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Airman’s defense says others may be murderer

BOLLING AIR FORCE BASE, Washington, D.C. — On the second day Airman Calvin Hill faced murder charges in a Bolling Air Force Base courtroom, his defense team focused jurors on two separate airmen they deem “plausible suspects.”

Hill is accused of killing Airman 1st Class Ashley Turner two years ago at Iceland’s Keflavik Naval Air Station. Friends since technical training, both were deployed with the 56th Rescue Squadron.

Hill has pleaded guilty to charges that he learned Turner’s automated teller PIN code, repeatedly stole her bank card and drained roughly $2,700 from her account. But Hill’s three-person Air Force defense team contends the crimes end there.

Defense attorneys say Hill was pegged in a “rush to judgment.” The night Turner was killed, the defense alleges, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigators were confident they knew who killed Turner. The service failed, they said, to more thoroughly investigate two other suspects with means and motives.

One is Tech. Sgt. Jerrod Sunderland, then a staff sergeant. After just 10 days in Iceland, he made the 911 call alerting the base to Turner’s death.

The other is Turner’s boyfriend at the time, Tech. Sgt. Ronald Ellis, now an airman basic. He ran drugs on base, the defense says, pulled Turner into his web and killed her, perhaps because she knew too much.

Neither has been charged in Turner’s death.

Defense grills sergeant who found body

In cross-examination Thursday, Sunderland said he was exercising in the dorm’s third-floor fitness room the night Turner died.

While cooling off from a treadmill run, he said, he noticed two legs on the floor in the dark adjoining spare room. Sunderland said he assumed a dorm resident was annoyed with a roommate and looking for a place to crash.

After about five minutes of sit-ups, Sunderland said, the scene struck him as odd. He went for a better look, peeking into the barely lit room and noticed fluid pooled around the woman’s head.

“So you just thought she was sleeping on a dirty floor,” said defense attorney Capt. Jason Kellhofer, “without a blanket or pillow ... and you didn’t say, ‘Hey, can I help you?’”

“No, sir,” Sunderland said.

The sergeant roused an acquaintance, Airman 1st Class Thomas Seffernick, and returned to the room. Seffernick, who originally suspected an elaborate prank, was convinced when he called 911, turned over the phone and watched Sunderland calmly summon an ambulance.

Hill’s defense team set out to discredit Sunderland, asking why he roused a “witness” to assist with helping the unconscious female he noticed while exercising. They asked why he was not immediately suspicious of the motionless woman he saw through an open doorway in the gym.

The defense also questioned Sunderland about two Uniform Code of Military Justice non-judicial punishments he received in the mid-1990s. They also brought up an Article 32 hearing brought for rape allegations that were later dropped.

Prosecutors, in questioning Sunderland, gave him a forum to explain that the charges were ultimately discredited.

Defense: Boyfriend had motive

Attorneys for both the defense and the prosecution also cross-examined Senior Airman Amber Bullins and Turner’s former roommate, Airman 1st Class Amanda Shepherd. Both friends said Turner was uncomfortable living so close to Hill after she discovered his thieving. But, they said, Turner did not feel threatened by Hill.

She was more distraught, friends said, about her then-boyfriend, Ellis. According to the defense, Ellis was a drug user and seller whose crimes led to an airman basic demotion in June 2005, when he pleaded guilty to using and distributing narcotics, making false statements and obstructing justice.

Ellis also demanded that his relationship with Turner stay hidden, because he liked making advances to other girls, said Bullins, who claimed Ellis hit on her, as well.

“I thought Ashley deserved better,” Bullins said. “I believed him to be a dog.”

The defense claims that Turner had transported drugs on base for Ellis. Bullins said that she never questioned her friend about drugs but that Turner would sometimes show up in the early morning acting strangely. Her toxicology, or drug test, report was negative when Turner was autopsied.

The couple, she said, had a teary fight at a nearby pub the night before Turner was killed.

Defense attorney Capt. Gwendolyn Beitz suggested to jurors that Ellis had something to gain by silencing Turner, who may have known of other crimes. Ellis had cut a deal in that summer 2005 court-martial reducing punishment if he stayed out of trouble, Beitz said. And he later demonstrated to witnesses the “exact manner” in which Turner was stabbed, she said.

“Listen to the very plausible suspects that [investigators] never followed up on,” Beitz said.

The case against Hill

Prosecutors tried to convince jurors that Hill murdered Turner days before she was slated to testify in the court-martial spurred by his thieving.

“All signs of guilt point to one person,” said Maj. Matthew Stoffel of the Air Force Legal Services Agency. “That is the accused.”

From the prosecution’s case: Another airman downstairs heard unexplained knocks from the room above, which was adjacent to the dorm’s gym. A knife used to prepare dinner for Hill’s then-girlfriend, Vannee Youbanphout, is missing. And testimony from Youbanphout, a citizen of Iceland, suggested Hill faked a meeting with a supervisor, slipped out for an hour while they were watching “Top Gun” and washed his clothes when he returned.

In that hour, prosecutors allege, Hill beat Turner with a five- or 10-pound weight, stabbed her once in the neck and left her to die on the dormitory carpet. Investigators later found a spot of blood on one of Hill’s shoes.

Furthermore, they told jurors, Hill confessed all this to a bunkmate during his pretrial incarceration at an Army prison in Mannheim, Germany.

Prosecutors say the defense’s insinuations that other airmen could have killed Turner are “wild speculation.”