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State will not reopen Beverly Hills Supper Club investigation Extensive review finds no basis, evidence to reopen 30-year-old case From Gov. Beshear's Communications Office FRANKFORT, Ky. - Following a more than three-month review, Gov. Steve Beshear today announced that there is no basis to reopen the investigation into the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. "Three of our state's leading attorneys, who have extensive knowledge of this case, along with a state Inspector General, have spent hours interviewing people and reviewing thousands of pages of documents," Gov. Beshear said. "Their finding is clear that there is no substantive evidence to support reopening this investigation." Gov. Beshear said he sympathizes with members of an organization--the Beverly Hills Survivors of Justice--who have asked for a new investigation, but "the facts simply don't warrant such a move." "These men and women have been through a great deal and this tragedy has impacted an untold number of lives. I believe we owed them the time it took to look with fresh eyes at this case," the governor said. "But all the facts and all the materials point to the conclusion that a horrible accident--not a crime of arson--occurred in Northern Kentucky more than 30 years ago." In October 2008, after members of the organization met with senior administration officials, Gov. Beshear ordered the review of the original investigation. The 1977 tragedy was one of the nation's worst fire disasters, resulting in the deaths of 165 people. The attorneys -- Cecil Dunn of Lexington, former University of Kentucky (UK) College of Law Dean Bob Lawson, and UK law professor William Fortune -- volunteered to lead the review. Dunn was the special prosecutor in the Beverly Hills case. He reviewed the actions of a Campbell County grand jury that was impaneled. Lawson wrote what is considered the definitive legal account of the tragedy. Lawson and Fortune--both of whom assisted Mr. Dunn in his review of the Beverly Hills case--are considered two of the leading criminal law professors in the state and the nation. In addition, the attorneys were assisted in their review by Inspector General Deedra Benthall and investigators Scott Hatfield and Cristi Violet of the Office of Inspector General for Kentucky's Public Protection, Labor and Energy and Environment cabinets. Their report was formally submitted to Gov. Beshear this week. Representatives of the review team also discussed their findings with the governor. Specifically, over the last few months, the review team met with the members of the Survivors Group, reviewed documents the organization had gathered in support of their case, conducted interviews, examined depositions from extensive civil lawsuits that occurred in the aftermath of the tragedy, as well as the Kentucky State Police's investigatory files. The review cited the fact that three extensive investigations were conducted into the fire--by the Kentucky State Police and investigators from the National Fire Protection Association, a grand jury in Campbell County and a special prosecutor for the state--and none of those found "a single shred of evidence indicating that the fire resulted from acts of arson." In fact, the review team's report states that the "tragedy entered the court system to be subjected to unbelievable scrutiny" all centered around one question: what caused the fire? Every piece of evidence, the review team concluded, pointed then and now to an accident. "With full conviction and no hesitation," the report concludes, "the Review Team and the Office of the Inspector General have concluded that the information (from the Survivors Group) falls many miles short of the kind of proof that would be needed to justify ... a reinvestigation of a tragedy that was carefully and competently investigated and reinvestigated three decades ago."
This story was posted on 2009-03-15 08:58:28
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