RALEIGH (AP) — The North Carolina Court of Appeals has reinstated a murder charge against a man who kept a Durham woman’s skeleton in a backpack.
A three-judge panel ruled Tuesday that Durham County Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson was wrong in dismissing charges against Michael Dorman, 34. Prosecutors say he killed Lakeia Boxley, 31, and kept her bones for two years before his arrest.
Hudson dismissed the murder case in 2011, saying Durham authorities violated Dorman’s right to a fair trial by prematurely releasing all Boxley’s bones but for a piece of her skull to her family for cremation. The judge said that destroyed key evidence before defense experts could examine the remains.
Dorman has remained in jail under a $150,000 secured bond for more than a year while his appeal worked its way through the courts. Tuesday’s ruling was unanimous, meaning there is no automatic right of review at the N.C. Supreme Court.
It was not immediately clear when Dorman will stand trial for Boxley’s murder. His lawyer, Ann Petersen, was unavailable for comment.
Hudson, Durham’s senior resident judge, said Tuesday that he has not yet decided whether to retain jurisdiction over Dorman’s case. But there is nothing in the appeals ruling, he said, that would bar the defendant’s lawyers from making the same argument over the bones at trial or preclude him from ruling on the issue again after the defense presents testimony.
“Just because you rule against a party doesn’t mean you can’t come back and hear the case,” Hudson said. “I don’t think there’s anything in the case that says I couldn’t be fair.”
Former Durham District Attorney Tracey Cline lost her job after publicly criticizing Hudson’s decisions dismissing charges against Dorman and Derrick Allen, who had been convicted of killing and sexually assaulting a 2-year-old girl in 1998. Cline then sought unsuccessfully to have Hudson removed from overseeing cases involving her office, claiming he had personal ill will against her.
Cline is now appealing a 2012 decision by Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood removing her from her elected position for bringing her office into disrepute. Arguments in that case were heard by the court of appeals last week.
Cline’s lawyer, James Van Camp, pointed out Tuesday that appeals judges have now overturned decisions in both the criminal cases that drove the former district attorney to attack Hudson’s judgment. The court overturned Hudson’s ruling in the Allen case in September. That should aid his client’s argument that she was unjustly removed, Van Camp said.
For his part, Hudson said he has no regrets about his rulings or Cline’s fate.
“It was her actions, not my actions, for why she was removed,” Hudson said. “She wants to make it, her argument, that it was me. But Judge Hobgood did not buy that and I don’t think the court of appeals is going to buy that.”
Dorman was arrested in July 2010 after a friend told authorities that Dorman admitted shooting a prostitute and asked him to help dispose of her bones, which he kept in a backpack at his apartment. An autopsy later determined that the bones belonged to Boxley, who had been missing since March 2008. Wounds found on Boxley’s skull indicated she may have been shot in the head, according to the medical examiner’s report.
Investigators said Dorman told them the woman was already dead when he found her remains, which he planned to use for his sexual gratification.
At a hearing before the appeals court in September, Dorman’s lawyer argued his client’s constitutional rights had been violated when the bones were cremated, leaving no way for the defense to confirm that some or all of the remains belonged to Boxley or that they were even human.
The medical examiner is required under state law to release remains to the next of kin after all needed tests are completed.
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