Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  According to the Official Crime version, Mr. Grimes illegally entered the residence of a 69 year old female and forced the victim into vaginal intercourse. Her undergarments were ripped from her body. Mr. Grimes threatened the life of the victim while wielding a knife and holding his hands around the victim’s neck. The victim had recently been widowed.

  […]

  Conclusion: HIGH RISK FOR UNSUPERVISED ACCESS TO THE COMMUNITY

  Ken Yearick, PhD 3/30/10

  Ken Yearick, PhD Date

  Psychological Program Manager

  To be determined a high risk rather than an unacceptable one was faint praise, but it was enough to leave the door ajar for the parole commission. The week after the assessment, Willie was sent one afternoon to Raleigh, to meet with a panel of DOC authorities. What changes had he made since he’d been incarcerated? they wanted to know. What classes had he enrolled in, and had those rehabilitated him? Did he think he posed a risk to the community?

  He explained his baptism as a Witness and about Eddie and Virginia Moose. No, he wasn’t any risk. In fact, he’d never been any risk in the first place.

  After ten minutes he left the panel, certain they would deny him. Halfway through May, he learned instead they’d approved him for a MAPP contract.

  The MAPP changed everything. This guaranteed that in two more years he’d be paroled, as long as he followed instructions, which he knew he could. Finally on the horizon he could imagine entire days beyond prison fences. It would mean reintegrating on the outside. This was crucial. Besides those first several years, when anger had disfigured him, the most damning fact of prison was not concrete or razor wire but the simple absence of anyone who recognized who he was. Except for Gladys, Eddie and Virginia, and a friend or two from Douglas High, for as long as he’d been on a camp, no one had known him as Woot, only as Inmate Grimes, #0158046. The MAPP contract would change this. On the outside, he would meet strangers who were not guards or inmates or administrators, and they would not all know of his conviction, meaning that, however rarely, he would be free of its associations—to them he would not be Inmate Grimes, he would be Woot, plain Woot, and shy as he was, he would meet a sponsor or employer or even people on the street, would meet social workers and more Witnesses, and all of them would see who he was, they would have to, they would listen and know he was innocent. On the outside, it would be impossible for someone to meet him and not see this. The more people who saw it, the more this most basic fact about him would travel, and the pressure it would bring on the prison would prove unbearable. Eventually they’d be forced to let him out for good.

  There were things he needed to complete before this could begin. “The Mutual Agreement Parole Program (MAPP) is designed to prepare selected inmates for release through structured activities, scheduled progression in custody, participation in community based programs and established parole,” read a form his case manager had him sign that spring. As long as he remained infraction-free, soon he would qualify for day passes; in July 2011, for work release; the following December, for home leave; and eventually for parole. He asked for a transfer to Gaston Correctional as soon as the DOC promoted him to minimum security, as he knew it would now be forced to. Gaston sat barely a dozen miles from Kings Mountain, where Gladys had moved, and less than thirty miles from Lawndale, and only thirty-five miles from Gaffney, just over the border in South Carolina, where Eddie and Virginia Moose now lived.

  He was summoned to meet a classification committee: two case managers, a guard captain, and a coordinator, one of whom he recognized from his parole hearing. Why did he want minimum security, and would he be any threat there? Did he believe he deserved it? Had he taken any courses?

  Yes, he deserved it; yes, he’d taken courses; no, he wasn’t a threat to anyone.

  After fifteen minutes they asked him to step outside the door, then called him back inside and told him to sign another form. “He spoke about going through changes,” they noted in their subsequent committee report. “He also spoke about proving his innocence and the innocence project. It was the decision of the facility classification committee to recommend promotion for inmate Willie Grimes #0158046.”

  A nurse at Mountain View filled out a health-screening form on Willie’s behalf, to update his records. Under Question 10—“Have you ever used alcohol and/or other drugs?”—she checked “Yes.” Under “Date of last use,” she wrote, “25 years ago.” That same day he was transferred to Gaston Correctional, where promptly he signed up for Alcoholics Anonymous, a condition of his MAPP.

