Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  But I did respect him. Three years before the Brown-Goldman murders, as a longtime professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York, Scheck had cofounded the Innocence Project with Peter Neufeld, organized to use DNA and other scientific evidence to exonerate people who had been wrongly convicted of violent crimes. He had worked hard to get the new scientific analyses introduced before Cameron Todd Willingham’s execution in Texas. Though that effort had failed, the project has managed to get more than two hundred wrongful convictions overturned and a number of death row residents freed.

  But I had to question why he was coming into the Alley appeal at this late stage. Like the Simpson case, I knew this one inside and out; and unlike Willingham or others Scheck and his team had worked on, sophisticated science or DNA analysis wasn’t going to lead to a different conclusion or suggest a different killer.

  The Innocence Project has done a lot of heroic work and championed people who were in jail erroneously. But Sedley Alley wasn’t one of them, and that should have been clear to any experienced professional who took a close look at the original trial and evidence, or read the appeals decisions that had come out since then. I knew about false confessions, and this clearly wasn’t one of them. The details were all correct, there was no police leading of the witness, and Alley’s original story had been complete and made total sense in context.

  I wondered how much of this maneuvering was about establishing actual innocence and how much was about trying to thwart the death penalty. If he was serious about showing that Sedley Alley was innocent and that someone else had brutally murdered Suzanne Collins, did he want to see that theoretical guilty person brought to the Tennessee death chamber, or would he then have tried to have that execution stopped as well? I felt bad for the Collins family, to have this new stumbling block put in front of them. I felt bad for the prosecutors and state attorney general Paul Summers’s office, whose staff had put so much work into this case for more than two decades. And in a strange way, I even felt bad for the Innocence Project, because they were squandering their credibility on someone who was clearly not innocent, and had never shown an ounce of remorse for one of the most horrible crimes I had ever investigated.

  When Jack and Trudy found out about the hearing, they traveled to Nashville at their own expense. This time, Stephen came with them. Jack and Trudy had tried to shelter him as much as possible, but his sister’s loss had been at least as hard on him as it had been on his parents, and his normally serious disposition had grown darker and even more intense. He had been married and divorced, and some of his friends thought his marriage had broken up because he was unsuccessfully trying to find a woman who could live up to all Suzanne had meant to him. That had begun to change when he met Kassandra, whom he married in 2002. She was a strong, resolute and beautiful woman who had faced challenges of her own, and who understood the valleys Stephen had walked through. Now he was a successful telecommunications executive living outside of Denver. Before long, he and Kassandra would adopt a little girl, whom they would name Sienna. Her middle name would be Suzanne.

  Through a member of the AG’s team, Barry Scheck asked to meet Jack and shake hands with him. Jack refused, saying he wouldn’t shake hands with someone who was trying to thwart the sentence a jury had imposed on his daughter’s killer more than twenty years earlier. To him and Trudy and Stephen, anything or anyone who got in the way of the sentence being carried out was standing in the way of justice for Suzanne.

  The defense team presented its case, which was essentially a rehash of the arguments they had made unsuccessfully before the trial and appeals courts. Then the Collinses read statements they had written. The chairman seemed particularly impressed with Stephen, and asked him to summarize the family’s perspective.

  The panel then left the room; when they returned, the chairman announced a split vote in favor of granting Sedley Alley a fifteen-day reprieve to try to make his case in court one more time for DNA testing.

  The Collinses had been accompanied to the hearing by Lisa Helton, the empathic and highly respected and effective victim liaison in the attorney general’s office. When Jack said he wanted to make certain that the governor had all of the facts, Lisa suggested they go over to the governor’s office and see if he was in.

  When they got to the state capitol building and went to Governor Philip Bredesen’s office, the receptionist not surprisingly said he wasn’t available. But shortly after that, he came out of his private office on his way to an appointment. Governor Bredesen cordially invited them in for a brief meeting. By this point, Jack said, he was completely exhausted and afraid he no longer had the energy to make the case forcefully.

  Stephen took over, reviewed what had happened for the governor, and said that once the fifteen-day reprieve had passed, they expected him to let justice take its course. Stephen was strong and persuasive; and while Bredesen made no promises or offers, it was clear he had taken Stephen’s passion to heart.

  On May 31, the trial court denied the new petition for DNA testing, basically reaffirming every previous court ruling. By this time, Governor Bredesen’s fifteen-day reprieve had run out. The state supreme court granted a motion to set a new execution date: June 28, 2006.

  On June 7, Alley appealed, and the appeals court expedited the motion. Going through all of the twenty-plus-year history—factual and procedural—yet again, and taking the requests for DNA testing item by item, Judge David Hayes wrote a thirty-one-page decision affirming the trial court’s denial.

  On June 26 came a final appeal to the state supreme court. Once again, Alley’s lawyers made their arguments. The district attorney’s office countered, “The petitioner has raised no additional arguments that would justify a different judicial ruling than the one previously rendered by the trial court and affirmed by the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals in 2004.”

  The court apparently agreed, turning down the appeal. The mechanics of the execution process began.

