by Tim Junkin
The detectives prepared an affidavit and obtained a warrant for Kirk Bloodsworth’s arrest. They drove back to Cambridge, arriving sometime around midnight. Working with Detective Cottom and others, it took a few hours to trace Kirk’s movements to his cousin’s house. But they found him.
When Kirk Bloodsworth answered the pounding on Cindy Bloodsworth’s door, a dozen police officers stood outside. A spotlight shone in his eyes. Disoriented, he looked over his shoulder behind him, wondering who or what they wanted. He heard one of the cops yelling, then, that he, Kirk Bloodsworth, was under arrest for the rape and first-degree murder of Dawn Hamilton. Police were suddenly everywhere. “You have a right to remain silent,” he heard a man shout. “Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law . . .”
Kirk’s first reaction was to lose his temper. He began cursing the lot of them. Someone knocked him hard in the small of his back, sending him against the wall where he was pinned and told to shut up. He did. Kirk realized this wasn’t just some lurid game. He was up to his ears in it, and he had no idea what to do.
All Kirk was wearing was a pair of blue shorts. They handcuffed him roughly, led him outside barefoot, without a shirt, and pushed his head down and into the back of a police car. The night was hot and he could hear the bullfrogs from the ditches, and the cicadas from the hedgerows. He grew more afraid. Police cars were all over the street with their red and blue lights rotating through the trees and against the row of houses. He stared at the windshield feeling helpless and sick. His life was over, he kept thinking. Over. He could see what looked like movie credits in red lettering scrolling down the car’s windshield: The End, they read.
He was driven to the Cambridge Police Station, where Ramsey and Capel took him into the same interview room as the day before. Configured the same way, the room was bare except for the table and two chairs in its center. There, the detectives interrogated him for several hours. Ramsey, this time, took the lead. “How come you’re telling people the rock had blood on it?” Ramsey demanded to know. “How would you know about a bloody rock?”
“What the hell you talking about?” Kirk answered, denying at first that he’d said anything about a bloody rock.
“We got the witnesses,” Ramsey told him. “You’ve been talking about a bloody rock all over town!”
Kirk backtracked. He told him he never said it had blood on it, but that they’d made him think it was the murder weapon when they put it in front of him.
“Why’d you think the rock was the weapon,” Ramsey said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
Kirk told him again he’d assumed it was the weapon when they put it on the table. They’d tricked him into thinking something he wasn’t supposed to know, he said.
Ramsey scoffed at this. “Oh, so you’re the detective, now, are you?” He threw Dawn’s picture down in front of Kirk. “You kill that little girl?” he asked. “Why’d you kill that little girl?”
“I didn’t kill no little girl, sir. No, I did not.”
“Why’d you do her, Kirk? Why did you do that to her?”
He asked it over and over.
Each time Kirk denied it.
Ramsey wouldn’t quit. He kept coming back to the same question. Then he demanded to know where Kirk was the morning of July 25.
Kirk couldn’t think straight, was too afraid. He told them he wasn’t sure. He thought he was home. He thought he’d met a friend named Wayne Palmer who sold pot.
“Tell us about the little boys at the pond,” Ramsey said. “Before you took Dawn into the woods.”
Kirk shut his eyes and shook his head.
Ramsey threw the child’s shorts and panties that Kirk had seen the day before on the table. “Look at them,” he ordered. “Look at them!”
He pressed Kirk again about killing Dawn Hamilton. “You killed that little girl, didn’t you,” he said. “You’re going to the gas chamber, if you don’t tell us.” Ramsey repeated the words slowly, enunciating each one, “The gas chamber . . .”
Gas chamber. This sunk in. Christ . . .
All the while, Capel sat in the corner and never spoke.
Ramsey pointed his finger at Kirk and started in again.
