Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  More frightening to Kendra was this: there was no reason to suspect that North Carolina was unique. It was simply that no one else was doing these investigations. An agency like hers wasn’t the only model—a few states held conviction integrity units within their DA offices, those did good work, too, though they cost more to run. Most states had nothing at all, no one to run neutral, postconviction fact-finding, or to issue subpoenas and conduct searches. All that was a lot of work. Was it worth it? people sometimes asked her. She told them: “Why don’t you go ask Greg Taylor if it was worth it?”

  Kendra was right. That June, four months before Chris’s closing argument at the Newton courthouse, the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the law schools at Northwestern and the University of Michigan, issued its first report of known wrongful convictions in the United States, case after case summarized in compact, half-page paragraphs, alongside a notice that these were only the beginning—873 of them, between 11 and 66 in each year for more than two decades. Certainly more existed, going back further. But DNA testing had come into use only in 1989, and the registry had to begin somewhere. Its authors had chosen there.

  Most of the 873 had been convicted of rape or homicide, only because these were the crimes where postconviction resources were concentrated. If you were a lawyer who recognized that trial verdicts could be mistakes, and felt moved to act, naturally you prioritized those assigned the longest sentences, or the death penalty, since it was where you felt most needed. Obviously those verdicts followed the most heinous crimes. This explained why most exonerations one saw in the news were for murders or rapes—not because those were the only verdicts reached in error, but because they received the most postconviction scrutiny. It stood to reason that innocent people were also being convicted of theft, or assault, or drug sales, or tax fraud, at roughly the same rate. It was just that no one was investigating those. “The procedure for convicting a defendant of a crime is set by law,” the registry reported, to explain why it could be so difficult to identify mistakes. “There is no parallel procedure for deciding that a convicted defendant is innocent.” In fact, this last sentence was false—of course there was such a procedure, here in North Carolina. Chris had seen to it personally.

  The 873 exonerations had been discovered in forty-three different states, plus Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. The state with the most was Illinois, followed by New York, Texas, and California. It could be tempting to think, momentarily, that these were the states doing the worst job, wrongly convicting the most people. More likely the reverse was true; these were the states doing the best job, searching most responsibly for errors and overturning them. Two of the oldest, best-funded innocence projects in the country stood in Chicago and in New York City. Another was in Northern California. Well-run conviction integrity units were housed inside the DA’s offices of Dallas and Houston. Coincidence? Chris doubted it. The prospect that kept her awake at night was that courtrooms in the other forty-six states across the country convicted just as many innocent people, proportionally to their populations, and simply hadn’t noticed yet. Not a single exoneration, as far as the registry could find, had ever occurred in Maine or Vermont, in Delaware or New Mexico, in Wyoming or either of the Dakotas. Did that mean no innocent person had ever been convicted in those places? No. Men and women just like Willie, with siblings just like Gladys, with friends like Thomas Hill and Louie Ross, were languishing in those states at this very moment, wandering hopelessly in loops around a prison yard, or tossing on a thin, state-issue mattress, while Chris, sleepless at three o’clock in the morning, stared at her ceiling in Durham.

  She wasn’t surprised when, hardly ten months after its initial report, the registry published an update. Since listing those 873, researchers already had found 198 more. In 2012 alone, 97 people besides Willie had been exonerated—a new American record, though it would stand only briefly. Two years later would come 140 more exonerations. Which would stand even more briefly. The following year, 2015, would add another 151. The full tally by then would exceed 1,700, with at least one in each state in the country.

  In its final pages, the registry’s 2015 report would also mention, at last, a peculiar state agency. “In nine years of operation, the NCIIC has been responsible for nine exonerations. There’s a lot to be said for agencies like the NCIIC—but there are no other agencies like the NCIIC in the United States. To create one would require legislative action and… funding by a legislature and a governor. Outside North Carolina, no state has been interested.”

