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Chapter Seven

Justice Denied

Walter’s appeal was denied.

The seventy-page opinion from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirming his conviction and death sentence was devastating. I’d filed a lengthy brief that documented the insufficiency of the evidence and raised every legal deficiency in the trial that I could identify. I argued that there was no credible corroboration of Myers’s testimony and that under Alabama law the State couldn’t rely exclusively on the testimony of an accomplice. I argued that there was prosecutorial misconduct, racially discriminatory jury selection, and an improper change of venue. I even challenged Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s override of the jury’s life sentence, though I knew the reduction of an innocent man’s death sentence to life imprisonment without parole would still have been an egregious miscarriage of justice. The court rejected all of my arguments.

I didn’t think it would turn out this way. At the oral argument months earlier, I’d been hopeful as I walked into the imposing Alabama Judicial Building and stood in the grand appellate courtroom that was formerly a Scottish Rite Freemasonry temple. Constructed in the 1920s, the building was renovated into a cavernous courthouse in the 1940s, complete with marble floors and an impressive domed ceiling. It stood at the end of Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, across the street from the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had pastored during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A block away was the state capitol, adorned with three banners: the American flag, the white and red state flag of Alabama, and the battle flag of the Confederacy.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals courtroom was on the second floor. The chief judge of the court was former governor John Patterson. He had made national news in the 1960s as a fierce opponent of civil rights and racial integration. In 1958, with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan, he defeated George Wallace for governor. His positions were even more pro-segregation than Wallace’s (who, having learned his lesson, would become the most famous segregationist in America, declaring in 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” just a block away from this courthouse). When he was attorney general before becoming governor, Patterson banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama and blocked civil rights boycotts and protests in Tuskegee and Montgomery. As governor, he withheld law enforcement protection for the Freedom Riders—the black and white college students and activists who traveled south in the early 1960s to desegregate public facilities in recognition of new federal laws. When the Freedom Riders’ bus traveled through Alabama, they were abandoned by the police. Alone and unprotected, they were beaten violently, and their bus was bombed.

Still, I forced myself to be hopeful. That was all long ago. During my argument, the court’s five judges looked at me with curiosity but asked few questions. I chose to interpret their silence as agreement. I hoped they saw so little support for the conviction that they didn’t think there was much to discuss. Judge Patterson’s only remark during the oral argument came at the end, when he slowly but firmly asked a single question that echoed through the mostly empty courtroom.

“Where are you from?”

I was thrown by the question and hesitated before answering.

“I live in Montgomery, sir.”

I had foolishly discouraged McMillian’s family from attending the oral argument because I knew that the issues were fairly arcane and that there would be very little discussion of the facts. Supporters would have to take off from work and make the long drive to Montgomery for an early morning argument. Since each side had only thirty minutes to present, I hadn’t thought it worth the effort. When I sat down after the argument, I regretted that decision. I would have appreciated some sympathetic faces in the courtroom to signal to the court that this case was different, but there were none.

An assistant attorney general then presented the State’s arguments—capital cases on appeal were managed by the attorney general, not the local district attorney. The State’s lawyer argued that this was a routine capital murder case and that the death penalty had been appropriately imposed. Following the oral argument, I still had hope that the court would overturn the conviction and sentence because it was so clearly unsupported by reliable facts. State law required credible corroboration of accomplice testimony in a murder case, and there simply wasn’t any in Walter’s case. I believed that the court would have a hard time affirming a conviction with so little evidence. I was wrong.

I drove to the prison to deliver the news. Walter didn’t say anything as I explained the situation, but he had a strange, despairing look on his face. I had tried to prepare him for the possibility that it could take years to get his conviction overturned, but he had gotten his hopes up.

“They aren’t ever going to admit they made a mistake,” he said glumly. “They know I didn’t do this. They just can’t admit to being wrong, to looking bad.”

“We’re just getting started, Walter,” I replied. “There is a lot more to do, and we’re going to make them confront this.”

I was telling the truth: We did have to press on. Our plan was to ask the Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider its decision, and if that turned out to be a dead end, we would seek review in the Alabama Supreme Court. And we had uncovered even more evidence of Walter’s innocence.

