Edward L. Cooper stands accused of slashing Barbara Norvell to death in 2008.
September 14, 2010|By Peter Dujardin, pdujardin@dailypress.com | 247-4749
NEWPORT NEWS — It wasn't uncommon for Edward L. Cooper and Barbara Norvell to argue — and then to make it up and slow dance in the living room late into the night.
But there would be no slow dancing the night of June 24, 2008, after Norvell got a phone call at about 11 p.m. from an old cab driver friend, a witness testified Tuesday.
"It was someone who called to check on her," the witness, Christine Little, said at the trial in which Cooper is charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing death of 54-year-old Norvell.
But Cooper — who had met Norvell at a bus stop only weeks earlier, a few months after he got out of prison after serving 34 years in another crime — was enraged. The couple argued "louder than normal," Little testified, with Norvell promising "it wouldn't happen again."
Shortly thereafter, Little said, she saw Cooper picking up kitchen knives, lifting them up partially out of a wooden block, "as if he was measuring them," then "dropping them" back into the block.
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"He told us we needed to leave because it was going to be messy when the police got there," Little testified. Cooper added that Norvell, his fiancée, had "demons" in her, Little said.
Little and her husband had moved in with Norvell in the 25th Street home only weeks earlier at Norvell's invitation when they ran into financial problems. They left at Cooper's urging, leaving Norvell behind with a "pale look" on her face.
Little said she thought about calling 911 — even at one point dialing 9 and 1 — but didn't follow through. "I didn't want to get involved," Little said. "I grew up with a lot of domestic violence, and it usually gets turned around on me. I didn't know what to do."
She also said she interpreted other actions by Cooper — moving his belongings near the front door of Norvell's residence — to mean he was moving out, not that he would harm Norvell.
At one point in her testimony, Little recounted a conversation she had with Cooper days before the crime while they were sitting on the porch. Cooper "said he was going to kill someone, but that he didn't know how he was going to do it," Little said.
The statement raised the ire of Cooper's defense attorney, William "Sam" Roots. Roots asked Circuit Court Judge Warren Stephens — a retired judge called in to hear the case — to send the jury out of the courtroom, which the judge did.
Roots then asked for a mistrial, asserting that the statement tainted the jury because the prosecution didn't connect that comment with what happened to Norvell. But Stephens denied the motion, instead opting only to tell the jury to disregard the statement.
Much of Tuesday's testimony was from police officers responding to a bizarre series of 911 hang-ups from three different pay phones on the night of the crime.
The man — whom investigators say was Cooper — would tell dispatchers that someone had been killed on 25th Street, but gave incorrect street numbers. Finally, at about 7:20 a.m., a call came in of a man holding a knife outside the 25th Street house.
Officer Jeff Bailey, the first officer on the scene, said that Cooper told him almost as soon as he arrived that he had killed Norvell. "She's dead. I killed her," he said Cooper told him. Another officer said Cooper told him: "I did it. Hurry up and take me to jail."
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