Appeals court to hear arguments in murder case of ex-Navy SEAL trainee

SPECIAL REPORT: Jennifer Evans Murder

A former Navy SEAL trainee's bid to be cleared of a murder conviction will be argued before the Court of Appeals of Virginia tomorrow.

Dustin Turner, 34, is serving 82 years for the first-degree murder and abduction in 1995 of Jennifer Evans, a 21-year-old pre-med student at Emory University in Atlanta. The two had met at a Virginia Beach nightclub.

A former fellow SEAL trainee, friend and co-defendant, Billy Joe Brown, 36, is serving 72 years for the same crimes. He now says he alone killed Evans, although when they were arrested, each man accused the other of the killing.

Brown, who claims he found religion in prison, says he was drunk and attacked her as the three of them sat in a car in the club's parking lot.

"One minute I was normal, and the next minute I snapped and I started choking her," he testified last year in Virginia Beach Circuit Court. Judge Frederick B. Lowe concluded that Brown's confession was credible and returned the case to the Court of Appeals.

Turner is seeking a writ of actual innocence from the court and to be immediately released. The court must decide if the new testimony is so critical that had it been presented at Turner's trial, "no rational trier of fact" would have convicted him.

His petition argues that the only eyewitnesses to the crime were Turner and Brown.

But in papers filed with the appeals court, the Virginia attorney general's office points out that a witness testified that Turner -- minutes before leaving the club with Evans in the early morning hours of June 19, 1995 -- told him that he, Evans and Brown "were going to have a threesome."

Brown also has changed his story a number of times and is not credible, the attorney general's office says.

"For Brown to have almost immediately killed a woman whom he did not know and whom he had shown no interest in and in a parking lot filled with people at that time makes no sense," the attorney general's office wrote in a brief.

Contact Frank Green at (804) 649-6340 or .