After filing the appeal brief, I’d continued investigating the case intensively. If we hadn’t come up with so much new evidence to prove Walter’s innocence, I think the court’s ruling would have been even more overwhelming. I told Walter before I left the prison, “They don’t know what we now know about your innocence. As soon as we present the new evidence to them, they’ll think differently.” My hopefulness was genuine, in spite of everything that had happened already. But I was underestimating the resistance we would face.

I’d finally been able to hire some additional lawyers for the organization, which gave me more time to investigate Walter’s case. One of my new hires was Michael O’Connor, a recent Yale Law School graduate with a passion for helping people in trouble that had been kindled by his own struggles earlier in life. The son of Irish immigrants, Michael had grown up outside of Philadelphia in a tough working-class neighborhood. When his high school friends started experimenting with hard drugs, so did Mike, and he soon developed a heroin addiction. His life descended into a nightmare of drug dependency and chaos, complete with the growing risk of death by overdose. For several years he floated from one crisis to another until the overdose death of a close friend motivated him to crawl his way back to sobriety. Throughout all of this heartache, his family had never abandoned him. They helped him stabilize his life and find his way back to college. At Penn State he revealed himself to be a brilliant student, graduating summa cum laude. His academic credentials got him into Yale Law School, but his heart was still connected to all the brokenness his years on the street had shown him.

When I interviewed him for the job, he was apologetic about the darker episodes in his past, but I thought he was perfect for the kind of staff we were trying to build. He signed up, moved to Montgomery, and without hesitation jumped into the McMillian case with me. We spent days tracking leads, interviewing dozens of people, following wild rumors, investigating different theories. I was increasingly persuaded that we would have to figure out who really had killed Ronda Morrison to win Walter’s release. Aside from my appreciation for Michael’s invaluable help with the work itself, I was grateful finally to have someone around to share the insanity of the case with—just as I was discovering that it was even crazier than I thought.

After a few months of investigation, we’d uncovered strong evidence to support Walter’s innocence. We discovered that Bill Hooks had been paid by Sheriff Tate for his testimony against Walter—we found checks in the county’s financial records showing close to $5,000 in payments to Hooks in reward money and “expenses.” Sheriff Tate had also paid Hooks money to travel back and forth out of the county around the time of the trial. This information should have been disclosed to Walter’s counsel prior to trial so that they could have used it to cast doubt on the credibility of Hooks’s testimony.

We also found out that Hooks had been released from jail immediately after giving the police his statement that he’d seen Walter’s “low-rider” truck at the cleaners on the day of the murder. We found court records revealing that the D.A. and the sheriff, who are county officials, had somehow gotten city charges and fines against Hooks dismissed, even though they had no authority in city courts. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, that Hooks had charges against him dismissed in exchange for cooperation with authorities was information that the State was obligated to reveal to the defense. But, of course, they hadn’t.

We found the white man who was running the store on the day that Ralph Myers came in for the purpose of giving a note to Walter. Walter had tried to persuade his original lawyers to speak to this man, but they had failed to do so. After Walter described the location of the store, we were able to track him down. The storeowner recounted his memory of that day: Myers had sought out Walter—but had to ask the storeowner which of the several black men in the store was Walter McMillian. Months after the crime, the storeowner was adamant that Myers had never seen Walter McMillian before.

In a church basement, Walter’s sister found flyers advertising the fish fry held at Walter’s house; they confirmed that the event had taken place on the same day as the Morrison murder. A white storeowner who had no relationship to Walter or his family had kept a copy of that flyer for some reason, and he confirmed that he had received it before the Morrison murder. We even tracked down Clay Kast, the white mechanic who had modified Walter’s truck and converted it to a low-rider. He confirmed that the work had been done over six months after Ronda Morrison was murdered. This proved that McMillian’s truck had had no modifications or special features and therefore could not have been the truck described by Myers and Hooks at the trial.

I was feeling very good about the progress we were making when I got a call that would become the most significant break in the case.

The voice said, “Mr. Stevenson, this is Ralph Myers.”

Our secretary had told me there was a “Mr. Miles” on the phone, so I was a little shocked to hear Ralph Myers on the other end of the line. Before I could compose myself, he spoke again.

“I think you need to come and see me. I have something I need to tell you,” he said dramatically.

Myers was imprisoned at the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Alabama, and Michael and I made plans to meet him there in three days.

