St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 24

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH METRO WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13, 2001 Law Order CHESTERFIELD Police are seeking driver in crash that killed man Man says he turned in his ex-cellmate to get reward Defendant told him details of slaying, he says Making one giant step for land i ii 1 mm. i.i I'M fT 1 a I ttr ROBERT COHEN POST-DISPATCH Corey Lacey stretches out to reach land from a johnboat he had used Tuesday as transportation through Mississippi River floodwater from the old Lt. Robert E. Lee, which Is being renovated into a new restaurant, Mesquite Charlie's.

Construction workers on the project resorted to river transport to cross the flooded Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard. ceremony at 6 p.m. Mayor Robert Lowery, who proclaimed the special day, said the ceremony would last only about 15 minutes in keeping with what he knew would be Ea-gan's wishes to keep it short Eagan died Nov. 2.

His wife, Suzanne Eagan, his children and grandchildren are expected to attend. Refreshments will be served immediately after the dedication, and the St. Louis Symphony will perform outdoors at the Civic Center at 7 p.m. The performance will be followed by a fireworks show. en board members to run from subdistricts, failed to make clear which three seats were to come up in the April election.

Because of the earlier ruling by the circuit judge, board members in the April election had run city-wide. The board had sued the state in July to block enforcement of the law. Among other things, the board had said the law constituted racial gerrymandering because it would limit the number of black seats on the board. Currently, the board has four blacks and three whites. The subdistrict law was part of sweeping legislation passed in 1998 that helped settle the St Louis desegregation case.

The rest of the law was left in tact by the ruling. FLORISSANT Civic center will be named for Eagan Father's Day will be "James J. Eagan Day" in Florissant this Sunday. The Florissant Civic Center will be renamed the James J. Eagan Center for the late mayor in a special ST.

LOUIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS Subdistricts for school board are rejected St Louis School Board members will continue to run for election citywide. That's the practical effect of a ruling Tuesday by the Missouri Supreme Court The court sided with a Cole County circuit judge, who had found that a provision in a state law requiring board members to run from subdistricts was too vague. School Board attorney Ken Brostron said the law, which would have required all sev Chesterfield police are looking for the driver of a car that was involved in an accident that killed Frank D. Herring, 64, and seriously injured his wife, Rose, of the 300 block of Turn-berry Place in Wildwood, on Monday evening. Police said that about 6:40 p.m., Frank Herring was driving west on Highway 40 (Interstate 64) when his 1988 Buick Park Avenue was hit from the rear by another vehicle and overturned, throwing him out.

He died at 7:21 p.m. at St John's Mercy Medical Center. Police said he was not wearing a seat belt. Rose Herring was in satisfactory condition Tuesday evening at St John's. A driver in a third car was treated for minor injuries and released.

Police would not describe the collision in detail but said they were looking for a dark green, 1990s Toyota Celica with tinted windows and Missouri license plates. Anyone with information is asked to call Chesterfield police at 636-537-3000. NEW HAVEN Woman may face murder charges Police said Tuesday they planned to seek murder charges against Debbie Steinkoetter in the fatal stabbing last weekend of Dorris Dann, 70, of New Haven. Dann died Monday evening at St John's Mercy Medical Center in Creve Coeur. She had previously owned a bed-and-breakfast in New Haven, about 50 miles west of St Louis.

Police said a relative discovered Dann lying on the floor of her home in the 100 block of Main Street about 7 p.m. Sunday. She had been stabbed multiple times but remained conscious and told the relative and later police that Steinkoetter was her assailant Officers arrested Steinkoetter, 46, of New Haven, on charges of assault and armed criminal action Sunday evening at St John's Hospital in Washington, where she was being treated for a broken arm. She remained in custody Tuesday in Franklin County Jail on initial charges of assault and armed criminal action. Bond was set at $100,000.

Police said Dann's 38-year-old son had previously dated Steinkoetter and broke off a relationship with her several months ago. ST. LOUIS COUNTY Court backs state in ad battle In a battle involving bus shelters, the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the state not Ball win and Sunset Hills have exclusive say over advertising on state highway rights of way. The ruling reversed a decision in St. Louis County Circuit Court in favor of the municipalities.

The dispute is between Wall USA which erects Bi-State bus shelters, and the two cities. Ball win and Sunset Hills officials had questioned whether Wall had the proper permits to erect the shelters and advertisements. The dispute escalated in late 1999 and early last year when Ball win and Sunset Hills cited Wall or Bi-State for violating municipal sign codes. Associate Circuit Judge Patrick Clifford ruled in favor of the cities and ordered the advertisements removed. But the appeals court, in St Louis, ruled that state law and the Missouri Constitution give the state Department of Transportation exclusive jurisdiction over advertisements on state highway rights of way.

The bus shelters are within such rights of way, the court noted. UNION Man pleads guilty of embezzlement Sentencing is to be Aug. 31 for Gregory Selz, who pleaded guilty Tuesday of embezzling from United Missouri Bank, where he was an officer with the branch bank in Union. Selz, 42, of Union, admitted taking $110,000 in a scheme to make withdrawals from a bank customer's line of credit and money market account, the U.S. attorney's office said.

