At about 8:45 a.m. on March 6, 1993, George Harmon found the body of 29-year-old Anthony Cannon “laying up beside the building” in the small town of Snow Hill, Maryland, on the state’s Eastern Shore.
Cannon had been shot to death with a single bullet to the head. The contents of his wallet and other personal belongings were strewn around the area.
The Snow Hill Police Department investigated the murder with the assistance of the Maryland State Police. Betty Jane Blake told police that she and Cannon had come into town at about 8:45 p.m. to buy some beer and liquor. She said that she went to get the beer at a small market and café known to the locals as “Chicken Man,” and Cannon went into a nearby liquor store. She bought the beer and waited for Cannon. When he didn’t show, Blake walked over to the liquor store. The clerk told her that Cannon had just left. Blake said she returned to the car and found a bottle of Crown Royal but no note from Cannon.
Blake said she waited a while longer, then asked her cousins for a ride home. A few hours later, she saw Cannon’s car still parked where they had left it, and she called the police.
Maurice Blake said that he was “hanging out by Chicken Man” and saw Cannon, Clifton Waters, and another man standing on the corner. Blake said that at about 9 p.m., he went to relieve himself outside the store and heard a gunshot. He said he saw Waters come running up from the store. (Court records don’t say whether Maurice and Betty Jean Blake are related.)
March 5 was a Friday, and this section of Snow Hill was a popular gathering spot. The police interviewed numerous people who were in the area around the time that Betty Jean Blake lost contact with Cannon.
Douglass Haynie, who was 29 years old, went to the Snow Hill police station on March 10 to give a statement. At the time, Haynie was on probation from an armed robbery conviction and staying with a woman named Genniece Cropper, who lived about 17 miles south, just across the Virginia state line in the Horntown community.
Haynie said he had been in Snow Hill on the night of March 5, visiting with friends and hanging out near the liquor store and the chicken joint before eventually walking back to Cropper’s house. He denied any involvement in Cannon’s death.
The police went to interview Cropper on March 10. She gave them some of Haynie’s clothing as well as a .38 caliber Ruger revolver that she kept in a bag of cat food under the kitchen sink.
Officers with the Maryland State Police had been combing the area near the shooting to find the bullet that killed Cannon. On March 22, Trooper Frank Ford found a bullet in the grass, about 11 feet from where Cannon’s body had been found slumped against the wall of a janitorial business.
Joseph Kopera, a firearm examiner with the Maryland State Police, compared the bullet against test rounds fired from Cropper’s gun and said in a report that the revolver was the source of that bullet.
Haynie was arrested on April 30, 1993, and charged with first-degree premeditated murder, robbery, theft, assault, battery, and use of a handgun in the commission of a felony. Waters was also charged in Cannon’s death, but his charges were later dropped.
Haynes’s trial in Worcester County Circuit Court began on November 30, 1993.
Randall Coates, the state’s attorney for Worcester County, told the jury in his opening statement: “I will tell you right now that the state does not have a witness, and does not intend to produce a witness, that says they saw Mr. Haynie shoot Mr. Cannon. That doesn’t mean that nobody saw it. It simply means that we are not able to produce such a witness for you.”
Carolyn Mathers, Haynie’s attorney, said the state’s theory didn’t add up. There were no eyewitnesses and, other than Cannon’s scattered belongings, there was no evidence of a robbery, Mathers said. She said that the bullet found at the crime scene had been recovered more than two weeks after the shooting.
“The problem is that the state has determined and has charged Douglass Haynie and is now trying to make these pieces fit, and you will see these pieces being stretched and stretched and stretched, but they will still not fit,” she said.
During the trial, the state’s witnesses described the events of the evening of March 5. Several witnesses testified that they saw Haynie in the area, wearing a black jacket similar to clothing worn by a man seen running east just after the shooting. Other witnesses said that Haynie wasn’t wearing the jacket later in the evening, and it wasn’t clear how Haynie had been able to get back to Horntown in time to be there when Cropper arrived home at 12:30 a.m. from her job at the state prison.
The state’s theory of the forensic evidence was that Cannon had been next to the wall when he was shot at close range and that the bullet traveled through his head, hit the wall, and then ricocheted 11 feet to where it came to lay in the grass.
Robert Radnoti, a forensic chemist at the Maryland State Police Crime Laboratory, testified that he found trace residues of paint on the bullet consistent with the paint on the wall. He also said that a hole in the building had traces of antimony, an element often found in bullets.
Michael Marinaro, a serologist, testified that the bullet tested negative for the presence of blood. He testified that blood was detected on the barrel of Cropper’s gun. On cross-examination, he said that he was unable to determine the source of the blood.
Kopera testified about his toolmark report. At the time of the trial, he had been with the state police for two years and previously with the Baltimore Police Department for 22 years.
Kopera testified that he had mechanical engineering degrees from the University of Maryland and the Rochester Institute of Technology. He also said he had graduated from the FBI Academy in the fields of firearms identification, ballistics, gun powder residues, and primer residues.