  There were no reinforced perimeter walls at Gaston, no turreted guard towers or severe, hulking stone cubes. Only an aging, tree-lined campus of brick and white buildings with road names like Life Skills Lane and Safety Officers Drive, hemmed in by a single layer of fence. Unlike most camps he’d been at, which were isolated from the surrounding town, Gaston sat on the same unremarkable street as a community park and a strip mall: Arby’s, Walgreens, Wells Fargo, a gas station. At the clothes house, he exchanged his brown prison uniform for a green one, the color of minimum custody. When he tried to shave the following morning, he learned he could purchase and keep his own razors, rather than sign one out from a guard.

  “He said being housed at Gaston was a great help,” his new case manager wrote in his file. “We went over his ability to work at a job like dorm janitor. He said he felt he could do that type of work and would try what ever he was told to do… He wants to do what ever is needed to remain in compliance and at the same time he knows it will be hard to find a work release job due to his crime.”

  He checked the activities board, found no announcement for a Jehovah’s Witnesses meeting, so asked around and learned that no Witnesses visited Gaston regularly. One congregation had tried a while back, but when no inmates attended they’d stopped coming, and when they’d tried to start up again, administrators denied them permission. But Thursday afternoon a stranger named Bryan Stewart showed up, with news that Eddie Moose had called him. Stewart was a round man with wispy cotton hair and a habit of quizzing those he met on biblical trivia—he was an elder in the local congregation, he explained, and Gaston had given him a hard time about visiting Willie for Bible study, but he was allowed to come on Sundays, during regular visiting hours, as a normal guest. This was what he planned to do, as long as Willie would like him to. Today Bryan had argued with Gaston for just fifteen minutes to welcome Willie as a new arrival, but he promised to return over the weekend for longer. Willie agreed to add him to his list of approved visitors. “I’ll see you Sunday,” Bryan told him before leaving.

  On Sunday, Bryan arrived at noon. Only a couple years shy of eighty, he was so effusive he seemed a decade younger. He owned a company in nearby Gaston, Pioneer Utilities and Plumbing, he told Willie, but really his calling was to spread the Truth as far and as loud as he could. Since he’d married, at twenty-one, and found Jehovah, he estimated he’d read the Bible more than thirty times, cover to cover, and in his own life he had seen miracles. A few years earlier he’d decided to erect a Kingdom Hall on the same grounds as his utilities company. When the authorities had told him he couldn’t, due to zoning restrictions, Bryan began a petition, and soon enough the zoning prohibition was lifted. Still, he couldn’t build there, authorities told him, since his driveway was too narrow. A few days later, a neighbor approached Bryan with a problem: He needed to sell off some of his property. So Bryan bought sixty feet and used it to widen his driveway. Still, he couldn’t build there, authorities told him, since no fire hydrant was near enough. So Bryan planned to bore under a service road, beneath a highway, and tap into a water main, at a cost of thirty thousand dollars. Around then, however, he noticed for the first time a small, dilapidated house, visible from his office through an unkempt copse of trees. He could barely read its FOR SALE sign through the weeds. He scraped dirt from the phone number on the sign, called it, and made an offer, which the real estate agent accepted immediately. Then he walked the lot to take a
closer look around. There on the corner, he told Willie, you could guess what he found: a fire hydrant. All he needed to do was give his congregation rights to use that hydrant through his property, which he happily signed over. Building the actual Kingdom Hall had taken less time than getting all the permits. “Why’d it work?” he asked. “Jehovah makes things work, if it’s according to His will. Jehovah will provide.”

  Bryan had first visited Gaston after learning its warden had a brother who was a Witness, but that warden had since retired, and his successor was less accommodating—like its chaplain, to whom Bryan had tried explaining that all he wanted was to hold a simple Bible study. “What’s a Bible study?” the chaplain had asked him.

  “You know, where we read chapters,” Bryan had replied, dumbfounded. “Ain’t you a minister? You don’t know what a Bible study is?”

