Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

After all that time, free at last.

  What did it feel like?

  What did it feel like?

  He felt as if his every vein was filled with helium. He felt weightless, he felt afloat. He felt the tallest he’d ever been. His every muscle and tendon seemed to slacken; he could hear his blood billowing in his ears. His chest was thrumming and his heart rattled in his fingertips.

  Free at last.

  He needed to find his case manager. Needed to find his case manager, tell her what had happened, tell her he wouldn’t be checking in anymore. Fleetingly he thought of a meeting he had tried to attend some weeks earlier, in nearby Gastonia—what was it called? Not AA, something else—but they’d refused him, said they couldn’t accept sex offenders. He would go there. He would go to Hickory, stride through the front doors of the police department, stand in the lobby, and watch the officers’ faces. He would shout that he was innocent, he’d been telling them the truth, he no longer needed their help. He could do this. He could do anything. He was never going back to Gaston Correctional, never going back to any prison at all, except to tell his case manager this, that he was never going back to Gaston Correctional, never going back to any prison at all. He felt an urge to leap and shriek and pump his arms, just as quickly suppressed it. He wasn’t going to let these people see him like that.

  Gladys stood and slung her arms around him, he could feel her trembling, her tears soaking his suit jacket. A hand clapped his shoulder and he knew without looking it belonged to Bryan Stewart. Another hand. Eddie Moose. There was a sound he couldn’t place, then he realized it was applause. The entire courtroom was applauding. Chris appeared beside him, her eyes glistening. He hugged her tightly. “Thank you,” he tried to say, but it wasn’t coming out right, he couldn’t speak normally, he wasn’t sure she understood him. Robert Campbell was there. Those two men from the DA’s office whose names he couldn’t remember. The three judges. Strangers. They were hugging him, shaking his hand. What did it feel like? they were asking him. Congratulations, they were saying. Had he seen all this coming? They were handing him business cards. He should call them, if he ever needed help. He should call them, if he wanted to talk. “My brother is free!” Gladys was wailing.

  At the close of her first three-judge panel, for Greg Taylor, Chris had felt so overwhelmed, and so suddenly, that she had made a noise that was more than a gasp, that approached a scream, then cried uncontrollably. Colleagues had chastised her for it afterward, for not behaving professionally enough. Next time she would be more composed, she’d resolved. Now she hugged Robert Campbell, thanked him, hugged her center staffers, walked through the gap in the ornamented courtroom banister, hugged Gladys and Willie. “You’re free,” she told him.

  “Oh, yes,” Willie said. He was beaming wondrously, unlike she’d ever seen him, seemingly lit from within. “Oh, yes.”

  People with cameras were calling for their attention.

  Bryan Stewart felt thrilled the judges had mentioned Jehovah. His wife was in tears. Had she heard that? he asked. They’d mentioned Jehovah.

  Eddie Moose was drying his eyes on his sleeve. He’d assumed he was prepared for this, but he wasn’t.

  Greg Taylor was there. He’d come to support Chris and her latest client. He watched Willie, flushed and radiant, recalled vividly what this had felt like. A moment of uncertainty, of confusion—had he heard correctly?—before an upswell beyond anything he had imagined. All those years of doubt and frustration, each time he’d felt angry or sick or embarrassed, evaporating just like that. He still couldn’t believe, at his own three-judge panel, he hadn’t blasted through the courtroom ceiling.

  He heard Chris calling his name now, saw her beckoning. She wanted a photograph: her and him and Willie.

  They were inside a steak house, fourteen of them at one long table. Willie was tasting the best shrimp and steak of his life.

  Chris wasn’t. She couldn’t eat. For her nerves, she ordered a glass of pinot grigio, immediately felt guilty about it, drinking in front of Willie and Bryan and a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  From the steak house she drove Willie to the sheriff’s office, a copy of the court order in her hand. Take his name off the registry, she demanded. Do it today.

  Local news that evening showed a moment from the panel: Willie, his hands clasped against his chest, rocking forward in a courtroom chair, mouthing Thank you again and again. Gladys seated beside him, her face upturned, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

  A second shot. Willie and Gladys standing. How did it feel? a reporter was asking him.

