35 years after serial killer’s trial, a witness accuses the prosecutor of rape

On the evening of Aug. 20, 1980, four youths went running in Liberty Park, a grassy expanse at the heart of Salt Lake City. After a while, 15-year-old Terry Elrod and her close friend Karma Ingersoll fell behind their two older male friends, Ted Fields and David Martin. That’s when the two boys jumped out from some bushes to scare the girls.

It was around 10:15 p.m. by the time the four friends left the park. Gunshots suddenly cracked over the quiet park.

Martin stumbled on one leg and fell. As Fields tried to help his friend, he, too, was shot.

Both men died.

Elrod was struck in the arm by shrapnel but survived. A year later, she took the stand to testify against the man responsible for the double slayings: Joseph Paul Franklin.

Franklin was a white supremacist who had terrified the nation with a string of bombings and sniper shootings. He would eventually admit to more than 20 murders, mostly of African-Americans like Martin and Fields. He would also admit to shooting and wounding Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan Jr.

On the stand in September 1981, Elrod was questioned by a prosecutor named Richard Warren Roberts. As an up-and-coming civil rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Roberts was one of two attorneys in charge of the federal case against Franklin.

Thanks in part to Elrod’s emotional testimony, Franklin was convicted.

Thirty-two years later, on Nov. 20, 2013, Franklin was executed in Missouri for another murder. Hours later, Roberts allegedly emailed his former witness regarding the execution.

Since the trial in 1981, Roberts had risen through the legal system to become chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Terry Elrod, now named Terry Mitchell, had overcome a turbulent life to become an artist.

Instead of comforting her, however, Roberts’s 2013 mail did just the opposite.

It reminded her of an alleged crime — just not the serial killer’s.

In a stunning lawsuit filed Wednesday in a Utah federal court, Mitchell claims that Roberts repeatedly raped her during the trial 35 years ago.

The lawsuit, first reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, alleges that the then 27-year-old attorney raped and abused his then 16-year-old witness before and during the two-week trial.

“Roberts exploited the psychological and emotional vulnerabilities of 16-year-old Mitchell who, as defendant Roberts well knew, had experienced a lifetime of sexual abuse, grooming, violence, and rape, including a violent, four-hour-long rape just six months earlier, the murder of her two friends as they walked beside her just five months earlier, and tremendous trauma and physical and emotional isolation,” according to the lawsuit.

Roberts also allegedly threatened her not to tell anyone because it could undo the case against Franklin, the white supremacist serial killer.

“Roberts maintained the secrecy of his abuse by using intimidation, deception, artifice, and the coercive, victim-blaming threat to Mitchell that if anyone discovered defendant Roberts was engaging in sex acts with Mitchell then a mistrial in the Franklin case would occur,” the complaint says.

Roberts’ attorneys call the allegations “categorically false” and say he intends to “vigorously challenge” the allegations in court.

His lawyers did say, however, that the judge had an intimate, consensual relationship with Mitchell.

On Wednesday evening, hours after the complaint was filed, Roberts retired as chief judge of the District of Columbia’s federal court.

Roberts cited unspecified health issues that he said prevented him from continuing to serve on the bench.

“Roberts acknowledges that the relationship was indeed a bad lapse in judgment,” according to the statement from his attorneys, led by Reid Weingarten. “However, the relationship did not occur until after the trial and had no bearing on the outcome of that trial.”

The lawsuit is already causing uproar on Capitol Hill.

Minutes after the Tribune broke the news of the complaint, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz of Utah released a statement saying his panel had already conducted a preliminary review of the allegations after the Utah attorney general recently made the committee aware of “credible evidence of misconduct” by the judge.

The Utah attorney general assigned a former U.S. district judge, Paul Cassell, to review the office’s findings. In his 187-page report, Cassell found that Roberts did have a sexual relationship with Mitchell during the course of the Franklin trial. But Cassell, the attorney general’s office and a third judge all determined that it was not statutory rape because the age of consent at the time in Utah was 16. (It is now 18.)

“Under Utah laws as they existed in 1981, she was old enough to be able to consent to the sexual relations,” Cassell wrote in his summary.

Roberts has not been charged with any crime.

Meanwhile, the woman at the center of the controversy said she filed the $25 million lawsuit not for the money, but rather to help others.

“Could you have done this to a 16-year-old who had been raped (by someone else) six months before and shot and watched her friends die in the … street? Could you do that?” Mitchell told The Washington Post Wednesday night. “That’s my question, to anybody that has this ‘bad judgment.’ ”

At the same time, Mitchell acknowledged that the 35-year saga was almost too strange to believe.

“This story is so crazy I wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t my truth,” she said, “if this really didn’t happen to me.”

Racist killing spree

Unbeknown to Mitchell and her three friends on that August evening in 1980, the man shooting at them was one of America’s most wanted men: a white supremacist who, for three years, had sown terror across the country in an attempt to start a race war.

Born James Clayton Vaughn Jr., Franklin, as a teenager, was inspired by Adolf Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf.” In 1976, he changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, after Paul Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin.

His racist rampage began the following year when the 27-year-old Franklin bombed the Maryland home of a Jewish lobbyist and a synagogue in Tennessee.

The killings began about two weeks later.

