Convicted last month of killing an Elkton woman, Charles Eugene Burns lost his bid for a new trial Tuesday.
Public Defender Lloyd Merriam argued that his client deserved to be retried because the jury might have been influenced by media attention before and during the April trial, where Burns was found guilty of murdering Lillian Abramowicz Phelps and leaving her body by the side of a secluded lane outside Havre de Grace last summer.
“All those articles started out with the phrase ?alleged serial murderer Charles Burns,? ” Merriam said. “The result was to create in jurors a fear of being under public scrutiny, the fear of being the next O.J. Simpson jury facing public criticism.”
Burns was originally arrested and charged with taking a total of six women, on separate occasions, to isolated places and assaulting them. But investigators soon began to suspect that he might be connected to the deaths of four women ? including Phelps ? whose bodies were found in isolated areas of the county during a three-month period.
No charges have been filed in the three other cases, pending the conclusion of autopsies and forensic analysis of the bodies.
While news reports mentioned the assaults and other bodies, the jury was only allowed to hear about Phelps? case during the trial.
During pretrial motions, it was revealed that blood belonging to Phelps and another one of the dead women had been found beneath Burns? car. However, police reports presented to the jury were edited to avoid the other evidence.
Merriam pointed to something Burns? adoptive mother had overheard during a lunch break in the midst of the trial, when she said one of the alternate jurors told another person, “I?m on a high-profile murder case.”
Assistant State?s Attorney Lisa Marts said that the court did everything necessary, including the elimination of some potential jurors during jury selection and daily jury instructions from Judge Stephen Waldron to avoid newspapers and TV news.
