Rodney Reed only has 6 days left to live unless we stop his execution. Can you help him today by contacting Governor Abbott at (512) 463-1762 and sharing why you think it’s wrong for the State of Texas to kill an innocent man?
Not sure what to say? Just speak from the heart and share some facts:
+ I’m calling to let you know that I don’t support the execution of Rodney Reed.
+ Important new evidence has come out since his trial that shows we should slow down and reevaluate the case.
+ This matters to me personally because _________________.
If possible, stay calm and be polite, because I know that we can still change Gov. Abbott’s mind before Wednesday.
With just a week left to save Rodney Reed’s life, I’ll be sending you one action a day. It’s my hope that you’ll join me in standing strong with Rodney. Every single voice counts, and he needs yours. Just showing up for him right now means everything.
https://www.kvue.com/article/news/l...ites/269-83d1b2d1-8db2-412f-aae2-afbda9128e48
Rodney Reed: His fight for a new trial and why prosecutors say he's guilty
More than 20 years have passed since Stacey Stites' body was found in a wooded area in Bastrop, Texas. Did Rodney Reed kill her?
Updated: 1:13 PM CST November 14, 2019
BASTROP, Texas —
Since his conviction in 1998 for the rape and murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites, Rodney Reed has maintained his innocence.
But after nine failed appeals, Reed is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Nov. 20.
Now his lawyers and family are trying to save Reed in the court of public opinion after every attempt in the court of law has failed.
On the morning of April 23, 1996, an H-E-B worker became alarmed when Stacey Stites didn’t show up for her shift.
Stacey Stites was a 1995 graduate of Smithville High School who had recently moved to Giddings, Texas, with her mother and fiancé, a local Giddings police officer named Jimmy Fennell.
She worked at the H-E-B in Bastrop and had recently switched to the early morning produce shift to make extra money for her upcoming May 1996 wedding.
"She'd been working, paying off her dress and doing a little bit each week to make sure this wedding came off OK,” said Carol Stites, Stacey Stites' mother.
Stacey Stites was living with Fennell in the unit above her mother’s apartment. Stacey Stites and Fennell shared a truck and would occasionally borrow Carol Stites' car, but it wasn’t very reliable for a longer commute from Giddings to Bastrop in the middle of the night.
Carol Stites said the night before her daughter disappeared, they had discussed the plans for the next day. Stacey Stites had to work, but Fennell did not, so initially, they planned on Fennell driving Stacey Stites to work at 3 a.m. in his truck. But Fennell later told police they had decided in their own apartment, that night, that Stacey Stites would drive the truck to work by herself since Fennell didn’t have to work the next day. He said she went to bed, and he stayed up watching TV before falling asleep.
On the morning of April 23, 1996, Stacey Stites' H-E-B coworker became alarmed when she didn’t show up for her 3:30 a.m. shift. He waited a few hours, and when Stacey Stites still didn’t show up for work, he called Carol Stites to tell her Stacey Stites was missing.
Immediately, Carol Stites yelled up to Fennell through the thin apartment walls to let him know. He came running down the stairs to her apartment, and they called the Giddings Police Department.
That same morning, an officer noticed a truck parked at Bastrop High School. He called it in and discovered it was registered to Fennell. He made a note of the truck but left since there wasn’t anything obviously wrong. He did notice a piece of her braided leather belt sitting nearby.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that a person called 911 saying they had found a woman’s body in a wooded area off a rural Bastrop road called Bluebonnet Lane. It was Stacey Stites.
....
Another woman is attacked, but she survives
Months after Stacey Stites' death, a different 19-year-old was viciously attacked. But she lived to tell the tale.
On Nov. 9, 1996, 19-year-old Austin native Linda Schlueter was visiting friends in Bastrop when she stopped to use a drive-up payphone at the now-closed Long’s Star Mart on Loop 150, also known as Chestnut Street, in Bastrop.
She said
she was using the drive-up payphone through her car window when a tall black man approached her, asking for a ride. Initially, she said she refused.
"He was on the phone with somebody else, and he said, ‘She won't give me a ride, I guess I'll just freeze to death.’ And it made me feel bad. I was only 19 at the time,” Schlueter told KVUE.
“So, I was like, ‘Where do you live?’ And he said, ‘On Main Street,’ and in my mind, Main Street is this big, lit up road,” Schlueter said. “So, I was like, ‘How far?’ And he said, ‘A mile or two.’”
He got in her car, and she said as she started driving down the street it started to get darker. She said when he pointed down a dark road to turn, she refused and tried to turn the car back around.
She said when he went to get out of the car, he attacked her.
"The next thing I know
he has me by the back of my hair slamming my face in my steering wheel,” Schlueter said. “I'm punching backward, and I open the door. I scream so loud that I peed my pants, and I just kept punching."
Schlueter said
she kept trying to fight back as he continued to attack her.
"And I asked him, ‘What do you want? What the hell do you want from me?’ And he said, ‘I want a blowjob,’” said Schlueter. “And I said, ‘You'll have to kill me before you get anything from me.’ And he said, ‘I guess I have to kill you then.’"
