Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  Kenneth Adams, Verneal Jimerson, Willie Rainge, and Dennis Williams, in Chicago, would be convicted of abducting and murdering a newly engaged couple, on testimony from a teenage witness with an intellectual disability. Actually the teenager witnessed nothing at all. David Ranta, in Brooklyn, would be convicted of killing a rabbi, on testimony from snitches whom police bribed with prostitutes. Curtis McCarty, in Oklahoma City, would be convicted of stabbing an acquaintance, on testimony from a forensic analyst who altered her laboratory notes to implicate him. Debra Milke, in Arizona, would be convicted of murdering her own son, on testimony from a detective who recalled that she flashed him her breasts, offered him sex, and admitted it was all for the insurance money. This detective would have a history of fabricating confessions.

  But Willie Grimes, lying quietly in his jail cell in North Carolina in 1988, had heard of none of these names. Nor had he heard of so many others. Ten of the men and women in this first American accounting, from a National Registry of Exonerations, would be discovered innocent only after they’d died in prison. Still more were sentenced to be executed. All missed birthdays or weddings or funerals or graduations, or their own unraveling marriages, or the final years of their parents’ lives. Several, after release, committed suicide. None of these would be the most worrisome fact. That would be a sentence on page 10 of the registry report, still twenty-five years in the future. “As best we can tell,” it would read, “we have only scratched the surface.”

  Initially Willie’s court date had been set for February 4, but for reasons he didn’t understand it was postponed another five months, until July. These nearly interminable days Willie spent staring at his concrete ceiling, or through the bars of his cell, into the empty gray corridor. His girlfriend Brenda visited him once a week, when he was allowed to speak with her only by telephone, and through an inch-thick glass window. Normally a calm man, he grew obsessively, incalculably angry. At night he lurched awake to dimness so acrid and impounded he could taste it, to hallway lights thrumming outside the bars of his cell. For thirty minutes, once every two or three days, guards allowed him into a small courtyard outdoors.

  The setting for these months was the county prison in Newton, though in the final week of January he was packaged over to Central Prison, just west of Raleigh, on whose twenty-nine cordoned acres no space could be made for him. After three days they shunted him to Eastern Correctional Institution, halfway to the coast, in the paltry town of Maury, which he could see from the bus ride in was really just two minimum-security prisons encompassed by farmland and housing for the prison staff. He was there hardly weeks before they trucked him back to Newton, where he stayed until his trial. Throughout, he saw de Torres once or twice a month. Each visit, Willie expected de Torres to ask further about what had happened that night in October, and that, in turn, de Torres would lay bare more evidence to support him, but this never happened. De Torres’s questions seemed to Willie beside the point. Had he spoken to Brenda or Rachel about the case, once imprisoned? Did he know anyone willing to sign an affidavit? During one visit, de Torres admitted he wasn’t so familiar with criminal cases, since he worked mostly on civil suits. During another, he professed to have been working on criminal cases for several years. Willie felt uneasy. He began worrying that de Torres had chosen simply not to invest his time, having decided, for reasons Willie couldn’t see, that his case was hopeless.

  In fact the opposite was true. De Torres had felt confident from the start. Though he didn’t specialize in criminal cases—he “dabbled,” he would say, in criminal and juvenile and real estate law—he recognized a straightforward assignment when he saw one. Given Willie’s avowed innocence, his nonviolent history, the consistency of his alibi, and, finally, the fact that his size, missing fingertips, and chest scar had never exactly fit Carrie’s description, de Torres was skeptical the case would proceed to trial. After his first meeting with Willie, de Torres had spoken with each of the alibi witnesses: Brenda Smith, Rachel Wilson, Richard Wilson, Carolyn Shuford, and Les Robinson, another friend who had visited Rachel’s house that October night, in search of a cooking pot for his wife, and seen Willie there. All their stories aligned. As important, de Torres felt, not one of those stories had altered over time. The police work, too, struck de Torres as mishandled. He couldn’t believe two banana peels had been left outside Carrie’s apartment; he knew those would have saliva, or fingerprints. Not to collect them seemed negligent beyond comprehension. He further knew the Hickory police had never bothered to speak to Willie or any of the alibi witnesses. Once Carrie had pointed to Willie’s photograph, neither Hunt nor anyone else in the department had apparently troubled with much of an investigation. For this reason, prior to trial, de Torres had asked each alibi witness to sign an affidavit attesting to Willie’s whereabouts and actions, and submitted these to the district attorney. Affidavits were unusual in this circumstance, de Torres knew, and potentially redundant, since those witnesses would testify anyway if Willie’s case proceeded to trial. But the Hickory police had accomplished so little that de Torres thought it was possible the district attorneys truly hadn’t realized how rickety their case was. By producing affidavits, de Torres expected that a trial might be averted altogether. Then, since it was unlikely that Willie had been Carrie’s true assailant, the Hickory police might be persuaded to reopen their investigation.

