After the verdict was rendered, Jocelyn Earnest’s family finally had free access to the home where their loved one had lived and died. Her sister and mother, Laura Rogers and Joyce Young, called her friend Jennifer Kerns, who accompanied them to Pine Bluff Drive.
All three hearts clenched and burned when they looked at the cutout chunk in the carpet where Jocelyn fell to the floor and died. Other than what forensics had taken, nothing had been altered since Jocelyn’s death more than two years earlier. Jennifer cleaned out the litter box and the refrigerator, now filled with moldy and sour food. The pain of their loss swelled as they went through her belongings.
The prosecution had taken possession of Jocelyn’s private journals pretrial, not allowing family, friends, or media to read them at length. They felt a bit freer with the contents after the trial was over. They gave family and select friends copies of one poignant section where, after expressing her fears that Wesley might take her life, Jocelyn said good-bye to the people she loved.
• • •
On April 22, 2010, Jocelyn’s mother, father, and sister filed a lawsuit against Wesley Earnest, Sanzone & Baker PC, and Shameka Wright over the insurance proceeds from the fire at the lake house. Under the provisions of Virginia’s slayer statute, they alleged that Wesley was not entitled to profit from Jocelyn’s death in any way. They claimed that Wesley had unlawfully kept the couple’s home and properties, including Jocelyn’s personal effects and jointly owned vehicles. He then, the documents read, used insurance payments to pay his lawyers and his legal firm knew when they accepted the money that Jocelyn’s relatives had a claim on it.
Joey Sanzone wrote on behalf of his client that the family was not entitled to the money. “The insurance proceeds, which the plaintiff alleges to exist . . . were not acquired as a result of the death.”
Although officials with the sheriff’s office suspected that Wesley burned down the house before the bank could foreclose and before his insurance policy could lapse, no one was ever arrested or charged in the blaze.
• • •
A letter from Patricia Wimmer was published in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph in West Virginia on May 10. It began, “My son, Wesley Earnest, did not kill his wife, Jocelyn Earnest. He is innocent and your help is needed to get the verdict set aside.”
She went on to itemize the points the defense had raised as issues of reasonable doubt: the length of the drive from his home, the unidentified drop of blood in the bathroom, and the credibility of the fingerprint evidence. She also mentioned things that she either misunderstood or remembered incorrectly from the trial, such as the claim that the prosecution’s linguist testified that Wesley could not have written the note found at the scene (he actually said he couldn’t make a statement regarding that), or that Jocelyn’s body had been moved at least eight hours after her death but before police arrived (no one offered evidence of this claim at trial).
She wrote in summation: “This is a case of justice gone wrong. We must help Wesley; he is innocent. He did not, he would not, he could not have killed Jocelyn.” She urged everyone to contact Judge Updike. “Ask him to set aside the jury’s misguided and preconceived verdict of guilty.”
• • •
Although the defense was working on the possibility of entering an appeal in the case and Wesley’s mother was desperate to see one, everyone else thought it was all over. And it was—until one day in early July when Laura Rogers was browsing through the website of the Lynchburg News & Advance and saw a comment posted back on April 11 from someone self-identifying as “bedfordresident.” The anonymous writer claimed to have been a jury member on the Earnest trial and was defending the panel against critics who insisted that they had convicted an innocent man.
The author argued that they had seen lots of evidence—including the journals written by Jocelyn—before finding Wesley guilty. “There was not a doubt in my mind that Wesley Earnest committed murder . . . I personally would have voted for [the] death penalty if it had been a choice we had, but it was not. For anyone to say that we did not give Wesley Earnest a fair trial is absurd.”
Laura called Wes Nance and delivered the news that she knew might call the guilty verdict into question. Nance said, “It was a punch in the gut—my heart hurt for the family—it will be devastating for them to have to go through the trial again.”
Nance called Investigator Mike Mayhew. “We’ve got a problem.”
“What is it?” Mayhew asked.
“I don’t know what to do about it.”
“What’s going on?”
“Somehow, the journals got into the jury room.”
• • •
Wes Nance contacted Joey Sanzone and informed him of the latest development. Wesley Earnest had already been scheduled to appear before the judge on Thursday, July 8, for his formal sentencing. Nance and Sanzone delivered the news to the judge, who immediately postponed that day’s hearing until September.
The first item on the court’s agenda was to discover if “bedfordresident” was, in fact, an actual member of the jury. Updike ordered the Lynchburg News & Advance to disclose the name of the poster, stirring up the question of whether one person’s right to a fair trial trumped another’s right to free speech.
The Roanoke Times sent an email to the News’s city editor Caroline Glickman asking what the newspaper would do. She responded: “Lawyers are reviewing it and will respond as appropriate, as we would with any subpoena.”
In less than a week, they did respond, sending a letter to the court identifying the anonymous author, who told the court that the jurors believed they were allowed to see the journals. “They brought them in on a table of evidence while we were deliberating . . . Some of us picked up a journal and went through it. As we found something interesting, we would read it out loud,” adding that before they looked in them, “there were a couple of people on the fence because they didn’t want to convict without a smoking gun.”
• • •
The investigators worked hard to prepare for the second trial. They set up a situation room in the emergency EEOC room at the sheriff’s department. They reinterviewed a number of witnesses, including Wesley’s former co-workers, his landlords in the Tidewater area, Rick Keuhne at Kramer Tire, and Shameka Wright.
On Monday, July 26, Judge Updike tossed the guilty verdict and set a new trial date for November 8, 2010. Sanzone announced his intention to file for a change of venue.
The prosecution team faced the direst consequences in this new trial. If the Commonwealth prevailed, the defense would be no worse off than they were before a mistrial was declared. If the outcome was different from the first trial, the prosecution would not only lose the justice they thought they had secured for Jocelyn, her family, and her friends, they would also look like bumblers. In life, as in football, the person with the most to lose is the one who made the last mistake.