Dr. Schanfield's conclusion was based on the assumption that vaginal fluids were not mixed with the semen used for the test. If the semen was intermixed with vaginal secretions, Dr. Schanfield reported that the results would be inconclusive."

The victim had testified that DuMond raped her vaginally, then forced her to perform oral sex during which time he ejaculated, then brief vaginal rape again.

She had also testified that she spat the ejaculate from her mouth onto the ground, and that her jeans were underneath her body, not near her face.

Contrary to Dunleavy's claim that the victim had first identified two other men as her rapist, then failed to pick DuMond out of a lineup, the Court wrote in the background to its DuMond vs. Lockhart decision:

DuMond's life sentence for a rape conviction received intense nationwide attention in late 2007, when his parole became an issue for presidential candidate Mike Huckabee during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Lois Davidson, mother of DuMond rape/murder victim Carol Sue Shields, appeared in a one-minute video entitled "Lois Davidson tells her story" which was posted on YouTube.

The commercial attacked Huckabee's efforts to get DuMond released from prison early.

DuMond was a soldier in the Vietnam War and worked as a handyman and carpenter in communities around DeWitt and Forrest City and in Texas.

A decorated military veteran, DuMond told reporters that he "helped slaughter a village of Cambodians".