Again de Torres found himself outside the necessary argument. This was the first he had heard of any fingerprints. No one had mentioned them during discovery, when he had requested all available evidence. For several confounded minutes he asked that Holsclaw re-explain where precisely in Carrie’s apartment he had explored for evidence—the bedspread, but not the couch; the kitchen table, but not a nearby suitcase—before confirming simply that Holsclaw had recovered fingerprints from the bananas, that Holsclaw considered them valuable, and that they hadn’t matched Grimes’s. In what seemed like desperation, de Torres also wanted to know who exactly had been responsible for this evidence, how it had been stored, and who else could theoretically have accessed it at the station. Mostly these questions fell flat. Then he sat down.
In addition to the fingerprints, hair samples had been collected from Carrie Elliott’s apartment, but it had taken Steve Hunt several months, until May of 1988, to obtain samples from Willie for comparison, and then only by Willie’s own urging; he himself had filed the motion for his hair to be tested, thinking the results would exculpate him. This hadn’t happened. To explain why, Johnson called Troy Hamlin, a special agent with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, or SBI. For seven years Hamlin had worked as a forensic chemist, specializing in hair comparison. In his career he estimated he had compared several thousand hairs. A month after Carrie’s assault, he explained to Johnson, Hamlin had received her blood, saliva, and hair samples, as well as vaginal swabs, from Jack Holsclaw, evidence technician with the Hickory police. Hamlin’s colleagues at the SBI had analyzed everything except the hair samples, since hair comparison was not part of the customary protocol, and the Hickory police hadn’t asked for it. Six months later, the Hickory police issued a request specifically for hair comparison. This was when the case had been assigned to Hamlin.
For hair comparison to mean anything to jurors, Johnson wanted them to understand how it worked. For fifteen minutes he asked Hamlin questions designed to illuminate the procedure. From a typical hair sample, under a microscope, a trained analyst could determine a person’s race, though not gender. Technically it was impossible to deduce the source of a hair definitively, but Hamlin could get pretty close. “It is rare that you would see two individuals in the general population whose hair has the same microscopic characteristics,” he explained. In May, when Officer Holsclaw mailed him the hairs from Carrie Elliott’s apartment, Hamlin determined that eight of them came from a black man. Seven were fragments, inadequate for analysis. The sole remaining hair Hamlin compared with head hair from Willie Grimes. That hair “was found to be microscopically consistent,” Hamlin testified. “Accordingly, it could have originated from Mr. Grimes.”
“When you say ‘could have,’” Johnson clarified, “can you elaborate on what you mean by that?”
“That it did originate from Willie Grimes,” Hamlin said. “Or if it did not originate from him, it would have originated from an individual of the same race, whose hair had the same microscopic characteristics.”
“That is all,” Johnson said.
Unlike the fingerprints, de Torres had known to prepare for this. He asked Hamlin if he could be certain the single appraisable hair belonged to Willie Grimes. “It was consistent with his hair,” Hamlin answered. “Hair is very specific to one individual. You cannot say, to the exclusion of all other individuals, that the particular hair came from one individual. But as I said before. In seven years of doing hair examination, it is rare that I see two individuals whose hair is the same under the microscope.”
“But it does happen?” de Torres pressed.
“It does happen,” Hamlin said.
Next de Torres had chain-of-custody questions. He wanted to know about the envelope in which police had stored the hairs when they weren’t being tested: exactly when and how Hamlin had received that envelope, the manner in which it had been glued, whether it also had adhesive tape. When these didn’t lead anywhere, he asked about DNA.
Hamlin was familiar with DNA testing, but North Carolina didn’t use it, he explained. De Torres, just before trial, had read of private labs with DNA capability, and Hamlin confirmed these existed. He knew of only two such labs, and of only a couple of cases where DNA had been introduced as evidence. “But those have been on blood or semen,” Hamlin cautioned. “To my knowledge, none have been tried involving a hair identification. As far as hair examination is concerned, that is a relatively new area.” No one knew yet how relevant DNA was to human hair, which was the reason the SBI wasn’t using it. Even if they were, Hamlin predicted, he would not feel secure relying on something so novel. He was hopeful about the technology, but it wasn’t clear how well DNA testing worked.
