RECOVERED HISTORY: THERE ARE NO SIMPLE STORIES IN ARKANSAS

MIKE HUCKABEE IS GETTING A LOT OF flack over his role in freeing Wayne DuMond, a convicted rapist who learned not to worry about killing people as a soldier in VieTnam went on to murder another woman. But nothing in Arkansas is simple and there is a strong bipartisan quality to the abuse of power there.

What is generally not being reported these days is what was done to DuMond in the name of the law. It was so repulsive that it probably affected a number of decisions in the case, including Huckabee's. If there is a moral here it is that one of the evils of wrong-doing by public officials is that it badly undermines the very law and order they are meant to be maintaining.

One other note: Huckabee is only accused of letting a rapist go free. This is a step ahead of one of his well known predecessors who has been accused - without interest on part of either law or press - of committing the act

CRIME LIBRARY - Wayne DuMond, a decorated Vietnam veteran, handyman and father of six, was convicted in August 1985 of the rape of a 17-year-old cheerleader from Forrest City, Arkansas. The girl was the daughter of a prominent Arkansas mortician and a distant cousin of former president Bill Clinton.

On March 7, 1985, while free on bond awaiting trial, DuMond was savagely attacked. Matt Stearns of The Kansas City Star stated in a June 2001 article that two masked men broke into his Forrest City house, "armed with a handgun, a razor blade and fishing wire." They "hogtied him and forced him to perform oral sex on one of them" and then "castrated him with the fishing wire and the razor blade," it was further reported.

DuMond's two sons found him not long after. He had lost an enormous amount of blood and was barely alive when he was rushed to the hospital. However, he managed to survive the attack.

DuMond claimed that the crime was committed out of revenge. Yet if it were, it was not clear if it was revenge for the rape of the teenage cheerleader or for something else. Steve Dunleavy suggested in a 1996 New York Post article that a local crooked sheriff, Coolidge Conlee, who ran an illegal car-theft ring and was later convicted of extortion, racketeering and drug dealing, might have been behind the castration because DuMond threatened to expose him.

Dunleavy said that the two men acted on Conlee's orders. However, the claims have remained unsubstantiated. Interestingly, neither of the men who crudely castrated DuMond was arrested, even though one later confessed to a state police officer, Dunleavy further claimed.

According to a Ward Harkavy article in The Village Voice, not long after the violent castration, Conlee went to DuMond's home, scooped up his testicles from the scene and put them in a fruit jar filled with formaldehyde to preserve them. It was further reported that Conlee then proudly displayed the jar with the testicles in them on his desk with the warning "that's what happens to people who fool around in my county." Conlee later flushed the testicles down the toilet.

DuMond later filed suit in a St. Francis County federal court against Conlee for humiliating him by displaying his testicles, Ward Harkavy reported in The Village Voice. . .

After DuMond physically recovered from his injuries he finally attended his rape trial. Even though DNA evidence recovered from the crime failed to link DuMond to the rape, the victim was able to positively identify him as her attacker. The victim's testimony was enough for the jury who later found him guilty of rape and sentenced him to life plus 20 years in prison.

In 1992, former Lieutenant Governor Jim Guy Tucker [a Democrat] reduced DuMond's sentence to 39 years, which made him eligible for parole, David Lieb said in an AP Online article. In 1996, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee planned to release DuMond from prison based on a lack of sufficient DNA evidence related to the rape investigation. However, he "abandoned his plan" after a public outcry and denied DuMond clemency, Stearns said. In 1999, DuMond was released from prison on parole but his freedom was short-lived.

In January 2004, DuMond was sentenced again to life in prison for the 2000 murder of Carol Sue Shields, 39. Shields was found bound and suffocated "on the bed in the apartment of a man with whom she had been having an affair," Dana Fields said in an AP Online article. DNA evidence, which was found under the victim's nails, linked DuMond to the crime. Aside from the 1985 rape conviction, DuMond had also been previously arrested for sexual assaults in 1972, 1973 and in 1976.

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - The sheriff involved was sent to jail for 160 years for extortion and drug dealing and died there of natural causes.

