St. Louis Riverfront Times

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ON THE HOT SEAT

After denying he withheld crucial evidence, denying he arranged secret deals with jailhouse snitches, denying he misled a jury and denying he participated in any cover-up, St. Louis County Circuit Judge Steven H. Goldman suggested that maybe someone else had done those things but that he wasn’t sure and, in all likelihood, they wouldn’t remember, either.

It wasn’t the former prosecutor’s most convincing performance, certainly unlike the trial in 1983 when Goldman, without physical evidence or eyewitnesses, convinced a jury that a young black woman named Ellen Reasonover was guilty of capital murder.

This time, as an ill-at-ease Goldman tried to account for his actions during an evidentiary hearing, an observer watching the proceedings from the back rows in a federal courtroom leaned forward and whispered, “It’s STA time — “save thy ass’ time.”

Indeed, during four days of testimony at the hearing last week before Chief U.S. District Judge Jean Hamilton, new evidence of possible police and prosecutorial misconduct in the Reasonover case surfaced like dead bodies, one after the other. Among new information floating to the top: secret police tape recordings, memos about sentencing deals, and a would-be snitch who refused to be coerced. Just one day into the hearing, a seemingly exasperated Judge Hamilton asked Stephan D. Hawke, the state’s attorney, “Are there any other documents you haven’t disclosed? This is a little startling.”

The mounting evidence that police and prosecutors may have framed an innocent woman would become even more startling to onlookers as the hearing progressed. For Reasonover, serving a life sentence after being convicted of shooting and killing gas-station attendant James Buckley, 19, in a botched robbery attempt, the hearing is likely her last bid to win a new trial (“Burned,” RFT, June 30).

Reasonover, now 42, has always maintained her innocence, saying that she was at the Vickers service station in Dellwood the night of Buckley’s murder only to get change and cigarettes. When she heard news accounts of the murder, she called police with information about possible suspects she saw at the station. She identified men from mug shots, but when those suspects produced alibis, police investigators accused her — along with her former boyfriend, Stanley White, and another man named Robert Macintosh — of the crime.

Goldman’s evidence in the 1983 trial consisted mainly of the testimonies of two women — Mary Ellen Lyner and Rose Jolliff — who claimed that Reasonover had confessed to them in a holding cell that she had killed Buckley. What jurors and Reasonover’s trial lawyers didn’t know in 1983 was that there existed at least two secretly taped conversations in which Reasonover maintained her innocence.

One of those key recordings is of Reasonover protesting her innocence to Jolliff in a telephone conversation on Jan. 12, 1983 — five days after the women had been placed in a holding cell together. Reasonover’s current lawyers, Cheryl Pilate of Kansas City and Richard Sindel of St. Louis, obtained a copy of the recording just last week.

Jolliff was in jail for writing a number of bad checks, Reasonover because she was a suspect in Buckley’s murder.

During Reasonover’s trial, Jolliff testified that Reasonover confessed Buckley’s murder to her on the day they shared the cell. But the secretly taped phone conversation, which was never disclosed to jurors at the trial, appears to undermine Jolliff’s testimony. In the conversation, Reasonover repeatedly denied having had anything to do with the killing. In fact, Reasonover proclaimed her innocence eight times during the call to the woman she had supposedly confessed to five days before. And even though under law the police must give the prosecutor such evidence, and the prosecutor in turn must give it to the defense, the tape was never submitted to Reasonover’s attorneys during her trial.

Last week, when asked why the police tape was never submitted, Goldman said he never knew it existed, implying that the police were at fault for never handing it to him.

In 1983, prosecutor Goldman told jurors that Jolliff had no incentive to lie about her testimony — that she was not getting any kind of a deal on her pending felonies in exchange for testifying at Reasonover’s trial.

A different story emerged last week.

In December 1982, then-assistant county prosecutor Larry Mooney recommended that Jolliff receive five years’ supervised probation for her three pending felony counts. Jolliff’s lawyer at the time, Stormy White, testified last week that Mooney’s recommendation was “the best I could do at the time” for her client.

But on the same day she testified against Reasonover, Jolliff changed her plea of not guilty to guilty and received six months’ unsupervised bench probation, which meant if she stayed out of trouble for six months, her three felonies would never be recorded. Other than having the felonies reduced to misdemeanors, Jolliff couldn’t have gotten a better deal.

No one seems to know just who in the prosecutor’s office approved the lighter sentence.

“Is that what a person would normally get for three felonies?” Sindel asked White when she took the stand last week.

“No,” she replied, adding that she had been on maternity leave at the time and didn’t know how Jolliff got the bench probation.

Mooney said he didn’t order the bench probation for Jolliff, either, and didn’t know who had.

And Goldman told the court that he had given Jolliff “no deal” for her testimony and wasn’t aware that anyone else had given her one.

In post-trial transcripts, Goldman denied ever promising Jolliff a deal for her testimony. “It was the same sentence anyone else would have gotten,” the transcripts show Goldman saying.

Several witnesses testified that receiving bench probation for three felonies is extremely unusual. Prominent defense attorney Arthur Margulis, called by the state as a character witness for Goldman, told Sindel during cross-examination that he couldn’t recall ever hearing of someone getting bench probation for three felonies.

“Would you suspect that that person got a deal?” Sindel asked.

“I think it would be self-evident,” Margulis said.

And earlier this year, Sindel and Pilate found a long-forgotten memo written by White back in 1983, stating that Goldman had called her about Jolliff, that Jolliff was testifying in Reasonover’s case, that they wouldn’t actually make a deal with her until after the trial so that Reasonover’s lawyers couldn’t bring it up before the jury, and that Goldman promised not to “burn” Jolliff in the process.

White testified that she didn’t remember much about the memo but surmised that it didn’t mean what it seemed to mean. Goldman acknowledged that he had in fact talked to White before Reasonover’s trial but said he didn’t remember much about the conversation.

As for Jolliff, she isn’t talking. Called as a witness last week, she invoked her Fifth Amendment constitutional right against self-incrimination.

“I never asked”

The taped conversation between Jolliff and Reasonover wasn’t the only attempt by police to get Reasonover to confess to Buckley’s murder. An undercover policewoman tried to get Reasonover to confess to her in jail and was unsuccessful. Then there was the hourlong tape of a conversation between Reasonover and her former boyfriend, Stanley White, when the two were arrested as suspects and placed in adjacent cells on Jan. 7, 1983.

Goldman testified last week that the police misinformed him about that secretly taped conversation in which Reasonover and White are heard discussing the murder, mystified about why the police think they did it. That tape wasn’t given to Reasonover’s defense attorneys, and so the jury never heard it, either.

“Were you aware of the tape?” Sindel asked Goldman last week.

“Some police officer in a very brief conversation … told me that they had a tape between Stanley White and Ellen Reasonover in which, I understood, they were complaining about being in jail. I also had the impression that they taped over it or destroyed it or something like that,” Goldman said. “What they were telling me was that it wasn’t admissible.”

“Did you try to find out why it had been destroyed or taped over?” Sindel asked.

“I never asked,” Goldman said.

Several weeks ago, Patricia Lynch, a producer and writer for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, which is broadcast by PBS, interviewed Goldman about the Reasonover case. Lynch says Goldman told her that he had only learned about the tape’s contents “recently” and that the tape wasn’t produced at the trial because of a “cataloguing error” committed by the Dellwood police.

But Dan Chapman, commander of the Major Case Squad investigating Buckley’s murder in 1983 and now Dellwood’s chief of police, testified last week that everything of evidentiary value — including the taped conversation between White and Reasonover — was turned over to Goldman.

“Would it be fair to say that statements made by a suspect are important and that they can often be used to help determine their guilt or innocence?” Sindel asked Chapman.

“Yes.”

“And in part you wanted to preserve this conversation (between White and Reasonover) in case it pointed to Ms. Reasonover’s guilt?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell anybody that you had destroyed the tape?”

“No, sir.”

“To the best of your knowledge, you gave it to Mr. Goldman?”

“We gave everything to the prosecutor’s office.”

In 1985, Reasonover’s lawyers filed an appeal claiming in part that the tape should have been disclosed at her trial. Gary Gardner, the assistant attorney general who represented the state during the direct appeal, testified last week that when he asked Goldman about the tape, the prosecutor told him in one phone conversation that the tape contained no admissible evidence and in another call that the police had destroyed it. “My impression was that Mr. Goldman had listened to the tape,” Gardner testified.

Goldman still claims he never heard the tape and never pursued its contents, even when he found out in 1996 that it hadn’t been destroyed. That year, the tape was discovered in the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office by Pilate and Sindel and was written about by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in several articles.

