Hartford — Prosecutors overcame a number of legal hurdles before they convinced a New London jury five years ago that George M. Leniart was guilty of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering a Montville teenager on May 29, 1996.

For starters, the state's attorneys brought charges against Leniart, a convicted sex offender from Montville, even though the body of 15-year-old April Dawn Pennington was never found.

She made up her bed to look as if she was in it, then climbed out a window and disappeared forever.

Leniart, now 49, would remain locked up for the remainder of his natural life if the conviction holds up on appeal. 

His attorney, Lauren Weisfeld, had a lot to work with — including the issue of "corpus delecti" — when she argued before three members of the state Appellate Court on Thursday that there is insufficient evidence in a case that "is as serious as a case gets."

"There is no body, no trace of a body, no witness of a homicide," said Weisfeld, chief of legal services for the Office of the Chief Public Defender. 

Weisfield attacked the state's use of jailhouse informants who told the jury that Leniart confessed the murder to them and the inclusion of testimony from a woman who had been raped by Leniart during the same time period.

While the trial judge, Barbara Bailey Jongbloed ruled that the sexual assault victim could testify because of similarities with the two cases, she did not allow defense attorney Norman A. Pattis to call an expert witness on jailhouse informants, which is another prong of the appeal.

Appellate judges Michael R. Sheldon, Eliot D. Prescott and Joseph P. Flynn came to the bench with questions for Weisfield and New London prosecutor Stephen M. Carney, who had tried the case in 2010 with now-retired prosecutor John P. Gravelec-Pannone.

Sheldon asked Carney if he could cite a case where a disappearance had served as sufficient evidence of a victim's death.

Carney cited the case of Miguel Estrella, a Meriden drug dealer who was convicted based on testimony from an accomplice who said he helped Estrella dismember the body of victim Juan Disla and burn it with acid. 

"It is not the state of our law that there needs to be a body or forensic evidence," Carney said.

Weisfield argued that investigators had found traces of evidence in other cases where no body was present.

She cited, among others, the case of Richard Crafts, who was convicted of killing his wife, Helle Crafts, in 1986. Crafts had put the victim's remains through a wood chipper, but investigators recovered strands of hair, skin and a fingernail.

"We also have people who say they saw this girl (April Pennington) years later," Weisfield said.

The state police interviewed a man who claimed he saw the teen in a video store in Virginia three years after her disappearance, but discounted his report after learning he had suffered a traumatic brain injury and memory loss.

Leniart's attorneys also are appealing a decision not to allow the jury to view a recording of a state police interview with Patrick J. "PJ" Allain, a classmate of Pennington who was a key witness for the state.

The recording was of a "pre-test" of Allain taken prior to a polygraph exam. Polygraphs are inadmissible in court, but Leniart's attorneys say the "pre-test" portion, which the state objected to admitting as evidence, was wrongfully withheld from the jury tasked with assessing Allain's credibility.

At the trial, Allain testified that he and Leniart, who was 30 at the time, picked up the girl and brought her to a wooded area where both of them had sex with her.

He said Leniart told him he planned to kill April, and that the last time he saw her was when Leniart dropped him off near his home and drove away with her.

Allain said the next day, Leniart told him he had dragged April into the woods, choked her and disposed of her body in a lobster pot.

Allan, who was serving a 10-year prison sentence for his own sexual assault conviction when he testified at Leniart's trial, later received a four-year sentence reduction for his cooperation with the state.

Weisfield said she would be filing a supplemental brief on the insufficiency of the state's evidence in the kidnapping portion of the case. The appeals court will render a decision some time after that. 

k.florin@theday.com

Twitter: @KFLORIN