Judge dismisses all charges against Slagle

By DANIEL GILBERT/Media General News Service

The testimony of two young sisters who accused a longtime area law enforcement officer of rape, forcible sodomy and aggravated sexual battery would have been enough for a judge to convict the man without any corroborating evidence and sentence him to life in prison. But only if the girls’ sworn accounts eclipsed all reasonable doubt.
After listening Wednesday to the sisters’ recollections of the October 2007 events, a circuit court judge dismissed all three charges against Timothy Lynn Slagle, who had worked as a police officer at the Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute.
In the bench trial, Keary R. Williams, a retired circuit court judge, found that the special prosecutor failed to prove that Slagle coerced the older sister, who was 15 at the time, to justify the charges of rape and sodomy, which Slagle maintained never occurred. But when it came to the younger sister’s allegation that Slagle inappropriately touched her breasts when she was 12, the judge was more circumspect.
Calling the younger sister’s testimony credible, Williams said, “I have some suspicions of what went on, but a suspicion is not going to be enough for a conviction here.” He also found that Slagle and his wife’s testimony, which rebutted temporal details alleged by the sisters, to be compelling.
Special Prosecutor Frank Slavin, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Wythe County, rested his case after the sisters testified.
Wayne Austin, Slagle’s defense attorney, called his client, his client’s wife, and three community members as character witnesses.
After the verdict, Austin said Slagle was “happy to move along with his life.”
“These are the most dangerous cases known to man,” Austin said, noting that his client had faced a possible life sentence. “It doesn’t take any corroboration to convict.”
Slagle, 43, resigned from his job at the mental health institute after being placed on leave pending a resolution of the criminal charges. Previously, he had been a police officer in Abingdon and a security guard at Walmart. Asked if he would pursue a career in law enforcement, Austin said, “I personally wouldn’t be surprised to see him back in law enforcement. But his initial reaction is probably to go in some other direction.”
Slagle was arrested in June and indicted in September. The sodomy charge stemmed from a Friday in October 2007 when the older sister said Slagle, while ferrying her to and from a birthday party, stopped at a park and performed a sex act on her.
The older sister, now 18, had a hazy recollection of the incident and offered differing versions in interviews with police officers, at a preliminary hearing in August and on the witness stand Wednesday. Asked by Slavin why she did not resist, she said, “I respected [Slagle]. I didn’t see it as being wrong at first. I knew the act was wrong, but it didn’t seem like he was doing anything out of anger or anything.”
After that incident, the older sister testified, Slagle drove her to his Atkins home where she was staying for the weekend, and the two had sexual intercourse Sunday morning. Again, the girl said, Slagle “was not threatening” – a necessary element to prove the rape with which he was charged. Under Austin’s questioning, the 18-year-old could not explain why she had no specific recollections of the encounter, which she had graphically described to a Virginia State Police officer in June.
The older sister testified that she entered Slagle’s bedroom to take a shower and laid down on his bed when the two had intercourse, but could not remember how the incident unfolded. She did not explain Wednesday why she chose to shower in the bathroom connected to Slagle’s bedroom when she had walked past another bathroom with a shower on her way.
The younger sister accused Slagle of fondling her breasts on many occasions when she visited his house. But the indictment only charged that he committed aggravated sexual battery in October – effectively restricting the prosecution to proving the elements of that offense.
The younger sister, now 14, said she was watching a movie with Slagle’s wife’s children asleep on the living room floor beside her when he unfastened her bra and “played with” her breasts. The 14-year-old said Slagle stopped when his wife – an emergency medical technician – pulled into the driveway after working a shift.
“I didn’t really understand at all,” the girl testified, explaining why she said nothing for almost two years. “I was really young. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I knew if I told it might cause some big stuff to go on, like now.”
Contradicting the 14-year-old’s recollection, Slagle’s wife, Sherry, testified that she never was scheduled to be on call when she had her children at home; she and her ex-husband have joint custody.
To Slavin, such discrepancies were “irrelevant and inconsequential.”
“Does it really matter if Sherry was on call, or grocery shopping?” Slavin said.
“What reason does she have to make it up? None,” Slavin said. “Is it consistent with human experience? Yes. The important issue is, did it happen? It did happen,” he argued in his closing statement.
After the verdict, Slavin said, “The difficulty in any case of this kind is that sometimes you can’t bring out that proof.” He had previously offered a plea deal to Slagle – the terms of which he would not disclose – but it was rejected.
The parents of the two sisters reacted angrily to the verdict.
“We had other evidence that we wanted checked into, but they never did,” the mother said.
“The commonwealth’s attorney did not do his job,” said the father.
“I’d agree with that,” the mother said.
As often takes place in cases against law enforcement officers in his jurisdiction, Smyth County Commonwealth’s Attorney Roy Evans was excused from prosecuting the case, court papers showed. Evans “advised that he is so situated with respect to the accused as to render it improper in his opinion to act as attorney for the commonwealth,” records said.

dgilbert@bristolnews.com
Dan Kegley, staff, contributed.