INNOCENCE BETRAYED PART ONE

Murder, then rush to judgment

By Laura A. Bischoff and Mary McCarty

Staff Writers

In the joyful pandemonium nobody notices the girl hanging back, reluctant to join in the mass embrace of Clarence Elkins — her Uncle Clarence — as he walks out of the Mansfield Correctional Institution. Elkins steps through the security gate and flashes the back of his hand under a blue light that shows it has been swabbed to indicate he is free to go.

Just yesterday, he was Inmate Number A375856, convicted killer, child rapist. Now, he is Clarence Elkins, husband, father, devout Christian, avid fisherman. As he hugs his mother and father, his wife Melinda and their boys Clarence and Brandon, Elkins can't stop smiling.

"He's home, finally," Brandon thinks as he clutches his father.

It is Dec. 15, 2005, nearly eight years since Clarence Elkins was hauled away in handcuffs for a crime he didn't commit. Brooke Sutton watches shyly, feeling like a wallflower at the party. She is 14 now, looking like Little Orphan Annie almost grown up. She is the girl with the curly, reddish-brown hair, the dimpled cheeks and the crushing guilt.

She is the only one in the family for whom the joy and anticipation are mixed with dread and anxiety. She is the one who was in the house the night her grandma was killed, the night she herself was raped and beaten.

She is the one who said, "Uncle Clarence did it."

She was only 6 years old the day she said it. But in her mind that doesn't exonerate her. She knows that her words put him behind bars, tore her family apart.

Her words caused her cousins Brandon and Little Clarence to grow up without their dad. Without their mom, really, since Melinda — Aunt Mindy — worked feverishly to free her husband and track down the real killer.

"It was my testimony that put him in there," she tells herself. "Nothing else."

She and Uncle Clarence exchanged letters and messages in prison, always in code. They were forbidden to communicate with each other because he was her alleged attacker. She signed her messages "Curly Girl"; she told him she loved him.

But now that the moment is here, she feels tense, awkward, a stranger.

In the euphoria, nobody notices her standing back.

Nobody but Clarence.

"Come give me a hug," he says, opening his arms wide.

And in that moment she finally believes the words he has told her so many times: "I have never blamed you."

June 6, 1998

Judy Johnson is a tiny woman with oversized Coke-bottle glasses that make her eyes look as big as billiard balls. Her one-bedroom rental house on Summit Street in Barberton is sparsely decorated, except for her treasured collection of elephant figurines. One of her favorites is the gray ceramic set of a family of three elephants that her daughter and son-in-law, Melinda and Clarence Elkins, picked up for her at a flea market. Like all the other elephants in Johnson's home, the trunk is turned up in a trumpeting salute — a symbol of luck.

Not that there's been an abundance of that in her life. She was born Judith Ann Posten but uses the last name of her third husband who, like her first two, has been out of the picture for a long time. At 58, she's had her share of failed relationships. When Judy was 34, one of her boyfriends smashed her into the kitchen cabinets while Melinda, then 11, watched helplessly. The beating caused both of Judy's retinas to detach, permanently damaging her eyesight.

After that, Judy could no longer work as a waitress and was forced to live on a monthly Social Security disability check. Her tan bungalow with the white trim is no bigger than a walk-in closet in one of the new subdivisions in nearby Akron. That doesn't stop Judy from opening her home to her four grandchildren, who are constantly running in and out of the house like summer locusts.

Tonight it's Brooke, her 6-year-old granddaughter and oldest of her daughter April's two children. They snuggle on the couch watching Walker, Texas Ranger, Judy's favorite show.

"Well, OK, say your prayers. Love you," she tells the kindergartner, kissing Brooke's forehead before tucking her into bed around 11 p.m.

Johnson takes a pillow and comforter to sleep on the couch in the living room. The child hears her propping open the door, as she often does on humid summer nights.

Sometime between 2:30 and 5:30 a.m., a man steals in through the front door, surprising Johnson as he rushes at her. She tries to ward off his blows, but at 5-foot-1 and 117 pounds, she is no match for him. Within minutes he breaks her jaw, nose, eye sockets, skull, right collarbone and a rib. Blood splatters the walls and couch. She bites her tongue. He rips off her left earring. She tears her fingernail. He whacks her across the lower back, shoves her into a cushioned chair and presses so hard against her neck that he breaks two vertebrae and the bone above her Adam's apple.

