Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  Listed as Carrie’s next of kin was Bobby Elliott. Her son. A search revealed he still lived in Hickory.

  Stellato phoned and introduced herself, and together she and Lau drove out to meet Bobby and his daughter Tamera, Carrie’s granddaughter. Out of concern for the family’s privacy, neither Lau nor Stellato recorded the meeting, as they usually did, and even afterward declined to share anything about it with anyone but Kendra—except for Stellato’s impression that Tamera, who’d done most of the talking, had struck her as a sweet, receptive woman, an attentive listener, and that everyone at the IIC hoped she and Bobby felt they’d been treated as kindly as possible. It required no imagination at all to appreciate what Bobby and Tamera might be feeling. It was Bobby whom Carrie had phoned that awful October night in 1987, when she couldn’t remember the number for police.

  Lau diagrammed a second map of Hickory, with pins dropped for Brenda Smith’s house, where Willie had lived; for Rachel Wilson’s house, where he’d reportedly been on the night of the rape; for Betty Shuford’s house, where he’d reportedly slept on the couch; and, a few miles west, for Carrie Elliott’s apartment in Hillside Gardens, surrounded by clusters of pins representing addresses for Albert Turner. This final map Kendra assembled with everything she or her investigators had discovered into a brief that ran 463 pages. Printed out, it weighed three and a half pounds. She mailed copies to all eight of her commissioners, drove again to Hickory for one final meeting with the HPD and the district attorney, then phoned Chris Mumma, to let everyone know she had called a hearing for the first week of April.

  32

  What She Said Happened, Happened

  At a few minutes past ten in the morning on Monday, April 2, 2012, Kendra rose to a lectern in a windowless, carpeted room in the North Carolina Judicial Center, a stack of brick and glass rectangles nestled in a complex a few miles west of downtown Raleigh. Facing her sat eight commissioners at a horseshoe of tables already littered with neon highlighters, disposable coffee cups, and foot-tall stacks of paper. A row of plastic bins, stuffed with more files, ran the length of an entire wall. To begin, Kendra called Lau, then Stellato, to walk commissioners through portions of their investigation. Then she began calling witnesses.

  For nearly an hour, Linda McDowell slumped in the witness chair, lips pursed, looking unhappy she’d been subpoenaed. Yes, she’d received a thousand-dollar reward for tipping police about Willie, but that wasn’t why she’d done it. Her neighbor Carrie had described her assailant as “that tall guy with the mole on his face,” and Linda had replied, “I know you’re not talking about Woot,” and Carrie had said, yes, it was Woot she was talking about. This was a week or so after the rape.

  When Lau and Stellato visited her, three months ago, Linda had told them this conversation was the very day after Carrie’s rape, Kendra reminded gently. Was she certain now it was a week later?

  Linda didn’t know.

  From a folder Kendra withdrew the 1987 Hickory police report, and read aloud. “It says, ‘Ms. Elliott advised that McDowell told her that she would give the name to the police only and no one else.’” She turned to Linda. Was she certain she’d told Willie’s name immediately?

  “Maybe,” Linda said.

  At trial, Kendra continued, Linda’s own mother, plus three of her sisters, had testified that it was impossible Willie had committed this crime. Did Linda have any thoughts about why her entire family had gone to court and said this?

  “I have no idea,” Linda said.

  “Ms. McDowell, I think I got confused in your testimony,” one commissioner, a DA, admitted, once Kendra had opened the hearing to their questions. He asked Linda to lead him again through how she’d learned of Carrie’s assault. Linda tried. She’d returned from the movies that night to a silent, still apartment, gone straight to bed. But also, Carrie’s children had phoned that night, to tell Linda the news, so Linda had rushed to the hospital. But also, no one had phoned—Linda didn’t own a phone—and Linda had never visited the hospital at all. She’d only seen Carrie back at the apartment once Carrie was discharged.

