by Pat Brown
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THIS IS WHAT I think happened:
I don’t think Heidi was ever in the room. Heidi stated that she went to the bathroom when Jimmy supposedly started punching Earl. She said that when she came out of the bathroom and entered the bedroom, the altercation was already going on. But Earl said Jimmy attacked him and Heidi in the bedroom. He indicated Heidi was already in the bedroom when the physical violence began. I believe Heidi was never in the bedroom, which is why she seemed to have no bruises on her.
Earl decided Heidi had to be in the bedroom, too, so he had somebody to protect. Earl probably pressured Heidi to support his story, so she reported, “Yep, I was in the bedroom, too, and he attacked me, too.”
That made her a witness and a victim as well, giving Earl cover for committing this act of murder.
I believe Heidi was probably in the kitchen when Earl shot Jimmy. I think he coached her to say what she said. They both claim Jimmy said these exact words: “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker? I have a gun in my car!”
This was kind of weird, because if Jimmy says, “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker?” you would think he was being threatened with a gun at the time. And if he was being threatened with a gun at the time, it’s kind of a strange thing to say. “I’ve got a gun in my car.” It’s not going to do you a lot of good if your gun is not in your hand. How can you threaten a person with a gun that’s not even around? It’s a stupid statement.
It didn’t make sense, but I do think it’s possible that such a statement was made in the kitchen. If Earl threatened Jimmy and said, “I could shoot you, buddy,” and Jimmy said, “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker? I have a gun in my car! Yeah, you get your gun in the bedroom, I’ll get mine in my car!” But they probably were just saying stuff, and I don’t think Jimmy believed Earl was serious.
I think Earl went to his bedroom, and I think Jimmy followed him in to talk to him.
Here’s where it gets fascinating:
After Jimmy was shot in the chest, both Heidi and Earl said he fell onto the bedroom couch. This was true; I could see blood all over the couch, so the police photographs confirmed that, yes, that did happen.
Then Heidi stated that after Jimmy clutched his chest and fell facedown on the couch, she beat him with a baseball bat. Yes, she felt it necessary to hit a defenseless, dying man in the head with a baseball bat that she conveniently found in the corner, where she was trapped. According to her account, she was in the corner of the bedroom, saw Jimmy get shot in the chest and as he fell to the sofa, she thought, That’s not enough, let me hit him in the head with a baseball bat, because I’m scared of him.
I don’t know about you, but if I just saw somebody get blown away with a shotgun, I’m not worried that they will be coming after me at that point.
Except … I believe Heidi is trying to make some point about this baseball bat. There is a reason for that, and I’m coming to it.
Heidi claimed not to remember how many times she hit Jimmy. In one report, she supposedly told somebody twenty to thirty times—but Jimmy didn’t even have the slightest concussion! No damage to his head at all!
She also said that after she hit Jimmy on the head, he got off the sofa and fell to the floor, then never moved again.
Jimmy was found on the floor next to the sofa. He was dead right there, that’s for sure. But what she said was curious: “He never moved again.”
Earl said that Jimmy fell on the couch and then straight to the floor. He also said that Heidi hit Jimmy with a baseball bat after he got to the floor, so their stories didn’t quite agree.
At that point, they both checked on Jimmy and then they left the house. That was their claim.
I say that Heidi was never in the bedroom at all. It is my belief that Heidi never touched the baseball bat, never struck Jimmy, and was merely repeating a story given to her by Earl to account for his use of the baseball bat on Jimmy.
Here’s where the photos made such a difference to the plausibility of their stories. There was only one set of bloody footprints leading from the bedroom into the kitchen. One. Of course, the police never said to whom those bloody footprints belonged. They should have been able to look at their feet and make an easy match, but that was never in the notes. There was one foot that stepped into the blood but, I wondered, if there were two people running around going crazy, beating people with baseball bats and checking on the dead guy on the floor, then why were there not two sets of footprints leaving? It seemed obvious to me that Heidi was never, ever, there.
