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Black found guilty of capital murder
By Bill Conrad, bconrad@starlocalnews.com
McKINNEY - Terrance Black has been found guilty of capital murder in the death of Susan Loper. The jury of nine men and three women reached a verdict after nearly four-and-a-half hours of deliberations.
Loper, 40, was abducted from Gleneagles Country Club on April 19, 2011. Her body was found in a Frisco field the following day. The verdict came at the end of the nine-day trial, which featured 83 witnesses and hundreds of items of evidence.
The prosecution and defense rested their cases Wednesday, with closing arguments delivered Thursday morning. Prosecutor John Schomburger told the jurors during his argument that while their job as jurors as hard, their decision was an easy one.
The prosecution's case focused heavily on the belief that the murder was not a random killing and that Black was the only person in Loper's life who had a reason to kill her.
"Only this defendant had the know-how, the means, the opportunity and the obsession to commit this capital murder," prosecutor Justin Johnson told the jury. "... If you look at the evidence in this case, you know that whoever killed her was obsessed."
The decision to kill Loper on April 19 was made out of necessity, since she was moving her studio to another location the next day, Johnson said. Evidence presented earlier in the trial showed that Black accessed Loper's email account the night before the murder, reading an email that mentioned what time she was get to work the next day.
"If you have a plan to kill me at Gleneagles, it expires tomorrow," Johnson told the jury, playing the role of Loper speaking to Black while he was reading her e-mail.
Both Johnson and Schomburger disputed the defense's claim that Jayson Hayes, Loper's boyfriend at the time of her death, was in any way responsible for her murder. Prosecutors mentioned that Hayes would have been able to have access to Loper after she moved studios, an opportunity Black would not have had. They also mentioned that Hayes had to be at work that morning while Black was unemployed and had nowhere to be during or after the crime.
Immediately after being informed of Loper's disappearance, Hayes went to the crime scene and spoke with police. He also was interviewed by detectives later that day at Loper's residence. These, prosecutors told the jury, were not the actions of a man with something to hide. By comparison, Black had left North Texas shortly after the crime, ending up in Arizona the next day.
To illustrate their point that it was Black, not Hayes, who was acting guilty, the prosecution shared a passage from Proverbs 28:1.
"The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the innocent are as bold as a lion."
At the end of his argument, Schomburger reiterated the state's principal motive: that an abortion Loper had in 2009 drove Black to murder. His obsession with her meant that no woman could ever replace her, and that if he couldn't have her, nobody could, Schomburger said.
"As long as she has a baby he will always be connected to her," Schomburger said. "The only way he allowed it [in 2009] was because she promised she would have a baby with him."
Defense attorney Toby Shook said much of the prosecution's case focused on Black's actions after the crime, not on evidence placing him at the scene.
Neither side disputes the fact Black attempted to kill himself by leaping in the Grand Canyon. While prosecutors claim he did this because he had killed Loper, the defense has a different reason: Black was depressed that he owed a large amount of money to his sister.
"We know Terrance Black was depressed," Shook said. "A man almost 50 had been laid off, has debt, has to change careers and go back to school with people 20 and 30 years younger than him."
Shook also discussed the standard of reasonable doubt, telling the jurors the state did not reach this high standard and they therefore must find his client not guilty. He also urged the jurors to not speculate on the evidence.
"When people speculate in guilty verdicts, that is when innocent people get convicted," Shook told the jury.
He pointed out that there was unknown male DNA on Loper's clothing at the time of her murder. While the DNA did not match Hayes or Black, it could have matched the real killer, Shook told the jury.
Prosecutors have said the DNA likely belonged to Loper's son, Jake, or her father, Morris Miller, both of whom she saw the night before she was killed. This theory cannot be ruled out, Shook said before adding it was not the jurors' role to speculate on whose DNA it was. Instead, the jurors should consider why the police didn't do additional testing in an attempt to match up the DNA with the actual killer.
"That is called reasonable doubt," Shook said. "If something didn't fit on Terrance Black, it was not pursued. This was not an objective investigation."
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