State v. Fryer

UHLENHOPP, Justice.

This appeal involves several issues which arose in a prosecution of four murder charges. The jury could find the following from the evidence.

On the night of November 17, 1973, Sandra Cheskey-, age 13, and four older teenage male companions, Roger Essem, Stewart and Dana Baade, and Michael Hadrath, went in a van to Gitchie Manitou Park in Lyon County, Iowa, where they smoked marijuana.

At that time, defendant James Ray Fryer, age 21, with an I.Q. of 85 according to a test several years before, was on work release from jail in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in connection with a…