Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  “That’s correct. I do not know if the witness in this particular case was correct or incorrect.”

  “Nothing further,” Bellas said.

  “One question,” Chris said, standing again and turning toward Dysart. “Was your testimony here today that you know the victim made a misidentification in this case?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Was your testimony that, based on various factors, a misidentification could have been made?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” Chris said, and sat down.

  Linda McDowell recalled for Chris what her neighbor Carrie Elliott had told her that long-ago weekend. Again this recollection differed from what she’d told Kendra and commissioners, six months earlier, and Lau and Stellato, three months before that, and the Hickory police, back in 1987.

  “Do you really remember any of this, Ms. McDowell?” Chris asked her.

  “Not really, no,” Linda admitted.

  “‘Hair is very specific to one individual,’” Troy Hamlin, the forensic analyst, read aloud from a transcript of his own testimony. “‘It is rare that I see two individuals whose hair is the same under the microscope.’”

  That word rare was interesting. On what statistics, exactly, had Hamlin based that conclusion?

  “It’s one of those things you cannot quantitate,” Hamlin answered.

  But it was possible, wasn’t it, for two hairs to look similar, and still belong to different people? Not that Hamlin had deliberately misled anyone—that word rare might have been an honest mistake.

  “I wouldn’t term it as a mistake,” Hamlin said. “I would term it as the science at that time.”

  Steve Hunt recalled arriving to Carrie Elliott’s apartment that October evening to find Jack Holsclaw, the HPD’s evidence technician, processing the crime scene, so Hunt had told Holsclaw about the banana peels on Carrie’s lawn. A few days after that, Hunt recalled, Mr. Turner had walked into the police station, where Hunt, who’d been appointed lead investigator by then, arrested him.

  “You’re saying Turner,” one of the judges interrupted. “Do you—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Grimes,” Hunt corrected. It was Grimes who’d walked into the police station, Grimes he’d arrested. He’d simply gotten their names mixed up just now.

  Robert Campbell waved a transcript of Hunt’s 1988 testimony, then read aloud a passage where Hunt had described his arrival to Carrie Elliott’s apartment. “‘I just observed the outside of the apartment and the area, and there was nobody at the residence.’” Campbell lowered the transcript. Did Hunt recall saying that? Had Holsclaw been there, or not?

  Hunt wasn’t sure.

  “So you could be mistaken here today, under oath, when you say you remember speaking with Officer Holsclaw about the bananas?”

  “Yes,” Hunt conceded.

  Hunt had assumed, when he noticed those peels and apple core, that Carrie’s assailant had dropped them, right? Since he’d heard something about fruit over his radio?

  “That was the radio traffic, yes,” Hunt agreed.

  According to his own trial testimony, though, and despite what he’d just claimed, Hunt had never actually mentioned them to Holsclaw. Nor had he acted at all on the fingerprints lifted from Carrie’s kitchen. He hadn’t known Holsclaw lifted any fingerprints? How could he have managed not to know this? Hunt was lead investigator, wasn’t he? Wouldn’t Holsclaw have filled out a report and submitted it to him? He had seen no report like this, saying the fingerprints didn’t match Grimes? From a binder, Campbell withdrew another sheet of paper, walked it over to Hunt. This was the report they were talking about, wasn’t it?

  It was, Hunt agreed.

  CAMPBELL: And whose name is on the top of it?

  HUNT: Willie Grimes.

  CAMPBELL: Whose name shows as the officer on top?

  HUNT: Holsclaw.

  CAMPBELL: And is that the form that would have been in the Hickory Police Department file?

  HUNT: Yes, it should have been.

  CAMPBELL: Okay. What’s the first item of evidence that shows being collected at the scene?

  HUNT: One card of latent prints.

  CAMPBELL: What is a card of latent prints?

  HUNT: They are prints that are lifted at a crime scene.

  And still Hunt was comfortable testifying he had no knowledge of any fingerprints until he’d heard about them at trial?

