“(My brother) and I never, ever had that conversation,” said Sissy Atkinson, responding to a question from Beach's defense attorney, who contends Nees was killed by a group of girls in 1979 - not by Beach.
Among the defense witnesses who testified on Wednesday was J.D. Atkinson, Sissy's brother, who said his younger sister divulged out-of-the-way information implicating herself and several other suspects in Nees' brutal murder.
Kim Nees had just graduated as the valedictorian of her high school class when she was bludgeoned to death near the edge of the Poplar River, a crime that went unsolved until Beach confessed in 1983.
“She mentioned she was down there at the party that night ... and a fight broke out and somebody was chasing Kim around with a wrench,” said J.D. Atkinson, referring to the alleged admissions of his sister.
Sissy Atkinson sat listening to the testimony from inside a packed classroom at the Montana State Prison, where this week's hearing before the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole is set to run through Friday.
Beach's hearing marks the culmination of his decades-long effort to clear his name in a crime that has polarized the town of Poplar, with recent attention stirring up new emotions.
It also gives the public a glance at the fruits of a seven-year reinvestigation of Beach's case, which helped bolster his plea for clemency and was a critical factor in landing the public hearing.
Working through Beach's attorney, Peter Camiel, the investigation was assumed in 2000 by a New Jersey-based advocacy group that works to free innocent convicts. The group, called Centurion Ministries, helped Beach appeal to Gov. Brian Schweitzer for executive clemency, which means a pardon or commutation of his sentence.
But prosecutors have opposed Beach's appeals every step of the way, and to this day maintain they incarcerated the right man, noting that Beach's signed confession has been upheld all the way to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
And assistant attorney generals Mike Wellenstein and Tammy Plubell say the confession corroborates too many accurate details to be false.
“Every court in the land has found this confession to be valid,” said Plubell while cross-examining Richard Leo, an expert defense witness who was on hand to explain how and why false confessions occur.
Of the roughly 200 DNA exonerations nationwide, between 20 and 25 percent resulted from false confessions, said Leo, who's being paid handsomely for his role as a defense witness.
But Leo, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco, said Beach's confession is problematic because there's no objective account, like a recording, of the Louisiana detectives' interrogation prior to Beach's “post-admission narrative,” or confession.
Leo also said the confession does not match key evidence found at the murder scene in Poplar, including Beach's descriptions of what Nees was wearing and how he disposed of the body.
“There is no physical evidence to corroborate that confession,” Leo said. “(The confession) makes numerous errors, so many errors I can't keep track of them all.”
But Wednesday's hearing answered few questions, and state prosecutors had plenty of triumphs as they browbeat defense witnesses like J.D. Atkinson and Richard Holen, who gave little explanation as to why they never told authorities about new developments in the case.
“I have no reason to lie about this,” Atkinson said.
Holen testified he saw Nees driving toward the river bottom with at least four other girls piled into her pickup truck after 2 a.m. on the night of the murder.
So why did he wait until now to come forward?
“Nobody ever asked me,” Holen said.
Holen was questioned after the murder by Steven Greyhawk, a tribal police officer, and was never contacted again.
And while this week's hearing is scheduled to proceed much like a trial, the board's chairwoman, Teresa McCann O'Connor, said it will grant “maximum latitude” in many respects.
Indeed, the three members of the board - Vance Curtiss, Margaret Bowman and O'Connor - peppered witnesses with questions of their own, with O'Connor occasionally putting attorneys on both sides in their places.
“Hearsay, double hearsay and triple hearsay are all issues to resolve,” she said, elaborating on the rule saying attorneys can't draw hearsay from witnesses as direct testimony.
But if a single thread recurred throughout the day, it was the legitimacy of Beach's confession, a portion of which has even been contradicted by autopsy reports.
Beach's defense attorney who represented him in Louisiana 24 years ago, Paul Kidd, also traveled to the state prison and took the stand, telling the board he was never present during the detectives' interrogation of Beach so many years ago.
But at Beach's trial, Louisiana Detective Jay Via told jurors that Kidd had been present for the interrogation, an assertion Kidd called “poppycock.”
Leo said Kidd's presence would have indicated to jurors that the confession couldn't have been coerced.
Bobby Atkinson, another of Sissy's brothers, also testified that the room where Nees' clothes and other crucial crime scene evidence was stored was broken into shortly after the murder.
The culprit?
Tribal officer Steven Greyhawk, father to Maude Greyhawk, another of the women Centurion has subpoenaed to appear at the hearing and whom others have implicated in Nees' death.
Working with Centurion, Camiel has subpoenaed more than 20 witnesses to appear at the hearing.
Upcoming witness include Marc Racicot, the special prosecutor in Beach's case and a former governor of Montana, the Louisiana detectives who obtained Beach's confession and Arnold Melnikoff, the former director of the Montana State Crime Lab, who provided the only physical evidence linking Beach to the murder at trial.
Reporter Tristan Scott can be reached at 523-5264 or at tscott@missoulian.com
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