WHEELING -
7News Reporter D.K. Wright, who has covered court cases for 30 years, covered Donald Palmer's trial from start to finish back in 1989.
"There was clear evidence," Wright said Thursday as she sat down and shared her memories of that spring in 1989. "I don't think the jury could have done anything else."
It may be decades later, but Wright still remembers those weeks she spent in the courtroom,while Donald Palmers trial played out, she said he was quiet and polite the entire time.
"They called him Duke Palmer, and he was the one who led the authorities to all the evidence," she said. "Once he started to cooperate, he opened the bag and gave them everything."
Yet, she says, in the end, he insisted on his innocence. She even remembers a personal encounter with Palmer, when she and her photographer ended up being in the same elevator with him.
"That's never supposed to happen, but it did, it was a quirk, and we had a conversation the whole way up to the elevator to the courtroom," she said. "There had been an earthquake in California, and it hit at a baseball stadium, during a game and it was all over the news and Donald Palmer talked about that, how awful that was for those people in that baseball stadium."
Wright remembers reporting on every detail, up to the moment he was sentenced to death on October 26th, of 1989. On the morning that sentence is carried out, more than 20 years later, she reflects.
"I have covered cases where a woman starved her child to death over a period of years, where a group of young men burned a woman alive under a pile of tires until she died," Wright said. "I don't know that the most heinous and the most cruel cases get the death penalty."
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