Finally, Kirk went off. He grabbed the girl’s panties from off the table, shook them in the face of William Ramsey, and screamed back, “I didn’t kill that little girl and I don’t know who did neither . . . But it wasn’t me! You hear me? You listening?” Kirk threw the panties at the detective. “I wouldn’t do a thing like that and if you think I would then you’re crazier’n hell!” Kirk started crying. He asked to see a lawyer.
Ramsey rose from the table and walked out of the room in disgust. Capel just shrugged and recuffed him.
When they put him in the police car for the drive to Baltimore County, the tip of the sun was just rising over Leggett’s Store. Through the dawn haze it flashed like a roadside flare, stippling the river’s far edge with garish flecks. Riding across the old Fishing Pier Bridge, Kirk wondered whether he’d ever see the old bridge again, ever see the river again. He shut his eyes on the highway. He wished it might all be a bad dream. Minutes later he heard the officer in the front passenger seat say, “How can he sleep? How can someone who’s done what he has done ever sleep?” Kirk wanted to answer him but he didn’t know how.
THEY TOOK HIM to a holding cell at the police station in Towson. It was the first time he’d ever been in a cage. It smelled of stale urine. Other detectives questioned him again about his whereabouts the morning of July 25. They acted friendly and said it would help him if he could remember. One detective handed him a calendar through the bars and encouraged him to work backward with the dates in order to figure out his whereabouts. Kirk tried and told him that he was home, that July 25 was his day off. Kirk asked the detective to talk to his housemates. He was sure they’d confirm this. He repeated that he was nowhere near where that girl was killed.
But Kirk felt he wasn’t explaining himself. His words seemed to fall flat. He didn’t know what words would serve to make them understand. He was running out of words. He was running out of strength. It was overwhelming. It seemed like some cosmic nightmare. Some surreal hoax. He tried to explain again to another detective that he was home on the 25th but couldn’t find the language to sound convincing, even to himself. At one point he just lost it. “I’m an innocent man!” he screamed through the iron bars. “I’m not guilty! Don’t you understand? What are you doing to me? Why are you doing this to me?”
Later that morning Ramsey and Capel showed up. Kirk was allowed to make his first telephone call from the station and was able to reach his father. In broken words and between sobs he tried to tell his dad what was happening. Curtis angrily demanded to talk to Detective Ramsey. Ramsey took the phone.
“Sir,” Ramsey said, “we’re charging your son with the first-degree murder of Dawn Hamilton.”
Curtis cleared his throat. “Man,” he answered him loudly, “do you know what the hell you are talking about?”
“We think we do,” Ramsey said.
“Wait a minute! Don’t be talking this fool stuff. Let me get a lawyer and get up there and talk to you—”
“I’m sorry. We’ve already charged him.”
Curtis couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Do you know what the hell you’re saying?” he asked again. “You’re devastating a whole family here! A young man’s life and his mother and sister and myself!”
Kirk could just hear one side of the conversation—Ramsey’s side—but he got the gist. Curtis was going on as though it all were a misunderstanding that could be straightened out over the phone. Ramsey was losing patience. The detective handed the phone back to Kirk. Kirk tried to get his father to understand that it was more than that. He’d need a lawyer, he told Curtis. Right away. A good one.
The detectives told Kirk that they were taking him to a hearing. He hadn’t yet seen or talked to anyone except his father. They told him there would be press there, and lots
of cameras. They asked Kirk if he wanted a blanket to put over his head. Kirk had been up all night. He was half terrified, half crazed. He answered, hell no, he didn’t want no blanket. He hadn’t done nothing wrong and didn’t care if the whole damn world saw him. A big mistake. Ramsey and Capel just shrugged. The detectives should have known better, should have insisted.
Barefoot, still, and wearing his blue shorts and a dirty terry-cloth shirt one of the police officers had given him, Kirk was taken in handcuffs to the courthouse. Reporters jostled one another to get a look. Cameras flashed. Television crews filmed him being taken out of the police car and walking along the corridor. Bystanders stared at him, and Kirk could see the hate in their faces. Someone yelled that he was a child killer; someone else called him a motherfucker; others cursed him. What was happening had begun to sink in.