“Did you read any of the articles about the tape’s contents?” Sindel asked Goldman.

“I don’t remember,” Goldman said.

Sindel then reminded Goldman that he had written two letters to the editor to the Post-Dispatch complaining about the articles.

“That may be,” Goldman replied.

Reasonover’s lawyers last week played yet another recorded conversation for Judge Hamilton, this one a phone call between Reasonover and Chapman when she first called to give information about the people she saw at the Vickers station that night.

During the call, Reasonover gave a fake name and asked Chapman several times not to put her name in the paper for fear of reprisals. Chapman promised he wouldn’t and asked Reasonover whether she’d come down to the station to look at mug shots. She replied that she would but said she didn’t think she could positively identify the people she saw. “I don’t want anybody to go to jail for something they didn’t do,” she told Chapman. He then urged her to try anyway, because there was a $3,000 reward for anyone who could help find the murderers.

“I don’t care so much about that,” Reasonover said. “Maybe that money should go to the boy’s family instead.”

The contents of the call were never revealed to Reasonover’s jurors. Chapman later arrested Reasonover because during the first call she gave a false name and because the people she eventually picked from mug shots turned out to have alibis.

Goldman did admit last week that, according to law, he should have handed over any and all taped conversations. “At the time, I didn’t think it was relevant,” he said.

What he did think was relevant was the taped testimony of Jolliff telling police that Reasonover admitted the murder to her in jail. That tape was submitted in Reasonover’s murder trial.

Sindel noted: “Every time there was a tape recording that made Ellen Reasonover look bad, there was a police record and a transcript, wasn’t there? And every time there was one that made her look good, there wasn’t.”

“I don’t recall”

Besides the two women — Jolliff and Mary Ellen Lyner — who testified that Reasonover confessed the murder to them, police also sought out Marquita Butler, another cellmate. Her testimony at last week’s hearing shed some more light on the tactics used in prosecuting Reasonover.

Butler testified last week that she originally considered lying about what Reasonover told her but backed out at the last minute.

“They wanted me to lie,” Butler said on the stand, then explained that Chapman fed her all of the information about Buckley’s murder she would need to testify, including the names of the two other suspects, Stanley White and Robert Macintosh. “I was making up stories to get some money, but Ellen never told me anything,” Butler said.

And once she decided not to cooperate with the deception, Butler said, Chapman got “mean” and threatened to have her arrested.

Chapman said he didn’t remember promising Butler any money in exchange for her testimony and didn’t recall feeding her any information she would need to lie.

But Sindel then pulled out a transcript of the taped conversation between Butler and Chapman on Jan. 12, 1983. The transcript showed that Chapman promised Butler $150 to come to the station and testify and an additional $7,000 if her testimony led to Reasonover’s conviction. Sindel then read aloud Chapman’s words to Butler:

“”OK, Robert Macintosh, was he one of them?’” Sindel read, then asked Chapman, “So you supplied the name to her, right?”

Chapman replied, “I did say that.”

“Did you also say, “Stanley White is one?’”

“Yes,” Chapman admitted.

“Did you threaten to have her arrested if she didn’t cooperate?”

“I don’t recall.”

“I don’t remember”

Whereas the jury never heard about the light sentence Jolliff got after she testified against Reasonover, in Lyner’s case the jury never heard about her past — a past that might have severely damaged her credibility on the witness stand.

At Reasonover’s murder trial, Lyner told jurors that Reasonover confessed to Buckley’s murder. Lyner also admitted to the jury that she was receiving a reduced sentence for her own crimes in exchange for her testimony. But Lyner told the jury that she had never made any such deal before, and the jury and Reasonover’s defense lawyers were never told otherwise by Goldman.

During last week’s hearing, Ronald Klein, a St. Louis police officer, testified that in November 1982 he arrested Lyner at her apartment, where he found drug paraphernalia, narcotics, more than 300 stolen items and materials used to create false IDs. Under her bed and in her closet were dozens of stolen purses, wallets and credit cards used to purchase more than $300,000 worth of goods.

“It was probably one of the largest fraud rings ever cracked in the city of St. Louis,” Klein testified, adding that Lyner was “incoherent” when she was arrested and admitted she had a $1,000-per-day drug habit. “She was a desperate person when we found her,” he said.

Yet jurors at Reasonover’s trial were never told about Lyner’s desperation or her drug addiction. They were instead told that Lyner, who killed herself in 1990, had been arrested for “writing bad checks,” even though her convictions were really for forgery.

“When she testified that she had been charged for writing bad checks, did you correct her and explain it was for forgery?” Sindel asked Goldman.

“I don’t remember,” Goldman an-swered.

Sindel then pointed out that forgery is far more serious than a bad-check-writing charge, in that writing bad checks simply means a person has overdrawn his or her account but forgery involves intentionally trying to pass off something as genuine that isn’t.

“Were you aware that her charges were for forgery and not just writing bad checks?”

“Whatever I testified,” Goldman said.

What he told jurors in 1983 was that Lyner was arrested for writing bad checks. Goldman also allowed his witness to tell the jury that she had never made a similar deal for a reduced sentence before.

But Sindel noted that in 1979 Lyner was found guilty of burglary and stealing but hadn’t been sentenced as of February 1983. One month later, Lyner’s conviction on burglary and stealing was wiped out “for lack of evidence,” when in fact court records show she’d made a deal for the reduced sentence in exchange for testifying at another trial unrelated to Reasonover’s.

Sindel then pointed to trial transcripts of Reasonover’s trial, where Lyner told the jury she had never made a deal before in her life. She lied, Sindel said, and Goldman never corrected her.

“I knew nothing about it,” Goldman testified. But Sindel pointed out that in Goldman’s own trial notes, her burglary and stealing convictions were listed and that Goldman had drawn a slash through them, indicating that Goldman knew about the deal.

Throughout his questioning of Goldman last Thursday, Sindel maintained a restrained, laserlike focus on nailing down the details of what he believed was prosecutorial misconduct on Goldman’s part. When he wrapped up his questioning of Goldman, though, Sindel’s restraint cracked a bit.

“So it was your mistakes which deprived Ellen Reasonover of her freedom?” Sindel finally asked Goldman.

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“So it was your mistakes which almost sentenced her to death?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“Don’t you think she deserved better than that?”

“Objection!”

But Sindel was already back at his seat. At the defense table behind him, tears fell from the hands Reasonover held over her face.

“This man is a judge”

Unlike her 1983 trial, when her lawyers didn’t let her take the stand, Reasonover got up in the witness box last week and told a story that had many in the crowded courtroom — lawyers, family members, politicians and community activists — in tears. Reasonover testified that after she went to the Dellwood police station and misidentified people from mug shots, Chapman’s attitude toward her changed. He started getting “mean,” she said, pounding the table and threatening her.

“He told me that I was going to be 150 when I got out of jail and that my daughter would be 100, and I’d never see her again,” she said. “They told me I’d be raped in prison and that if I didn’t roll over on Stanley White, I’d be given the death penalty.”

Reasonover then said that she was taken somewhere by a police officer and given a polygraph test. When she passed it, the policeman ordered that the test be administered again. When she passed it a second time, the policeman ordered a third. When she passed it the third time, the policeman drove her to yet another place, where a fourth test, which she failed, was administered. This fourth test was what jurors heard about during her trial.

“I was sorry I ever talked to the police,” she said, “because they didn’t appreciate it.”

Reasonover’s testimony, as well as that of Goldman, Chapman and others, struck a chord among the approximately 50 supporters of Reasonover who sat through all four days of the trial.

“We live this every day,” said Richard Dockett, chair of the St. Louis chapter of the National Black United Front, at one point during Goldman’s testimony last week.

There were repeated gasps of surprise as the evidence unfolded. When Chapman left the stand, Pearlie Evans, community activist and longtime assistant to U.S. Rep. William Clay, said, “That man used to be a policeman?”

“Used to be?” someone responded. “He’s the chief of police now.”

“No!” Evans cried as she covered her face with her hands.

As Goldman testified, state Rep. Betty Thompson (D-St. Louis) sat, muttering under her breath, “This man is a judge. This man is a judge.”

But there were also repeated murmurs that the story of Ellen Reasonover is all too familiar. “Those people made their careers on the backs of people like Ellen Reasonover,” Dockett said. “Most of them have become wealthy, because Ellen Reasonover dared to be born black and poor.”

Reasonover’s hearing — perhaps her last chance at freedom — probably wouldn’t have happened if Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit group from New Jersey, hadn’t hired Pilate and Sindel to pursue the evidentiary hearing in federal court. Reasonover’s first appeal failed after her lawyer didn’t file the right paperwork, and after that, she was left with little recourse.