Schlueter said he tried to take her in her car, but when she saw other car lights approaching, she jumped out and ran. She said the man took off in her car, and she found help and called 911.
"The cops came, and I identified who it was, exactly what he was wearing, where I picked him up, what time it was,” said Schlueter.
According to prosecutors, earlier in the night, a Bastrop police officer had noticed Reed – a man who had been arrested several times in Bastrop before – hanging around Long’s Star Mart.
When officers got a description of Schlueter’s attacker, they realized he matched the description of Reed that night, including what he was wearing.
Police put one of Reed’s prior mugshots in a photo line-up, and Schlueter picked him out as her attacker.
"I knew immediately who it was. Immediately. I picked him out immediately, no doubt at all,” said Schlueter.
This attack is what would lead police to connect Reed to Stacey Stites' case.
The prosecutors said there were similar MOs. Schlueter’s car was abandoned close to where Fennell’s truck was found in the Bastrop High School parking lot. Additionally, prosecutors think Stacey Stites was likely stopped near the Long’s Star Mart at the train tracks when Reed spotted her.
Stacey Stites took Loop 150 to get from Giddings to Bastrop.
"We believed that Stacey was abducted from that point, from that place, possibly by being stopped by a train,” Tanner said. “We knew that there was a struggle inside of her truck, based on the condition of her truck. Also based on the abrasions that were found on her body that were linear abrasions [likely from a seatbelt] across her shoulder."
Connecting the DNA
Investigators test the DNA found on Stacey Stites, and find a match.
Working off the similar MO to Schlueter’s attack, police decided to test the DNA found in Stacey Stites against Reed’s DNA. His DNA was already in the system for a sexual assault charge. Reed has previously been accused of raping a woman with intellectual disabilities in Bastrop in May 1995. Reed had not yet been tried in that case.
For background, this testing all happened before the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which blends forensic science and computer technology into a tool for linking violent crimes. Investigators in Stacey Stites’ case had to test DNA individually.
Reed’s DNA was a match.
Oliver, Stacey Stites' sister, remembers the moment they learned about Reed’s DNA.
"They called and said, 'We have a suspect, and we think it's him,'" Oliver said.
Reed, in jail for a separate drug charge, initially denied knowing Stacey Stites. But when he was confronted with the DNA evidence, he changed his story and told investigators they were sleeping together, claiming they had sex several days before she was killed.
Reed said they had kept the relationship a secret because Stacey Stites was engaged.
Investigators weren’t convinced, Tanner said, because no evidence of Stacey Stites having an affair had come up in their nine-month-long investigation into her life.
"All of this talk about Stacey Stites having this clandestine affair with Rodney Reed only came up after he was linked to her by DNA, which we later learned, in looking at the case, was precisely the argument that he made back in the previous case in Wichita Falls,” said Tanner.
Tanner is referring to
a 1987 case in Wichita Falls. Reed was charged with aggravated sexual assault for the rape and beating of a 19-year-old woman there.
The victim – who was also white – said she was coming home and at her door when a man grabbed her, pulled her inside, raped her and hit her. Photos of the victim show her eye swollen shut with a cut near her mouth. KVUE is not naming her given the nature of the charges.
Reed’s DNA was also found inside the Wichita Falls victim, but he claimed the sex was consensual, and that she wanted to hide it because she is white — and he is black.
Reed claimed the victim insulted him after sex, and that is why he hit her.
Her kitchen window was broken, but the prosecution could not prove that Reed entered her home through the window. The jury acquitted Reed in 1991.
As he stands trial for Stacey Stites' murder, Reed's DNA matches two unsolved rape cases
In one case, the rape victim was 12 years old. Another rape happened just months before Stacey Stites was killed.
Once police had a match for Stacey Stites' DNA, they decided to test it against some of the other unsolved rape cases in Bastrop dating back at least 10 years to see if they saw any other matches.
According to prosecutors, Reed’s DNA also matched two unsolved rape cases.
The first case was a 12-year-old who was attacked, raped and sodomized in her Bastrop home while she was sleeping in 1989. The victim said her attacker, a large black man, got upset when she bit his penis when he tried to make her perform oral sex. He then bit her face several times.
The photos taken by Bastrop police show several large bite marks on her face.
The second prior case Reed’s DNA matched was a woman who had reported her rape to police just six months before Stacey was killed. KVUE is naming her in this article as she has given public interviews and testified at Reed's sentencing.
Her name is Vivian Harbottle.
She told police that her attacker grabbed her while she was walking on the railroad tracks near Loop 150, also known as Chestnut Street, after leaving a bar late at night in October 1995. It is the same area police believe Reed took Stacey Stites since she took that route to work.
Harbottle told police the man threw her to the ground and raped her, covering her mouth with his hand. She couldn’t identify the man, she said, because it was dark, and she had been drinking. She called police immediately, and they took a DNA sample of the semen found on her body.
The DNA matched Reed’s.
Again, Reed did not go to trial for these attacks because he was already on trial for the capital murder of Stacey.
