Justice System Put on Trial in Murder Case

Up in the piney hills of Yuba County, they are still talking about the way Brenda Marie Ferreira died in 1982 and how her live-in boyfriend, Joseph Peder Coleman, was not charged with her murder until last June.

Ferreira, suffering from brain damage, regained consciousness briefly before dying and told her family and a nurse that Coleman was responsible. But the district attorney refused to file charges.

What happened next caused a minor uproar. A sheriff’s deputy investigating the case became frustrated that Coleman was not being prosecuted. After he threatened to take the case to the state attorney general, the district attorney and sheriff charged him with stealing money from a prisoner’s wallet. He claimed that the charges were trumped up. A jury acquitted him.

Stole Files

Angry, the deputy stole the Ferreira case files and gave them to the state attorney general and the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” claiming that local officials were not prosecuting Coleman for political reasons. “60 Minutes” responded with a story, and the attorney general filed murder charges.

The case finally went to trial last month. But six days into the proceedings, Coleman’s defense attorney failed to show up in court one morning and the judge declared a mistrial.

“This is a very weird . . . very mixed-up case,” said Kitty Fowler, publisher of the weekly Rabbit Creek Journal that circulates in these hills 90 miles north of Sacramento.

Before it ends, say many close to the case, the criminal justice system in this poor, rural county in the Sierra Nevada foothills will have been tried right along with Coleman.

While state prosecutors refuse to comment on the case, which has been rescheduled for trial, a state Department of Justice official was critical of the actions of Yuba County lawmen. The official, who asked not to be identified, criticized Dist. Atty. Fred Schroeder’s handling of the matter, which he said “wasn’t thoroughly investigated.”

Lover’s Quarrel

The tale of Ferreira’s death began with a lover’s quarrel at a party in a run-down cabin near Dobbins, Calif., early in December, 1981. The events of the next six years emerged from court records, the case file and the first days of Coleman’s aborted trial.

Coleman, 27, and Ferreira, who weighed 96 pounds, were drinking at the party and fought on the front porch, witnesses testified at the trial. They said Coleman picked her up by the neck and hurled or pushed her down on a couch. Ferreira, 24, struck her head on the couch frame then slumped to the floor, dazed. Coleman carried her to the car and took her home, according to trial testimony.

What happened to Ferreira over the next 48 hours is not known. What is known is that two days after their public fight, Coleman took Ferreira to Oroville Hospital. She was in a coma with massive head injuries from an assault, according to investigative reports. She died four months later.

Apparent Beating

Dr. Claude Marquette, on duty at the hospital when Ferreira was brought in, testified at the trial that Ferreira appeared to have been severely beaten.

Investigators reported that Coleman told hospital attendants and police various stories about how Ferreira injured herself, claiming that she fell down stairs, fell out of a car or had seizures of some kind and began hitting and biting herself.

Coleman has maintained his innocence, telling investigators that he had never beaten Ferreira. Although he has avoided reporters, Coleman did shout through a screen door at “60 Minutes” correspondent Morley Safer, “I never, ever hit Brenda. . . . All I’d ever done was slap her, maybe--any girlfriend I’ve ever had, maybe slap, at the most.”

Questions arose almost immediately about the apparent lack of vigor shown by the sheriff’s investigators. The records stolen by the former deputy, William H. Hill, show that the investigation did not start until Dec. 11, nearly a week after the case was reported by Marquette.

The investigation was opened only after Frank Ferreira, the victim’s father, complained to a deputy sheriff that his daughter had been badly beaten and nothing was being done about it.

Sheriff Robert Day and Capt. Gary Tindel, then a lieutenant in charge of the case, said there had been no swift follow-up to the initial report because, they said, the department was already investigating two other murder cases.

By the time the investigation began, Brenda Ferreira had been transferred to the Chico Community Hospital, where neurosurgeon Dr. John R. Clark gave her little chance to survive.

Without her side of the story, Tom Mathews, who was then district attorney, told investigators that they did not have much to go on.

Ferreira remained in a coma until March, when she periodically regained consciousness and was talking with “numerous doctors and nurses, as well as her own family,” Clark told investigators.

