(July 27, 2008)--Members of a Texas defense lawyers group are objecting to a highly unusual search of a defense attorney's office in a murder-for-hire case in which a former Central Texas woman is charged with criminal solicitation of capital murder in the death of her estranged husband.
The Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association says the February search violated attorney-client privilege.
Vera Elizabeth Guthrie-Nail of Carrollton was arrested in January in Carrollton and was charged in the death of her estranged husband, Craig William Nail, 36, who was shot repeatedly the day after Christmas at his home in Frisco.
His girlfriend, Therisa Hofman, 38, was injured, but was able to reach a neighbor’s house, from which a 911 call was placed reporting the shooting.
Guthrie-Nail grew up in the Waco area and graduated from China Spring High School in 1984.
The attorney whose office was searched represents a man accused of being the contract killer.
Collin County prosecutors, who are seeking the death penalty, believed defense attorneys were hiding incriminating evidence.
Prosecutors thought they would find boots Mark Lyle Bell wore on the night of the alleged killing, but they didn't.
The search did turn up a sealed box, documents and handwritten letters from Bell to his wife.
A hearing is scheduled Aug. 5 to determine whether state District Judge Mark Rusch, who signed the search warrant, can stay on the case.
Bell's lawyers want him off the case.
Rusch declined to comment.
The Texas Attorney General's Office said Rusch should be able to stay on the case and should not have to testify at the hearing.
Southern Methodist University law professor Linda Eads says lawyers can be subject to search warrants, but she says it's considered an extreme and rare measure to execute one against an attorney.
No trial date has been set in Bell's capital murder case.
He is accused of shooting Nail to death.
He, Guthrie-Nail, and another man, Thomas Edward Grace, who’s also charged with conspiracy to commit capital murder, remain in the Collin County Jail.
In January, Frisco police detectives searched the home of Guthrie-Nail’s mother and an adjacent mobile home on Old China Spring Road.
They recovered a .22 caliber weapon, boxes of .22 caliber ammunition, a .22 caliber handgun magazine, a cell phone, cell phone bills, marijuana and a methamphetamine kit.
According to the affidavit filed in support of the warrant, a Frisco police detective interviewed a longtime friend of Guthrie-Nail’s who said she visited with Guthrie-Nail after the shootings and said Guthrie-Nail told her “that she did not hire anyone to kill Craig, nor did she ask anyone to kill Craig, she did however know it was going to happen,” the affidavit says.
The woman said Guthrie-Nail told her that the killer was someone in California who had been contacted by a member of Bikers Against Child Abuse, to which Guthrie-Nail also belonged.
She said that person, who was not identified, watched her estranged husband’s home for four months and intended to make the attack look like a murder-suicide.
Craig Nail’s 16-year-old daughter was also supposed to have been killed, the affidavit says.
Guthrie-Nail told the woman “she does not know who the killer is, but she saw him on one occasion, but never met him,” the affidavit says.
The affidavit indicates Guthrie-Nail did communicate with the killer on an older pay-as-you-go cell phone that had belonged to her mother and that she had told her mother to destroy the phone if police ever showed up at the house.
Before the woman left, she said Guthrie-Nail gave her a bag of documents and two .22 caliber rounds “from the same box of ammunition used to kill Craig,” the affidavit says.
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