Gene Lyons speaks, you listen (via Digby: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/rash-devious-incapable-of-admitting.html):

DuMond was the Arkansas celebrity inmate of the 1990s. Convicted of raping a Forrest City high school cheerleader at knife point in 1985, he became famous for two reasons.

First, somebody castrated him while he was free on bond awaiting trial. (Local investigators said they suspected drunken self-mutilation, not unknown among sex offenders.) Worse, the local sheriff exhibited DuMond’s testicles in a jar of formaldehyde, an Arkansas-gothic stunt triggering rumors of vigilante justice.

Second, DuMond’s victim, who’d recognized her attacker on the street weeks after the crime, was a distant cousin of Clinton. That excited the kinds of conspiracy nuts who circulated Clinton “death lists.” They portrayed DuMond as a victim of the Clinton machine’s satanic wrath. His innocence became an article of faith on the fruitcake right.

Huckabee came into office talking about pardoning DuMond, citing “serious questions as to the legitimacy of his guilt.” ,b>He did that without consulting the prosecutor, who described the case as one of the strongest he’d ever tried. If nothing else, what were the odds that the victim would have identified, purely by chance, a perp with an extensive rap sheet? DuMond’s criminal history included arrests for murder and assault as well as other allegations of rape. He’d beaten the murder rap by testifying against two accomplices he’d helped beat a soldier to death with a claw hammer. The rape cases never came to trial. Young Ashley Stevens’ courageous eyewitness testimony, however, sent him to the penitentiary. After Stevens went public in 1997, Huckabee relented somewhat. Instead of pardoning DuMond, he held an improper closed-door meeting with the state’s parole board, which subsequently reversed itself, paroling DuMond to Missouri. Huckabee claimed the board brought up DuMond; some board members insisted that he did. Huckabee wrote a “Dear Wayne” letter, stating, “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction into society to take place.”

In June 2001, DuMond was charged with the murder of a Kansas City area woman, exactly as some of us predicted. Police found his DNA under the victim’s fingernails. Stevens said that when she heard the news on her car radio, she had to pull off the highway until she’d cried herself out. Convicted of first-degree murder, DuMond died in prison in 2005. No sooner was his Missouri arrest announced than Huckabee began blaming everybody in Arkansas except himself. “I think you guys are being played like a cheap fiddle by the Democrats,” he complained to reporters. “They’re trying to make a Willie Horton out of it. And if anybody needs to get a Willie Horton out of it, it’s Jim Guy Tucker and the Democrat Party, and it ain’t me.” His recent book,“From Hope to Higher Ground,”claims that DuMond died in Missouri before coming to trial. He even blames Clinton, who played no role whatsoever in the affair, whining that the Arkansas “tabloid press” has mischaracterized his actions. That’s Huckabee at his worst: rash, devious, incapable of admitting error, a crybaby and definitely not, I submit, presidential material.

"I apologize if this question has been addressed earlier, though I haven't seen that it has. But, WHY on earth would Huckabee go to this extent to free Wayne DuMond?"

Because Mike Huckabee is an Arkansas Republican, and Arkansas Republicans play dirty. And bizarrely (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/09/20/huckabee/). The Clintons were at first relieved to be leaving Arkansas for Washington in 1992, because they thought that they would be well away from the snake pit that is Arkansas politics. Little did they know that well-heeled conservatives and GOP operatives were setting up shop in Little Rock just to slime them.

"Was there a family connection? Was DuMond well-positioned or well-heeled? What was it about Wayne DuMond that made Huckabee go to this extent to free him?"

Wayne Dumond was a tool for Huckabee and the Vast Right Wing Cons to attack Clinton. Nothing more. Huckabee blew off the pleas of Dumond's other victims, even as cons were trashing the reputation of Ashley Stevens, the distant Clinton cousin (and 17-year-old girl) who Dumond raped: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/04/documents-expose-huckabee_n_75362.html

"Wikipedia says that DuMond had a "groundswell of public support" in 1999 favoring his parole. Where did it come from?"

The "groundswell" didn't exist in reality. It was a scam, paid for by various rich Clinton-haters such as Richard Mellon Scaife (http://www.salon.com/news/1998/03/23news.html) and various conservative writers like Steve Dunleavy (http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=154e1aad-fd18-4efd-8d80-b5dab8559419) and the nutjobs at Free Republic and other right-wing internet sheltered workshops.

"An Amazon review of a book about this subject says that DuMond's rape victim was a distant relative of Bill Clinton. Does that explain Huckabee's determination to free DuMond (i.e. did he think the charges against DuMond were a Clinton conspiracy?). Or was there more?"

See above. This was done solely to attack Bill Clinton, and neither Huckabee nor his conservative wingnut allies cared who got hit by the shrapnel therefrom.

Here's the Murray Waas story:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/04/documents-expose-huckabee_n_75362.html

Yupper: Not only did Mike Huckabee free a guy just to piss off Bill Clinton -- DESPITE the pleas of the rellies of Dumond's many victims (nope, the Clinton cousin wasn't the only one) -- but now that he's got the blood of TWO raped and dead women on his hands (Dumond when he died was about to go on trial for raping and murdering a second woman, Sara Andrasek), what does the lying sack of dung do? He blames the guy he was attacking in the first place!

Read the latest Murray Waas story and get educated.