  “It’s been a long time coming,” Willie replied. He was nodding and smiling widely. “But I knew it would come, sooner or later.”

  A reporter was asking Jay Gaither about his closing argument. “My office is about seeking the truth,” Gaither answered. “We never play ‘hide the ball’ for anybody, or any reason.”

  “Even after being exonerated, Willie Grimes did not have a bad word to say about the people who put him in prison,” a news anchor was saying.

  “And now evidence shows those people may have had information that could’ve cleared him,” her co-anchor added. Producers cut to footage in Newton, then to the inside of the courtroom, where cameras had caught Tamera Elliott approaching Willie after the verdict. “These were things we didn’t know until they all came out at the end,” Tamera was saying to him, as Willie, at least a foot taller, nodded politely. Now one of Tamera’s sisters spoke directly into the camera, looking stricken, shaking her head in disbelief. “The police officers, they didn’t do their job,” she exclaimed. “They got the ball rolling the wrong way.”

  On another network, Tamera standing on the courthouse steps. “We found out a lot of things we didn’t know about the evidence,” she was explaining into a microphone. “We as a family have all talked, and we feel like if he was not the one who did it, we need to make it right.”

  He stayed that night in an empty house Bryan Stewart owned, yards from Pioneer Utilities and the Kingdom Hall. It was the first time all day he’d been alone. He walked a short hallway and looked around. The lights were off but he saw everything clearly. The house was silent but he thought it might be glowing. His mind teemed with—nothing. Everything. He felt wetness on his cheeks before he realized he was sobbing. Then something loosed inside him and all at once he was kneeling there in the hallway, his body quivering. “Thank you,” he whispered, to the empty house. His chest and skull throbbed. He stood. He was leaping, hurling his arms out wildly. “Thank you!” he shouted. “Thank you!”

  When he finally slept he had no idea what time it was, how many minutes or hours he had passed howling and weeping in the hallway. It didn’t matter. Time belonged to him now. He could spend it however he liked.

  Willie and his legal team, Robert Campbell and Chris Mumma. Courtesy of the NC Center on Actual Innocence.

  Judge David Lee congratulates Willie after his exoneration. Off to left stands Judge Sharon Barrett. Courtesy of the NC Center on Actual Innocence.

  Willie with Chris Mumma and Greg Taylor. Courtesy of the Hickory Daily Record.

  36

  Cases of Innocence Still Open

  More reporters phoned. From the Hickory Daily Record, the Shelby Star, the Charlotte Observer. The news division at Time Warner Cable. Was he angry? Did he plan to sue? What did he think of Albert Turner?

  What was there to think of Turner? He’d known who Turner was, back before all this had happened—Hickory was a small town, Turner was his age—and even then had wanted nothing to do with him.

  On the subject of a lawsuit he kept silent. He’d barely considered it, and, until he had, Chris warned him not to speak about it. But he didn’t feel angry. He wanted reporters to know this. He was a different man than he’d been twenty-four years earlier, no longer carried that sort of bitterness. It disappointed him, what had happened. He missed his siblings, all that time they might have had together. He still didn’t understand Steve Hunt, or Linda Mc
Dowell. “I would like to know why he really didn’t take initiative to do his job, because I wouldn’t have been in prison,” he admitted to WRAL, about Hunt. But he didn’t feel angry, at Hunt or anyone else. “It really feels great to be free,” he told the Gaston Gazette. “I’ll just be thankful to do what I want to do and go where I want to go. That’s a privilege I haven’t had in a long time.”

  No reporter understood this. How could he feel this way? He ought to feel angry, they told him. Even his friends hardly understood it, even Gladys, who would never stop feeling upset about what they’d done to her brother.

  To one after another, he tried to explain. There was no question others had wronged him. But for every person who had done him harm, there was someone else who had loved him. For Steve Hunt, there was Eddie Moose. For Linda McDowell, there was Bryan Stewart. For those hardheaded prison guards, for Sergeant Orsky and Officer Mull, for that programmer at Craggy, there were Chris Mumma and Louie Ross and Thomas Hill. And there was Gladys—always. He repeated this all weekend long, each time his phone rang or someone knocked at his door, to strangers with microphones who he could tell did not understand him. But wasn’t he angry? they asked. Finally he pulled his shades and stopped answering.

