Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  Two hours later, the captain e-mailed again. Yes, he replied. There at the department, he’d found a card with two fingerprints on it. According to the accompanying notes, they’d been lifted from a fruit basket on the victim’s kitchen table.

  Get it in custody, Lau thought. We’ll suss out what it means later. He reached for his phone, dialed the DA’s office.

  Lau drove west the 290 miles to Gaston Correctional, where guards led him inside a permanent trailer, barely yards over the fence from where he’d parked. Moments later the door opened again and Grimes appeared, taller than Lau had expected; Lau had seen a mug shot, but he realized now he hadn’t considered Grimes’s height. He clicked his tape recorder on. “We don’t represent you,” he cautioned, as Kendra had taught him to begin. He and his agency were investigating Grimes’s case only to determine what had happened. This didn’t mean they were on Grimes’s side, exactly, since they weren’t out to prove him innocent. “But if you are indeed innocent,” and if Lau or his colleagues could prove it, there was a process theoretically Grimes could go through. Did he understand that? All right. Then Lau wanted to hear how Grimes had ended up here.

  So Willie led Lau through the October day in question: He’d woken and visited the post office, returned home to shower and shave; he and his girlfriend, Brenda, had stopped into a supermarket, for food to bring to a friend’s house party; he’d gone to that house party, and slept on Betty’s couch; he and Brenda had driven down to Shelby the following morning with tax money for his cousins. Then he’d returned home from work two days later to learn from Brenda the police had come looking for him, so asked her to drive him to the Hickory station, to find what they wanted, where Steve Hunt arrested him. “He said, ‘You know what you here for?’” Willie recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I ain’t did nothing.’ He said, ‘Well, you in big trouble.’ I said, ‘What for?’ He said, ‘If I was you I’d just be quiet.’ I told him, ‘I ain’t did nothing. I’ll take a lie detector test or anything.’ He said, ‘Best that you be quiet right now, and don’t say nothing else.’” Here Grimes paused. “They went and locked me up. I been locked up ever since then.”

  Lau considered this. “I want you to know,” he warned, “this has happened to me before.” He’d visited inmates just like Willie who insisted they were innocent. One in particular, around Willie’s age, also convicted of rape. “And he told me, ‘I didn’t do it,’” Lau recalled. “He said, over and over, ‘I didn’t do it.’” But Lau had investigated, and discovered the rape kit, which had matched. “He did it. There’s no doubt he did it.” Dutifully Lau had relayed this to the district attorney, and the inmate had stayed in prison, now technically also liable for perjury. “So, with that said, I want to make sure you want me to go look for these hairs,” Lau finished. “And that you want me to have them compared to you, if I find them.”

  “Yes, sir,” Willie answered.

  Then Lau wanted a DNA sample. He offered two swabs to rub against the inside of Willie’s cheeks. “We will make every effort to locate this evidence,” he promised. “If it’s out there.”

  “I know I’m innocent,” Willie repeated. “If they had anything, it can’t match nothing from me, because I know I’m innocent.”

  When Lau had left, Willie met again with his case manager, who decided CV passes had gone so smoothly he was ready to be promoted again, to work release. This required finding an employer, however, and Willie was a sex offender. An old man like him, and a convict? Who would possibly give him a job?

  “I’ll give you a job,” Bryan Stewart declared one Sunday visit, waving his hand dismissively. What use was owning a company, if he couldn’t do what he wanted with it?

  So Willie relayed the offer to his case manager, who looked up the address for Pioneer Utilities and Plumbing, to see whether it neighbored any schools or day-care centers. It didn’t. Mr. Stewart would need to come in, pass an inspection, she told Willie. But on a map, this looked like it might work. She gave him a form to sign, invited Bryan in for a meeting. He would supervise Willie personally on the job site, start him at eight dollars an hour, Bryan promised.

  The case manager gave him a thick packet of forms. Then she drove Willie to Pioneer Utilities, to inspect the grounds—low office buildings, the Kingdom Hall that Bryan had built, a thirteen-acre field strewn with Caterpillar equipment. This looked like it might work, she said again.

