Verdict: Guilty; Harvey Sentenced To Life

August 04, 2005

HUNTSVILLE — Charles Ray Harvey will spend life in prison after being convicted of first degree murder in the 2003 execution-style shooting death of Armando G. Loredo.

Loredo, age 27 at the time of his death, was married to Harvey’s daughter, Vanessa Loredo, who has pled guilty for her role in her husband’s July 9, 2003, death. Loredo’s body was found by fishermen, weighted down with rocks and cinderblocks and submerged in New River, 10 days later.

Following closing arguments by attorneys from both sides on Wednesday afternoon, the jury deliberated for just two hours and 45 minutes before finding Harvey guilty of first degree murder. Subsequently, Criminal Court Judge E. Shayne Sexton sentenced Harvey to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

In the end, the jury may not have been certain that it was actually Harvey who pulled the trigger on that July morning. After more than two hours of deliberating, the jury — which was made up of nine women and three men — returned a question to Judge Sexton asking whether they had to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt that Harvey pulled the trigger in order to find him guilty of first degree murder. Earlier, during closing arguments, Assistant District Attorney Sarah Davis had told the jury that they did not have to find that Harvey fired the fatal shot in order to convict him of murder in the first degree.

The defense had attempted to cast doubt on who had actually fired the shot from Harvey’s Beretta 9mm handgun. In Wednesday’s testimony, the defense team put both Harvey and Vanessa Loredo on the stand, with each giving a different account of Armando Loredo’s death. Vanessa Loredo gave testimony that corroborated statements given by state witness Donna Gail LaBoy, Harvey’s live-in girlfriend at the time the crime occurred. In her sometimes-tearful account of the events of July 8 and July 9, 2003, Loredo told the jury that she and her husband were skipping rocks on the river’s edge when her father, who she said was standing directly behind Armando Loredo and handing him rocks to skip, shot him in the back of the head.

Harvey, meanwhile, told the jury that he was in the woods when he heard his daughter screaming for help. He said she ran back to the river bank to find Armando Loredo pinning his daughter to the ground. He and Loredo began to fight, he said, and Vanessa Loredo shot Armando after her husband had her father trapped on the ground.

Harvey’s argument was that he did not know that his daughter intended to kill Armando Loredo, which would have cleared him of criminal wrongdoing except for after-the-fact. Vanessa Loredo, however, said that her father had planned to kill her husband after she called him from the couple’s Indiana home and told him that she was “tired” of the physical abuse she says she received from her husband.

In attempting to make its case, the defense team focused on two key points: That Armando Loredo was an abusive husband, and that LaBoy’s testimony could not be trusted, leaving a “he said, she said” account of Loredo’s death for the jury to choose from.

In closing arguments, however, Davis said that whether Armando Loredo was an abusive husband wasn’t the point.

“Human life is precious,” she told the jury. “Whether you’re rich or poor . . . Whether you’re white or Mexican, life is precious. Whether you’re an American citizen or an illegal alien, life is precious. Even when you don’t act precious, your life is precious.

“For making bad decisions, does that mean he deserved to be executed in the back of the head on New River?” Davis asked the jury. “Did he deserve to be lured by two people who pretended to care about him? Did he deserve to have his body dumped in the river where the fish could feed upon him?”

Davis told the jury that they were “not required to find that Charles Harvey pulled the trigger, although there’s evidence that certainly says he did.” She added that killing Armando Loredo “took a team effort. Charles Harvey was no minor part. In fact, it was him who was making the calls.”

Davis concluded that “Charles Harvey has had so many stories that it’s hard to keep up with them. If it was self-defense, why didn’t they say it before hand and we wouldn’t be here today?”

Defense attorney Ed Holt attempted to plan several seeds of doubts in the minds of the jury, focusing on several points that he said “can’t be explained away.” The devil, he told the jury, is in the details.

One point Holt focused on was the gun, which was recovered near a well house in Harvey’s back yard after a tip from LaBoy led Detectives Robby Carson and Wade Chambers to the location. Holt said that Detective Carson’s earlier testimony that he and Chambers didn’t find any sign of the ground being disturbed until Chambers picked up an entire clod of dirt and grass by chance had to mean that it was LaBoy, not Harvey, who had hidden the gun. If Harvey had buried the gun a full week earlier, before he went to jail, Holt said, the grass would have already been dead because it was cut off from the roots — a point later refuted by the state.

Holt told the jury that there are only two people that know what happened the night Armando Loredo was killed. From the time Vanessa Loredo first contacted Charles Harvey by telephone until the fatal shot rang out and Armando Loredo went down, he said, is all that matters. As for what happened when the shot was fired, Holt said, there’s a “he did it, she did it, and one that is sitting in the background saying ‘he told me he did it.’”

But in an effective closing argument by Deputy District Attorney John Galloway, the jury was told that Harvey “is trying to tell you that he was manipulated by these two ‘evil’ women, his daughter and his girlfriend. In truth, he was trying to manipulate them. Then, he tried to manipulate his sisters to send him money to kill them when his manipulation didn’t work. And now he’s in court trying to manipulate you all.

“Throughout this entire proceeding, Mr. Harvey’s imagination has run wild,” Galloway added. “He’s told multiple stories, ranging from ‘I don’t know Armando Loredo,’ to — in court today for the first time — ‘Vanessa killed him in self-defense.’”

Galloway told the jury that the case was a situation “where it is first degree murder or it is nothing.” He urged them to mark the verdict form guilty of first degree murder, and made a reference to earlier testimony regarding letters sent from Harvey in prison to LaBoy, in which he wanted her to use codes instead of writing what she meant.

“Mark the (verdict form for first degree murder) guilty,” Galloway told the jury. “Use Mr. Harvey’s code . . . put a big 10-4 on it.”

The jury retired for deliberations at 3:45 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, needing less than three hours to return a verdict. At 5:30 p.m., the jury informed the court that it had a question. Twenty minutes later, that question was delivered to Judge Sexton in written form by court bailiff Buck Gunter. After consulting with counsel from both sides in his chambers, Judge Sexton had the jury brought into the courtroom and read aloud the question, which asked whether the jury was required to be absolutely certain that the defendant fired the fatal shot in order to render a verdict of first degree murder.

Rather than give a yes or no answer, Judge Sexton read to the jury a portion of the law partaining to first degree murder verdicts, which in effect answered that the jury did not, in fact, have to be certain that Harvey pulled the trigger, the same sentiment that Davis had expressed in her closing argument for the state.

The jury retired again for deliberations at 6:10 p.m. Given the nature of the question, it appeared that a verdict would be returned in short order. Twenty minutes later, the jury informed Judge Sexton that it had reached a verdict. At 6:33 p.m., the jury foreman read the verdict aloud to the court.

Harvey showed no visible reaction as the verdict was read. Likewise, there was no visible reaction from inside the courtroom, where members of both Armando Loredo’s and Charles Harvey’s families had gathered throughout the proceedings.

Attorney John Mitchell told Judge Sexton that the defense intends to seek a new trial. The matter was placed on the criminal court docket for the first day of the next term, November 14.

The above represents only a portion of this week's coverage of the Harvey murder trial. For the complete story, see this week's edition of the Independent Herald.

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