BURTON SPEAKMAN
BOWLING GREEN — Nearly three years after being taken into custody on two murder charges Dustin Asher may be free within just a short time.
Asher, 32, of Glasgow, pleaded guilty Thursday in Warren Circuit Court to two counts of tampering with physical evidence. He received a five year sentence.
Based on the parole laws Asher should be eligible for parole immediately or nearly immediately, said Pat Renn, of Louisville, his attorney.
Asher maintained his innocence throughout the case. He was able to pass a polygraph administerd by a former FBI agent that neither he nor Freeman was the shooter, Renn said.
Asher and Lonnie Freeman, 40, originally of Etoile, were both charged with murder and tampering with physical evidence in the July 2005 deaths of Daniel Froedge, 38, of Park City, and Kelly O. Johnson, 32, of Smiths Grove. Froedge’s and Johnson’s burned bodies where found on July 28, 2005, inside a truck on a gravel road near Scottsville. Freeman entered an Alford Plea to two counts of facilitation to murder and being a first-degree persistent felony offender Monday in Warren Circuit Court. He received a 12-year sentence that will run concurrently to a federal weapons sentence Freeman is currently serving.
The case was tried in 2006 in Allen County and ended in a hung jury. The retrial was moved to Warren County due to publicity before, during and after the initial trial.
The plea hearing had been moved up to Thursday from Friday when it had been scheduled to ensure a number of witnesses who had to come to Bowling Green on Friday if Asher decided not to plea would be available, said Clint Willis, commonwealth’s attorney for Allen and Simpson counties.
Johnson’s sister, Jessica Xaysana, of Bowling Green, arrived Friday at the courthouse hoping to have a chance to speak at the hearing.
Freeman’s sentence was not long enough, Xaysana said.
“If this had been the commonwealth’s attorney’s family, I don’t think they would have accepted this,” she said. “Even if these two men didn’t kill my brother, they know who did.”
Johnson’s family was not made aware of either Monday’s plea hearing for Freeman or the change to Thursday for Asher’s plea.
Willis said the changes were made quickly to ensure that Asher would plead and there would not be a problem at the motion hearing scheduled for Friday if Asher changed his mind.
“I told our victim advocate to do a lot of things. I can’t say for sure if all of them got done,” he said.
Xaysana was not on the commonwealth’s list of people who would be contacted. The contact for Johnson’s family was his mother, Willis said.
Johnson’s mother also believed the plea hearing was supposed to take place Friday, Xaysana said. She believed the hearing time was changed abruptly specifically so the victim’s families could not attend.
Xaysana said although her brother had done some things wrong, it wasn’t necessary to kill him.
“Kelly wasn’t violent. He wouldn’t fight,” she said.
Johnson had been living and working around Nashville for the last few years before moving back to the Smiths Grove area shortly before he was killed, Xaysana said.
“He came back and a few months later he was dead,” she said.
This was a circumstantial case, said Willis. The goal in this case “had always been more about keeping them off the streets and these plea agreements did that.”
The lesser plea for Asher was offered because the jurors from the initial trial stated they were more comfortable finding Asher guilty of tampering, Willis said. They were not convinced he was directly involved in the murder.
“We have to listen to that because those are the people who sat through nearly two weeks of evidence,” he said. “We’ve always thought Mr. Freeman was more involved.”
There was some DNA evidence tested between trials that came up negative, Willis said. There were some other pieces of information that were dead ends.
“If we would have been holding four aces this is not what would have happened,” he said.
“Mr. Asher and I are relieved to have this case behind us,” Renn said.
The plea deal that Asher accepted was the same one that had been presented to him three years ago, Willis said.
Renn said he could not confirm if the plea agreement had been presented before, but added if it had it would have contained a requirement that Asher testify against Freeman.
Asher could not testify truthfully that he or Freeman had been involved in the murder, Renn said.