“Very few poor or black people can afford this,” Dockett says, “And we commend Centurion Ministries for helping us be here today. This was a grassroots effort, and we, like Ellen Reasonover, will prevail.”

Judge Hamilton is expected to rule in August whether Reasonover should get a new trial.

07/07/1999
Burned

Ellen Reasonover worried that her former boyfriend, Stanley White, was angry. He looked mad, anyway, when they placed him in the holding cell next to hers in the Dellwood police station on Jan. 7, 1983, and because she hadn’t seen him since her arrest, she didn’t know what kind of mood he was in.

In fact, she hadn’t seen White since the month before, when she called the police on him after he pulled up in the parking lot of her apartment building in a large, dark car and broke the window of her own automobile because of an argument they’d had earlier.

Maybe he was still mad about that. Maybe he was just scared. She was a little worried, too, about being accused of robbing and murdering that young white boy at the Vickers service station on Jan. 2, but she knew the police didn’t have any evidence against her and figured they’d hold her a little while and then let her go home.

The fact that White was here now, though, that wasn’t a good sign. She hadn’t told the police he did it, even when they showed her the awful photographs of the crime scene and accused her and White of beating up 19-year-old James Buckley and then shooting him seven times with a .22-caliber rifle until he was dead. Not even then, looking at those pathetic pictures, had she rolled over on anybody, least of all Stan.

Maybe he was just mad about being hauled in. Maybe he thought she really had told the police he was involved when they pressured her, threatened her with life in prison and showed her those terrible, terrible photos, or maybe, just maybe …

“Stan?” she asked from her cell.
“What?”
“Did you rob that Vickers place?”

It was a question she felt she needed to ask. Her own life hadn’t exactly been a session in slapstick, but neither she nor Stanley White had ever been convicted of anything before, and robbing and killing a young white boy like that, well, that was something serious.

“Babe, you know I been here but ain’t done no shit like that,” White said.
She told him she figured as much.
“You know one thing I can’t understand?” White asked.
“What?

“They, they, they really trippin’ and everything, and I ain’t did a motherfuckin’ thing.”

“These motherfuckers is crazy,” she assured White, “think you gonna rob and kill a, a young white boy, kill him, take his life.”

“You know me better than that, sister.”
“Yeah, I know you ain’t done no shit like that.”
“You know what?” White asked.
“What?”

“I’m gonna tell you somethin’. If I knew somethin’, I would tell the motherfuckers. I don’t know shit, and I’m not lyin’.”

“I’m tellin’ you. I mean, gosh, Stan, you know, if I had somethin’ to do with that shit, I’da snitched on you and everybody else that I thought was involved.”

But she hadn’t. The day after Buckley was found dead on the floor of the Vickers station on West Florissant Avenue, Reasonover called the Dellwood police and told them she’d been at the Laundromat next door that night and had gone to the service window of the station to get change. She said that when she got there, she saw a young black man inside, and it dawned on her that he looked like someone she’d met somewhere before, someone she couldn’t quite place. But when she knocked on the window to get his attention and he didn’t respond, she told the police, she drove her AMC Hornet down the street to a 7-Eleven to get change there instead.

As she began to pull out of the Vickers parking lot, Reasonover said, she saw a police car cruise by, and because her Hornet was missing a taillight, she waited until it drove past — she didn’t need a ticket, especially because she had been warned about the light earlier.

At the 7-Eleven, Reasonover told police, she saw the same man she saw at the Vickers station, but with two other people — one in a green army jacket — in a large, dark car, maybe a Buick or Cadillac, with whitewall tires and another tire on the trunk. She said she didn’t think much about it until the next day, when her mother saw a report about Buckley’s murder on TV and told her daughter to call the police and tell them what she saw.

Reasonover said she didn’t want to call anybody and tell them anything, but after her mother asked, “What if that was one of your brothers who got killed? Wouldn’t you want a witness to come forward?” she agreed, but only if she could give the police a fake name so that, in case the man she saw was someone she knew, she wouldn’t have to worry about any trouble down the road. The next day, she went into the Dellwood police station to look at mug shots, and when Capt. Dan Chapman asked her for identification, she admitted that she had given a fake name. She then picked out two men from the mug shots who she said resembled the men she saw the night of Buckley’s murder.

But the two men Reasonover picked out were in jail the night of the crime, so the police asked Reasonover to look at more photos, and she picked one of a man she knew named William Love. But Love passed a psychological-stress test administered to him by the police, so Chapman figured Reasonover was trying to throw suspicion elsewhere. She was arrested as a suspect in Buckley’s murder. Having used a fake name didn’t help her case very much, and because the car she described seeing William Love in at the 7-Eleven — a big, dark car with whitewalls and a wheel on the back — was similar to the car Stanley White drove the night he smashed her windshield, they hauled White into jail, too.

“It sure looked like William Love’s ass,” Reasonover told White when he was put in the cell next to hers. “Sure the fuck did. But if I ever do see that dude again with the green army jacket on and he’s out there, man, I ain’t gonna tell them motherfuckers shit. I was trying to help them.”

“If you seen somebody, baby, you tell them,” White said.
“I told them who I thought I seen, but they don’t believe me.”
The police — and, later, Reasonover’s prosecutors — didn’t believe her even after they listened to the hourlong conversation between Reasonover and White that day in the Dellwood jail, taped secretly with a recorder hidden in their cells.

In fact, the tape was considered so lacking in evidentiary value, as prosecutors later claimed, that it was somehow “misplaced,” and neither Reasonover’s defense attorneys nor the jurors at her trial knew that it existed. Indeed, the tape — and other recently discovered evidence allegedly withheld by prosecutors — wouldn’t be seen or heard for another 16 years, long after Reasonover was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to prison for the rest of her life.

She was convicted in late 1983, despite the fact that there were no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence — no murder weapon, no fingerprints, not one strand of hair. Instead, she was convicted because two jailhouse snitches — who later received light sentences for their crimes — told the jury Reasonover confessed to them that she killed Buckley. The prosecutor, Steven H. Goldman, acknowledged in court that one of the snitches was promised a reduced sentence in exchange for her testimony. The other, Reasonover’s attorneys now allege, was also offered a deal that was kept from the jury — just like the secretly taped conversation.

But now, 16 years later, Chief U.S. District Judge Jean C. Hamilton has granted Reasonover’s request for an evidentiary hearing at which the tape — and other evidence Reasonover’s attorneys say should have been presented to the trial jury — is being examined. The hearing began Monday.

One of Reasonover’s attorneys, Cheryl Pilate of Kansas City, argued in her filing for the hearing: “Her case in fact provides a stunning example of how the suppression of exculpatory evidence and repeated prosecutorial misconduct can lead to the conviction of someone who is totally innocent.”

The prosecutor in question, Goldman, who is now a St. Louis County circuit judge, did not respond to our request for an interview.

“Lemme ask you, can these motherfuckers do anything?”
“Hell, yeah, they do it all the time, Stan, lock motherfuckers up for shit they didn’t do.”

“You know, they need to call in somebody special an’ check into this shit.”
“I’m tellin’ you. A specialist.”

Ellen Reasonover sits across the table in the Chillicothe Correctional Center, in northwest Missouri, as her caseworker paces back and forth across the room. She doesn’t seem to notice, even though the caseworker stops occasionally, folds his arms across his chest, and sighs. The air conditioning is out as well — across a yard fenced in barbed wire, the repairman can be seen, working on a distant roof — but the 41-year-old woman at the table doesn’t seem too concerned about the heat, either, focusing instead on the upcoming hearing in St. Louis. It may be her last chance to get out of this place.

Like many of the inmates around her, Reasonover’s life before confinement wasn’t a twilight walk across manicured lawns. After dropping out of Soldan High School in the 10th grade, she received her GED and went on to work as a cashier at a Vickers service station. She dated two men who were later found shot to death — one on a street corner, the other handcuffed in a vacant lot — and both of her brothers went to prison, one for killing his girlfriend and the other for robbing a Schnucks supermarket. In 1980, Reasonover gave birth to her daughter, Charmel, and two years later, while working in a massage parlor for a month before the holidays so she could buy Christmas presents, she married a man in the U.S. Air Force.

