It is almost Judgment Day for Roger Keith Coleman, and in this gritty Southwest Virginia coal town, the scales of justice are wobbling.

Scheduled for a May 20 rendezvous with the electric chair, Coleman is getting national attention as a possibly innocent man whose hope of release has been hamstrung by the ruling of an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

James McCloskey, a former seminarian renowned for rescuing wrongfully convicted inmates, is combing this rugged terrain for evidence that might clear Coleman of the gruesome rape-murder of which he was convicted a decade ago.

Already, two people have come forward saying another man has admitted a role in killing Wanda Faye McCoy.

But others - the victim's family, former prosecutors, and a woman Coleman was convicted of attempting to rape - say the case really illustrates the extraordinary lengths to which society will go to stall an execution.

After all, 11 years have passed since the death of McCoy, a shy and pretty 18-year-old whose body was discovered by her husband when he came home from work late one night in March 1981.

Elements of the case have been appealed three times to the U.S. Supreme Court. And a recent genetic test - requested, ironically, by Coleman's attorneys - has by one interpretation narrowed the group of potential killers to 2 percent of the population. Coleman is in that group.

"Nobody wants to see an innocent man hurt," said Pat Hatfield, who is director of the Grundy library and once had a bizarre run-in with a man she identified as Coleman. "But we don't think he's innocent."

Countering that belief are Coleman's defenders, including McCloskey and Kathleen Behan, an attorney in one of the nation's blue-chip law firms, Arnold & Porter of Washington. They have mounted a massive public relations campaign in Coleman's behalf, vigorously assaulting forensic evidence that points to Coleman's guilt and taking the extraordinary step of publicly naming the person they contend committed the crime.

By advertising in the local newspaper, the pair ferreted out a woman who signed an affidavit alleging that the same man - a former neighbor of McCoy's - confessed the killing to her. They also claim to have found an anonymous witness who says that once at a party the man admitted involvement in the killing.

In the sort of heart-thumping twist that makes this a tale worthy of a mystery novel, the woman who signed the affidavit - 23-year-old Teresa Horn - turned up dead last month. A day earlier, she had given her first interview about the case to Horn Roanoke's WDBJ-TV Channel 7.

A preliminary autopsy listed a drug overdose as the cause of death, but Horn's family is suspicious.

According to Behan, the other informant is refusing to go public because he fears for his safety.

The story is so spellbinding that "I wish I weren't teaching. I'd be up there writing about it," said Lee Smith, a Grundy native and prize-winning author whose books are set in the region. She has followed the case from its inception.

In a town of 1,300, isolated by Appalachian winters and roads that still follow natural creekbeds and mountain fissures, "something like this really affects everyone," Smith said.

Unquestionably, the death of Wanda Faye McCoy was a riveting community event.

There have been other murders in the hamlet in recent decades, but none that so blatantly assaulted Grundy's image of itself as a haven from the outside world. Some residents date the time when they began locking their doors to McCoy's death. He was a pallbearer

Brad McCoy married Wanda Faye when she was 16. McCoy, who worked the evening shift for a coal company, found her body just after 11 when he returned to their white frame house on Slate Creek at the edge of town. Her throat had been slashed. She had been raped, stabbed twice and left in their bedroom. The body was still warm.

Roger Coleman, then married to one of Wanda Faye's seven sisters, was a pallbearer at the funeral. Five weeks later, he was under arrest for the crime.

Then 22, dark-haired and compactly built, Coleman had grown up in circumstances that were neither idyllic nor necessarily scarring.

Coleman's father was in the Army, and when his parents divorced early in his life, he was brought back to Grundy to live with his paternal grandparents. Prosecutors suggest Coleman may deeply resent women because he was abandoned by his mother, but Coleman rejects that claim.

On a waitress' salary, his mother "simply could not afford to raise me. . . . She did what was best for me," said Coleman as he sat - hands chained - in a room at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center last week. He and his mother, who was to visit later that day, were regularly in touch throughout his youth, he said.

Coleman recalled fishing and hunting in the mountains, playing junior varsity basketball through high school and developing a fondness for science fiction novels.

"I was pretty much a loner," he said. Even so, "I had a really good life."

Any bliss was marred by at least one episode, however. When he was in about the eighth grade, Coleman was convicted of making two obscene telephone calls and was given a three-year suspended sentence. The charge was minor compared with what awaited him a few years later. Evidence was enough

In 1977, a schoolteacher and daughter of an ex-mayor accused Coleman, then 18, of entering her home on false pretenses, forcing her at gunpoint to tie up her 6-year-old daughter, and attempting to rape her. She escaped. Coleman denied the charge, but was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. He served 18 months.

Knowledge of that case helped point investigators toward Coleman after McCoy's death. The evidence they assembled was circumstantial, but it was enough to convince a jury.

According to trial testimony:

Coleman was one of the few men McCoy trusted enough to let in the house - and there was no sign of forced entry.

Coleman was known to have been in the vicinity on the evening of the murder.

Three small spots of type O blood - found in about half the population, including Wanda Faye - were on the leg of his jeans.

Two pubic hairs found on her body were consistent with Coleman's, although they could not be definitely linked to him.

There was a bit of blood on his pocketknife, although not enough for analysis.

The semen taken from her body came from a person with type B blood, occurring in about 10 percent of the population, including Coleman.

In addition, a jailhouse informant testified that Coleman, while in custody, had acknowledged raping Wanda Faye and being present at her murder.

