Slain Woman’s Family Feels No Closure

By Daniel Gilbert
Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: July 19, 2008

On the morning of the plea hearing for the man charged with her daughter’s murder, Mickie McSwain went to the commonwealth’s attorney’s office tormented by indecision and toting a statement she thought might change prosecutors’ minds.

On her wrist was an inpatient bracelet from Bristol Regional Medical Center, where she’d spent the previous night with an anxiety attack.

In her hand was a tattered, green spiral-bound notebook containing an account of her daughter’s death – the one she has come to believe.

The statement, unsigned, undated and written in the third person, purported to be the kind of evidence authorities had failed to secure in six years of investigation: a witness who saw how Christa Brae Hart ended up dead in South Holston Lake.

But it, too, fell short of resuscitating the prosecution, taking its place in a paper graveyard of circumstantial evidence with credibility issues. Details gleaned from interviews with prosecutors, law enforcement officials and Hart’s family offer new insight into what has up to now been an opaque investigation, whose evidence remains off limits to public scrutiny.

Details learned by the Herald Courier reveal how years of investigation yielded a cacophony of conflicting statements, weakening the prosecution’s case as it slipped from second-degree murder to voluntary manslaughter.

On May 28, the day of Stiltner’s plea hearing, McSwain, her mother, a daughter and prosecutors poured over the contents of the green notebook for an hour and 15 minutes, weighing whether it tipped the scales of evidence.

The words, McSwain claims, are those of Joshua Andrew Mays, who first told her his story months after her daughter was found dead, and subsequently was interviewed by police. When he learned that Stiltner was receiving a plea deal, he contacted McSwain and on May 24 met with her and another woman who took down his statement, saying he would testify if authorities could guarantee his safety.

The woman, a former neighbor of Mays, confirmed by phone that the meeting took place, asking that she not be named because she feared for her safety. Efforts to reach Mays were unsuccessful.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Dennis Godfrey would later say that the late-arriving statement of Mays appeared authentic and squared with what he initially told police a few months after Hart’s body surfaced, with one crucial difference: Mays had said he wasn’t present at Hart’s death, and now his statement placed him at the scene.

The discrepancy opened up a credibility gap, and a defense attorney could impeach him as a witness, Godfrey concluded. The odds of convincing a jury of Stiltner’s guilt had not improved. The plea would go forward.

On the second floor of the Washington County Courthouse, Stiltner – who had remained free on bond since his July 2007 arrest – paced the hallway with his family, waiting for Godfrey and his team. He bought a soda and snacks from a vending machine. Twice, he left the building to smoke a cigarette with his son. When approached by a Herald Courier reporter, he declined to talk about his case.
Instead, he asked about the weather forecast. Rain, he said, would be “good for the garden.” He made no further comments.

After the hour-plus delay, Stiltner had his long-awaited day in court. The man who perhaps holds the most answers to the mystery of Hart’s death stood stoically before Circuit Court Judge C. Randall Lowe, giving a string of yes and no responses, tacitly accepting the weight of the evidence against him without ever uttering the word “guilty.”

Following the hearing, McSwain and Jackie Hale – Hart’s grandmother – at first looked past the Alford plea that had allowed Stiltner to stay silent, focusing instead on the judge’s pronouncement of his guilt – that he “did kill and slay” Hart; that he was guilty of voluntary manslaughter. That someone was to blame for Hart’s death.

But in the days and weeks following the hearing, the satisfaction of Hart’s family at hearing those words has faded into bitterness at the levity of Stiltner’s sentence.

After nearly six years of investigation, the upshot is this: one person was responsible for Hart’s death, and he will be out of jail in a year.

A life derailed

Most of the tangible evidence of Christa Hart’s life can fit on a rectangular poolside table, where on a recent July day Hale and McSwain emptied the contents of boxes of photos, newspaper clippings and sundry items.

It makes for a moving montage: the girl posing with a baseball bat in a Little League photo becomes the glamour-obsessed teen with gravity-defying hair. There are science fair projects, certificates of academic achievement, Mother’s Day cards, and varsity and academic letters from North High School. Two little boys – Hart’s children – materialize in later photos.