  “How certain are you that Woot is the one who raped Ms. Elliott?” another commissioner asked.

  “I don’t know,” Linda said.

  “Do you think it’s possible that he is not the one that did it?”

  “I just—” Linda began, then stumbled. “The only thing I’m—” Stumbled again. “That’s the only person I know with that mole on his face.”

  Steve Hunt, wearing a suit and a red tie, described for commissioners the apple core and banana peels he’d noticed on Carrie Elliott’s lawn. On a map Kendra offered, he pointed to where he’d seen them, then repeated what he’d told Lau and Stellato: today he used this case as a model when he taught criminal investigation at his community college. “The point I wanted to make to students was, make sure you leave no stones unturned when you are doing a crime scene. Because what you do on the crime scene can determine whether people get brought to trial for crimes they commit, or turned loose for things they didn’t do.”

  “About the no-stones-unturned aspect of this investigation,” Kendra prompted.

  “Sure,” Hunt said.

  “Do you think that collecting the banana peels, and the apple core, would have also been an essential part of the no-stone-unturned investigation?”

  “Sure,” Hunt agreed. “I—yes, I would’ve thought that.”

  “Okay,” Kendra said.

  “And if I may just elaborate on that just for a second.”

  “Please do.”

  “I would’ve thought that—my evidence technician had been an eight-or ten-year police officer. And when I left him on the scene, I—I thought he would have got that.” Yes, Hunt was lead investigator, but that didn’t mean he controlled anything. “Most of the investigation was done by folks other than me.”

  If Hunt, as lead investigator, hadn’t directed the investigation, then who had told officers what to do?

  “Well, no one,” Hunt said. Mostly investigators had directed themselves, then reported back to him. “I was receiving the information once—you know, the lineup was shown, I got a yellow sheet saying that the lineup was shown. All of those type things.”

  “There was nothing you directed people to do in this case?”

  “No,” Hunt said. “This case came together fairly quickly.”

  The hairs HPD had collected from Carrie Elliott’s bedspread, then submitted to a state laboratory, had been examined there by an SBI analyst named Troy Hamlin, who today still worked in the field. Hair comparison, he explained to commissioners, simply meant aligning two hairs under a microscope, then peering at a side-by-side comparison. There was no particular checklist for how this comparison worked. An analyst simply offered his subjective opinion. Few conclusions could be drawn this way, so really it was useful only in combination with other evidence. Or at least it was today. “But in the eighties,” Hamlin admitted, “there were a lot of—not disagreement, but there wasn’t—what I’m saying is, there wasn’t a lot of guidelines to what your conclusions could be.” Only since then had experts discovered that hairs could look similar without actually belonging to the same person. After one study of 268 criminal trials in which an FBI agent or analyst had testified about hair comparison, the Bureau now acknowledged that, in retrospect, 257 of those trials—or 96 percent—included “erroneous statements” during testimony. For defendants in nine of those cases, the study came too late. They’d already been executed.

  Hamlin had no recollection of working the Grimes case specifically, but Kendra handed him his laboratory report and case notes, and Hamlin led commissioners through it. According to his own report, only a single hair from Carrie Elliott’s apartment had been long enough for comparison, so Hamlin had measured it against sixty or so of Willie’s hairs. Some of those had looked similar. Others hadn’t. At trial, he’d testified that such resemblance was “rare,” and therefore, the hair recovered from Carrie’s bedspread “cou
ld have originated from Mr. Grimes.” Both these conclusions Hamlin still stood by, he told Kendra, since personally he felt it was rare—that was simply his opinion, not a scientific claim—and, if two hairs looked similar, then technically it was true they could have originated from the same person. Aside from his own testimony, however, Hamlin had attended nothing else of Willie’s trial, so he hadn’t been in the courtroom during closing arguments, when prosecutors had told jurors, under the guise of a reminder, that an SBI agent—meaning Hamlin—had said, “The only place this hair could have come from is the defendant, from his head, and it came from him when he was assaulting this lady.” Hamlin had never said that.