  On Monday, October 8, reporters from WSOC-TV checked the North Carolina Sex Offenders Registry. The name Willie Grimes had been removed.

  Chris bought him a prepaid cell phone, then drove him to the DMV, to get his driver’s license back. This required a hearing and a hundred and fifty dollars in fines, since he hadn’t held a license in so long, and technically that DWI, from 1982, had never been resolved. But a receptionist at the counter recognized him from her newspaper and promised to expedite things. She handed him a form. “Outline drug/alcohol use including date of last use and pattern of use in the past twelve months,” read item 1. That was easy. He hadn’t tried alcohol in two decades. “Give brief psychosocial history including family, work, legal history, abbreviated mental status and treatment history,” read item 2.

  With the phone Chris had bought him, he called Louie Ross, who’d attended his hearing in Raleigh but was unable to drive to Newton for the three-judge panel. Louie had asked that he phone as soon as he could. “It’s over,” Willie told him now.

  Our prayers are answered, Louie thought. He felt so—just so—well, it was hard for him to describe. The fact of the verdict crystallized his anger. It clarified what had happened. His friend had told the truth; they’d imprisoned him anyway. At the same time, Louie felt jubilant. Woot was free. The first chance he got, he drove to see Willie in Gastonia, where, talking about something else, Woot confessed that he’d never seen the ocean. Louie was astonished. Could that be right? Woot had never seen the coast? Of course, he realized. Both men had grown up too poor for vacations, two hundred and fifty miles from the Atlantic, an untraversable distance, and when Louie moved away, Woot had stayed back, and then they’d arrested him. Of course he’d never seen the coast. Louie cleared a long weekend and drove his friend east to Wilmington, then south to Myrtle Beach, just Louie, his wife, Woot, and one other friend. Louie bought them all lunch at a sun-drenched restaurant right there on the boardwalk, its foundation flush against the sand, its second floor a wall of glass to an endless sheet of blue. Willie ate shrimp and stared.

  When Thomas Hill heard the news, he drove to Woot’s nephew’s house and there he was, Woot, sitting on the couch, the first Thomas had seen him since JT’s funeral, where Woot had worn handcuffs. Thomas fetched a camera. On a mantel in his own small house in Lawndale, he kept photographs he’d captured from annual reunions: Thomas and his classmates, Douglas High, class of ’64. Woot was missing from all of them. “C’mon!” he urged now. “Let’s take some pictures!” He snapped a few, disappeared, returned with more classmates from next door, arranged them all around Woot. He would frame these, add them to his mantel.

  Chris brought him more forms to sign, drove him to Raleigh for another hearing, returned with him weeks later to collect an envelope. Compensation from the state, for having wrongly imprisoned him. Now that his innocence was a proven fact, laws in North Carolina entitled him to $50,000 a year for up to fifteen years, or a maximum of $750,000. Willie had spent twenty-four years and 208 days in prison. Inside the envelope was a check. Chris helped him arrange a trust with a bank in Raleigh. Most of the money went there, with a fraction deposited to him each month.

  The language around the money was bizarre. Even its name seemed wrong, compensation. It made no sense as recompense. It righted no wrong. It could not restore anything. Even exonerating him hadn’t. There was no sum that might accomplish this, no number that corresponded to any logic. The envelope was not an apology. It made sense only because it prevented a compounded injustice. Without it, he would return to the outside even poorer than he’d left it, an inexplicable gap on his résumé and renter’s history, his bank account empty but for interest he’d accumulated from loans to fellow inmates inside prison, plus the little he’d earned from work release. He was sixty-six years old and if not for Bryan Stewart he would be homeless and unemployed. The envelope prevented this. It did in North Carolina, at least. Twenty-one other states offered no compensation at all.

  Besides what he needed to live on, the money meant nothing to him. He expected he would save the rest, give it eventually to Gladys or the Witnesses. He kept his job at Pioneer Utilities, though Bryan ordered him to take a week off—paid, Bryan insisted, just like Willie was taking vacation. Soon after he returned, the economy faltered, and business at Pioneer slowed. Rather than stand around the office from nine to five, he trimmed his schedule to three or four hours a day, until he stopped entirely.

