Hubbell
A local man in prison since 1999 after being convicted of murder has alleged in his appeal pending before Bartholomew Circuit Court Judge Kelly Benjamin that an individual now on death row actually committed the crime.
Jason Hubbell was arrested and charged with abducting Sharon Myers in a parking lot outside Arvin Industries on May 13, 1997. According to court records, Hubbell was a former Arvin employee whose benefits were handled by Myers. During the trial, a witness testified Hubbell was having difficulty getting insurance benefits and that Myers was treating him coldly.
The body of Myers, who was killed by strangulation, was discovered six months after her disappearance, at Teal Marsh in Atterbury Fish and Wildlife Area north of Columbus, according to court records.
Hubbell was convicted on Nov. 4, 1999 after a three-week trial with a jury finding him guilty of murder and criminal confinement. One month later, then-Circuit Court Judge Stephen Heimann sentenced Hubbell to 75 years in prison.
In an amended petition for post-conviction relief seeking a new trial and DNA testing, Hubbell and his attorneys allege that death row inmate Michael Dean Overstreet, who was convicted for the 1997 killing of Kelly Eckart in Johnson County, killed Myers.
“The new evidence that has surfaced shows beyond any reasonable question that Hubbell deserves a new trial,” according to the petition filed by the Exoneration Justice Clinic at the Notre Dame Law School and Hubbell’s attorneys. “First, John Borges, the Task Force Commander of the Kelly Eckart investigation, revealed that the Franklin Police Department provided the Columbus Police Department with numerous pieces of exculpatory evidence connecting Michael Dean Overstreet to Sharon Myers’ abduction. Second, Overstreet himself repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about his responsibility for Myers’ abduction and murder,” the petition states.
According to the petition, Myers was abducted in May 1997 from Arvin’s Gladstone plant in Columbus in a white van. The assailant removed her shoes, strangled her with a ligature fashioned from her own clothing, and left her body with the ligature around her neck near the marsh in Atterbury Wildlife Preserve where it was found six months later, the petition states.
The petition states Eckart was abducted in a van after leaving her job at Walmart in Franklin in September 1997. In this abduction, the assailant removed Eckart’s shoes, strangled her with a ligature fashioned from her own clothing and initially left her body in a remote part of Atterbury, the petition states. In both cases, there were indications that a sexual assault had occurred.
In the Eckart case, a male DNA profile was generated consistent with Overstreet’s DNA, the petition states. At Overstreet’s 2000 trial, his brother, Scott Overstreet, testified that he drove his brother to Atterbury the night Eckart was abducted and that his brother told him he had “taken a girl” and had to “get her lost,” according to court records. Based on evidence at his trial, Overstreet was convicted of the murder, rape and criminal confinement of Eckart and sentenced to death, according to the petition.
After Hubbell was charged with murder and criminal confinement of Myers in August 1998, Hubbell’s attorneys sought all information implicating other suspects in the case, according to the petition. Then, Columbus Police Department Detective Dennis Knulf testified that there was no information connecting Overstreet to the crime, the petition states.
According to the petition, no DNA, fingerprints, hair or blood ever linked Hubbell to the crime. Hubbell was convicted and sentenced to 75 years, a judgement that was reaffirmed on direct appeal, according to court documents.
In August 2020, Hubbell sought habeas relief from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, resulting in a judge granting Hubbell discovery from law enforcement agencies that had investigated both murders, according to the petition.
In that discovery, the petition states attorneys learned that Melissa Holland, Overstreet’s former wife and a key witness in the Eckart case, directly implicated Overstreet in Myers’ abduction. Holland told attorneys the morning that Myers was abducted, Overstreet left his house before sunrise in a white cargo van and said he was going to Arvin in Columbus to apply for a job, the petition states.
Overstreet was gone until the evening, and when he returned, he was covered in blood and asked Holland to wash his clothing, according to the petition. Holland provided this information to Franklin police in November 1997 and after they spoke to officers with Columbus police, she and the Franklin Chief of Police were told “Columbus was not interested in that information, they already had somebody as a suspect,” according to the petition. This evidence was not disclosed to Hubbell prior to his trial, according to the petition.
“Newly discovered evidence further reveals that Overstreet engaged in a course of brazen conduct and made statements that directly implicated himself in the Myers homicide,” the petition states. “Multiple witnesses observed him tapping on a missing persons photo of Myers at a Walmart while grinning menacingly at his wife after an argument with her. When he saw a news report that Myers body was found by Teal Marsh, he allegedly commented, ‘Teal Marsh, I knew that was the place.’ He repeatedly commented to his family members and others about how the shoes of both women were missing and the cases had the same ‘M.O.’ And most significantly, when Overstreet was arrested and charged with the murder of Eckart, a search of his home revealed he was collecting newspaper articles about both the Myers and Eckart abductions,” the petition states.
Other witnesses provided law enforcement with information suggesting Overstreet had a relationship with Myers or was under “the delusion he was,” the petition states. John Mascoe, a fisherman from Indianapolis, told police that he saw Overstreet and Myers together in the midst of an argument on a boat ramp by an Atterbury lake in May 1997, the same month Myers disappeared, the petition states.
According to the petition, law enforcement collected a significant amount of physical evidence after the discovery of Myers’ body, including pubic hairs from a piece of fabric, head hair, fingernails, pieces of duct tape, a band-aid, pantyhose, underwear, a jacket and fabric from a sweater and skirt. None of this evidence connected to Hubbell in any way, according to the petition.
Law enforcement also recovered “hundreds of fibers” from the crime scene, determining that red acrylic fibers found at the crime scene were similar to fibers found in Hubbell’s van, although no common source of the fibers was identified, according to the petition.
An FBI forensic examiner who testified in the case said the red fibers from the crime scene were “consistent” in appearance with those of Hubbell’s van, but could not say they were from the same source, the petition states. the witness said the fibers were “fairly common” in manufactured products and were found in sweaters, hats and other clothing, the petition states.
In 2014, a South Bend judge ruled Overstreet was not mentally competent to be executed but would remain on death row until the state could prove he was competent. St. Joseph County Judge Jane Woodward Miller ruled that Overstreet’s severe case of paranoid schizophrenia prevents him from rationally understanding his execution, meaning he cannot be put to death.
The state elected not to appeal the judge’s ruling, however, Overstreet’s death sentence has not been commuted, so if his mental condition ever improves, the state could make an attempt to reschedule the execution. He will continue to be kept on death row at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City for the rest of his life, according to court records from 2014.
