Clark to resume testimony today

By Kathy Mellott
The Tribune-Democrat

BEDFORD June 27, 2008 01:19 pm

— Murder defendant Joseph W. Clark will be back on the witness stand today as his trial enters its final days.
Bedford County District attorney William Higgins will resume his cross examination of the 49-year-old former iron worker who is charged in the April 2000 kidnapping and murder of Holly Christine Notestine.
Clark spent all day Thursday on the stand with much of the time responding to questions from his defense lawyer Thomas Crawford.
He talked at length of his job as an iron worker, the loss of his tools in the fire which destroyed his car six hours after Notestine went missing and his life on the farm, a homestead owned by his widowed mother.
His fiancé Joan Baum was in Baltimore at the time living in a house she owned which was also occupied by a man she once lived with who refused to move out, according to Clark’s testimony.
Clark again denied that he’d been to the Grubb farm the day Notestine went missing and that he kidnapped and killed the victim.
He talked of spending the day cutting brush and smoking marijuana.
He went to Hancock, Md., to see the C&O Canal in the later afternoon where he started drinking beer and smoking a couple more joints.
As evening approached, he headed home and was back at the farm before 9 p.m., he testified.
He talked at length of the state police presence at the car fire at his home, estimating at one time that there were 20 cruisers on his mother’s property and 50 troopers – what he termed a “wall of troopers.”
He said that at the time he had no idea he was under suspicion for what was then known only to be the kidnapping of Notestine.
Clark was at time unresponsive and rambling as Bedford County District Attorney William Higgins took over cross examination late in the day Thursday.
He grew angry when questioned about a letter he sent to Baum in early April, 2000 regarding his emotional state.
“I’m so (expletive) lonely, I could scream,” Higgins read from the letter.
Clark said he wrote that so Baum would know how much he missed her and wanted her.