by Bill Wallace
The DNA found on Kimberly Ancona’s clothing was entered into the national DNA database that contained the DNA of everyone who had been found guilty of a crime in the United States. It came up with the name of Kenneth Phillips, a man in prison at the time for sexual assault. It emerged that when Kimberly Ancona was murdered, he was out of prison on parole. He had the same blood type as that found at the crime scene.
That night, Kenneth Phillips, a Native American had got very drunk and Ancona had exercised her right to refuse to serve him any more alcohol. Later when the bar emptied, he wanted to use the men’s toilets, but Ancona was cleaning it and she told him he should go home. He lost his temper, took a knife from behind the bar and viciously stabbed her to death and raped her. He then replaced the knife back after washing it. He later said that he was subject to blackouts and could remember nothing of the incident; the first he knew of it was when he woke up the following morning covered in blood. No one ever linked him with the murder and just three weeks later, he was arrested for sexually assaulting and attempting to strangle a seven-year-old girl.
On 8 April 2002, Ray Krone at last walked through the gates of Arizona State Prison at Yuma, a free man. Sixteen days later the District Attorney’s office officially dismissed all charges against him.
He had served 3,769 days in prison for a crime he did not commit. Unsurprisingly he now campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States, saying, ‘There is a serious problem with the death penalty and there are serious mistakes made. The punishment is irreversible, irrevocable. We can’t bring back someone when we execute them; it is no longer right for a punishment like that to be in a society like ours.’
Nick Yarris
His is a story of astonishing deceit, double cross and obfuscation, a Kafkaesque legal maze in which was trapped for twenty-one years, being let down by his lawyers and treated with disdain and downright dishonesty by the United States justice system.
It began early in December 1981 when thirty-seven-year-old Linda Mae Craig mentioned to her fellow workers at the Tri-State Mall in Delaware that she thought a man had been watching her. Tragically, she did nothing about it, because on 15 December she left work and never completed her ten-minute drive home. Her husband phoned the police whose search located her shoes in the car park at the mall and at 7 pm her car, a 1977 Chrysler Cordoba, was found abandoned a mile and a half from a church in Chichester Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
Next morning, they found Linda Craig’s body in a car park at the church. She had been raped before being murdered.
Nick Yarris entered the story on 20 December when he was stopped in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania by patrolman Benjamin Wright. Yarris was no angel, a methamphetamine addict, an escapee from prison, a car thief, a drug dealer and an armed robber. As Yarris himself puts it, he was a criminal, but was no murderer. Therefore, when Officer Wright placed a restraining hand on his shoulder as Yarris tried to get out of his car, he did not take kindly to it. When the officer grabbed him by the arm, a scuffle followed. The officer’s revolver went off accidentally, firing a bullet into the ground. Yarris was subdued and taken into custody where he was charged with attempted murder and the kidnapping of a police officer. It would later take a jury less than an hour to find him innocent of all charges, but for the moment it looked bad to the frightened twenty-year-old.
As a drug-user, he was placed in solitary confine-ment while he underwent ‘cold turkey’ from his methamphetamine habit. While there, he read about Linda Craig’s murder and devised a plan that he hoped would obtain his release. He decided to tell the police that he knew the identity of her murderer and would tell them everything he knew in return for his release. He gave them the name of a friend that he thought had recently died of a drug overdose. When it transpired, however, that the friend was alive and that he had a rock-solid alibi for the night in question, Yarris was really in trouble, especially as the police now believed that he knew so much about the murder that he must have done it. They threw him back into solitary, at the same time letting it be known to other prisoners that he was a snitch who had tried to inform on a friend. After being constantly attacked for a week, he could stand no more and tried to hang himself.
After a stay in hospital, he was returned to a cell, allowed to wear only boxer shorts, even though it was a freezing cold January. Further attacks by fellow inmates followed – urine was thrown over him and he was subjected to verbal attacks. Yarris spoke to a prison guard, hoping to at least be given some clothing if he seemed to be helping. He asked him what would happen if he admitted that he had been part of the crime but had not committed the murder. The story was taken to the officers investigating Linda Craig’s murder and Yarris was arrested. He received clothes and a blanket and, having now achieved the status of a murderer, the attacks from other inmates stopped.
One inmate, however, Charles Cataleno – serving time for burglary – offered the District Attorney handling the Yarris case a deal. In exchange for a dismissal of the twenty-year sentence he expected to receive, he would share a cell with Yarris and try to get a confession from him. Ironically, around this time, on 17 April 1982, Nick Yarris would have walked free after the jury in the case for which he had originally been arrested reached a verdict of not guilty. Instead, a couple of months later, on 5 June 1982, proceedings began on the murder charges. Yarris learned that District Attorney Barry Goss who had taken over the case, was seeking the death penalty, instead of a charge of second-degree murder. Yarris was horrified, but his descent into hell had only just begun.
At the trial, it did not look good for Yarris from the outset when the judge opened by saying, ‘In light of the 4th of July Holiday coming on Friday, I intend to make sure you all get to go home and enjoy yourselves in time.’ He was not going to waste much time on this trial, it seemed.