  The chaplain had not taken this well. Bryan was not always so tactful, he knew—this was one of his flaws, along with his belly—but it was a Bible study, after all. How could a chaplain be confused about that? Anyway, this was why, when Eddie Moose phoned to ask whether he would visit Willie at Gaston, Bryan answered that he was happy to, but could do it only on Sundays, because otherwise he wasn’t welcome.

  From then on, Bryan and Willie spent each Sunday afternoon together at a picnic table out on the yard, near the Gaston basketball courts. Every week Bryan clipped a Scripture lesson from Watchtower magazine, a Jehovah’s Witness publication, for himself and Willie to study together. His open Bible lying flat atop the picnic table, Bryan followed lines of the text with his finger, his chin slumped to his chest, periodically looking up wide-eyed to emphasize a certain passage. Willie, seated placidly across from him, followed along in a Bible of his own, one hand neatly in his lap, the other pinching a page corner. He told Bryan what he had waited longer to tell Eddie: he was innocent, and could have been freed already if he’d only confessed, even though it wasn’t the truth. Soon after, Eddie called Bryan at home, to tell him the same thing.

  Bryan believed them. Already he’d noticed how different Willie seemed from other inmates he’d visited—so mild, so private, so polite. A typical inmate was not this way. Up at Avery County, he’d once studied with an inmate in the warden’s own office, where every so often the inmate would leap up from his Bible to steal things. “Let me show you, I can open this safe,” he would say, and Bryan would try to talk him out of it. Later, when Bryan rose to leave, the inmate would begin cackling. “Before you go, do you want your billfold?” he would ask, and suddenly he’d be holding Bryan’s wallet. Bryan had tried his best, but Scripture hadn’t taken. Not every inmate he’d met was so skilled, or so gleeful about it, but they were nearer to that than they were to Willie, whom Bryan couldn’t imagine stealing anything. If he himself had spent two decades in prison, Bryan imagined, he wouldn’t be so serene. But here Willie was. Another miracle.

  On weekdays between Bryan’s visits, meanwhile, Willie continued attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the Gaston library. Next he enrolled in a class called Guides for Living, and another called Hard Focus on Freedom. Then he joined Narcotics Anonymous, though he’d never tried drugs, and a parenting class called Father Accountability, though he didn’t have children and didn’t plan to. Then, in autumn, a questionnaire arrived in the mail from something called the Innocence Inquiry Commission.

  30

  Send Him a Questionnaire

  A grant from the National Institute of Justice allowed Kendra to increase her IIC staff to eight, including two investigators, a staff attorney, and a case coordinator. Now when one of them phoned a state office, the office had usually heard of the commission, and when a staffer asked an office for evidence, the office usually looked—without threats, without court orders, though the IIC could leverage either if it needed. Once or twice Kendra or one of her lawyers had even managed to track down some file or other that police or clerks had misplaced. This got her thinking. She knew the IIC was better equipped today than it had been in its infancy, meaning cases that had stymied them in the beginning they might now have solutions for. To see if this was true, she wanted to try an audit: to revisit certain cases they’d closed, find whatever obstacle they’d encountered, and see whether they’d since learned a way around it.

  The IIC had never opened a file on Willie Grimes, but from the documents Chris had shown her, and the mock brief she’d prepared, Kendra had never forgotten about him. She recalled that Chris and the center had spent years looking unproductively for Carrie Elliott’s rape kit, and for the hair recovered from her bedspread. Almost certainly this meant both those things had been destroyed. But who knew? Kendra had thought that before and been wrong. A nonprofit like Chris’s, state offices might ignore. A subpoena from the IIC, they couldn’t. By statute, anyone at all could refer a claim to the IIC: a lawyer, a family member, another agency. Or, theoretically, even Kendra herself. She’d never done this before, but no rule forbade it. Midway through her audit, she found Grimes’s DOC record, printed it, and handed it to her case coordinator.

  She thought she recalled Chris having told her that she didn’t expect Grimes to apply to the IIC on his own, since the man had more or less resigned himself to prison or, if he got lucky, parole, so Kendra wasn’t sure he would even fill out the paperwork. But she wasn’t positive she was remembering this correctly, and, even if she was, Grimes could always change his mind. You never know, she thought.

