State to retry man for murder

IDAHO FALLS – The state attorney general’s office says a man convicted in the 1983 slaying of a 15-year-old girl, but set free on bond after a judge found problems with the original prosecution, should be retried.

Rauland J. Grube was convicted of first-degree murder in 7th District Court and sentenced to life in prison in 1991 in the slaying of Amy Hossner.

In June 1983, the girl was found dead in her bed from a shotgun blast fired through the window of her basement bedroom in Ashton in eastern Idaho.

In 2006, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ordered that Grube be released or get a new trial after Winmill determined investigators had withheld a key witness at trial and that police logs had been tampered with.

The attorney general’s office appealed the order for a new trial, but was rebuked earlier this week by another federal judge.

Alex Kozinsky, who serves on a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said Grube would likely be acquitted if he were tried again.

Kozinsky also said that Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden might instead consider prosecuting the people who handed in tainted evidence.

Wasden’s office disagreed.

“We have carefully reviewed the entire case and determined the proper course of action is to retry Rauland Grube,” Bob Cooper, Wasden’s spokesman, told the Post Register on Thursday.

Grube has been free on $250,000 bond and has lived in eastern Idaho since spring 2006.

“Now that the case has been remanded back, my client is entitled to the presumption of innocence that every citizen enjoys,” said Grube’s attorney, Greg Moeller of Rexburg.

In 1991, prosecutors focused on forensic analysis of lead shotgun pellets in Hossner’s body that were compared with pellets in shells found in Grube’s garage.

Prosecutors also said a mark on a shotgun barrel was made when it hit the window frame of Hossner’s bedroom after being fired. Winmill said the ballistic evidence has since been disavowed by the FBI.

Grube’s appeal focused in part on evidence that a key witness had not been disclosed to defense lawyers. In 1994, Lynn Gifford approached defense lawyers and told them he had informed investigators in 1991 that he had reported seeing a local police officer – an early suspect in the crime – driving a patrol car within a few blocks of the Hossner home about 2:30 a.m. on the night of the slaying.

None of what Gifford told defense lawyers had been disclosed by prosecutors, so Grube filed a request for a new trial because of that alleged denial of due process and because Gifford’s information led to the discovery that Ashton police logs for the night of the slaying appeared to have been altered.

According to Winmill’s 2006 ruling concerning the police logs, “police officers actually manufactured false evidence and submitted it to Grube’s attorneys as true evidence.”