  For a long time, Jack and Trudy Collins had resolved that if Sedley Alley ever was executed, and it happened in their lifetime, that they would attend. They had not been able to be with Suzanne when she died, so they felt that while watching her killer pay the price for his barbarism would not make up for that, it would represent the final steps in walking the entire journey with her.

  But as the appeals dragged on, year after year, their thinking and feelings evolved. They had never hated Alley—it was unproductive. All they wanted was to see the scales of justice finally balanced, as much as the system was able to do, to show that Suzanne’s life mattered at least as much as that of her killer. As a human being, Alley was now simply beneath their contempt. They decided not to dignify him by attending the execution.

  “It was time for us to go home and for the state to do its work,” Jack explained.

  As they hoped, Governor Bredesen refused to intervene in the execution. Lydia Lenker, the governor’s spokesperson, said that he “believes that this matter has been thoroughly and appropriately reviewed by the courts and therefore has denied clemency.”

  A final plea to the U.S. Supreme Court also was denied. In the afternoon on June 27, Alley was moved to a holding cell at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Execution was scheduled for 1:00 A.M. on June 28, 2006.

  In the flurry of activity that always seems to accompany the lead-up to executions in the United States, Alley’s attorneys once again (a phrase which became all too common in describing this case) hit the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, this time through a hearing held at 10:00 P.M. at the Nashville home of Judge Gilbert S. Merritt Jr. Around 11:00 P.M., in a stunning move, Judge Merritt granted a habeas corpus motion based on a claim of actual innocence and DNA testing. The order, partly printed and partly handwritten, called for a hearing on July 7 to determine jurisdiction in the case and promised to render: an opinion within the next three days further detailing the reasons for the entry of this order.

  Everyone on the prosecution
side and among Suzanne’s family and friends knew what this meant. Any question of jurisdiction would become a legal morass and begin a whole new cycle of procedures. God knew what the defense team would bring up once they had the chance. Maybe this time Alley would claim he had been abducted by aliens and they were the ones who had committed the murder. With execution supposed to take place within two hours, the prospect of more years of this ordeal still loomed.

  Instantly AG Summers’s office sprang into action and filed a motion to vacate the stay. It was signed by Summers himself, Solicitor General Michael Moore and Associate Deputy AG Jennifer Smith. It called the invoked procedure: highly irregular and in brazen violation of every rule that applied to this situation, and because Judge Merritt’s stay order is unlawful, the Court should immediately vacate the stay of execution. They then went on to elaborate why Judge Merritt, who wasn’t one of the judges who had heard the original case, should not even have been involved and had no standing to issue the order.

  At 1:18 A.M., a fax went out from Leonard Green, Clerk of the Court. It was a two-page order from circuit court chief judge Danny J. Boggs and judge James L. Ryan assertively vacating the stay.

  At 1:46 A.M., Sedley Alley was brought into the Riverbend death chamber. Through the viewing glass, he said good-bye to his grown son and daughter, and the lethal injection was administered. He exhaled twice, and otherwise seemed peaceful. He was pronounced dead at 2:12 A.M., central daylight time. He was fifty years of age. It had been twenty years, eleven months and fourteen days since Suzanne’s murder. She had been nineteen years, one month and four days old when she died.

  Verna Wyatt, head of You Have the Power, the organization Governor Bredesen’s wife, Andrea, founded, read a statement from the Collins family. The statement began: Rest in peace, Suzanne. The jury’s sentence has been carried out.

  CHAPTER 12

  “I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT THEM”

  The more-than-two-decade story we’ve just related is an achingly sad one. Yet by the grim calculus of murder, it has a “happy” ending. At least it does by our standards, and from the perspective of the victim’s family and friends and the many who loved her. If there is a more perfect justice beyond our human experience, Sedley Alley was now consigned to it. And in our own human realm, the scales were balanced to the degree the system could do so.

  After the case was finally resolved, we heard from two women, seemingly very different. Yet, both had been victimized, and both clearly were affected, each in her own way.

  I had been surprised and somewhat disappointed not to hear from Governor Bredesen’s wife after I had written to her. But it was what it was. Then, about two weeks after Alley’s execution, I received a letter, dated July 11, 2006, and written on the stationery of the State of Tennessee, Office of the First Lady.

  She acknowledged my letter and said she wanted me to know that my voice, as well as the Collinses’ and other crime victim advocates’, had been heard.

  Of the entire gracious note, the sentences that stood out most poignantly for me were: My heart goes out to the Collins family for an ordeal no one should have to bear. There are no words to repair the hurt and cruelty they have endured these past 21 years.

  Now I understood why I had not heard back from Andrea Conte; not because she was ignoring my comments or putting me off, but because she took me and my message seriously. If she had just wanted to put me off, it would have been easy to send a bland note thanking me for my interest and saying she had looked into it.

  I doubt we will ever know what went into Governor Bredesen’s ultimate decision to let the execution go forward in a state that continues to collect convicted killers on death row but seldom goes through with the punishment assigned to them. I’m sure he studied the case record and read the Tennessee Board of Probation and Parole report. But I would be surprised if the righteous, experience-based passion of both his wife and Steve Collins didn’t also have their effect.

