(Editors Note: This article is a prologue to our latest investigative crime series "Missy Witt; Searching for a Killer". This open-ended series will be written by our investigative reporter LaDonna Humphrey who has spent years investigating the case and maintains the Facebook page "Who Killed Missy Witt?")
After some thought, our investigative team has decided to post a portion of the following email from Wiebke S. (Schlue) Swearingen. Wiebke was a German pen pal of Larry Swearingen's. She later became his wife.
Below is an excerpt from a story entitled “The most guilty person in the history of Montgomery County” written by Andrew Purcell. It describes how the relationship between Wiebke and Swearingen began:
BEGIN QUOTE -- The inmate profiles were all the same: ‘I love to read the Bible. I didn’t do it. I love basketball. So boring.’ Wiebke – she asked me not to print her surname – couldn’t recall how she had ended up at the website. It was the first time she had used Google, to find a flight for her daughter from Hamburg to New York; six hours later, she was scrolling through a list of men on death row. Larry Swearingen didn’t say he was innocent. She decided to write to him.
Wiebke had no particular interest in the death penalty, and still doesn’t. But over the past seven years she has become Swearingen’s best friend and most committed advocate, working on his case ‘full-time’ from home: compiling forensic data, poring through trial transcripts, tracking down witnesses and learning to navigate the Texas justice system.
‘A death-row inmate is not a dog or a child,’ she told me. ‘You cannot walk into someone’s life just out of boredom, get a new job or a new boyfriend and then walk away.’
Her file about the case takes up a whole room in her apartment in Hamburg. Although she speaks excellent English now, the first email she received from a forensic pathologist took her eight hours to decipher.
On the second day of her first visit to the Polunsky Unit, in 2007, Swearingen got down on one knee, looked up ‘with big round eyes, like a dog’, and asked her to marry him. A prison chaplain appeared, then another.
Furious and embarrassed, Wiebke wanted to leave, but stayed to tell him he was out of his mind. In the car park, the wife of one of Swearingen’s prison friends was waiting for her with a teddy bear and a card: ‘Congratulations!’
Swearingen ‘begged’ for a year. When his appeal was rejected and an execution date set, Wiebke acquiesced, even though she had a long-term partner. ‘It was a drive-through, ninety seconds, by-proxy ceremony. The worst day of my life,’ she told me.
She spent hours driving around the nearest town, West Livingston, asking strangers if they would stand in for her incarcerated groom, before finding a devout Christian who agreed to help her. ‘I got married with a man that I didn’t love and wasn’t in love with, just because of an execution; it was horrible.’
Her father stopped speaking to her and she split up with her partner, partly as a result of her obsessive devotion to the case.
‘I’ve abandoned my family, my friends, everyone and everything in my life,’ she told me. Over the years, her marriage to Swearingen has become real, though, as much as any union conducted by post and either side of a plexiglass screen can.
She has never touched her husband, but last year she proposed to him, so that she could redo the ceremony, this time with another ‘death row groupie’ standing in for Larry. -- END QUOTE
Wiebke reached out to our team in 2017. In one of her messages, she confirmed that Swearingen had been working in Arkansas and Kansas. While this does not give us proof of anything much... it does give us a starting point and continued motivation to find out if Swearingen was working in Fort Smith, Arkansas in late 1994.
We already know that he was in the Clinton and Dennard, Arkansas areas in November of 1994. We have included, just for the sake of discussion, the route To/From Dennard and Clinton Arkansas To/From Fort Smith, Arkansas.
It could be argued that IF Larry Swearingen did kill Melissa Witt, that he dumped her body in the Ozark National Forest along the direct route he took back to Clinton/Dennard.
Again, does this PROVE anything? Unfortunately, no. But it is definitely interesting.
It's also important to note that Wiebke wrote to us from an email address that is associated with the official Larry Swearingen website: http://www.larry-swearingen.com.
This could be important later -- especially since someone from Swearingen's own "camp" admits in writing he was working in Arkansas and Kansas.
As always, this topic is open for debate. Our goal is to find out IF Larry Swearingen was in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Our team would love to have evidence that would either rule him out completely...or prove to the world once and for all that Larry Swearingen killed Melissa Witt.
To continued...
