Like a scene in a movie, the kidnapper allegedly knocked out his female victim with a chemical-soaked rag and hauled her to an abandoned house where he seized her cell phone and began taunting her boyfriend with text messages. “She’s so sexy when she’s passed out,” read one. “IMMa warm her up,” read another.
It would be an unusual abduction strategy for anyone, particularly for a 52-year-old grocery store manager and Barboursville-based family man. Yet despite a lack of any physical evidence tying him to the scene and despite a reported later admission by the alleged victim that her tale was “an elaborate scam,” Mark Lawrence Weiner, now 53, was convicted of abduction with intent to defile and has been jailed for more than 18 months.
His long-running legal ordeal, detailed in the transcript from his May 2013 trial and in a variety of records filed with the court, has only intensified now that Albemarle County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl Higgins, who presided over the trial, declined to set aside the conviction, even though the prosecutor blocked the jury from hearing cell phone tower evidence that the defense claims would have proven the alleged victim was lying.
“A man’s innocence, a person’s innocence, should always be the key to their freedom,” said Weiner’s Richmond-based attorney Steve Benjamin outside the courthouse after Judge Higgins, ruling that her court lacked jurisdiction, denied the motion on June 3.
While the accuser stands by her story, the defense team has amassed an array of evidence that contradicts it, thrusting the case and Virginia’s legal system into the media spotlight. His attorneys point out that Virginia’s legal procedures could force Weiner to spend years in prison for a crime he not only didn’t commit but which, they assert, never even occurred.
Ride gone wrong
It was a chilly December night when Chelsea Steiniger’s boyfriend, Michael Mills, told her she could not spend the night in his Region Ten housing on Grady Avenue, according to trial documents. At 11:30pm on December 12, 2012, with temperatures just above freezing, according to weather records, she began walking to her mother’s townhouse on Pantops, texting back and forth with Mills as she walked, asking him if she could come back to his place if she and her mother fought—“I can’t do that I’m sorry,” Mills texted back at 11:50pm—and discussing her efforts to find her own apartment.
At Lucky 7 convenience store on Market Street, she encountered Weiner, a Forest Lakes Food Lion manager who’d taken a business class that evening at Piedmont Virginia Community College. According to his testimony, the married father of a 9-year-old son had been to Wendy’s after class, and drove around smoking the cigarettes of which his wife disapproved. He was leaving Lucky 7, which he knew was right across the street from the Charlottesville Police Department, when he saw the 20-year-old Steiniger in the parking lot on the cold and windy night. “She looked like she needed a ride,” he testified.
Steiniger and Weiner both agree she accepted his offer of a ride toward Pantops, but from that point, their stories wildly diverge.
Weiner said he dropped Steiniger off at her mother’s Carriage Hill residence behind the Giant grocery store, less than three miles from the Lucky 7—a five-minute ride—and that she willingly gave him her phone number, which he wrote on a matchbook cover, in case he had a job opportunity for her at Food Lion.
Steiniger, however, testified that her night took a terrifying turn soon after she got into Weiner’s van.
At 12:10am, Steiniger texted her boyfriend that “some dud[e]” was giving her a ride. Eight minutes later, at 12:18am, she texted, “he tried to get in my pants,” accordingto court records of her messages. At 12:21am, she texted on her 10-digit Tracfone, “just pulled up he wont let me out of the car,” and at 12:22am, she texted her boyfriend that they’d driven past Pantops and she didn’t know where she was going. Exactly one minute later, at 12:23am, the tone of the texting changed.
“[S]he doesn’t have her phone,” read a message allegedly typed by Weiner and sent from Steiniger’s number, according to the phone records.
Steiniger testified that as they drove towards Pantops, Weiner slowed down and put a chemical-soaked cloth over her face that rendered her immediately unconscious. The texting record suggests it had to have happened in that one minute and that somehow, while Weiner drove, he had also managed to subdue Steiniger and take control of her phone.
The defense calls that story “pure fiction,” and in the motion to set aside the verdict, they included affidavits from two expert anesthesiologists who said there’s no volatile chemical that will render an adult female unconscious in 10 to 15 seconds. That debunks the classic movie trope in which a victim is rendered instantly helpless by a chloroform wielding bad guy.
