Friday, July 21, 2000
DiGiuro slaying to grand jury
Ragland suspected in UK football player's death in '94
The Associated Press
LEXINGTON — Tests on a rifle recovered from the bedroom of Shane Ragland show it could have been the weapon used to kill University of Kentucky football player Trent DiGiuro in 1994, a detective testified Wednesday.
Mr. Ragland, 27, is charged with murder in Mr. DiGiuro's shooting death.
“The results are that the rifle recovered from Shane Ragland's bedroom could have been the rifle that killed Trent DiGiuro,” said Don Evans, the Lexington police detective who testified at Mr. Ragland's preliminary hearing.
Detective Evans said according to Ronnie Freels, firearms expert for the Kentucky State Police, rifling characteristics “are the same on the test bullets that were fired from the rifle found in Ragland's bedroom as the bullet that was removed from Trent DiGiuro.”
Mr. Ragland has pleaded not guilty. At his preliminary hearing Wednesday, Fayette District Judge Kevin Horne ruled there was enough evidence to send the case to a grand jury and denied a defense request that the $1 million bond be lowered.
Judge Horne also set conditions on Mr. Ragland in the event that he makes the bond. The judge imposed an 8 p.m. curfew, ordered Mr. Ragland to have no contact with any of the witnesses, to stay in Franklin County except for court appearances and subject himself to electronic monitoring.
Mr. Ragland is the son of a prosperous Frankfort businessman who is a financial contributor to Gov. Paul Patton, but defense attorney Guthrie True said after the hearing that raising a $1 million bond for Mr. Ragland was a practical impossibility. Mr. Ragland is lodged in the Fayette County jail.
An attorney for one of the witnesses in the case, an ex-girlfriend of Mr. Ragland's, said the woman fears for her life and is living in seclusion outside the state.
The woman, a 28-year-old former University of Kentucky student, has been identified in court records only by the initials “A.L.” Her information was the break police needed for Friday's arrest of Mr. Ragland, also a former UK student, in Mr. DiGiuro's 1994 shooting death.
The woman dated Mr. Ragland for almost two years, according to her lawyer, Thomas Bullock.
Mr. Bullock said the U.S. attorney's office, the FBI, Lexington-Fayette County police and the Fayette County commonwealth's attorney's office are all helping to protect the woman and keep her location a secret. She is not in protective custody, he said.
Mr. DiGiuro was killed after a party on July 17, 1994, on the front porch of a Lexington home he shared with other football players.
As the party wound down about 2:40 a.m., Mr. DiGiuro was shot in the head.
For nearly six years, police kept hitting dead-ends in the case. The break came around the first of the year when the woman came forward.
In January, the woman told police that in 1995, Mr. Ragland told her that he had shot Mr. DiGiuro because the football player had played a role in having him kicked out of a fraternity. Ralph Derickson, a UK spokesman, said Mr. Ragland was a member of the pledge class of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity in the 1990-1991 school year.
Mr. DiGiuro reportedly told fraternity members that Mr. Ragland had boasted that he'd had sex with a ranking fraternity member's girlfriend, court records said. Mr. Ragland was later “blackballed.”
Mr. Bullock said she had wanted to tell her story to police because she was driven by a “terribly guilty conscience.”
“She came to me to see if there was a way that we could inform the police of what had happened but still keep her name and her identity anonymous,” he said. “Basically she came to me to make sure that she would be safe.”
She eventually helped police and agreed to wear a listening device to a meeting with Mr. Ragland last week.
The affidavit said Mr. Ragland acknowledged he had made some of the statements about “the incident” and never denied his role in the murder.
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