  Early in May 2010, I got a call from our lawyer, Steven Mark, that someone named Lynne wanted to get in touch with me. I have Steve’s name as the contact on our website for book and media inquiries. She hadn’t noted any publishing or media affiliation and her last name didn’t ring a bell, so I asked Steve if he would call her back and find out what she wanted to talk to me about.

  “I was married to Sedley Alley,” she explained.

  Wow, I thought. I had only seen her once briefly at the courthouse and I’d never had the opportunity to talk to her; so whatever she had to say, I wanted to hear it.

  I sent her a confirming e-mail, then called Mark Olshaker. We decided it would be best if we talked to her together, so we’d make sure not to miss anything. We arranged a time with her; then a few days later, I went over to Mark’s place. We got on extensions in different rooms and called the number she had given me. She suggested we refer to her here as “Lynne S.”

  She was living in Southern Indiana, the mother of four children. She was up-front and candid that she was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, who had been struggling for years to get her life in order. This was a regrettable and damaging, but perfectly understandable, coping mechanism given the overwhelming circumstances she had had to face.

  This interview, or debriefing, as it turned out, was highly informative and valuable for us. It confirmed the behavioral profile of an angry, abusive, inadequate and manipulative predator that I had constructed of Suzanne’s killer. It filled in details that wouldn’t have been in the voluminous court record. The conversation connected a lot of dots I had been speculating about for twenty years. It told the story from another character’s point of view. And it provided some firsthand insight on what it is like to live with this type of personality.

  The first thing I always want to know in any situation is: Why? Why did she suddenly contact me, almost four years after Sedley’s execution ? What did she want?

  I asked why she had approached me at this point. She explained about a year before, she had Googled “Sedley Alley” and learned about our book Journey Into Darkness. She hadn’t known about it before, but she read it and said she had learned things she had never known.

  Much as I’d like to take this as a compliment, this is not an unusual phenomenon. In many ways, a violent crime is like a battle. As with the fog of war, every participant has a different perspective, and few, if any, have a complete overview. Witnesses see only a limited angle for a limited time. Physical evidence, hair and fiber, even fingerprints, only refer to one aspect of a scene. Not only are the prosecution and defense teams trying to offer divergently different narratives and slants on what happened, in most cases even the lead detective and district attorney will see things differently. The jury seldom gets all the facts or the full story, such as a defendant’s previous record. If you compound all of this with the fact that Lynne, as a potential witness, was kept out of most of the trial proceedings, she would have a narrow window on this determinative event in her own life.

  What she wanted to know was how the Collinses were doing. Better, we said, since her former husband had been executed. “I can’t stop thinking about them,” she revealed.

  I knew she hadn’t been at the execution and asked how she’d found out about it. “In the Louisville paper,” she replied, and it became clear where her sympathies lay.

  “At first, for an instant, I felt sad. I called my brother and I said, ‘I feel bad about it.’ And they said he was a model prisoner, and I thought, ‘At least he got to live. The victim didn’t.’ ”

  Lynne had made her own journey in the last twenty years.

  I was interested in her recollections of July 11, 1985, and the following day.

  Had I been profiling the case without a known suspect, the behavioral evidence would have led me in one of two directions right off the bat. With the degree of rage, cruelty and overkill demonstrated by the evidence at the crime scene, the UNSUB would have been someone who either: (1) knew the victim well or (2) was displacing his rage
from another young white woman who, for one reason or another, he didn’t feel he could kill.

  The next investigative step would have been to turn to victimology to determine which of the two types we were dealing with. Since a thorough examination had revealed no bad or even suggestive male relationships with Suzanne, this had to be an individual who matched the second description. For a stranger murder to be this brutal, it almost had to represent an instance of emotional displacement.

  I had seen this phenomenon a lot. When I had conducted an extensive prison interview with Edmund Kemper, the so-called “Coed Killer” in California, he had ultimately admitted to me that the young women who attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, whom he’d picked up and killed were all in some way a substitution for his hated mother. When he finally got up the nerve to batter her to death in her bed with a claw hammer, he gave himself up to police. He had accomplished what he set out to do.

  The same was true with Gary Heidnik, another case I worked on. This was a guy—a very bright guy, I might add, who made himself a fortune in the stock market—who kept women in a pit in the basement of his house in Philadelphia, raping them at will and punishing them as necessary. Finally he killed some of them. When I interviewed him in prison after his conviction, he was completely rational and matter-of-fact about his actions, until I mentioned his mother. Then he went nuts on me. In his case, his rage against women had been precipitated by his strange mother having committed suicide without ever having become the loving and nurturing presence Gary dreamed of experiencing.

  In Alley’s case, though, I didn’t think the murder had anything to do with the offender’s mother. Everything about the crime pointed to a lover or partner as the object of his wrath, possibly a series of lovers or partners. This was clearly someone who wanted to punish women, not for the sexual satisfaction of seeing them suffer as a sadist would, but to vent his built-up anger and frustration.