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February 14, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Alive and in death, Lynn Voll was twice a victim

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — The murder defense that Luther Garcia mounted for Joseph C. Jenkins last week was spirited and ethical, but something larger than legal justice demands a few words for a person who no longer has a voice:

Lynn Voll.

A quiet, steady office worker in Indiana State University’s Career Center, Voll was 52 when her body was found Nov. 11, 2005, in her home on Garfield Avenue in Terre Haute. Police, prosecutors and Vigo County’s coroner all say she was strangled.

Jenkins, 46, a neighbor, was accused of the alleged crime.

During a weeklong trial that ended early Wednesday morning in a hung jury, public defender Garcia did what every good defense attorney is supposed to do for a client. Like a picador with an arm full of lances, he thrust doubt after doubt into the prosecution’s circumstantial case.

With no eyewitness, fingerprints or DNA to guide them, jurors had a particularly stringent “shadow of a doubt” standard to consider.

According to Vigo County Prosecutor Terry Modesitt, who did not personally try the case, 10 jurors voted for acquittal, only two for a guilty verdict. A Tuesday hearing before Judge David Bolk in Superior Court Division 3 will determine whether the state will re-try the case or allow Jenkins to go free for the first time in more than a year.

Who will re-try the case against Lynn Voll?

To discredit the state’s evidence against Jenkins, his attorney painted a portrait of Voll that was, at best, pathetic and grotesque. At worst, it transformed a woman who was described by friends and family as solid, selfless and sacrificing into someone who knuckled to life’s pressures and killed herself by wrapping a vacuum cleaner cord around her own neck.

Garcia’s specific portrait of an individual he knew only as a corpse in police photos was devoid of light or happiness. He presented Voll as a middle-aged, depressed woman, living alone and financially strapped by nursing home costs for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother.

Also, Garcia felt it necessary to mention, Lynn Voll’s father had taken his own life in 2000 and Voll had discovered his body.

For the record: No note was found in Voll’s home to indicate such a desperate act. The other end of the vacuum cleaner cord was not tied to a ceiling beam or obvious fixture that could aid in self-strangulation. Her lunch was packed, as usual, for the workday ahead.

In 2005 Vigo County Coroner Dr. Roland Kohr ruled Voll’s death a homicide. In trial testimony he declared a suicide all but impossible. But the one person who could have refuted, 100 percent, the idea that Voll managed to strangle herself was dead.

Even the people who were seeking justice in Voll’s name inadvertently cast her in a feeble light.

According to news reports, much was made during the trial about the dust in Voll’s home, and how it appeared no one had disturbed (or cleaned) it for months. Forensics testimony was filled with negative comments about her housekeeping.

The defense used the dust to imply no struggle had taken place between Voll and an intruder such as Jenkins. The prosecution used the dust as a possible explanation for police finding no fingerprints other than Voll’s. (It is more difficult to lift prints in a dusty environment.)

Then there was the rocking chair.

When Garcia spoke of it, it was over-turned — the way a chair used for a suicide might be kicked aside as a body fell.

When Voll’s sister, Paulette Brentlinger, spoke for the prosecution, the rocking chair wasn’t over-turned, it was unassembled.

Voll’s colleagues at ISU had given a chair kit to her as a present for 25 years of service, Brentlinger said. But neither Voll’s nor friends’ efforts had cracked the code of the assembly manual. Reflective of a life with a full-time job, and family and church obligations, Voll had neglected the unfinished rocker — long enough for considerable dust to settle on the chair and the floor around it.

Brentlinger also testified that Voll knew she did not have to carry the financial burden of their mother’s illness alone; an offer of family help was there.

“She was a quiet, gentle, kind person that kept to herself,” Brentlinger said.

Other prosecution witnesses talked about nice lunches with Voll, about the woman’s tender heart for her own cats and the neighborhood’s strays. A member of Barbour Avenue United Methodist Church since childhood, Voll had rung the bell for Sunday school since she was 17. No one could remember her missing a worship service, ever.

The day before she died, Voll had stocked up on groceries at a supermarket and had paid her daily visit to her mother in Meadows Manor North. When she didn’t show up at ISU the next morning at her usual 8 a.m. start time, her co-workers requested a well-being check.

As news reports noted at the time of her death, Voll never married and she had no children. As investigators discovered in their search for why someone might strangle her, she didn’t travel, have extravagant tastes or a secret life of drinking, gambling or drugs. She lived an existence many people would consider dull.

In other words, nothing Lynn Voll did should have led her to become a victim of homicide. And despite what a court record might indicate in the future, she did nothing to deserve being portrayed as a suicide — nothing but have the rotten luck to die with only her careful killer in the room.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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