The good news was that the lost witness who prevented the solicitation for murder trial of James Harvey Tipler from being concluded Saturday was located over the weekend.
The bad news was that at the end of the day Monday the case still hadn’t gone to the jury.
It should wrap up today, however, with closing arguments, expected to last about four hours, scheduled to get under way at 9 a.m.
“It seems to me I’ve apologized more in this case than in any other,” County Judge T. Patterson Maney told jurors as Monday’s day of court began.
He apologized to them once more at shortly before 5 p.m. as all eight nodded their willingness to show up one more day.
Timothy Albaugh, who didn’t show up to testify in Tipler’s defense Saturday, was brought shackled into court Monday and informed he was facing a charge of criminal contempt.
He was released from the charges and from custody after testifying.
A six-time convicted felon, Albaugh told the court that he “tried to show him (Tipler) the ropes in jail.” He said he protected him and cleaned up for him while the two were incarcerated together.
In return, Albaugh said, Tipler wrote him a $400 check that was handed to him one day after chapel services at the jail.
Albaugh’s role in the Tipler saga was not nearly so important as the testimony’s implication that Tipler had access to checks, and therefore money, while incarcerated on charges of racketeering.
Prosecutors contend that the defendant laid out his plan to have Assistant State Attorney Russ Edgar killed to fellow inmate R. Scott Whitehead because he needed access to Whitehead’s money.
Defense Attorney Clyde Taylor also elicited testimony from Randy Crowder, who investigated Tipler on behalf of the State Attorney’s Office, that Tipler had money in a checking account that he could have paid another inmate.
Prosecution evidence indicates that Tipler believed he was paying another inmate, Dion Lowe, $1,500 of Whitehead’s money to travel to Atlanta to hire a hit man to kill Edgar.
The biggest brouhaha of the day developed as prosecutor Bobby Elmore questioned Crowder about a storage shed containing Tipler’s business documents. Or, more specifically, the disappearance of four boxes of documents deemed by prosecutor Bobby Elmore “the smoking gun boxes” that Tipler allegedly paid another inmate to attempt to locate and burn.
Taylor called for a mistrial after Elmore had taken Crowder’s testimony.
He said Elmore, in pointing out that an employee of the Taylor and Taylor law firm had visited the storage facility where the “smoking gun boxes” were supposed to be housed, had attempted to implicate his firm in “wrongdoing.”
“That bell can’t be unrung,” he said.
“All the state has done is suggest an alternate explanation,” Elmore argued in return.
Maney denied the motion for mistrial.
Tipler, who told the court Saturday that he was considering taking the stand in his own defense, but couldn’t decide to do so without hearing Albaugh’s testimony, chose ultimately not to testify.
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Tom McLaughlin at 850-315-4435 or tmclaughlin@nwfdailynews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomMnwfdn.