Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  But hadn’t people looked? she asked. If the fingerprints were out there, where did Willie believe they were?

  He didn’t know, Willie admitted. But everyone who’d looked had been searching in his file. Why would the fingerprints be in his file? If he’d actually raped Carrie Elliott, or even been inside her apartment, it would follow they’d have been put there. But he’d never done either of those things. Why put fingerprints in the file of a man you knew they didn’t match? He didn’t know whose file they’d been added to, but obviously it wouldn’t be his. That explained why no one had found them there. Until someone proved otherwise, he believed the evidence was still somewhere. He just didn’t know where.

  Privately Chris had dreaded the entire afternoon nearly since Greene had proposed it. She hated meeting clients in person, had learned to avoid it as long as she possibly could. It was hard enough to deal with paper files, to know the letters in print corresponded to a real person and that he was imprisoned. To see him in three dimensions, to hear his voice and touch his hands—it was all too much, it haunted her.

  From the mug shot in his file she recognized Willie instantly. Mentally she’d tried to age his photograph, to predict what he would look like today, but too late she realized she hadn’t accounted for how sick he was. She knew of the prostate cancer; he’d written of it in his letters. The man she met at Caledonia was the height she’d expected, he had the right mustache, the short, graying Afro—but he was gaunter than she’d foreseen, feebler, nearly waxen. Of course, she berated herself.

  Willie moved and spoke slowly, as though his words were viscous. As Greene asked him questions Chris could see him considering his every sentence. She noticed his hand, which he’d injured in those factory accidents. “Willie’s deformed fingers on his left hand are very obvious,” she wrote on her notepad. “It is surprising that the victim did not mention them.” She listened to him answer Greene. “Willie thinks detective Steve Hunt knows he’s not guilty,” she added.

  When Greene had gotten what she’d come for and her photographer was satisfied, Chris hugged Willie and the two women wished him good-bye, then returned to the parking lot. Greene opened her car door to leave, but Chris raised a hand, Hold on, leaned against the hood. Began crying. She hated this part.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Greene asked.

  Chris nodded, trembling. She lifted a finger—Just give me a moment—and then rocked forward, gripped her knees, crouched over the pavement. She was going to vomit, she realized. She reached a hand to the car bumper to steady herself. A wave of nausea rippled over her; she opened her mouth, but nothing emerged. Another ripple. Then it was gone.

  She regained her balance, looked at Greene, nodded, opened her car door. “Okay,” she said.

  24

  I Can Tell That This Lady Have Went Over My Case

  A month after the Denver Post meeting, Willie wrote to the reporter, whose address was listed on a business card she’d given him. When she’d come for his interview, another woman had been there, too, he described—at first he’d thought this was a second reporter, but then she’d mentioned working at Duke Law School. “I don’t know any one at Duke Law School or any one that teach there but I can tell that this lady have went over my case a few times or talk to some one that know about my case because she ask about things that were not in court and I think she will do a good job because she is concern about the truth.” But Willie hadn’t thought to write her name down, and now he’d forgotten it. “Is this lady a professor or a lawyer,” he wondered—could she let him know? “I do want to thank you for all you doing or will do to get the truth out.”

  The answer came a week later.

  March 29, 2007

  Dear Mr. Grimes,

  I was disappointed to hear from Susan Greene that you apparently had not received my letter which I sent shortly after our visit with you. I hope you will receive this one and it will help to answer any questions you have.

  It was a pleasure to meet you during my visit with the reporter from the Denver Post. I sincerely apologize that someone from the Center had not been to see you sooner and that you were not receiving communication from the Center that you were entitled to. I think part of the reason for our limited communication is that your case is very difficult for the Center staff. There is very strong support for your innocence and there is very high frustration that our options for presenting evidence to support your claim in a court of law are very limited. I am hopeful that including the story of your case in the Denver Post’s series will help.