Her lower dentures drop into the chair.

By the time the man picks her up and throws her to the floor, Judy Johnson has already stopped breathing. At some point, probably after her death, he uses mayonnaise or canola oil as a lubricant in a sexual assault.

Brooke hears noises and sneaks into the living room. She sees the man in the kitchen, catching a glimpse of his back as he pulls something long and shiny — a knife, she thinks — out of a drawer. The small kitchen is cluttered and her baby brother's high chair sits next to the fridge.

The girl dashes back to the bedroom and pretends to be asleep. Moments later — she doesn't exactly know how long — the killer enters. She glimpses his face before he punches her, leaving an angry, swollen welt on her dimpled left cheek.

The 51-pound child is beaten, strangled and raped with a jagged object. She floats in and out of consciousness, at one point seeing her grandmother gagging and spitting up blood on the floor.

"She's still alive; she'll be OK," she reassures herself before passing out again.

'Wake up, Grandma!'

When the girl finally comes to, she is alone. She frantically tries to wake Johnson, thinking she must be play-acting.

"Wake up, Grandma!" she screams over and over.

The killer had tossed Johnson's cordless phone in her yard, just in case anyone was able to call for help. With incredible presence of mind, the 6-year-old pushes the page button on the base unit, follows the beeping sound outside and digs the handset out of the front bushes. She doesn't remember 911, and her parents don't have a phone, but two other numbers pop into her head. She dials her friend Ashley's house but gets no answer. Then she dials her neighbor, June Varnes, and the answering machine comes on.

"June, I'm sorry to tell you this, but my grandma died and I need somebody to get my mom for me. I'm all alone. Somebody killed Grandma. Now, please would you get a hold of me as soon as you can? Bye," she says, her voice trembling.

In her grandmother's nightgown, Brooke walks two doors down Summit Street to Tonia Brasiel's apartment and knocks. Her best friends — Brasiel's three daughters, ages 6, 7 and 8 — live there. She plays with the girls almost every day when she's at Grandma's, and Brasiel often drives Johnson to the grocery store and the bingo parlor.

It is 6:50 a.m.

Brasiel opens the door to find the distraught child with blood on her nightgown and a grotesquely swollen jaw standing on her front porch.

"What's the matter?" Brasiel asks the child.

Brooke throws her arms around Brasiel's waist and says, "My grandma is dead."

"Are you sure? Are you sure?" Brasiel asks.

"Yes," the child says, asking Brasiel to go over to Judy's house and help her grandma.

"Hang on," Brasiel replies. "I have to get the girls dressed and they have to finish their breakfast." Brasiel goes back inside and leaves the shaken 6-year-old on the front porch.

She doesn't return right away. Brooke waits for as long as a half hour, according to the timeline given in court.

Standing by herself, the child wonders, "What did I do? What did Grandma do to deserve this?"

Brasiel finally returns to the doorstep with her three daughters dressed in underwear and T-shirts, loads them into her car and asks Brooke for directions to her parents' house.

Brasiel breaks the news to the girl's parents, April and David Sutton, and reports that their daughter has already identified the killer. David Sutton kneels down in front of his daughter, grabs her and says, "Please, tell Daddy what happened."

Brooke then utters the words she would later regret:

"Uncle Clarence killed Grandma."

Five hours earlier

At 2:45 a.m. Clarence Elkins parks the family's 1996 white Ford Taurus in the driveway to their doublewide trailer in Magnolia and walks inside, suspecting his angry wife will be waiting for him. They had argued earlier in the evening when Melinda refused to make Clarence a sandwich. She took off to get a drink in Mineral City with a girlfriend, so Clarence decided to go out too.

On her way home, Melinda spots the Taurus outside The Flying Horse bar and talks Clarence into coming home. But he stops at three more bars, prompting Melinda to go out on another fruitless search for her husband. When she finally gives up, her resentment is simmering. "He's never home," she tells herself.

It's the "classic pattern" in their marriage, she reflects: Clarence goes out partying and drinking with his friends while Melinda stews at home.

"Are you upset I didn't come home?" Clarence asks.

"Yes," Melinda says. "And I don't appreciate your driving my new car when you've been drinking."