  In either case, de Torres needed access to discovery—any evidence the state had uncovered that might exculpate his client. A regulation called the Brady Rule, from the 1963 case Brady v. Maryland, required the state to disclose any such evidence to the defense. By now de Torres should have been provided with any information known to either the district attorneys or the Hickory police that suggested Willie’s innocence. But de Torres wasn’t finding this so simple. In March 1988, one month past Willie’s original court date and five months after his arrest, there were still documents de Torres hadn’t seen. Medical records from Carrie Elliott’s hospital visit, including the results of her rape kit. Photographs Officer Holsclaw had captured from the scene of her apartment. The lineup in which she had recognized Willie. De Torres, citing Brady, requested each of these from the district attorney’s office, which referred him to Steve Hunt, the lead investigator. When de Torres phoned Hunt, though, Hunt refused to provide anything, and referred de Torres back to the district attorney, to whom de Torres finally mailed a letter to ensure his request for discovery was on record.

  March 30, 1988

  Dear Mr. Hennigar:

  Last week I attempted to secure the additional discovery you did not have from Investigator S. O. Hunt, HPD, as you had suggested previously, concerning… any fingerprints and any other physical evidence (and tests thereon) obtained at the crime scene (investigative report shows that evidence technician Jack Holsclaw processed all evidence at the scene and that evidence was found). I remind you that exculpatory evidence is to be also given to the defense.

  Officer Hunt rudely informed me that he had nothing to speak to me about and if I needed any additional discovery, to get it from the District Attorney office.

  Therefore, I am formally requesting the above mentioned information and discovery from you. I suppose it will be your responsibility to get this from the Hickory Police Dept. Please notify me when this will be available, as we cannot proceed to trial without this and seeing what further will be needed as a result of this discovery.

  I will await your response.

  Sincerely,

  E. X. de Torres

  Attorney at Law

  Five days later, Hennigar wrote back. His office had recorded de Torres’s request for discovery, he assured him, and in accordance with their open-file policy had already cooperated with each of de Torres’s two requests for paperwork. But only one laboratory report appeared in Hennigar’s file, dated November 1987, and Hennigar had already provided it to de Torres. Now he enclosed another copy. De Torres was welcome to review the file again, Hennigar wrote, and to request whatever
copies he liked. But “we cannot furnish you material we do not have in our file. If Investigator S. O. Hunt, Hickory Police Department, has additional material, you may examine it when we receive it. If he has been rude, I suggest you take the matter up with his superiors.”

  Neither of these things happened. Because Hunt refused de Torres access to his file, and for months kept its full contents from the district attorney, de Torres didn’t learn until trial that fingerprints had been lifted from the banana peel in Carrie’s apartment. At the same time he learned the lineup in which Carrie had recognized Willie was not, in fact, the first lineup shown to her by police. There had been another lineup, at the police station, the night of the crime, before Willie had ever been considered a suspect. Because de Torres couldn’t know if either of these items exculpated Willie, though, he also couldn’t be certain Brady had been violated.