  Mr. Grimes, the rape victim in your case is deceased and the clerk’s office claims that all of the evidence collected after the rape, including the rape kit and the hair evidence, has been destroyed. Without the witness and without the physical evidence, there are limited avenues for the Center to pursue to prove innocence in your case. It is our hope that the publication of your story in the Denver Post will heighten interest in your case enough that if there is any evidence left in your case, it will be uncovered. We will keep you informed of our progress.

  Again, I sincerely apologize for the delay in communications. Our office is a volunteer office with limited resources and we never seem to have the time to communicate with our inmates to the level we would like or they deserve.

  I wish you well.

  Sincerely yours,

  Chris Mumma

  Executive Director

  NC Center on Actual Innocence

  “I know that if we had that hair we could [prove] that I’m innocence,” he wrote back. “The only reason the jury found me guilty is because the doctor told them the one hair they had were in fact my hair.” If not the hair, Willie wanted the fingerprints: “If we had the fingerprints we might find who did this rape.” He and his lawyer Ed de Torres had learned of those fingerprints only at trial, he repeated, and he expected the Hickory police deliberately hadn’t compared them to other suspects’, because that would have proved Willie innocent, which for some reason they hadn’t wanted. “They knew I were innocence the whole time.” Had anyone contacted Linda McDowell, to ask why she’d given the police his name in the first place? “I think she were the one trying to tell Mrs. Elliott what to say.”

  Chris had visited the Catawba County clerk’s office herself, she wrote back. Neither the hair nor the fingerprints were there.

  He wrote to Chris again, to share some advice a jailhouse lawyer had given him in the prison library. She probably needed to file a motion with the attorney general to learn when exactly the evidence in his case had been destroyed, who had authorized its destruction, and why. Since he was skeptical the evidence had been destroyed at all, he predicted the Hickory police, unable to answer those questions, would be forced to turn over what they’d been holding this whole time, and, because the fingerprints didn’t match him, they would turn out to match someone else, a fact that would prove he’d been telling the truth. “They know this,” he insisted. “That is why they didn’t tell us about them.” Still, he would trust whatever Chris chose to do. “I’m going along with what you decide to do until you give up, because I believe Jehovah, who is my God is going to help us and I don’t believe He is going to let me die in here.”

  “States he would like to attend the SOAR program, but will not admit guilt,” a new case manager noted in his file. “Therefore he will not be admitted. He showed me paperwork from Duke Law School and the Innocence Project, that are supposedly working on his case.” The following month he was switched to a different case manager, so he asked for SOAR again. “We discussed his plan and he again states that he will not admit guilt. Therefore he can not attend the SOAR program.”

  The next day he was up again for custody review. “Inmate Grimes has attended no sex offender treatment programs. He has refused to attend the SOAR program, and it is felt retention in medium custody is warranted at this time.”

  25

  Everybody Knows He Didn’t Do It

  Susan Greene e-mailed Chris fro
m Denver with a question that had occurred to her while writing her feature for the Post. She didn’t have a law degree, Greene admitted, but she’d been looking into hair analysis and discovered it had been “discredited, even by the FBI, as somewhat of a pseudo-science based on the faulty assumption that no two specimens are alike.” The police in Hickory who’d worked on Grimes’s case had recovered one hundred hairs from Carrie Elliott’s bedspread, sent eight to the crime lab, and analyzed just one. “That was the only physical evidence against him,” Greene pointed out. “Also, it seems that using only one hair specimen, as in Grimes’s case, goes against accepted practice. Can you do anything for him on those grounds?”

  She wished, Chris replied. She’d considered this already. Greene was right; at trial, a so-called expert had suggested the one recovered hair belonged to Willie. But the expert had only hinted that; he’d never said it outright. This was the worst of both worlds, as Chris saw it. The flimsy comparison had certainly influenced the jury, and prosecutors had certainly relied on it, but the expert had never said anything explicitly false, so Chris didn’t have anything to challenge. That one hair comparison hadn’t been the only evidence, either—Greene had left out Carrie Elliott’s ID of Willie. That ID had been “incredibly weak,” Chris admitted, but jurors had believed it, which was all that mattered. Even if Chris tried appealing the hair comparison, a judge would simply cite the ID. As far as the court was concerned, Willie’s case hadn’t depended on hair comparison alone. “This case just sucks more and more every time we touch it,” Chris wrote.

