Brett Hartmann
Summit
County, Ohio
Date of Crime: September 9, 1997
Brett Hartmann was sentenced to death for the murder of
Winda Snipes. Snipes was brutally beaten, strangled, and stabbed over
135 times. Her throat was cut and her hands were cut off. The
cord with which she was strangled was taken from a clock that stopped at
4:38. This evidence suggests she was murdered at 4:38 a.m. or 4:38
p.m.
Hartmann had sex with Snipes at about 3 a.m. on the day of her murder. Snipes received a phone call at 3:31 a.m., which she did not answer. A
few minutes later, she asked Hartmann to leave because she said her
boyfriend was coming over. After Hartmann left, Snipes received
another phone call at 3:36 a.m. which she did not answer either. At
Hartmann's trial, Detective Joseph Urbank testified that the calls came from
a pay phone in Kennmore, which is a few towns away. Later
investigation showed that they came from a pay phone less than 100 yards
away from Snipes' apartment, and almost in a direct line of sight of the
apartment.
Winda was later seen on the streets of Akron and had picked up her paycheck. Hartmann found her murdered in her apartment. Because he did not want
to be arrested for outstanding traffic warrants, he removed a shirt of his
that was at the apartment as well as some trash he had left there the day
before. He did not dispose of the shirt. He anonymously made two
calls to 911. Police arrived at the scene at 11 p.m.
While police were at the scene, Hartmann contacted them and informed them
that he knew Winda and had been with her. He was questioned the next
day and as an officer was bringing him home, the officer was instructed to
arrest Hartmann for the outstanding traffic warrants. Hartmann then
told the officer about finding the body, his 911 calls, and taking his
shirt. He consented to a search of his home.
Witnesses have reported that a month or so prior to Snipes' death, her
boyfriend Jeffrey Nichols had threatened to “cut the bitch up, slit her
throat.” Police dismissed Nichols as a suspect, because of his alibi. Allegedly, he was at home drinking beer with a friend. The brutality
of Snipes' murder suggested it was committed by someone who was intimate
with her and had reason to feel great rage towards her. Hartmann has
phone records indicating he was home talking to a girlfriend at the time of
the murder. Hartmann was checked the day after the murder and he had
no defense wounds or other marks of injury that could be construed as having
occurred during the crime.
At Hartmann's trial, testimony was presented that crime scene evidence was
not tested for fingerprints, but reports later surfaced indicating that the
evidence was tested for fingerprints. The results are still not known. The state's case was marked by deliberate misleading statements, perjured
testimony, sloppy investigation, and sloppy processing of evidence. The coroner testified that Snipes' murder could have occurred at 4:38 a.m.
or p.m., when his own reports, hidden from the defense showed that the a.m.
time frame was not a possibility. Hartmann's public defense team did
little to defend him. They never asked or accepted Hartmann's side of
events, saying that they preferred to let the evidence tell them what
happened, and then relied on the state's evidence for trial.
Hartmann's prosecutor, Judy Bandy, has a record of misconduct. Regarding a later case, a 2000 Beacon-Journal article stated, “In
Bandy's zeal to win, evidence was hidden or otherwise kept from defense
counsel, that individual defense attorneys were then targeted for
investigation and threats. If this were an isolated case, that would
be one thing, but defense attorneys had been alleging Bandy's tactics for
years.”
Other officials are apparently no less corrupt. Hartmann's co-counsel
was sentenced in 2002 to four years in prison for defrauding clients from
1993 on. Hartmann's trial judge, Michael Callahan, was implicated in a
murder investigation. A prostitute informant told her handler that a
guy picked her up, took her to a room in the courthouse and gave her cocaine
in exchange for oral sex. She pointed out the chambers she was brought
to and the car in which she was picked up. Both belonged to Judge
Callahan. Six days later she was found murdered. [5/07]
________________________________
Reference: End
Death Penalty for Brett Hartmann
Posted in:
Victims of the State,
Eastern Ohio Cases
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