Circumstantial Evidence

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - A year after a team of serial snipers went on a cross-country rampage that left 14 dead in seven states, the trial of John Allen Muhammad will begin today as prosecutors armed with mostly circumstantial evidence try to paint the ex-soldier as the controlling mastermind behind the attacks. Investigators have assembled a trove of evidence - which will be laid out in court here over the next several weeks - that includes a loaded rifle found in Muhammad's car, a hole cut into the trunk to serve as a gun port and an accomplice who has admitted his role in the killings.

While her older sister watched, an 8-year-old Brooklyn Park girl on her way to the store was snatched from a street corner, pulled into a truck and driven away. Later, the driver molested her and dumped her in Arbutus.That abduction and assault happened in March 1987. Three years later, the police arrested a suspect.Now a county Circuit Court jury is grappling with the question: Was Jeffrey Meredith Chaney the kidnapper?The jury, which began deliberating yesterday afternoon after 2 days of testimony, was told no one is disputing that the girl was sexually assaulted.

Bruce E. Ivins may not have been the anthrax killer, but scientific, postal and investigative evidence painstakingly compiled by federal agents and released yesterday points strongly to his guilt, as declared by the FBI. The case, detailed by prosecutors and investigators, is circumstantial - there are no witnesses or incriminating statements about the attack that killed five people and terrorized the nation in 2001. But it presents a plausible portrait of Mr. Ivins as the mastermind and sole perpetrator of the first bioterrorist attack in the United States . Mr. Ivins' suicide last week prevents a conclusive resolution of the 7-year-old case.

A Baltimore County jury concluded Monday that Frederick A. Christian killed his girlfriend — the mother of their 2-year-old child — in November 2009 and that he used a gun to do so, even though the weapon was never found and, prosecutors conceded, much of the evidence against him was circumstantial. Testimony in Christian's trial, which lasted more than a week, showed that the body of 23-year-old Jerryell Myesha Foster was dumped near a highway in Virginia, where it was found several months after she disappeared from the apartment in Cockeysville she had shared with the defendant and their daughter.

WASHINGTON -- When people ask me, as everyone seems to, what I think of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, I have to ask, ''Which one?''There were two trials here. There was the inside trial that the jurors saw in which O.J. Simpson was being judged. And there was the outside trial that the rest of us saw, in which American society, particularly its system of justice, was on trial.Two sets of experiencesThe polls showed two-thirds of white Americans believed Mr. Simpson was guilty while two-thirds of blacks thought he was innocent.

Defense attorneys for Duke University lacrosse players implicated in the alleged rape of a 27-year-old stripper said yesterday that results of DNA testing failed to link the players with any sexual assault. "No DNA material from any young man was present on the body of this complaining woman," said defense attorney Wade Smith of the results that were delivered by the North Carolina state crime lab to local police and prosecutors yesterday. Prosecutor Mike Nifong said that he still has faith in the accuser's version of events and that the investigation will continue, according to The Raleigh News & Observer.

It was chance that put police on the trail of a man charged with killing a 29-year-old Baltimore woman last fall, but it was science that kept them there -- and science that will convict him, an Anne Arundel Circuit Court jury was told yesterday.David Clarence Boser, 25, of the 200 block of S. Vincent St., Baltimore, is on trial for the murder of a Emma Jean Wantland, a woman whose decomposed body was found Sept. 29 in an isolated section of Patapsco State Park, her throat cut from ear to ear.In opening statements yesterday, assistant state's attorney Jennifer Spivak said police first became suspicious that Mr. Boser had been in volved in foul play after he had a car accident on Main Street in Elkridge Sept.

It was chance that put police on the trail of a man charged with killing a 29-year-old Baltimore woman last fall, but it was science that kept them there -- and science that will convict him, an Anne Arundel Circuit Court jury was told yesterday.David Clarence Boser, 25, of the 200 block of S. Vincent St., Baltimore, is on trial for the murder of a Emma Jean Wantland, a woman whose decomposed body was found Sept. 29 in an isolated section of Patapsco State Park, her throat cut from ear to ear.In opening statements yesterday, assistant state's attorney Jennifer Spivak said police first became suspicious that Mr. Boser had been involved in foul play after he had a car accident on Main Street in Elkridge Sept.

The judge overseeing the Phylicia Barnes murder trial said Friday that prosecutors are proceeding on a circumstantial theory that causes him "great concern," but added that the case should continue and be presented to jurors. Circuit Judge Alfred Nance's comments came after prosecutors rested their case and the defense moved for the acquittal of Michael Maurice Johnson. Johnson is charged with one count of first-degree murder, and defense attorney Mary Lloyd said prosecutors cannot prove that he planned to kill Phylicia.

MIAMI -- More than half a century after a Christmas Day explosion killed a black activist couple, Florida prosecutors have accused four Ku Klux Klan members of the long-unsolved crime. The four Klan members, who are all dead, are accused of planting the bomb at the home of Harry T. and Harriette Moore, the original architects of the state's civil rights movement, teachers and quiet leaders who fought against lynchings and police brutality. They were killed nearly 55 years ago, on their 25th wedding anniversary, becoming two of the country's early civil rights martyrs.