  “Got it,” Greene replied. “That does suck.”

  A week later Greene e-mailed again. She wanted Chris to know that she’d reached out to a captain in the Catawba County sheriff’s department, who’d told her he “liked old cases” and would look personally for Grimes’s evidence. The captain himself had gone on to search three different evidence rooms, including one that held everything for cases that never proceeded to trial, just in case something had been misfiled there. But he hadn’t found anything.

  The Post feature ran that summer of 2007, in a four-part series called “Trashing the Truth” that Greene had written with a colleague. “In some evidence rooms, chaos and disorganization makes searches futile,” a caption read. “Others are purged of valuable DNA samples, leaving cases unsolvable.” The problems with storage that had once alarmed Chris turned out to exist nearly everywhere: “In a country whose prime-time TV lineup glorifies DNA forensics, many real-life evidence vaults are underfunded and mismanaged,” the Post reported. In certain counties it had found bicycles, lawn mowers, car parts, computers, rifles, tree branches, and six-packs of beer piled atop rape kits, test tubes, and bloody T-shirts, all logged haphazardly in incomplete, handwritten catalogs. One district, in Florida, had taken to storing overflow evidence in a men’s bathroom. Another, in Louisiana, used the attic of a local courthouse, where marijuana leaves scattered on the floor were marked with tiny perforations—these turned out to be the bite marks of rats, which clerks had laid traps for. “The system is almost foolproof,” another clerk promised. “I’ve got a photographic mind, see. I know from memory where almost everything is.”

  In ten different states, the Post had discovered evidence rooms so overburdened that clerks had finally decided simply to purge them, intending to begin fresh. Instead, this had compounded the problem. The Post had found 141 inmates, across twenty-eight states, whose innocence claims had been collapsed by lost or destroyed evidence. “You can’t keep everything,” one clerk, in New Orleans, told reporters.

  The problem, clerks agreed, was that no policies prioritized evidence from felonies over evidence from misdemeanors, and since a car bumper from a hit-and-run typically occupied more space than a DNA swab from a sexual assault, evidence rooms had gotten organized this way. Or that was one problem. Another was jurisdiction. To avoid politics and confusion about who held authority over what, federal and state governments often left the handling of evidence to local courts, or to police, both of whom had less training and fewer resources. In 2004, Congress had passed something called the Justice for All Act, requiring that all biological evidence be preserved in federal cases, but no equivalent mandate existed for local or state cases, which were far more common. And some officials still weren’t sure what biological evidence even was. “That would include tree bark, right?” one courthouse official, in Houston, had asked a Post reporter.

  “Nobody has stepped up to the plate and said, ‘This is the way it has to be,’ one expert told the Post, and in all the patched-together confusion, many districts weren’t sure themselves of what evidence they had, so inmates in those districts who might truly be innocent had absolutely no way to prove it. “To give the public the impression that the bad guy will be caught and the good guy will be exonerated based on DNA evidence is a fraud,” a defense attorney in Southern California remarked. “Because more likely than not, the evidence is in the trash can, and that trash was taken out years ago.”

  The Post’s feature on Willie ran July 24. APPLE TOSSED IN GARBAGE MAY HAVE CLEARED MAN, its headline read. In addition to Chris, Susan Greene had interviewed the Catawba County clerk, Al Jean Bogle. “In an evidence room packed to its brim, Bogle was flummoxed to discover that her predecessor had destroyed the only DNA samples that could have freed Willie Grimes before he dies in prison.” It was a mystery to Bogle why that had happened: “I’ve been clerk for almost eight years. We’ve got four truck tires in the evidence room. We’ve got bales of marijuana that have been in there since I became clerk. And Mr. Grimes’s evidence, evidence in a life case, is gone. I hate it.”

