Hartland murder case inches to trial amid discovery disputes, competency issues

SKOWHEGAN — Attorneys for a 70-year-old Garland woman charged in the shooting death of her 78-year-old sister in Hartland were in court Monday asking a judge to further sanction prosecutors for failing to hand over information when they were required to.

The mental competency of Bonnie Coombs, meanwhile, has also been called into question. At the request of her court-appointed attorneys, James Howaniec and Mitchel Roberge, Superior Court Chief Justice Robert E. Mullen last week ordered an evaluation of Coombs.

Coombs’ mental state has “declined significantly” during her 17 months in the Somerset County Jail, wrote Howaniec in a court filing. Unless she is deemed incompetent, the evaluation should not delay an upcoming trial, he wrote. A report is due to the court by the end of October.

The competency determination and a slew of evidentiary issues raised by Coombs’ attorneys need to be straightened out before trial, which was recently postponed. It is now set to start the first week of December at the Somerset County Superior Court.

Coombs is charged with one count of intentional or knowing murder in connection with the April 9, 2025, death of her sister, Velma Withee.

Three days after Withee is believed to have died, Withee’s son and daughter-in-law discovered her body between a pickup truck and camper trailer outside her home at 456 Canaan Road in Hartland, police affidavits state. Police and prosecutors believe Coombs was the last person to see Withee alive, although they have not publicly pointed to a clear motive for the killing.

The two were seen together on Withee’s route for her trash collection business April 9, 2025, and the clothes she was wearing that day matched the clothes on her dead body. Investigators found blood and a small caliber bullet in Coombs’ vehicle that matched Withee’s DNA profile.

Police characterized voicemails that Coombs left for Withee after her death as attempts to make it seem like she was unaware of what happened. Police also believe Coombs knew more than she should have about the circumstances of Withee’s death before that information became public.

Coombs was arrested in June 2025, two months after her sister’s death. She pleaded not guilty and has been held in jail without bail since.

The trial had been set to begin this week, but Mullen delayed it in August as part of an order sanctioning prosecutors from the Office of the Maine Attorney General for failing to provide certain information to the defense in a timely fashion.

The judge ruled that prosecutors did not disclose the existence of a jailhouse informant to Coombs’ lawyers for months and excluded evidence from that person from being introduced at trial. He also ruled a Maine State Police detective’s analysis of cell tower and cellphone records would be excluded from trial, unless Coombs takes the witness stand.

Among the issues raised at Monday morning’s hearing was whether prosecutors can call another state police detective — not acting as an expert witness — to testify about the cell tower data.

Roberge argued that would basically be a backdoor maneuver to get around the sanction Mullen imposed and said the data should not be introduced at trial whatsoever.

Assistant Attorney General Kate Bozeman said the other detective would be testifying in amore limited way. And, she said, the records prosecutors would present would show, without any expert knowledge or training, just that Coombs’ phone pinged a tower in Hartland the morning after Withee’s death.

In another dispute over the exchange of discovery, Coombs’ lawyers asked Mullen on Monday to prohibit prosecutors from bringing in any expert testimony about an analysis regarding gunshot residue in Coombs vehicle. In the SUV, detectives found Withee’s blood and one of two bullets they believe killed her.

But Howaniec said prosecutors and police did not test samples collected in June 2025 for gunshot residue until nearly a year later, only after he hired his own expert to provide an opinion.

Testing subsequently requested by the state and conducted in Pennsylvania found only one unknown particle in the samples from the vehicle. Prosecutors provided him with a report in May.

If Coombs killed Withee in the vehicle, there should be millions of particles of gunshot residue, Howaniec said. He and Roberge want to point out that apparent discrepancy as they challenge prosecutors’ theory that Coombs shot her sister in the car, where the blood and bullet were found.

“We’re going to be raising questions about the forensic evidence in this case, the forensic analysis,” Howaniec said. “We’re going to be raising questions about possible contamination of the crime scene … but also the analysis of the interior of that Ford Explorer.”

Bozeman said that even though investigators did the testing after the discovery deadline this spring, prosecutors still should get a chance to offer a response to the expert Coombs’ attorneys want to call to testify. And Coombs was not unfairly prejudiced by any delay because her attorneys already have an expert lined up to testify, Bozeman said.

Mullen did not make rulings Monday on either the cellphone data or the gunshot residue experts, along with two other requests from Howaniec and Roberge to exclude evidence.

At the close of the two-hour hearing, he called them “interesting issues” and asked the lawyers to provide him with relevant case law by the end of the week.

Maine prosecutors’ handling of discovery is not a new issue but has come into focus recently. In a Supreme Judicial Court decision last month on a criminal appeal, Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill put prosecutors on notice, expressing her “increasing alarm at the frequency with which the state of Maine is violating its simplest discovery obligations.”

Roberge cited Stanfill’s statement in a court filing about the gunshot residue report.

“We’ve gotten so much late discovery in this case,” Howaniec said.