Kopera explained his examination methods. He said: “Together on the microscope, looking at both of the bullets at once, we would match up the rifling or the striated marks to ascertain if the accidental marks, the stria, are there. And once they are matched, we can positively say that that bullet or both those bullets were fired from the same weapon.”
Later, he said: “The bullet had five land and groove impressions consistent with the revolver as to which it was fired from. Further microscopic examination of the bullet to a test shot from the revolver revealed that that bullet was indeed fired from that particular revolver.”
Kopera also testified about how the bullet came to rest in front of Cannon.
“Hitting an object after it had gone through two substances such as bone or a head would slow the bullet down to such a speed that it would not penetrate or go through the third object.” he said. “And if it hit on a perpendicular or almost perpendicular angle to that wall, the effect would be a rebound. It’s a physics law, law of physics. For every action there’s a reaction. As it’s hitting a wall it’s coming back forward if it does not have the force.”
Cropper testified that Haynie did not know where she kept her gun, which was fully loaded when the police took it from her home. (There was no testimony about where Cropper kept her ammunition.) Cropper’s cousin, who drove Haynie to Snow Hill on March 5, testified that he did not see Haynie with a weapon or trying to hide a weapon that night. Cropper also testified about how she had agreed to let Haynie stay with her in hopes of ending his addiction to crack cocaine.
Haynie did not testify. Mathers presented three witnesses. Maurice Blake, who also testified as a state’s witness, testified that he saw Waters running from the area around the time of the shot being fired and that Waters later tried to tell Blake that he was mistaken about what he saw. Blake also testified that he didn’t know Haynie or Cannon but didn’t see either man that night. Alexander Wise said he saw a man and a woman hanging out near Cannon’s car several hours after the shooting. Aaron Poulson testified that he saw Waters arguing with a man near the chicken joint. Poulson did not know the identity of the second man but said it could have been Cannon.
On December 3, 1993, the jury acquitted Haynie of premeditated murder but convicted him of felony murder, robbery, assault, battery, and use of a handgun in the commission of a felony. Based in part on Haynie’s previous robbery conviction, Judge Thomas Groton III sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, with a 20-year sentence, to be served consecutively, for the handgun conviction.
Haynie appealed, arguing that there was insufficient evidence to support his conviction, and that Judge Groton had erred in allowing Cropper to testify about Haynie’s drug addiction.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals affirmed his conviction on January 6, 1995. It said that Haynie had opened the door on Cropper’s testimony by not objecting to other testimony that he was trying to sell marijuana on March 5. The court also said there was sufficient evidence to support the conviction.
“We are satisfied that the multiple strands of circumstantial evidence we have recounted … were sufficient to support rational inferences that Ms. Cropper’s gun was the murder weapon and that appellant was the only person who both had access to that weapon and was present at the scene of the crime,” the court said.
During his career, Kopera would testify in hundreds of trials in Maryland and other states. In early 2007, a public defender in Maryland discovered inconsistencies in Kopera’s testimony about his resume. The attorney dug further and found out that Kopera had lied about his credentials. He had only attended college for a year and forged a transcript from the University of Maryland. After being confronted with this evidence, Kopera retired from the state police and then shot himself to death on March 1, 2007.
Seventeen years later, in 2024, Haynie filed a two-page pro se petition for a writ of actual innocence. His petition was reviewed by Erica Suter, then with the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law, who filed a more expansive, amended petition on April 1, 2025. The petition said that Haynie was innocent and that Kopera’s false testimony about his credentials undermined his credibility as a witness.
“Kopera testified that the bullet recovered from the crime scene on March 22 was fired by Genniece Cropper’s gun,” the petition said. “The exposure of a state’s witness as a liar whom the State had failed to vet would have undermined Kopera’s testimony in its entirety.”
Credential issues aside, the petition also said that Kopera wouldn’t have been able to testify with the same level of confidence he exhibited at Haynie’s trial. The Maryland Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that firearm examiners could not claim “without qualification” a “specific firearm as the source of a questioned bullet or cartridge case found at a crime scene.”
The petition said: “In Mr. Haynie’s case, after excising Kopera’s testimony, legally insufficient evidence remains to support his conviction. The remaining evidence is that Mr. Haynie was in the area of the crime around the time of the crime. Some witnesses testified to his changing his jacket at some point in the evening. One witness testified that he saw someone who could have been Mr. Haynie running from the area around the time of the crime.”
On May 29, 2025, Judge Beau Oglesby granted Haynie’s petition. The state vacated Haynie’s conviction and then dismissed the case. Haynie was released from prison that day. He filed a claim for state compensation in March 2026.
Kopera's misconduct also led to the exoneration of Ronnie Hunt Jr. in 2022 and Marando Warthen in 2023.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 06-21-2025
Last Update Date: 03-20-2026