Clarence tries to butter her up, but Melinda's having none of it. "Go to bed," she tells him.

About 3:10 a.m. Clarence retreats to their bedroom. Melinda watches the Prince movie Purple Rain and falls into a fitful sleep on the living room couch. From time to time she wakes up to check on their 12-year-old son Brandon, who has a stomachache and fever.

This isn't the life she expected. Melinda was 17 the night she met Clarence at a drive-in movie theater and he asked for her number. Less than a year later, just a few weeks after both graduated from high school, they were married.

They could hardly have come from more divergent backgrounds. Clarence grew up in a Waynesburg farmhouse, one of six brothers who were all but inseparable. His father worked two jobs, as a coal miner and construction worker, so Clarence's mother could stay home with the boys and their younger sister.

They were stable, grounded.

Melinda, on the other hand, moved so often growing up that her first full year in the same school didn't come until she entered high school. She also was a celebrity of sorts. When Judy Johnson was 23, she and her first husband traveled to the Hicks Clinic in McCaysville, Ga., where they paid $1,000 for the newborn baby girl they named Melinda.

Johnson went public with her adoption story in an Akron Beacon Journal series about 49 couples from Akron who bought babies in the '50s and '60s from Dr. Thomas J. Hicks. The news landed Johnson and her daughter on "Hard Copy" and the "Maury Povich Show."

Clarence and Melinda's marriage had been rocky, but so far had managed to survive unemployment, money woes and two brief break-ups. Melinda relies on Clarence, emotionally and financially, and she wants her boys to have the continuity she never had as a child.

Still, she feels isolated at times. Her mother's house in Barberton is nearly an hour away. Melinda always draws fresh strength and determination from Judy, a tough-minded soul who has had to fight for everything she has.

By 10 a.m. everyone in the trailer is up. Melinda is thinking about driving to Barberton and spending part of the weekend with her mom when activity outside disrupts the Sunday morning calm.

"There are police cars at the neighbor's house," Clarence Jr. announces.

His dad immediately suspects the teenage girls next door. "I wonder what they did this time," Elkins speculates, sending 15-year-old Clarence Jr. out to the shed to get gas and oil for the mower.

Elkins is checking his wallet — practically a whole paycheck is there for the monthly house payment — when he hears a car flying up the long gravel driveway. When he walks out the back door, he is puzzled: A Carroll County sheriff's car is in the driveway and his son is lying in handcuffs on the ground.

They quickly undo the handcuffs. It is Elkins the deputies have come looking for.

As he walks toward them, a deputy growls: "Put your hands in the air and walk slow."

"What's going on?" he asks, looking at the guns drawn.

More police cars are tearing into the drive off Irish Road and Melinda catches sight out the window of SWAT officers storming the yard. It must have something to do with the publicity surrounding her adoption story, she thinks; she and her mother had been getting some strange calls lately. Maybe some crank is on our property.

"What's your mother's name?" the tall deputy in a gray uniform asks Melinda as she steps outside with Brandon.

"Judy. Why?" Melinda answers. The deputy closes his eyes for a second.

"Tell me what's going on now!" Melinda screams.

"Well, I'll tell you, but I'm not going to tell you in front of the boy," the deputy says.

Brandon goes back inside, sits on the couch and looks out the window at his mother talking with the deputy.

"The Barberton police department got a call that Clarence Elkins' mother-in-law was stabbed in her home," he tells her.

"Is my mom OK?" Melinda says, grabbing the deputy by the arms.

"No, ma'am, she's been murdered," he tells her.

In the next breath, he explains that her 6-year-old niece is accusing Clarence Sr. of the crime.

Melinda doubles over in pain, then runs inside to call her grandmother's house. "Grandma, Clarence wouldn't have done something like that," Melinda tells Lillian Posten, Judy's mother. "Well, I hope not," Posten says. "That was the only mother you had."

The rush to judgment has begun.

As Jeff Elkins, Clarence's youngest brother, pulls into the driveway, the property is swarming with sheriff's cars. A police car pulls out with his brother in the back seat. Clarence shakes his head at Jeff, then lifts his arms to show him the handcuffs.

Jeff can't hear Clarence from behind the closed windows of the cruiser, but he lip-reads his brother's words:

"I'll be back soon."