  In 2016, 166 more men and women would be exonerated. Another record. “Since 2011,” the registry would explain, “the annual number of exonerations has more than doubled.” On March 1, 2017, the number of exonerations would surpass two thousand.

  Today the registry is adding exonerations weekly.

  21,730 days—the total number of days that Dwayne, Willie, and Greg were incarcerated. Left to right: Dwayne Dail, Willie Grimes, Chris Mumma, Greg Taylor. Courtesy of Christer Berg.

  A year or so after the three-judge panel, Teresa, the granddaughter of Carrie Elliott and sister of Tamera, who’d told reporters in Newton that obviously the Hickory Police Department had “got the ball rolling the wrong way,” received a letter in the mail from Catawba County. A summons for jury duty. Unhappily she drove to the courthouse, asked a receptionist for the correct room, and took her seat to wait. Later, as lawyers spoke, the substance of the case hardly registered, only that it involved the Hickory Police Department, some crime they’d investigated. Teresa didn’t need to hear anything more. When her number was called, an unfamiliar attorney approached. Could she think of any reason preventing her from being impartial?

  “I wouldn’t trust anything they do or say,” Teresa answered, pointing toward the policemen. Neither she nor her siblings had attended their grandmother’s trial, so they’d always just assumed it had gone properly; it shocked them, twenty-three years later, when the IIC reached out with news of a reinvestigation. What they’d learned about Willie Grimes, his fingerprints and hair and alibi, dumbfounded them. How did they find him guilty in the first place? Teresa had wondered, sitting beside her sister in Newton.

  Today, a year later, she still felt grateful for the IIC, whom she’d never heard of before that. No one from the agency had ever whispered a single harsh word to her family, or about her grandmother, and it was obvious how much legwork they’d done. Without them, Teresa and her family would still believe a lie. She had not stopped feeling betrayed by the Hickory police. Her grandmother would never, ever, have chosen the wrong person on purpose, but it wasn’t impossible to imagine what had happened: A friend whom Carrie trusted had told her something, and Carrie, in her shock, had believed it. And the police never investigated! And they paid the friend a reward! It was a shame this man Willie Grimes had gotten caught up in anything, and then so much time passed, and the real criminal got away, and today she was supposed to listen to the HPD? She didn’t believe them one bit.

  “No more questions,” the lawyer told her. She was dismissed from the jury before she even sat down.

  He had no interest in a lawsuit. Given the choice, like Teresa, he preferred not to return to any courtroom at all. All he wanted was a promise from the Hickory police, and from Catawba County, that neither would do to anyone else what they’d done to him. Or if not a promise then some sort of penalty, some public reprimand, where police would admit they’d been wrong, promise to do better. Without this, he worried nothing would change. They would simply choose another man and arrest him—another man like Willie, black and penniless and with no way to get out of it.

  A penalty like that did exist, everyone told him. It was called a lawsuit.

  So Chris found him a firm she trusted in nearby Raleigh, the same one that had handled the lawsuit for Greg Taylor. A typical attorney’s fee for something like this was 40 percent of however much they won, but this firm had taken on Greg’s for less, and Chris thought she could persuade the
m to do the same for Willie. She preferred not to represent her own clients in lawsuits. It wasn’t where her expertise lay, and, besides, she didn’t like the optics: exonerating a man, then turning around and suing? It allowed for a wrong impression of her motives.

  “Federal Lawsuit Targets Area Officials,” the Hickory Daily Record announced in October 2014. Willie’s new attorneys had filed against the town as well as two county sheriffs, three clerks of court, two chiefs of HPD, and a pair of former officers, including Steve Hunt, who together had “conducted a grossly inadequate investigation,” the suit alleged, “then withheld exculpatory evidence” despite “repeated requests… from Grimes’s attorney,” amounting to “negligent, willful, wanton, reckless, and deliberately indifferent acts and omissions,” and robbing Willie of his liberty “without due process of law, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Under common law in North Carolina, it also amounted to obstruction of justice.

