St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell is seeking to vacate the conviction of Marcellus Williams, who was sent to Missouri’s death row in 2001 for a murder he swore he did not commit.

Forensic testing of the knife used to murder Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, a beloved former newspaper reporter, revealed male DNA that did not belong to Williams. That evidence, which supports Williams’s innocence claim, has never been reviewed by any court, Bell noted in a newly filed motion. “This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt … casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence,” the motion reads.

Bell is invoking a relatively new provision of Missouri law that allows prosecutors to intervene in cases when they have “information that the convicted person may be innocent.” Bell asked the St. Louis County Circuit Court, where Williams was convicted, to set a hearing to consider the DNA evidence and other serious flaws in the case against Williams, including poor defense lawyering at trial and misconduct by prosecutors, who stuck qualified individuals from the jury pool because they were Black.

Bell’s office is also reviewing the police investigation of Williams to determine if it was “intentionally or recklessly deficient” and is conducting a probe into an “alternate perpetrator.” That inquiry involves forensic testing, which will take time, the motion notes. Still, Bell believes it is his duty now to ask the court to “correct this manifest injustice by seeking a hearing on the newfound evidence and the integrity of Mr. Williams’s conviction.” The request is all the more urgent because Missouri’s attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to set a date for Williams’s execution.

Picus’s husband, Dan, came home from work on August 11, 1998, to find his wife dead. The former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter had been stabbed repeatedly, and the murder weapon, a knife from the couple’s kitchen, was left lodged in her neck. The house was full of forensic evidence: There were pubic hairs found near the body, bloody fingerprints on a wall, and a trail of bloody shoeprints. The kitchen had been ransacked, and closets and drawers upstairs had been opened. Not much of value was taken; Picus’s wedding ring and $400 in cash were still in her walk-in closet. But a few items were missing, among them Picus’s wallet and Dan’s old Apple laptop computer.

Despite the wealth of physical evidence, the case quickly stalled out. It wasn’t until months later, after Picus’s family posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer, that a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole came forward with a story about his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, whom he said had confessed to the murder. Police subsequently secured a second informant, Laura Asaro, Williams’s former girlfriend, who also claimed Williams was responsible.

There was ample reason for police and prosecutors to be wary of the accounts: The informants were both facing prison time for unrelated crimes and had a history of ratting on others to save themselves. Many of the details Cole and Asaro offered shifted over the course of questioning, while others did not match the crime. Nonetheless, Williams was charged with Picus’s murder. When Cole’s support for the endeavor appeared to flag before trial, prosecutors encouraged Dan to pay him $5,000 to secure his testimony.

Although Cole and Asaro were the foundation of the state’s case against Williams, painting him as a ruthless killer, their stories contradicted the physical evidence. Asaro claimed Williams had scratches on his face the day of the murder, yet no foreign DNA was recovered from under Picus’s fingernails. The bloody shoeprints in the house were a different size than Williams’s feet, and the pubic hairs found near Picus’s body didn’t belong to Williams. In his trial testimony, Cole claimed that Williams bragged about wearing gloves during the murder, despite the bloody fingerprints left behind. The fingerprints lifted by investigators were deemed unusable by the state and destroyed before the defense had a chance to analyze them.

The Apple computer, however, was eventually recovered by police. According to Asaro, Williams had given his grandfather’s neighbor the computer in exchange for crack cocaine. At trial, the neighbor denied that account, saying he’d paid Williams cash for the laptop. What the jury didn’t know was that the man also said Williams was pawning the computer for Asaro.

According to Bell’s motion, Williams’s trial attorneys provided him with ineffective representation by failing to call witnesses who could have undercut the credibility of Cole and Asaro. Among those witnesses was Cole’s son, Johnifer, who said that while Cole was locked up with Williams, he’d written Johnifer a letter to report that he had a “caper” going on and “something big” was coming.

Williams’s conviction was also tarnished by the prosecutors, who illegally struck several potential Black jurors from service. In one instance, a prosecutor said they hadn’t rejected the juror because he was Black, but because he “looked very similar” to the defendant. (The prosecutor also claimed he struck the juror because he was a mail processing supervisor for the postal service, and postal employees are “very liberal.” He did not use the same logic to disqualify a white postal employee.) 

The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has a well-documented history of striking Black jurors from serving on death penalty cases, Bell noted in his motion. The prosecutors who handled Williams’s case have had at least two other death penalty convictions reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court based on such violations.

