Chris Coleman was the director of security for Joyce Meyer Ministries, a Christian ministry based in suburban St. Louis, when his wife, Sheri Coleman, and the couple's two young sons died in Columbia, Illinois, on May 5, 2009. For the first two weeks of the inquiry he was the husband who had warned the police, months earlier, that someone was threatening his family. Two weeks later he was under arrest. On May 5, 2011, exactly two years after the deaths, a jury in the Monroe County courthouse in Waterloo found him guilty of three counts of first-degree murder.
The case was circumstantial from beginning to end. No witness saw the killings, there was no confession, and the defense told the jury that nothing physical tied him to the deaths. The State answered with a long chain of testimony about his job, his marriage, the threats he had reported and the hours of that morning. The jury needed two days, and at one point told the judge it was deadlocked, before it returned its verdicts. The trial judge sentenced him to three life terms without the possibility of parole, and in December 2014 the Appellate Court of Illinois, Fifth District, affirmed the judgment in a long published opinion that called the circumstantial evidence against him overwhelming.
Columbia is a fast-growing town of about 10,000 people in Monroe County, Illinois, southeast of St. Louis across the Mississippi River. It sits where farm country meets the outer edge of the St. Louis suburbs. The county seat is Waterloo. The Colemans lived in Columbia in the spring of 2009.
Coleman was a former Marine. He had worked for Joyce Meyer Ministries for about 11 years. He began in security, built the ministry's security division from the ground up, and rose to supervise it, serving also as the personal security guard of the ministry's founder. The job paid about $100,000 a year and involved frequent travel. The ministry, with headquarters in Fenton, Missouri, figures in the case because the State built its theory of motive around his position there, and because the threats he reported in the months before the deaths were tied to his work.
From November 2008 Coleman told the police that he and his family were being threatened because of his job. The Columbia Police Department stepped up patrols in his neighborhood, and after one report in January 2009 officers canvassed the neighbors to ask whether anyone had noticed anything unusual. No one had. A detective sergeant who lived next door was among the officers who knew of the reports.
On the morning of Tuesday, May 5, 2009, Coleman asked that neighbor, the detective sergeant, to check on his family. Columbia officers responded, and that morning his wife and the couple's two sons were confirmed dead. Coleman told investigators he had been away when the deaths occurred.
The Columbia Police Department asked for help from the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis, a regional task force of detectives. The squad was activated on May 5. Its commander for the investigation was a major from the Granite City Police Department, and the Columbia detective sergeant Coleman had asked to check on the family served as one of its officers.
At the squad's first public briefing, its deputy commander told reporters that the police had had earlier contact with the family about what he called "some interaction between an unknown individual and them." He declined to say more. No one was in custody, no cause of death had yet been determined, and the squad asked the public for tips, explaining that information that might seem ordinary to residents could matter to investigators. The ministry issued a statement calling Coleman "a very dear friend" and describing the deaths as an "unexpected and devastating tragedy."
Coleman spent much of that first day with investigators. He was questioned at the police station for about six hours and then released, because there was not yet enough evidence to charge him. Illinois State Police investigators recorded an interview in which they confronted him as the prime suspect, and in that recording he denied killing his wife and sons.
Over the following two weeks the inquiry widened across Illinois, Missouri and Florida. Detectives interviewed many of the couple's friends and the people Coleman worked with, and investigators traveled to Florida to conduct interviews there. Investigators also reexamined the threats Coleman had reported to the police since November 2008, and they came to conclude that he had written them himself. Medical evidence placed the three deaths before the time Coleman left that morning.
During the same period Coleman left his job. A spokesman for Joyce Meyer Ministries said he had resigned after an internal inquiry found that he had failed to follow a ministry policy, and the spokesman declined to say which one.
The week before the arrest, the police presented their evidence to the Monroe County State's Attorney. The prosecutor held off on filing charges while the results of laboratory tests were pending. On Tuesday, May 19, 2009, after investigators obtained what the squad's commander described only as new evidence, Coleman was arrested on a no-bond warrant. "For several days now we have been close," the squad's spokesman said as the arrest was announced. Police and prosecutors declined to discuss a motive that day.