  The lawsuit was settled in August 2016, for $3.25 million. According to the language of the settlement, Hickory and its officials “do not admit liability of any sort,” and their agreement is only “a compromise to avoid expense and to terminate all controversies… of any nature whatsoever, known or unknown, connected with the allegations.”

  In 2006, Steve Hunt ran for sheriff of Catawba County. He lost. In 2012 he ran for commissioner of Catawba County. He lost.

  Because Carrie Elliott died in 1989, meaning, of course, that she can no longer testify, and because the only remaining evidence linking Albert Turner to her assault is a pair of decades-old fingerprints, Turner is unlikely ever to be charged with her rape. However. Statute requires the IIC to share with law enforcement any criminal evidence it discovers over the course of an investigation, related to any crime at all. After Willie’s hearing, therefore, the agency turned over to Jay Gaither and the SBI the transcripts from its interview with Juanita Probst, the woman who’d misunderstood why Lau and Stellato had come and confided that Turner had raped her as a child. (Ms. Probst’s name has been published already, in public documents.) The agency also turned over Turner’s confession that he’d had intercourse with Probst when mathematically she’d been too young to consent. Which Probst hadn’t done, regardless. There was no statute of limitations on a felony, Jay Gaither remarked to the Hickory Daily Record. That September, a week before Willie’s three-judge panel, Turner was arrested. A month later, a district court judge found probable cause to charge him. A grand jury indicted him the following spring. But he never made it to trial. Turner died in April 2016, while out on bond. Police found him alone in his apartment when they visited to ask him about a welfare check. An autopsy showed his heart had failed from chronic alcohol abuse.

  How would his life have gone, if none of this had happened? If Linda McDowell had never offered his name, if Miss Elliott had never chosen him from a lineup, if Steve Hunt had never knocked on Brenda’s door. Where, and who, would he be?

  He wasn’t certain he would be alive at all. So many of his siblings, others he’d grown up with, had found problems with their thyroids or livers, or gotten diabetes, and couldn’t afford their doctors’ bills. One childhood neighbor had had knee and hip replacements, followed by organ failure. Even Gladys had cataracts. If the prostate cancer had befallen him on the outside, there was no chance he could have paid for surgery, radiation, all those appointments. The jobs he’d worked back then, at the textile plant and furniture shop, had offered no health insurance. Almost certainly that would have been the end of him.

  If he’d survived, somehow? He guessed he would own some apartment and car, hold some job making hardly any money. Those things didn’t matter. They weren’t what he wondered about. The question was not what objects he would own but what person he would be. He felt he had been too impatient as a young man, too short-tempered, too distracted by the wrong things. Would he have overcome those on the outside, if his survival had not depended on it? Would he have found Jehovah? It was impossible to know. He would be different, he assumed. He hoped not by much.

  He drove north from Gastonia to Lawndale, chugging up the rural hillsides in search of FOR SALE signs. Found one just eight minutes from where Thomas lived, on a winding road barely five hundred yards from a middle school, atop the crest of a rise overlooking an expanse of emerald and oatmeal and rust, hay bales lined countlessly to the horizon. The house had three bedrooms and its own outdoor shed and a red tin roof like the one from his childhood, so that he could hear the shelling rain. An old lady lived there and she promised him it was quiet, his neighbors wouldn’t disturb him. When he moved in he noticed she’d left a decorative stone on the front steps with the word HOPE carved smoothly into an oval. He decided to keep it there.

  She was right, the neighbors didn’t disturb him. But one morning he was out mowing his lawn—he loved this part of owning a house, the fenceless outdoor solitude, his progress recorded slowly in the grass—when he noticed a neighbor’s yard growing unruly. It turned out this was because the man who lived there worked all day and didn’t have time to care for it, and couldn’t afford to hire someone else to do it for him. Willie volunteered to mow that lawn in addition to his own. A second neighbor noticed and asked if Willie would mow his, too, even tried to pay him. Willie turned the money down. No one he knew in Lawndale wasn’t poor, and he had a bank account now that his neighbors didn’t. Soon he was mowing a dozen lawns, all for free. He bought a new riding lawn mower, then an old Dodge truck to haul the mower around.

