New trial bid for ex-Ft. Jackson soldier in cold case murder pending
The 54-year-old “cold case” murder conviction of former Ft. Jackson soldier Edward Freiburger just keeps getting colder.
In 2002, a Richland County jury convicted Freiburger in the 1961 slaying of a Columbia taxi driver, John Orner. Since then, Freiburger, 72, has been serving a life sentence in state prison. He is not eligible for parole.
Now, more than two months after an S.C. Court of Appeals panel ruled that Freiburger should get a new trial, Freiburger’s case is tied up in time-consuming motions concerning that decision – motions that are routine as prosecutors try to get the Court of Appeals to let it have another hearing.
It is just the latest stage of a years-long process.
In 2005, three years after Freiburger’s trial in Columbia, the State Supreme Court affirmed his conviction. But Frieburger had another appeal avenue – called post-conviction relief – in which a convicted person asserts that his trial lawyer committed a grievous error.
The Court of Appeals panel ruled in February that Freiburger’s trial attorney had failed to introduce evidence crucial to Freiburger’s case and that failure “deeply undermined the State’s case.”
J. Mark Powell, spokesman for Attorney General Alan Wilson, said Monday, “The Attorney General’s Office has filed a petition for rehearing to the Court of Appeals. We are awaiting the Court’s decision.”
If the Appeals panel rejects Wilson’s bid for a new hearing, the attorney general likely will appeal to the S.C. Supreme Court.
John Blume, one of Freiburger’s lawyers, said in an email that his client knows his case’s status.
“I went to see him to let him know and also called his children,” Blume said. “Ed was very happy. He understands the case is not over, but he is optimistic that this is the first step in having a jury decide the case after hearing all the relevant evidence.”
For some 40 years after Orner’s death, the case was a mystery.
Orner’s body, with one gunshot wound to the head, was found dumped off U.S. 601 in Lower Richland County several days after he disappeared in late February, 1961. His bloodstained taxi had earlier been found abandoned near Gervais and Assembly streets in downtown Columbia. Because his body was outside city limits, it became a Richland County sheriff’s department case.
In 1999, Richland County detectives re-opened the case and zeroed in on Freiburger, who had been a suspect in 1961. Back then, detectives had suspected Freiburger – at the time an 18-year-old Army recruit – because he had bought a pistol from a Columbia pawn shop the day before Orner disappeared and was AWOL.
But detectives then believed they didn’t have conclusive enough evidence to charge Freiburger. Although Tennessee law officers had confiscated a pistol from Freiburger while he was hitchhiking in that state several weeks after Orner was killed, ballistics tests failed to match that pistol to bullet fragments recovered from Orner.
In the 2002 trial, prosecutors placed considerable weight on new evidence that, to them, proved the bullet from Freiburger’s gun confiscated by Tennessee law officers in 1961 matched bullet fragments found in Orner. The jury agreed, taking less than three hours to return a guilty verdict.
But in February, the Court of Appeals panel found, 2-1, that Freiburger’s then-defense lawyer had failed to introduce crucial evidence that would have cast doubt on the prosecution’s assertions at trial about matching bullet fragments.
Asked about the case Monday, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said, “If necessary, we are ready to go back to trial again. I have confidence in the court system.”
Lott had started a cold case squad in 1997 to look at unsolved murders. Freiburger’s arrest in 2001 was the cold case squad’s first arrest. Prosecutors speculate robbery was the motive in Orner’s death. When he was found, his pockets had been turned inside out.
This story was originally published April 20, 2015 at 9:09 PM with the headline "New trial bid for ex-Ft. Jackson soldier in cold case murder pending."