Trial nears for man found with body in car

PALMER — With a trial looming in the murder case against Frank Adams, the lawyer representing him has filed motions revealing details of the case.

The attorney, Scott Sterling, is hoping to have two conversations Adams had with police barred from admittance in the trial, which is scheduled to start Feb. 17. He filed his request Jan. 7.

Court records show that prosecutor Rachel Gernat filed motions Thursday opposing Sterling’s requests. Her rebuttals were not available as of press time. Gernat was out of town and the file was unavailable at the courthouse.

Adams, 46, was pulled over on the Glenn Highway heading from Palmer to Anchorage on July 28, 2007. In the back of his hatchback, police found the body of Stacey Johnston, 42, who’d been apparently beaten to death.

Later, he was taken to Anchorage, where he talked to police. Attached to Sterling’s motions are transcripts of those interviews. In them, Adams doesn’t admit to killing Johnston. Instead he tells Alaska State Trooper Investigator Leonard Wallner and Anchorage Police Department investigator Glen Klinkhart that a drug deal gone wrong led to Johnston’s death.

He said that the day before he was pulled over, he and Johnston had been to a drug dealer’s house to try and collect $40 they’d paid but for which they’d received no drugs.

Adams said they arrived on scene and the drug dealer was trying to leave.

“I jumped up and I snatched [the dealer] and said you’re gonna pay. Pay us our f—- money,” Adams says in the transcript. “It was forty bucks but it was… the point it was Stacy’s last forty bucks.” [CQ]

Adams told investigators that afterwards the drug dealers started threatening him.

“We put ourselves into a bad situation. And it sucked,” Adams said.

The day he was pulled over, Adams said, he dropped Johnston off at their Chickaloon home and came back later to find her dead inside.

“I went in, I found her, I tried doing CPR on her,” he said. “There was blood and, there was blood all over, there was blood actually everywhere.”

He said he suspected the drug dealers killed Johnston.

Johnston and Adams had an extensive history of domestic violence detailed in previous motions Gernat has filed in the case.

In April 2007 Johnston filed a complaint with the Anchorage Police Department saying Adams smashed up her truck, bashing in her windshield, rear lights and bumpers.

“It appeared he used a 4x4 post,” Gernat wrote.

In May 2007, Johnston told police Adams had pulled a gun on her. The same month she, “reported she was hit in the head by defendant while she was driving down the road that that she had to jump out of the vehicle,” Gernat wrote.

That jump hurt her foot, an injury she was still being treated for when she died.

In June 2007, Adams was charged with hitting her in the face and pleaded guilty, Gernat said.

Gernat also detailed domestic violence issues between Adams and a different woman, to whom he was married. The abuses occurred in Anchorage and in Colorado.

More motions from prosecutors show they intend to present evidence that blood found under Johnston’s nails after she’d died was consistent with both Johnston’s DNA and Adams’ DNA.

Sterling writes that the conversations with police should be thrown out since Adams at the start of the interview asked to see a lawyer.

“Adams’ request for counsel at the early onset of the July 28 interviews was not in any way ambiguous or equivocal. Even if it was, however, Klinkhart and Wallner were permitted only to seek clarification,” Sterling wrote.

The transcripts show Adams requested an attorney at the very start of the interview.

Two pages later, though, there’s this exchange:

Wallner: Okay. Okay. Now you said you want a… Okay.

Adamas: I just want to talk to you for a minute.

Wallner: Okay. That’s fine. I, just go ahead. I’ll just listen.

From there, the transcript goes on for 40 pages as Adams lays out his story. The interview ends more than an hour after it began.

In addition to his motion regarding the interviews, Sterling is trying to have the search and seizure of Adams’ car, and all the evidence obtained therein, thrown out.

His motion goes over the initial traffic stop, which occurred after an employee at the Tesoro station in Palmer called police to say a man had staggered in, apparently drunk, and drove off.

The Palmer Police officer who went to stop the car, “reported no information nor observations which either corroborated the observations and information of [the clerk] concerning the red car and its driver, or otherwise generated a reasonable suspicion/probable cause to stop and seize the car,” Sterling wrote.

Without a reason to stop the car, Sterling wrote, the law says the car can’t be stopped and the evidence must be thrown out.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.

Not a first for defendant

PALMER — The murder for which Frank Adams will stand trial next month is not the first he’s been alleged to have participated in.

In a motion filed in court over the summer, prosecutor Rachel Gernat details Adams’ first murder case, in which the Chickaloon man was convicted when he was 16 years old.

According to the motion, on Aug. 15, 1978, Colonel Robert Cassell was found beaten to death in his home in Eagle River.

Gernat wrote that the colonel’s adopted son hired Adams and another individual to kill the colonel.

According to the affidavit, the night of the murder Adams and his friend went to the colonel’s home. They brought along a tire iron they’d tried to saw in half. The colonel let them inside and went back to sleep.

“Adams and [his friend] entered Colonel Cassell’s bedroom and Frank Adams began to bludgeon the colonel about the head and body. The wrench broke where it had been sawed earlier and Adams asked his friend to retrieve a knife. [His friend] did and then Adams stabbed the colonel and cut his throat,” Gernat wrote.

—Andrew Wellner