By GINGER SHIRAS
gingers@harrisondaily.com
Published: Saturday, March 27, 2010 6:07 AM
EUREKA SPRINGS — Wendell Parton, a Lampe, Mo., homebuilder, told a jury here Friday that his employee, Marty Alvard, 40, of Green Forest told him on April 25, 2008 that he had killed Janice Allen.
Parton said he had wanted to send paramedics to check on Allen at her daughter’s Green Forest apartment, but Alvard said it was no use:
“I’ve killed enough deer that I know when something’s dead.”
Deputy Medical Examiner Stephen Ericson testified that he was a deer hunter and he had seen deer bled out with a slash to the side of the throat like the one that opened Allen’s aorta and the windpipe.
Alvard’s lawyers don’t deny that he killed Allen, whose daughter, Jo Ann Alvard, was his estranged wife.
Instead, they say they will prove that he should be found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Much of Friday was spent following Marty Alvard’s steps after the killing. There has been testimony that he forced his wife through the living room where her dead mother was on a chair with a beige throw blanket over her head and chest.
She said he threatened to kill her when she tried to call for help from neighbors and again from a secretary she knew as they drove by the nearby school superintendent’s office.
Wendell Parton said he called Marty Alvard to check on the earache that had taken him away from a job site near Golden, Mo., and was told “I messed up.”
When Marty Alvard drove up, he asked Parton to take Jo Ann Alvard, who was still in her pajamas and recuperating from brain surgery.
When he hesitated, Parton said, Marty Alvard spat and said “if you don’t, I’ll kill her.”
He said he arranged for them to meet Rev. Todd Rogers to at the Harvest Assembly of God Church near Oak Grove, where Parton and the murder victim were members. Jo Ann Alvard often came with her mother and sometimes Marty Alvard came.
Co-worker Randy Waggoner, who was with Parton that day, testified that Marty Alvard once told him “If I could get away with it I’d kill” Jo Ann Alvard.
Another time he complained that Allen wouldn’t allow him to talk with his estranged wife after she had brain surgery and about other slights through the nearly 20 years of marriage to her daughter.
While Alvard’s lawyers contend that he had been hoping to reunite with his wife and children, Waggoner said Alvard had brought an old girlfriend he brought to a Christmas party and said he was seeing a teacher.
Terry Hutchison said Marty Alvard stopped by his Oak Grove home before going to the church and said, “I killed Jo Ann’s mother” using a baseball bat and a knife.
He asked Hutchison to “see to it the boys went hunting,” Hutchinson said, because he probably wasn’t going to be able to take his three sons hunting himself.
The preacher said when he got to the church, Jo Ann Alvard was inside and Marty Alvard was in the parking lot.
“I messed up bad,” Marty Alvard told him twice while waiting for police to arrive, Rev. Rogers said.
He said Parton had asked for and received Marty Alvard’s gun and he held it in the church safe until police picked it up later that afternoon.
The medical examiner’s testimony included enlargements of autopsy photos showing Allen was both beaten with a baseball bat and stabbed.
A male juror collapsed during the display but was tended first by the medical examiner, who is also a doctor, then had his blood pressure checked by paramedics before trial resumed with him in his seat.
The state’s case ended at 1:45 p.m. Friday and when the jurors left, Alvard’s lawyers made the standard request that the judge hold him innocent because the state hadn’t made its case that Marty Alvard committed capital murder or any other crimes in the death, hadn’t kidnapped Jo Ann Alvard, hadn’t made terroristic threats and hadn’t been guilty of anything that would require an enhancement for use of a firearm.
Prosecutor Tony Rogers noted Alvard’s “numerous admissions” to killing Allen, including statements to Green Forest Police Chief and Officer Shannon Hill when they picked him up, said Alvard’s both beating and stabbing Allen showed his acts were deliberate and cited Jo Ann’s testimony about his threats to her life before and during the drive after the killing.
Circuit Judge Kent Crow ruled that the case would continue.
Alvard’s lawyers will begin presenting their case Monday. They have said they will prove that Alvard was not by law responsable for his actions because of mental disease or defect.
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