Adams guilty of murder

By Andrew Wellner

Frontiersman

PALMER — After seven hours of deliberation over two days, the jury in the Frank Adams first-degree murder trial reached a verdict Thursday — guilty on all counts.

Prosecutor Rachel Gernat said that, as in any murder case, the result was bittersweet. Adams was convicted of first-degree murder, which was definitely the result she had hoped for, since what he did fit the charge.

But, “Stacey’s not here to be with her family.”

Adams, 47, was pulled over in July of 2007 on suspicion of drunken driving. Officers on scene quickly discovered the beaten, bloodied body of Stacey Johnston in the back of his red hatchback.

For his part, after the verdict was read, Adams stayed mostly silent. He fidgeted a bit, shook his head. After the jury left he talked to his father briefly before he was taken away.

During her final arguments to the jury, Gernat referenced letters found at the Chickaloon cabin where Johnston died. She said Adams brought up the letters when he told investigators, “We wrote our love down all the time.”

“There’s no ‘we’ here. These are Stacey’s writing,” Gernat said. “Where are the defendant’s notes to her? His expression of love was the bruises he left on her body.”

Gernat also pointed to a message Adams left on Johnston’s parents’ answering machine. Johnston had gone to her parents’ home after one very severe beating. Adams called the home, behaving, in Gernat’s words, like a “caged animal,” speaking of Johnston as a piece of his property, in his words, “my woman.”

“He doesn’t like his women to be out alone without him,” Gernat said.

For his part, Adams’ attorney Scott Sterling said his client wasn’t guilty of first-degree murder — intentionally killing someone, or even second-degree murder — recklessly killing someone. Manslaughter — causing someone’s death — was a closer call, he said.

“If you get drunk enough, or get loaded enough and get into a confrontation with someone, it can get out of hand,” Sterling said.

And the law, he said, recognizes that. In some cases where intent is the issue — first-degree murder — a person can be too drunk to form intent.

And so it was, he said, with Adams.

Sterling also pointed out that Adams certainly didn’t behave after the fact like someone who was trying to conceal a murder. He drove Johnston toward Anchorage when he could have found a spot somewhere near where he lived to hide her body. He stopped for gas. He borrowed money from a friend he invited into the car with Johnston’s body.

“You have to be pretty drunk to pull up to a gas station with a dead body in your car and think, ‘Oh, no one will ever notice,” Sterling said.

He also pointed out that the medical examiner who testified at trial couldn’t say when Johnston died. She could have been alive when loaded into the car and Adams could have been seeking help. He also said that an overdose of Benadryl could have caused her death.

In essence, Sterling said, his client could have committed murder but prosecutors wanted the jury to make a leap of logic.

“’Could’ doesn’t equal ‘did’ and they want you to think it does.”

Gernat addressed each argument Sterling made.

Anticipating the Benadryl claim, she said, ‘What’s the argument going to be? ‘Well, I meant to kill her but the Benadryl got to her first?’”

As for the theory that Adams had lovingly loaded Johnston into the car for a trip to the hospital?

“The state finds that statement appalling,” she said, noting that Adams dragged Johnston out of the house feet-first, leaving her head to bounce off every step on the way out.

As for his behavior after the murder, she said, Adams was just arrogant and pompous enough, she said, to think he could get away with it.

The alcohol argument, she said, was also ridiculous. She said that to raise such a defense, the defendant isn’t saying alcohol gave him courage enough to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise.

“It’s ‘I was so blotto I have no idea what I was doing,’” Gernat said. “If he was so blotto, if he was so drunk, how did he land the number of blows that he did?”

The charge of first-degree murder carries a sentence of up to 99 years. Adams was also convicted of evidence tampering for burning the clothes Johnston wore when she was killed.

He is scheduled to receive his sentence June 26. Gernat told Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler she expects the sentencing hearing to last half a day.