BRENDA SMITH: He is quiet, and don’t bother nobody.
RACHEL WILSON: He is a nice person, and he is no trouble to anybody. He gets along with everybody there.
CAROLYN SHUFORD: I know that he is a nice fellow.
LUCILLE SHUFORD: Well, he always come down to see me and he did not give me any trouble or nobody else any. He come down to see me and was real nice.
LIBBY KING: A real nice person, helps people whenever he can help them.
RICHARD WILSON: He is a very good person and he has never been raising any sand at me.
MARY FINGER: As far as I know, he is a nice person, and friendly.
DE TORRES: What kind of reputation does Mr. Grimes have for truthfulness, and telling the truth?
BRENDA SMITH: He will tell the truth.
RACHEL WILSON: So far as I know, he always tells the truth. He is a pretty honest man.
BETTY SHUFORD: He has been with me.
CAROLYN SHUFORD: As far as I know, he never told me or anybody else a lie.
LIBBY KING: He seems to be truthful to me.
RICHARD WILSON: As far as I know he has always been truthful.
LES ROBINSON: As far as I know, he never told me any lie.
ALVISTA VINSON: He is an honest fellow.
SAMMIE LOU VINSON: He was a truthful person, as far as I know, in my dealings with him.
ROBERT VINSON: Willie Grimes has always been honest and a good fellow as far as I know.
DE TORRES: Have you ever heard of him being violent?
BRENDA SMITH: No, sir.
RACHEL WILSON: No, sir.
CAROLYN SHUFORD: No, sir.
BETTY SHUFORD: No, sir.
LUCILLE SHUFORD: Not that I know of, no.
LIBBY KING: No, sir.
RICHARD WILSON: No.
LES ROBINSON: Well, as long as I have known him, I never known him to have been in but two fights. And he didn’t start them, and he lost both of them.
On the final day of trial, Friday, July 8, at a few minutes before noon, Jay Meyers provided the first half of a closing argument for the state. He believed he and Johnson had surpassed their burden of proof, implicating Grimes “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The facts in this case were “stubborn things,” he reflected, “and they don’t seem to go away.” One, Carrie Elliott had been raped. “She told you how she fought with all her strength,” he reminded jurors. “But she was not big enough, nor young enough, to defend herself against somebody that size.” Moreover, Carrie had been able to describe him afterward: “She said he talked with some impairment, and that he was like being tongue tied. You heard the defendant himself testify from the stand, and you heard his speech, you heard how he talked. There was a lot made about her description of her attacker. But she told you about a mole on the side of his face, around his mouth. She said one time it was on the right side, and then later she said on the left side, but there was a big mole and it was close to his mouth. You saw the defendant up here, and he does in fact have a mole on his face, at the corner of his mouth. It is not so important as to which side the mole is on, but that is a fact that he has a mole. That is consistent with what Mrs. Elliott testified.
“She said that she would never forget that face,” Meyers continued. “That face was right over her, and she had the opportunity to observe him very close up. She had her glasses on, and the lights were on. You heard the police evidence technician say that he found the lights on in the house when he arrived. She had ample opportunity to get a very good look at him. She told you she recognized him. She testified as to the clothing that he was dressed in that night, and the defendant admitted that he had on a green pullover sweater and that he did wear it frequently to work.
“Then there is one other piece of evidence in this case. That is the hair. The state submits the only place that hair could possibly come from is from the defendant, and it came from him when he was assaulting this lady.”
De Torres responded with his final thoughts. A crime had been committed, he agreed, but he felt it was impossible for Willie to have committed it. Besides his alibi, which the jury had heard from every conceivable angle, Willie simply did not match the description Carrie had provided that night at her apartment, the same she had provided at the hospital, the same she had provided at the Hickory police station. Her assailant had weighed two hundred pounds; Willie was one sixty-five. Her assailant had been stubbled; Willie had shaved that morning. Her assailant had held a knife and walked shirtless in a lit room. Willie was missing two fingertips from his dominant hand, and a prominent scar was on his chest. None of these features had ever come up. Willie’s mole, de Torres reminded the jury, had been mentioned only later, after Carrie had spoken with her neighbor, Linda McDowell. And Carrie had placed that mole on the wrong side of Willie’s face.