Earl said that when Jimmy fell to the floor and was dead, he and Heidi left the premises. No mention was ever made of coming back to check on the dead man.
Heidi, however, maintained that she and Earl came back with a handgun and went to the bedroom and saw that Jimmy hadn’t moved at all. She said they went back to check after they got a handgun. The guy was shot in the chest and beaten twenty times with a baseball bat, but Heidi thought they needed another gun to make certain he was 110 percent dead.
Earl, on the other hand, didn’t mention returning with another gun.
Was Jimmy really dead when they claimed he was?
However, one photo showed that there was blood from Jimmy’s body all the way from his right side to the entrance of the room.
This was blood that spread out from under his body after he was shot; but it was not just a solid, expanding pool of blood. Something had come in contact with that blood. The photo showed smeared blood, and a dead man doesn’t smear blood. If he had lain there and hadn’t moved, there would be no smearing.
The picture of the blood going to the right side of the room was one of the regular pictures. But it was the Polaroid that linked it all together. In the spread blood, you could see two interesting things. There were four lines parallel to each other through the blood, and then there was kind of a muck mark, a spot where a palm pressed on the floor. I looked at that and thought, Hmmm. I looked at his fingers, and there was blood on them. It looked like somebody’s hand dragged through that blood, like a person trying to push himself up, trying to get off the floor. Was that indeed what I was looking at?
A little bit further down in that blood there was something else interesting. There was a crescent, a bloody area with a little crescent moon shape missing out of it. I wondered, Where did that go? It was lifted out of there somehow. Why was that spot of blood missing?
Something had been in that blood and then was pulled off it. I looked at that. The extra Polaroid picture showed Jimmy lying on his stomach on the floor. There were other pictures, better pictures showing Jimmy on the floor, but this was the only picture that showed his shoe. This picture showed the bottom of Jimmy’s right shoe, and it showed Jimmy’s heel. At first glance, one would think there was no blood on his shoe. And there shouldn’t be, because, after all, the guy fell and was lying on his stomach, so the blood would not be on the soles of the shoes. But then I looked closer and I saw it, blood; blood on the bottom of Jimmy’s heel. There was a small crescent of blood, a curved area of blood on his heel that matched exactly the missing part in the pattern on the floor.
This evidence contradicted the accounts of Earl and Heidi.
I believe that Jimmy was not dead on the floor. He lay on the floor, alive, and tried to get up. He dragged his hand through the blood, put his palm down, got his knee up underneath him, and stepped in the blood. There was some blood spatter on the door. I think he picked up his hand and cast off the blood onto the door, and that’s as far as he got when somebody or something made him step back, fall down, and never move again.
That somebody was probably the returning Earl, who came back with the baseball bat, pushed Jimmy with it, and knocked him down.
But when Earl and Heidi both said, “He never moved again,” that was probably a lie, because I believe the photo shows that Jimmy moved.
Continuing with my hypothesis, I believe the two of them left the room thinking
he was dead, and then they heard Jimmy moving around. Oh crap, Jimmy’s alive and he’s getting up!
One of them went for the gun and one went for a baseball bat. And they both thought, That guy better be dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was dying. I don’t think they had to do more than push him, and then he collapsed and never moved again.
As for the bat? If you hit somebody with a bat twenty to thirty times, wouldn’t you have blood spattered all over that bat? But there wasn’t any blood on the bat except for where it looked like someone laid the bat in some blood and rolled it around.
It’s also possible that Earl asked Heidi to hit him—Earl—in the nose with the baseball bat just enough to look like Jimmy caused some damage to support their assertion that Earl was assaulted. Maybe Earl did it to himself.
It reminds me of the husband who said, “The robbers came into the house and they shot my wife six times in the face, and they shot me in the shoulder. It was painful.” In other words, they killed the wife, but they left the husband alive and only gave him a flesh wound in the shoulder.
