With the guilty plea of Darren Winans yesterday to the murders of Bob and Ellen Sheldon of Carthage, it is likely that the failures of the system that led to those deaths will remain unexplored.
Last July, I wrote the following post on The Turner Report. Sadly, it is the only place, as far as I can tell, that this information has been printed:
It took a double murder to finally put Darren Winans behind bars. You see in the state of Missouri, brutally murdering an elderly couple is considered to be a probation violation. Darren Joseph Winans, Jasper, less than a week from his 23rd birhday, is serving five years in the state penitentiary in St. Joseph. At some point during those five years, right now it is scheduled for early next year, Winans will be tried on two counts of first degree murder for the October 2009 slayings of Bob and Ellen Sheldon, owners of the Old Cabin Shop in Carthage.
What has not been mentioned, except in this blog, are the series of second chances, one after another after another that Darren Winans received as he followed a road of crime that authorities say led to the Sheldon home.
According to online court records, earlier this year, Barton County Circuit Court Judge Charles Curless sentenced Winans to serve the remainder of his five-year sentence on a felony charge of stealing a motor vehicle. Winans had served only four months of the sentence before being released on probation just two months before the Sheldons, owners of the Old Cabin Shop in Carthage, were murdered.
Winans pleaded guilty in Barton County Circuit Court March 21, 2006, to stealing a motor vehicle and was sentenced to five years in prison by Curless. At that point, the sentence was suspended and Winans was placed on supervised probation for five years.
His first probation violation was reported Nov. 3, 2006. At a hearing 11 days later, Curless continued the probation. The next violation was filed Jan. 2, 2008, and another was filed Jan. 30. No hearing was held for the first violation. The second violation appears to be his arrest on drug charges in Jasper County. Judge Richard Copeland signed off on a deal that let Winans plead guilty to a misdemeanor and sentenced Winans to one year in the county jail, then suspended the sentence and placed him on unsupervised probation for a year. After that, a probation violation hearing was held in Barton County where Curless sentenced Winans to prison for five years, but kept the case on a 120-day callback. Winans' prison stay began May 1, according to court records, and concluded Aug. 28, six weeks and two days before the Sheldons were murdered.
Winans' next probation violation was reported three days after the murder, according to court records, with two more violations reported Oct. 30 and Dec. 9. The records do not indicate that hearings were scheduled for any of the three alleged violations.
In the meantime, Jasper County Circuit Court records show Winans' "ex-spouse" asked for a child protection order to be issued May 19. During a May 27 hearing, Winans denied her allegations, but Judge Stephen Carlton issued the full order of protection. Whatever the allegations were, online records do not show that any probation violation was filed.
While authorities have charged Winans with two counts of murder, and single counts of burglary and armed criminal action, no one is examining how or why Winans slipped through the cracks in the system. Do more people have to be killed before anything will be done?
That question remains unanswered.
2 comments:
I don't think there's an unanswered question here, Randy. We all know the answer...small-time thefts and drug problems just aren't something our criminal justice system is prepared to get tough on. Sure, sometimes it bites you in the butt, like it did in this case when a small-time loser got out of hand and committed a tragic act. But as a nation, we're evidently willing to roll those dice as we hope that these thugs mostly hurt only each other. Ultimately, I'm sure it's a question of money...the jails are full. Yeah, Sheriff Dunn has lots of cash to blow now, but he spent that on new hats and headquarters and dispatchers...not on additional jail space. And our state's probation officers are underfunded and overworked, so it's unsupervised probation for most of these losers. Besides, if we ever got really tough on white trash losers who do drugs in Southwest Missouri, then I'd be the only one left shopping for groceries at Rameys at 10 p.m.
While Ron make some good points, his otherwise justified attack on Sheriff Dunn would seem to be irrelevant to this case seeing as the big failures occurred in Barton County. According to Randy's excerpt, prior to the murders in this county Barton was the one that dropped the ball.
As far as the greater point, I don't see how a trial would have made that much difference in "answering" Barton County's failures. The long, drawn out publicity would have shown a spotlight on them, to the extent the media would point them out, but I don't see the county's officials saying much of anything, let alone "we made a mistake".
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