Opinion ID: 1323198
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Fact of Robbery.

Text: The defendant contends that the Commonwealth failed to prove the corpus delicti of robbery, a prerequisite for his conviction of capital murder and of robbery. The defendant recognizes that his confessions may be sufficient to establish the corpus delicti, but contends that there is insufficient reliable evidence corroborating his statements. While the corpus delicti cannot be established by a confession of the accused uncorroborated by other evidence, Reid v. Commonwealth, 206 Va. 464, 468, 144 S.E.2d 310, 313 (1965) when the defendant has fully confessed the crime, only slight corroborative evidence is necessary to establish the corpus delicti. Clozza v. Commonwealth, 228 Va. 124, 133, 321 S.E.2d 273, 279 (1984), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 1230, 105 S.Ct. 1233, 84 L.Ed.2d 370 (1985). Shortly after the body was discovered fully clothed, the wallet was found to be missing from the rear pants pocket. Despite a diligent search of the entire house shortly thereafter, the wallet was never found. The daughter with whom the deceased lived testified that Stone had been paid two days before he died, noting, I knew it was something he didn't do was take his wallet out of his pocket. Even when he would go to bed at night he would take his pants off and hang them on the foot of the bed, but his pants pocket would still be fastened ... [w]ith his wallet. This evidence, coupled with Williams' confession that he took the wallet from the decedent's pocket after killing him, removed some money, and then threw the wallet into a river, corroborates the corpus delicti of the robbery. Williams suggests that the wallet may have been taken either by the first persons to enter the house just after the murder or by others who entered later, casting the burden upon the Commonwealth to produce evidence to the contrary. Neither hypothesis springs from the evidence and both must be rejected. Responding to a similar contention in Turner v. Commonwealth, 218 Va. 141, 148, 235 S.E.2d 357, 361 (1977), we said, the hypotheses which must be reasonably excluded are those which flow from the evidence itself, and not from the imagination of defendant's counsel.