  Every few nights he drove the bending road to Thomas Hill’s house to play checkers. Thomas’s new photographs overlooked them from the mantel, a few feet from where Willie sat with his hands in his lap, studying the board, as Thomas rubbed his forehead and groused about a losing streak. If not for their graying, thinning hair, their wrinkled faces, the fact that Willie had driven rather than walked, they might have been kids again, home in the evening from Douglas High, finished with cotton season. If not for everything else, they might never have missed a game. In another chair JT might have sat, or Cliff Jr., or Robert Lee, who might have brought chitlins. Would Brenda have come? Willie doubted it. He didn’t think he and Brenda would have married. But he’d never had the chance to find out. Instead in the house sat only the pair of them, two men of nearly seventy, relearning how the other liked to play. If it wasn’t checkers they played cards, gin rummy or spades. Or they went to lunch. Or Thomas was thinking about bowling.

  Midday he went with Bryan Stewart to a pasture a few miles south, to feed the cows. Out of sheer habit he found an AA meeting nearby, attended weekly. On Thursday and Sunday evenings he drove to Kingdom Hall to worship. But he could feel a distance growing between himself and the congregation; the Witnesses wanted him married, and to another Witness, and he wasn’t interested. He thought he might prefer worshipping alone, or just with Eddie or Bryan. He phoned congregations in DC, even drove up once, searching for Bryan Garner, that inmate from the benches at Harnett, the very first Witness he’d met. Last he’d heard, Garner had moved north, and Willie wanted to tell him what had happened, what Jehovah had come to mean to him, what Jehovah had accomplished in his case. But DC was so big. In the phone book he found men named Bryan Garner, but never the one he was looking for.

  There was such a thing as the post-exoneration blues. A full week after Willie’s panel, Chris still awoke numbly, feeling listless, as rootless and adrift as a mariner. For so many weeks she had surfed endorphins, the pressure had draped over her palpably, her purpose shone as clearly as a lighthouse, and now—what? Selfishly she had wanted that final day of the panel never to end—that lunch at the steak house, then marching into the sheriff’s office with her shoulders back, order in hand. She could’ve stayed there forever. Now it was over. Willie was free, his name was off the sex-offender registry
. He held a driver’s license and a cell phone, had moved full-time to Gastonia. He didn’t need her anymore.

  How close she kept with an exoneree depended on the man. Greg Taylor lived right there in Durham. The pair still got coffee every so often. But Willie lived out west. Chris worried about him, out there on his own, which was mostly irrational, she knew. He had Gladys and his congregation. After a week of wandering, exhausted and nostalgic, she pulled that old notepad from her purse: Cases of Innocence Still Open, Cases with No Avenues to Pursue. Scratched out Willie’s name entirely. Chose another name. Larry Lamb. There was work to do.

  At the close of Willie’s panel, Kendra had approached him and shaken his hand, still uncertain if he knew who she was. She had never explained her agency’s work on his case, and didn’t know how much Chris had told him. That was fine. It was the point. Grimes didn’t owe her a thing. She, Lau, Stellato, her other staffers, had only done their jobs. They’d never worked on Grimes’s behalf. Only on behalf of the truth. No headline she’d seen in the past two weeks read “Kendra Montgomery-Blinn Frees Man,” and this was how she preferred it. It was what made her job different, made it special, she felt. She was in it for the right reasons. She had moved on to other cases she couldn’t speak about.

  It surprised her that no other state had followed with an IIC of its own, six full years after North Carolina’s. Not yet, at least. Early on, after creating the new agency’s rules and procedures, she’d also built a website, nearly chose innocencecommission.gov for its address, then realized she shouldn’t, since when other states learned what North Carolina had achieved, they would follow with IICs of their own, and would need websites, too. So she appended -nc to the address. This left space for innocencecommission-ny.gov, -ca.gov, -fl.gov. None of those had happened. How come? Obviously there was a need. By now she or her staffers had discovered evidence in a dozen or so cases after being told no evidence existed. That was a frightening number, for everyone involved.