Fool me once...

Ruse during search aided prosecution
Kinsey, Terry. Cincinnati Post, Feb. 22, 2007, pg. A1.

The Marcus Fiesel case first captured the tri-state's attention when thousands of people helped search for the boy last August.

It was that search -- and Liz Carroll's performance during it -- that prosecutors turned back to Wednesday in their closing arguments to persuade jurors Carroll should be convicted of murder.

"Her performance before all those cameras was something even grizzled veterans cannot do," Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutor Mark Piepmeier told the jury in closing arguments.

At the time of the search, Carroll's story was that her autistic 3-year-old foster child had wandered off or was snatched from Juilfs Park in Anderson Township after she fainted.

When police began to question her story, she held a tearful news conference and begged people to keep looking. She later admitted that she knew Marcus had died in a closet in her home.

After deliberating for five hours Wednesday, the jury found Carroll, 30, guilty of murder for causing the death of Fiesel, who was wrapped cocoon-like with a blanket and packing tape and left in the closet, where he died while Carroll went to a weekend family reunion in Williamstown, Ky.

Carroll also was found guilty on six other charges -- involuntary manslaughter, kidnapping, felonious assault and three counts of child endangerment. Her husband David Carroll, 29, is to be tried separately in March on the same charges as his wife, along with gross abuse of a corpse. Prosecutors allege that he burned the boy's body and dumped the remains in the Ohio River.

As authorities began to suspect that story about the boy's disappearance was a ruse, they got a break in the case. The Carrolls' live-in friend, Amy Baker, told investigators how the boy died, prosecutors said. They then called Liz Carroll to testify before a grand jury in Hamilton County.

At first, she stuck to her story that the boy had disappeared in a park, but subsequently admitted that she knew he had died in the closet. She did not testify in her trial, but prosecutors read her grand jury testimony to the jury.

Baker has not been charged, but acknowledged that she helped dispose of the child's body. Prosecutors agreed not to prosecute her in exchange for her testimony against the couple, unless evidence shows she had hands-on involvement in the boy's death.

Prosecutors said Marcus was hard to handle and needed constant attention. Baker testified that's why Liz Carroll didn't want to take him to the reunion and bound him, as the Carrolls had done before when they ran errands.

An investigation by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services said the Carrolls were unqualified to care for Fiesel and cited failure to check references and inadequate home study and follow-up visits.

The state moved to revoke the license of Lifeway for Youth, a private agency that helped place the boy with the Carrolls, and Lifeway then ended its Ohio operations, which began in 1994.


The state report recommended increased training of foster parent applicants and those who assess them; thorough background checks that would include credit and residence histories; drug testing of applicants; more data-sharing among agencies, courts and law enforcement; and increased state staffing for foster-care oversight.


Legislators expect to work on reform measures this year.

Author: Terry Kinney, Associated Press
Section: News
Page: A1
Dateline: BATAVIA