Opinion ID: 2650094
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Stacey Stites’s Murder

Text: Stites moved, along with her mother, to Bastrop, Texas in 1995 after graduating from high school, and began working at the Bastrop H.E.B. grocery store. By late December 1995, she was engaged to Jimmy Fennell, a recent police academy graduate. The following month, Stites moved to Giddings, Texas to be closer to her fiancé, who had been hired as a patrol officer with the Giddings Police Department. Stites continued working at H.E.B., but eventually transferred to the store’s produce department to earn more money in preparation for her wedding, scheduled for May 11, 1996. Stites was required to report to work daily at 3:30 a.m. to stock produce. Around 6:30 a.m. on April 23, 1996, one of Stites’s coworkers called Stites’s mother to inform her that Stites had failed to report to work. Stites’s mother called Fennell who set out looking for Stites, while Stites’s mother called the police to report her daughter missing. Earlier that morning, at 5:23 a.m., a police officer with the Bastrop Sheriff’s Department had observed Fennell’s pickup truck (which Stites routinely drove to work) parked in the Bastrop High School parking lot. After confirming that the vehicle was not reported stolen, there was no broken glass, 2 Case: 13-70009 Document: 00512496780 Page: 3 Date Filed: 01/10/2014 No. 13-70009 and the driver’s side door was locked, the officer returned to his patrol duties. Later, after Stites was reported missing, Officer Ed Selmala, an investigator with the Bastrop Police Department, conducted an investigation of the vehicle. Stites’s body was discovered shortly before 3:00 p.m. later that day in a ditch on the side of a road. Investigators observed that Stites was partially unclothed. She was missing a shoe. Although she wore a bra, she was otherwise shirtless. Her H.E.B. nametag was found in the crook of her leg. Additionally, Stites’s pants were undone, her pants’ zipper was broken, and her underwear was bunched around her hips. A piece of webbed belt belonging to Stites was located at the edge of the road, and matched a piece of belt discovered outside Fennell’s truck. Two beer cans lying across the road from Stites’s body were also collected. Karen Blakely, a criminalist and serologist with the Texas Department of Public Safety, took vaginal and breast swabs from Stites’s body, which showed the presence of semen. However, as a result of rigor mortis, Blakely could not determine whether Stites had been anally sodomized. Blakely observed various other injuries to Stites’s body, including an indentation in her neck, apparently caused by the piece of belt found nearby, scratches on her abdomen and arms, a cigarette burn on one arm, and shallow wounds on her wrists and back that appeared to have been caused by fire-ants. An autopsy the following day by medical examiner Dr. Roberto Bayardo revealed bruises on Stites’s arms, bruises on her head in a pattern consistent with the knuckles of a fist, and bruises on her left shoulder and abdomen consistent with a seatbelt. A wide mark across her neck matched the pattern of her belt. Dr. Bayardo concluded that the belt was the murder weapon, and that Stites was strangled to death. He estimated her time of death as approximately 3:00 a.m. 3 Case: 13-70009 Document: 00512496780 Page: 4 Date Filed: 01/10/2014 No. 13-70009 Dr. Bayardo also took vaginal swabs and identified intact sperm, indicating that the sperm had entered Stites’s vagina “quite recently.” Dr. Bayardo also observed injuries to her anus, including dilation and superficial lacerations consistent with penile penetration inflicted at or near the time of Stites’s death. Rectal swabs showed sperm heads without visible tails leading Dr. Bayardo to report a “negative” result. Dr. Bayardo also could not rule out the possibility that the presence of sperm in the anus was the result of seepage from the vagina. Further DNA testing on Stites’s blood, the vaginal swabs, and liquid in Stites’s underwear showed that there was a single semen donor. Authorities thereafter engaged in an eleven-month-long investigation. Police interviewed hundreds of individuals and identified over twenty-eight male suspects, including Fennell (Stites’s fiancé), Officer David Hall (one of Fennell’s fellow officers), and David Lawhon (a man who, officials learned, was bragging about killing Stites and who had killed another woman, Mary Ann Arldt, a few weeks after Stites’s murder). None of the suspects’ DNA matched that recovered from Stites’s body. Eventually, Reed was identified as a suspect. Bastrop police officers frequently saw Reed in the early morning hours near Stites’s usual work route and the parking lot where Fennell’s pickup was found. A comparison between Reed’s DNA and that found on Stites’s body revealed that Reed could not be excluded as a suspect. Additional DNA analysis proved that Reed’s genetic profile matched that of the semen found at the crime scene.