Crime

State Attorney Scheiner Rejects Push to Reopen Crosley Green Case

Published on

By Robert W. Burns III
Central Florida orange grove at dusk evoking the 1989 Crosley Green murder case scene near Mims
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BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. State Attorney Will Scheiner has rejected a former Brevard prosecutor’s call to reopen the decades-old murder case of Crosley Green, telling The Space Coast Rocket that his office has no plans to revisit a conviction that prosecutors have examined more than a dozen times across a 33-year appeals fight.

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“I knew all the attorneys involved in prosecuting that case,” Scheiner said in a statement provided to the Rocket, naming Chris White, Bill Respess, and former State Attorneys Norm Wolfinger and Phil Archer. “None of them would have allowed their egos to keep an innocent man in prison. And neither would I.”

The statement is the office’s first public answer to a letter-writing campaign launched this month by Fritz VanVolkenburgh, a former Assistant State Attorney who mailed roughly 300 Floridians on June 2 urging them to pressure Scheiner’s office to reopen the case and grant Green an unconditional release. The Space Coast Rocket obtained a copy of that letter, which argues that “upon a thorough review, the State Attorney’s Office will determine that Crosley Green should be granted an unconditional release.”

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A Brief Tenure, Long After the Trial

VanVolkenburgh identifies himself in the letter as a former Assistant State Attorney. According to the State Attorney’s Office, he was employed as an Assistant State Attorney in Brevard County from October 30, 2006, until August 23, 2007, a span of less than 10 months and roughly 16 years after Green’s 1990 conviction. There is no indication he was involved in the original prosecution.

The Case That Won’t Close

Green, now 68, was convicted in 1990 of the first-degree murder of 22-year-old Charles “Chip” Flynn, who was shot in an orange grove near Mims in April 1989. The sole eyewitness, Flynn’s ex-girlfriend Kim Hallock, told investigators the couple had been abducted by a Black man and identified Green in a photo lineup. Green was sentenced to death and resentenced to life in prison in 2009 after the Florida Supreme Court ordered a new penalty phase.

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No physical evidence ever tied Green to the scene. No fingerprints belonging to Green were found on Flynn’s truck, and the three witnesses who testified that Green confessed, all of whom were facing criminal charges of their own, later recanted and said they had been pressured to testify, according to reporting by the CBS News program 48 Hours, which has covered the case for years. Hallock has never been charged with any crime in connection with Flynn’s death and has never been publicly identified by authorities as a suspect.

In 2018, U.S. District Judge Roy B. Dalton overturned Green’s conviction, finding that prosecutors had withheld notes documenting that the first two law enforcement officers on the scene told then-Assistant State Attorney Christopher White they believed Hallock, not Green, was the