Coleman claimed innocence, and his attorneys set about the standard round of appeals.

The first appeal, based on the merits of the case, was rejected by the Virginia Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a hearing. Next came a habeas corpus petition, highlighting constitutional questions. Coleman lost at the local level and then was tripped by a technicality when he went back to the state Supreme Court.

Because his attorneys filed a notice of appeal one day late, the state court refused to hear the challenge. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to make the state court hear it.

In a third stage, the habeas corpus petition was submitted to U.S. District Court. Judge Glen Williams of Abingdon ruled against Coleman both on the merits of the case and on the technicality. Because of the late filing, Williams said, Coleman had not exhausted his state appeals and was not entitled to a federal court hearing.

In a far-reaching decision, reflecting the justices' irritation with lengthy court delays in capital murder cases, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. Clemency or else

Back in state court last fall, Coleman's attorneys argued that new evidence - including Teresa Horn's allegation that the murder had been confessed to by someone else - demanded a rehearing. But attorneys for the state said a case cannot be reopened in Virginia because of new information, unless the facts were illegally withheld at the first trial. Gubernatorial clemency is the only state remedy, they said.

The local judge agreed, and the Virginia Supreme Court rejected the appeal last week.

That chain of events prompted a complaint from Behan, Coleman's attorney: "We've all heard of those people who get off because of a technicality. Well, Roger's going to be electrocuted because of a technicality."

The evidence that Coleman's attorneys would like reconsidered is part new and part old.

Many of the questions focus on whether Coleman had enough time to commit the crime. By the state's theory, at 10:20 p.m. Coleman picked up a tape he'd lent to a woman at a trailer park about four miles from McCoy's home. Prosecutors say he then drove to McCoy's neighborhood, parked, waded through a creek, entered the home, raped and murdered her, returned to his car, drove to a miners' bathhouse in town, showered, changed, and was home by about 11:30.

The defense argues that Coleman was with a friend until about 10:30 and that a time card punched by the friend supports the claim. It would have been impossible for him to drive to the trailer park, rape and kill McCoy, clean up and get home by 11:05 p.m., the time his grandmother testified he returned, they say.

And there are a slew of other questions: Why, if Coleman's 3-inch pocketknife was used to slash McCoy's jugular, was there no blood on its inner-workings? Why was no coal dust from Coleman's clothes found on her body? Why, if McCoy had waded in a creek, was there no sign of water in the house? Genetic test backfires

So convinced were Coleman's attorneys of his innocence that they fought the state in court and won the right to have a recently developed genetic test conducted on the semen taken from McCoy's body.

But the resulting report, returned in November 1990, was a surprise. Testing a specific gene, DQa, the forensic scientist found three alleles - genetic markers - identified by the numbers 1.3, 2, and 4.

"The DQa type of the primary sperm donor was determined to be type 1.3, 2," wrote Dr. Edward Blake of Forensic Science Associates in Richmond, Calif. The type occurs in roughly 2 percent of the population, he said, including Coleman.

The results were initially unsettling, acknowledged McCloskey, Coleman's other attorney, who is credited nationally with helping to free a dozen convicted rapists and murderers.

Coleman's defenders quickly set about trying to discredit Blake's interpretation of the results and focusing on the extra, No. 4 allele. Its presence, they said, confirmed that two people participated in the murder-rape.

Prosecution attorneys counter that it came from McCoy's husband, who testified that he had sex with his wife two nights before the murder and whose DQa test showed a No. 4 allele.

The defense also produced Dr. Bruce Kovacs, a research scientist in medical genetics at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif. Kovacs disputes Blake's conclusion that because the number 1.3 and 2 alleles turned up in equal intensity, they can be paired.

"That's never been substantiated scientifically," Kovacs said. He has seen alleles from a single individual show up in differing intensities in the test, he said.

Blake declined an interview request. They believe he's guilty

Meanwhile in Grundy, the debate over Coleman is as much about his capacity for a crime so awful as about such intricacies of evidence.

The most chilling assessment comes from library Director Pat Hatfield and Jean Gilbert, a clerk-typist there. On Jan. 12, 1981, two months before McCoy's murder, Hatfield and Gilbert were alone at the library just before its 8 p.m. closing.

A man, openly masturbating, walked through the door, approached the desk, ejaculated, turned and left. "I've tackled big, rough men in high school," said Hatfield, a former teacher. "But there was a look of hatred in his face that scared me to death."

Both amateur artists, the women drew a composite sketch of the man, noting the slope of his shoulders, the wolfish line of his nose. About a week later, independently, they picked Coleman out of a basketball team picture in a high school annual.

Coleman was indicted in the incident, but the case never came to trial. Former prosecutor Mickey McGlothlin says it was because the murder-rape trial took precedence; Coleman says it was because he was working that night and could not have been at the library.

He also suggests that a local man of similar appearance was the true culprit. However, police rounded up that man on the evening of the episode. It wasn't him, both women said.

"There are a few of us alive who are witnesses to his perversion," said Hatfield last week. "We need to be pretty vocal. It's not mistaken identity."

But Sonya Vandyke, who works at a fast-food restaurant and is married to one of Coleman's former buddies, said she fears too few people know the Coleman she remembers. "He was a very nice individual, helpful, a good friend."

Before her marriage, when she was living alone outside Grundy, Coleman often came by to visit, occasionally late at night, she said. Had he been looking for someone to murder, it was a perfect opportunity. "I could have been dead two days and no one would have missed me," she said.