Finally, de Torres addressed the imperfect science of hair comparison. He reminded the jury of what they had heard from Troy Hamlin: that it was possible for hair from two different people to look similar under a microscope. Uncommon, but possible. If a single hair was all that linked Willie to the crime, it was not enough. In this circumstance, there was only one correct choice for the jury to make. De Torres trusted jurors to make it.
At two in the afternoon, once the court returned from a lunch recess, Bill Johnson had the final word. It was important, Johnson suggested, that jurors consider the credibility of each testifying witness. Every person involved in Willie’s alibi was a friend of his, or a girlfriend. Nearly half of them were siblings. Johnson didn’t think these made for reliable witnesses. Willie’s alibi was vague, anyway. Richard Wilson, for example, said he’d met Willie a little before nine. “I don’t know what that means,” Johnson confessed. “Does that mean eight thirty? Or eight fifty-nine? Does it mean sometime in between there?” He repeated what Meyers, his co-counsel, had described: that Carrie’s apartment lights had been on that night in October, and she had been wearing her glasses. “She was face to face with him not just once, but twice. If you are being sexually assaulted, where is your attention going to be directed? Are you not going to be looking at the face of the person doing that assault?” De Torres’s worry about the mole, that Carrie might have been influenced by her neighbor, was misleading. “Is she the kind of person that is going to do that?” Johnson asked skeptically, gesturing toward Carrie. “Surely she wants the right person caught as much as the state does. And as much as you would, if you were in her situation.” Neither did he take seriously the alleged imperfection of hair comparison. Jurors could make up their own minds about the reliability of science.
After instructions from Judge Griffin, the jury withdrew to deliberate. This took them less than ninety minutes. When they returned, their foreman was grasping three sheets of paper. At Judge Griffin’s order, he handed them to a court clerk, who read them aloud. Willie Grimes was guilty of two counts of first-degree rape and one count of first-degree kidnapping. All three convictions were unanimous. De Torres, desperate now, moved to poll the jury, which meant for each juror to confirm individually that he or she agreed with the verdict. Each juror did so. Judge Griffin set a sentencing hearing for after the weekend.
Court recessed at four thirty.
At the sentencing hearing the following Monday, de Torres moved to dismiss the charges against Willie entirely. Judge Griffin denied this. Then de Torres moved that the verdict from the previous Friday be dismissed “as contrary to the weight of evidence presented at the trial.” Griffin denied this, too.
At last Judge Griffin instructed Willie to stand. “It is ordered, adjudged, and decreed,” he announced as Willie rose, that Willie “be imprisoned in the North Carolina Department of Corrections for a period of his natural life.” The conviction for kidnapping carried another nine years, though credit would be subtracted to reflect the 259 days Willie had already spent in prison, awaiting trial.
De Torres said he intended to file an appeal with the North Carolina Supreme Court. Judge Griffin replied that he was allowed ninety days
to do so. Then de Torres made a strange motion. He wanted access to every piece of evidence from trial, so he could submit the fingerprints from Carrie’s apartment to the FBI for comparison with their database. He also wanted permission to solicit fingerprints from Carrie Elliot, so that hers could be compared with those from the banana, something the Hickory police had never done. Finally, he wanted funds for independent forensic testing, in order to pursue DNA analysis on the recovered banana, a procedure Willie would never be able to afford on his own.
Johnson objected that this was a “very unusual request.” In eleven years as a prosecutor, he had never heard one like it. The FBI fingerprint database was still so new that Johnson doubted a comparison would yield anything. Anyway, a search like this required prints from all ten fingers, and only two had been lifted from that banana. Any appeal to the FBI was thus a needless expense. “Discovery and testing of evidence is a pretrial type of exercise,” Johnson argued. “It’s not something you do once the case is tried and the verdict’s in. It just seems to me like we’re kicking a dead horse here.”
De Torres, though, would not be cowed. He reminded Judge Griffin about his difficulty gaining discovery prior to trial. “I would like the opportunity to see if we can discover whose fingerprints those are,” he insisted.
