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The first day of the Donald “Doc” Nash homicide trial in Rolla on Monday saw a packed courtroom, security screenings on everyone entering the courtroom, four witnesses for the prosecution and a defense attorney angered by allegations made by the prosecutor.
Charged with homicide in the 1982 slaying of 21-year-old Judy Lynn Spencer of Salem, Nash, 65, of Beaufort, appeared in court with a new haircut and several members of a defense team.
The boyfriend of Spencer, Nash was arrested 26 years after Spencer’s homicide. He was charged with her death in March 2008 after a Missouri Highway Patrol investigation revealed his DNA was present on clippings of Spencer’s fingernails.
Spencer’s partially clothed body was found by farmers on March 11, 1982, the day after she went missing. She had been strangled with a shoelace from her own shoe and then shot in the neck with a shotgun. Her wristwatch, still on her arm, was broken, the crystal missing, the time stopped at 9:10.
Spencer’s body was found the next day at 1 p.m., hidden under tree limbs in an old outhouse foundation by Bethlehem School, an abandoned one-room schoolhouse near State Route 32, about 12 miles west of Salem.
State Prosecutor Theodore Allen Bruce said Nash staged the murder to look as though Spencer had been sexually assaulted, although the autopsy report revealed otherwise.
Her panties, shoes and blue jeans were strewn across bushes near the schoolhouse, and her purse with all its contents intact was found a short time later near a bridge, appearing as though it had been tossed from a passing car, Bruce claimed.
Nash appeared calm as he listened to the testimony of the state’s witnesses, even as his lead attorney, Frank Kimberly Carlson, brusquely refuted almost every allegation made by the prosecutor in his opening statement, saying the state had no witnesses to support its claims.
Many of his objections to statements made by Bruce were overruled by Senior Judge Douglas E. Long Jr.
The first day of the Donald “Doc” Nash homicide trial in Rolla on Monday saw a packed courtroom, security screenings on everyone entering the courtroom, four witnesses for the prosecution and a defense attorney angered by allegations made by the prosecutor.
Charged with homicide in the 1982 slaying of 21-year-old Judy Lynn Spencer of Salem, Nash, 65, of Beaufort, appeared in court with a new haircut and several members of a defense team.
The boyfriend of Spencer, Nash was arrested 26 years after Spencer’s homicide. He was charged with her death in March 2008 after a Missouri Highway Patrol investigation revealed his DNA was present on clippings of Spencer’s fingernails.
Spencer’s partially clothed body was found by farmers on March 11, 1982, the day after she went missing. She had been strangled with a shoelace from her own shoe and then shot in the neck with a shotgun. Her wristwatch, still on her arm, was broken, the crystal missing, the time stopped at 9:10.
Spencer’s body was found the next day at 1 p.m., hidden under tree limbs in an old outhouse foundation by Bethlehem School, an abandoned one-room schoolhouse near State Route 32, about 12 miles west of Salem.
State Prosecutor Theodore Allen Bruce said Nash staged the murder to look as though Spencer had been sexually assaulted, although the autopsy report revealed otherwise.
Her panties, shoes and blue jeans were strewn across bushes near the schoolhouse, and her purse with all its contents intact was found a short time later near a bridge, appearing as though it had been tossed from a passing car, Bruce claimed.
Nash appeared calm as he listened to the testimony of the state’s witnesses, even as his lead attorney, Frank Kimberly Carlson, brusquely refuted almost every allegation made by the prosecutor in his opening statement, saying the state had no witnesses to support its claims.
Many of his objections to statements made by Bruce were overruled by Senior Judge Douglas E. Long Jr.