  “Send him a questionnaire,” she instructed her case coordinator. “If he applies, then we’ll look for evidence.”

  In September the coordinator mailed a questionnaire to Grimes at Gaston Correctional, where she knew he’d been transferred as soon as he was promoted to minimum security.

  31

  If They Had Anything, It Can’t Match Nothing from Me

  He took the job he’d spoken with his case manager about, as a janitor, but there were problems with the next step of his MAPP contract, the community volunteer program, whereby a chaperone might bring him for a few hours each week outside the Gaston walls. Because he was a sex offender who’d never taken responsibility, the prospect of Willie out on a CV pass, even briefly, alarmed prison administrators. “I feel reluctant to recommend participation,” a superintendent wrote in Willie’s file. “But due to his MAPP and its preplanned promotions the facility must abide.” Willie found a chaperone in his weekly AA meetings, a man from the outside who volunteered to drive him into town, for lunch at a farmers’ market or at Golden Corral. “You’ll get used to it,” the man told him. “Just need to adjust.”

  He wasn’t used to it. He hadn’t ridden in a car like this for more than twenty years, not since Brenda’s, since that drive from their apartment to the Hickory police station. Not the Gray Goose, or a police cruiser—just a regular car, with a regular seat belt and windows, no guard in view and Willie right there in the passenger seat, his hands unshackled so he could turn the radio knob if he wanted. Bound not for a hospital or a distant camp but for lunch twice a month at the Sonic Drive-In, before AA in the rear of a church across the street. Otherwise there were few places he could go. Because they’d labeled him a sex offender, he was permanently forbidden to go anywhere “intended primarily for the use, care, or supervision of minors,” including schools or nurseries, or any place minors might gather for “regularly scheduled educational, recreational, or social programs,” like museums or playgrounds, or within three hundred feet of any mall or shopping center. “Said it was hard to find a place for his sponsor to take him,” his case manager wrote in his file. “He is looking forward to completing his MAPP and going home.”

  The staffer whom Kendra assigned to Willie’s claim was a recent hire to the IIC named Jamie Lau, a thin, pensive, dark-eyed man who liked to joke that he was a postconviction attorney only accidentally. At Duke, where he’d studied law, he’d never envisioned doing this sort of work, had never volunteered for the Innocence Project, barely felt interested in criminal law, planned instead to move to
the Northeast and work in consumer protection. But then Lau’s wife, a schoolteacher, found a job she liked there in Durham and decided to stay, even after Lau graduated. Lau noticed a position open at the IIC. A friend introduced him to Theresa Newman, who introduced him to Kendra. He began the following January. Three months later, Kendra strode into his office, a thin purple folder in one hand. “Here’s a case where all the evidence is supposed to be gone,” she told him. “I want you to take a look.”

  Inside that purple folder lay the questionnaire Grimes had returned. Under “Please explain why you are innocent,” Lau noticed, the man had written: “Because I was not there and did not rape anyone.” Under “Are you willing to have your DNA and fingerprints run against the databank?,” he had written, “Yes.”

  Lau e-mailed the Catawba County clerk’s office, whose evidence logs went no further back than 1991, and then the SBI, who forwarded him two laboratory reports—one it had conducted on Carrie Elliott’s rape kit, from November 1987, another on hair samples from the following June. Neither showed anything Lau didn’t know already. He drove to the SBI lab himself; maybe staffers there had missed something. They hadn’t. He e-mailed the county sheriff, whose search, too, came up empty. He e-mailed the chief of the Hickory Police Department, who forwarded his request to a captain, who replied a week later: a search there had turned up only three pages of old forms showing that, after trial, all Grimes’s evidence had been transferred to the clerk’s office, except for film negatives and a pair of fingerprints recovered from the victim’s apartment. To prove he was telling the truth, the captain scanned these pages and included them as an attachment.

  Wait a minute, Lau thought. He e-mailed back. Was the captain saying those fingerprints, too, had been transferred, and simply weren’t mentioned on the forms? Or rather that they were never transferred—that the fingerprints were still there at HPD, literally in custody?