Deadline

He’s 34 but looks 50. He doesn’t maintain eye contact for long. Life
in prison has not been easy for Brett Hartmann. But he doesn’t want to
die.

His hands cuffed, he sits at a small table in the visitor’s room of
the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown, his home for the past four
years. When he talks, his voice is calm, unassuming, a little high. He
says that when he was first arrested for murder, he didn’t take it
seriously enough, because he knew he didn’t do it. He put his faith in
his lawyers. It wasn’t until he noticed the jury foreman distractedly
playing with his watch during his attorney’s closing argument that he
sensed danger. He never expected to be sentenced to death — a
sentence scheduled to be meted out on April 7, barring a last-minute
intervention by Governor Ted Strickland.

“All I’m guilty of is being a drunk,” he says, shaking his head.
“I’d like people to look at this case more closely. Look at the facts.
Look at the truth. I know a lot of things make me look bad on the
surface. But the more you start to look at it, the more the state’s
case falls apart. So much of the case is a complete lie. It’s all a
fraud.”

It’s a long story, though. And he doesn’t have much time.

Brett Hartmann never had a chance. His father was a hotel manager,
his mother worked for FEMA and neither seemed to want him. They split
when Brett was five and he went to live with his mother in California
for a spell. But the new man of the house didn’t like Brett, and Brett
didn’t like him. So he was sent to the Navajo Indian Reservation near
Window Rock, Arizona, to live with his aunt. Aunt Arletta taught
special-ed classes on the reservation and lived in a trailer in the
middle of the desert, three quarters of a mile from a paved road. The
trailer’s water supply was powered by a windmill. There was no TV.

Brett was the only white boy at St. Michael’s Catholic Indian
School. On the playground, the other kids spoke Navajo so that he
couldn’t understand the specifics of their taunts. Every summer for
four years, he returned to his mother, only to be sent back to the
isolation of the desert each fall.

At 11, Brett stole money from his aunt and passed it out at school.
He disrupted class. When Aunt Arletta demanded an explanation, he said
that good behavior had never gotten him what he really wanted. “When I
was little, I could make the babysitters change if I was bad,” he told
her. “So I thought if I was bad here, you would get mad at me and send
me home.”

When he was 12, he was sent to live with his father’s new family in
New Mexico. Not long after he arrived, Brett stole enough money from
his father’s motel to pay for a train ticket back to California. He
never made it. His father’s new wife had called the cops and they
picked him up before he left the state, charging him with larceny. They
had him committed to the New Mexico Youth Diagnostic and Development
Center for three months.

Several mental-health professionals interviewed him in juvie. “Brett
is a very disturbed adolescent,” his file reveals. “Brett presented
several symptoms that are normally found in individuals who have been
abused during their childhood. He is repressing strong feelings of
anger and hostility. Brett’s poor ego strengths, together with
impulsivity, feelings of anger, hostility and his suspiciousness make
him a high risk to himself and others.” His counselors recommended that
he be placed in a treatment center.

Upon his release, however, he moved back in with his mother, who had
remarried again and was living on the La Jolla Indian Reservation in
California. To attend school, Brett rode a bus an hour and a half each
way. Soon, Brett was living on the streets of Escondido.

Occasionally Brett was arrested and returned to a home for wayward
youths, but nothing clicked until he was nearly an adult. At 17, he
shined up to a manager at McDowell Youth Homes, who liked to refer to
Brett as “one of the four horsemen.” This man, whose name he has
forgotten, appears to have been the first adult to accept him, faults
and all. Before he turned 18, Brett took all the culinary classes the
youth center offered. And after he got his GED, the manager paid for
him to attend culinary school until he landed a steady job at a
steakhouse.

Brett had learned a trade, and he was never without a job after
that. He followed his mother to Wisconsin and then to Akron, picking up
jobs running cafeterias at nursing homes and then area bars. He got to
be so good at cooking and managing that restaurants began recruiting
him. And that’s how Brett ended up working at the Quaker Square Hilton
in Akron in 1997.

In February of that year, he met Winda Snipes. Brett liked to drink
— he could down 15 beers a night — so it’s fitting that
they met in a bar. He was 23. She was 46. They started meeting for sex,
even though they both had lovers of their own. And then she was
dead.

Winda Snipes never had a chance. Whoever killed her was filled with
rage; she was stabbed 138 times and her hands were cut off.

An examination of the events leading up to and directly following
her violent end appear to link Brett Hartmann to the crime. Certainly,
he did himself no favors.

In the early-morning hours of September 9, 1997, Snipes walked into
the Bucket Shop bar in Highland Square and found Hartmann already
there. He kissed her on the cheek, and they made idle chitchat. Though
he knew her by sight, truth was, Hartmann couldn’t remember her name at
the time and doubts she knew his. Their relationship was about
no-strings-attached sex, and that suited him fine. That night would be
no exception. On the way back to her apartment, Hartmann stopped by
another bar and bought four bottles to go.