  That November, at an SBI laboratory in Asheville, a Special Agent Brian Delmas compared both fingerprints the HPD had forwarded him to those of Willie Grimes. They didn’t match. So Delmas uploaded the first mystery print to AFIS—the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the statewide criminal database—whose software compared it digitally against the constellation in its records. AFIS worked by returning its ten nearest statistical entries, each corresponding to an arrest number. On its own this list meant nothing, since nearest was relative, Delmas knew; AFIS had been programmed to always return a list of ten, even if none were exact matches. To find out, Delmas needed to look up each arrest number, find the name it corresponded to, then compare each print manually. Partway through this, he noticed something curious. AFIS’s first hit, its nearest statistical entry, belonged to a man named Albert Turner. Its second hit also belonged to a man named Albert Turner. So did its third. So did its fourth. Turner had been arrested multiple times, so multiple sets of his fingerprints appeared in the database. All four nearest AFIS entries were his. One at a time, Delmas compared them manually. Each confirmed the same thing. The first mystery print matched Turner’s left index finger. Not nearly. Exactly. Delmas reached for the second mystery print. This matched, too. Turner’s left middle finger. To make certain, Delmas showed every relevant print to a colleague. He was right, she told him. Both prints were Albert Turner’s.

  Delmas mailed his conclusions to the district attorney, who forwarded them along to Lau, at the IIC: a 141-page report, including Delmas’s notes and a screenshot of Turner’s fingerprints on the AFIS interface, taken at 1:54 p.m. on November 7, 2011.

  Early Monday morning Willie caught a bus from Gaston Correctional, stepped off at Pioneer Utilities by eight, and spent the day “piddling around,” as Bryan called it: plucking weeds, replacing floorboards, soaping office windows. At four p.m. the bus returned to deposit him back at Gaston. One hundred and fifty dollars of his new salary he owed each month to the prison, for room and board, but the rest was his. “He was very pleased with the job,” his case manager noted when she saw him next. But the arrangement had limits: for as long as his workday lasted, he was forbidden to leave the Pioneer grounds, and when he did—Bryan gave him a company credit card, and sometimes he used it to buy gas for the lawn mower—he worried over what might happen. What if, when he was out buying gas, another driver pulled up with a child in the backseat? What if, even if that didn’t happen, someone said it did? No one besides Bryan would believe him, and they’d send him right back to Gaston for good. What if a crime happened somewhere in the town, Gastonia, on a day he was on work release? Who police would blame was no mystery. He felt permanently nervous, as jumpy as a fugitive. He could barely keep track of all the restrictions. Sometimes, while he was replacing linens, a visitor knocked at the door and he flinched, filled instantly with dread.

  Back at Gaston he got a letter from Jamie Lau, saying his case had been accepted for formal inquiry, whatever that meant. Enclosed were a waiver and an affidavit. He could hire a lawyer if he wanted. He wrote to Chris Mumma. Would she represent him?

  Her reply arrived three days later. “I would definitely want to represent you, and would do it without charging anything.” But Chris didn’t know, either, why the IIC had suddenly decided he needed a lawyer. She would find out, she promised. She would be in touch soon.

  From her office, Chris e-mailed Kendra to ask what was happening. When several hours passed without reply, she phoned impatiently and left a message, then phoned another IIC staffer she knew, left a message there, too. Why did Willie nee
d a lawyer?

  Jamie Lau drove with Kendra to Hickory, where in a conference room at HPD the pair met with the town’s police chief, sergeant, and the captain Lau had been e-mailing, who agreed to assign one of their officers, whose territory included Little Berlin, to assist the IIC’s investigation—not to reopen any cases, from HPD’s perspective, but to help with anything Kendra or Lau needed. Before the meeting Kendra had silenced her phone, but now, leaving Hickory, she turned it on again. Checked her voice mail. A message from Chris Mumma.

  In Durham, Chris’s phone rang. It was Kendra.

  As soon as she hung up, she found the number for Gaston Correctional, phoned, explained she was Willie Grimes’s attorney, she needed to speak with him. It was urgent, it was a legal matter. Willie was out on work release, a voice told her. Call after four forty-five.

  She phoned again. This time Willie was there. Breathlessly she relayed what had happened.