Inside the courtroom, the clerk announced the case of The People v. Kirk Bloodsworth. District Court Judge Gerard Wittstadt told Kirk he was there to set bond and asked Kirk if he had anything to say.
Kirk answered that yes he had plenty to say.
The judge interrupted him. Wittstatd cautioned him that there were tapes running and that they would record every word he said.
“I don’t give a damn what you got,” Kirk responded, “I didn’t kill that little girl and I don’t know who did. You got the wrong man. I was at my home. I didn’t do it . . .” Saying that in the courtroom, in public, lifted his spirits a notch.
The prosecutor, a smartly dressed woman in heels named Susan Schilling, just twiddled her pen and seemed preoccupied. Finally she rose and said a few words to the judge, something about it being a capital offense. Judge Wittstadt nodded, then denied bond. It was over before it started. Kirk was hustled out, surrounded by police. Appalled, frightened, alone, this time he hung his head. He felt stained, gnawed down, a bone-bare scarecrow of a human. When he glimpsed up, in every look he saw disgust. He saw the look people give a sick-minded monster. Four officers escorted him to a squad car that was waiting for him outside the courthouse. It would deliver him to what would become his new home, the Towson Detention Center.
That night all of the local television stations prominently displayed his face on their news shows. He was shown being taken from the police car and being escorted to the courthouse, shackled, disheveled, and surrounded by uniformed police. For anyone watching, he couldn’t have been exhibited in a more suggestive way.
DETECTIVES RAMSEY AND Capel ordered a lineup to be held the following Monday, August 13. With each new piece of information they became more convinced that Bloodsworth was the killer, but they wanted the other adults who’d seen him around Fontana Village the morning of the murder to pick him out. They expected them to clinch the identification.
Kirk Bloodsworth and five other men would stand in the lineup. Two of the men would be police officers, and three of them would be maintenance workers. All would be dressed identically, in prison jumpsuits and barefoot. Four of them were of equal height, close to six feet tall. Most had mustaches. Bloodsworth would be man number six. Only Bloodsworth had hair that matched in style that of the man in the composite sketch.
The men would stand in a row, behind a one-way Plexiglas screen, facing the witness room. The witnesses, brought into the room one at a time, would be able to see the suspects through the glass shield, but the suspects would not be able to see them.
After watching Kirk’s picture being taken by so many media cameras outside the courtroom on the day of his arrest, though, Ramsey and Capel realized they might have a problem. If their potential identification witnesses saw Bloodsworth on TV first, handcuffed, under arrest, and surrounded by cops, the reliability of their lineup identifications might be called into question. Before the local news shows aired the evening of Bloodsworth’s arrest, Ramsey and Capel arranged for the witnesses they considered key to be contacted by police.
Nancy Hall was one of these. She was in her early thirties and one of the people who’d reported seeing a strange man with a thin build and dark brown curly hair standing outside of Orion Court the morning of the slaying and later sitting on a green electrical box. Hall was a friend of witness Donna Ferguson. It later came out that both were drug users and had smoked marijuana the morning of the crime. Hall was the one who’d told police to arrest Mickey Manzari. She’d said that Manzari looked just like the man depicted in the composite sketch. Hall, it seems, had known Manzari for years. Manzari was cleared. Having identified the wrong man once, though, didn’t stop Nancy Hall from taking a second shot.
On the afternoon of Bloodsworth’s arrest, a police detective telephoned Nancy Hall and told her he wanted her to attend a lineup the following Monday. He told her that the police had arrested and charged a suspect named Kirk Bloodsworth and asked her not to watch any television news shows over the weekend. He told her that if she did, it might hurt the case. Nancy Hall couldn’t help herself. After all, this terrible crime had happened in her own backyard. She watched all the news shows. She repeatedly saw Kirk Bloodsworth. She saw him in handcuffs, surrounded by police, being taken to the courtroom, being led away. The next Monday, she had no trouble identifying man number six in the lineup, Kirk Bloodsworth, as the stranger she’d seen outside Orion Court. Who else would she possibly pick? Nancy Hall became a key prosecution witness at both of Kirk Bloodsworth’s trials.
