State v. Potter

657 S.W.2d 694, 1983 Mo. App. LEXIS 4106
CourtMissouri Court of Appeals
DecidedAugust 2, 1983
DocketNo. WD 34403
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 657 S.W.2d 694 (State v. Potter) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Missouri Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Potter, 657 S.W.2d 694, 1983 Mo. App. LEXIS 4106 (Mo. Ct. App. 1983).

Opinion

KENNEDY, Judge.

The defendant James Jon Potter was convicted upon jury trial of capital murder, § 565.001, RSMo 1978, and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for 50 years. He appeals.

Finding no prejudicial error in the trial of the ease, we affirm the judgment.

First, the facts:

The murder victim was Ed Schneider, 70 years old, who lived alone in a mobile home located in a rural part of Macon County, near Bevier. His body was found by officers on August 6, 1981, in a wooded field about a quarter of a mile from his residence. His hands and his feet were tied together behind him. His death had resulted from one or more blows to the head, causing a brain injury. It was later learned that his death had occurred on the evening of August 4, 1981.

[696]*696The details of his death were supplied by the trial testimony of Lori Walker and of defendant James Jon Potter, both of them participants in the homicide, and by a statement given by Potter after his arrest which was introduced in evidence at the trial.

Potter was 18 years old at the time of the crime. Lori Walker was his friend. She lived, evidently, in Kansas City, Kansas, and it was from there they started out on their criminal adventure. Potter was well acquainted with Schneider and knew where he lived. The preceding February he had lived with Schneider while he was remodeling a trailer. While living there he had stolen some guns from Schneider. In the process of recovering and restoring the stolen guns to Schneider, some of Potter’s auto-body-repair tools had been given to Schneider by the police. Potter told Lori he was going to steal them back. The events that followed proceeded according to a plan they formulated.

Potter himself had no car. Lori furnished the car. They took a .22 rifle from Lori’s father’s house and put it in the car trunk and struck out from Kansas City, Kansas, toward the vicinity of Schneider’s home. They stopped at Macon and purchased a pellet gun, a container of BB’s, a container of pellets, and two lengths of clothesline.

After it was dark, they drove to a point near the entrance to Schneider’s premises, and stopped their car along the blacktop public highway. There was a lane of some undisclosed distance from the highway entrance to the location of the mobile home. In accordance with their plan, Lori went to the door of the mobile home where Schneider lived. Potter stationed himself behind a building along the side of the lane.

When Schneider responded to Lori’s knock, she told him that she had a problem with her car and asked him to help her get it started. Schneider said he would drive her to Macon for help. He put on his overalls. He furnished himself with a flashlight and put a pistol in his hip pocket. (Lori saw him do this. Potter had expected him to arm himself with the pistol when leaving the trailer.)

As Schneider and Lori walked along the lane toward the highway, Potter stepped out from his hiding place, pointed his rifle at Schneider and ordered him to stop. Schneider shined his flashlight toward Potter and reached for the gun in his pocket. According to Lori, he never got the gun out of his pocket. Lori wrestled him to the ground. She tied his hands behind his back with the clothesline which she had put in her purse. They also gagged him with some material which Lori had in her purse.

According to Lori’s testimony, Potter struck Schneider in the head with the rifle. She heard a “thud noise” and heard Schneider moan. She was unable to remember at trial whether she saw this. She then went to the trailer, and she heard “thud sounds” from the location of where Schneider was lying on the ground, face down. Afterwards the gun was broken and had blood on it.

Potter placed Schneider in the trunk of Lori’s car, drove him out into the field and left him there.

The two of them took several items of property, including guns and tools, from the mobile home and outbuildings, putting them in Lori’s car and Schneider’s. Potter drove Schneider’s car and Lori her own. They returned to Kansas City.

Potter’s own testimony about their plan for the crime was as follows:

We were going to get — go down and try to get Mr. Schneider under gunpoint. That way he wouldn’t be firing, so therefore, he wouldn’t — nobody would get hurt. We was going to tie him up and put him back in the trailer.... She was going to bring him out where I could get him under gunpoint. From there we could tie him up, put him some place where he couldn’t cause us any trouble and I couldn’t cause him any trouble.

Potter’s testimony of events beginning with his encounter with Schneider was as follows:

He was flashing the light in my eyes. Somehow he dragged the .38 from his left-hand pocket. He brought it up and he aimed it at my chest. I was approximately six feet away from him. He had [697]*697it aimed at me. Lori saw that he had it out. She pulled his arm away, then the gun went off.... I had it [the .22 rifle] on my shoulder. I had it in the firing position.... I had more or less my sights locked on to Ed Schneider.

His description of his striking Schneider was as follows:

After the gun had fired, I jumped over a small bush that was there. An obstacle, I think it was a bush. I jumped over it, and Lori Walker was throwing him down on the ground. Ed still had the gun in his hand. She was throwing him down. As he was going down, I hit him. I hit him once in the back of the head on the left side, between him and the ground.

A second blow he described as follows: “After he was down, we were trying to tie him. He kept pushing up with his left arm. At that time I hit him in the left shoulder-blade, enough to push him — I hit him with the rifle butt.... The rifle butt cracked again.”

He said that Schneider was in “good condition” when he left him in the field, unhurt and “talkative,” “yelling for us to let him go.”

Appellant’s points, abbreviated, are as follows:

1. The court erred in allowing the amendment of the information.

The information was allowed-to be amended on the day of the trial by adding the words “with premeditation, deliberately and unlawfully” to characterize the defendant’s act.1 Appellant’s objection to the amendment, made to the trial court and carried forward in his brief here is, that he had had no preliminary hearing on the charge of capital murder; that the original information had omitted those words, charging defendant only with manslaughter, § 565.005, RSMo 1978.

We have not been furnished with the original complaint upon which the preliminary hearing was held, §§ 544.020, 544.250, 544.350, RSMo 1978; Rules 22.02, 22.07(c), and we have no way to consider the appellant’s point that he had had no preliminary hearing upon the charge of capital murder. Rule 30.04(a); State v. Brown, 654 S.W.2d 290 (Mo.App.1983); State v. McClain, 602 S.W.2d 458, 459 (Mo.App.1980).

The appellant makes no contention that the information upon which the case was tried was insufficient, the issue before the court in the two cases cited by him, State v. Brooks,

Related

State v. Toland
708 S.W.2d 293 (Missouri Court of Appeals, 1986)
State v. Ehlers
685 S.W.2d 942 (Missouri Court of Appeals, 1985)

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Bluebook (online)
657 S.W.2d 694, 1983 Mo. App. LEXIS 4106, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-potter-moctapp-1983.