On Aug. 7, 1977, Franklin shot a young interracial couple in Madison, Wis. He then moved to St. Louis, where he hid in some bushes to ambush a bar mitzvah, fatally shooting Gerald Gordon, a 42-year-old father of three, two months later. In February 1978, Franklin attacked another interracial couple, killing the black man and injuring his white wife.

On March 6, 1978, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and his attorney were shot in Georgia. Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down. Franklin would later admit to the shooting, saying it was because Flynt produced interracial porn, but was never charged with the crime.

On May 29, 1980, National Urban League president Vernon Jordan Jr. was shot in Indiana. Franklin would later be charged with attempted murder and acquitted in court, only to eventually admit to the shooting.

In the summer of 1980, Franklin carried out shootings in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. He arrived in Utah on Aug. 10.

Horrific hate crime

Although Mitchell was only lightly injured in the Aug. 20 Liberty Park shooting, she was deeply traumatized. Only 15 years old, Mitchell had been raped months before.

On Sept. 24, 1980, Franklin was arrested in Kentucky for stealing a car but escaped a police station. He was finally arrested for good on Oct. 28, 1980, in Florida.

Three days later, as states across the country linked him to mysterious sniper shootings, a federal jury in Salt Lake City indicted Franklin for violating the civil rights of Fields and Martin.

Richard Warren Roberts flew out from Washington to handle the case.

High-profile trial

Roberts rose from his seat in a Salt Lake City federal courtroom and asked the 16-year-old witness exactly what happened that day in Liberty Park.

“There was blood all over,” Mitchell said. “Ted kept saying, ‘Run, Terry!’ ”

Her Feb. 23, 1981, testimony was a key part of Roberts’ case against Franklin. Ten days later, a jury found him guilty — the first in a long series of convictions against the serial killer.

According to Mitchell’s lawsuit, however, by the time the verdict was delivered, the winning prosecutor had been raping Mitchell for weeks.

“He used that trial to gain acceptance in so many places. It opened so many doors,” she told The Post on Wednesday. “He is a (expletive) hypocrite.”

It raised red flags for Mitchell when Roberts asked her to come to the courthouse one night before the trial, according to the lawsuit. He took her to dinner and put his hand on her thigh, according to the suit.

After dinner, Roberts ordered her to come inside his hotel, according to the lawsuit.

“When he finally had Mitchell in his hotel room, defendant Roberts locked the door, took off her jacket, began kissing her neck, and said, ‘You aren’t going anywhere until I get a taste of you,’ ” the lawsuit claims.

The suit claims that Roberts “raped her twice” that night, then again and again over the course of the trial.

“Roberts continued to manipulate and control Mitchell for his own sexual, emotional, and ego gratification throughout the rest of his stay in Salt Lake City,” the lawsuit claims.

When the trial ended, Roberts left Utah, never to return.

As Roberts rose through the judicial ranks, Mitchell “repressed all memory of the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse,” according to her complaint.

The two rarely talked over the decades. In one of the few conversations, sometime in the mid-2000s, Roberts kept saying: “We’re good, right?” She said she felt “uncomfortable” afterward, but wasn’t quite sure why.

“My memory was gone,” she told The Post.

That would allegedly change on the day Franklin was executed.

Old memories

Joseph Paul Franklin hadn’t been dead long, killed by lethal injection in a Missouri prison, when Mitchell received an email from Roberts about the execution.

“This event triggered the beginning of the release of Mitchell’s memories about her abuse by . . . Roberts,” her lawsuit alleges.

She puts it more simply.

“That’s when the memories came back,” she told The Post.

Ever since, Mitchell has been trying to hold the prosecutor-turned-judge accountable for what she says he did to her 35 years ago.

On June 24, 2014, she emailed Roberts saying that she had suffered from night terrors and migraines ever since the trial, saying she had been raped and abused by many men. She also talked about their attraction to one another during the trial, and asked why he was attracted to her.

Minutes later, he called her, according to the Utah attorney general’s report. She taped the conversation, during which he admitted to a relationship but said he was “very careful about making sure that. . . your testimony happened and nothing, you know, physical went on until after you had finished your testimony.”

Mitchell took the tape to the attorney general’s office, which eventually investigated her claims.

Cassell, after reviewing that investigation, concluded that there was “significant evidence that Mr. Roberts did engage in sexual relations” with Mitchell “on multiple occasions under the guise of ‘witness preparation.’ These events are firmly established not only by Ms. Jackson-Mitchell’s own report but also by a recorded telephone call between her and Mr. Roberts. Additional witnesses provide generally corroborative information.”

Those witnesses, he said, included her mother, who said she had thought it was “odd about how much time her daughter and Mr. Roberts were spending together.”

Also interviewed was a friend of Jackson-Mitchell, who said Jackson-Mitchell had told her about her “affair’” with Roberts and “that the two of them were having sex.”

While Cassell said “it does not appear that these allegations are strong enough to support a criminal prosecution” — noting that under the law at that time she was “old enough to consent” — he said that sex between a federal prosecutor and one of his witnesses, let alone a 16-year-old witness, has “ethical implications.”

Despite Roberts’ retirement on Wednesday, Mitchell said she is not satisfied. She called Roberts’ claim that the sex was consensual “a lie.” And she said her lawsuit is not about money but “doing the right thing” and inspiring others to do the same.

“I want other victims to not feel like their lives are ruined and they are throw-away people because they were raped and silenced,” Mitchell said.

This story was originally published March 17, 2016 at 7:34 PM.