Donna Ferguson, Hall’s neighbor, had also seen the stranger on the electric box, and later heard a man calling “Lisa, Lisa” but hadn’t seen whether it was the same man. Donna admitted during her trial testimony that the morning of the crime, at around 10 A.M., she’d smoked a half joint of marijuana. A neighbor, Lorraine Trollinger, told defense investigators that Ferguson and Hall often did drugs together and that both had gotten stoned while sun-bathing the morning of the crime. The police officer who called Donna Ferguson to warn her about watching TV never identified himself. He told Donna the same thing told to Nancy Hall. Again, Kirk Bloodsworth was mentioned by name. Donna Ferguson denied she ever saw Bloodsworth on television but admitted the TV was on most of the weekend. She too picked Bloodsworth out of the lineup and would also testify against him at his trials.
Debbie McNamara also had seen a man on July 25 sitting on the green electrical box. She was also telephoned by police, told that Kirk Bloodsworth had been arrested, and asked to attend a lineup to identify him. McNamara saw Bloodsworth on television before the lineup but thought she only saw the back of him as he was being led to a police car. She identified Bloodsworth out of the lineup but later recanted, claiming that she’d confused him with another man who was the spitting image of Bloodsworth. She’d seen this other man driving a Thunderbird with a white vinyl top, and he’d been cruising the area frequently. Debbie McNamara was never called as a prosecution witness.
James Keller, an elderly black man living in Fontana Village, saw Kirk Bloodsworth on television. He mentioned something about it to his wife, and she then called the police. The man on TV was the same man he thought he’d seen at about 5:45 A.M. the morning of the murder. He reported this to Detective Capel for the first time on August 10, the weekend of Kirk’s arrest, and sixteen days after the crime. Keller had been driving, on his way to work. He only saw the man for a second as he passed by him. The man was lounging by the fence next to Bethke’s Pond and was wearing light-colored shorts. Even though he had seen Bloodsworth on TV, Keller was asked to attend the lineup that following Monday. He picked out Bloodsworth. Keller testified at both trials that Bloodsworth was the man he’d seen the day Dawn was killed.
Chris Shipley and Jackie Poling both attended the lineup. They were driven there with their mothers, all in the same car, by police officers from the Fullerton district. Bloodsworth was not the only man in the lineup whose picture had also been in the photo array. Ramsey had arranged for one other of the men whose photograph had previously been shown to the two boys also to stand in the lineup. They were the only two, though, in both arrays.
When Jackie Poling att
ended the lineup, he was visibly frightened. Detectives observed that he was actually shaking. When asked if he wanted the men behind the glass wall to do anything, he said he wanted them to leave. The detectives in the room laughed. Poling pointed to number three, someone other than Bloodsworth. Two weeks passed before Denise Poling, Jackie’s mother, contacted police and told them that the night of the lineup, after they had gotten home, Jackie had told her he’d picked out the wrong man. He said he’d recognized number six as the man by the pond but was too scared to say it. He was afraid, his mother related, that the man might hear him. Why she waited two weeks to provide this important piece of information was never made clear.
When Chris Shipley viewed the lineup, he did not choose anyone while in the lineup room, but upon exiting the lineup room told detectives that number six, Bloodsworth, was the man by the pond with Dawn Hamilton.
Fay McCoullough, who’d worked with Detective Capel to try and create an accurate composite sketch, went to the lineup and failed to identify Bloodsworth. The strange man she’d seen in Fontana Village the morning of Dawn’s slaying was not in the lineup, she told the detectives. Others came and failed to identify Bloodsworth as well. But with the two boys, Shipley and Poling, and the three adults, Hall, Ferguson, and Keller, the detectives felt they’d already built a convincing case.