  Grimes would become eligible for parole in another year, but he was unlikely to get it, Greene’s feature continued, because he refused to join a program that would require him to admit guilt. “Whether I ever get out or not, I’ll never sign papers saying I’m guilty of something I didn’t do,” she quoted Willie, from her visit to Caledonia. “I’ll spend the rest of my life in here before I do that.” Greene had followed up with Betty Shuford, Willie’s onetime girlfriend, who also happened to be the sister of Linda McDowell, the neighbor who’d implicated him. “She just got the wrong person, mixed up,” Betty had said. “She’s my sister, so it’s hard. But everybody knows he didn’t do it.” Finally Greene tracked down Linda herself, who hadn’t recalled the details of Willie’s case. “All I know is he went away. It’s over and done with now.”

  “He says he hopes he won’t die behind bars,” Greene’s feature closed. “But without any evidence, he knows it’s likely that he will. He struggles to find meaning in his disappointment.” Its final page included a photograph from Greene’s visit: Willie, his face tilted slightly upward, flecks of white in his mustache and hair, fluorescent ceiling lights reflected in his bulky, prison-issue glasses.

  Chris hoped the Post series would attract new scrutiny to Willie’s case, or pressure officials to look once more for his evidence. Now that it had run, she listened for her office phone neurotically, pleading for it to ring, or stared at her computer screen, hoping for a promising e-mail to appear.

  And waited.

  “As you know, it was my hope that the Denver Post series would heighten the interest in your case and perhaps result in some additional searches for evidence,” Chris wrote him. “Unfortunately, I do not know of any new developments at this time.” She folded a copy of the Post article into her letter so Willie could read it. “My plan now is to go to Catawba county to go to the Sheriff’s Department and Police Department to go through the evidence rooms one more time. There is a very good chance that everything has been destroyed, Willie, but we will keep pressing until we are 100% sure.”

  “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your time and effort that you have exerted on my behalf,” Willie replied. “I am truly grateful.”

  “I know you have been waiting for an update on your case,” Chris wrote him some weeks later. “I wish I had better news for you.” She’d
searched all three evidence rooms at the Catawba sheriff’s office, but turned up nothing. “It continues to look like the rape kit was destroyed in 1990 as part of normal operating procedure… The victim is deceased, Linda McDowell stands by her story, and it is becoming certain that the biological evidence has been destroyed.” Their only remaining option was a clemency petition to the governor. Chris knew Willie had applied for this once before, a decade earlier, but she expected she could file a better petition than he had managed on his own. “We have not given up on looking for evidence in your case,” she promised. “We think about your case constantly. Rely on your faith and continue to be strong.”

  A week later, he sat down with a pencil to write back.

  11-09-07

  Dear Mrs. Mumma

  I do hope that this letter will find you and family in the best of health and I were glad to hear from you.

  I do want you to do what you think is the best thing to do, so if you think petition for Clemency is the best, I agree with you and it’s been on my mind too, plus I know you can have it done better than myself. And I didn’t have any one behind me when I did it.

  Respectfully

  Willie J. Grimes

  26

  The First Real Test

  Now that she was executive director, Kendra embarked on a campaign to promote the IIC to nearby law schools and police and attorney organizations, especially those she predicted might be skeptical, hoping to make herself and the organization seem as transparent and unthreatening as she could. “We do not advocate for inmates,” she repeated to anyone who would listen. “We try to find out what the truth is about a crime, and a conviction, in order to achieve justice.” The IIC wasn’t on one particular side or the other; the cases that interested her involved an element of doubt, and Kendra intended to put that doubt to rest. If she could do this by establishing guilt or innocence, then as far as Kendra was concerned, justice had been done.