Leonard Heatherly met a man in the Morgan County Correctional Complex nearly 13 years ago and came to Chattanooga on Wednesday to try and help him.
Heatherly contacted local media outlets to draw attention to the case of Edward T. Kendrick, a Chattanooga man convicted in the mid-1990s of killing his wife and sentenced to life in prison.
Kendrick is seeking a new trial. After multiple appeals, many lawyers and a lot of filing legal documents on his own, Kendrick has a hearing scheduled in Hamilton County Criminal Court on Monday.
In March 1994, police found Lisa A. Kendrick dead at the BP Oil Store on Lee Highway where she worked. Police said that Kendrick came to the store and ordered his wife outside, according to newspaper archives.
“Then, Kendrick ‘pulled a rifle out of the vehicle, pointed it at the center of her chest [and] pulled the trigger,'” according to an archived news story.
The facts seem damning, Heatherly admits. When he met Kendrick in 1998 while working in prison ministry, the man didn’t strike him as a killer, Heatherly said. In fact, Kendrick didn’t tell him the story of his crime for years.
In the upcoming hearing, a witness from Utah to testify as to whether what Kendrick has said could be true – that the Remington Model 7400 .30-06 rifle could have “just went off,” Heatherly said.
He cited an archived newspaper story reporting that four hours after Kendrick’s 1994 arrest, the same rifle went off and a bullet struck a Chattanooga police officer in the foot.
Police inspector Steve Miller said at the time that the gun went off because “Kendrick threw it from his vehicle while fleeing the scene.”
The article states that Kendrick drove from the store to Lovell Field, threw out the rifle and called police to report the shooting.
Assistant District Attorney Neal Pinkston would not comment Wednesday except to say the case is scheduled for a hearing Monday.