Ellen Reasonover -- Missouri, 1983

True Stories of Injustice...

Ellen Reasonover -- Missouri, 1983

Ellen Reasonover was wrongfully convicted in 1983 of murdering a St. Louis Vickers gas station attendant, Jim Buckley. She arrived at the gas station soon after Buckley’s murder and later voluntarily provided the police with the descriptions of at least three men whom she saw hastily leaving the scene. Even though at least one other independent witness corroborated her account, the police focused their suspicion on Reasonover almost immediately. She was convicted almost exclusively upon the self-serving jailhouse informer testimony of Rose Jolliff and Mary Lyner, who claimed Reasonover “confessed” to them about the murder. CM’s exhaustive investigations uncovered crucial information which seriously discredit their testimony.

CM has obtained a statement from Police Chief Sylvester Jones, Jr., of the Alton, Illinois police department. Jones was one of the St. Louis police investigators originally assigned to this case. Jones recently told CM for the first time ever that he had “always felt that Ellen was innocent and that those two women [Jolliff and Lyner] lied to get out of jail.” Jones revealed that St. Louis police and prosecutors wanted to believe Reasonover was the killer because of her family background; her brothers Steven and Mark had both been incarcerated for serious violent felonies.

CM has also obtained statements from at least five former cellmates of Reasonover and Lyner who specifically contradict Lyner’s claim that Ellen confessed the murder to her in February 1983. One of the cellmates was Marcia Vogt, an undercover police officer who was sent into jail to try to obtain inculpatory statements from Ellen. Vogt was present during the entire period when Ellen and Lyner were in the same cell. Vogt tells CM that all she heard was Ellen repeatedly proclaiming her innocence. Also according to Vogt, at one point Ellen even said, “They’re trying to say I killed a great big guy. How could I do that?”

In addition, CM has uncovered powerful circumstantial evidence that Jolliff lied when she testified that she did not receive any benefits from the state in exchange for her testimony against Ellen. At the time that Jolliff shared a cell with Ellen, Jolliff had four bad check cases and one theft charge pending against her. Jolliff already had numerous bad check and federal mail fraud convictions dating back to 1975. Within days after she told authorities that Ellen confessed to her, Jolliff pleaded guilty on the theft charge and received a two-year probationary sentence. On December 1, 1983, immediately after she testified at trial, Jolliff was shipped to another courtroom where she pled guilty to the remaining four bad check cases, for which she received a sentence of six months unsupervised bench probation SIS. SIS (sentence is suspended) means the conviction would not stay on her record if she successfully completes probation.

Stormy White, Jolliff’s former criminal attorney, recently told CM that he believes Jolliff definitely received substantial benefits from the state in return for her testimony. White observes that, in the jurisdiction where he practiced, it is almost unprecedented for someone with Jolliff’s extensive criminal background to receive the light probationary sentence she got for the serious charges then pending against her. It was “obviously a case where the state took good care of her,” White says. White also spoke of another extraordinary event: a state criminal investigator actually paid for Jolliff’s court-ordered restitution on her theft conviction. White also revealed that, after Jolliff spoke to the police in early January 1983 about Ellen’s confession and pled guilty to four counts of passing bad checks in St. Louis County, authorities took the rare measure of immediately releasing Jolliff from custody so that she could permanently relocate to South Bend, Indiana.

The new CM investigation has also uncovered clues strongly indicating that Jim Buckley’s real killers may have been a known Milwaukee drug dealer named Ronnie Lock and one or more of his confederates — not Reasonover. At the time of Buckley’s murder, Lock was a 29-year-old drug dealer with an impressive arrest and conviction record dating back to 1973, primarily for theft, burglary, and drug possession. Ronnie also worked as a drug informant for the Milwaukee police, which explains why he never spent a day in prison for any of his prior offenses.

CM has obtained the crucial statement of one Eddie McClenton, presently a prison inmate and a former neighbor and family friend of Ronnie Lock in Milwaukee. McClenton told CM in a taped interview that, in November 1984, Lock confessed to killing Buckley as part of a robbery attempt in St. Louis. Lock told McClenton he was assisted by a friend named Jesse Banks. McClenton passed a polygraph test in 1988 and his story was made into a television documentary called “Eddie’s Deadly Secret” in May 1990. Eddie has stuck by his story despite the fact that he has received numerous death threats and his jail cell was firebombed.

Jesse Banks, the man whom Lock told McClenton was his accomplice, has given CM a taped statement in which he says that Lock independently confessed to him about the Buckley murder. Although Banks strenuously denies involvement in the killing, his account of Lock’s confession corroborates with McClenton’s in many important aspects. In particular, both McClenton and Banks claim that Lock said he was unable to raid the station’s cash till because, after shooting Buckley, a woman stepped into the station. This significant point of agreement is also consistent with Reasonover’s observations. Ellen has consistently maintained that when she entered the Vickers station on the night of Buckley’s murder to purchase cigarettes, she noticed there was no attendant but did see a black male quickly dart out of sight through the back of the station.

These and numerous other newly discovered pieces of evidence pointing strongly towards Reasonover’s innocence (and the guilt of others) are all contained in a 56-page memorandum which Jim McCloskey forwarded to the St. Louis prosecutor’s office in June. The prosecutor has expressed an interest in reconsidering this case. We hope CM’s new findings will persuade him to take action.

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)
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