There are three total sexual assault charges and one aggravated sexual assault charge still pending and active against Reed. The victims include the 12-year-old, Harbottle, a former girlfriend of Reed's and Schlueter — all four testified at Reed's punishment phase of his trial.
"Everybody says he's innocent, and they just don't know the whole story,” said Schlueter, Reed’s last alleged victim.
New testing shows more of Rodney Reed's DNA on and in Stacey Stites
Several years after Rodney Reed's conviction, more DNA testing was conducted.
In 2014, Rodney Reed’s lawyers pushed for more DNA testing, and a judge signed an order to conduct new, more-advanced DNA testing of swabs taken from Stacey Stites’ vaginal and rectal cavities and from her breasts and underwear.
The state also agreed to test extracts from stains found on Stacey Stites' pants and H-E-B work back brace, which had been left in the truck.
The report from the DNA, completed in 2015, showed even more of Rodney Reed’s DNA on Stacey Stites than originally thought during his original trial.
Testing showed Rodney Reed’s DNA in Stacey Stites’ underwear, which is why prosecutors argued she had been raped shortly before her death. It also found Rodney Reed’s DNA on her pants, on her back brace found in Fennell’s truck, on her breasts, in her vagina and in her rectum.
As Rodney Reed maintains his innocence, a wave of supporters demand a reprieve
Celebrities, lawmakers and even the European Union have spoken out, urging Texas' governor to halt Rodney Reed's execution.
From the beginning, Rodney Reed has denied any involvement in Stacey Stites' death. His family has fought by his side the entire time. Texas representatives and senators on both sides of the aisle have urged the governor to grant a reprieve. The European Union has joined the call, and so have celebrities such as Dr. Phil, Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Rihanna, T.I. and Meek Mill.
"I want to do all that I can do, all that I can do, because I know my brother is innocent,” said Rodney Reed’s brother, Rodrick Reed. “All we're asking people is to just look at the evidence. Look at the truth. If you don't believe Rodney is totally innocent, there's enough out there to cast doubt, and that is enough for a new trial."
A petition to free Rodney Reed has reached millions of signatures.
Rodney Reed’s supporters believe Stacey Stites' fiancé, Fennell, is her true killer. They point to holes in the investigation, such as the fact that police didn’t search Fennell’s apartment that he shared with Stacey Stites. They are also quick to point out Fennell’s arrest 11 years after Stacey Stites' death.
In 2007, Fennell pled guilty to kidnapping and improper sexual activity with a person in his custody while he was an officer with the Georgetown Police Department. He was accused of sexually assaulting a woman involved in a domestic dispute he responded to as an officer.
Fennell served nearly 10 years.
Fennell and his lawyers have continued to deny any involvement in Stacey Stites' death, noting his DNA wasn’t found anywhere in or around her body at the scene.
According to an affidavit provided by KVUE's partners at the Austin American-Statesman, inmate Arthur Snow Jr., who was serving a sentence for forgery, had a prison yard conversation with Fennell around 2010. The sworn affidavit was submitted on Rodney Reed's behalf in 2019.
“He was talking about his fiancé with a lot of hatred and anger,” the three-page affidavit said.
“Jimmy said his fiancé had been sleeping around with a black man behind his back. By the way Jimmy spoke about this experience, I could tell that it deeply angered him.”
Snow said Fennell confidently confessed he “had to kill her” in response.
Several other new witnesses have also come forward supporting Rodney Reed's claim that he was having an affair with Stacey Stites.
The four most recent witnesses include:
Rebecca Peoples, who said she and Stacey Stites would talk when they worked together at H-E-B about how she was afraid of her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, and that she was "having an affair with a black man."
Richard Derleth, a former Bastrop County Sheriff's deputy, who said H-E-B employees told him in 1996 that they would warn Stacey Stites if her fiancé arrived at the store, allowing her to hide because she feared he would begin arguing with her in public.
Brent and Vicki Sappington, who said Brent’s late father lived directly below the Giddings, Texas, apartment shared by Stacey Stites and Fennell. The father said he often overheard them arguing and believed Fennell was physically abusive.
"We're really just trying to get these witnesses in front of a judge, in front of a jury, and let's sort it all out and let's find out what really happened here before we execute the wrong guy,” said Benjet.
The state said the witnesses are not credible.
....
However,
prosecutors, Stacey Stites' family, and Rodney Reed’s alleged rape victims agree that Rodney Reed is guilty of Stacey Stites' death. And Rodney Reed's additional three sexual assault charges and one aggravated sexual assault charge are still pending in Texas.
: for a death row inmate convicted of raping and murdering a 19-year-old woman.
Reed's family claims prosecutors withheld evidence during the trial. 
/static.texastribune.org/media/files/6843b94d091df11935ea512a55d21c72/Rodney%20Reed%20YT%20TT.jpg)
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/6843b94d091df11935ea512a55d21c72/Rodney%20Reed%20YT%20TT.jpg "Rodney Reed is scheduled to be executed next Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019.")
Claire Osborn