He’d been to her place on South Highland Street before — in
fact, the first time they met, Hartmann says that Snipes had locked
herself out, and he used a ladder he found lying behind the apartment
next door to climb up to her kitchen window. He knew that the side door
of the complex was often kept ajar. That night, he followed her inside,
and they began dancing.

A friend of Snipes’ left the Inn Between bar around 3 a.m. that
morning and passed by her apartment. He looked up and saw Hartmann
closing the blinds near her bed, only to have Snipes angrily open them
again. Hartmann maintains she wanted to keep the blinds open so people
could see them having sex. Eventually, though, she let him close the
blinds again.

They argued. According to Hartmann, he wanted anal sex, and she
refused. After he finished, she kicked him out, saying that her
boyfriend was coming over. Jeffrey Nicholas lived in the apartment
across the hall.

Hartmann says he stumbled home — it was a short walk to his
mother’s place on Charlotte Street — and passed out in bed. He
didn’t have to work the next day, so he slept in. His girlfriend called
and woke him up at 3:12 p.m. and called again at 4:50, according to
phone records.

Snipes was last seen alive at 4:30 p.m., when an acquaintance saw
her cross the street.

Both Hartmann and his mother, who was home that afternoon, claim
that he didn’t get out of bed until 6:15 p.m. and didn’t leave until
around 7:30, when he headed for the bar. He was supposed to meet his
girlfriend later that night. And that’s when things took a bizarre
turn.

Hartmann says he got to thinking that he might have better sexual
endurance with his girlfriend that evening if he had sex with Snipes
first. So he slipped in the side door of her apartment and walked
upstairs to her room. The door was unlocked, he says. Stepping into the
room, he saw a leg draped over the bed by the window. Her mutilated
body lay on the floor. Her throat had been slashed open. Her bedside
clock had been ripped out, the cord used to strangle her.

Hartmann’s first reaction, he claims, was to nudge the body with his
foot; he thought it might be a joke. When he realized it was real,
Hartmann says he tried to see if she was alive. He lifted her body,
which was difficult because one leg was tied to the bed with a pair of
pantyhose. It was then he noticed that Snipes had no hands.

Hartmann then realized that he was covered in her blood and would be
a prime suspect in this murder. He’d had sex with her the night before
— they might even find his semen still inside her. His
fingerprints were all over the room. He spent the next several minutes
washing the blood off his hands and wiping down surfaces that he
remembered touching. He returned home, changed, then walked to Inn
Between to get drunk.

At 9:59 p.m., Brett used a pay phone to call in an anonymous tip to
the police. He then hid behind a tree and watched the police secure the
crime scene. Around 3 a.m., Brett approached a mobile crime lab that
had arrived at the apartment and told a detective, “She was a whore, a
big whore, she got what she deserved.”

Because of his strange behavior, Hartmann quickly became a person of
interest in Snipes’ murder. Police asked to search his house and he
agreed. Under his bed, they discovered the bloody shirt. On his
dresser, they found a knife and Snipes’ wristwatch.

Detectives interviewed Hartmann’s coworkers. One recalled that
Hartmann had once commented that O.J. Simpson should have cut off his
victims’ hands so that police would not find evidence under their
fingernails.

Hartmann was arrested and charged with Snipes’ murder. Summit County
Prosecutor Judy Bandy also charged him with kidnapping for tying her
up, making the crime a capital murder.

At trial, prosecutors enlisted the help of a forensic expert named
Rod Englert to examine blood spatter and other evidence. Englert told
the jury that he had found an impression of a knife on Brett’s shirt.
He also stated that Snipes’ hands had been removed by someone
experienced with cutting flesh — a doctor or maybe a cook. Also,
a giant “X” had been carved into her body. Could it stand for “Xavier,”
Hartmann’s middle name?

An inmate who shared a cell with Hartmann testified that Hartmann
had actually confessed to the murder in a private conversation.

On May 22, 1998, Hartmann was sentenced to death for the murder of
Winda Snipes. “You are beyond lecturing and I’m not going to waste my
breath lecturing,” said Judge Michael Callahan. “I intend to do
everything in my power to make sure you never draw another free breath
as long as you live. May God have mercy on your soul.”

The defense never had a chance. Not against an assistant prosecutor
as notorious as the late Judy Bandy. She was once as revered for her
zealousness in Summit County courts as Bill Mason is in Cuyahoga, tough
on crime, racking up convictions. But, like Mason, she was a glutton
for indictments, over-charging criminals in weak cases to push plea
deals, and a fierce opponent of open discovery.

