Published: June 25, 2009 11:08 pm      

Elliott County jailer’s wife testifies during trial

CATLETTSBURG — The wife of Elliott County Jailer Charles Howard testified Thursday that she normally accompanied her husband as a deputy jailer matron on trips where he had female prisoners to transport.

However, Christy Howard said she did not go with her husband on Aug. 31 of last year — the day he drove a woman he is accused of raping from Sandy Hook to the Boyd County Detention Center —because she could not find anyone to stay with her children while she was gone.

Christy Howard also told jurors that it wasn’t particularly unusual for her husband to haul female prisoners without her along because her full-time job as a nurse prevented her from making every trip.

Also, under cross-examination by her husband’s attorney, Michael Curtis, Christy Howard testified about a telephone call she said she made to her husband the day of the alleged rape.

Charles Howard’s cell phone records show a call was placed to his cell phone from the Howards’ home phone at 7:08 p.m. on Aug. 31. Christy Howard said when she spoke to her husband at that time, he was at a viewing at the couple’s church in Elliott County for “one of our Christian sisters who had passed away.”

Christy Howard said she knew that was where her husband was because she heard voices in the background she recognized.

If Charles Howard was, indeed, where he told his wife he was, that would be at odds with the prosecution’s timeline of when the alleged rape took place.

Prosecutors on Thursday introduced security camera footage from Appalachian Fuels that showed Howard’s vehicle leaving the company’s property at the junction of Interstate 64 and Ky. 180 at 5:56 p.m. Records from the Boyd jail show the alleged victim was booked into the facility at 6:44 p.m.

It was in that 48-minute gap that Howard drove the woman to a remote spot off U.S. 60 near the Boyd-Carter County line and forced her to engage in sexual intercourse with him, Commonwealth’s Attorney David Justice said.

However, Curtis has maintained that the jail records show only when the woman was processed and not when she actually arrived at the facility with Howard. And, another of the prosecution’s witnesses testified Thursday that records that would have shown the time of Howard and the woman’s arrival could not be located.

Capt. Rex Castle, a deputy jailer and the custodian of records at the detention center, said it was standard procedure for deputies to note the arrival time of every vehicle that pulls into the jail’s sallyport to drop off a prisoner, along with the name of the officer making the drop-off and the gender of the prisoner.

Castle said he was “at a loss” to explain why that apparently didn’t happen when Howard dropped off the woman.

Castle went on to say, though, that he believed the record showing the time the woman was processed was a fairly close approximation of the time she was dropped off. Under normal circumstances, prisoners normally are booked within a few minutes of their arrival at the detention center, he said.

The prosecution on Thursday also called two Kentucky State Police crime lab scientists who analyzed evidence in the case.

Nechelle Burns, a biologist at the Northern Regional Lab, told jurors she examined the sexual assault kit containing evidence taken from the woman at King’s Daughters Medical Center, where she was taken after she reported the alleged rape to Boyd jail deputies.

Burns said she found semen on a vaginal smear and vaginal swabs from the kit, and on the woman’s underwear. She said she forwarded the swabs to the KSP’s Central Lab in Frankfort for DNA analysis.

Melissa Brown, the forensic scientist who performed the DNA analysis, testified that her tests showed that the odds of anyone other than Howard being the donor of the semen were one in 690 quadrillion.

“The way I would explain that,” she said, “is that if I performed that test on 690 quadrillion people, I would get the same result only once.”

Howard admitted to having sex with the woman, a 27-year-old married mother of three from Boyd County, in an interview with KSP Detective Erik Kouns, the lead investigator in the case. However, he said it was consensual and that the woman initiated it.

Howard also told Kouns the sexual encounter took place in a small cemetery just up the hill from Appalachian Fuels. The woman testified that Howard drove her there, but that nothing sexual occurred there.

The footage from Appalachian Fuels’ security cameras shows Howard’s vehicle traveling up the hill to the cemetery at 5:51 p.m., then back down the hill almost exactly five minutes later.

Howard is charged with first-degree rape and could get 10 to 20 years in prison if he is convicted. He is free on $20,000 bond and remains in office but was stripped of his duties by the Elliott Fiscal Court shortly after his arrest.

The fifth day of Howard’s trial is scheduled to begin at 1 this afternoon. The prosecution is expected to rest its case, after which Curtis will begin calling witnesses.

KENNETH HART can be reached at khart@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2654.