  Meanwhile, in the November laboratory report Hennigar had enclosed for him, de Torres noticed the Hickory police hadn’t requested hair analysis. This meant hairs recovered from the scene had never been tested. Unaware the police had sent a second request to Troy Hamlin precisely for this reason, since neither that request nor Hamlin’s subsequent report had been communicated to him, de Torres assumed the responsibility to test those hairs was his. On April 6, he filed a motion for them to be examined by a private company. He was also interested in DNA. Though he’d never worked with DNA evidence before, just recently he’d happened to read of it in a magazine. The technology of the future, the article had called it. For a guilty client, if he understood correctly, he might want to avoid it. For Willie, it might clear him. Because the hairs themselves were with the Hickory police, though, de Torres would need their cooperation, and he had begun to feel pressure from the upcoming trial date. By the end of May, having still heard nothing back, he wrote to Bill Johnson, the assistant district attorney.

  May 20, 1988

  Dear Bill:

  It’s been a couple of weeks and I haven’t heard anything more on the hair sample testing for Willie Grimes. Since I fully expect to try this case on July 5th, you need to arrange for this as soon as possible so the SBI can finish the hair comparison on time.

  Additionally, I would also suggest that the samples undergo DNA typing as well. If the SBI can do this, it will give an almost sure identification (1 in 30 billion) to a specific person. If they cannot do this, it can be done for under $250.00 by private labs such as Cellmark Diagnostics of Germantown, MD or Life Codes Corp. of Valhalla, NY. DNA typing is a great deal more accurate than traditional hair tests, as it compares the actual genetic codes within the hair cells, with its identifying and individually unique characteristics. This will yield irrefutable evidence one way or another.

  I know you’re involved in the Tucker murder case at present, but maybe Greg, Jay, or someone else at the office can get on this right away. I enclose part of an article on DNA typing for your reference.

  I await hearing from you.

  Sincerely,

  E. X. de Torres

  Attorney at Law

  After more than a month came a response.

  June 28, 1988

  Dear Mr. de Torres:

  This is to advise you that on this date we were advised telephonically by Troy Hamlin of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Lab that he had examined and compared hair samples taken from Mr. Grimes and those found at the crime scene. Mr. Hamlin advised that one of the hairs found at the crime scene matched with those samples from Mr. Grimes.

  A written report should follow shortly. If you have any questions, please contact me.

  Sincerely,

  William L. Johnson, Jr.

  Assistant District Attorney

  There was no response to de Torres’s request for DNA analysis.

  Two weeks later Willie was at trial. Eleven of the twelve jurors were white, he noticed, a proportion that mirrored very nearly the demographics of Catawba County, whose population was only 9 percent black. At least two of them he recognized as local farmers. The three elderly white ladies made him feel more hopeful; he imagined they might be skeptical about a man his age, forty-one, without any history of violent or sexual crimes, assaulting a woman as old as themselves. What the rest were thinking, he couldn’t tell. He expected the sole black juror would conform to whatever the whites decided.

  Also present every day of trial were Willie’s cousins, to whom he had brought his eighty dollars in taxes that Sunday in October. Willie’s four brothers hadn’t been able to attend, nor his three sisters; not all of them lived nearby, and it was bad luck to set foot in a courtroom if you didn’t need to. Besides, this was just some mistake. Their brother would be home soon. De Torres didn’t think their support necessary. To the jury he pointed out that, because Willie had been present until nine o’clock that Saturday inside Rachel Wilson’s house, had returned by nine thirty to phone Allen Shuford, and in between had crossed the street to Richard Wilson’s house, he would not have had more than a few minutes to commit a crime even if somehow this had been in his plans. Carrie Elliott lived three miles from Rachel Wilson’s house, round trip. That distance wasn’t coverable by foot in the sliver of time between Rachel’s and Richard’s houses, and Willie couldn’t have traveled by other means, since he didn’t own a car. The logistics of galloping full speed to Carrie Elliott’s house in order to commit a crime strained credulity even if the jury chose to disregard that Carolyn Shuford had seen Willie cross the street to Richard’s house, where Richard confirmed having met him, and a few minutes later Willie was back at Rachel Wilson’s house, calmly and unremarkably, watching television and complaining about taxes on his land.