Really?
Did Earl bop himself in the face with that baseball bat just enough to cause some damage and pretend he was attacked? I guess he couldn’t bring himself to hit his girlfriend in the face with a baseball bat and damage her.
What I saw clearly from the photos in this case was that this was no case of self-defense. Most likely, Jimmy was shot while sitting on the couch complaining. It was a downward shot to Jimmy’s chest, so it looked like Earl reached under the bed, pulled out the gun, and shot down at Jimmy, who then fell to the floor.
After he was dead, I believe Earl and Heidi concocted the story about how they were both assaulted. But their statements and the pictures did not match. Their statements were inconsistent. They didn’t match each other’s. They didn’t make sense. They didn’t match the elements of the scene. There was little evidence of self-defense.
This was a homicide; the police should have investigated the crime scene for at least second-degree murder. It didn’t seem like it was premeditated because the fight erupted after Jimmy confronted Earl. But it is important to remember that premeditation can be a plan you work out just a minute or two before the murder, something like, “Son-of-a-bitch, I am going to have to repay Jimmy! Or I can kill him.” Then it would be murder in the first degree.
I SENT MY profile to the Conway family in 2005.
The manner of death in this case should not have been classified as a justifiable homicide, and the case should be reopened and properly investigated. There was no evidence here that anyone in the house was in danger of death or extreme bodily harm by Jimmy Conway.
Earl White had a clear motive to kill Jimmy Conway. He had been involved with Jimmy in an effort to bilk Jimmy’s employer of a considerable sum of money and had spent a good portion of what he was supposed to be holding for Jimmy. Jimmy wanted the money back so he could turn it over to the company but the money no longer existed.
Clearly, there was reason for bad feelings on the part of both Jimmy and Earl. Certainly Jimmy could have threatened Earl that night but we have no evidence that he did other than the cockeyed word of the shooter and his girlfriend. Based on this information only, the stories of these two should be carefully checked and analyzed against the evidence and not taken as the unvarnished truth.
The family of Jimmy Conway deserved more than a cursory glance at the events of that night. A full investigation into the murder of Jimmy Conway should be undertaken by whatever law enforcement agency is willing and equipped to do the job.
CHAPTER 11
DONNELL
A QUESTION OF MOTIVE
The Crime: Double homicide
The Victims: Frank Bishop, Renee Washington
Location: Midwest
Original Theory: Drug dealers sought vengeance against Renee’s son by killing her
Motive is tricky.
Analyzing motive properly really counts at the beginning of an investigation in order for the right suspect to be identified and investigated.
On December 10, 2002, when Donnell Washington’s mom and her boyfriend turned up dead in a basement apartment, the police thought his mother was the target of a drug gang the son pissed off. But Donnell’s family thought the boyfriend was killed because he was going to turn state’s evidence.
Donnell, thirty-two, knocked repeatedly on the door of his mother’s boyfriend’s house, but no one answered. Worried, he kicked in the door and found the boyfriend, Frank Bishop, lifeless on the sofa, a dozen stab wounds to his head and neck. Donnell ran to the back bedroom and found his mother, Renee Washington, on the floor, her throat cut. He lifted her onto the bed and attempted to give her CPR. He was too late.
The case stalled and no one was arrested. Months went by, then a year, and the police and Donnell’s family were still arguing about who killed the couple. The police said it was someone taking revenge on Donnell over drug territory and for robbing their illegal gambling joints, but Donnell’s family believed the mom’s boyfriend, who was turning state’s evidence, was the target of the crime.
I spent a week in town poring over the evidence. By the weekend, I had an answer as to who I thought was right and who was wrong. Nobody was right and everyone was wrong.
ONE OF THE compelling aspects of this case was how people tend to form a theory and then fit the case to the theory. This happened both with the families and the police detectives, because it’s a natural human response to go for what seems most likely.
