Manville man denied alibi appeal in 2003 murder conviction

Defendant allegedly dragged the victim's body onto the railroad track to make her death appear to be a suicide.

MANVILLE -- The latest appeal by Somerset County man convicted of killing a woman in 2003 and attempting to cover up the murder by leaving her body on railroad tracks to be run over by a train was rejected by a judge last week.

Left to right: Carol Bodo, mother of victim Jacqueline Bodo; former Somerset County Assistant Prosecutor Timothy Van Hise and Robert Carman Jr. listen to judge at Carman's 2007 sentence in Somerset County Superior Court. (File photo)  

Robert Raymond Carman Jr., 47, of Manville, is currently serving 35 years to life for beating Jacqueline Bodo, 23, also of Manville, to death with a wooden beam in the borough. He was convicted in 2007.

Carman was granted a hearing in Superior Court under the state's post-conviction relief rules to argue that his lawyer should have called a witness who could have provided an alibi for the time of the killing.

Superior Court Judge Bruce A. Jones filed an order last week ruling against Carman after a hearing in August.

"The defendant has not shown that there was ineffective assistant of counsel or that anything his trial attorney attorney did or did not do caused him prejudice," the judge wrote.

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Carman had argued that his mother Joan Carman told his lawyer's investigator in December 2004 that she saw her son sleeping in his bed at about 6 a.m. on Oct. 12, 2003, at roughly the same time Bodo's body was run over by the train.

Carman argued that his attorney erred by not calling his mother to testify at trial.

Judge Jones, however, found that Joan Carman was "missing and incommunicado" at the time of the trial" and her testimony at the August hearing was "vague and inconsistent."

That would have "persuaded even the most inept criminal defense attorney not to call her as a witness at the trial," the judge wrote in his ruling.