Surging Huckabee forced to defend role in release of rapist

Pastor Jay Cole had two close friends. One was an inmate in the Arkansas State Penitentiary. There, the minister would sit with Wayne DuMond "and pray and read the Bible." For a while, the prisoner's new wife lived in Cole's home.

Cole's friendship with Mike Huckabee ran deeper, back to when the surging Republican presidential candidate headed the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. The two produced Bible lessons on videotape. "We worked heavily with him when he got politically involved, too," Cole said.

A little more than 10 years ago, the paths of these three men merged at the state capitol in Little Rock, where Huckabee was the new governor. With Cole's urging, and with DuMond insisting he was "born again," Huckabee played a key role in setting free a rapist who was supposed to serve many more years, say three members of the state board that paroled DuMond.

After his release, DuMond moved to Missouri, where he suffocated his wife, a mother of three, in a Kansas City suburb. Police suspect he killed another woman there, as well.

How a convicted rapist went free has become an issue in today's presidential campaign. Polls show Huckabee with a formidable lead in Iowa, site of the nation's first nominating contest, Jan. 3. A Newsweek survey released Friday showed he appears to hold a clear lead over Mitt Romney among likely caucus-goers, 39 percent to 17 percent, a rise fueled by evangelical Christians.

Huckabee's surge has drawn a spotlight to his record in Arkansas. Amid the new attention, he is facing questions about whether his Christian faith colored his view of DuMond's case.

Campaigning in South Carolina on Saturday, Huckabee brushed aside a question about the case but said he was expecting attacks from rivals.

"Over the next few weeks, I'm sure you're going to see a whole lot of things," he said at a Columbia restaurant. "Already some of the other campaigns are getting desperate. They never imagined they'd have to contend with me."

Huckabee last week said he had "considered" — but rejected — using his powers as governor to commute DuMond's sentence and release him for time served. The parole board acted before he had to make a final call. The board, Huckabee said, unlocked the cell door.

"It was a horrible situation, horrible. I feel awful about it in every way," the candidate said at a news conference. "I wish there was some way I could go back and reverse the clock and put him back in prison."

While Huckabee acknowledged discussing the case with the parole board, he said that conversation was "simply part of a broader discussion" initiated by the board chairman.

Three board members recalled it differently. They said Huckabee raised the issue of DuMond's release, asking to discuss the matter in a closed session. They said his religious beliefs, and the influence of the evangelical community from which he sprung, drove him.

"We felt pressured by him," board member Ermer Pondexter said. "I felt compelled to do it." Looking back, she added, "I regret it."

Another board member, Deborah Springer Suttlar, said Huckabee did not mince his feelings about DuMond. "He wanted him out," she said.

The parole board voted to free DuMond just before the deadline by which Huckabee would have had to decide what assistance, if any, he would grant to an inmate whom he had said he wanted to help.

"He thought DuMond just grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, that he may have gotten a raw deal and a longer sentence than others under similar circumstances," said board member Charles Chastain, who said he was the lone dissenter in a 4-1 committee vote to grant parole, with two abstentions.

All seven members of the board had been appointed by Democrats. The chairman refused to comment; one member could not be reached, and one said he did not remember details of the case. A seventh member is deceased.

"The governor felt compassion for Wayne," said Cole, the minister who befriended DuMond. "He was sorry for him. So I asked the governor to help. I asked him if anything could be done. And Mike had a lot of people on his neck trying to get him to get Wayne released."

"Many of them," Cole added, "were in the Christian community."

Victim related to Clinton

The story opens in 1984, when a 17-year-old cheerleader was kidnapped in Forrest City, Ark. She was driven to a field and raped. A knife was used to cut off her bra.

Police arrested DuMond, a skinny Vietnam veteran, handyman and father of six. He had been suspected in a prior rape in Texas and as an accomplice to a homicide in Oklahoma. Those cases never stuck.

The Forrest City case drew public attention, because the cheerleader was known to be a distant cousin of then-Gov. Bill Clinton. As the suspect remained free on bail awaiting trial, police were summoned to his home, where a bleeding DuMond told them several men had castrated him. Some authorities theorized that he castrated himself in a ploy for mercy and to claim he no longer would be a threat to women.

For a while the local sheriff kept DuMond's testicles in a fruit jar on his desk, with a sign: "This is what happens to men who go bad in my county." DuMond sued and was awarded $110,000. The sheriff went to prison in an unrelated extortion case and died there.

DuMond was sentenced to life in prison for rape, plus 20 years for kidnapping. In prison, he said he found religion.

"I became his spiritual director," Cole said. "He was a nice fella, and it was hard to believe he could have done what he was accused of doing."

Clinton was elected president in 1992, and Lt. Gov. Jim Guy Tucker became governor. Tucker evaluated the DuMond case and, believing the castration plus life made for an unusually harsh punishment, reduced the sentence to 39 years, six months; DuMond was now parole eligible.

Huckabee became governor in 1996, after Tucker was convicted of fraud in the Whitewater investigation.

Cole, meanwhile, was working to win DuMond's release. Cole said he talked to "probably a hundred people," turning foremost to the evangelical community. He said many evangelicals were encouraged that DuMond had claimed a religious conversion, and that many wrote to Huckabee.

Huckabee said the case was "on my desk" when he became governor. He announced he was considering a commutation. He later acknowledged writing a letter to the prisoner.

"Dear Wayne. ... My desire is that you be released from prison," he wrote. "I feel now that parole is the best way."

The rape victim, Ashley Stevens, was enraged. She and prosecutor Fletcher Long met with Huckabee. They warned that DuMond would strike again.

At one point, Stevens recalled, she stood up, put her face next to Huckabee's and told the governor: "This is how close I was to DuMond. I'll never forget his face, and you'll never forget mine."

Long, a Republican, could tell the governor was unmoved. "Most of what I think about him would be unprintable," Long said.

The prosecutor added that Huckabee and evangelicals were conned by DuMond's contention that he had been "saved," a common ruse by prisoners. "If you're religiously converted," Long said, "how do you go out and kill two women in Missouri?"

Before DuMond could be paroled, he had to find a state that would take him, a process that took years. A new wife he had met while in prison was from Missouri. So, after serving 14 years, DuMond relocated to the Kansas City area in 1999.

Less than a year later, Carol Shields was suffocated in a friend's apartment. DNA scrapings under her fingernails led to DuMond. Another woman, Sara Andrasek, was killed in much the same way.

DuMond in January 2004 was sentenced to life without parole for killing Shields. He wasn't charged in the second slaying. He died of cancer in 2005. He was 55.

Huckabee's comments Saturday were reported by The New York Times.