Citing the long delay in bringing criminal charges, a South Carolina judge on Friday dismissed murder counts that were filed earlier this year against a father and stepmother accused of killing the father’s 5-year-old son in 1989.
The judge, Roger M. Young Sr. of the Ninth Judicial Circuit, wrote that the 35-year delay had caused “substantial actual prejudice to both defendants, infringing upon their right to a fair trial.”
More than 20 witnesses who could have testified in 1989 were no longer able to so do because they were either dead or in poor health, the judge wrote. As a result, he said, lawyers for the father, Victor Lee Turner, 70, and his wife, Megan Renee Turner, 63, would have been unable to question them.
After the boy, Justin Lee Turner, was reported missing on the afternoon of March 3, 1989, the Turners initially told the authorities that he had gotten on a school bus and never returned.
Two days later, as a local news station, WCBD-TV of Charleston, S.C., was recording, Mr. Turner appeared to discover the boy’s body in a camper trailer on the family’s property. “My son’s in there,” he said quietly.
Investigators believed in 1989 that Ms. Turner had strangled Justin with a dog leash that was recovered in the kitchen of the family’s home, Judge Young wrote. She was indicted on a murder charge in February 1990, but prosecutors dropped it later that year.