Man faces trial without accuser present

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. – As the trial begins today for the man accused of attacking and raping her, Christa Brae Hart will not be present to testify.

She is dead.

Three weeks after Hart accused Jimmy Joe Stapleton of raping her at a 2002 party, her body was dragged from South Holston Lake. The 23-year-old was pronounced drowned, and Washington County, Va., authorities launched a separate investigation into her death. In July, they arrested and charged a different man with Hart’s second-degree murder.

Now, after more than five years of legal maneuvering and administrative hang-ups, Sullivan County prosecutors are taking the unusual step of bringing a rape case to trial without the live testimony of the alleged victim.

"In most instances, the victim is still living," H. Greeley Wells Jr., district attorney general of Sullivan County, said of rape cases. However, "there are at times different ways of proving the things we need to prove" for a conviction, he said.

Neither Wells nor Barry Staubus, the lead prosecutor, would elaborate on their case. But the state could call three witnesses who were present during the September 2002 incident, according to court records.

For Hart’s family, Monday’s trial is a landmark day in the drawn-out criminal proceedings. There have been points during the last five years when Jackie Hale, Hart’s 67-year-old grandmother, wondered if she would live to see Hart’s attackers punished.

Hale, with whom Hart lived until her death, is "elated" about Monday’s trial, and praised Staubus for going forward with the case.

But after two changes of defense attorneys and a judge who retired – factors that substantially delayed the case – Hale worries Stapleton will slip the justice system at the last minute.

She follows the case’s every movement the way she once watched over her traumatized granddaughter, who slept in the same room with her in the days after the alleged rape.

While she acknowledges that no conviction will bring Hart back, "I feel like I owed it to Christa for this to happen," she said.

At the time of her death, Hart was a mother of two children, newly adjusting to life as a single woman after breaking up with her high school boyfriend in February 2002, according to Hale.

Hart worked as a nursing assistant to the elderly in and around Kingsport, loved swimming and going to yard sales, and used to practice her catwalk by balancing a book on her head, Hale said. A fondness for glamour comes out in photos of Hart, who continuously restyled and dyed her hair.

When Hale identified Hart’s body, greenish from the lake water, she immediately fixed on the newly dyed, platinum blond hair.

The grief that laced Hart’s last three weeks began at a small party in a Church Hill apartment on Sept. 23, 2002. In their statements, none of the witnesses police interviewed appeared to know her, or even her name.

When he sat down next to her on a couch in his mother’s apartment, 26-year-old Jimmy Joe Stapleton had a rap sheet several inches long, including an assault and battery charge, two DUIs and five convictions for driving on a revoked license. A 2004 probation report shows that he has a history of alcohol and drug abuse and received mental health treatment in 1999.

According to one witness, Eugene Marshall Keeler, the two had been flirting until Stapleton made an unwelcome advance. After this point, "she didn’t want to be left alone with him," Keeler, who goes by "Tom," told police the next day.

Keeler took both Hart and Stapleton to his apartment nearby, where he said he had consensual sex with Hart and later left to pick up a friend.

Accounts of what happened next between Hart and Stapleton vary slightly, but three people present that night told police they saw the defendant sexually assaulting her on the floor of Keeler’s bathroom, which he had locked.

When Keeler returned to his apartment, he told police, "I went in and you could hear her screaming for him to quit." He got a .380 pistol and opened the door with a penny. Two others stated they saw Stapleton on top of Hart.

According to witnesses, Stapleton picked up a knife and threatened those present before attacking them, wounding two men before Keeler shot him in the stomach. All, including Hart, were treated at Holston Valley Medical Center.

A physician who examined Hart wrote that she had bruising across her nose, under her eye, on both arms and elbows, on her right hand and left fingers, and on her back and legs. There were "some red marks on [her] neck in front," where Hart said she had been choked, and there were raised areas on her head.

The physician described Hart as "calm" and "cooperative."

The Sullivan County detective who investigated the scene at Keeler’s apartment charged Stapleton with one count of aggravated rape and four counts of aggravated assault – which were ratified by a Sullivan County grand jury in May 2003.

Stapleton has disputed the charges and his alleged role in the rape. Stapleton wrote an April 2005 letter to now-retired Judge Phyllis Miller. Parts of the letter are quoted verbatim:

"It is 3 of the states wittnesses who were trying to Gang Rape Crissa Hart that night thats why I tour the door down & put my foot in there [expletive]." He added, "I’m just trying to make a win-win thing for myself and the state."

In a letter and court documents, Stapleton expresses a particular concern with how his case has been portrayed to the media.

"All I ask is for the TV News Brief that I am not the rapist here," he wrote in the April 2005 letter to Miller. In a civil rights complaint he filed against Staubus and his then public defender, William A. Kennedy, he stated he wanted Staubus "to go back on live news broad cast" and say that he is not a rapist.

Kennedy, whom Stapleton called a "2 face liar," and a "waste of taxpayers money," withdrew from the case in November 2006.

A second attorney for Stapleton retired, and a third was appointed.

For Hart’s family, the stress has reached a peak. Mickie McSwain, Hart’s mother and Jackie Hale’s daughter, recently suffered a heart attack, Hale said. She worries about her own heart, having noticed a pain in her left arm. But most of her worries are concentrated on the trial.

"We want these people convicted," she said. "It’s been so long in coming."

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