  “Yes,” Hunt said. “Right.” Now he paused. “Wait a minute. Let me back up.” Of course he had seen this evidence control form, back in 1987. What he’d meant before, about not knowing there were fingerprints—he’d only meant he didn’t know they came from a banana. That was the part he hadn’t known until trial.

  “So you did have knowledge there were fingerprints.”

  Hunt wasn’t sure. He couldn’t recall. “But I’m sure I would have looked at this,” he said, gesturing toward the form. “It’s just routine.”

  “Would you also have looked at the actual latent lift card?” Now Campbell raised another sheet of paper. Hunt didn’t recognize this one, either. “Does it appear to be a copy of a latent lift card?” Campbell pressed.

  HUNT: Yes.

  CAMPBELL: And does it have in big, bold print on it, “From banana on kitchen table”?

  HUNT: Yes.

  CAMPBELL: And does it bear Mr. Holsclaw’s initials?

  HUNT: Yes.

  CAMPBELL: And does it bear the date of 10/24/87?

  HUNT: Yes.

  CAMPBELL: And those things are routinely kept in the Hickory Police Department files?

  HUNT: Sure.

  Campbell changed course. “You’ve used this case to teach about?”

  “In crime scene investigations classes,” Hunt agreed.

  Could Hunt explain what he tried to teach?

  “Sure. When you go to a crime scene, the crime scene speaks to you, as a criminal investigator. If there’s anything that looks out of place, appears to be evidence, then you collect it. No stones unturned. Locate, photograph, collect, and process.”

  “And this crime scene spoke to you,” Campbell suggested. “The perpetrator, you believed, had eaten those bananas.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you didn’t ensure that they were collected?”

  “Right.”

  “And you threw the apple core away.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hunt said.

  Eric Bellas invited Hunt to defend certain record-keeping practices—that, as far as Hunt knew, everything inside his personal folder should have also appeared in the departmental file, at headquarters. He had no idea why the initial lineup, containing Albert Turner, wasn’t there. Obviously something had slipped through the cracks between HPD and the DA’s office. That wasn’t unheard of, and certainly it wasn’t Hunt’s fault, since Hunt had made sure to relay the most important evidence, the hair and Carrie’s description, to the DAs.

  “What specifically about the description did you find important?” Bellas asked.

  “Well, the height, the weight,” Hunt answered.

  Campbell rose again. Carrie Elliott had described her assailant as weighing between two hundred and two hundred and twenty-five pounds, with a face scratched from her fingernails. Paperwork from Willie Grimes’s arrest showed he weighed a hundred and sixty-five, and had no scratches. How was it possible Hunt had believed Carrie’s description, especially height and weight, was the most important piece of evidence, then arrested someone who didn’t match that description at all?

  “Mr. Campbell, I’ve investigated a lot of cases in the years, and people who are in that moment, they don’t give you accurate description of suspects,” Hunt answered impatiently.

  “They don’t always get it right?”

  “Right,” Hunt said. “That’s correct.”

  “I don’t have any further questions,” Campbell said.

  One final time, Willie recounted for Chris where he’d been that October evening in 1987. He lifted his rig
ht hand to show the two missing fingers Miss Elliott had never described. He recalled he had shaved that morning, though Miss Elliott had felt stubble.

  Could Willie please explain what SOAR was, and why he’d refused it for a decade? Chris asked.

  “I would have to sign papers saying I was guilty,” he answered. “I told them I would stay in there the rest of my life before I signed papers saying I was guilty of something I didn’t do.”

  Nine years ago, he’d filed an application with the Center on Actual Innocence, and seven years after that he’d filed another with the IIC, Chris pointed out. Why had he filed those?

  “Because I knew I was innocent,” he said. “And I thought you all would be the only one that can help me.”

  Eric Bellas, on cross-examination, wanted simply to clarify a few things. Willie had spent two years in the army? He’d told Ed de Torres, immediately after his arrest, that he was innocent? He’d been baptized in prison as a Jehovah’s Witness? All those were true, Willie confirmed. “It went to changing my life,” he added, about his baptism. Before then he’d felt so angry and depressed. “Made me feel like a whole different person.”

