New trial set in Henrico slaying

A brief glimpse by jurors at inadmissible portions of a taped interview with murder defendant Wyatt Ward Hollar was enough to win the former Henrico County resident a new trial.

In a ruling that comes almost three months to the day after Hollar was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison after a four-day trial, Henrico Circuit Judge Gary A. Hicks yesterday declared a mistrial and set a new trial for May 4.

Hollar, 29, was released on $250,000 bond last night, pending a retrial.

In the courtroom yesterday, he slouched in his chair momentarily at the decision while across the room Dawn Wilson, the mother of victim Danielle Wilson, stared blankly at a far wall.

"We are staying strong and united," she said later as she left the courthouse accompanied by family and friends, her face reddened and sad.

She had pushed investigators for months after her daughter's February 2007 death, arguing that the James Madison University graduate who was headed to graduate school had been murdered and could not have killed herself. Part of the investigation included her daughter's exhumation, which Wilson watched.

Hollar's family hugged and fought back tears. "There's never been any doubt in our minds that he didn't do this. I'm so happy the court was fair in its ruling," Hollar's mother, Patricia Hollar, said.

A National Guard member and Virginia Military Institute graduate, Hollar had been in jail since Oct. 31, the day a jury convicted him of shooting a casual friend whom he'd been dating for a matter of weeks.

In the early morning hours of Feb. 11, during an argument and after a night of drinking, the couple ended up at Hollar's apartment on Glenside Drive.

The rendezvous quickly became a death scene.

In an even voice, Hollar called 911 -- "I got a chick here; she shot herself," he reported -- while Wilson's dying gasps from a "sucking chest wound," as Hollar called it, could be heard in the background.

Hollar methodically kept pressure on the wound and was so preoccupied, he would say, that he momentarily refused to admit rescue workers.

Hollar casually explained to detectives that Wilson, who was from Fredericksburg and just days from her 26th birthday, had grabbed a gun from beneath a seat cushion, whirled away from him and shot herself in the chest while she held the gun backward.

Forensics evidence about the distance of the gun from the victim was in dispute and Hollar was mistaken about the bullet's direction of travel; he was 90 degrees off.

The seven-woman, five-man jury didn't believe him, siding instead with prosecution experts who said the gun had to have been fired from a distance longer than the length of Wilson's arm and in a different direction than Hollar first mentioned to police.

A key segment, several minutes long, of a 90-minute police interview with Hollar the night of the shooting was played to the jury during the trial. It was a key point of interest during deliberations.

But prosecutors inadvertently sent back to the jury the entire tape, including portions that the day before trial Judge Hicks had ordered not to be shown.

Defense lawyer Cary Bowen argued successfully that the redacted portions showing Hollar chatting with a guard could be prejudicial, suggesting that Hollar wasn't sufficiently emotional about his friend's death.

Hicks ordered the jury back to the courtroom Thursday and questioned each member about what they recalled seeing of the tape.

Jurors said they fast-forwarded the tape to the portion played in court but there were differences among jurors about what they had specifically seen. Nine jurors said the viewed portion matched what had been seen in court; three said they saw additional material, with one juror specifically recalling Hollar talking about his duties at Guantanamo Bay and about how he handled Wilson's wound.

Hicks delayed a ruling until yesterday, spending several hours reviewing the tape, he said.

On the bench yesterday, Hicks praised the work of the jury but said jurors had accessible to them portions of the tape that had clearly been redacted.

He sided with Bowen's argument that a 1981 state Supreme Court case established reversible error when redacted material is available to the jury, even without a finding that jurors have not been biased.

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or .