Ebanks acquitted of murder
(CNS): A jury took until late in the evening Monday to reach the unanimous verdict that Leonard Antonio Ebanks was not guilty of murder but guilty of accessory after the fact in the killing of 40-year-old Swiss Banker, Frederic Bise, in 2008. During his summation, the judge explained to the jury that if they did not believe Ebanks was one of the killers but that he may have assisted in the aftermath of the murder, they could return the alternative guilty verdict of accessory. Following the murder acquittal, an emotional Ebanks, who is already serving a life sentence for the murder ofTyrone Burrell in 2010, was scheduled by the court to be sentenced on Wednesday.
The evidence that supported the case against Ebanks came only from two women who claimed that he had confessed to being involved in the murder with his cousin, Chad Anglin, who was convicted of killing Bise earlier this year. There were no eye-witnesses or forensic evidence or any other circumstantial evidence that placed Ebanks at the scene of Bise’s killing.
There were differences in women’s evidence against Ebanks. One implied that Ebanks may have turned up after Bise was dead and the other said he had claimed to be part of the killing.
There were also significant inconsistencies in the evidence given by both of them, not just between the accounts they each gave on the stand during the trial, which they said had come from Ebanks, but in their own witness statements and interviews with the police over the five years since Bise’s body was discovered in the back of his own burned out car in Mount Pleasant West Bay on 8 February 2008.
Ebanks had emphatically denied killing Bise when he took the stand and insisted theevidence from his ex-lover was a lie made up out of malice, as she went to the police on the night he left her to go back to his wife.
The second woman was the helper at a local drug yard in West Bay, where Ebanks, a self-confessed crack addict, frequented. He claimed she had lied because she was desperate and was saying what she did for money, as the police had placed her in a paid witness protection programme after she gave what Ebanks claimed was untruthful evidence against him in the Burrell murder case, which led to his conviction in that case.
On this occasion, however, the evidence from the women raised doubts about Ebanks' guilt regarding his part in the brutal murder, leaving the jury to conclude that Ebanks was not the killer but may have assisted Anglin and whoever else may have been involved in the banker’s death.
Bise, the crown believes, was killed following an encounter with Anglin and Ebanks in a sex-for-money deal. During the trial the court heard that, having recently divorced, Bise, who was homosexual, began living a fully open gay life, and according to friends, was engaging in increasingly risky behaviour, seeking sex with multiple men and looking for partners to engage in outdoor sex romps.
Category: Crime
Plenty more to come.