Two of the five Law Lords who heard John Baughman's final appeal would have quashed his conviction. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council dismissed it three votes to two on May 25, 2000.
Six days later he hanged himself in his cell at Her Majesty's Prison in St. John's, Antigua, with a bed sheet tied to the window bars.
Three people connected to him had died across the previous twenty-five years, in three jurisdictions. He was convicted over one.
Valerie Joyce Baughman, whose first name appears as Velerie in some court and wire reports, was fifty-five, a twice-divorced customer service representative who had worked at 3M for twenty-two years and had four grown children. She met John Baughman at a singles dance after he retired from police work and went to sell for Honeywell, and they married in February 1991. She knew what had happened to his first wife and she believed him when he said he had not done it. At least one of her children did not.
On the afternoon of Saturday, May 27, 1995, two weeks into a vacation in Antigua and a day before they were due to fly home, she fell ninety-nine feet from the roof of the eight-story Royal Antiguan Hotel and was killed instantly. She and her husband were the only two people up there. A wire report that June gave the date as May 29; the trial and the appeals proceeded on May 27.
They had checked into the Royal Antiguan, about three miles southwest of St. John's on the island's west coast. Hotel employees later testified that he had asked for a room for two for the first three nights and a room for one for the last.
His account was that it was an accident with a greeting card. They had found the staircase to the roof early in the vacation and had gone up several times for the view. That afternoon she had been drinking and was low, so he went out for a newspaper and bought a packet of cards on impulse, wrote love messages in two of them and left one on her pillow. They went up at about five. He took the second card out to hand to her, it caught the side of her hand and fell a foot or so in front of them, they both bent for it, and she, wearing slippers, caught her foot, stumbled forward and went over a parapet sixteen inches high. She said honey as she bent down. She screamed on the way.
The prosecution said he pushed her, that he had grown tired of her, and that he stood to collect two hundred thousand dollars.
There was no witness to the fall itself and the injuries settled nothing. What convicted him was arithmetic and a man with binoculars.
She landed fourteen feet out from the wall of the building. A civil engineer called by the prosecution, Mr. Lewis, explained to the jury that a body dropping that distance is in the air for 2.48 seconds, and that to travel fourteen feet sideways in that time it has to leave the roof at about 3.8 miles an hour. A stumble does not produce that.
Baughman's own lawyers then called an expert to rebut it, and made things worse. Mr. Workman told the jury that a body falling without lateral force would have landed closer in, on a nine-foot-wide metal fire escape platform ten feet above the ground. Asked in re-examination, he agreed the necessary force could have been a push, while allowing it might have been something else.
Philbert Jackson was sitting on the front balcony of his house with a pair of binoculars, in view of that side of the hotel. The scream made him look. He saw her already in the air, level with the roof edge, falling backwards, buttocks down, feet drawn up toward her chest. He saw a man standing on the roof facing the direction she was falling, who paced about, looked over the southern side, and then ran down the external stairs. He gave a fuller statement three days later saying the same thing, and repeated it at trial. The judge told the jury his evidence was very important. The defense said he had made it up, and never suggested a reason why he would.
The jurors were taken up to the roof to see it for themselves, and found little there that anyone could trip over.
Then there was the card.
Baughman told police he bought the cards the day she died. The shop assistant testified he had bought them the day before, that his wife had come into the shop with him, and she identified the card itself. When the detective searched the roof he could not find it and said so. Baughman produced it from his own pocket, still sealed in its transparent plastic bag.
Either he had tried to hand his wife a card without taking it out of the wrapper, or he had picked it up off the roof and bagged it again before going down to look at her body. His counsel could not resolve it, and neither could anyone else.
He did not give evidence. He made an unsworn statement from the dock instead, and in it he said for the first time that he had reached the roof edge in time to watch her hit the fire escape railing on the way down. He said it after the expert evidence about the fall had been given. The fall took two and a half seconds.
Some of the evidence pointed the other way. Her son by an earlier marriage, Victor Delaurier, described a marriage that had been badly strained for eighteen months, with arguments that escalated out of nothing, and an occasion when his stepfather refused to slow the car when his mother asked, but also said his own relationship with Baughman was good and that the two of them watched basketball together. He said his mother was frightened of heights and a moderate drinker, which sat awkwardly against the quantity of alcohol in her blood. A taxi driver named Keith Roberts, who had driven the couple around the island five times in their first week, said they always seemed very much in love, and that they made him jealous.
The jury convicted him unanimously on Thursday, April 4, 1996. Under Antiguan law a murder conviction carried an automatic sentence of death by hanging. He was taken out of court past people shouting for his execution and said nothing. His lawyer, Gerald Watt, said the court had been biased toward the prosecution and gave notice of appeal.
The Court of Appeal of Antigua and Barbuda dismissed it on September 15, 1997, and the way it did so is the part of this case that lasts.