  Chris drove out to Gaston, more forms in her backseat. Privately she felt ambivalent. The call from Kendra had exhilarated her—and also made her furious. Obviously the fingerprints had been there, at HPD, this whole time. She still remembered asking them for evidence, them answering they had none. Four years since then Willie had spent in a cell, and she’d done nothing about it. Goddamn it, she thought. Why does it always take this long? Why are the most obvious tasks so difficult?

  Would the fingerprints be enough? Still, they’d found those—who knew what else they’d find? Really what she wanted was the rape kit, the holy grail in a case like this, since it held DNA. If not that, then any of the clothing Carrie Elliott had worn, or even those hairs from the bedspread.

  At Gaston she hugged Willie tightly. It was important not to expect too much, or look too far ahead, she warned him. No one knew what anything meant yet, and there was no use speculating. All Willie could do was keep the news to himself, concentrate on work release.

  Willie didn’t care about any rape kit. They found the fingerprints. Whatever else the lawyers were searching for, it was the fingerprints he’d always wanted, and now he had them. They weren’t destroyed. He knew it.

  He also knew that lawyers had held these once before, and found a way to convict him regardless. He would say nothing to Bryan or Eddie or even Gladys. If they learned the news, they would only get their hopes up, and then if his case went nowhere, it would devastate them. He’d been through that enough times himself. He couldn’t put others through it, too.

  Jamie Lau and a second investigator whom Kendra assigned to the case, Sharon Stellato, drove to the Catawba County clerk’s office, to search personally for the rape kit, bedspread, anything at all they might test for DNA. In a basement near the Newton courthouse, the pair lifted one evidence box after another, read the label, put it down again. Nothing related to Grimes. Back in Raleigh, they wrote to the governor, then to the sheriff’s office, the HPD, and the SBI, with orders for Willie’s clemency file as well as criminal records for this Albert Turner. Kendra wrote to Prisoner Legal Services, then to the parole commission, for more records on Willie; they wrote to the DOC for records on both men. For Willie alone, this represented six volumes, spanning more than two thousand pages. They read every one. They wrote to the Catawba Valley Medical Center, which had kept a two-page record from Carrie’s emergency department visit, in 1987—but the hospital had forwarded this already to the HPD, so IIC staffers had already seen it. They wrote to the DA’s office, which held nothing more than a trial transcript. The prosecutors who’d originally handled Willie’s case, back in 1988, both were assistant DAs, and one had died since then; the other’s law license had lapsed in the early 2000s. Lau and Stellato phoned him anyway. They phoned Noell Tin, in Charlotte. Tin had kept a file, but all it held was a trial transcript and a letter to Eddie Moose. He e-mailed these along.

  Together Lau and Stellato drove to visit Steve Hunt. Four years earlier, when Chris Mumma had tried him, Hunt had had little to say, but Lau and Stellato held something Chris hadn’t. A subpoena. Today Hunt was a tall, loose-limbed, bald-headed man with eyeglasses and a neat mustache; he’d retired from the police but still worked in Hickory, directing the Office of Multicultural Affairs at a local community college. Did he remember a case involving Willie Grimes? Lau asked him, sitting in his office.

  “I don’t remember much at all about it,” Hunt replied.

  “Okay,” Lau said politely.

  “I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” Hunt said, and grinned. In fact Hunt remembered the case vividly. He personally had grown up in that area, even lived for a few years in the same public-housing complex, Hillside Gardens. Today, when he taught classes on crime scene investigation, there at the community college, he actually used the Grimes case as a model. “The point in doing that is just to show them how important the smallest piece of evidence can be,” he explained. For Grimes, this was the hair; without that, Carrie Elliott’s rape might never have been solved.

  What about the fruit? Lau asked. Did Hunt remember anything about that?

  He did. He’d seen that apple core, and those banana peels, lying behind Carrie’s apartment, a sight that struck him as “bizarre,” and inside had noticed more fruit on her kitchen table. So he’d pieced together that her assailant must have taken some of it. He even remembered in which direction the discarded peels suggested the man had fled: south, from Carrie’s front door.

  Did Hunt know why no one had collected them?

