SEAL trainee’s mom wants to free her son from prison

SPECIAL SERIES: What Happened To Jennifer Evans?
Fourth of five parts

VIRGINIA BEACH Not for one moment did Linda Summitt believe her son had committed murder.

She first recognized trouble in Dustin A. Turner's voice when he called home to Bloomington, Ind., on June 27, 1995.

"I have to tell you something," he said. "I witnessed a murder."

He said he could not tell her more.

Summitt kept trying to call Dustin back at Fort A.P. Hill, where he and other SEAL trainees drilled with small arms. An officer said everything would be fine with her son. Summitt arranged to have Dustin meet with a lawyer.

Early the next morning, the lawyer called to report Dustin had been arrested along with fellow trainee Billy Joe Brown on charges of killing a young woman named Jennifer Evans. Dustin claimed to have been a shocked witness to Billy choking her to death.

Summitt hired one of the most prominent criminal defense lawyers in Hampton Roads, but Dustin was convicted of murder and sentenced to 82 years in prison.

Summitt, a soft-spoken, 45-year-old second-grade teacher, set out to free him. She studied legal documents and wrote letters on Dustin's behalf to public officials, church leaders, civic groups and reporters.

Each letter contained a small photo of Dustin in his Navy uniform. Some people showed only pity for a heartbroken mother. They underestimated Summitt.

She visited Dustin in prison every two months with help from family and friends, who gave her money and frequent-flier miles. Summitt told her story to anyone who would listen, and some strangers allowed her to stay at their homes when she visited him in prison.

Summitt poured more than $200,000 into her son's defense and the family's campaign to clear his name, including a second mortgage on their home and much of their retirement money.

Dustin was running out of appeals.

. . .

Dustin had spent seven years behind bars by the spring of 2003, when he called his mother from Augusta Correctional Center near Staunton with jaw-dropping news: Billy had found religion in prison and started telling everyone he had killed Jennifer by himself.

The news came from an inmate recently transferred to Augusta from the prison at Keen Mountain in Southwest Virginia, where Billy was serving a 72-year sentence.

Summitt did not want to approach Billy herself. She had written him after the trial asking him to recant and free Dustin, and she had received a terse reply. She chose a lawyer at random from the town of Richlands, the nearest town to Keen Mountain, and asked him to obtain a sworn statement from Billy.

Billy was willing.

He told the lawyer he had found God and did not want to stand before him as a liar on judgment day. He said he choked Jennifer to death in Dustin's car, in the nightclub parking lot, simply because he was very drunk and out of sorts. "I just snapped," he would testify later.

Summitt drove to Richlands to pick up the affidavit, which she believed would be Dustin's ticket to freedom. But she was not aware of Virginia's 21-day rule that prohibits new evidence from being introduced into criminal cases more than 21 days after a conviction.

The 21-day deadline, designed to keep the appeals process from dragging endlessly, is the strictest in the nation. The General Assembly created an exception to the rule for DNA and other biological evidence in 2001 -- after the state nearly executed Earl Washington for a killing he did not commit.

Two years later, the legislature considered a bill to allow certain other types of evidence and testimony after 21 days.

State Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, one of the key lawmakers involved, recalled recently that the bill was designed to include only powerful evidence such as undiscovered videotapes or testimony from witnesses unavailable at the trials.

Stolle said he and other members of the state crime commission specifically agreed the new law should not allow Billy's changed story to overturn Dustin's murder conviction. Stolle went as far as to call Jennifer's mother and reassure her of that.

But Summitt saw opportunity in the proposed bill. She lobbied for it, collecting thousands of signatures on a petition in Virginia Beach in support of the bill, which subsequently became law.

She carried a separate petition asking then-Gov. Mark R. Warner to pardon Dustin. Not everyone would sign it; a few people she approached in Virginia Beach remembered the case and spoke harshly of Dustin.

. . .

But Dustin's plea for clemency won support from a surprise source: The foreman of his jury wrote a letter saying most jurors did not believe he killed Jennifer but didn't understand the law and didn't want to let Dustin walk.

Warner did not pardon Dustin.

Late last year, however, the Virginia Court of Appeals agreed to review Dustin's case in light of the new law allowing testimony after 21 days.

One appeals court judge had to sit out the case -- Robert Humphreys, who as Virginia Beach commonwealth's attorney in 1995 had sent Dustin and Billy to prison.

Under the new state law, the testimony had to be so credible and significant that if it had been offered at the trial, "no rational trier of fact could have found proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." The Court of Appeals assigned Virginia Beach Circuit Judge Frederick Lowe to listen to Billy's latest confession and decide if it was credible.

After 13 years, this was a chance.

Summitt pictured Dustin walking out of prison, getting a fresh start, applying for a new driver's license. She called him a fine young man who froze and panicked in the face of Billy's sudden violence. "He had just turned 20," Summitt said, and "he had been brainwashed" by the Navy to take orders and be loyal. "He really did let Billy Brown guide him around."

Summitt said her heart aches for Jennifer's mother. "We have been on totally different paths, but really, we're both victims."

. . .

From her home outside Atlanta, Jennifer's mother, Delores Evans, has followed Summitt's crusade with a mixture of frustration and anger.

"I understand that when you're a mother, you'd probably do anything for the good of your child," Evans said in a recent interview. "But Turner's mother could be a little more level-headed. He's not the choirboy he wants people to believe and that she apparently believes."

Evans, a retired computer specialist, said Summitt wrote her several letters after the trial, saying Dustin had not killed Jennifer. Evans read only the first one and did not respond.

At first, the Evanses had focused their anger at the SEALs, accusing the Navy in a federal lawsuit of transforming Dustin and Billy into "lethal weapons" who thought they stood above the law. A judge threw out the suit in 1998.

But afterward, Evans said, a SEAL contacted her through her pastor and told her the SEALs had cleaned up their act as a result of the case. His phone call was "one of the blessings God sent me," she said.

Evans said she believes Dustin and Billy choked her daughter unconscious and then drove her out of the parking lot into some other location where they meant to have sex with her and ended up choking her to death.

But even if Dustin is telling the truth, she said, he failed to stop a killing and then drove the passed-out killer 45 miles out of town so they could dump the body together. Evans said Dustin's bland admission of poor judgment burns against her mental image of Jennifer's body lying in the woods for nine days.

"Turner was there, he had every chance to clear himself of any wrongdoing," Evans said. "All he had to do was honk the horn, or yell for help or drive to the police station."

She said Virginia should toughen its laws if everything Dustin admits to doing adds up to nothing but a misdemeanor. Delores and Al stay in touch with Jennifer's friends and with the annual recipients of a scholarship at Emory University in her name, established by some Virginia Beach police officers.

Delores remembers Jennifer smiling and flipping back her shoulder-length brown hair, and the way she "always gave her best even when she wasn't the best at something." The Evanses did not relish returning to Virginia Beach after 12 years to face Dustin and Billy again.

"Every time I start to get my little canoe balanced under me, a letter will come or the phone will ring or some other motion will be filed," she said. "Only with the help of God am I able to get through this. That's my only solace.

NEXT: One man changes his story, but will it free the other?

"Whatever happens here on Earth, God knows who's guilty and who's innocent, and he will have his day of reckoning."
Contact Bill Geroux at (757) 498-2820 or .