  De Torres wanted to know whether, in the nine months Willie had since been imprisoned, Officer Steve Hunt, in his capacity as lead investigator, had ever visited him to ask what had happened that night in October. “No,” Willie answered, shaking his head. “He has not.” Had Officer Hunt ever asked Willie where he was that night? “No. He has not.” Had any of Hunt’s colleagues, any police officer at all, ever spoken to Willie about the case? “Not one person at all,” Willie said. “Only you.”

  DE TORRES: Other than these traffic offenses, have you ever been charged or convicted of any crime?

  GRIMES: No, sir.

  DE TORRES: Have you ever been charged with or convicted of any assault?

  GRIMES: No, sir.

  DE TORRES: Have you ever been charged with or convicted of any violent crime?

  GRIMES: No, sir.

  DE TORRES: Have you ever been charged with or convicted of breaking or entering, or burglary?

  GRIMES: No, sir.

  DE TORRES: Have you ever been charged with or convicted of any sex offense?

  GRIMES: No, sir.

  DE TORRES: And—

  GRIMES: I feel like they should tell the truth. I am not saying that Mrs. Elliott lied about anything she said. She might have been raped, but it was by some other person. It was not me.

  On cross-examination, Johnson asked whether Willie sometimes had trouble articulating clearly—whether, in other words, a stranger might interpret his speech as slurred. Having observed Willie for the better part of a morning, Johnson already knew this was true, and Willie agreed. To speak had always been difficult gymnastics for him, as though his throat closed and opened without notice. Johnson also wanted to know, even if Willie shaved every morning, whether he grew a five o’clock shadow by evening that a stranger might describe as stubble. Willie didn’t think so, but Johnson was skeptical. He clarified the names of everyone involved—that Richard and Rachel Wilson shared the same last name, but weren’t related, and that several of the women mentioned were Shuford sisters, though some had different married names. Then, without much challenge except to Willie’s shaving habits, he let de Torres call more witnesses.

  De Torres in turn called nearly everyone who had seen or spoken with Willie that Saturday night in October. Brenda Smith described the nine-thirty phone call wherein Willie had as
ked her for a ride home, and she had misheard the name Rachel Wilson as Richard Wilson. She also testified to having seen Willie shave Saturday morning. Next, Rachel remembered Willie arriving to her house at eight thirty that Saturday, and staying past midnight, save for a fifteen-or thirty-minute window around nine, when he had crossed the street. Rachel’s sister Carolyn confirmed having seen Willie cross the street to Richard Wilson’s around nine, when she stepped outside to retrieve her pocketbook from her car. Betty Shuford, a third sister, explained that hers was the couch Willie had slept on after leaving Rachel’s so late. Lucille Shuford, the mother of Rachel, Carolyn, Betty, and Linda, confirmed that Willie had called on Saturday night to speak with her son, Allen, about a ride down to Shelby.

  Richard Wilson testified that Willie had visited around nine on Saturday night, to pick up the eighty dollars Richard had been holding for him. Les Robinson, the friend who had stopped into Rachel’s that night to borrow a cooking pot, found Willie there, and returned later to watch television with him, testified the pot was for his wife, who had been trying to boil a ham: “her biggest pot was too small for the ham, so she asked me to go borrow a pot from Rachel.” Libby King, another friend who had been at Rachel’s house, confirmed Willie had been there for nearly the entire night, and she hadn’t noticed anything strange. Mary Finger, Brenda’s cousin, testified that Willie had been wearing brown pants and a striped shirt, not a sweater, green or otherwise.

  Alvista and Sammie Lou Vinson, Willie’s cousins, both testified that they had known him since he was born, and that he was not the kind of person to commit this sort of crime. Robert Vinson, Sammie Lou’s husband, testified that in the forty-odd years he’d been married to Sammie Lou, he had never known Willie to be violent.

  No one who knew Willie had ever seen him express interest in older women or date one of them. De Torres asked each witness, separately, about Willie’s general reputation and character: