A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god

THE

LONG

TRIAL

OF

CLESTON

HIGGINBOTTOM

JACKSONVILLE, N.C.

1988

The Carolina countryside that rushed past the patrol car taking Cleston Higginbottom up U.S. 258 to the prison in Raleigh was familiar and flat.

But Higginbottom’s life was going downhill, and going fast, the breathtaking plunge irreversible.

An Onslow County Superior Court jury had heard the evidence, said he was guilty of child-molesting and gone home.

For Higginbottom, a sergeant in the Marines, there would be no more home, no more Camp Le Jeune, no more summer barbecues in the trailer park off N.C. 24.

He was losing his life as slowly and helplessly as a drowning man.

Even so, as Higginbottom rode to prison, he was not sorry he had declined the prosecutor's offer of a plea bargain. A three-year sentence would have been short compared with life in prison, but he had refused to make a deal.

Higginbottom had told his wife he would not plead guilty to something he did not do.

He never imagined the criminal justice system could fail him so.

Higginbottom, who grew up in Louisville and southern Indiana, was convicted Sept. 16, 1983, of a first-degree sexual offense in Jacksonville.

Fifteen months later, one of his accusers -- Marine Sgt. Rodney Morrell, the stepfather of Higginbottom's alleged victim -- pleaded no contest to a child-molesting charge.

Although the cases were unrelated, Morrell's plea has raised doubts about Higginbottom's guilt.

Law enforcement officials say Higginbottom was convicted on a thread of evidence, and the case against him might never have gotten off the ground had Morrell's plea come first.

"It's pure speculation," said Joseph Stroud, who was an assistant district attorney when he prosecuted Higginbottom, "but I question whether the Higginbottom case would have ever reached trial."

The mother of the girl Higginbottom was convicted of molesting said she "never really doubted" her daughter's story five years ago. But now she wonders what really happened.

"I know it's possible to convict people of things they didn't do," she said. "I'm not as sure now as I used to be. I agree there's a lot of fishy stuff.

"All I can say is there is reasonable doubt."

Because of Morrell's plea, prison has become even more maddening for Higginbottom, who has served almost five years of a life sentence.

"The worst part is I've lost my family, my sons," Higginbottom said. "I've lost five years of my time with them."

His boys -- one handicapped, one frustrated and angry -- are growing up, and the woman who was his wife has moved with them back to southern Indiana near Louisville.

Higginbottom, the oldest child and only son of Cleston Hue and Arcie Marie Higginbottom, spent his own boyhood in the Louisville area.

He was born Nov. 25, 1958, in Waukegan, Ill., but his parents moved to Jeffersonville, Ind., when he was 4.

For years, his father ran a produce route in Louisville, and the family often visited Churchill Downs, the Kentucky State Fair and the planetarium at the University of Louisville.

At 17, Higginbottom graduated from Jeffersonville High School, and "on the spur of the moment" he decided to follow a friend into the U.S. Marine Corps.

In July 1977, he went to Parris Island, S.C., for boot camp. Three months later he went to Camp Le Jeune, the Marine base near Jacksonville, N.C.

In 1981, Higginbottom was transferred to California. On the way, he went home for a month and married Nina Marie, his boyhood sweetheart.

The newlyweds crammed two large military duffel bags, a suitcase, a uniform bag, a briefcase and a pup tent into a new Honda 400 and headed west. "Talk about a rough ride," Higginbottom said.

He was transferred back to Camp Le Jeune in 1982, and that summer the couple's second son, Lucas Wayne, was born. Space was tight -- they already had another son, Kenny, who was almost 2 -- so they moved to a larger trailer.

Their new home was cramped, but it would be the last place Higginbottom lived that was not enclosed by a fence laced with razor wire.

The Higginbottoms met Jeanne Harsen and her 3-year-old daughter, Sandy, in December 1982.

The mother and child had been living with Morrell, a Marine buddy of Higginbottom, for almost a year. The little girl has always thought of Morrell as her father, her mother said.

Morrell and Higginbottom, who worked in the same supply unit at Camp Le Jeune, had discussed Marine life over many a beer since 1980 -- the year they met.

Higginbottom was 21 then, Morrell 31. Higginbottom valued their friendship. "When a boy's lonely and far from home, that means something," he said.

In 1983, they worked in the same unit. Higginbottom installed radios -- some weighing as much as 300 pounds -- on jeeps.

Morrell and Miss Harsen often visited the Higginbottoms. The couples frequently held barbecues together across the wide, sun-bleached highway from Camp Le Jeune.

One day in the spring of 1983, Higginbottom hurt his back as he tried to lift a jeep. A doctor prescribed roboxin, a muscle relaxant, but it did not relieve the pain.

In early May, Miss Harsen and Morrell asked the Higginbottoms if they would baby-sit with Sandy for a week later in the month. Miss Harsen and Morrell planned a vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains on a motorcycle; there would be no room for the girl.

It would not be Sandy's first overnight stay with the Higginbottoms, her mother testified. In fact, she slept over "every couple of weeks," her mother said in court.

The couples often baby-sat for each other, she said. It was convenient.

They lived only four blocks from each other in neighboring trailer parks off N.C. 24 -- known in Jacksonville as Le Jeune Boulevard.

When Higginbottom got home from base May 18, he was surprised to see Sandy. She was not supposed to arrive until the next day.

On Saturday afternoon, May 21, the Higginbottoms cleaned the house, then went to K mart. On the way home, they drove past a drive-in theater to see whether there was a movie playing that might interest the children.

There was not, so they decided to make popcorn that night.

The Higginbottoms bought butter and a six-pack of beer at a grocery store and went home.

Once they arrived, they put a ribbon on the beer and took it next door to their friend and landlord, Ed Cowell. It was Cowell's birthday.

Cowell drank five beers, but Higginbottom had none, Cowell testified.

Mrs. Higginbottom left with the children at 8:30 p.m. Her husband stayed and watched television.

Higginbottom went home between 10 and 11, he testified, and "raised the roof" when he saw that the children were still up.

He and his wife promptly put the children to bed. As usual, Kenny and Sandy slept together in the rear bedroom -- the one closest to the Cowells' trailer.

Higginbottom, his back hurting and stiff, lay on the love seat in the living room. His wife lay on the couch. The last thing Higginbottom remembered was watching "Saturday Night Live."

His wife woke him up the next morning. He was still on the love seat.

Higginbottom did not recall getting up all night, he testified. And he was not sure he could have.

In the morning, he could not straighten up to walk.

Mrs. Higginbottom helped her husband off the love seat and dragged him to the bathroom, where she eased him into a tub of hot water.

The children already were dressed for Sunday school. Sandy's behavior was normal, Mrs. Higginbottom testified.

At a cookout Sunday night, Higginbottom played monster with the children: He growled and chased them; they laughed and ran.


At dinner time on Tuesday, May 24, Sandy went home with her parents, who had just returned from the mountains.

The three came back at 8:30 p.m. It was not a social visit.

"We have a problem," Miss Harsen said.

Sandy normally liked visiting the Higginbottoms, Miss Harsen said. This time, Higginbottom testified, the girl "acted scared of me, which was totally out of character."

Soon Higginbottom, too, became upset. Sandy, he learned, had whispered to her mother at the dinner table that "Higgie" had molested her Saturday night, Miss Harsen testified.

"I couldn't believe it," Higginbottom said. He denied it and stormed out of the trailer. Morrell soon joined him outside.

Sandy had never before complained of being molested after staying with the Higginbottoms, her mother said.

Higginbottom testified that Miss Harsen and Morrell offered explanations for the girl's story, including:

She was trying to teach her mother a lesson for leaving her alone for so long.

She was mad at the Higginbottoms for keeping her.

But Miss Harsen testified that the Higginbottoms were the ones who had offered all the explanations.

Mrs. Higginbottom sternly asked Kenny whether he knew of anything happening Saturday night. He said no, she testified.

