Murder charge dropped

Accused then acquitted for one of the two High’s Ice Cream murders, William Thomas Jr. lived 40 years with a second murder indictment hanging over his head.

He said he missed job promotions and spent thousands of dollars on a legal defense that failed to get the second charge dismissed. Scrutiny and suspicion plagued him and his family as the Staunton community waited to learn who shot dead Constance Hevener, 19, and her sister-in-law, Carolyn Hevener Perry, 20, on April 11, 1967.

His acquittal for the Hevener murder did little to help.

But a judge Tuesday dismissed the second charge against Thomas, closing another part of the decades-long case.

“I’m reminded of the language of Martin Luther King: ‘free at last, free at last,’ ” Thomas said by phone Tuesday.

The 64-year-old Virginia Tech graduate and former Buffalo Gap High School teacher called the experience “humanizing.”

“It made me appreciate a lot of things in life ... family, friends and the rule of law,” Thomas said.

The case is now in the hands of Staunton Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond Robertson.

Staunton police arrested Sharron Diane Crawford Smith on Dec. 12 in the killings.

The 60-year-old, terminally ill woman is near death and free on her own recognizance on the first-degree murder charges, authorities said. She is scheduled to appear Jan. 7 in Staunton General District Court.

Robertson said he checked on Thomas as a possible accomplice to Smith before requesting that the charge be dismissed.

“I wanted to make sure this guy was squeaky clean and I’m satisfied we’ve done that,” Robertson said. “I’ve called Mr. Thomas and had a couple of nice conversations with him.”

Thomas said Robertson and Judge Humes J. Franklin are “firm hands at the wheel” of the pending case.

Acquitted

A jury of 11 men and one woman found Thomas not guilty during a four-day jury trial in 1968. The trial came to an end exactly one year, to the day, after Hevener and Perry were killed, and after less than three hours of jury deliberation.

According to News Virginian reports, Thomas made a collect call from a phone booth near High’s Ice Cream the night of the murders. One witness said Thomas was in the store eating a banana split, with “roughed up” hair and needing a shave.

Thomas provided conflicting stories to police at the scene and during subsequent interviews, some of which were recorded and read back to jurors. Thomas told officers he had seen a white man and a black man leaving the store — a statement included in the original one-page police report detailing the murders. He also told police he saw a dog running in a neighborhood with bloody trousers in its mouth.

Thomas also called police interrogations a “terrific thrill.”

The News Virginian reported that 24 witnesses took the stand and that Thomas made notes about their testimony in a tan notebook. The jury “sat, stone-faced, without permitting so much as a flicker of expression to cross their faces.”

The courtroom, which seated 96, overflowed. Some attendees brought sandwiches to court.

Detective work

The long-unsolved cases perplexed relatives and the community since the day the shots rang out inside the store.

A former Staunton police investigator, Roy Hartless, now a private investigator, said the murder case file lacked documentation when he reopened the case in 1998.

The case gained new life in June, when Joyce Bradshaw told a distant relative of the murdered women about a threat made by Smith 41 years earlier. That relative, Lowell Sheets, had been looking into the case since 2001.

Thomas credited Sheets as a “man among men” for his work bringing the case to prosecution this year.

Sheets, Hartless and Thomas all said late Staunton police Detective Sgt. David Bocock was instrumental in Thomas’ prosecution. Bocock, the lead investigator in the murders, worked the case in ways that would not be deemed acceptable by the current police department’s standards, Hartless said.

“As long as [Bocock] was alive ... there was not much we could do,” Thomas said.

NBC29 contributed to this report.