STEVE DUNLEAVY, NY POST, 2001: Both as governor of Arkansas and president, the one pardon [Clinton] forgot about was Wayne Dumond. In 48 years on this job on six continents, I have never seen or heard of a miscarriage of justice in these United States like the one visited on Wayne Dumond . . . Armed with a semen sample off a pair of jeans worn by the victim and which the state claimed came from Dumond, I went to Atlanta. I presented the sample to Dr. Moses Schanfield, one of the most respected DNA experts in the country. Dr. Schanfield told me: "No way, zip, nada. No way Dumond was the donor of that sperm. Not in a million years." . . .

VILLAGE VOICE - "They were mine. Those were my testicles," DuMond told a sickened courtroom in 1988. "He didn't have no right to take them and he didn't have no right to show them around and he didn't have no right to flush them down the toilet.". . .

The rape victim's daddy, mortician Walter E. "Stevie" Stevens, was part of a Democratic machine that ruled the Arkansas Delta and nurtured Clinton's career.

Wayne DuMond, guilty or innocent, didn't have a chance at justice.

As Clinton was abandoning Arkansas for national politics, he stymied DuMond's release from prison, ignoring the judgment of his own parole board in June 1990 that DuMond's continued incarceration was a "miscarriage of justice.". . .

In late 1991, on the campaign trail, Clinton began to be pestered about the DuMond case. Recusing himself, in April Clinton turned over the matter to his lieutenant governor, Jim Guy Tucker. Unlike Clinton, Tucker read every word of DuMond's voluminous file, a DuMond lawyer told the Voice. Tucker promptly reduced DuMond's sentence, making him eligible for parole. Seven years later Republican governor Mike Huckabee signed DuMond's release papers.

Releasing Wayne DuMond earlier would have been a tough call, but many people were willing to show the decorated Vietnam veteran mercy, despite his admitted bad past—booze, drugs, mayhem. DuMond has told the tale of how he helped slaughter a village of Cambodians. Later, stationed in Oklahoma, he was charged with participating in the claw-hammer murder of a fellow soldier. Turning state's evidence, he insisted that he merely stood by and watched. In Tacoma, Washington, he accosted a teenage girl, an incident that led to five years of probation. . .

In early 1992, when the Gennifer Flowers story broke, Clinton interrupted his presidential campaign to stoke his stance as the one Democrat who would lock up and kill criminals. He flew back to Arkansas from New Hampshire so he could be standing on state soil while the convict was put down. It didn't matter to him that Rector had shot himself in the head immediately after the murder, in effect giving himself a lobotomy that left him without the power of reason. . .

Clinton dismissed a similar last-minute phone appeal from Rector's attorney, Jeff Rosenzweig, a Clinton friend since boyhood. Strapped down, the brain-damaged Rector screamed for 50 minutes while the executioners dug into his arm before finding a vein in which to shoot the poison. . .

Sheriff Coolidge Conlee [was] a notorious gambler, bootlegger, dope dealer, and racketeer. He was so corrupt that, as it was later revealed in court, he even used crooked dice to shoot craps against his own deputies. Even as he threw dice in the sheriff's office, Reel writes, he was busting black-run gambling houses, except the ones that paid off his chief deputy, Sambo Hughes. . .

Wayne DuMond was sitting at home, drunk, when two men broke in, hog-tied him, and made him give one of them a blowjob - "just like you made her do," the perp snarled. Then they castrated him with a knife.

One of them, DuMond later said, chortled, "Mr. C would be proud." They left him to be discovered by his children.

Sheriff Conlee strolled into the DuMond home a few hours later. By his own court testimony, related in Reel's book, Conlee scooped up DuMond's testicles from the evidence scene and put them in a matchbox. He drove home, dumped the balls into a fruit jar, and then sped over to Stevens's funeral home. There, Stevens and funeral home employee Regan Hill were waiting. Hill poured formaldehyde over DuMond's balls. Clinton's cousin Stevens recounted later in a deposition that the sheriff said to him, "Here are DuMond's testicles. Do you want to see them?" Stevens, continuing his testimony, recalled, "Of course, they are looking at me, so that was it.". . .

In 1986, Sheriff Conlee lost a bid for reelection. A couple of years later, he was put on trial for racketeering and other felonies. Several pals turned against him, including deputy Sambo Hughes, who tearfully testified about the routine extortion of black-owned nightclubs. Conlee was convicted and died in prison.