  Kendra was curious—had Hamlin ever personally observed two similar-looking hairs, only to discover later they were from different people?

  Yes, Hamlin replied. Well, maybe. Certain cases he’d worked on had been subjected afterward to DNA testing. Hamlin had never followed up on those results, though, so he didn’t know what the DNA had proved.

  “You do not know?” Kendra repeated, startled.

  “I do not know,” Hamlin agreed.

  “Do you think it would be important that you…” Kendra paused. “Find that out?”

  “No,” Hamlin remarked offhandedly. “There’s probably been others.”

  “But you didn’t… you know that some work you did was later subjected to DNA. And you didn’t want to find out whether the DNA said, ‘Yes, it was this person,’ or ‘No, it’s not’?”

  Hamlin considered this. He swung his eyes toward the ceiling. “No, not particularly.”

  “When I think of cases I’ve handled, this is probably the one that haunts me still today,” Ed de Torres told commissioners. He still remembered motioning for further testing at trial, the judge never ruling on it. “I did not follow up,” de Torres admitted, which now he regretted. “I should have followed up.” He didn’t blame Carrie Elliott, since the poor woman had been raped. It wasn’t her job to do an investigation. He shrugged sadly. “It’s the kind of crime that, if you have a bad identification, it will go down the wrong way.”

  Early Tuesday morning, Willie woke at Gaston Correctional and met with guards who put him in a cruiser, drove him three hours to the Wake County sheriff’s office, then handed him over to unfamiliar deputies, who put him in the rear of a second cruiser, drove to another building, and ushered him into a holding room, where he waited. Before long, a door opened and deputies led him into a larger room filled with strangers: men in suits and ties, women in knee-length wool skirts with matching blazers, all staring at him. Degrees, he thought, imagining the stacks of diplomas all these strangers must have earned, to dress like that. So many different degrees. He wore chinos and an oversize T-shirt that Gladys had bought him and he’d slipped on in the predawn gloom of his cell.

  One of the strangers ordered him to place his left hand on the Bible, raise his right in the air, but deputies had shackled his wrists, so he couldn’t separate them widely enough to do this. For a few moments he struggled against the chain. Finally he just tilted his palms in two different directions and promised he would tell the truth. At the far end of the room he recognized Chris Mumma, who smiled at him reassuringly. He remembered she had told him to speak loudly, so all these strangers could hear him, but also to show he wasn’t hiding anything. So he explained where he’d worked and what he’d looked like, back in October of 1987—how tall he was, how much he weighed, that he had a mole on his face and a scar on his chest. Once more he recounted the day in question: the post office, the supermarket, the tax money, the house party. Returning home from work that Tuesday to learn the police had come looking for him.

  What had he thought that was about? another stranger asked him.

  “I didn’t have no idea,” he told her. “Because I knew I hadn’t did anything. That’s the reason I went up there, to find out.” Instead, Steve Hunt had arrested him. When Willie complained, Hunt had told him not to say anything more, since he was in a lot of trouble.

  “Did Investigator Hunt ever come back and try to talk to you later on about the case?” the woman asked.

  “No, ma’am,” he answered.

  KENDRA: Would you have talked to him if he had?

  WILLIE: Yes, ma’am.

  KENDRA: Did any other officers ever try to talk to you about the case?

  WILLIE: No, ma’am.

  KENDRA: Would you have talked to them if they had?

  WILLIE: Yes.

  Since then, Kendra pointed out, Willie had written letters to a number of attorneys, in addition to Ed de Torres. Why had he done that?

  “Because I knew I was innocent,” he said. “I wasn’t going to give up, just do the time, for something I didn’t do.”

  A different stranger asked about his chest scar, so Willie pulled down the loose collar of his T-shirt to show it. He seemed to remember the details of that October night quite well, given that it had been so many years ago, another suggested. How?