On Friday, the final morning of trial, de Torres at last called Willie Grimes. Each session of the preceding two days, Grimes, who had close-cut hair and a light mustache, had sat at the defense table observing testimony quietly. Now, as he moved toward the witness stand, he didn’t walk so much as slowly glide, as a boat under limp sails, his willowy limbs nearly like cantilevers. Nine sedentary months in prison had filled him out considerably. When he was arrested the previous October, he had weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds. Now he was nearly two hundred. On the stand his voice emerged slowly, and with strain, as though his vocal cords lacked the necessary flexibility. For most of his life, he admitted to Johnson, he had been “tongue tied, or tied tongued,” whatever that phrase was, and had trouble pronouncing certain words.
For about a year he had lived with his girlfriend, Brenda, in Hickory, Willie explained, and he owned a modest plot of land down on Friendship Road in Shelby, nearly an hour’s drive south. In October, a local bank had mailed him a letter concerning eighty dollars he owed on that land in taxes. Willie had arranged to bring his payment down on Sunday, the twenty-fifth. The bank wouldn’t be open on a weekend, but Willie worked two jobs during the week—one at the Hickory Country Shop, hauling furniture, and another at a textile plant—so he couldn’t get down to Shelby another time. On Sunday he would bring the money to cousins who lived there and who had agreed to stop into the bank for him when it opened on Monday. Until then, Willie knew to keep his eighty dollars in a reliable place, where he wouldn’t be tempted to spend it. On Friday he planned to meet friends for wine, and sometimes, when he drank socially, he spent more money than he knew he should. He didn’t want to be reckless. On Friday afternoon he gave the eighty dollars to a friend named Richard to hold.
Saturday morning, the twenty-fourth, Willie shaved, as he did every morning. Other than his mustache, he liked to be clean-shaven. He dressed in a blue-and-white-striped shirt and a brown jacket, which he would wear for the rest of the day. That afternoon, he and Brenda headed to her cousin’s home for dinner. On the way they stopped at Richard’s house, so Willie could collect his eighty dollars. But Richard wasn’t home. Instead, Willie and Brenda dropped into a supermarket for a seafood platter, to bring to Brenda’s cousin, and two packages of chitlin meat, for the friends Willie planned to meet afterward. The receipts for these purchases Brenda later found in her car, time-stamped 4:14 p.m. After dinner, around eight thirty, Brenda brought Willie to the home of another friend, Rachel Wilson. Willie went inside. Brenda herself couldn’t stay; she worked the third shift, from eleven at night to seven the next morning, at a local nursing home.
At nine o’clock Willie decided to try Richard again for his eighty dollars. Because Richard happened to live across the street from Rachel Wilson, Willie could walk there easily. Around this same time, Rachel Wilson’s sister, Carolyn, realized she had forgotten her pocketbook outside, and returned to her car to retrieve it. Out front of her sister’s house, she saw Willie cross the street to Richard’s.
Richard pulled in a few moments later to find Willie had just arrived in his driveway. Richard said he was sorry for being away earlier—he had been out hunting for auto parts. The two of them vanished briefly inside, then Willie reappeared with his eighty dollars and crossed
the street back to Rachel’s.
In another half hour Willie was ready to return home. Because it was still before eleven, he knew Brenda hadn’t yet left for work, so Willie called to ask if she could come for him. But Brenda misheard him to say Richard Wilson, not Rachel Wilson—Richard and Rachel happened to share the same last name, and Willie’s speech could be hard to decipher over the phone. A few minutes later, Brenda drove the ten blocks to Richard’s house, and found it empty. Deciding Willie must have made other plans, she left for work.