Hart was a certified nursing assistant who quit working in a retirement home because mortality depressed her. She was sensitive to her appearance in the extreme – the kind of girl who incessantly styled and restyled her hair, who balanced books on her head to practice a catwalk, who never left home without a bag of makeup. She had a quick temper, a coy expression in photos, a silly laugh, her mother and grandmother say.

On the table where Hart’s abbreviated life is spread out, the newspaper clippings – so at odds with the photogenic images and memories they evoke – gush tragedy.

“Body found in S. Holston Lake.”

“Body found in South Holston still unidentified.”

“Autopsy confirms Bristol, Va., woman drowned.”

They tell of unfathomable horrors one woman endured in the span of a month; how Hart was sexually assaulted in a bathroom at a party in Blountville, Tenn., and how three weeks after the attack, her body was pulled from the brackish lake water.

They are low points – the endpoints – of a rough year from which she never recovered.

The dissolution of her marriage in February 2002 left her unmoored and looking for a boyfriend. Her bipolarity led her to overindulge her children with gifts, write several bad checks, and skip a court date, her mother and grandmother say.

Only this year has criminal blame been assigned to the men who attacked her – separately, in separate jurisdictions. In late January, a Sullivan County, Tenn., jury convicted Jimmy Joe Stapleton of her attempted aggravated rape, and other related assault charges.

Though Stapleton and his mother were subpoenaed for the Stiltner trial, authorities in Washington County, Va., and Sullivan County have affirmed that there is no indication the crimes were connected, or that the defendants knew each other.

Stapleton “was a candidate that had to be ruled out” in Hart’s death, said Lt. Scott Snapp, the lead Washington County investigator, in a June interview. “We determined he was not a person of interest. We determined there was not a connection” between Stapleton and Stiltner.

From early on, the investigation focused on Stiltner, whom authorities suspected almost immediately, but waited to arrest for years as they worked to establish probable cause.

“From the point in time when he became a person of interest, he continued being a person of interest,” Snapp said. “We just did not want to exclude any others. We wanted to be sure we had a real strong case.”

Said Godfrey, “I didn’t want to cavalierly bring a charge. You only get one chance.”

‘Bye’

McSwain first saw Stiltner on Oct. 12, 2002, outside the mobile home she was renting on Lee Highway.

It was approaching dusk, and Hart was outside talking to an unfamiliar, well-dressed man. She wore a black dress with red flowers. She told her mother that the man was the boss of a neighbor, and that she had worked on his house earlier that day. The man, who McSwain said was Stiltner, offered to give her a ride to a nearby convenience store so she could buy a soda.

She recalls being impressed by his appearance, by the new smell of the interior of his car.

“He had himself fixed up pretty good,” she said.

Another thing she noticed was how he avoided making eye contact with her.

The trio rode to a Chevron and Stiltner told McSwain he would get her a drink, without asking what she wanted, she recalled. He came out with three six-packs of beer. He dropped them, shattering the bottles, she said. The clerk let him pick up three more six-packs.

They drove back to McSwain’s place, and Stiltner plucked a few bottles out of the cardboard and handed them to her, telling her to put them in the fridge.

When she re-emerged from the house, Stiltner and her daughter were gone. She would not hear from Hart until she checked her voicemail the next day, and discovered a message left at 12:57 a.m. from a phone number she did not recognize. She made a recording on an audio tape.

“Mom, this is Christa,” says a flat female voice in the recording. “I just wanted to call and let you know everything’s all right. I’ll be home sometime tomorrow. I’ve tried and tried to call you but your answering machine keeps coming on. Love you, bye.”

But it was not bye, not quite. Hart’s muffled voice can be heard in conversation with a lower pitched male voice, though their words are no longer distinguishable on the tape recording. The incoming call would turn out to be from Stiltner’s cell phone. The effect was anything but reassuring.

| (276) 645-2558