The prosecution presented its only evidence – semen left by the killer both in and on the victim. The tests that had been run on it, however, were incomplete and it could even have belonged to Linda Craig’s husband who said they had sex the night before the attack. When he learned, however, that there was a suspect he had said that he had worn a condom. No one thought it strange that the couple were unable to have children. Wearing a condom was, therefore, a pretty pointless exercise.
The real deceitfulness began almost immediately when the prosecution refused to hand over to the defence team more than twenty pages of homicide files. In those that were handed over, paragraphs had been deleted, as if they wanted to hide certain elements of the investigation. What they were hiding were conflicting witness statements and inaccurate identifications. They also hid the fact that the murderer wore gloves. Charles Cataleno testified against Yarris, claiming that he had confessed to him and denying that he had been offered a deal for his evidence.
After one of the briefest murder trials in US legal history – three days – Nick Yarris, a totally innocent man, was found guilty of the murder of Linda Mae Craig. On 24 January 1983, he was sentenced to death as well as being sentenced to an additional thirty to sixty years in prison. He was sent to one of the most notorious prisons in the United States – Huntington Prison, high in the mountains of Pennsylvania.
Needless to say, Yarris sacked his defence team and hired a new one, which launched an appeal on the basis of the files that had been withheld by the prosecution and evidence that had been destroyed. At one point before the appeal, Yarris was offered a commutation to a life sentence, but he declined. He was after justice, not compromise.
In February 1985, when he was being taken to his appeal hearing, Nick Yarris did a second stupid thing – he escaped from custody, becoming the most hunted man in the USA. It enabled the prosecution to dismiss his appeal on the destruction of files. twenty-five days after the escape, Yarris handed himself in to the authorities in Florida. A few days later, his conviction and sentence were upheld.
In 1988, Yarris read about DNA testing in a newspaper and when he asked hi
s lawyer to investigate whether it would be possible in his case, he became the first death row prisoner in America to seek DNA testing to prove his innocence. To their dismay, however, they learned that the evidence in the case had been disposed of. All that remained were two slides of material that were in no condition to provide accurate test results. Yarris found out, however, that some material had been sent to another laboratory and had never been returned. He ordered his attorney not to tell the prosecutors about it, fearful it would be lost or tampered with, but the lawyer ignored him. The material was collected by two detectives and never arrived at the testing facility. One of the detectives transporting it refused to hand it over, keeping it for two years in unsuitable conditions while the court refused to force him to hand it over.
Once again, Yarris fired his counsel.
In 1989, Yarris tried to get a retrial on the basis of the gloves about which the prosecution had kept him in the dark at his trial. He was refused and protested about the judge making the denial, Justice Toal, to the Judicial Review Board. He got nowhere again.
Between 1989 and 1991, the authorities did everything they could to prevent DNA testing but finally they allowed it, on the condition that it was carried out in a police lab in Alabama, a lab that had never before carried out the type of testing necessary. They came back with inconclusive results, but with no detail about how they had tested or what the results actually were. It had been a sham.
In 1994, he was once again, after a review of the evidence in court, denied a new trial. He was denied again in 1999.
The legal quagmire in which he had floundered for so many years took its toll, and in 1993 he had been struck by hepatitis C and by 2000 he was very ill. Staff at Greene County Prison where he was now being held, made his condition worse by giving him the wrong doses of the drugs being used to treat him.
As he lost the will to live, his latest attorney asked a lab in California to make one last effort to prove Nick Yarris’s innocence by testing some untested DNA evidence from the pair of men’s gloves found in Linda Craig’s car. Yarris agreed to accept his verdict once and for all if this evidence did not exonerate him.
Two samples of DNA were found, but sensa-tionally, neither of them was a match for Yarris’s DNA. Although they made every effort to block the proceedings, the prosecution had no alternative but to drop the case against Nick Yarris and he walked out of prison a free man, having had his sentence reduced to the time he had already served. He was the 140th US prisoner to be exonerated by DNA testing, the thirteenth to be exonerated on death row.
Even then, however, they would not leave him alone. The case had been dropped in such a way that if new evidence was found of his involvement, Yarris could be thrown back in prison. His family were hounded for DNA samples as late as June 2004, as they pursued him. Yarris responded by going public. For weeks he protested outside Delaware County Courthouse, addressing people entering and leaving the building through a megaphone and distributing thousands of leaflets. He was protesting about the fact that the authorities were refusing to put the DNA found on the gloves onto the FBI national DNA database.
Eventually, for Nick Yarris, incarcerated for more than half his life for a crime he did not commit, everything turned out fine. He was aware he could still be in serious trouble in the United States due to the ‘three strikes’ law – if he committed the slightest misdemeanour, he stood a chance of returning to prison for the rest of his life. He moved to Britain, the land of his forefathers, married and started a new life.
He had been in prison for twenty-one years. Admittedly, at the start of it all he had been stupid, but you cannot execute a man for stupidity.