When Brenda didn’t show up, Willie realized he would need to find another ride home. He also predicted Brenda might be exhausted the next morning, after working overnight. In case she would like to sleep in, he wanted another way of getting down to his cousins on Sunday. He called Allen Shuford, a friend with whom he often carpooled to work. Allen was the brother of Rachel Wilson, and of Carolyn, the woman who had left her pocketbook in the car and therefore had seen Willie cross the street. Theirs was a large family, all originally Shufords, though several of the sisters had changed their last names in marriage. Rachel Wilson, for one, had grown up Rachel Shuford. Another sister, Linda, had married a McDowell.
By eleven Willie realized it was getting late, and still he had no ride home. He walked to the house of another friend, where he slept on the couch. The next morning, Sunday, he woke at seven and walked back to Rachel’s. Since Brenda’s shift was over by then, Willie phoned to ask if she could come for him. She was there by seven thirty. She told him she was alert enough to drive, so together the pair headed down to Shelby with Willie’s tax money.
The next day, Monday, Willie carpooled with Allen Shuford to work. He did the same on Tuesday. That day, Willie wore a green sweater, as he often did to work—the pullover was warm and comfortable, and wearing the same sweater whenever he moved furniture meant his other clothes wouldn’t get dirty. When he returned from work in the early evening, Brenda told him the police had come looking for him.
Willie couldn’t think of any reason he might interest the police. “What were they looking for me for?” he asked.
“They wouldn’t tell me,” Brenda replied. But she remembered the name of the officer who had come by: Steve Hunt.
“Well, I haven’t done anything,” Willie told her. “How about giving me a ride to the police station? So we can find out what’s going on.”
At the police station Willie identified himself to two officers at the front desk, and asked the reason they were looking for him. Neither officer had any idea. They consulted their records and found no warrants with his name. Willie explained that Steve Hunt had come by, so the desk officers decided they would radio Hunt to see if he knew anything. Hunt directed them to hold Willie until he got there. When he arrived, he told Willie of warrants for his arrest. Willie, mystified, asked what for. The rape of Carrie Elliott, Hunt answered.
Willie didn’t know anyone by that name. “I haven’t done anything,” he insisted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He asked to be put through a polygraph, to show he was telling the truth.
Hunt declined. “You’d better be quiet,” he warned. “You’re in a lot of trouble.”
As Hunt began paperwork, another officer fingerprinted Willie and photographed him. During this procedure officers noticed a large raised scar below Willie’s collarbone, visible from yards away, and two missing fingertips from his right hand, both the result of accidents years earlier at a textile-manufacturing plant. That Carrie hadn’t mentioned either feature was curious. The scar especially was obvious, and her assailant had spent so much time wandering her apartment shirtless. Willie’s missing fingertips were also from his dominant hand, where, presumably, he would hold a knife, so Carrie likely would have noticed. Briefly, these facts gave Hunt pause. But only briefly. At five thirty in the evening that Tuesday, Willie was processed into the Catawba County jail, behind the courthouse in Newton.
Courtesy of the Hickory Police Department
Because of Willie’s chest scar and missing fingertips, and his weight, which was thirty-five pounds too light, de Torres tried to understand why Hunt had continued anyway with Willie’s arrest. He pointed out the misfortune of Willie having worn a green sweater the day he visited the police station.
“Yes, I did,” Willie confirmed. “And a pair of blue jeans, and a striped shirt. And that pullover sweater.”
“You had worn that to work?” de Torres asked.
“Yes,” Willie agreed. “I just returned from work when Brenda told me that Steve Hunt was looking for me with some warrants. I didn’t even go to the kitchen or anything to get a sandwich. I just told her to carry me up to the police station, because I was going to get this straight. Because I had not done nothing.”
He hadn’t gotten anything straight, though, and after the night in a cell, his preliminary court appearance was held on Wednesday before a judge and a bailiff, who brought him into an otherwise empty courtroom. All was wood-paneled and silent. There, for the first time, Willie heard the full charges against him: rape, kidnapping, and burglary. Not one of those made any sense. There had been some mix-up. Asked to enter a plea, he said not guilty. Asked if he had his own attorney, he said he didn’t. He was photographed and fingerprinted again, and assigned a secured bond of twenty-five thousand dollars, a price beyond anything he could dream of affording. Then another night in jail. Steve Hunt, during Willie’s arrest, had pledged to return later to hear Willie’s version of Saturday night, but he never did. Willie would not see him again for another seven months.