At Chillicothe, Reasonover keeps mostly to herself and doesn’t commune much with the other women here. Because she has trouble sleeping, she works the prison’s night shift, cleaning toilets and mopping floors; when she is around the others, she says, she tries to keep peace. One prison employee who oversees her notes, “Despite all the negativity in this place, and there’s quite a lot of it, Ellen has stayed pretty much positive, pretty much unchanged.” She’s soft-spoken but doesn’t seem shy or reserved. Her eyes throw off the occasional artless glances of a very young girl but don’t wander the walls or the floors looking for an escape. She repeatedly apologizes for words she can’t pronounce or names she can’t remember.

She recalls the descent when she first became a murder suspect and then the accused, beginning with the fateful night James Buckley was murdered:

On that night, Reasonover says, she waited to put 2-year-old Charmel to bed before she went out to do the laundry. What happened in the next few days and weeks, she says, destroyed the slim faith she had in fair play to begin with.

“When I first went to the police, I told them I couldn’t positively identify anybody, because I really didn’t get a good look at the guy,” Reasonover says of the night she viewed more than 250 mug shots at the Dellwood police station after Buckley’s murder. “But they told me, and I remember this to this day, they told me, ‘Look at the nose, the eyes — if anything looks familiar to you, pick him out, and we’ll check into it.’

“Well, I picked out a lot of photos. Then they turned some of them over in front of me, and Mr. Chapman, he said, ‘That’s OK if you can’t positively identify them, but just for the record, on the back of these pictures, write that you did positively identify them.’ I remember this specifically,” Reasonover says as she leans forward in her chair, “because I couldn’t spell ‘positively,’ and I asked him how, and he told me.”

That day Reasonover picked out two photos, of men named Isaac Scott and Herman Staples. That same day, another person who was at the Vickers station the night of the murder, Kenneth Main, also described seeing a black man wearing a green army jacket, blue jeans and black boots. Main, in his late 20s at the time and working at the St. Louis County’s Sheriff’s Department, chose one of the same mug shots Reasonover had picked, the one of Isaac Scott.

But Scott and Staples were in jail on the night of the Vickers robbery, so the next day, Reasonover looked at more mug shots and picked out one of William Love, who later passed a stress test, during which he said he wasn’t at the scene. Because of these three mistaken identifications, and because Reasonover’s description of the car she saw at the 7-Eleven was similar to that of the car Stanley White drove, Chapman decided to bring White in for questioning as well.

Chapman, like many of the people involved with this story, says he can’t comment about the case now because of the federal court hearing, but transcripts from Reasonover’s trial in late 1983 quote Chapman as saying he never told Reasonover that she should just pick out any mug shot that looked familiar.

Though that may or may not be so, it is clear that not everyone who was unsure about who they saw that night became a suspect in Buckley’s murder.

For instance, White was placed in a lineup for Kenneth Main to view. According to Main’s trial testimony, when he looked at the lineup and tried to identify the man he saw at the Vickers station that night, “The first two wasn’t him, the third kind of looked like him, but the fourth resembled him pretty much.”

The fourth man in the lineup was Stanley White.
“I was pretty positive,” Main testified, “but there was something about him that I couldn’t say that I was positive that it was the man.”

Main then submitted a voluntary statement to the police stating, “Number One and Number Two were not the men I saw at Vicker’s. I remember the man having a tall, lean build, like suspect Number Four. Number Three’s face somehow reminds me of the man I saw, but I can’t be sure. Number Four’s build reminds me of the man I saw and his profile reminds me of the man, but I only glanced at him at Vicker’s and can’t be sure it’s him.”

Unlike Reasonover, whose fruitless identifications made her and Stanley White suspects, Main was asked to undergo hypnosis the day after viewing the lineup. After the 20-minute hypnosis session with a psychiatrist, Dr. Jon Tek Lum, Main again viewed White in a lineup and positively identified him as the man he saw in the Vickers service station. In a later interview with John Hoogstraten, a private investigator, Main said the detail that “clinched it” for him was that after the hypnosis, when he saw White’s profile in the lineup, “the muscles popped out on his jaw.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 7, while with her friend Valerie Clark, Reasonover was arrested, and Clark was also brought in for questioning

According to an interview Clark had with Hoogstraten later: “Valerie said the police had them in separate rooms and they kept coming into Valerie’s room and saying, ‘We know that you know she did it.’ At one point Valerie said the police came into her room and said, ‘You know, there’s a $3,000 reward. If you put her away you can get it.’ At another time (Valerie Clark) said that a policeman said, ‘You can get $3,000. All you have to do is change your story.’”

Earlier in the week, when Reasonover first came to the police, she was given a polygraph test, which she passed. After her arrest, Reasonover was given a second test, which she failed.

“I took the test, and they say I was lyin’,” Reasonover told White that day. “‘Don’t give me that bullshit, talkin’ ’bout you ain’t gonna see your daughter no more. Your daughter see you, she be 50 years old and you be 100.’”

She tried to laugh it off.
“That ain’t funny,” White said.
“I know.”

Soon after Reasonover’s taped conversation with Stanley White, in which they both denied killing Buckley, several other women, including an undercover policewoman who was wired, talked with Reasonover in jail, and during the conversations Reasonover maintained her innocence. One cellmate, Marquita Butler, said in a later interview with Hoogstraten, “In all the time that Ellen was in that cell with us that night, I never heard her confess to doing any kind of murder or robbery. As a matter of fact … she was convinced she was going home, because she didn’t do anything wrong. She was convinced they would let her go home soon.”

After Butler was released, she told Hoogstraten, the police came to her house: “They wanted me to say I heard Ellen admit to killing someone at the Vickers station. The police told me they’d give me money if I’d testify to that. They offered me a reward.

“I was desperate for money then,” Butler said, “The police gave me information I needed to lie, and I started to feed it back to them. But finally I caught myself. I told myself it would be wrong for me to lie about Ellen. The police were very, very angry with me.”

In an earlier 1984 interview with reporters from the Washington Post — who also interviewed five other cellmates who said they never heard Reasonover confess — Butler told the newspaper what she later told Hoogstraten. And Dan Chapman told the Post that he never coerced Butler or anyone else into lying about Reasonover.

The next day, both White and Reasonover were released for lack of any evidence tying them to Buckley’s murder. One month later, though, three people — two men and one woman — robbed a Sunoco service station on Olive Boulevard. According to published reports, two attendants described the female robber as dark-complected, weighing 150 pounds and standing 5-foot-10, with short, curly hair. The next day, when police showed them both mug shots, including one of Reasonover — who had light skin and straight, shoulder-length hair and weighed about 135 pounds — one attendant positively identified her; the other attendant could not.

The police were once again knocking on Reasonover’s door. “After they took me, I never went home again,” she says.

“Them motherfuckers,” White said. “Hey, you know what they’ll do?”
“What?”
“They, they, they’ll trick you and shit. They gonna lie to you and tell you somethin’, and you know the motherfuckers be lyin’ to you. They some slick motherfuckers.”

“Motherfuckers lyin’,” Reasonover said.
“Why they do shit like that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

When Rose Jolliff took the stand at Ellen Reasonover’s trial in late 1983, she was asked by the prosecutor, Steven Goldman, whether anybody else in the courtroom was with her in jail earlier that year, on Jan. 7. “Yes, there was,” Jolliff said, pointing toward Reasonover, seated with her attorneys. “Ellen … the lady with the blue on.”

Every day, for 10 months that she was in jail, Reasonover says, she expected to be released for lack of evidence in Buckley’s murder. After all, White had been released for lack of evidence, and if he was her supposed accomplice, and if no one saw her at the Vickers station that night, and if there was no physical evidence linking her to the crime, then surely she’d be going home soon, too.

“Now, she had some conversation with you after she came into the cell?” Goldman asked Jolliff.

“Yes.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She told me, she asked me had I heard about the Vickers Station robbery, murder. And I said I heard about it a little, but not very much…. She said that she had been the one that had did the Vickers Station robbery and murder, and she went on to say how it was done and how it was supposed to have been.”

“Did she say how they went about doing it and what, if anything, did she say about this?” Goldman asked.

“She said she was supposed to, someone was supposed to have went up to the window, one of the guys, to distract the boy at the window and something supposedly went wrong. She was supposed to have went in, but something went wrong. So when something supposedly went wrong, she had to shoot him.”

Reasonover says now that when Jolliff took the stand that day, she realized she was being framed. Earlier, another witness, a woman named Mary Ellen Lyner, testified that she, like Jolliff, heard Reasonover’s confession in a jail cell she shared with Reasonover, after Reasonover’s arrest for the Sunoco robbery in February. During that trial, held during the summer, Lyner testified — as she did in the Buckley murder trial — that Reasonover told her she’d shot Buckley. Because of the Sunoco attendant’s positive identification of her and because of Lyner’s testimony, Reasonover was sentenced to seven years in prison for the Sunoco robbery.

