Man faces prison term decades after conviction

— Chris Zulpo almost got away.

After his 1987 conviction for kidnapping, he spent two decades traveling, riding Harleys, working and avoiding his 20-year prison term.

An intertwined and indecipherable mix of mistakes, strokes of luck and Zulpo’s own resolve to stay out of jail allowed him to remain free.

It was only after a recent chance encounter with lawmen that Zulpo found himself behind bars and finally facing justice for holding a man captive and torturing him.

Now 52, tattooed and haggard, Zulpo is wondering whether there’s a legal way to dodge his sentence.

“I considered this paid and done,” he said at the Saline County jail, where’s he’s awaiting transfer to prison.

The case was unusual from the start.

A young man was found tied up and filthy on a rural Saline County property with a sign over his head that read “thief.”

Marlin Resinger III, 20, had gone to Zulpo’s remote property the morning of Oct. 14, 1986, to return a stolen gun.

He ended up facing the wrath of a man who vowedto teach him a lesson.

Resinger was hogtied, stripped naked, strung up in a tree, burned on the butt with a hot poker and forced at gunpoint into a sewage pond, where he was shot at when he came up for air, according to the original investigative file.

“I branded him on his ass,” Zulpo told a reporter smugly.

At one point, Zulpo tied rope around Resinger’s genitals and tortured him until he screamed and cried, witnesses told police.

When an investigator tried to get Resinger to testify, he refused.

Jeff Ramsey, a former Saline County detective, recalled Resinger saying, “I ain’t going to testify against him.”

“He done that to me last time, he’ll kill me next time,” Ramsey recalled Resinger saying in a Memphis motel room before the trial.

As promised, Resinger didn’t show up.

The judge proceeded anyway.

A jury convicted Zulpo of kidnapping. He appealed and was allowed post an appeal bond.

It wouldn’t be the last time he would be set free.

BOND, AGAIN

Zulpo’s conviction was upheld, and he was sent toprison at the Cummins Unit in Grady.

He didn’t stay long.

Records show he spent less than four months in prison before he was sent back to Saline County, where his newly hired defense attorneys planned another kind of appeal.

Attorneys Dan Harmon, James Cluette and Richard Madison argued that Zulpo’s trial lawyer should have tried to make Resinger testify.

The trial, they said in court papers, was “a farce and mockery of justice that should shock the conscience of the Court.”

The lawyers also asked that Zulpo be allowed to post bond while the new appeal was considered.

John Cole, the judge who presided over the case, agreed to set bond for the felon.

Lawyers and judges said inrecent interviews that granting bail after a convict has been committed to prison and after losing a direct appeal is rare. They couldn’t recall another case like Zulpo’s.

Cole said recently that he doesn’t remember why he would have allowed him to go free.

“I just know it happened,” said Cole, who is retired but still sits as a special judge.

After Zulpo made his $50,000 bond, Cole changed his mind. He signed an order saying the court had no authority to release Zulpo and revoked bail.

By then, it was too late.

Zulpo wasn’t about to turn himself in.

“I said, ‘Hell no,’” he said, recalling telling attorney Harmon he wasn’t giving himself up.

SYSTEM ‘VINDICATED’

Zulpo said he never considered himself on the run.

At first, he said, he lay low at a neighbor’s house.

“After a time, I went about my business,” he said.

That included returning to the property where police originally arrested him. He said he lived there until 1997, and no one ever went to get him.

Over the years, he said, he rode motorcycles through Texas and California, visited a dying uncle in Washington state, helped raise a girlfriend’s two children, worked as a welder, and tried to stayout of more trouble.

Meanwhile, the state tried to collect on his $50,000 bond. But the Arkansas Court of Appeals ruled that the bond was illegal, meaning authorities couldn’t get the money from the bail-bond company or force bondsmen to hunt down Zulpo.

“We couldn’t win” said Gary Arnold, who inherited the Zulpo case when he took office as prosecutor in 1989. “They don’t have to pay or go find him.”

Records show a bench warrant for Zulpo was issued Oct. 16, 1989, although it’s unclear when it was first entered into state and federal databases. A stamp on the warrant indicates it was entered in 2004 - 15 years later.

That was after, Zulpo said, he was stopped by an officer in Kansas during a 2003 motorcycle ride. His bathrobeclad girlfriend on the back raised an officer’s suspicions, he said.

But Zulpo was allowed to drive off into the night.

His next run-in with the law wasn’t so easy.

When a Pulaski County sheriff’s deputy responded to a noise disturbance at Zulpo’s Prothro Junction-area house Nov. 4, he saw the 1989 bench warrant. And he took Zulpo to jail.

“I feel a bit like the system’s been vindicated because we did get him, and he is going to serve his sentence, and he ought to,” said Arnold, who is now a Saline County circuit judge.

Cluette, a Little Rock attorney who was one of Zulpo’s defense lawyers in 1989, said he recalls little about the case. Madison, now a public defender in Saline County, said the same.

Harmon, who served a federal prison term for racketeering, extortion and other charges for crimes committed while prosecutor in Benton in the 1990s, didn’t return messages left on a cell phone.

Parker Jones, one of Zulpo’s new attorneys, said he is exploring Zulpo’s options. He said he could pursue the ineffective-counsel appeal that was never resolved or a constitutional claim about timely punishment.

“Not only are you supposed to have a speedy trial; you are also supposed to have speedy punishment,” Jones said.

If his sentence stands, Zulpo becomes eligible for parole in 2019. He acknowledges he could have long ago finished his sentence if he’d turned himself in.

“I’ve thought about that several times,” he said. “I could be free.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/26/2009

Upcoming Events