Saturday, April 10, 2010 2:51 AM
BY BRUCE CADWALLADER
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Gary L. Robinson, 46, is to be sentenced May 13 for murder.
Armed with only circumstantial evidence and vague references that Gary L. Robinson had made to others about how one might hide a body, a Franklin County jury convicted the former Grove City resident on a murder charge despite the absence of a body.
Robinson, 46, told Grove City police in 1999 that he didn't know where his girlfriend was after she disappeared the night of June 12. But he didn't help look for her body either, testimony showed.
Nearly 11 years later, police and prosecutors told jurors in a four-day trial this week that Robinson choked Tammi "T.J." Campbell in their apartment, wrapped her body in a carpet and took it to a local landfill. Her remains were never found.
It was the first case since 2003 in which local prosecutors tried a murder case without a body.
The Common Pleas jury of 10 women and two men deliberated eight hours over two days before convicting Robinson of murder and tampering with evidence. Three jurors and the defendant's mother cried as the verdicts were read.
Robinson is to be sentenced May 13 by Judge Richard A. Frye.
Assistant County Prosecutors Scott Kirschman and Nathan Yohey didn't have much evidence: Robinson admitted burying the missing woman's jewelry in the backyard of his parent's home in Warren County. He said he buried her jewelry so he wouldn't be tempted to pawn it.
And he told a buddy something about burying a body in concrete.
"I'm smarter than the average bear," he boasted to one ex-girlfriend, Sandra Gabbard, in a phone call recorded with the help of police. Gabbard said he had confessed to the killing before police became involved.
Prosecutors acknowledged that Gabbard has had memory lapses from a head injury and that Robinson had left her for Campbell.
Police also presented phone records from Campbell's apartment phone showing that when she disappeared, she was planning to meet a drug dealer at 3 a.m. to make a buy.
The dealer testified that Campbell never showed up.
A neighbor said she heard a loud thud coming from Robinson's apartment at 3:30 a.m.
Police, pushed for answers by Campbell's best friend, conducted multiple searches, sifted through 5tons of debris at the Franklin County landfill, ordered DNA tests and interviewed several witnesses after finding Campbell's keys, purse and ID in her apartment at 3111 Southwest Blvd. Her car was parked across the street.
The Social Security Administration declared Campbell dead in 2008.
Campbell left a 12-year-old son with a friend while she made plans to leave Robinson.
James Campbell, now 23, testified that he believes his mother is dead. The diamond necklace police found was something his mother never took off, he said. He said they had left Kentucky a year earlier to avoid Robinson.
His mother, a drug abuser and former strip-club dancer, later invited Robinson to join her in Columbus, though, because she was being evicted from her Grove City apartment. Then she told him their romance was over the night she disappeared.
Prosecutors tried to convince jurors that they had built a circumstantial "mosaic" of Campbell's disappearance.
"For 3,953 days, no one has seen Tammi Campbell. We know she is dead," Kirschman told jurors Thursday. "This case is about the death of hope for a 12-year-old.
"This is a cold, cruel crime, and the clock kept cruelly ticking."
Defense attorneys Shanda Behrens and Sheryl K. Munson countered that prosecutors had failed to provide reliable witnesses or evidence of a murder. They pointed to Campbell's habits of dating more than one man at a time and of leaving others to care for James. Any one of the men in her life could have killed her, they said.
"Nothing has changed in the last 11 years," Munson said. "The mosaic is not complete; the picture isn't clear. All we want is justice, and justice doesn't always mean you solve the crime."
bcadwallader@dispatch.com
Missing-body cases
There have been at least two other Franklin County murder cases tried without a body:
A jury in 2003 acquitted Darrell E. Walker of aggravated murder in the slaying of Earl "Monty" Robinson in 1997; a convicted drug dealer testified that Walker had been there when Robinson was shot in a car on N. Cassady Avenue. Robinson's body was never found.
William Wickline was sentenced to death in 1985 for the 1982 dismemberment slayings of a Blendon Township couple in a dispute over a $6,000 cocaine deal. Peggy Ann Lerch and her husband, Christopher, were killed in a Columbus apartment while Wickline's terrified girlfriend looked on. No remains were found. Wickline was executed in March 2004.
Source: Dispatch archives
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