Cup Of Coffee Vital To Murder Case Prosecution

Section Three

THE ANN ARBOR NEWS

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Thursday, July 10,1969

Cup Of Coffee Vital To Murder Case Prosecution

By William B. Treml

(News Police Reporter)

Prosecuting Attorney William F. Delhey is counting on a cup of warm coffee to send an accused killer to prison for life.

The coffee—and its warmth—played a subtle but vital role yesterday in the District Court examination of Ernest R. Bishop Jr., 28-year-old itinerant handyman, charged with the premeditated murder of Margaret Ann Phillips. Miss Phillips, 25, a graduate student in sociology at the University, was shot three times in her N. State St. apartment early last Saturday morning and died of the wounds in St. Joseph Mercy Hospital 34 hours later. .

Yesterday’s 2 1/2-hour examination in which Bishop was bound over to Circuit Court for arraignment on July 25 was a study in contrasts as Prosecutor Delhey called his 12 witnesses to the stand. There were the trim, measured answers of two state troopers and five Ann Arbor policemen who testified, interspersed with the tense, sometimes-quavering words which tumbled from the mouth of Judith Rubin, the 21-year-old U-M music major who found Miss Phillips last Saturday night. Sandwiched between was the cool, analytical testimony of Dr. Robert C. Hendrix, who performed the autopsy on Miss Phillips, and the quiet, colloquial approach given his witness role by Bishop’s companion on the night before the shooting, Clifford E. Shewcraft.

Most observers were focusing on Shewcraft’s testimony as the key to the prosecution s case Therefore, it was easy to miss—or ignore— how for Prosecutor Delhey an eventual conviction must turn on the white, ceramic cup and the warmth of its contents.

The cup was found on a table in the Phillips apartment moments after the dying girl had been moved to St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. Ann Arbor Police Sgt. Harold Rady testified he saw the cup which had a liquid which appeared to be coffee.

 “Did you touch it?” Prosecutor Delhey asked.

“No, sir. I put my finger in the liquid,” Rady answered.

“What was the temperature of that liquid?” came the question.

“It was warm, almost drinking temperature," Rady replied.

Later, State Police Detective Eugene R. Weiler testified he matched fingerprints found on the cup to those of Bishop. Testimony from Miss Rubin indicated that the Phillips apartment was sealed off both before and after the shooting when she twice locked a hallway entrance door. With the contents of the cup still warm when police arrived and Bishop’s fingerprints on it, Delhey’s strategy is to place the accused in the murder room at the exact time of the killing.

Ralph Keyes, Bishop’s court-appointed attorney, prodded Shewcraft and Miss Rubin about their testimony and attacked Detective Weiler’s processing of the coffee cup and the fingerprints on the grounds the evidence had not been in “continuous possession” of the state policeman.

Judge S. J. Elden decided the chain of evidence rule had not been violated by Detective Weiler and admitted the cup and the negatives of the fingerprints.

Keyes demanded from Detective Weiler a photographic print of the fingerprints taken from the cup and Prosecutor Delhey agreed to have the print made.

Miss Rubin, under obvious strain, entered and left the court room with a black sweater over her head to thwart photographers and television cameras.

After completing testimony and while being escorted from the first floor police headquarters she fainted and was given first aid. She testified she had moved away from 203 N. State St. after the killing.

She told of hearing Miss Phillips ask “Who’s there?” when a knock came on an outer door about midnight on July 4...then a reply and then hearing the Coopersville girl unlock the outer door. Then Miss Rubin testified she heard “normal, conversational” voices from the Phillips apartment, heard the bathroom door open and close twice and the noise of someone moving about the kitchen of the apartment.

Then she said she heard noises “like a screen being dropped from a window...” Then came the quick footsteps down the hallway “. . . as if you were late for work . . .,” she said. She said she went out and locked the outer door, saw a cat in the hall which “looked scared” and then she went into the Phillips apartment to find the mortally wounded girl.

In his testimony, Dr. Hendrix, who has been the pathologist on all seven area murders, testified the autopsy showed gunshot wounds on either side of Miss Phillips’ forehead which “funnelled inward” into the skull.

Shewcraft, 25, who worked with Bishop for a time in the city’s sanitation department, described what Bishop had told him early last Saturday morning.

He said Bishop appeared at his apartment, drenched by rain and “looking like he had been crying or something, looking scared.”

“He said this guy shot this girl three times and that he saw the last bullet go into her head,” Shewcraft said. “He said the guy’s name was Dave and that he had blond hair and the girl was blonde, too.”

Police say they have found no evidence to substantiate the story about “Dave.”

Shewcraft also testified that he and Bishop drove around for a while before Bishop threw a .22 caliber revolver out the window and into the Huron River at the U.S. 23 overpass. State Police skindivers continued the search today in hopes of finding the weapon.

Under cross examination, Shewcraft said although he had fired the .22 caliber gun which Bishop reportedly purchased in Lansing, the weapon belonged to Bishop. He said he and Bishop had ben to a barbeque party on Davis St. on the night of the shooting and had consumed liquor.

Keyes, who called no defense witnesses, moved when the examination was over that the prosecution motion to bind over on first degree murder be denied because of what he described as a lack of evidence of malice or premeditation in the shooting.

Prosecutor Delhey called the defense motion “facetious.”

“Two well-placed shots in the head show malice,” Delhey told Judge Elden. “It might be an accident when a gun goes off once but three times is abundant evidence for a first degree murder charge.”

Bishop, dressed in rumpled, blue County Jail denims, slouched beside Keyes throughout the 150-minute hearing, much of the time his head down, eyes staring at the table in front of him. Rarely did he look toward the witness stand and conferred only twice with Keyes. He balked about entering the court room just before the hearing started but, after a brief conference with Deputy Police Chief Harold E. Olson, agreed to leave the court detention cell and walk to the counsel table.

Funeral services were scheduled today for Miss Phillips in her home town of Coopersville, near Grand Rapids in southwestern Michigan.

Her minister said he has chosen as his text for the funeral at United Methodist of Coopersville a passage from John 15:13—“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

The verse was selected, said the Rev. Philip Steele, because of “her devotion to helping people.”

Miss Phillips reportedly was trying to rehabilitate ex-convict Bishop prior to her death.