William Fleming knew nothing about his final year of life.

His last conscious moment was at 3:10 a.m. Aug. 14, 1991, when Yul Barry crashed a rock down on his head.

Fleming, a 65-year-old St. Thomas taxi driver and former nightclub singer, suffered such extensive head injuries that he went into a coma immediately and never recovered.

Missing and tainted -- The Police Department's method of storing and supervising evidence leads to many blunders. The Inspector General found evidence piled haphazardly, unprotected from tampering and theft. The auditor took this picture in a truck trailer used as the evidence room on St. Croix after Hurricane Hugo hit. The police have a new place for evidence, but the problems continue. A prosecutor calls the evidence room 'a black hole into which evidence disappears and rarely returns.'

On the day he died, Nov. 17, 1992, police filed first-degree murder charges against Barry.

Barry, a 29-year-old with a string of arrests but no known convictions, admitted hitting Fleming with the rock. But he insisted he struck in self-defense because Fleming was attacking him with a knife in a dark Charlotte Amalie alley near the Labor Department.

Police and federal prosecutors didn't buy that. They believed Barry smashed Fleming's head in because Fleming resisted when Barry tried to rob him.

Fleming suffered a broken nose, a cut under his right eye and injuries to the front and back of his head.

Police investigators found a football-size rock they believed to be the murder weapon and a knife at the crime scene. They put both in the St. Thomas police evidence room.

Both disappeared.

When the case came to trial earlier this year, police couldn't produce either the rock or the knife.

The U.S. Attorney's office was forced to drop the murder charges against Barry.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nelson Jones handled the case. He says that without the murder weapon and the knife he had no choice.

The Barry case is not unique. Missing evidence has forced the dismissal of dozens of cases each year, including murder, rape and armed robbery, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors also complain that the Police Department rarely punishes the officers responsible for evidence room bungling, even though those screw-ups allow murderers, rapists and robbers to go free.

Sometimes missing evidence does resurface -- too late to be of use.

When Aubrey Joshua went on trial for armed bank robbery in January 1991, the U.S. Attorney's Office planned to use photographs of the scene of the Nov. 26, 1990, heist as evidence.

As usual, police investigators photographed the interior and exterior of the Red Hook branch of CoreStates First Pennsylvania Bank to present as evidence at trial. But at the time of Joshua's trial, two months after the robbery, prosecutors still had not received the pictures.

The police said they couldn't find them.

Prosecutors tried the case without the photographs. The jury deadlocked on the bank robbery charges but convicted Joshua on related weapons charges.

Because of his seven previous felony convictions, Joshua was sentenced to 15 years as a habitual offender. He had faced 50 years on the bank robbery and weapons charges.

Police did eventually deliver the pictures -- nearly 11 months after the trial. The officer who delivered the pictures simply told prosecutors he had stumbled across them while looking for other photographs.

Sgt. Liston Gumbs is the man in charge of the St. Thomas Forensics Division. It is his responsibility, say police brass, to supervise evidence room custodians.

He was directly implicated in at least one case where mishandled evidence let the suspects go free. He was never reprimanded or disciplined for his role in that case.

The Police Department's lack of care with evidence extends to mislabeling items taken from crime scenes, improperly handling them and misplacing them.

The Police Department's Forensics Division on St. Croix piled evidence, including firearms, into this abandoned truck in an open field behind the police headquarters building.

"If the evidence is not properly marked you may have a serious problem getting it admitted in court," says former Assistant Attorney General Valerie Collanton.

In a recent case, she says, a defense attorney succeeded in blocking the introduction of bullets as evidence because police did not put any identifying marks on the package when they placed it the evidence room. They had simply wrapped the bullets in plastic, unmarked, according to Collanton, who resigned in August from the Attorney General's Office and now works as a public defender.

"Naturally, the defense attorney told the court that there was no way for prosecutors to say with any degree of certainty which case the bullets were connected with," Collanton said. "This has created a real predicament for prosecutors."

Collanton learned that the hard way when she tried 19-year-old Timothy Greenaway for vehicular homicide. She was given the 2-year-old case just five days before trial, she says, and her most crucial piece of evidence was missing.

The police had sent pieces of the windshield from Greenaway's car and patches of the victim's shirt to the FBI for analysis. The FBI found that fiber samples on the windshield matched the shirt. But when trial time arrived, police could not produce the samples.

"Greenaway's case was that it wasn't his car that killed the victim," Collanton recalls. "The FBI results showed conclusively that it was his vehicle."

But when Collanton asked for the tested samples, police at first refused to go into the evidence room. They said that because sewage gases were seeping into it -- the result of a longstanding construction problem -- it was unhealthy for them to enter.

When FBI agents asked to be allowed to look for the samples themselves, police refused, Collanton says.

"They said the FBI agents weren't authorized to enter the room," she says. "Eventually when the agents were allowed in, they said the room was in such disarray that it was impossible to determine if the evidence was in there.

"They also found packages of evidence addressed to the FBI that were never sent."

At least one package contained blood samples in a murder case, a prosecutor says, which eventually had to be discarded because they had not been stored properly.

Collanton won the vehicular homicide case, based on testimony by FBI experts who had analyzed the missing evidence and on eyewitnesses' accounts. But she says the missing samples almost cost her the case.