The Two Vendettas

Far too often, prosecutors and investigators can be motivated by personal factors completely unrelated to the offense that goes to trial. In 1999, La Porte County prosecuting attorney Robert Beckman dropped the charges against Ray McCarty in the killing of his sister-in-law Rayna Rison. Although McCarty’s indictment came after a grand jury heard from 70 witnesses, Beckman said he still didn’t have enough evidence to win a conviction in a murder trial. In SUBMERGED, I clear up the mysteries surrounding Rayna’s cause of death and how it was tied to McCarty. I also reveal his accomplice for the first time. Even without these revelations, a prosecutor would have had enough evidence to convict Ray, including eyewitness testimony, his failure to provide a verifiable alibi, and friends who reported his motive for killing her. There was one big problem with McCarty’s indictment. It was a hallmark in the tenure of Cynthia Hedge, Beckman’s predecessor as Prosecuting Attorney. She had fired him, and he had been vocal about how much that affected his family’s welfare. His race against her was characterized as a vindictive grudge match. When the newly elected prosecuting attorney dropped the charges against McCarty, he never checked first with the detectives or prosecutors who had spent years on his investigation. A second vendetta involved Brett Airy, the detective who ran the City of La Porte’s investigation of Jason Tibbs. Early in his career, he tried to nail Tibbs with a preposterous charge for stealing barrels of nickel from the foundry where he worked. Although he succeeded in getting Jason fired, the young detective could not get the evidence to pass muster with a judge, and the case was dismissed. Airy then volunteered to lead the charge against Jason, ignoring all the evidence gathered against McCarty and cherry-picking anything that could incriminate Tibbs. When one witness verified Jason’s alibi, Airy reported she told him she would lie for Jason. During his trial, the witness, who had not remained friends with Tibbs or showed any affection for him, denied she ever said anything about lying for him.