Judge Griffin admitted he had never heard a request like this. He would take it under advisement.
But he would never rule on the forensic testing, and de Torres would never follow up. Within two years, Judge Griffin had retired.
A month and a half after Willie’s conviction, on August 21, 1988, Ed de Torres sat in his kitchen reading the local newspaper, the Hickory Daily Record. In its pages he noticed an exposé on the new Crime Stoppers program in Catawba County. TIPS WILL AID FIGHT BY POLICE, its headline promised. Beneath a photograph of a prison guard surveying an empty cell, a caption elaborated: “Crime Stoppers Program Is Helping Put Criminals Behind Bars.” Recently Crime Stoppers had led to “arrests in at least two major crimes,” the article continued.
On October 26, a confidential source telephoned HPD and provided information that led to an arrest, and subsequent conviction, in the rape of an elderly woman. The confidential source had heard the description of the person being sought, and called HPD and directed them to Willie Grimes. He recently was sentenced to life in prison for rape, plus nine years for kidnapping. The confidential source was paid $1,000 for the tip.
De Torres put down his newspaper. It was the first he had heard of any tip, or informant. From the start he had been troubled by suspicion that Carrie Elliott’s neighbor, Linda McDowell, had likely swayed her recollection. But he had expected Carrie’s evolving memory would be enough to demonstrate this influence to the jury. No one had told him of any reward. Linda herself had never testified at trial. The district attorneys had never suggested it, and, unaware that she’d received any financial incentive, de Torres hadn’t thought there was reason to call her.
Now it was too late.
2
Chris
That same summer, in Durham, North Carolina, a hundred and fifty miles east, Christine Mumma hoped to keep out of morning newspapers entirely. A pretty, blond twenty-six-year-old, just a few inches taller than five feet, she and her husband expected a daughter the coming October, and for two weeks she’d been dodging cameras, mortified that her belly might appear in news reports. She hadn’t wanted to serve on jury duty at all—the company she worked for, Northern Telecom, had even made calls to get her out of it. But twice already she’d asked for excusals, so now she was out of them.
On trial that summer was James McDowell, for a murder Chris could see he’d obviously committed. On the day of the shooting he’d been carrying a gun, and boasted to friends he planned to “burn someone.” The four gunshots he’d fired had followed the path of his victim’s car—this was important, it showed he’d been aiming—and McDowell’s own lawyer admitted he’d fired them. The woman he killed, a Sunday-school volunteer, had been on her way home from midweek service.
Whether McDowell had murdered her, it turned out, was not the variable to be solved for. The question was whether he’d been after any money. Under North Carolina law, Chris discovered, a conviction for murder alone did not guarantee the death penalty. That required an aggravating factor. McDowell’s argument wasn’t that he hadn’t fired the gun but rather that he hadn’t been trying to rob anyone. Legally, he was better off if he’d simply murdered without reason. This way he would be sentenced to life in prison.
How was it possible a decision so large depended on something so trivial? The proportions were all wrong; this felt preposterous. McDowell had fired the gun. Who cared whether he’d also been after a wallet?
McDowell himself surprised her, too. She’d imagined a murderer would repulse her. McDowell didn’t. He was a skinny kid, only five years younger than she was, who’d spent most of his life in detention centers. A dozen times he’d gotten expelled from one of these to another, until he’d turned eighteen and was released. Out on his own he broke into houses and stole things. Twenty-one months later he sprayed four gunshots through some poor woman’s windshield.
Looking nearly as disheveled as McDowell was his lawyer, Chris noticed, who appeared as though he were dressing on the commute in. Often he repeated himself, or shuffled papers, or abandoned his sentences mid-thought. Chris wondered how long he’d had to prepare. Then, at home, on the final night of trial, her phone rang; it was him, the lawyer. He could tell she didn’t want to convict his client, he told her. She seemed nervous in her seat in the jury box, and he didn’t want her feeling pressured by the others. This was why he’d called, to reassure her. How had such a nice girl wound up in a situation like this? He felt just awful about it.