There was confusion. Sandy kept changing her story, first saying it happened, then saying it did not, Mrs. Higginbottom testified. "She was switching back and forth. She was upset at the time."

Higginbottom said he thought the crisis was over when the visit ended an hour later.

But when he got home from work about 5 p.m. the next day, his wife told him Miss Harsen and Morrell had taken Sandy to the mental health center in

Jacksonville and planned to go to the sheriff next.

Keith Taylor, who was an Onslow County deputy sheriff, visited Higginbottom on base May 29 to question him.

Several days later, the Higginbottoms drove their van to the home of Miss Harsen and Morrell to pick up a bicycle. Sandy saw them and hurried to the door of the van with a caterpillar on her finger, Mrs. Higginbottom testified.

Sandy said, " 'Higgie, Higgie, Nina,' " Mrs. Higginbottom testified.

Then the little girl asked Higginbottom for a kiss, he said.

Sandy's mother still cannot explain why her daughter was not afraid of Higginbottom that day.

"She wanted to play," she said. "Kids are like that, you know."

Higginbottom was arrested June 8 and charged with a first-degree sexual offense. He was accused of forcing Sandy to perform oral sex on him.

Except for being cited once for speeding and once for reckless driving, Higginbottom had never before been in trouble as a civilian.

The military had convicted him four years before of wearing a camouflage uniform off base. But he said that his van had run out of gas on Le Jeune Boulevard and that he had been forced to walk back along the highway median.
Stroud, the assistant district attorney, offered Higginbottom a deal: He could plead guilty to a lesser charge -- indecent liberties with a minor -- and be sentenced to three years in jail.

Under the agreement, Higginbottom would be eligible for parole in 15 months. A conviction on the sexual offense charge, on the other hand, would land him in prison for life without the possibility of parole for 20 years.

Stroud said he offered the plea bargain because he was not confident about his chances of winning in court.

"It was not the strongest case I ever tried," he said.

Taylor, the deputy sheriff, said the evidence was unusually weak for presentation to a jury.

"In other cases I worked, I don't remember it having gone to trial without having more evidence than that," Taylor said.

There was no admission of guilt, no physical evidence and no expert witness -- at least one of which usually is necessary to ensure a conviction, he said.

Taylor also remembered that Miss Harsen did not press the case as forcefully as most mothers. "I never really wanted to see him go to jail," she said.

Still, Sandy's story could not be ignored. "She appeared to be truthful and seemed to know the difference between right and wrong," Taylor said.

She also was remarkably explicit in her description of certain sex acts, Stroud said. The question remained: How could a child of 4 be so knowledgeable about such things?

"At the time of the trial," Stroud said, "I certainly had no reservations about her story."

Higginbottom, who was indicted July 26, 1983, had no reservations about his story, either. He pleaded not guilty, and the court appointed him an attorney, W.M. "Mac" Cameron III of Jacksonville.

The trial was set for Sept. 15.

Things began ominously for Higginbottom.

His attorney, a tall, red-haired man three years out of law school, subpoenaed 13 character witnesses. One of them could not be found.

The missing witness, a Marine named Wesley Simkins, had once lived with Morrell and Miss Harsen.

Some people thought Simkins resembled Higginbottom, the girl's mother said, but Higginbottom was much stockier.

At the time of the alleged crime, Simkins lived with the Higginbottoms and had a key to their trailer, Miss Harsen said. But he was out of town the night of May 21, Higginbottom testified.

He was out of town during the trial, too. Cameron had to settle for 12 character witnesses and the Higginbottoms.

Sandy -- "a really cute, winsome little girl," Stroud said -- was the star witness for the prosecution. Her mother provided corroborating testimony, telling the jury what her daughter had said at the dinner table.

No one else testified for the prosecution -- including Morrell, who married Miss Harsen two weeks before the trial.

Superior Court Judge Anthony Brannon allowed Cameron and Stroud to question the girl to determine whether she was competent to testify. At one point during the pretrial hearing, Brannon asked Sandy whether she ever wrote on the blackboard at Sunday school.

"There's no blackboard," she said. "There's a green board."

The judge was impressed. He denied a motion by Cameron to exclude the girl's testimony.

During her testimony, Sandy sat in a small chair in front of the witness stand. Sandy told the jury she once had a nightmare about a "munster," but said it had not looked like Higginbottom.

"What's a 'munster' look like?" Cameron asked her. "Are they big?"

"No," the girl said. "They're real big -- just like my daddy."

"The big monster thing," Cameron said later, "was sort of the point of the jury argument.

"We contended all along that almost by the nature of a 4-year-old and the lack of ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, there should have been reasonable doubt."

Sandy sometimes changed her answers, depending on how the question was phrased.

When Stroud first asked her whether anybody came into the bedroom where she was sleeping the night of May 21, she said no.

Stroud then changed the question: "Did Higgie ever come in there?"

"Yeah," she said.

Sandy told her mother that she cried when she was molested, Mrs. Morrell testified.

But Donna Cowell, wife of Ed Cowell, the Higginbottoms' landlord, has a different story.

Mrs. Cowell was up most of that night with her newborn son in the trailer next door, where it always had been easy to hear the Higginbottoms walking and talking.

Mrs. Cowell had overheard the Higginbottoms have many a quarrel, even with the windows closed. One night, just a week before Higginbottom was accused of molesting Sandy, Mrs. Cowell saw him sitting outside on the back of a car. His wife, he said, was going to leave him.

The night of May 21 was hot, and all the windows in both trailers were open, Mrs. Cowell said. The new mother and her baby were in a tilt-out on the side of the trailer, placing them even closer to the Higginbottoms' rear bedroom.

She heard no child crying next door. The night was quiet, she said, the silence broken only occasionally by a dog barking or by someone walking in the street.

Nagging questions remained as the jury retired to deliberate the afternoon of Sept. 16.

Once in the jury room, the 12 men and women who would decide Higginbottom's fate could not agree.

Jury member Judy Gordon suggested praying, so they all did. When the foreman called for the next vote, "my hand went up immediately," Mrs. Gordon said.

The jury returned with a verdict: guilty as charged.

Taylor was slightly surprised. "What impressed me was that with such a small amount of evidence, the jury did find him guilty," he said.

Jury member Dorothy Meekins said Higginbottom's character witnesses had seemed undesirable. "They were not the boy-next-door, girl-next-door types," she said.

Mrs. Gordon said she based her vote on the "actions of the child while she was being questioned."

"I have grandchildren about that age," she said. "When they don't want to talk about something, they'll hang their head and change the subject. That's the very thing she did."

Mrs. Meekins said Sandy's testimony had been too detailed to be contrived.

"The little girl was very explicit about what happened to her," Mrs. Meekins said.

But Mrs. Cowell said she did not think Sandy would necessarily have had to experience sex to be knowledgeable about it. Morrell and Miss Harsen kept Playboy and Penthouse magazines on the coffee table "where the girl could pick them up and look at them," she said.

It seemed certain to the jury, though, that "somebody had done something to the child," Mrs. Gordon said.

Sandy's mother said that a psychologist at the mental health center had talked to Sandy and concluded that she had been molested.

Since the trial, however, more and more doubts have arisen about who did it and when it happened.

"It's an awful thing, our judicial system," Mrs. Gordon said. "How can you be sure somebody's not lying to save their own skin? You never know.

"You just can't know for sure unless you see it with your own eyes."

The trial was hard on the jury, Mrs. Meekins said. "I was all to pieces when I made the decision."

Taylor said one member of the jury was so upset after the trial that she called him at home.

Higginbottom was nearing the end of his first year in prison at Raleigh when Morrell was arrested Aug. 8, 1984, and charged with two counts of rape and one of indecent liberties involving a 5-year-old girl.

The girl, Stephanie Joi Kocis, was Morrell's stepdaughter from a marriage that ended in 1982. The charges against Morrell stemmed from incidents earlier that year.