  Because of the tax money, Willie explained. He’d planned that day around bringing his tax money down to cousins in Shelby, so he knew every place he’d visited. Besides that, he’d had so much time in the years since to review those hours in his head. “I’ve always thought about it. Because I know where I was and I know what I did. And I know I wasn’t into no crime that night.” He shook his head. “It bugged me for years. Almost ran me crazy when I first went to prison.” He laughed softly, shook his head again. “Eventually I got over it, and I saw that I wasn’t going to get no help or anything. But I kept on trying, every way I thought to try.”

  The SBI agent who’d run the HPD’s recovered fingerprints through AFIS, and matched them not to Willie but to Albert Turner, explained his method for commissioners. On an overhead television, Kendra flashed a screenshot of the AFIS software, so commissioners could see for themselves: two magnified fingerprints, side by side.

  “I assume, then, the commission can feel pretty comfortable this absolutely is not Willie Grimes’s fingerprint?” one commissioner asked.

  The agent nodded. “Yes. Without a doubt.”

  “You may not be able to do this,” the commissioner continued, “but in your opinion, is this absolutely Albert Turner’s print?”

  The agent didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  “There’s no doubt in your mind it’s Albert Turner’s print?”

  “I have no doubt,” the agent said. “Both of those prints.”

  News cameras from WRAL had rolled during all three days of the hearing, but now Kendra ordered them shut off, and asked everyone who wasn’t a commissioner to leave the room. When the door was closed behind them, she called Tamera Elliott.

  Back in 1987 she’d been twenty-eight, and living with her parents, Tamera explained privately to commissioners. She still remembered their phone ringing that October night, her mother picking it up, shouting at Tamera’s father, who’d already gone to bed: Get up! We have to go to your mother’s house! She’s been attacked.

  Tamera’s grandmother had lived in Hillside Gardens three years or so by then, though she’d never felt comfortable there, since everyone knew it was a high-crime area. It was bad enough when Carrie’s husband, John, had been around, but John had died of complications from a heart attack just before Thanksgiving 1986, so Carrie had been left there alone, looking for somewhere better. There weren’t many apartments she could afford. That was why they’d ended up in Hillside Gardens in the first place. Before all this, she and John had regularly gone out dancing—scooter-pootin’, Carrie called it. Later, once Carrie had given up driving, Tamera and her father had brought her on errands two or three times a week, but even this Carrie preferred to do during the day, since she avoided leaving her apartment at night. It was the same reason she attended church only on Sunday mornings. Weekday services were held in the evening, and traveling past dusk made her nervous.

  From all her visits to her grandmother’s apartment, Tamera knew who Linda McDowell was, but no one had spoken
to her in the days following the assault about any identification, so Tamera didn’t have a clue about Linda’s role in the whole thing. Her grandmother had spoken of the incident only once, when she told Tamera a man had “hurt her really bad.” Otherwise they’d never acknowledged it. Carrie died of pneumonia just two years later. “She was a good person,” Tamera said, about her grandmother. “She was a kind person. I never heard her say anything bad about anybody. And I trust her judgment. You know, what she said happened, happened. I don’t think she would have said it was someone else, if it was not. I cannot see my grandmother saying it was another person when it was not that person. I just trust my grandmother’s judgment.”

  33

  A Lawyer I’ve Never Met

  He woke Thursday morning at Gaston Correctional, showered, dressed for work release, and walked toward the mess hall for his oatmeal and banana. In the dayroom he passed a mounted television screen, heard his own name, turned, and realized he was looking at his own photograph. Then a brief video of himself testifying in that room in Raleigh. “All eight judges,” he heard.

  In the mess hall, inmates were whooping and clapping their trays. He ate silently. When he stepped off the bus an hour later at Pioneer Utilities, a secretary was holding a telephone out to him. It was Chris. Once he’d left Raleigh yesterday, she told him, commissioners had voted unanimously to send his case on to a three-judge panel.