Confessed killer of Carthage couple may testify from the grave

Thanks to a ruling issued Monday by Jasper County Circuit Court Judge Gayle Crane, jurors in the murder trial of Darren Winans, Jasper, may hear testimony from Winans' co-defendant Matthew Laurin, who commited suicide one day after pleading guilty to killing Bob and Ellen Sheldon of Carthage.

Crane's ruling, according to the Joplin Globe report, shortly before his death, a videotape was made with Laurin saying that he stabbed the Sheldons, owners of the Old Cabin Shop in Carthage:

A Jasper County sheriff’s detective wrote in an application for a search warrant at the time of the men’s arrests that Laurin told him that Winans entered the house first and stabbed the couple to death. But a Springfield woman testified at the co-defendants’ preliminary hearing that Winans told her that he did not enter the house until after Laurin had gone inside and killed the Sheldons.


Laurin changed his story at his plea hearing last month. On a petition to enter the plea change, he wrote that he alone stabbed “both of them until they died.”

As noted in the July 28 Turner Report, that Springfield woman, Teresa Adkins, died June 1 at age 43.