An Aug. 10, 1984, report by the U.S. Naval Investigative Service includes an interview with Stephanie in which she relates explicitly how Morrell abused her sexually.

The report said that Stephanie had described playing "Mom and Dad" with Morrell. It was a game he had taught her, she said.

A Navy investigation was not done in the Higginbottom case.

Soon after Morrell was arrested, his marriage to Sandy's mother foundered. They separated the same month and were divorced March 27, 1987. She has since remarried, and her name is now Jeanne Moler.

In December 1984, Morrell pleaded no contest to the indecent liberties charge. He was sentenced to eight years.

The other charges were dismissed because North Carolina authorities had no jurisdiction over them. They allegedly occurred in Oklahoma.

Stroud said he thought jurors in Higginbottom's case would have "seriously considered" that Sandy's stepfather was an admitted child molester -- if only they had known.

Cameron said Morrell's plea "solved one of the riddles of the case."

"That was how the 4-year-old girl could have described detailed sexual acts if she did not experience them" with Higginbottom.

Would the knowledge that Sandy lived with an admitted child molester have affected the outcome of the trial?

"I'm sure it would," said Mrs. Meekins, the jury member.

"It might would have," said Mrs. Gordon, another jury member. "You would certainly have to consider that -- somebody right there in the same house with her. It looks bad."

Before Morrell was arrested, Cameron appealed Higginbottom's conviction on the grounds that his client had not received a fair trial.

Cameron cited the way Stroud had been allowed to "embrace (and) talk softly" to Sandy whenever she became upset during the trial.

The appeal failed.

"I have no reason to believe the district attorney did anything that would have influenced her testimony," Cameron said. But he added: "You always wonder. You never know."

Higginbottom said he "fully believed something would be done" to free him after Morrell pleaded guilty.

Morrell is free now, but Higginbottom spends his days and nights in the crowded medium-security prison at Burgaw, N.C., waiting for the year 2003.

That is when he will be eligible for parole.

Meanwhile, life goes on without him. "He mentioned he still could not believe he was paying for . . . something he hadn't done," said Mrs. Cowell, who has visited Higginbottom twice.

Higginbottom and his wife were divorced Jan. 8, 1986, and he sees his sons infrequently. The youngest has a bone deficiency in his hip and has to wear a brace on his leg. The oldest is "raising hell," Higginbottom said.

"He needs his father."

Last September, Cameron prepared a motion for a new trial that said "new evidence has been discovered."

"This evidence . . . is that the adult male living in the victim's household at the time of this offense has admitted to the commission of sexual acts on another minor female," said the motion, dated Sept. 14, 1987.

It was never filed.

Cameron said he did not press for a new trial then because he did not think the Morrell case alone would have convinced a judge to overturn the verdict.

"If you file a motion for a new trial and lose it, it's tougher to get the court to consider the same case later on," he said.

Cameron said he was waiting for the girl's mother, to say, " 'Well, maybe he didn't do it.' "

"When we file a motion like this, the people most likely to object would be the parents," he said.

Sandy's mother, who now lives in South Carolina, seems unlikely to object.

"I hope to God," she said, "that I haven't done something wrong."

Friends of Higginbottom's family have hired a private detective in Lexington, Ky., to dig for evidence that might vindicate him. The detective, Ed Adams, has taken the case at a loss because of Higginbottom's ties to the state.

"He's one of ours -- a Kentucky boy," Adams said.

Someday, if he ever gets out of prison, Higginbottom would go back to Kentucky and try "hitting them up for a job" at the General Electric plant in Louisville, he said.

Cameron said Higginbottom seemed to be a "straight shooter"

"As far as I know, he never lied to me, and I can't say that for anyone else," Cameron said.

"He maintained his innocence in this throughout. He never changed his story."


ONE-
WAY

TICKET

LEXINGTON

1988

Viji Jeganathan flies home tonight, first-class.

She will sit in the most expensive part of the plane because she might need the reserve oxygen supply available there.

