Review Of May God Have Mercy By John Tucker

7 Pages 1819 Words

May God have Mercy by John C. Tucker gives an account of the story of Roger Coleman, a Virginia man tried and executed for the 1981 rape and murder of nineteen year old Wanda McCoy. This book gave a very in depth, detailed review of every aspect of the crime, trials, and events that led to the execution of Roger Coleman. Even as the most staunch, conservative, pro prosecution reader you can’t help but to second guess the decision to execute Coleman. Reasonable doubt as to whether he committed the murder is established through the police investigation and subsequent trials. At the very least Coleman should have received a life sentence due to all the inconsistencies in the prosecution’s theory on what happened on that dreadful night.
Brad McCoy arrived home from work shortly after eleven PM on March 10, 1981 when he found his wife brutally raped and murdered on the floor of their spare bedroom. Brad called his father and asked him to come over to the house. Brad, impatient, then ran down the street to his father’s house. At 11:21 the police received a phone call from McCoy about the murder. Brad’s father Hezzie McCoy estimated that ten minutes had passed from the time he received Brad’s initial phone call to when he placed the call to the police. The police and medical examiner arrived and said that Wanda had just been killed recently because the blood was still warm and wet. Virginia State Police special agent Jack Davidson took over the investigation into the crime.
Wanda’s sister Trish and husband Roger Coleman were frequent visitors to the McCoy house. According to friends of Wanda’s, Coleman was one of a few men she would have let into the house. The McCoy family provided a couple of names to Davidson of people they thought may have committed the crimes including Wanda’s former husband and a man Brad McCoy had a recent argument with.
Coleman had a previous rape conviction involving a...