  He didn’t. Neither did he recall Grimes turning himself in—Grimes had turned himself in?—or Grimes ever claiming he was innocent, or anything about an alibi. While Hunt had worked at HPD, though, he’d often taken files home with him, and even in retirement had kept his file on Willie Grimes, to use when he taught. He spread this on his desk for Lau and Stellato to see.

  Lau pointed to a particular page. This looked like a lineup, but Lau didn’t recognize it. Now Stellato noticed, too. “May I see those photographs right there?”

  “Oh, absolutely.” Hunt slid the page over.

  Stellato scrutinized it: a typical six-person lineup, with photographs arranged in two horizontal rows. But something different. She spun the page toward Hunt, pointed to a particular photograph that hadn’t appeared in any lineup before this one. “Can I ask you a question? Do you remember this guy?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Hunt answered. That was Albert Turner.

  Lau pulled the lineup from Stellato and squinted at it. Turned it over. On the reverse of each photograph, a number was listed—from the HPD filing system, Lau guessed. Except for Turner, who had no number. Instead, his full name was written out. Lau flipped the page over again. That was him, Albert Turner, in position number two, center photograph of the top row. He peered back at Hunt’s file. Flipped two more pages. There. Another lineup. This one he’d seen before. This was the lineup officers had shown Carrie Elliott two days after the crime, after Linda McDowell’s visit to headquarters. Now Turner’s photograph was gone. In its place, in the same position—number two—was Willie Grimes.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Lau said. He pointed to Turner’s handwritten name. No one else’s name was written out; did this imply Turner had been a suspect at one point?

  Hunt wasn’t sure. It wasn’t him who’d put either lineup together. This one was only a copy; he didn’t recall who he’d gotten it from. He had no memory of Turner ever being a suspect—although, now that he thought about it, it didn’t surprise him that Turner might be included in a lineup, especially near Little Berlin, in those years, since the man was an often-violent criminal. Come to think of it, Turner also fit the profile, Hunt realized aloud. “Albert’s about six one, six two, pretty close to the physical description of the suspect.”

  Courtesy of the Hickory Police Department

  Courtesy of the Hickory Police Department

  Courtesy of the Hickory Police Department

  The officer whom Linda McDowell had phoned two days after the crime, to say she thought her neighbor’s assailant sounded an
awful lot like Willie Grimes, was Hunt’s former sergeant Steve Bryant, who that same evening had driven out to Claremont, to show Carrie a second lineup, with Willie included. Today Bryant remembered nothing of the case, however, even after Lau phoned him in Massachusetts, where he lived now, and faxed him his original police file. Neither did Bryant follow who Lau was, or what this IIC was, or what they were doing, asking him about a case so old. “Did he all of a sudden, twenty-five years later, decide that he’s—’cause I know a lot of people claim they’re innocent,” Bryant told Lau over the phone. “And actually they’re not.”

  “Well, he’s been asserting his innocence for twenty-five years,” Lau replied.

  “Oh.” Bryant paused to consider the police file again. Was Lau certain he’d faxed the entire thing? He noticed it seemed a little thin. “I was saying that to my wife last night,” he told Lau. “There has to be more than this.”

  The crime scene technician who had processed Carrie’s apartment, Jack Holsclaw, still lived in North Carolina, so Lau and Stellato visited him for lunch, bringing along photographs Holsclaw had once taken and a transcript of his testimony at trial, to jog his memory. Despite those, Holsclaw didn’t recall the case. “I wish I could do more,” he told them. He’d spent thirteen years as a technician: “After you’ve been to hundreds of crime scenes, they all just kind of run together.” No, he hadn’t kept any files from his days with HPD. But he did remember Albert Turner. A local troublemaker.

  The officer who had interviewed Carrie Elliott on the night of the crime, and shown her the HPD’s first lineup—the one Lau and Stellato had discovered only recently, in Hunt’s file—was Jeff Blackburn, who today owned a cleaning business in Columbia, South Carolina. Vaguely he recalled standing inside Carrie’s apartment, but not showing her any lineup, or why Albert Turner’s photograph appeared in it, or whose decision it was to include him.