EVERETT — A birthday slumber party brought Molly Conley to Lake Stevens.
She had just turned 15. There was a cake, silliness and plans to watch a “Harry Potter” movie. She and her friends decided to make a late night trek to the lake. Molly never made it back.
Her dad on Thursday clutched a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” as he listened to lawyers give closing statements. The Harper Lee novel was one of his daughter’s favorites. Molly’s mom later made her way to the front of the packed courtroom to hug Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Ed Stemler and thank him.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Wynne instructed the jury to return to the courthouse on Friday to begin deliberations in the murder trial of the man accused of shooting Molly as she walked along a dark road in Lake Stevens on June 1, 2013.
Prosecutors say that hours after Erick Walker clocked off at Boeing he went on a random shooting spree. They say he crossed paths with Molly as she and her friends walked back from the lake.
Walker is charged with first-degree murder. Prosecutors allege that he showed “extreme indifference to human life” by firing his two Ruger Blackhawk pistols as he drove around Snohomish County. He also is charged with multiple counts of first-degree assault and drive-by shooting. Several houses and vehicles were struck by bullets and prosecutors allege that Walker, 28, specifically shot at homes that appeared occupied.
“For three hours a destructive force indiscriminately blew through Lake Stevens and Marysville,” Stemler said.
There was no reason to target Molly and no reason to fire at the houses and cars that were hit, he said.
“Somebody just wanted to hurt someone that night. It was the defendant. He wanted to hurt people, kill people,” Stemler said.
During the three-week trial, 76 witnesses testified and jurors saw more than 400 exhibits. All of it is enough to prove that Walker is responsible for the destruction, the deputy prosecutor said.
Jurors heard from a firearms expert who concluded that the bullets recovered from houses and cars matched two guns Walker owned. The broken headlight pieces found outside the Marysville shooting scene fit the damaged headlight Walker’s father turned over to detectives, Stemler said.
Walker’s Pontiac G6 is consistent with the vehicle captured on a home surveillance camera a few blocks from where Molly was shot. He told detectives he had been driving around Lake Stevens that night.
Stemler reminded jurors that Snohomish County sheriff’s detective Brad Pince questioned Walker about whether anyone else had driven his car or had access to his guns.
He would have been the only one, Walker admitted.
Everett defense attorney Mark Mestel later urged jurors to be critical of the investigation and the prosecution’s case.
The evidence doesn’t add up as much as they think it does, he said. There are too many holes and detectives made too many leaps to prove that Walker was behind the gunfire, Mestel said. The cops were under pressure to solve a high-profile murder and once they honed in on his client, their investigation didn’t go any further. They ignored any other possibilities and prosecutors didn’t give jurors a complete picture of what happened, Mestel said.
“The state’s case is riddled with reasonable doubt,” he said.
There is nothing that directly ties his client to Molly’s death. Detectives searched for hundreds of hours for the bullet that killed her because they knew it would be crucial in proving who fired the fatal shot. It was never found.
“If they can’t show us that, they really have no case,” Mestel said.
They ignored a witness who reported hearing gunfire in her Lake Stevens neighborhood and saw a blue SUV speed away, Mestel said. They downplayed the witness who said he saw a light-colored car hit the vehicle at the Marysville shooting scene. They didn’t prove that it was even possible to hit a second-story window from a car outside the house, as they claim Walker managed.
If the facts didn’t fit their case, they left them out, Mestel said.
The defense attorney asked jurors to question the testimony from Brian Smelser, the firearms expert from the State Patrol crime lab. He didn’t produce pictures that showed how the bullets recovered at the crime scenes matched the test bullets fired from Walker’s gun.
He couldn’t quantify or qualify how he judges whether a bullet is a match for a gun, Mestel said.
“If you have reasonable doubt about the ballistics, then the state’s case fails,” he said.
Evidence and common sense shows Walker was the man responsible for the “hurricane of bullets,” deputy prosecutor Edirin Okoloko told jurors before they headed off behind closed doors.
He urged the jury to look hard at the claim that police rushed to judgement. Who came up with the plan to set up Walker and when? What do you make of time-stamped police photographs of that evidence being gathered from the street long before the defendant became a suspect? And if police were going to plant evidence, why not produce a bullet fired from one of Walker’s weapons and claim it was the one that ended Molly’s life?
He encouraged jurors to heed what the judge had said about the importance of circumstantial evidence and the jury’s ability to reach inferences based on common sense and experience.
At each of the scenes in Lake Stevens and Marysville, detectives were able to demonstrate that somebody had fired a single shot and left the area, apparently without dropping any shell casings. In the days after the gunfire, Walker showed an intense interest in the case, talking with others about what may have happened and searching for news on his phone.
Science ultimately linked eight bullets recovered after the shootings to two revolvers owned by Walker.
Molly died that night, the prosecutor said, but the risk was there for everyone who encountered Walker as he created “a path of destruction, indiscriminate in its victims.”
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463, hefley@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @dianahefley.
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