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The Plain Dealer
Question: Why, when dealing with a lifelong liar like John Spirko, does the state’s case rely almost exclusively on what Spirko said, not what he did? Sunday, October 30, 2005 Here’s what’s known: Spirko was a busy man on Aug. 9, 1982 — the day Betty Jane Mottinger disappeared from her Elgin post office — shuttling between various activities in Toledo and Swanton, two hours to the north. And prosecutors never provided a timetable showing how he could have squeezed in a trip to Elgin and back. Nor did they have any physical evidence linking Spirko to Elgin, Mottinger or the murder scene. In fact, Spirko never appeared on investigators’ radar until nearly three months after the crime, when he contacted them. The career criminal and habitual liar said he had information he wanted to trade in return for lenient treatment for his girlfriend and himself in an unrelated case. In more than a dozen untaped interviews that followed, Spirko told investigators a series of gruesome, ever-changing tall tales about what he said he knew about the Mottinger murder. Investigators tried to chase down Spirko’s many leads but came up with nothing. They argued that, embedded among the lies, Spirko’s stories contained details that showed he knew things only the killer could know — something they say he acknowledged in a letter to his girlfriend. The letter was as filled with bravado as his interviews. What’s never been clear is where the details came from. Many had been reported in various news outlets before Spirko came forward. And others, Spirko’s lawyers argue, might have been supplied — deliberately or inadvertently — by investigators. One of the details was a description of Mottinger’s purse. Spirko first told one postal inspector he had seen a canvas “sack.” Two days later, Spirko met with another inspector who had earlier gotten a detailed description of Mottinger’s purse from her family. Suddenly, Spirko’s vague description radically changed, matching almost verbatim the one given to the inspector weeks earlier, including a precise recitation of the purse’s dimensions. Other descriptions, like the victim’s clothing, appear to have been added later to an investigator’s notes — in a different handwriting style. Since none of the key interviews was taped, his attorneys and their experts have questioned whether some of the details were supplied by investigators. The investigators dispute this. But Spirko never led them to new information to corroborate his stories, a troubling deficiency, according to a national expert on wrongful convictions who appeared before the parole board. And there’s plenty that Spirko didn’t know. Twice he told investigators he knew nothing about stamps being stolen from the post office, although more than $700 worth had been taken. Twice he told investigators that Mottinger had been stabbed in the back, but there was no evidence of back wounds. Spirko twice described the diminutive, 105-pound woman in his stories as “fat.” It was widely reported that her body was found wrapped in a shroud. Prosecutors claimed that Spirko knew what the shroud looked like (he said it was “gray”) and how Mottinger’s body was wrapped (shroud “flapped . . . end to end over head”). But Spirko didn’t appear to know the most memorable facts about either. He said nothing about two concrete blocks wrapped with the body, or about the rope and duct tape used to bind the shroud around her neck, waist and legs. And he didn’t appear to know the most obvious detail about the shroud — that it was covered with paint spots, a fact that led every investigator at the scene to describe it as a painter’s dropcloth. (A former house painter disclosed in 1997 that the shroud matched the dropcloth he and his boss used on painting jobs that summer, near where Mottinger’s body was found, and that his boss was involved in the crime. Investigators never followed up on the lead.) Despite what Spirko said and didn’t say, evidence of what he did the day of the crime tends to undercut the prosecution’s case. Investigators discovered that Spirko — released two weeks earlier from prison in Kentucky — met for more than an hour with his parole officer in Toledo, although it’s not clear at what time. He went to a doctor’s office with his sister that afternoon, also in Toledo. He also called the Kentucky prison from Swanton that afternoon to inquire about his personal belongings. And he signed for a package at the Swanton post office. Conclusions: The board majority said Spirko knew details of the crime and that he convicted himself with his own words. On matters like the lack of physical evidence, the content of Spirko’s statements and the quality of his alibi, the majority deferred to the original jury. Citing the alibi, the dissenters disagreed. With a “plausible” timetable from Spirko, and none at all from the state, “we are again
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