Another local case bears that out. In 2006, banker Kurt Kroboth pleaded guilty to attempted murder for a 2004 Halloween night attack on his estranged wife. Kroboth, who served seven years for the attack, admitted he cut the power and phone lines to his estranged wife’s house, then broke in wearing a vampire mask and attempted to subdue the sleeping woman with a chloroform-soaked rag to her face. His wife awakened and successfully fought him off, even as he attempted to throw her over a second-floor balcony.
According to the affidavit by Dr. John R. Janes supporting the defense motion in the Weiner case, it could take up to five minutes of continuous inhalation of a chemical like chloroform to render an adult unconscious and during that time—as Kroboth discovered— the victim would have the ability to struggle and to recall the events.
The disturbing texts from Steiniger’s phone continued for 10 minutes, according to court records, as Mills became increasingly concerned.
12:27: “Shes so sexy when shes passed out”
12:28: “She was a fighter ill give her that much”
12:36: “Ill let her wake before i let you talk to her”
Mills demanded answers. “What did you do?” he texted at 12:37, and at 12:38, “w[h]ere are you taking her”.
“[S]hes in my house she said she was cold so IMMa warm her up,” came the reply.
Steiniger said she woke up in an abandoned house off Richmond Road and heard the “click click” of Weiner using her phone to send the taunting texts to her boyfriend. According to court records, Steiniger claimed Weiner left the room and abandoned her cell phone, and she documented her escape through additional text messages.
“Baby,” came the first text to Mills at 12:49am after Steiniger said she awoke. “I cant Answer hell find me,” she texted at 12:51am, followed by “Im going out the window… hold on,” at 12:52am.
Steiniger said she escaped by leaping off a second-floor balcony and walking to her mother’s apartment two miles away. Steiniger, who, according to court documents, has at times been homeless, grew up in Fluvanna County and said that when she escaped, she recognized the stretch of U.S. 250 East that goes by the abandoned house and was therefore able to navigate back to her mother’s. Although she had her phone in hand, she didn’t call 911, but Mills already had.
The Emergency Communications Center (ECC) called Steiniger at 1:07am and left a voice message, and called again at 1:08am, according to court records. AT&T records show Steiniger checked her voicemail at 1:09am.
At 1:27am, Mills texted her again to ask where she was, and he told her to call the police so they could find her. Using a different phone, Steiniger called Mills around 2am and also talked to the police, according to court documents.
She was examined by a nurse that night and no evidence of sexual assault was found.
Steiniger testified that she stopped responding to texts after she escaped because her phone battery died after the 12:52am message. Weiner’s defense contends that according to AT&T records, she talked to Mills and listened to the ECC message on her voicemail during the time she said the battery was dead.
In a defense motion, Weiner’s lawyers also said that AT&T records show Steiniger’s cell phone accessed two towers near her mother’s Carriage Hill home dozens of times that night and never pinged from a tower close to the abandoned house at 2184 Richmond Road.
Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney Denise Lunsford successfully kept out those records, according to Ford Childress, who represented Weiner during the trial. That’s not all the jury didn’t hear.
Childress said Lunsford asked two local detectives to analyze the cell tower records. Charlottesville Detective Blaine Cosgro was the first, according to Childress, and he told Lunsford there was a problem with the case, concluding that the tower records suggested the text messages were not sent from the abandoned house as Steiniger claimed, but more likely originated from her mother’s address. According to Childress, during the trial, Lunsford then consulted Albemarle police Detective Mark Belew, who came to the same conclusion. Lunsford did not call either detective to testify, and when Childress tried to call Cosgro as a defense witness, Lunsford had him disqualified as an expert.
“I believe the jury would have had an entirely different outcome had they heard Cosgro’s testimony,” said Childress soon after the verdict.
Motion denied
In a motion to set aside the conviction filed in April, Weiner’s current lawyers, Richmond attorneys Steve Benjamin and Betty Layne DesPortes, lay out a slew of accusations and describe problems with the case. They argued that Steiniger lied about the abduction, that Lunsford allowed Steiniger to testify falsely and failed to disclose exculpatory evidence, including the cell phone records that indicated Steiniger used her phone during a period when she said its battery was dead, and that Childress provided ineffective counsel to Weiner.