But during this trial, the one for Buckley’s murder, Lyner also told the jury that Goldman promised he’d recommend to the court that her own sentence be reduced in exchange for her testimony against Reasonover.

Lyner, who was 35 at the time and working as a secretary for the Clayton law firm Swimmer and Associates, told the court that, beginning in 1978, she was convicted for a long string of bad-check and stealing counts. In fact, by the time of her testimony that day, Lyner had been convicted of 12 felonies and one misdemeanor, and when she shared a cell with Reasonover in February of that year, four more felonies were pending in St. Louis County and at least one other felony was pending in the city of St. Louis.

“And basically you are testifying that in exchange for these pending cases you had, in exchange for this testimony, Mr. Goldman recommended that you receive a one-year sentence, is that correct?” one of Reasonover’s attorneys, Madeline Franklin, asked.

“That’s correct,” Lyner said.
The attorney then noted that when Goldman approached Lyner about testifying against Reasonover, Lyner was in the middle of making a deal with the police in exchange for any information she had about drug trafficking at the jail where she was being held.

“Now you have testified that you have had 12 felony convictions and one misdemeanor conviction, and I believe your testimony is you have never served one day in the penitentiary, is that right?” Franklin asked.

“That’s right.”
“Is that because you have been a snitch and have been going around making deals with prosecutors to stay out of the penitentiary?”

“No,” Lyner answered. “This is the first time.”
“So you were looking for a way out of the penitentiary, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“And you were looking for a deal?”
“Yes.”

“A deal with the State, with Mr. Goldman, would that be correct, a deal with the police, a deal with anybody, as long as you didn’t have to go to the penitentiary?”

“That’s right,” Lyner said.
Reasonover says she remembered Lyner from the holding cell but never admitted Buckley’s murder to her. The fact that Lyner herself admitted to making a deal with Goldman in exchange for her testimony allowed Reasonover a little more hope with the jury.

When Jolliff got up on the stand, however, the landscape of the trial changed dramatically, because Jolliff, 32, previously on probation for mail fraud and passing bad checks, said she hadn’t made any deal with Goldman in exchange for her testimony.

Jolliff, who pleaded not guilty on Dec. 10, 1982, to three counts of passing bad checks — one for $274, one for $207 and a third for two checks written for $83 and $232, all Class C felonies, according to St. Louis City Court records — was placed in a holding cell with Reasonover on Jan. 7, the same day Reasonover and White’s conversation was secretly taped. She later testified that Reasonover confessed the Buckley murder to her.

But she swore to the jury that she’d made no deal with Goldman.
“Did I or anybody else ever offer to make a deal with you in regard to that pending case?” Goldman asked Jolliff on the stand.

“No.”
Later, Goldman asked again, “Did I or anybody ever promise your lawyer you would get any deal or you would get any kind of deal on it for testifying?”

“No.”
“Were you ever promised that you would get any kind of recommendation on that case at all, or did I ever promise you anything in that regard?”

“No.”
Reasonover, who sat watching Jolliff testify, says she remembers feeling, even at that point, that the jury wouldn’t convict her. The prosecution had called no witnesses who said they’d seen her at the Vickers that night, had no fingerprints and no murder weapon, and had produced no evidence that she shot James Buckley other than the testimonies of Mary Ellen Lyner and Rose Jolliff.

“I was thinking that they would find me innocent … and I knew the judge wasn’t going to let them frame me and take my whole life,” Reasonover says. “I thought everything would be fine, that they would find me not guilty.

“I didn’t really take any of it very seriously, you know? I didn’t think an innocent person could, you know, get framed. I really didn’t.”

Among the standard instructions to the jury was, “If the evidence in this case leaves in your mind a reasonable doubt that the Defendant was present at the time and place the offense is alleged to have been committed, then you must find the Defendant not guilty.”

When Goldman got up before the jurors for his closing arguments and began telling them what a “cold-blooded killer” and “liar” she was — “She intended that he die … took the life of James Buckley … she tells you these lies … she is making all this stuff up … these stories are crazy … she will kill…. ” — Reasonover says she started crying, because the jurors stared at her as though she were Satan.

Her only hope was that her own attorneys’ closing argument would bring them back around: “Ellen Reasonover became an easy way to wrap this case up and get that publicity off the Major Case Squad and off of Dellwood, and they can report to the news media, ‘Ah, we have got our killer, we are done, the police work is accomplished,’” Forriss Elliott told them.

“Now, if they had no eyewitnesses, if they got no fingerprints, if they have got no gun, if they have got no other way to put Ellen in this thing, how do they do it? They bring you … con artists who say, ‘I was in a cell with her. She told me all about it, everything you need to know. Just ask me, because in exchange for telling you anything you need to know’ — what is that TV program? Let’s Make a Deal? You know, the emcee is up on the stage, and he says, ‘We are going to make a deal. Rose Jolliff, come on the stage and let’s make a deal. Mary Lyner, come up on the stage and let’s make a deal.’ And of course, they had reason to come up on that stage and try to make a deal with Mr. Goldman.”

In rebuttal, Goldman told the jury that though he might have made a deal with Lyner, he offered Jolliff nothing, nothing at all. That apparently was enough. Soon after that, the jury returned its verdict: Ellen Reasonover was guilty of capital murder.

That wasn’t enough for Goldman. He then asked for the death penalty. “Ellen Reasonover realizes, if she does not get the death penalty, that she is going to go to the penitentiary, gets meals, gets a minimum wage, access to a library and recreation, and for Ellen Reasonover, that isn’t the answer,” Goldman told the jury. “You know what she deserves. No one but an Ellen Reasonover would think that James Buckley didn’t deserve to die. Somewhere in Ellen Reasonover’s life she decided that killing a person is like taking a drink of water for her. That’s what it means for her.”

Reasonover says she sat in a daze. She was numb. She was no longer fighting for her innocence; she was fighting for her life. As Goldman told the jurors that she’d just as soon kill someone as take a drink of water, Reasonover says she turned to James Buckley’s family behind her and mouthed, through tears, “I didn’t do it.”

The jury deliberated for three hours but came to no agreement on a sentence. The judge later sentenced Reasonover to life in prison. If she gets no reprieve and if she behaves herself in prison, she has a chance of getting out on parole in 2033, at the age of 75.

But there was hope, Reasonover was told, because the evidence was weak and the appeals process lay ahead. Besides, this sort of thing only happened in the movies, she thought, and in the end, when justice was served, the innocent got to go home.

“What was you thinkin’ when you came in here and looked at me all mean and shit?” Reasonover asked. “What the fuck was on your mind?”

“I don’t know, baby,” White said, laughing, “motherfuckers tellin’ me about the gas chamber …”

“What, you think I had, what?”
“I don’t know, baby, I …”
“I know you knew I couldn’ta told on you or nothin’, ’cause I ain’t got nothin’ to tell … that motherfucker tryin’ to get me to lie. I say, ‘What the fuck you want me to do, just lie on the man and say he did somethin’?’ Well, I say, ‘You’re wrong, baby, I ain’t gonna lie on no motherfucker, say somethin’ that man didn’t do.’”

“If it were true, baby, you know, why, I don’t blame you if you tell,” White said. “You know that?”

“Yeah,” Reasonover replied, “if it was the truth, I, I’da beat you and then told.”

They laughed.
“But you know what?” White asked.
“What?”

“I’m tellin’ you …. I ain’t never been in no shit this motherfuckin’ deep.”

“I’m tellin’ you, boy,” she answered. “It hurt me when I heard it happened, too, cause it happened around from my corner, and plus they showed me those pictures, boy, and that really fucked me up. I told them, ‘Hey …”

“Those motherfuckers.”
“It don’t make me no motherfuckin’ difference, he could’a been red, white, black, blue, he’s a young boy and he got killed.”

Like most people traversing the unknown terrain of the judicial system, Reasonover followed her appeals attorney’s lead, figuring that he, an NAACP lawyer from New York City, would find the right way out. But the appeal fell flat when the right paperwork wasn’t filed on time, and Reasonover says she felt almost as devastated as when she first heard her verdict.

Then Reasonover started writing the letters — letters to the pope, two presidents, their wives, their children, Jesse Jackson, Nelson Mandela, state legislators, reporters and just about anybody else she could get an address for to tell them she was innocent.

Then she read a magazine article about Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit group in Princeton, N.J., that works to free innocent prisoners.

