Crimes Below the Belt: Penile Removal and Castration
Wayne DuMond
Wayne DuMond, a decorated Vietnam veteran, handyman and father of six, was convicted in August 1985 of the rape of a 17-year-old cheerleader from Forrest City, Arkansas. The girl was the daughter of a prominent Arkansas mortician and a distant cousin of former president Bill Clinton.
On March 7, 1985, while free on bond awaiting trial, DuMond was savagely attacked. Matt Stearns of The Kansas City Star stated in a June 2001 article that two masked men broke into his Forrest City house, "armed with a handgun, a razor blade and fishing wire." They "hogtied him and forced him to perform oral sex on one of them" and then "castrated him with the fishing wire and the razor blade," it was further reported.
DuMond's two sons found him not long after. He had lost an enormous amount of blood and was barely alive when he was rushed to the hospital. However, he managed to survive the attack.
DuMond claimed that the crime was committed out of revenge. Yet if it were, it was not clear if it was revenge for the rape of the teenage cheerleader or for something else. Steve Dunleavy suggested in a 1996 New York Post article that a local crooked sheriff, Coolidge Conlee, who ran an illegal car-theft ring and was later convicted of extortion, racketeering and drug dealing, might have been behind the castration because DuMond threatened to expose him.
Dunleavy said that the two men acted on Conlee's orders. However, the claims have remained unsubstantiated. Interestingly, neither of the men who crudely castrated DuMond was arrested, even though one later confessed to a state police officer, Dunleavy further claimed.
According to a Ward Harkavy article in The Village Voice, not long after the violent castration, Conlee went to DuMond's home, scooped up his testicles from the scene and put them in a fruit jar filled with formaldehyde to preserve them. It was further reported that Conlee then proudly displayed the jar with the testicles in them on his desk with the warning "that's what happens to people who fool around in my county." Conlee later flushed the testicles down the toilet.
DuMond later filed suit in a St. Francis County federal court against Conlee for humiliating him by displaying his testicles, Ward Harkavy reported in The Village Voice. DuMond won and was awarded $110,000. He wouldn't be so lucky at his next trial.
After DuMond physically recovered from his injuries he finally attended his rape trial. Even though DNA evidence recovered from the crime failed to link DuMond to the rape, the victim was able to positively identify him as her attacker. The victim's testimony was enough for the jury who later found him guilty of rape and sentenced him to life plus 20 years in prison.
In 1992, former Lieutenant Governor Jim Guy Tucker reduced DuMond's sentence to 39 years, which made him eligible for parole, David Lieb said in an AP Online article. In 1996, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee planned to release DuMond from prison based on a lack of sufficient DNA evidence related to the rape investigation. However, he "abandoned his plan" after a public outcry and denied DuMond clemency, Stearns said. In 1999, DuMond was released from prison on parole but his freedom was short-lived.
In January 2004, DuMond was sentenced again to life in prison for the 2000 murder of Carol Sue Shields, 39. Shields was found bound and suffocated "on the bed in the apartment of a man with whom she had been having an affair," Dana Fields said in an AP Online article. DNA evidence, which was found under the victim's nails, linked DuMond to the crime. Aside from the 1985 rape conviction, DuMond had also been previously arrested for sexual assaults in 1972, 1973 and in 1976.