Chris knew she ought to report the call to the judge, but she kept silent about it. The lawyer had been wrong about her. She wasn’t nervous. She’d done the math; McDowell was guilty. It was unfortunate, the life he’d lived, and Chris felt sorry for him, though not as sorry as she felt for the woman he’d killed. And she resented his lawyer’s implication that she lacked nerve, that it had anything to do with her being—what had he called her?—a nice girl. She wouldn’t report him. She didn’t need anyone’s help. Instead, she would refuse his influence. She would show him precisely what he’d doubted.
Chris came from Morristown, New Jersey, a township so small that it was news when a Burger King opened, though really she’d grown up all over: in Massachusetts, in North Africa, in Rome. Her father, Ralph, had worked as an engineer for Exxon, and moved wherever they needed him. Ralph had been raised by a strict Italian family in Maryland, during the Depression, and the lessons this ingrained in him he carried through the rest of his life. His ample paychecks from Exxon made no difference; money was only paper, he knew, or numbers on a screen. Either could vanish in an instant. He’d seen it himself. He resolved to teach this lesson to his children: that the only insurance was self-reliance.
It hadn’t been easy, being a teenager in Ralph Cecchetti’s household, and Chris’s three older siblings had very nearly avoided it: a brother moved away at sixteen, a sister went off to boarding school. Another sister was so unnaturally well behaved that, even teenage, she’d never really been a teenager. Chris was not so lucky. She lived at home and, worse, had inherited a portion of Ralph: his will, his disputatiousness, his aversion to even the appearance of following others. Both could be unforgiving. There were things around her Chris couldn’t bear. Once, in Libya, at twelve years old, she saw live camels heaved like vegetables onto the beds of trucks, heavy doors slammed on their hooves. “Stop that!” she ordered tearfully, her hands clenched in tiny fists. But the men wouldn’t. So she demanded that Ralph make them. But he wouldn’t, either. She never forgot this: her keen, indignant sense of right and wrong, her outrage in learning that not everyone shared it.
Ninth grade she began at an all-girls school in Rome. Half of tenth grade she spent in New Jersey, the other half in Massachu
setts. For twelfth grade, she was back in New Jersey—except for the two months her parents were forced to withdraw her entirely, since she’d fled on her own back to friends in Massachusetts. The other times she’d run away hadn’t lasted so long: a night or two in the Port Authority, alone below moonlit glass and steel trusses; or to Duke, where a sister attended college; or for a weekend with a boy Ralph disapproved of. She was picking up broken birds, her parents told her. That was all she was doing, that was all these boys were. One bird was in trouble with the law. Chris put her babysitting income toward a lawyer.
The day after she graduated from high school, her parents boarded a plane for Saudi Arabia. Chris drove to Chapel Hill. Ralph had offered a loan to cover tuition, but Chris turned it down; she guessed he could have paid outright if he wanted, and anyway she didn’t want to feel indebted to anyone, much less her father. Instead, she took a job at a bar near campus. One night, a drunken undergrad punched her in the mouth. Still it was better than repaying a loan to Ralph.
Four years later she had a degree in business administration, and soon after that was married. She’d met Mitch Mumma back in high school, during an escape to her sister at Duke, where Mitch, too, had been visiting an older sibling. She took a job with Northern Telecom. Before long, she and Mitch were expecting. Seven months after that she was summoned to jury duty, for the trial of James McDowell.
3
Only a Few Additional Weeks
No way, he thought. For a moment Willie assumed he had misheard the verdict, but then de Torres was polling the jury and the moment rushed past him. No way. Now de Torres was saying something about an appeal, but Willie couldn’t concentrate. Guilty? He couldn’t work out what had happened. Only by the knowledge that soon it would all be put behind him had he survived the long wait for trial; in exchange for a few days sitting in a courtroom he would be allowed to resume his life, move back in with Brenda, go back to work. It wouldn’t look good to the boss that he’d been arrested, but he expected he could get both his jobs back, at the textile plant and loading furniture, since he hadn’t done anything wrong. All this had been a mistake, and he had always been a good employee. As soon as he was acquitted he could explain and get rehired.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 5