“I wrote to them that I was innocent and would they help me, too?” Reasonover says. “They wrote me back and told me they had a full caseload, but I kept on writing; I wrote every week until I think they got tired of getting letters from me — I was like pleading, pleading, pleading with them — and they finally got in touch with my mom and asked her to send them the transcripts. Then they agreed to help me.”

Then, in 1996, an investigator from the organization made an astounding discovery when he interviewed Kenneth Main, one of the witnesses at Reasonover’s trial. The invest

06/30/1999
Easy Money

At dusk, the mist wreathes halos around the headlight beams of the cars whooshing up the westbound entrance ramp onto Highway 30 from Route 141. The harried travelers come in waves: wheels whirring, wipers wiping, racing through the gathering darkness, with windows rolled up against the damp, chill air.

None of them hear the spring peepers on the far side of the guardrail, down the embankment among the shallow stands of flood water. In the fading light, they can’t see Fenton Creek running brown, either, as the stream carries away the topsoil from the barren hillside that looms over this crossroads. Behind the First Baptist Church, where the Wednesday-night prayer meeting is in progress, twisted clumps of forest debris are all that remain of the trees that once grew here.

That the wooded hillside survived almost into the new millennium is no small feat. But in this case the 28.5-acre slope has been clear-cut not for logging purposes but for retail sales. The groundbreaking for the new Fenton Crossing shopping center, which will be anchored by a Dierbergs supermarket, took place on April 15.

To develop this area, the hill itself will be sawed in half and the creek bed relocated. Plans call for excavating 640,000 cubic yards of earth, with more than half of those materials to be hauled from the site. By next year, much of the ground will be graded and covered with asphalt. The work entails blasting a series of rock terraces into the incline. An architectural rendering of the finished product depicts a manmade palisade towering 100 feet over the strip mall.

The cost of this project is estimated at $23.8 million, with more than $6.7 million of it to be publicly subsidized.

Another way to view the site is to drive farther west on Highway 30 and double back on Country Home Road. Once beyond the Summit Heights subdivision and the monolithic Solid Rock Ministries church, with its bank-style time-and-temperature display, the road narrows into the kind of lane that its name denotes. Traffic thins out here and rural mailboxes still line the shoulder, but things are about to change. Nearby, the road abruptly ends at a sign that says: “Welcome to the City of Fenton, pop. 3,343.” Behind the sign, two yellow bulldozers stand idle in the mud.

After the city recently annexed this area, it took the land of one property owner through eminent domain. As a result, Joe Murphy’s property is now within spitting distance of the new development. The Murphy homestead is situated near the crest of the hill, about a quarter-mile off of Old Smizer Mill Road. Murphy, 69, lives there with his wife, Joyce. English ivy climbs one corner of their shake-shingled cottage; conifers tower in the background. There are a screened-in porch and a toolshed out back.

“They kind of ruined it. That will be a cliff soon,” says Murphy, referring to the adjacent area that has already been clear-cut. “I imagine we’ll be able to see the tops of some roofs. There will probably be some noise and some lights and so forth. It’s just heartrending to see the bulldozers. A tree that’s been sitting around for 150 years they can knock over in about 15 seconds.

“We’ve owned the place for 72 years,” he continues. “I was born here. My dad bought it in 1927. I’ve always said that the law was for the rich and the poor. The little guy in the middle is the guy who really gets screwed.”

Murphy is alluding to the tax-increment financing (TIF) statute. Under the state law, a municipality can designate a redevelopment area as a TIF district if it meets certain criteria. This allows the city to issue bonds that pay for the necessary infrastructure improvements to spur new development, including the purchase of property. In addition, the money can be used for everything from constructing roadways to paying for legal and consulting fees. The debt is then amortized — for up to 23 years — by earmarking half the increases in applicable sales and property taxes generated by the new development.

TIF, which originated in California decades ago, became sanctioned in Missouri in 1982. The framers of the law intended for it to stimulate economic growth in the inner city, not realizing that statute loopholes would allow for its eventual misappropriation. After federal tax credits shriveled up during the Reagan era, private developers began to seek other ways of capitalizing their ventures with public funding. They hit on TIF because it provides for up-front financing rather than tax breaks later.

As a result, TIF use has soared in the last few years for all the wrong reasons. Instead of helping neglected urban settings, the law is frequently used nowadays to promote suburban retail projects. Sometimes, as in Fenton, the public subsidy triggered by the law is used not to clean up abandoned areas but to “straighten out” natural phenomena such as hillsides.

More often, it is used in the inner suburbs to finance the acquisition of residential property. In these cases, TIF employs a carrot-and-stick approach. Developers, with the assurance of TIF backing, will routinely acquire options to buy housing at above-market value. But their enticing solicitations to homeowners come with an implicit threat. Under the law, the city can invoke eminent domain and expropriate the property. The dubious public-private alliance also allows for the blighting of entire neighborhoods for the scantiest of reasons. Once an area is marked for such redevelopment, it tends to freeze any financial investment, and home and commercial improvements are placed in abeyance. Disinvestment becomes the rule, not the exception, which ultimately leads to further decline.

In short, TIF has become a form of corporate welfare, pumping public money into private projects where subsidization is unwarranted. Moreover, it’s a growth industry that provides not only lucrative business opportunities for developers but also further enriches the lawyers, consultants and construction contractors who do their bidding. Losers in the TIF game are the consumers, who are forced to subsidize the projects through sales taxes, and school districts, which are deprived of the increased tax revenues generated by TIF projects.

There are about 40 TIF proposals currently on the books in St. Louis County, according to the county planning department. They are spread across the map from Bel Ridge in the north to Valley Park in the south. Nearly half of these publicly subsidized projects are retail developments and several more fall into the mixed-use category, which includes a large percentage of retail space. Some projects have been completed, whereas others are yet to be approved (see chart on page 20). Although a few TIF projects deserve accolades for stimulating growth in economically depressed neighborhoods (see sidebar on page 22), economists, regional planners, politicians and lawyers interviewed for this story believe that TIF — as it is now being applied — is widely abused.

In part, the abuse of the law stems from its ambiguity. “The problem may well be the flexibility that the statute gives the municipalities,” says Peter W. Salsich Jr., a law professor at St. Louis University. “The concept was that it was supposed to be used to restore blighted inner city and inner-ring suburbs. To me, the key question is (whether) the area is blighted and is in need of this kind of public support in order to get turned around. When people get carried away with these things, there is eventually going to be a backlash.”

David Merriman, an economist at Loyola University in Chicago, estimates that more than half the states now use some form of TIF. “TIFs are almost always a bad idea,” says Merriman, who has studied the effects of the law. “The research we did was on cities in the Chicago metropolitan area. Our conclusion was that cities that have TIF actually grew more slowly than cities that didn’t have TIF. The reason we think that this happened is that by using TIF you are essentially stealing from the rest of the city to concentrate on a few areas that you’re trying to develop. So it’s actually costly to the city. You’re moving development around in an inefficient way.”

The Fenton Crossing project is being developed by Sansone Group, one of the most prominent TIF players in St. Louis County. Sansone built the Promenade on Brentwood with the help of TIF. The same developer is currently involved in controversial TIF projects or proposals in Hazelwood, Eureka, Rock Hill and Olivette.

Last year, the city of Fenton expanded its TIF district to include the hill on the other side of Highway 30. The plan also calls for the redevelopment of the existing Wal-Mart and Shop ‘N Save stores in the old downtown section. Altogether, the Fenton proposal has ballooned to a projected cost of almost $193 million, with more than $50 million in public funds coming from the TIF designation.

PGAV Urban Consulting, a St. Louis-based firm specializing in TIF-related matters, prepared the redevelopment plan for the city of Fenton. PGAV and other consulting firms have honed the art of defining large tracts of land — hillsides or already developed commercial areas — as blighted or in danger of blight so the areas can be designated TIF districts. As mentioned, the Fenton TIF district calls for the redevelopment of the existing downtown section, and PGAV’s study cited a deteriorating infrastructure — including a cracked Taco Bell sign — as sufficient indication that the area was drifting toward blight. That was deemed enough to justify a TIF-district designation, including the undeveloped hillside near the highway. The proposed plan allocates only about $4.5 million of the budgeted costs to spruce up the Olde Towne downtown section. More than $47 million in TIF, on the other hand, will go toward clearing the land to make way for the new developments on either side of the intersection of Highway 30 west of Route 141.

The Fenton redevelopment plan writes off the existing downtown area as obsolete, a throwback to the 19th century, and endorses enlarging the city’s commercial strip through westward expansion. “In contemporary terms, attracting commercial and mixed-use development means that parcels of sufficient size with appropriate width and depth dimensions, appropriate site topography, and appropriate access must be available,” according to PGAV’s redevelopment plan. “Such parcels must be located along and have easy access to major roadways and have excellent visibility from these roadways.”

