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He prosecuted the wrong man for 1986 Pinellas murder, then the right one

 
Prosecutor Richard Ripplinger says he’s glad the legal system worked.
Prosecutor Richard Ripplinger says he’s glad the legal system worked.
Published March 22, 2015

LARGO — The prosecutor who once tried to send the wrong man to prison walked out of a courtroom Thursday. And the wrong man walked up to greet him.

"Thank you Mr. Ripplinger, for all your help," said Tom Franklin Sawyer, in a surprisingly cordial tone to a man who had wanted to convict him of murder. "And no hard feelings."

Just as politely, Assistant State Attorney Richard Ripplinger said, "I'm sorry for what you went through."

The hallway apology was not the only unusual twist in the 29-year effort to find the killer of Janet Staschak, 25, who was found strangled in her Clearwater apartment in 1986.

This case is unusual because police arrested Sawyer after an all-night, 16-hour interrogation that produced what courts later called a coerced confession.

But it's also unusual because of the way Ripplinger has come full circle. He was lead prosecutor against Sawyer in the 1980s. He also served as lead prosecutor against a new suspect, Stephen Manning Lamont, nearly three decades later. In other words, Ripplinger went after the wrong guy and the right guy. And in a hearing three days ago, Lamont pleaded guilty to the murder.

Much has been written in recent years about the wrongfully accused, including the stories of many people cleared and freed from prison, often with the help of DNA evidence. But it's relatively rare to hear from the authorities who convicted or tried to convict people later shown to be innocent.

Less than two hours after last week's hearing, Ripplinger agreed to sit down with a Tampa Bay Times reporter to discuss perhaps the most unusual case of his 31-year career.

Ripplinger, 57, is known for handling tough, complicated and often grisly cases. He prosecuted four people for a drive-by shooting that left an 8-year-girl dead in 2009 in St. Petersburg. He is currently assigned to prosecute an Oldsmar man accused of chopping his mother's head off with an ax. Everyone in the courthouse calls him "Rip."

Ripplinger said that although he feels sorry for Sawyer and his ordeal, he does not think he did anything improper.

"It bothers me. I always try to do the right thing, and I think I did my job then with what we had." Referring to the checks and balances in the legal system, he said, "the whole system is based on the proposition that me and the police might be wrong."

And in this case, they were.

"At the time we believed in what we were doing," Ripplinger said. "But time and science and the words of Stephen Lamont have proven us to be wrong."

Staschak, a cake decorator for a Kash n' Karry grocery, was found dead in November 1986 in her apartment at 903 S Greenwood Ave. after failing to show up for work.

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Police brought Sawyer, her next-door-neighbor, in for an interview, which lasted all night and into the next day. Eventually he confessed to the killing. He spent more than a year in the Pinellas County Jail awaiting court proceedings.

Looking back, that 16-hour interrogation seems obviously flawed and possibly an abuse of police power. Among the problems later cited by courts: Sawyer was deprived of food and drink and was given "grossly misleading questions." Police didn't immediately stop interviewing him after he asked for an attorney. A judge called the interrogation "a form of charades," and threw out the confession. An appeals court agreed. And in 1990, the murder charge against Sawyer was dropped.

Ripplinger, who had been a prosecutor about three years, got the case after the interrogation already had occurred. It took time just to grasp its scope and substance, he said.

Police had no idea the interview would last all night, Ripplinger said. They decided to record it, but ran out of tapes. "The detectives were actually running around the Police Department going into drawers and they were actually taking cassette tapes that had been used in other cases," Ripplinger said. Afterward, it wasn't clear which of those tapes went in what order. They had to listen closely and figure out the sequence, he said.

The confession became the heart of the evidence against Sawyer. But his attorney, Joseph Donahey, said it was false and coerced. Attorneys did battle in a hearing that stretched on for six weeks — longer than most full murder trials.

Ripplinger defended the investigation at the time, and still says he believes Clearwater detectives were trying to do the right thing. But today, he acknowledges, "having spent countless hours analyzing the interview, it's not a convincing interview."

Ripplinger said he was surprised recently when he learned Clearwater detectives had reopened the Staschak murder case and submitted a sample for DNA testing — and that it matched Lamont, an Alabama man who had been in Clearwater at the time. Lamont's DNA matches samples recovered from Staschak's body and a necklace found in her apartment. And Lamont confessed, in a video-recorded interview that lasted considerably less than 16 hours.

Sawyer, now 62 and a janitor living in Illinois, flew down last week to see Lamont plead guilty in a Pinellas courtroom. In spite of his cordial encounter with Ripplinger, he said earlier that if he met him "I'd like to say that he and the Clearwater Police Department completely bungled this case." The Clearwater detectives who took up the case anew did "a terrific job," he said.

Ripplinger appeared in court last week along with Lamont's public defenders, as Lamont pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years.

Looking back, Ripplinger said, "I feel bad when every once in a while somebody kind of treats me like I'm some kind of villain. I just don't view myself that way."

He said that during the six-week court hearing in 1988, a doctor hired by the defense asked him, " 'Who's your next victim?' I still don't appreciate that little encounter"

He sees it this way:

"We did our jobs ethically and we were wrong. I'm glad the system came to that conclusion. And I'm glad to have the second chance to get it right. You don't have many second chances in life."

Times Researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this report. Contact Curtis Krueger at ckrueger@tampabay.com or (727) 892-8232. Follow @ckruegertimes.