Childress filed an affidavit supporting the motion and setting out the ways in which he failed his client. The matchbook, upon which Weiner said he’d written Steiniger ‘s number, was not found by police and the prosecution had accused him of lying about it. Childress later found it in the van, according to the affidavit, but he did not enter it into evidence, so the jury never learned of its existence.
Childress also cited his failure to obtain expert assistance to testify as to the impossibility of Steiniger’s story concerning instant unconsciousness by volatile anesthetic. He also did not summon an expert to interpret the AT&T Mobility Usage records, according to the affidavit.
Lunsford, however, fired back in a response to the motion denying that Steiniger lied and disagreeing with the defense’s interpretation of phone records. “I believe [the defense] either misunderstands or misrepresents those phone records,” said Lunsford in her response, insisting that the defense’s only valid claim is the ineffective assistance of counsel by Childress. She asserted that complaints about legal counsel can only be handled through an appeal or a habeas corpus proceeding, which would take place after appeals had been exhausted. Both of those legal processes occur after sentencing and can take months or even years to complete.
At the June 3 hearing in Albemarle Circuit Court, Judge Cheryl Higgins did not dispute most of the allegations within the motion to set aside the verdict, but she sided with the Commonwealth in claiming she didn’t have jurisdiction to throw out the verdict.
Childress and Benjamin are troubled by her decision in the face of what they see as overwhelming evidence of Weiner’s innocence.
“The court has jurisdiction up until 21 days to set aside a verdict,” said Childress, referring to Virginia’s 21-day rule, which only allows new non-DNA evidence to be submitted within 21 days after sentencing. Although Weiner was convicted a year ago, he still has not been sentenced. “I disagree with her ruling,” said Childress.
“Trial judges are given the express power under state law to set aside jury verdicts for error or fraud,” said Benjamin. “This is consistent with a trial judge’s responsibility to ensure the proper conduct of a fair trial.”
The case is deeply troubling to Deirdre Enright, director of investigation for UVA School of Law’s Innocence Project Clinic, who attended Weiner’s recent hearing. “It had all the earmarks of a bad case because it didn’t make sense,” said Enright, who finds much to be skeptical about including the taunting texts alleged to have been sent by Weiner, such as “IMMa warm her up.”
“Do they really think a [52-year-old] man talks like that?” Enright asked.
That Steiniger started texting her boyfriend about a creepy guy and an abandoned house after he’d kicked her out and she faced a long walk home in the cold, said Enright, “seems to me the sort of thing young people do to get your boyfriend to be concerned. And jumping off the balcony without getting hurt? Her story is replete with problems.”
Enright was also troubled by Higgins’ decision.
“It’s really disheartening to me to hear the court say she has no jurisdiction.” The cell tower evidence was known about during the trial—a rare occurrence of falling within the 21-day rule. “How [Higgins] could say she didn’t have jurisdiction is mystifying to me,” said Enright.
Virginia’s notorious 21-day rule is just one factor that hampers relief to the wrongly convicted, say defense attorneys.
Rigid system
Johnathan Montgomery was falsely accused of sexual assault in 2007 in Hampton Circuit Court. Years later, when his accuser recanted, the judge who convicted him was unable to release Montgomery because of the 21-day rule, and it took an order from former Governor Bob McDonnell to set him free after he’d already served four years in prison.
“Virginia proves that its system is error-free by making it extremely difficult to prove error happened,” said Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys President Doug Ramseur. “And it’s very rare that a case is overturned on appeal.”
Once appeals are exhausted, the wrongly convicted can file a writ of habeas corpus, which translates to “where’s the body?” said legal expert David Heilberg. “You literally sue the warden of the facility” where the person is being wrongly incarcerated.
That’s how a federal judge ruled that Michael Hash, who was in prison for almost 12 years, was the victim of “outrageous misconduct” on the part of the Culpeper police and prosecutor to convict him of the murder of Thelma Scroggins.