G.J. Grewe is the other developer involved in the project. Similar to the Sansone’s Dierbergs project, the opposite hillside will be blasted away to create a level area for another strip mall and parking lot. Ironically, the name of the new development is to be Gravois Bluffs.

James E. Mello, the attorney for Grewe, says that the use of TIF is appropriate in the Fenton development and elsewhere. “There has always been government participation in economic development. TIF doesn’t change that,” says Mello, a partner in the law firm of Armstrong, Teasdale, Schlafly and Davis. “It’s always been there in one form or another. You had tax abatement. You had federal grants. Those programs don’t exist anymore.”

Mello, a former Ferguson city manager, is a director of the Missouri Tax Increment Financing Association, a group dedicated to the use of the state statute to its legal limits. As a lawyer who specializes in municipal issues, he bristles at the idea that TIF is being misapplied in this case. “I think you really got to look not at the tool that’s being used,” says Mello, “but the public purpose of trying to maintain your economic base and strengthen it. Sometimes it is a public-private partnership that has to be used to accomplish that.”

Nothing in the law now precludes a city from annexing a proposed TIF district. Nor does the statute prohibit a municipality from subsequently using dynamite to blow away hillsides that stand in the way of economic progress. But is this what the law intended? Salsich, the law professor, issues a caveat in this respect. “My question is (whether) the area is blighted,” he says. “There is nothing wrong with the idea itself. You’re basically using the taxes to pay for infrastructure in that spot. But, if it gets misused, you’re not accomplishing your purpose.”

By rearranging the geological structure of the area, Fenton has laid rightful claim to the regional frontier of TIF development.

In the inner-ring suburbs of St. Louis County, TIF subsidies are used for another questionable purpose, the buyout of homeowners at exorbitant prices. The law allows for the artificial inflation of property values at taxpayers’ expense. By manipulating residential-real-estate market forces, TIF creates a different kind of upheaval — the displacement of human populations. The proposed project in Olivette is a good example of this unacknowledged diaspora.

According to plan, Chickasaw Drive is crumbling a little bit at a time, like the chink in the pavement under the front left tire of Irv Zeid’s red Toyota.

In 1956, when the street was new, Zeid and his family moved into their ranch-style home in Arrowhead Park, shortly after the Olivette subdivision opened. In those days, he commuted to work at the family-owned furniture and clothing store in North St. Louis. At home, his wife and he raised two sons, who attended nearby Hilltop Elementary School. The school acted as a common bond for residents of the neighborhood, and Zeid became more involved in the community as a subdivision trustee. Later, he ran successfully for a seat on the city council. The license plates on his Toyota identify him as Mayor Z, in honor of his one-year term as municipal leader between 1975 and 1976.

At 70 years of age, Zeid looks back on his civic career with pride. He has served on every conceivable municipal board or panel, and confronted an array of local issues, from annexations to potholes. “I still have a constituency,” he says, seated in the dinette of his Arrowhead Park residence. The half-drawn drapes allow natural light to filter through a cracked picture window. In the living room, oversized ceramic lamps harken back to an earlier suburban era, as does the chandelier, which resembles an inverted space-age menorah. Mayor Z, as he refers to himself, says he would like to buy new carpeting and furniture and replace the gutter and rotting fascia on the front of the residence. He would like to fix up the house, but his plans for renovating have been put on hold for nearly two years.

It’s not altogether clear how long Mayor Z’s self-proclaimed constituency will remain intact, either. Like those of his neighbors throughout Arrowhead Park, Zeid’s life is in limbo; the same uncertainty faces residents of the adjacent subdivisions of Hilltop Woods and Fairlight Downs.

As he explains his predicament, he leans his elbows on the pile of newspapers on top of the dinette table and describes how the stress has taken its toll. For more than an hour, a half-filled cup of black coffee is left untouched as he continues to talk. The man sitting at the dinette table looks older than the one in the family portrait on the wall. With each new tale, it becomes more evident that Mayor Z, in his current role of subdivision trustee, is facing the most disturbing quandary of his political career.

“It’s made me sick to my stomach,” says Zeid. “I’ve now got a spastic colon. From day to day, it can cause me a lot of problems.”

Zeid, who has devoted a lifetime to his community, now favors wiping his neighborhood off the map, including his own house. He is not alone. His views are shared by the vast majority of the nearly 300 homeowners located on an 85-acre tract of land north of Olive Boulevard between Interstate 170 and Price Road. All of these residents have been persuaded to sell their homes because the TIF subsidy allows the developer the luxury of buying the property at prices far above the going rate.

As in Fenton, the Olivette development is being driven by Sansone Group — in this case, through a partnership with THF Realty. The proposal includes building a Wal-Mart, Sam’s Wholesale Club, Shop ‘N Save and a Lowe’s or Home Depot.

Last month, the city finally signed a memorandum of understanding with the developer to permit up to $38.9 million in TIF financing for the proposed Wal-Mart project, which has a total projected cost of between $107 to $111 million. In other words, more than a third of this private development will be financed with public funding. The Olivette TIF Commission will next meet on June 9 to consider approving the proposal.

Requesting TIF assistance has become a routine operating procedure for developers like Sansone. But there is a continuing debate over the efficacy of the law. As one St. Louis County municipal official put it: “I believe there have been abuses of TIF in St. Louis County. In this day and age, every developer comes to town with his or her hand out. They’re looking for that subsidy that is known as tax-increment financing.”

Supporters of TIF, on the other hand, argue that the law allows economic development in areas that would otherwise go begging. Zeid, for example, defends the Olivette TIF proposal on the grounds that the city has no other way of increasing its tax base because there is no room for it to expand further. “The city needs the money,” he says. “The only way to do it is to get commercial in here.”

The developers concur with Zeid, arguing that the expense of building shopping centers mandates governmental assistance. “If it were not for TIF,” says Jim Lewis of THF, “these projects would never come close to happening. You can’t buy 280 homes and make the numbers work for any type of a shopping-area development. You’re subsidizing private development because the numbers would never work without a subsidy.” Lewis’ statements sound reasonable except for a crucial detail — the TIF statute was designed to address blight, not to buy out perfectly livable residential property.

In attorney Mello’s view, the rationale for defending TIF may change with the terrain or the clientele, but its rewards remain immutable. In Fenton, where he represents a developer’s interests, the Armstrong-Teasdale lawyer asserts that the city needs to expand its borders to pursue its economic destiny. In Olivette, where he represents residents aching for a buyout, a neighborhood is worthy of condemnation to accommodate market forces. TIF can be equally exploited in both locations.

But critics maintain that suburban retail TIF developments don’t really create new economic activity. Instead, they purloin a portion of the pre-existing tax base from neighboring cities. With municipalities throughout St. Louis County vying for their share of sales-tax revenue, TIF has become an incentive for competing cities to snatch a bigger piece of the pie.

To Lee Brotherton, an Olivette resident, TIF is a bane to the St. Louis-area economy. “It seems to me that the city of Olivette ought to pay a little more attention to the debate that’s been going on in this region now for at least a decade about trying to eliminate the pointless, unproductive profit system between the municipalities, the simple tax grabs that don’t benefit our community,” Brotherton told the Olivette TIF Commission at a hearing in April.

Brotherton is a former aide to St. Louis County Executive George “Buzz” Westfall; he currently serves on the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the regional planning agency. “Where is this new revenue that is going to be captured coming from?” asks Brotherton. “Is it coming from Overland? In the long run, (this) is not going to be a benefit to the people of Olivette or to the people of the St. Louis area. It’s bad public policy and it’s bad government.” Brotherton adds that there are ample shopping outlets within minutes of the proposed Olivette development, including the Target store in Brentwood — another Sansone TIF development.

Following his public comments, Brotherton expanded on his criticism of the Olivette TIF proposal. “It’s clear that the people running the city government decided long ago that they were going to have a TIF development,” says Brotherton. “It is also clear that they made absolutely no effort to weigh whether or not this was good for the area in general. As an Olivette resident, I care about Overland and I care about the other surrounding communities, and this is short-term gain and long-term loss. It’s really insulting to propose this development. I mean, we have the opportunity to have a Wal-Mart? Now a Wal-Mart by any other name is still a Wal-Mart. We don’t need another big, ugly warehouse in our community. We need a stronger regional economy. That’s the bottom line.”

Whether cash-strapped cities see TIF as a panacea or a necessary evil, the results are the same: Established neighborhoods are being destroyed, falling prey to TIF subsidies, which allow Sansone, THF and other developers to buy out property owners at above market value.

