Trial begins in 2001 rape, murder

Attorneys gave their opening statements Wednesday in the first-degree murder trial of a man Spokane police identified through a DNA test.

Raymond L. Nelson III, 26, appeared before Superior Court Judge Harold Clarke in a case expected to last into next week.

Nelson and another suspect, Theodore F. Stewart, 25, are charged with killing 41-year-old Diana Dee Wideman, who was found slashed, bludgeoned and raped March 25, 2001, in an apartment at 123 N. Bernard St.

Deputy Prosecutor Larry Steinmetz told the eight-woman, four-man jury that the coroner determined “Wideman had a number of stab wounds to the top of her head. Her throat was cut. Her nose was broken and her lip was cut.”

Now-retired detectives Richard Losh and George Benavidez processed the crime scene more than four years ago, Steinmetz said, and they found hand-rolled cigarette butts and ashes on top of blood, indicating someone had been inside the apartment after the killing.

A couple of weeks after Wideman was discovered under a pile of clothes and a mattress, Losh interviewed Stewart several times. He had been living in the same apartment complex where Wideman was killed.

According to court records, Stewart admitted going inside Wideman’s apartment and using the dead woman’s tobacco to roll some cigarettes, which he smoked. Crime lab technicians later tested those butts for DNA and found matches to both Wideman and Stewart, according to the records.

From the victim’s body detectives took semen samples, which tested negative for Stewart’s DNA.

In June 2004, Washington State Patrol forensic scientist Lisa Turpen checked the semen DNA against the state database of convicted felons. That’s when the sample hit on Nelson, who had been convicted of a felony after the database had been checked the previous year, Spokane police Sgt. Joe Peterson said.

Once they had a match, Detectives Minde Connelly and Brian Hamond interviewed Nelson at the state prison on McNeil Island on June 14.

Nelson told the detectives he went to Stewart’s apartment and used heroin while Stewart drank. Each took a pair of cloth gloves and Stewart took his backpack to Wideman’s apartment, records show.

“After they entered the apartment, Theodore Stewart took out a bar he had in his backpack,” Connelly’s report states. He used the bar to hit Wideman “on the head and upper body. Raymond Nelson admitted that he hit Diana Wideman, too.”

Nelson said he carried a knife with a 12-inch blade, but the records don’t say whether police believe that knife was used against Wideman.

“Raymond Nelson admitted he had sex with Diana Wideman,” Connelly wrote, adding that both men smoked in the apartment afterward.

“Stewart contacted Raymond Nelson on a later date and said he had gone back to Diana Wideman’s apartment to make sure everything was all right. Nelson clarified that meant to be sure no evidence was left behind,” Connelly wrote.

Deputy Public Defender Tom Krzyminski told the jury that “until June 2004, not one of these detectives, police officers or forensic scientists will give you the name of Raymond Nelson. Not one. Again, evidence will show that no one can put Mr. Nelson and Mr. Stewart together in the apartment.”

“When I address you again,” he told the jury, “I’m going to ask you to find Mr. Nelson not guilty.”