‘Has Not Improved’

When Mathews heard that Ferreira was out of a coma, he sent a memo to sheriff’s investigators asking them to get a statement from her.

Capt. Tindel wrote back: “Tom, I talked to Dr. Clark’s nurse regarding Ferreira’s condition. It has not improved. . . . She is still comatose! No possibility whatsoever of talking to her.” In an interview with The Times, Tindel said no one ever told him she was conscious and talking.

Clark and nurse Donna Holliday have contradicted Tindel’s account in statements to prosecutors and in interviews with the media before prosecutors told them not to discuss the case. They said that if Tindel had contacted Clark or nurses at the hospital, he would have learned that Ferreira had come out of the coma. “She became conscious and could speak,” Holliday told “60 Minutes.” “She told me that Pete beat her.” Pete is the name Coleman goes by, officials say. Ferreira’s family also said the victim had named Coleman as her attacker.

Decided Against Charges

Mathews, now a Yuba County Superior Court judge, decided not to file charges. He refused to discuss his reasons with The Times.

Schroeder, who was then an assistant district attorney, was appointed to take Mathews’ place in 1982. He, too, refused to prosecute, saying the conversations Ferreira had with members of her family and the nurse were hearsay and “obviously don’t qualify” as death-bed statements under the rules of evidence.

Schroeder said the Ferreira-Coleman matter was put aside for a time and then his chief deputy, G. Michael Johnston, finally closed the case in April, 1984, without notifying him.

Johnston disagreed. Now in private practice and a political foe of his former boss, Johnston said Schroeder brought the Ferreira-Coleman file to him and ordered him to dismiss it. He said he did so without realizing Ferreira was dead.

No Coroner’s Report

“What I was given was . . . an assault case,” Johnston said. “There wasn’t even a coroner’s report with the file.”

During this time, Deputy Hill became frustrated. He claimed that the case was allowed to languish because Coleman’s father had campaigned for Day and that the sheriff was doing the elder Coleman a favor by not prosecuting his son. He also said, “They didn’t think she was worth the expense of a trial.”

Both Schroeder and Day scoff at Hill’s claims.

“That’s a big lie,” Day said. He insisted that he favored prosecution all along, although Schroeder told The Times that Day had agreed with the decision not to prosecute.

Day also denied that the senior Coleman--now deceased--ever aided in his campaign. Day called Hill a “renegade deputy” who was using the Ferreira case to cover up his own problems within the department.

‘A Lousy Jury’

“We caught him (Hill) dirty,” Day said, referring to a grand theft charge filed against Hill in 1985 after a prisoner reported his wallet, containing $264, was missing. Day attributes a jury’s decision to acquit Hill of the charges to “a lousy jury.”

Hill claims that the grand theft charge was fabricated to force him to resign. He refused. Yuba County then filed insurance fraud charges against him, alleging that he staged a burglary in his home. Again, he was acquitted at trial.

Hill said the cost of defending himself against those and other criminal charges, which were later dropped, left him and his wife $100,000 in debt and cost them their house when they fell behind in payments.

Hill did not give up. In January, 1986, he stole the files from the sheriff’s office.

“I was mad,” Hill said. “I’d been arrested and my credibility was ruined. So I got ahold of Dr. Clark, for credibility, and we took the report to the attorney general.”

State Filed Charges

The attorney general’s office investigated and “found it was a homicide,” said Steve White, head of the attorney general’s criminal division. The state recommended that the district attorney prosecute.

When Schroeder again refused, the state filed charges, Coleman pleaded innocent and his trial was moved to Merced County Superior Court because of the extensive pretrial publicity. Meanwhile, Hill was also prosecuted for taking the files. He pleaded “no contest” to stealing government documents and was put on probation.

The latest strange turn in the case took place six days into Coleman’s trial when his attorney, Jerry Graham of Sacramento, failed to show up in court. His disappearance occurred just one day after the judge dealt a significant blow to the defense, ruling that the death-bed statements of Ferreira were admissible in court.

When Graham failed to appear, later claiming that he could not continue with the trial because of a medical disability, the judge found him in contempt. Graham appealed. But the damage was done, the judge had no recourse but dismiss the jury and call a mistrial.

The new trial date is Sept. 13.