To be decreed a TIF district, the law requires the area be designated an economic-redevelopment zone and be declared blighted or tending toward that end. Arrowhead Park falls in the latter category, having been defined under TIF to be a “conservation area.” To qualify as a “conservation area” under the TIF statute, 50 percent of the housing stock within the TIF district must be 35 years of age or older. In the aging, inner-ring suburbs of St. Louis County, this criterion can be easily met. It is a loophole in the law large enough to drive a bulldozer through.

When a municipality becomes bent on pursuing a TIF project, the whole process becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All investments are put on hold. Home sales halt. Roofs are not replaced. Houses aren’t painted. Additions aren’t built. Normal life comes to a standstill. Years may pass.

Meanwhile, property taxes get spent elsewhere, as everyone waits for the deal to go down. Each inaction reinforces the next. The Olivette TIF proposal, for instance, points to the deteriorating streets — the chink in the street in front of Zeid’s house — that the city itself has refused to repair. Since signing options to sell their properties, many homeowners have already relocated and rented out their former residences. The Olivette TIF proposal cites the increase in decaying housing and rise of rental units as another sign of deterioration. The neighborhood is in the process of destroying itself, with the assistance of the city and TIF.

Zeid finds himself caught in the middle, having taken on the role of a behind-the-scenes negotiator. “I’m kind of frustrated because I think the developers are using me, as well as the city,” he acknowledges. “The city knows I’m in contact with the developers, and they can use me to try and get their points across and vice versa.”

It all began in July 1997, says Zeid. While he was busy carrying out his duties as an organizer for Olivette’s annual Summerfest celebration, Sansone Group, through a third-party real-estate agent, was quietly obtaining options to buy the houses on the 30-acre tract that fronts Olive Boulevard. The Sansone proposal would have left Zeid and his neighbors surrounded by commercial and industrial property.

After word of the deal was leaked by St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Jerry Berger, Zeid and his fellow subdivision trustees convinced the Olivette City Council that Arrowhead Park should be included in the development. The subdivision then hired Mello. Meanwhile, a competing effort was under way by THF Realty, which contacted the Armstrong-Teasdale law firm and started buying options on houses in Arrowhead Park, says Zeid. Ultimately, the two competing developers formed a partnership to develop the entire 80-acre tract.

“When the city was starting to negotiate with both developers, they were trying to play one developer against the other, trying to get the best deal for the city,” says Zeid. “Nobody ever thought they would merge, because these guys were known not to have a fondness for each other.”

The partnership, indeed, seems to be a marriage of convenience. Sansone Group possessed the bulk of the sales options on the front half of the needed property but had failed to include Arrowhead Park in its proposal. This left THF an opening. Michael Staenberg and E. Stanley Kroenke own THF. The latter developer holds an interest in the St. Louis Rams football team. More important, he sits on the board of directors of Wal-Mart, and his wife is the niece of the late Sam Walton, the founder of the retail behemoth. Forbes magazine recently estimated her worth at more than $600 million.

That Kroenke is married into the Walton family is merely a coincidence and has nothing to do with his realty company’s efforts to build a Wal-Mart in Olivette, says Lewis, the spokesman for THF in St. Louis. “We have no tie to Wal-Mart other than we’ve developed a lot of shopping centers with them,” he says.

Using TIF money to raze hundreds of houses to make way for a Wal-Mart is an idea that astonishes Merriman, the Loyola economist. “That’s insane. If people are living in the houses, there is no way I would think that (possible),” he says. “A lot of times TIFs have moved very far from the original intent. That’s one of the things that I find disturbing. You start out with this law that makes some sense, even (that’s) debatable, and then the way that it’s implemented makes no sense.”

In a position paper released in April, the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the regional-planning agency, acknowledged the problems endemic to TIF. “In the mobile regional marketplace, many local governments are vulnerable to pressure from private developers to make tax increment financing available in order to ‘win’ new jobs, retail activity, and associated sales tax revenues,” says the report. “In the absence of other tools and enforcement standards regarding its use, TIF districts are cropping up throughout the region in areas in which evidence of blight and distress is scant or non-existent. Nor is it always defensible that public sector intervention in the market is necessary in order for the redevelopment to occur.

“If the region is going to stabilize the industrial and commercial areas which are truly blights on the economic landscape, TIF must be targeted to its originally-intended use. Individual local governments acting alone cannot make this happen. It requires both statutory and procedural changes and a long-term commitment to more sweeping reform.”

East-West Gateway recommends the following changes to the TIF law:

*Blighting for TIF developments should be restricted to economically distressed areas.

*Public-sector-intervention standards should be established and enforced.
*TIF proposals should be approved by an objective third party.
*TIF-district boundaries should not extend beyond the area found to be blighted.

*Cost-benefit-analysis requirements should be more stringently applied.
Anthony F. Sansone Sr., the patriarch of the Sansone Group, will never be displaced or disturbed by a TIF project. The 73-year-old developer is far from the bulldozers’ roar, ensconced in the tony St. Louis County suburb of Huntleigh, where, according to St. Louis County property records, he occupies a 15-room mansion that has seven baths and a market value of almost $1.5 million.

Reaping TIF benefits is but the latest good fortune to befall Sansone, whose financial affairs have flourished in the gray realm where private interests and public policy come together. Over the years, newspaper accounts have alleged a litany of improprieties from which Sansone Sr.’s business interests have reportedly profited. Many of the accounts contain references to associations with political and organized-crime figures.

For instance, in 1964, Sansone acted as campaign manager for his business partner, Alfonso J. Cervantes, who successfully ran for mayor of St. Louis that year.

Once in office, Cervantes named Sansone Sr.’s brother to the influential post of city assessor. Prior to this appointment, Joseph C. Sansone was a partner with Anthony Sansone Sr. in the family’s real-estate business. By 1967, Sansone Realty Co., then located at 4705 Hampton Ave., had its property taxes rolled back by more than 50 percent, according to a story in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

A 1970 Life magazine story, by former Globe-Democrat reporter Denny Walsh, focused national attention on Cervantes’ relationship with Sansone Sr. The story told, among other things, how Sansone arranged a 1964 campaign-strategy session between his father-in-law, Jimmie Michaels, then head of the Syrian organized-crime faction in St. Louis, and Cervantes. After Cervantes won the mayoral primary, the Life story reported that Sansone Sr. later attended another strategy meeting with Michaels and Anthony “Tony G” Giordano, then the leader of the St. Louis Mafia. After publication of the Life story, Sansone denied in news accounts that the meetings took place.

Sansone’s associations drew additional scrutiny in 1972, when he appeared as a witness in a federal anti-racketeering trial in Los Angeles. Under oath, he testified that in 1967 he had withdrawn a $150,000 investment in the Frontier Casino in Las Vegas, after being notified he would be required to apply for a Nevada gaming license. Federal prosecutors had alleged that Mafiosi in St. Louis and Detroit were trying to gain illegal control of the casino. Sansone, the prosecutors alleged, traveled to Las Vegas with Giordano to make the investment. Sansone denied the charge but testified that he was acquainted with Giordano through family ties.

With the passage of time, however, these eyebrow-raising headlines have been mostly forgotten, and the Sansone Group, as it is now known, goes about its business with little publicity. News stories that chronicle TIF projects are buried in the business section of the daily newspaper or relegated to the pages of the neighborhood weeklies. At the same time, the abuse of TIF keeps pressing the envelope of legality.

In Hazelwood, Sansone is involved in the redevelopment of the Elm Grove Plaza on Lindbergh. The proposal includes the demolition of 10 houses, with a TIF subsidy of $2.5 million on a $12 million project. In Eureka, Sansone has teamed up with Prime Retail Inc. and is set to begin building an outlet mall with a $35 million TIF subsidy. In Rock Hill, Sansone has been given the go-ahead for a 25-acre development at the intersection of Manchester and McKnight roads. The proposed $24 million mixed-use TIF project would raze 125 middle-income housing units and replace the existing neighborhood with a strip mall and luxury condominiums costing from $200,000-$300,000 each.

“Development is our business,” says Doug Sansone, a spokesman for Sansone Group. He declined any further comment, saying that members of the family-controlled company didn’t want to be quoted for fear that they would be portrayed in a negative light.

Space exists at a premium in the retail-development world, a world measured in dollars per square foot. “Big box,” “mega mall,” “power center” and “category killer” are all part of the real-estate jargon that describes the alterations that society is undergoing to fit the expansion of the market economy into the next millennium.

06/02/1999