The next morning, Thursday, a stranger wearing a suit visited Willie’s cell. “I’m Ed de Torres,” he told Willie. “I’ve been appointed as your lawyer.” He asked Willie to tell him, briefly, what had happened, and Willie did, though he felt apprehensive about how young de Torres looked; this man was thirty-two or thirty-three, Willie estimated, nearly ten years his junior. Their first meeting lasted five or six minutes. De Torres promised he would come back often. But the next Willie saw him was a month later, in mid-November, at his probable-cause hearing. There the district attorneys called Carrie Elliott to testify, and asked if she could see her attacker in court.
“I don’t know,” Carrie told them. Then she gestured toward Willie. “That looks like him, over there.” A judge asked Willie how he would plead, and again Willie said not guilty. Indictments were returned against him that December. It was much longer, though, before anyone told Willie this. From his cell he tried repeatedly to reach de Torres, but heard nothing back. It was spring before he learned the outcome of his probable-cause hearing. In the months before then, Willie couldn’t understand why de Torres wasn’t visiting, why they hadn’t already gone to trial. No one was listening. He wanted to go home. He was innocent, and the trial would prove it, and until then he was locked up for a crime he hadn’t committed against a woman he didn’t know. The sooner he got to trial, the sooner he could return to his life.
He might have thought differently had he known Michael Lee McCormick. McCormick had been convicted that previous July, a few months before Willie’s arrest, just over the border in Chattanooga, Tennessee—for a murder that he’d actually had nothing to do with. But Willie had never heard of McCormick, as almost no one outside Chattanooga had, and certainly no one outside Tennessee. So the prospect of being convicted after doing nothing wrong had never occurred to him.
Nor had it occurred to almost anyone else. It would be another twenty-five years before anyone began collecting, nationally, the names of the wrongly convicted, into a database that is still permanently growing. Until then—even then—the truth would remain that no one had any clue how often someone like McCormick was wrongly convicted in America, or where, or how long he spent imprisoned.
Meanwhile Richard Dziubak, in Minnesota, would be convicted of beating his mother to death. In fact she had overdosed on antidepressants, but experts misunderstood a toxicology report. Julie Baumer, outside Detroit, would be convicted of shaking her infant nephew. I
n fact the child had suffered an unprompted stroke. Robert Farnsworth Jr., outside Ann Arbor, would be convicted of stealing from the Wendy’s restaurant he managed. In fact the cash would be found six months later wedged in a bank deposit box, exactly where he swore he’d left it. Jaime Siguenza, in Dallas, wouldn’t quite be convicted, so possibly he wouldn’t count; he would only be charged and deported, for planning to sell kilograms of cocaine. In fact that cocaine was powdered gypsum, an ingredient of Sheetrock, the building material.
Jerry Pacek, in Pennsylvania, would be only thirteen years old. Police would interrogate him for seventeen hours. Johnathan Adams, in Georgia, would be twelve. Police would interrogate him without his parents or a lawyer. Jeff Deskovic, in New York, would be a high-school sophomore. Police would grow suspicious of him after a classmate was murdered, when the boy seemed “overly distraught.”
Juan Rivera, in northern Illinois, would be convicted even though DNA tests before trial didn’t match him. Phillip Cannon, in Oregon, would be convicted on expert testimony that bullets found in his home matched identically with bullets found at the crime scene—a type of metallurgic comparison the FBI later discontinued, as it was unreliable. William Richards, in California, would be convicted of murdering his wife—on expert testimony that bite marks on her hand were left by his teeth, a type of analysis the National Academy of Sciences later condemned for having “inherent weaknesses,” since “no scientific studies support this assessment.” Ernest Ray Willis, in southwest Texas, would be convicted of murder by arson and sentenced to death—five years before the National Fire Protection Association issued a report that “for the first time, applied scientific principles to the analysis of… suspicious fires,” according to which principles the fire was judged an accident.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 3