Richard Allen Davis
Richard Allen Davis has languished for the last ten years on death row in California’s San Quentin State Prison, a pariah to his fellow inmates. Not only is he the lowest of the low in criminal circles, a child-killer, he is also the reason that the California State Government introduced its ‘three strikes and you’re out’ legislation that enables courts to impose lengthy periods of incarceration on criminals who have committed serious offences three times.
In 1996, he was convicted of the first-degree murder of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas who he had abducted from her bedroom on 1 October 1993.
That night, Polly Klaas was fearful of the dark as ever, terrified that a mysterious bogeyman was going to come into her bedroom and kidnap her. Tragically, that is exactly what happened.
On that first day of October, Polly was having a sleepover at her house with her two best friends, Kate McLean and Gillian Pelham. As they did the usual things little girls do when together, playing with make-up and putting on funny clothes, a thick-set man with a beard and bushy grey hair was hanging about on the pavement outside the house which was situated in Petaluma, a quiet, affluent town about forty miles from San Francisco. Polly lived there with her mother, Eve, who was at the time separated from her second husband, and her younger sister, Annie. A number of people recall seeing the figure outside the house, but Petaluma was a town unfamiliar with crime and they surmised that he was just a local resident out for a walk.
As it was getting late, Polly decided to fetch the girls’ sleeping bags from the living room. When she opened the door, however, her heart was almost stopped by the sight of a middle-aged man she had never set eyes on before. In his hand was a knife. He hissed at her, ‘Don’t scream or I’ll cut your throats!’ The terrified girls’ chatter stopped at once. ‘Who lives here?’ he asked. ‘I do,’ Polly answered, her voice trembling with terror. ‘I’m just doing this for money,’ the man added. Polly immediately fetched a box with $50 in it. But he refused it, ordering the three girls to lie on the floor. He tied their hands behind their backs and covered their heads. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just doing this for the money,’ he reiterated, as if trying to convince himself. As he tied Polly up, she pleaded with him not to hurt her mum and sister. He picked Polly up and snarled at her friends to count to a thousand before they did anything. He then carried the little girl out of her house.
As soon as he was gone, Gillian and Kate began to tug at their bonds and succeeded in freeing themselves. They ran to Polly’s mother’s bedroom and blurted out what had happened. It was around 10.45 p.m. when she called 911.
As soon as the officers arrived, a description of the abductor was broadcast to patrol cars throughout Sonoma County but they failed, critically, to send it to every station which would probably prove fatal for Polly Klaas. This was because the abductor’s truck had broken down around midnight, twenty-five miles from the Klaas house. Dana Jaffe phoned the police to report a trespasser on her property. Her nineteen-year-old babysitter, Shannon Lynch, had seen a stranger standing by a Ford Pinto that had become stuck in a ditch. When she stopped and lowered her window a few inches, the man had told her he was stuck and needed a rope. Lynch did not like the look of him, however, and sped off. At the first payphone she found she phoned Dana Jaffe to warn her.
Jaffe became frightened, piled her child into her Toyota and drove away from her house, passing the stricken Pinto. She called the police from a petrol station.
Two police officers in a patrol car pulled up behind the Pinto. When they asked the man what he was doing in the area, he calmly told them he was ‘sightseeing’. He then pulled out a can of beer from his car and began drinking it. When one of the officers told him he should not be doing that, he tossed the can into nearby bushes. They ordered him to pick it up.
Meanwhile, a check was being run for outstanding warrants on him after he told them his name was Richard Allen Davis. Sadly, if they had checked further, they would have found that Davis had a an extensive and worrying rap sheet that included robbery, burglary, assault and kidnapping, and numerous convictions for violence against women. At that time, he was on parole and was in violation of it.
The officers told him to leave the property and helped him to get the Pinto out of the ditch. He drove off, Polly Klaas possibly in th
e boot of the car and, it has been speculated, still alive at that time.
The following morning Davis was identified as the abductor from a palm print in Polly’s room, but the information was not yet made public. A citizens’ group was assembled by a local printer, Bill Rhodes, who also printed thousands of leaflets carrying Polly’s photograph and a description of her. He organised the Polly Klaas Centre which coordinated search efforts. The case was feature on the television show, America’s Most Wanted, and Polly’s face and a sketch of her abductor’s face, stared out from posters in malls and supermarkets.
A massive search was launched with bloodhounds, hundreds of police officers and local people. Thousands of tips were received by telephone and the movie star Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, donated a $200,000 reward. A benefit concert featuring stars of the San Francisco music scene and hosted by the comedian and actor Robin Williams, raised $12,000 to help in the search. As the days turned into weeks, however, she had still not been found. There was a sad, but growing certainty that she was dead.
The police had another chance to catch Davis on 19 October when he was picked up for driving under the influence of alcohol. None of the officers involved spotted his resemblance to the sketches of Polly’s abductor, nor did they connect his white Pinto with that night as he drove off in it five hours later after sobering up.
Strangely, stories about Bill Rhodes who had organised so much to help the search, began to emerge. It transpired that he was in fact a registered sex-offender, convicted of masturbating in front of a group of children in 1967. In 1968, he had forced four young girls to undress at knife-point. He resigned, but many began to wonder just how involved he was. Was he the abductor? The police thought not. He was eliminated as a suspect.