Coleman was 32. On May 20, 2009, the State's Attorney charged him by information with three counts of first-degree murder under section 9-1(a)(1) of the Criminal Code. His lawyer said he would plead not guilty. He was held without bond.
The case, No. 09-CF-50 in the Circuit Court of Monroe County, took nearly two years to reach a jury. The pretrial record was heavy, and several of the rulings made in that period became the core of the later appeal.
The first concerned a linguist. The State intended to call an expert in forensic linguistics to compare the language of the threats with writings known to be Coleman's. The defense moved to bar him or, in the alternative, for a hearing under Frye v. United States, the test Illinois uses to decide whether new or novel scientific evidence is generally accepted in its field. The trial court held the hearing. The State's linguist testified, and the defense called its own, a professor from Duke University, who told the court that the comparisons were not scientifically valid. The trial judge then drew a line between the two positions. The linguist could testify to "similarities between the questioned documents and the known documents," the order said, but could not present "an opinion as to authorship by a specific person."
The second concerned private photographs and video recordings recovered in the investigation, which the State said went to motive. The judge reviewed the material in chambers and admitted three video clips and a limited number of photographs, with portions masked. The State had asked for only a fraction of what it held.
The third concerned what Coleman's wife had told her friends about her marriage in the months before her death. The State proposed 13 witnesses. Eleven of them testified at a pretrial hearing. The judge found the statements admissible in principle under section 115-10.6 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Illinois statute that allows hearsay from a witness whom the defendant is shown to have killed, then went witness by witness, admitting some testimony to show motive and intent and excluding other parts. One item was excluded outright, and the State agreed not to offer it. In the end five of the 13 testified at trial.
The defense also challenged the testimony of an Illinois State Police analyst who had compared Coleman's handwriting with questioned writing in the case. The judge barred any reference to the report of a second analyst and reserved the defense's relevance objection for trial.
Because of the volume of publicity in Monroe County, the jury was chosen elsewhere. Jurors came from a county about an hour and a half away and traveled to Waterloo for each day of trial.
Testimony began on Monday, April 25, 2011, in Waterloo, after short opening statements from both sides. The State's case ran through the first officers to arrive on May 5, 2009, the evidence technicians and laboratory analysts of the Illinois State Police, the Columbia police, the pathologist who performed the autopsies, and the friends and co-workers who had known the couple. Prosecutors played the recorded State Police interview in which Coleman, questioned as the prime suspect, denied killing his family.
The founder of the ministry and her son testified by video deposition. She told the jury that Coleman had been an excellent employee who had worked for her for about 11 years. Ministry employees testified about the organization's code of conduct and its consequences for employees who broke it. The State's position was that Coleman believed he could not end his marriage without losing his job, and that this was the motive for the killings.
Two pathologists gave evidence on the time of death: the pathologist who performed the autopsies, and the chief forensic pathologist of the New York State Police, a nationally known specialist whom the Major Case Squad had consulted in May 2009. The State's evidence placed all three deaths before Coleman left that morning. The State also called two witnesses on technical records connected to the threats, and a witness who identified a hardware store receipt. The linguist testified within the limits the judge had set, and the defense's own linguist told the jury that the comparisons meant nothing.
The defense case rested on the gaps in the State's: there was no physical evidence linking Coleman to the killings, no confession and no eyewitness. His lawyers did not dispute the private matters the State had put before the jury. They argued that those matters had been used to inflame jurors in place of proof.
During deliberations the jury sent the judge a series of notes. It asked to see an item of physical evidence and for a magnifying glass, and both were provided without objection. It asked for a definition of reasonable doubt, and the judge replied that no instruction defining the term would be given and told the jurors to continue. It asked for transcripts of the testimony of the two pathologists, and while the judge and the lawyers were working out how to answer, it sent another note: "we are a hung jury." The judge stopped deliberations until the transcripts were ready, gave them to the jury and directed it to continue.
On Thursday, May 5, 2011, the second anniversary of the deaths, the jury returned verdicts of guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder. Its deliberations had taken about 15 hours.