  For himself he bought a two-year-old Ford Taurus with only nine thousand miles on it, fancier than anything he’d ever owned. The week he steered it home, blue and red lights flashed in his mirrors and a police cruiser nudged him toward the shoulder. A car like that, silver and shining, there in Lawndale? Officers wanted to know where a black man they didn’t recognize had gotten it.

  Willie didn’t know where to begin.

  Acknowledgments

  The people I spoke with in reporting this book, including many who appear in its pages, generously gave me their time, expertise, recollections, or records. I’m grateful to every one of them. Their names appear in my notes. A few deserve additional mention here, especially Willie Grimes and Chris Mumma, without whom there would be no story at all. I’ve done my best to get it right. Specific thanks also to Kendra Montgomery-Blinn. As director of a state agency, Kendra faced stricter confidentiality prohibitions than either Willie or Chris, and never once wavered from them, usually to my disappointment. She refuses to answer questions more politely than anyone else I’ve met.

  Thanks to Sabrina Butler, Dwayne Dail, and Greg Taylor. In addition to Willie, these three exonerees helped me to see and understand life inside prison, and to begin imagining what it feels like to be sent there wrongly. That Dwayne and Sabrina don’t appear personally in the narrative is only a disappointment of space.

  Thanks to Teresa Hamlett, who shared with me the person her grandmother was. I’m sorry to Teresa and all her siblings for the trauma visited upon their family, and that it took so long to learn the truth of it.

  Thanks to Jin Auh, at the Wylie Agency, for taking a chance on me, and for her advocacy. To the kind and responsive Jessica Friedman, also at Wylie. To Ben George at Little, Brown, for making me better. To the entire team there, including Pam Brown, Liz Garriga, Sarah Haugen, Pamela Marshall, and Carol Fein Ross. To Tracy Roe, for her keen eye. To Ed Klaris, for his expertise, and for his patience with someone who never went to law school.

  Thanks to my teachers. In chronological order of their generosity and influence: Mike Phelps, Richard Ford, Margot Livesey, Anthony Walton, Philip Gerard, David Gessner, Clyde Edgerton, and Dave Monahan.

  A number of undergraduates at UNCW helped me to transcribe interviews. Without them I’d likely still be typing. Thanks especially to Nicole Aronis, Paula Eames, Marissa Flanagan, and Morgan Lehman.

  Thanks to my family—my parents, Allan and Vicki, my brothers, Noah and Luke—w
ho told me that I could.

  And mahalo nui loa to Jaclyn—for so many things, large and small, that to list every one would require another book.

  About the Author

  Benjamin Rachlin grew up in New Hampshire. He studied English at Bowdoin College and writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times Magazine, Time, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He lives near Boston.

  Notes

  I first learned of Willie Grimes in January 2013, three months after he was exonerated. At the time I was twenty-six, in my first year of an MFA program in North Carolina, learning to write magazine features. I’m the middle of three brothers, and the age gap between me and Luke, the youngest, is two years. So Luke was twenty-four. That was my first thought, when I read of Willie in a local newspaper. He’s spent Luke’s entire lifetime in prison. I understood exactly how long this was.

  I drove out to Lawndale in March thinking that, if Willie gave his blessing, I might try to write a magazine feature about his case. But the more I read, and the more I spoke with him and others, the more obvious it became that Willie’s story did not occur in a vacuum. His experience would not have been possible—I would never have read of him—if not for an agency called the Innocence Inquiry Commission. And there was nothing else like the IIC anywhere in the United States. I didn’t feel I could tell one of these stories without the other.

  This book occupied most of my next four years.