If we find a mutilated naked body, we assume it’s a sexual crime. Why would a body be shorn of its clothes if sex wasn’t involved? We don’t think it could be something else. If we find a man shot in the head in an alley and he was wearing gang clothing, we say, “It must be a gang hit.” Of course, it may have nothing to do with a gang. It may just be that he wears gang clothing because he finds it fashionable and, in reality, his girlfriend shot him.
But people will go to the most likely solution first, and sometimes this can cause trouble, because when you focus in on one particular avenue, you often ignore the other possibilities. It’s like watching a magician who distracts you from the real sleight of hand so what he does appears to be genuine magic instead of a highly practiced trick. By the time you figure out that you were staring intently at the wrong hand, you have lost the opportunity to witness what the other hand was doing (with the evidence, in a crime) and this, I believe, is what happened with Donnell Washington.
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I WAS BROUGHT in to study this case by members of the Washington family two years after the double homicide because they believed the police department focused on the wrong motive for the crime.
Two people were murdered, Renee Washington, fifty-two, and her boyfriend, Frank Bishop, fifty-three, and they were killed at Frank’s place. They had been in a committed relationship for a while. They were looking forward to the family Christmas just a couple weeks away and had their Christmas tree up and decorated, presents beginning to collect underneath the limbs.
Renee had last been seen the evening before the murder when she visited with her mother until she left to spend the night—as she did most of the time—at her boyfriend’s house. Frank was known to be already at home.
At seven in the morning, Renee’s son, Donnell Washington, went by the house because he was supposed to take his mother to a funeral. He arrived at his mother’s boyfriend’s home and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. He knocked again and again.
That’s crazy, Washington said to himself. They have to be in there. She’s expecting me.
He went back to his car, where his own son was waiting to be driven to school.
“Why don’t you go up and knock on the door?”
So the son got out and knocked on the door.
“Dad,” he said, “I heard a thump, but I didn’t hear anything else.”
“If you heard something in there, maybe I should break the door down.”
But Donn
ell didn’t break the door down and instead called his mother’s sister—his aunt—and said, “What should I do? She’s not answering the door. She should be there, because I have to take her to a funeral.”
The aunt said, “Why don’t you call the police?”
“No,” Donnell said, “I’m going to knock the door down.”
But he didn’t do that. Instead, he took his son to school and finally returned—at ten a.m.!
He used his cell phone and called his cousin, Lamont, to come over. When Lamont got there, Donnell had already kicked the door in and ran out of the apartment and told him, “They’re dead!”
Lamont told his girlfriend to stay in the car, went in, and saw Frank dead on the sofa and his aunt lying facedown on the bedroom floor. He said he freaked and left right away. Donnell later said he didn’t know Frank had been stabbed because the body was so bloody he thought he had been shot. Then he ran the five steps into the bedroom, because his mother wasn’t in the front room, and he found her lying on the floor in a nightshirt and panties, similarly bloodied, and he attempted to revive her. He put her on the bed and applied CPR, but didn’t succeed in bringing her back.
This is where—to use a technical term—some of the story points don’t hold water.
Washington’s cousin, Lamont, said he saw the dead woman on the floor but Donnell said as soon as he found his mother he moved her to the bed and gave her CPR. If he did the CPR when he said, how was it that Lamont said he had seen the woman still lying on the floor? When Lamont arrived, Donnell ran out of the apartment, told him that his mother and Frank were dead, the implication being Donnell must have already completed the CPR. Yet Lamont saw the woman on the floor. Had Donnell given CPR at that point? Something didn’t add up.
But others who arrived on the scene witnessed Donnell giving his mother CPR. Next, Renee’s sister, Charmaine, arrived on the scene, went into the apartment, saw Donnell trying to give his mother CPR, and then ran to a neighbor’s, banged on their door, and told them to call 911. There was no landline at Frank’s apartment.
