The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided
“The Shooter at Midnight offers a deep look into the criminal justice system, with all its warts, and reveals that the system is only as good as the people who operate within it.”
True crime books tend to break down into four categories or a combination of those four: whodunit; he/she done it; someone else done it; or miscarriage of justice. Sean Patrick Cooper’s The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided dabbles in all four worlds at once, though with its heaviest emphasis on the last.
Miscarriages of justice usually involve wrongful convictions, as Cooper suggests, convincingly, was the case here. But even if the wrongly convicted is ultimately freed, a miscarriage has still occurred no matter how brief the incarceration might have been. And the miscarriage is compounded so long as the actual guilty party has never been brought to justice. It is axiomatic that, for every wrongful conviction, someone else got away with the crime. Without that final, just conviction, there is no fairy tale happy ending.
Fortunately, a dogged journalist and an equally dedicated lawyer named Bob Ramsey, a champion for the underdog, found at least a measure of justice in helping ensure that the wrongfully convicted was released in this case. But beyond that, things are out of their control and back in the hands of prosecutors.
Author Cooper takes the reader back more than 30 years to a dark night in November of 1990, when a gunman entered the home of Lyndel and Cathy Robertson in Chillicothe, Missouri, and fired six shots from a .22-caliber weapon into the sleeping couple. Four struck Lyndel, serious but not fatal. But two struck Cathy, in the skull and the chest, with deadly results.
Authorities, spearheaded by sheriff’s deputy Gary Calvert, quickly focused their attention on 16-year-old Mark Woodworth, a neighbor of the Robertsons. This, even though Lyndel Robertson, speaking from his hospital bed, said that he was “almost 100% sure” the gunman had been Brandon Thomure, a hotheaded town bully and former boyfriend of Lyndel’s daughter Rochelle. Thomure had even once threatened to slit Cathy’s throat for trying to keep him away from her daughter. Could it be that he had actually acted on the threat, but simply with a different weapon?
However, Brandon had an alibi, albeit a changing one—which might seem to be a red flag—and investigators found Mark’s fingerprints on a box of bullets for a Ruger pistol of the same caliber as the murder weapon. Ignoring leads associated with Brandon, Deputy Calvert single-mindedly pursued Mark, who did himself no favors with his insolent attitude. When confronted during a polygraph exam that he could face the death penalty, Mark responded, “We all have to die sometime.”
To pin the murder on Mark, though, the prosecution needed a motive. Apparently it didn’t matter if it wasn’t particularly believable as they floated three equally implausible, evidence-less theories: (1) Mark knew of bad blood between his father and Lyndel Robertson, Cathy’s husband, and so, desperate for his father’s approval, he killed an innocent woman. (2) Mark had sexual fantasies about Cathy and jealously killed her for having sex with her husband. (3) Mark experienced unbridled anger at his own parents so he picked out a “substitute family” as the target of his ire.
The murder shook the town of Chillicothe, creating deep divisions as residents chose sides: Robertsons or Woodworths? Mark’s criminal conviction seemed to vindicate the Robertson side, but the conviction was reversed. Score one for the Woodworths. Then he was convicted again on retrial of the case with a surprising result: a harsher sentence.
After attorney Bob Ramsey got involved, the conviction was set aside again, nearly 25 years after the murder. But with Mark set to face a third trial in 2014, the prosecution’s case imploded for all the reasons that had resulted in two prior reversals, plus a few other matters for good measure. “The wrong person was charged in the first place,” the newly-appointed special prosecutor announced in dropping all charges.
Mark was finally freed, and the investigation of the murder was reopened, with a different target this time: Rochelle Robertson’s ex-boyfriend, Brandon Thomure. The book concludes without any definitive statement as to the outcome of the investigation. Author Cooper sought to interview Thomure, who declined to speak with him. “In Chillicothe, the shooting remains a tense, unresolved issue.” Justice delayed is justice denied?
The Shooter at Midnight offers a deep look into the criminal justice system, with all its warts, and reveals that the system is only as good as the people who operate within it. But sometimes even good people take wrong turns. And the story even offers a lesson that might come as a shock to many: a successful appeal that results in a new trial just might end in a second conviction with an even harsher sentence. It might make one wonder whether to simply play the hand they’ve drawn rather than risk the unknown.
There are heroes and villains in the criminal justice system, and plenty of victims, who include not only the family of the murdered woman but also the family of the wrongfully convicted. There are no winners in stories like this, no happy endings. Just frustration and anguish.