Leukemia is like that.

Miss Jeganathan, 34, is used to thinking of survival spelled with a dollar sign. There was a time when a $175,000 bone-marrow transplant -- one she could not afford -- would have saved her life.

That time is gone.

It ran out as she waited for donations from friends and strangers to reach an amount that would help her pay for the procedure.

The University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center wanted $125,000 down before doing the transplant, but Miss Jeganathan had only $50,000 in health insurance.

"It's a tough situation," said William K. Massie, hospital administrator. "We wrestle and wrestle with these types of things."

A bone-marrow transplant is one of only a few procedures that are so costly to the hospital that the patient is required to pay a "significant portion" in advance, Massie said.

Bone-marrow transplants are not considered emergency procedures becaus many patients choose a different type of treatment, he said.

Nevertheless, doctors at UK have performed expensive procedures on "a lot of people" who could not afford them, said Dr. Michael Messino, a cancer specialist. Medicaid pays for most of those cases, he said.

But Miss Jeganathan, a UK student who is a native of Sri Lanka, is not a U.S. citizen. She was therefore ineligible for that kind of financial aid.

"That," Messino said, "is the very unfortunate part of the entire story."

The story began when the leukemia was diagnosed in November 1986. Since then, Miss Jeganathan has been hospitalized several times and has undergone intensive chemotherapy just as often.

She has been in remission twice: from May until December 1987 and from January until last week.

When her second remission began, doctors started searching for a bone- marrow donor for the transplant, Messino said. They had found one by early February, he said.

But Miss Jeganathan could not afford the procedure.

Friends began raising money for her in early March. Donations to a trust fund at a Lexington bank rose to $18,000 in the last two months.

But while Miss Jeganathan waited for the money, complications that made a transplant impossible arose.

In late March, the chemotherapy caused her heart to fail. Miss Jeganathan said her doctors told her they would have to wait to see if she recovered fully before doing the transplant.

Last week, as she waited for her heart to mend, Miss Jeganathan began throwing up. She visited the doctor and discovered her remission had ended.

Time was up.

The most successful transplants are done for patients who are in remission because there is less of the leukemia to kill then, Messino said. And Miss Jeganathan's heart almost certainly would not survive the procedure now, he said.

"One thing an oncologist does not do is cause injury that would shorten a life span," Messino said.

Even chemotherapy was out of the question. Miss Jeganathan was too weak to withstand the side effects of the aggressive drugs, and she decided against the less potent ones.

"I decided to have whatever time left without any treatment," she said.

So she flies home tonight to Colombo, Sri Lanka. About $7,000 from the trust fund will pay for first-class plane tickets for Miss Jeganathan and her mother, said Cyndi Weaver, president of the UK Student Government Association.

The student association organized the fund drive, but money was "raised and sent by a lot of people," Miss Weaver said.

She said the group probably would decide next week what to do with the rest of the money. It might be used to establish a scholarship in Miss Jeganathan's name or a relief fund for ill students, Miss Weaver said.

Miss Jeganathan is thankful for the money. But she knows now that it cannot help her -- even if it once could have.

"At the time, it really bothered me that money was standing in my way," she said, smiling. "But now I don't care."

Yesterday, as she sat surrounded by friends in her apartment on Limestone, she said she felt "peaceful."

Another group of friends had visited her Saturday with some rare good news. They brought a letter from the chairman of the computer science department at UK that said she had fulfilled all the requirements for a master's degree in computer science.

Miss Jeganathan, who earned a master's degree in statistics in 1984, continued to work on her thesis in computer science despite her illness.

"She's getting the degree because she completed her course work, nothing else," said F.D. Lewis, director of graduate studies for the computer science department.

Miss Jeganathan will get a diploma, Lewis said. On it will be the date of some day in August.

That seemed far away yesterday as Miss Jeganathan sat on a couch in her apartment. Beside her was Kate Fouquier, the nurse who had cared for her at the medical center.

Both women cried. The way the nurse hugged her patient, neither could see the rain falling outside the window.