A former Kentucky State Police officer admitted he gave false testimony in a case involving a gruesome murder in Clay County.
Charles J. Senters pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Lexington to one charge of making a false statement while under oath.
Federal prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence of two years’ probation for Senters, with eight months of that time on home incarceration, Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Ream said in court.
Senters’ attorneys, Michael Murphy and Jarrod James Beck, said Senters started as a state police officer in 2005 and was named Trooper of the Year in 2012.
However, Senters had just become a detective when he was called on to investigate the murder of Eli Marcum in December 2012.
Jimmy D. Benge, a Clay County drug dealer, allegedly got another man to kill Marcum because of a suspicion that Marcum had told police about Benge’s drug trafficking, according to court records.
Another man involved in the case, Vernon Renus “Red” Delph, testified that he saw Gerald Lee “Jerry” Sizemore grab Marcum around the neck and stab him so deeply that it “effectively skewered” him, prosecutors said in one court document.
Sizemore and Delph put Marcum’s body on an all-terrain vehicle, dumped it near an ATV trail and used gasoline to set it on fire, Delph said.
Senters sent some pieces of evidence to the state police crime laboratory to be tested for DNA evidence, but did not include a piece of telephone cord found a yard from Marcum’s body or a small silver knife found about a quarter of a mile away.
Senters said he did not think the two items had any value as evidence. He threw them in the trash in October 2013.
Defense attorneys for Benge and Sizemore later asked to have the charges against them dismissed, arguing that police should have had the knife and cord tested to see if there was evidence on them that could have helped prove someone else killed Marcum.
During a hearing on that request in July 2014, Senters testified he had checked with Clay County Coroner Danny Finley and a state police analyst on whether it would be alright to throw away items, and that a KSP supervisor witnessed him disposing of them.
A grand jury charged that he did not check with Finley or the analyst before getting rid of the knife and cord, and that his supervisor did not see him do it.
Senters pleaded guilty on the charge involving the KSP supervisor.
“A very unfortunate set of circumstances led to this and he is happy to get this behind him and get on with his life,” Murphy said of Senters.
Chief U.S. District Judge Karen K. Caldwell scheduled sentencing for Senters in February.
In the underlying case, Benge and Sizemore pleaded guilty to drug charges but prosecutors dismissed the charge related to Marcum’s murder.
Source: https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article220486465.html