In 1999, both Bandy and Judge Callahan, who had since become Summit
County prosecutor, were embroiled in a very public scandal after
several local escorts were charged with prostitution. Bandy was the
prosecutor assigned to the cases. In all, 67 people had been indicted
on more than 1,000 charges, and Bandy was out to win at all costs. She
refused to provide open discovery to defense attorneys and when they
complained, she threatened to investigate them, according to reports in
the Akron Beacon Journal. She allowed false information
to be placed in a police report. And she withheld some important
information some of the alleged prostitutes had shared about Callahan.
One prostitute, Melissa Sue Sublett, told an investigator that she had
done cocaine with Callahan and had performed oral sex on him for money
inside his courthouse chambers. Five days later, she was found stabbed
to death. A woman pleaded guilty to murdering Sublett before the
connection to Callahan was revealed and got a three-year sentence.
Later, she recanted her confession. Callahan denied the
allegations.

Hartmann and his lawyers allege that Bandy and Callahan did their
best to manipulate the jury and to hide evidence in his trial that
might have exonerated him.

Bandy’s forensics “expert,” Rod Englert, had no formal science
education. His résumé appears to have been misrepresented
or outright falsified. In a New York trial, Englert altered the laws of
physics to better fit the prosecution’s case when he told the jury that
blood spatter never falls straight down, but always at a 45-degree
angle. Real experts, like Herbert MacDonnell, have called him a “liar
for hire.” Bloodstain expert Barton Epstein re-examined Hartmann’s case
and concluded that Englert’s claim of a knife impression on Hartmann’s
bloody shirt “is an overstatement at minimum and outright wrong at
worst.”

The jailhouse snitch who claimed that Hartmann had confessed to him
had a lawyer with a conscience named Tom Adgate. Before his client
testified, Adgate demanded a meeting with Judge Callahan. According to
an inside source, Adgate told Callahan than his client was about to
commit perjury. Still, Callahan allowed his testimony.

Detectives didn’t bother to determine where Jeffrey Nicholas,
Snipes’ boyfriend, was when she was murdered. Nicholas had been the
handyman at the apartment complex and had access to keys to every room
in the building. Initially, however, detectives assumed that the murder
had taken place after 9 p.m., so when Nicholas gave them an alibi for
that evening — he was at a friend’s house — they wrote him
off. But when the medical examiner determined that the time of death
was a few hours earlier, they never returned to Nicholas to find out
where he was at that time, despite the fact that Snipes’ neighbor had
told police that he’d seen the couple arguing shortly before her
murder. “He started ranting and raving, yelling about cutting the
bitch’s fucking throat,” said the neighbor.

The prosecution also ignored Snipes’ clock, which had stopped at
4:45, possibly when her killer ripped its cord out to strangle her.
Hartmann was at home at that time, on the phone with his girlfriend.
Though documents show that fingerprints were lifted from the clock,
there is no evidence that those prints were ever identified.

The watch on the dresser? It was a common brand, never proven to
have belonged to Snipes. The knife beside it was not the one that
killed her.

At the time, Bandy hadn’t bothered to send the semen found in
Snipes’ vagina and anus for testing. Same with hairs found in her
blood. She should have at least tested the semen — during his
appeals process, Hartmann successfully pushed the state to test the
semen, only to have it match his DNA profile, which suggests he was
either lying about not having anal sex with her or that he was too
wasted to remember. The hairs still have not been tested.

If hartmann is put to death by lethal injection on April 7, he says
his last meal will be T-bone steak, fried chicken, a cheese omelet,
cheesecake, M&Ms and cream soda. Until then, he plans to keep his
mind off the approaching deadline by continuing to paint oil-on-canvas
murals, some of which can be found for sale at enddeathpenaltyforbretthartmann.com He’ll hang out with the friends he’s made on death row: Ronald
Phillips, convicted in 1993 of the rape and murder of a 3-year-old
girl, and James Trimble, who murdered his girlfriend, her son and a
Kent State student in a 2005 killing spree. He might even play Scrabble
with Clarence Fry, convicted in the death of his girlfriend in
2006.

Hartmann’s sister Diane has made arrangements to fly in for the
execution and pick up the death certificate. She’s only had one chance
to visit him over the years, but has kept in touch with him by constant
letters. “I believe he’s innocent,” she says. “Common sense would tell
you a killer isn’t going to call the body in to 911. He figures he
wouldn’t be the first innocent man executed by the state of Ohio. And
he won’t be the last. I hope the governor will look and see that there
is still evidence that has not been tested.”

“Honestly, I don’t know if Brett is innocent,” says his attorney,
Michael Benza. “But there are a lot of things in this case that don’t
make sense. We have material that can be tested. We should test it
before Brett is executed. It does him no good if those hairs come back
as Nicholas’ after he’s dead. The only thing it costs us is time.
You’re still going to get your execution if the hairs come back as
Brett’s. It’ll just be a couple months down the road.”

jrenner@clevescene.com

Brett Hartmann’s fate is in the hands of Governor Ted Strickland
who has yet to make a decision on whether or not he will commute his
sentence. To contact the governor about Hartmann’s clemency, e-mail
jose.torres@governor.ohio.gov,
call 614.466.3555 or mail letters to Governor’s Office, Riffe Center,
30th Floor, 77 S. High St., Columbus, OH 43215-6108.

This article appears in Mar 25-31, 2009.