  This was all Bellas had.

  Immediately Chris stood. Those first years in prison, why had Willie felt so angry and depressed?

  “Because I knew I was in prison for something I didn’t do, and I couldn’t get no one that would help me,” he said. “Didn’t seem like I was ever going to get no help.”

  Les Robinson testified again: he had seen Willie that night, at the house party. Betty Shuford testified again: it was her couch Willie had slept on. Richard Wilson testified again: it was he who’d held Willie’s tax money. No one from the district attorney’s office, or from the Hickory Police Department, had ever phoned or visited any of them to ask about the case.

  Brian Delmas, the SBI agent, shared the comparison he’d run on the two recovered fingerprints. “They do not belong to Willie Grimes,” Delmas confirmed. He showed judges the list AFIS had returned of matches, which he’d then inspected manually.

  The first four names on that list—would Delmas please read who they belonged to?

  “The first four all belong to Albert Turner.”

  Jay Gaither, the DA, offered Albert Turner an immunity deal, hoping to encourage him to testify; nothing Turner divulged today would Gaither use to prosecute him. So Turner slumped toward the witness stand, his yellow DOC jumpsuit, its collar open, hanging on him loosely. “What we’re trying to do is get to the truth of the matter,” Gaither told him. “We’d like to question you about that. Do you mind if we do so?”

  “At this time we’re going to invoke our right against self-incrimination,” Turner’s attorney interjected.

  “Yeah,” Turner agreed, lurching to and fro in the witness chair as if he were on an invisible rocker.

  One of the judges spoke up. Turner held immunity—he wanted to invoke this right anyway?

  “Yes,” Turner’s attorney confirmed. “It’s a continuing objection.”

  “Yeah,” Turner repeated.

  “You’re excused,” the judge told him.

  Tamera Elliott rose to the witness stand, so Campbell approached tenderly. He personally had heard Tamera complain, at least privately, to him and Chris, about the investigation into her grandmother’s case, he hinted. Might Tamera confirm for the judges this was true? Might she also share what bothered her about it?

  “We didn’t know about the fingerprints,” Tamera answered. Neither had her family known that Linda had collected any reward. Both these facts Tamera and her siblings had learned only recently, from the IIC, at its April hearing, and after much thought Tamera couldn’t reconcile with the original trial verdict, the fingerprints especially. She could imagine no reason, save one, that Albert Turner’s prints would appear inside her grandmother’s apartment. There was no chance the two had been friendly, or that Carrie had invited him in, as Turner was claiming. Nor had Tamera felt any drop of reassurance listening to Steve Hunt testify. “We didn’t know Mr. Grimes’s witnesses were not contacted by the district attorney,” she protested. “We didn’t know any of that.”

  Personally Tamera no longer knew whether Willie Grimes was the man who’d attacked her grandmother. “If he didn’t, and my grandmother was mistaken, she would be the first to apologize,” Tamera said. She had brought with her today a family portrait to show the courtroom: her grandmother Carrie in the spring of 1986, in a powder-blue button-up sweater and gleaming white necklace, wearing rose lipstick, heart-shaped gold earrings, and huge, tortoiseshell eyeglasses, their lenses as wide as her cheeks. Behind her stood her husband, John, with a round nose and diminishing hairline and twice as broad as Carrie across the shoulders, his hand resting lightly on her arm.

  Eric Bellas didn’t have any questions.

  On Thursday, the final evening of the panel, Chris’s staffers from the center found a restaurant in town for dinner while Robert Campbell sped toward Chapel Hill to watch his daughter play trumpet in a university concert. Chris stayed alone in her hotel room, finishing her closing argument. She felt exhausted. Her vision had gone blurry and her legs wobbled when she stood. Her hotel bed was hardly visible beneath overstuffed banker’s boxes, loose folders, and a printer. Before Campbell left for his daughter’s concert, he’d told her he wanted to make their closing, and they’d argued about it, until finally Chris had prevailed. She’d let Campbell cross-examine Hunt. The closing argument was hers.