One of the three judges, Matthew JA, upheld a ground of appeal. He found the summing-up defective in several respects. The trial judge had told the jury to disregard Baughman's apparent crying in the dock, in effect, to ignore a witness's demeanor. He had invited them to speculate about why a woman described as a light drinker had drunk so much on the day she died. And he had dealt in a single dismissive line with the evidence of the taxi driver and the shop assistant that the couple seemed to be in love.
Having found all that, Matthew JA dismissed the appeal anyway. He applied the proviso in section 40 of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court Act, which lets a court that thinks a point might go the appellant's way dismiss regardless, provided no miscarriage of justice has actually occurred. His reasoning was that the prosecution case was strong and a properly directed jury would inevitably have convicted. The Chief Justice, Byron CJ, went further and said he did not accept the criticisms amounted to material irregularities at all, calling them minor deficiencies. Satrohan Singh JA concurred without choosing between them.
The Privy Council heard the case as Appeal No. 76 of 1998.
The majority, Lord Hobhouse of Woodborough, with Lord Millett and Sir Andrew Leggatt, accepted that there was force in several of the criticisms of the court below, and said disproportionate weight had been placed on the insurance claim and on a story about the locks at the couple's house being changed before the vacation. They reconsidered the proviso themselves and concluded it had been rightly applied. Their central objection was procedural: the Board is not a second tier of appeal, no error of law had been shown, and the arguments were factual submissions already lost downstairs. At most, they said, Baughman had shown there might be room for more than one view, and they noted that the division of opinion among themselves was evidence of exactly that.
Lord Slynn of Hadley and Lord Hutton dissented, and their objection went to how circumstantial evidence has to be handled. The question for a jury is not whether the proved facts are consistent with guilt. It is whether they are inconsistent with any other rational conclusion. They held the Court of Appeal had not applied that test to several strands of the case.
They took the insurance apart: an ordinary employer group scheme joined in the first half of 1994, no basis for inferring he had caused notification of his wife's death to be sent to the brokers, and an unfamiliar address on the claim file that could perfectly well have been an old address of his, innocently on record. On the alcohol, they observed that a drunk woman stumbling for a dropped card might travel further than a sober one. On his slowness to react, they said shock could explain it, and added that a man who had planned to push his wife off a roof would presumably have planned to look horrified afterwards. On the scream, they said it was as consistent with a woman realizing she had lost her balance as with a woman realizing what her husband was doing.
They were not satisfied that a properly directed jury would inevitably have convicted. They would have quashed the conviction and sent the case back to consider a retrial.
Under Antiguan law as reported at the time, Baughman had about five years to exhaust his appeals, after which an unresolved death sentence would be commuted to life. The Privy Council ruled two days short of the fifth anniversary of his wife's death.
The two earlier deaths had already been through the American courts, and neither produced a conviction.
He was born in Illinois on October 4, 1941, and grew up in Chicago, the youngest of three children, with two older sisters; a first son had died in infancy. His father, Bill Baughman, came from Clinton, Illinois, and worked on the railroad; his mother, Letha Smith Baughman, a bookkeeper, had been orphaned young. He volunteered for two tours in Vietnam as a Marine infantryman. Heavyset, with thick-rimmed glasses, he was called Bottles. He married Gertrude, known as Trudy, on July 17, 1964, and they had three daughters. He served as a police officer in Homewood, south of Chicago, and in those years also worked as a security guard, did electrical work for Datagraphics, and later sold for Honeywell. People who knew him described him as controlling.
Sergeant Dean Pence was found shot dead with a .38 revolver near the Prestwick Country Club in Will County, Illinois, on July 26, 1970. He was a longtime friend of Baughman's, then twenty-eight, and investigators suspected he had been having an affair with Trudy. Accounts differ on where Pence served: some place him on the Homewood force with Baughman, others at Flossmoor. Baughman became the lead suspect, was arrested and taken back to Joliet, and was charged, but the Will County grand jury refused to indict him and he walked free.
In 1984 Trudy Baughman, thirty-six, was found severely burned in the garage of the couple's home in Matteson. Her husband said they had been looking over camping equipment when she tripped over a propane stove, which lit some gasoline and set her on fire, and that in her panic she hurt her throat crashing into utility shelves. She had recently told him she wanted a divorce. The Cook County medical examiner found she had been strangled and then set alight. He was charged with her murder and acquitted in 1985; wire reports say a jury acquitted him, while other accounts say the verdict came from a judge. Doubt had been cast on the prosecution's case by a county pathologist who had not examined her body, against the one who had. In 1988 his lawyer in that case, Fred Aprati, was convicted in federal court of paying bribes to Cook County sheriff's police.
Neither outcome establishes anything beyond the fact that the state could not prove its case, and neither is evidence that he killed either of them.
What can be said about the conviction that stands is narrower and stranger. It was returned in another country under another legal system, on wholly circumstantial evidence, by a jury that heard a summing-up the appellate court below found defective and allowed to stand under a statutory proviso, and it survived its final appeal by a single vote.
None of that makes John Baughman innocent. Two Law Lords thought it meant the verdict was not safe.