He coded the withdrawals to conceal them from bank managers and arranged that no statements be sent to the customer. The scheme began in 1997 and ended last year, prosecutors said. By William C. Lhotka Of the Post-Dispatch Henry Cole admitted Tuesday that he implicated Marcellus Williams in the fatal stabbing of former Post-Dispatch reporter Lisha Gayle to get the $10,000 reward Gayle's family offered. On June 4, 1999, the day he got out of the City Workhouse where he had known Williams for nearly two months, Cole contacted University City police and told them Williams was the killer.

Cole's statement triggered the investigation that led to Williams' arrest in November 1999 and his trial, now in its second week. Williams, 31, is charged with first-degree murder. The state is seeking the death penalty. Cole and Williams were confined in the same second-floor dormitory at the Workhouse from April 23 until June 4, 1999. They became friends, Cole told the jury in St Louis County Circuit Court Gayle was murdered at her home in University City on Aug.

11, 1998. Williams was arrested three weeks later on an unrelated robbery charge in St Louis. Cole, 54, said he heard a television report about the reward in 1999 and talked to Williams about the Gayle murder. "They will bust someone for this," Cole recalled saying to Williams. "I pulled the caper I laid that down," Cole quoted Williams as saying.

Cole then began to take notes of subsequent conversations and made a two-page written list of details of the murder that he hid from the defendant and later gave police. Under lengthy cross-examination by defense attorney Chris McGraugh, Cole conceded his primary motive was the reward money and that he had asked for a portion of it upfront. McGraugh also cited inconsistencies between Cole's interview at the police station, his deposition in April and his testimony Tuesday. And McGraugh suggested that the so-called details of the crime Cole gave police came from newspaper reports or television accounts of the murder. Prosecutor Keith Lamer said Cole knew details about the crime only the killer could have known.

For example, Cole said Williams had told him the murder weapon, a butcher knife, was left embedded in the victim's neck. That information had never been revealed. Cole has a lengthy criminal record 12 convictions between 1964 and 1996 ranging from stealing mail to carrying a concealed weapon to armed robbery. When he talked to police, Cole -told them about Laura Asaro, Williams' former girlfriend. Asaro testified last week that when police confronted her, she told them that Williams had admitted the day after the murder that he killed Gayle.

Asaro then led police to a house whose owner got a laptop computer from Williams. Serial numbers matched a computer stolen from Gayle's home. Reporter William C. Uratka: E-mail: Phone: 314-615-3283 Appeals court allows "AEYAN-1" license plate Nixon suggests state might make new law to deal with such tags case). If I don't win, it shows (the) narrow-minded people we have in the state." Herman acknowledged that the license plate slogan is offensive (Adolf Hitler used the term to describe a superior race) but argued that the First Amendment permits such speech.

Lewis first applied for the plate in 1983, when she was known as Mary Carr of Black Jack. After getting a complaint in 1986, the state ordered her to surrender it A state appeals court initially sided with Lewis, and she kept the plate from 1990 to 1997. In 1992, the Legislature changed the rules to allow the Department of Revenue to deny a vanity plate with letters or numbers that are "inflammatory or contrary to public policy." That law was used to revoke the plates after another complaint in 1997. Lewis sued, putting the dispute before Limbaugh. The Associated press provided some information for this story.

Limbaugh must require the state to do that Lewis'" attorney, Robert Herman, said: "It should have been obvious to the state from the very beginning that (it) can't restrict people's speech on the basis of viewpoint It should be obvious to everyone." Attorney General Jay Nixon suggested Tuesday that the Legislature might carefully craft a statute to bar "hate speech" from license plates and still pass constitutional muster. "I think when you have a license plate this divisive, this hot, this shrouded in feelings of hate, that you have real, legitimate public safety concerns that play out" Nixon said. When the 8th Circuit panel heard arguments in the case in March, Lewis said nobody ever reacted violently to her plates. "I think everybody has a right to express themselves," Lewis said then. "If there is anything left of freedom of speech in this country, I should be able to win (the could so readily switch justifications for its rejection of the plate illustrates the constitutional difficulty with the statute," Judge Morris Shep-pard Arnold wrote for the three-judge panel.

"A public official with even marginal creative ability could frequently invent a public policy basis for rejecting a plate containing a message with which he or she disagrees." The ruling also put the state's road rage argument into the ditch. "While we do not disagree with the (Department of Revenue) that road rage is a conceivable consequence of the ARYAN-1' plate, any -road rage that might occur would result directly from the message of racial superiority that the plate would carry in the minds of some who read it." The panel of judges returned the case to Senior U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh, who had sided with Lewis' constitutional argument but had not ordered the state to re-issue the plate. Under the appellate order, By Tim Bryant Of the Post-Dispatch In requiring the state of Missouri to re-issue Mary Lewis her car's "ARYAN-1" license plate on free speech grounds, a federal appeals court declared Tuesday that the First Amendment "knows no heckler's veto." The ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a defeat for the Missouri Department of Revenue, which used state law to declare such use of the word "Aryan" as "contrary to public policy." Later, the state contended that the word's appearance on a license plate could incite road rage.

"The very fact that the (Department of Revenue) jj I STLtoday I I Other Sites I LANDING Iff. 'v. Vi em ft Introducing STLtoday.com the place to find exactly what you're looking for in St. Louis. Dining, entertainment, local sports, news and more.

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