  When court reconvened the following morning, however, it was Jay Gaither who went first. He’d run for district attorney in the first place because he wanted a job with purpose, where he could feel like he was doing the right thing, he remarked, standing at the courtroom lectern. When he and Eric Bellas retreated to his office the previous evening to consider their closing argument, they’d had a difficult time of it. Together the pair had reexamined every piece of evidence, listing as they went any detail they felt was problematic. When they’d finished, they tallied these. Thirty-five. Finally Bellas had looked up from the pages strewn across his desk, thrown his arms wide, and asked Gaither directly: “Where do you stand on this? What do you think?” And the answer had been, honestly, he believed Willie Grimes was innocent.

  So what the hell were they doing?

  “The State cannot argue any closing that does not support a finding of innocence for Willie Grimes,” Gaither announced. He wasn’t going to list all thirty-five problems he and Bellas had counted. He would keep this brief. “On behalf of the district attorney’s office, and the State of North Carolina, we offer an apology to Mr. Grimes. That’s all.” He sat down.

  Unsteadily Chris rose to replace him at the lectern. “I’m tempted to leave it right there,” she admitted. Nonetheless she wanted to say a few words, if only to mention Carrie Elliott—who, from all Chris had learned, had been a kind, generous person—and to lament what Chris regarded as the disgraceful investigation into her assault. A case like Carrie’s was precisely why the IIC, this three-judge panel, had been created. For a quarter of a century, Willie had begged every other court for justice. Finally this one had the chance to provide it. “Not just for Willie Grimes, but for the victims.”

  She sat down.

  The judges recessed. They returned. They had been gone only seven minutes. Before he announced their verdict, their chairman, Judge Lee, swiveled toward his two colleagues. Was there anything either wanted to say?

  “There is,” Judge Barrett answered. She wanted to mention that, before Monday, when this panel had begun, she’d never served on anything like it, and she’d heard concerns that it undermined public trust in her courts. “I think just the opposite is true. It speaks to the integrity of our system that this kind of commission would exist. I feel that all the more strongly, having had the opportunity to serve on this panel.”

  Next Judge Fox cleared his throat. Before becoming a judge, he’d been a district attorney, he reflected, so he foresaw that Gaither and Bellas might face cri
ticism for how they’d closed the state’s case. Fox thought the choice had demanded courage. He wanted to thank them for it, and also to thank the state legislature, if it was listening, for creating the IIC in the first place. “This is perhaps one of the best changes in the judicial system in North Carolina in the last hundred years.” He felt disappointed only that it hadn’t existed sooner.

  “In terms of the matters that have all brought us together to this moment,” Judge Lee said. He listed the legal terms of Willie’s conviction and the unusual statute that empowered him today. “It is unquestionably the unanimous decision of this three-judge panel that the defendant, Willie James Grimes, a convicted person, has proved by clear and convincing evidence that he is innocent. It is therefore ordered that the relief sought by Willie James Grimes is granted. The charges of rape and kidnapping of Ms. Carrie Lee Elliott, against Willie James Grimes, are dismissed.”

  Lee opened his mouth to say something else, but applause interrupted him. “Yeah!” a woman cried, as if she were at church. When the courtroom had quieted, Lee resumed. “It is further ordered that Willie James Grimes be removed immediately from the Sex Offender and Public Protection Registration program.” He recited his own name, the names of his two fellow judges, then paused again, removed his reading glasses, and considered Willie directly.

  “Mr. Grimes, you’re a little bit older than I am,” Lee observed. So he expected that Willie must remember, as Lee himself did, that August of 1963, the image of those steps to the Lincoln Memorial at the close of that famous speech that still echoed. “And I’m going to paraphrase it as we conclude this proceeding,” he decided aloud, as Judges Barrett and Fox beamed beside him. “Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty—thank Jehovah—Willie J. Grimes is free at last.”

  Lee thanked everyone and stood. At 10:29 a.m., his courtroom bailiff clapped a gavel.

  35

  A Long Time Coming

  Free at last.