Jane Alexander

July 22, 2007 Updated Aug. 30, 2011

Ryan Ferguson

New Hearing in Ryan Ferguson Murder Conviction

Cole County Circuit Court Judge Daniel Green has agreed to hold an evidentiary hearing on October 25, 2011 regarding recantations made by the only two witnesses against Ryan Ferguson at his murder trial in 2005.  The recantations are part of a habeas corpus petition submitted by Ferguson’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner. 

If Judge Green finds the recantations of merit, he could order a new trial for Ferguson.  Without the testimony of these two witnesses and with no forensic evidence linking Ferguson to the murder, the case against Ferguson – one of the most bizarre ever mounted – would collapse.

Based on the testimony of Chuck Erickson and Jerry Trump, Ferguson was convicted of the Halloween night 2001 murder of Kent Heitholt, the sports editor of the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, and sentenced to 40 years in prison.  None of the forensic evidence gathered at the crime scene – including fingerprints, hair clutched in Heitholt’s hand and bloody footprints – linked Ferguson or Erickson to the crime. 

Erickson, who like Ferguson was a high school junior at the time of Heitholt’s death, began telling friends two years after the murder that he was having “dreams” that he and his friend Ferguson had murdered Heitholt.  These comments quickly brought the police to Erickson’s door.

In his 2011 affidavit, Erickson averred, “Ryan Ferguson did not harm Kent Heitholt in any way,” stating that he alone had killed Heitholt although Ferguson was present at the scene.

Trump, a janitor at the newspaper who was on parole at the time for molesting a teenager, told police the day after the murder that he saw two men in the parking lot but could not see them clearly enough to identify.  He also said the same thing to his supervisor and several co-workers.

At Ferguson’s trial, Trump told the jury that while he was in prison for a parole violation, his wife sent him a newspaper article with photos of Erickson and Ferguson and from those he was able to positively identify both teenagers as Heitholt’s assailants.  He testified he then contacted Boone County D.A. Kevin Boone and became the prosecution’s second witness.   

In his affidavit, Trump said his testimony was a lie: it was Crane who met with him in December of 2004 after Trump had been released from prison and showed him the photos of the accused and told him it would be in his interest to identify Ferguson as one of the men in the parking lot the night Heitholt was murdered.  

Crane is now a Boone County circuit court judge and has been subpoenaed to appear at the evidentiary hearing before Judge Green.  

In a case rife with DNA and other physical evidence, not one shred of evidence linked 17-year-old Ryan Ferguson to the murder of Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune sports writer Kent Heitholt in 2001. Ferguson's conviction in 2005 proved only how far the police and prosecution would go to close Columbia's only unsolved murder. A Boone County (Mo.) Judge, at a three-day-evidentiary hearing in mid-July 2008, heard testimony of how the police and prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from Ferguson's trial attorneys and manipulated and threatened witnesses who dared not support their trumped-up case against Ferguson.

(Editor's Note: CBS's "48 Hours Mystery" broadcast a re-investigation of the case on March 26, 2011)

by Jane Alexander