The State asked for the death penalty. On Friday, May 6, the same jury found Coleman eligible for a death sentence under Illinois law. The decision on whether to impose it would then have been the jury's, but on the morning of Monday, May 9, 2011, Coleman waived his right to have the jury decide his sentence, and the question passed to the judge.
The timing mattered. Illinois had already enacted legislation abolishing the death penalty, effective July 1, 2011, so any death sentence would have been largely symbolic. The trial judge declined to impose one. On May 9, 2011, he sentenced Coleman to three life terms without the possibility of parole, to run concurrently, one for each count.
The defense moved for a new trial. Among its claims of courtroom error were that hearsay testimony had been wrongly admitted and that the photographs and video recordings shown to the jurors had inflamed them. On Monday, June 27, 2011, the trial judge rejected those claims and denied the motion in Waterloo, and the defense filed its appeal the same day.
The appeal was briefed by a new lawyer, a Springfield appellate specialist, who filed a 62-page brief with the Fifth District in Mount Vernon. It argued that the jury had been shown far more of the private photographs and recordings than was fair, that the hearsay testimony of his wife's friends should have been excluded, that the expert testimony on the questioned writing was unreliable, and that the cumulative effect of the errors required reversal. The case was handled for the State by the State's Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor.
The Appellate Court of Illinois, Fifth District, decided the appeal on December 31, 2014, in a published opinion, People v. Coleman, 2014 IL App (5th) 110274, joined by all three justices of the panel. The court took the seven issues in turn.
On the linguist, the court held that the trial judge had "correctly allowed" the testimony "in the limited manner in which he did." The expert had been permitted to describe similarities between the known and questioned writings but not to say who wrote them, and the defense had cross-examined him and called its own expert in reply. The court found no error.
On the photographs and video recordings, the court held that the trial judge had not abused his discretion. The material went to motive, and the record showed that much more was available but that the trial court had "used extreme caution in paring down these exhibits."
On the hearsay, the court held that the five witnesses had been properly allowed to testify under section 115-10.6 and, separately, under the common law doctrine of forfeiture by wrongdoing and to show motive and intent. It held that the trial judge had not abused his discretion in denying a mistrial after one witness referred, improperly, to the excluded material. The judge had told the jury to disregard the remark, and any prejudice, the court wrote, was "de minimis in light of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence against defendant."
On the State Police handwriting analyst, the court found that, even if admitting his testimony was error, the error was harmless, because the testimony "did little to advance the State's case." On the two witnesses who testified about technical records and on the hardware store receipt, it found no abuse of discretion and held that any error in admitting the receipt was harmless.
The last issue was the sufficiency of the evidence. Coleman argued that the State's case was weak, that the jury's notes showed it had serious doubts, and that jurors had been "pushed over the edge" by prejudicial exhibits. The court rejected each point. Other potential suspects had been ruled out, it found; the threats had come from Coleman himself; and the evidence showed both a motive and the opportunity, because all three victims had died before he left the residence that morning. The only reasonable inference from the record, the court concluded, was that Coleman was still present when the victims were killed. It added that, given the length of the trial and the number of exhibits, the time the jury spent deliberating did not seem inordinately long, and that part of that time had been spent waiting for transcripts.
The court closed by quoting the Illinois Supreme Court's reminder that a defendant "is entitled to a fair trial, not necessarily a perfect trial," and held that no error, alone or in combination, had been so grave that it infected the fundamental fairness of the trial. "For the foregoing reasons," the opinion ends, "we hereby affirm the judgment of the circuit court of Monroe County." The disposition was one word: "Affirmed."
Coleman later returned to the Circuit Court of Monroe County with a petition for post-conviction relief. Represented by new counsel, he argued that his trial lawyers had been ineffective and that photographic exhibits shown to the jury had carried information that should not have been before it.
On April 16, 2019, after evidentiary hearings, the judge handling the petition ruled on both claims. He allowed the claim of ineffective assistance to go forward to a further evidentiary hearing, on whether his trial lawyers had failed to put certain evidence from the investigation before the jury. He rejected the argument that the photographs were extraneous or prejudicial, because they had been admitted into evidence at trial, though he left the defense room to renew the point with further argument. He also ruled that comments jurors had made in television interviews after the trial could not be used to decide whether a new trial was warranted. No date had been set for the next hearing.