Williams’s lawyers requested DNA testing of crime scene evidence prior to his trial, but the court denied it. It wasn’t until 2015 — on the eve of Williams’s first execution date — that the Missouri Supreme Court stayed the case and ordered testing of the murder weapon, which ultimately revealed unknown male DNA. The court reset Williams’s execution for August 2017 without considering the impact of the DNA results on his conviction.

The Midwest Innocence Project, which represents Williams, turned to Missouri’s then-Gov. Eric Greitens, asking that he halt the execution and convene what’s known as a board of inquiry to investigate the case. On the day Williams was set to die, Greitens issued an executive order granting the request.

Greitens empaneled a five-member board of retired judges to “assess the credibility and weight of all the evidence.” The board was given subpoena power and tasked with making a final report to the governor “as to whether or not Williams should be executed or his sentenced of death commuted.”

Over the intervening years, the Midwest Innocence Project provided the board with a host of information and suggestions for lines of inquiry. Then, last June, Greitens’s successor, Gov. Mike Parson, abruptly dissolved the board of inquiry before it could report the findings of its investigation. It was time to move on, Parson said. The following day, Attorney General Andrew Bailey asked the Missouri Supreme Court to set an execution date for Williams.

The Midwest Innocence Project has sued to block the governor from disbanding the board. Parson’s order violated state statute, the lawyers argued, which requires a board of inquiry to issue a final report to the governor’s office. The dispute is pending before the Missouri Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Bell’s office and lawyers for Williams have asked the Missouri Supreme Court to hold off on setting an execution date while the St. Louis County Circuit Court considers Bell’s motion.

Until recently, what Bell is asking — for a judge to overturn a faulty conviction — would have been impossible. Prior to 2021, state law precluded local prosecutors from taking action to overturn wrongful convictions perpetrated by their predecessors.

The Missouri Attorney General’s Office has long expressed a perverse hostility to the plight of the wrongfully convicted. Back in 2003, the state Supreme Court considered the case of Joseph Amrine, who was on death row for a murder he did not commit. Amrine, who had exhausted his normal course of appeals, sought to press his innocence claim. The attorney general’s office argued that the court could not consider such a claim and Amrine’s execution was warranted. Was the office suggesting that “if we find that Mr. Amrine is actually innocent, he should be executed?” Judge Laura Denvir Stith asked. “That’s correct, your honor,” the assistant attorney general replied. The court later ruled in Amrine’s favor.

The office also fought back in the case of Lamar Johnson, who was sent to prison in 1994 for a murder he swore he didn’t commit. Kim Gardner, former elected prosecutor for the city of St. Louis, concluded that Johnson was innocent, but Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, insisted Gardner lacked the power to do anything about it. Gardner persisted in her efforts, landing the case before the Missouri Supreme Court in 2020, where the attorney general argued that giving a local prosecutor the power to right a wrongful conviction had “the potential to undermine public confidence” in the criminal legal system.

It took nearly two decades after the Amrine decision for the state legislature to pass the statute that allows prosecutors like Gardner and Bell to intervene in wrongful convictions. The first test of the new law came in late 2021, when Kansas City elected prosecutor Jean Peters Baker sought to overturn the more than 40-year-old wrongful conviction of Kevin Strickland. Baker’s efforts were ultimately successful, but not without a fight. During a court hearing on the case, lawyers for the attorney general’s office threw out myriad reasons Strickland should remain locked up. None were persuasive and the presiding judge freed Strickland just before Thanksgiving.

In one of her final acts before being ousted amid a political feud with the attorney general’s office, Gardner invoked the new law in Johnson’s case; he was exonerated last February.

If history is any guide, the attorney general’s office will oppose Bell and fight to keep Williams locked up despite the crumbling nature of the state’s case. The office has yet to issue a public response to Bell’s motion.

The “indirect evidence used to convict Mr. Williams has become increasingly unreliable,” Bell’s motion reads. “This, when considered alongside the new DNA expert testimony, undermines confidence in Mr. Williams’s conviction and accompanying death sentence.”

While the attorney general’s office has argued that challenging the righteousness of a conviction somehow tarnishes confidence in the system, Bell’s motion takes the opposite stance: “Public confidence in the justice system is restored, not undermined, when a prosecutor is accountable for a wrongful or constitutionally infirm conviction.”

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