The convictions and the three concurrent life sentences stood after that ruling.
Three Illinois statutes framed the outcome of the case. The first was the natural life provision of the Unified Code of Corrections, section 5-8-1. It directs that the court "shall sentence the defendant to a term of natural life imprisonment" when a defendant who was 18 or older at the time of the offense is found guilty of murdering more than one victim. Once the jury convicted Coleman of three counts of first-degree murder, life without parole was the minimum sentence the law allowed.
The second was the abolition statute, section 119-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which declares that the death penalty "is abolished and a sentence to death may not be imposed." It took effect on July 1, 2011, less than two months after the verdicts. The State's request for a death sentence was made in the narrow window before that date.
The third was section 115-10.6 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, under which the trial court admitted his wife's statements to her friends. The statute allows the hearsay statement of a person whom the defendant is shown to have killed, if the court finds at a pretrial hearing that the killing was intended to make the person unavailable as a witness, that the time, content and circumstances of the statement give sufficient safeguards of reliability, and that the interests of justice will be served by admitting it. The Fifth District found that the trial judge had followed all of the statute's requirements.
The ruling on the linguist rested on the Frye standard, which Illinois courts apply to new or novel scientific evidence. Under it, as the Fifth District restated, scientific evidence is admissible only if the methodology on which the opinion rests has gained general acceptance in its field, though it need not be accepted by all or even most experts. The trial judge's compromise, allowing comparison without attribution, was the ground on which the appellate court upheld that testimony.
Coleman has denied killing his wife and sons since the day of the deaths. His denial was played to the jury in his own recorded interview, and it has been the premise of every challenge since. His trial lawyers stressed that the State had no physical evidence connecting him to the killings, no confession and no eyewitness, and on appeal his lawyer pointed to the jury's notes, and in particular its note that it was deadlocked, as a sign of reasonable doubt. The Fifth District held that the evidence was sufficient and that the jury's notes did not show what the defense said they showed.
The State's theory of motive, that Coleman believed he could not end his marriage without losing his position at the ministry, was supported at trial by testimony from ministry officials and from friends of the couple. The defense accepted many of the underlying private facts but disputed what the jury should make of them, and argued that the private exhibits had been used to prejudice the jurors. The trial judge limited those exhibits, and both the trial court and the Fifth District held that their admission was not an abuse of discretion.
The post-conviction claim that his trial lawyers were ineffective had been allowed to proceed to a further hearing as of April 2019.
November 2008: Coleman begins reporting threats against himself and his family to the Columbia police.
May 5, 2009: Coleman's wife and the couple's two sons are found dead in Columbia, Illinois; the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis is activated; Coleman is questioned for about six hours and released.
May 2009: The Major Case Squad consults an outside forensic pathologist on the time of death.
May 19, 2009: Coleman is arrested on a no-bond warrant.
May 20, 2009: He is charged by information in the Circuit Court of Monroe County with three counts of first-degree murder; his lawyer says he will plead not guilty.
April 25, 2011: Testimony begins in Waterloo before a jury drawn from another county.
May 5, 2011: The jury finds Coleman guilty on all three counts.
May 6, 2011: The jury finds him eligible for the death penalty.
May 9, 2011: Coleman waives jury sentencing; the trial judge imposes three concurrent life terms without the possibility of parole.
June 27, 2011: The trial judge denies the motion for a new trial; the defense files its appeal.
July 1, 2011: Abolition of the death penalty in Illinois takes effect.
February 2014: Coleman's appellate brief is pending before the Fifth District.
December 31, 2014: The Appellate Court of Illinois, Fifth District, affirms the convictions in People v. Coleman, 2014 IL App (5th) 110274.
April 16, 2019: In post-conviction proceedings in Monroe County, the judge allows the claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel to proceed to a further evidentiary hearing and rejects the claim about the photographic exhibits.