Michael and I had started running a few miles at night after work to help us wind down from the increasingly long work days. Montgomery has a beautiful park that houses the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which brings nationally acclaimed playwrights and actors to Alabama to perform Shakespeare and modern theatrical productions. The theater is set among hundreds of acres of beautifully maintained parkland with lakes and ponds. There are several trails for running. That evening we spent most of our run speculating about what Myers would tell us.

“Why would Myers call us now?” Michael asked. “Can you imagine just going into a courtroom and straight-up making up a story that puts an innocent man on death row? I’m not sure we can trust anything he says.” “Well, you may be right, but he had a lot of help in putting together that testimony. Remember, they also put Myers on death row to coerce some of those statements. Who knows? He may be in touch with the State now, and this is some kind of setup where they are trying to mislead us.” I hadn’t seriously considered that possibility until our run that night. I thought again about how sleazy Myers had been during the trial. “We have to be careful to not reveal information to Myers—just get information he has. But we have to talk to him because if he recants his trial testimony, the State has nothing on Walter.” We agreed that depending on what he had to say, Myers could change everything for us. We had made a lot of progress in disproving the testimony of Bill Hooks; with the appearance of Darnell Houston, the new evidence about the condition of Walter’s truck, and the discovery of the assistance given Hooks by law enforcement, his testimony was now riddled with credibility issues. But getting a recantation from Myers would be a much bigger deal. Myers’s bizarre accusations and testimony were the basis of the State’s entire case.

Having read Myers’s testimony and reviewed the records that were available about him, I knew that he had a tragic background and a complex personality. Walter and his family had described Myers as pure evil for the lies he had told during the trial. The experience of being so coldly lied about at trial by someone you don’t even know was one of the most disquieting parts of the trial for Walter. When Walter called me at the office the next day, I told him we’d heard from Myers and that we were going to see what he had to say. Walter warned me: “He’s a snake. Be careful.” Michael and I drove two hours to the state prison in Springville, in St. Clair County. The prison is in a rural area northeast of Birmingham, where the Alabama terrain starts to turn rocky and mountainous. The maximum-security prison was more recently built than Holman or Donaldson, the other maximum-security prisons in Alabama, but no one would suggest that St. Clair was modern. Michael and I cleared security at the prison entrance; the guard who patted us down said he’d been working at the prison for three months, and this was the first time he’d had a legal visit during his shift. We were directed down a long corridor that led to a flight of stairs that took us deeper inside the prison. We were admitted through several secure metal doors into the large room that served as the visitation area. It was typical: There were vending machines against the back walls and small rectangular tables where inmates could meet with family members. The familiarity of the setting did little to calm us. Michael and I put our notepads and pens on one of the tables and then paced around the room, waiting for Myers.

When Myers walked into the visitation area, I was surprised at how old he seemed. His hair was almost completely gray, which made him seem frail and vulnerable. He was also shorter with a much smaller body frame than I was expecting. His testimony had caused so much anguish for Walter and his family that I had created a larger-than-life image of him. He walked toward us but stopped short when he saw Michael and nervously blurted out, “Who is he? You didn’t tell me you were bringing anybody with you.” Myers had a thick Southern accent. Up close, his scars made him appear more sympathetic than menacing or villainous.

“This is Michael O’Connor. He’s a lawyer in my office working with me on this case. Michael is just helping me investigate this case.”

“Well, people told me I could trust you. I don’t know anything about him.”

“I promise, he’s fine.” I glanced over at Michael, who was trying his best to look trustworthy, before turning back to Myers. “Please have a seat.”

He looked at Michael skeptically and then slowly sat down. My plan was to try to ease him into the conversation by letting him know that we just wanted the truth. But before I could say anything, Myers blurted out a full recantation of his trial testimony.

“I lied. Everything I said at McMillian’s trial was a lie. I’ve lost a lot of sleep and have been in a lot of pain over this. I can’t be quiet any longer.”

“The testimony you gave at trial against Walter McMillian was a lie?” I asked cautiously.

My heart was pounding, but I tried to stay as steady as I could. I was afraid that if I seemed too eager or too surprised—too anything—he might retreat.

“It was all a lie. What I’m going to tell you is going to blow your mind, Mr. Stevenson.”

He held his stare on me dramatically before turning to Michael. “You, too, Jimmy Connors.” It didn’t take many conversations with Ralph before it became clear that he had difficulty remembering names.

“Mr. Myers, you know I’m going to want you to not only tell me the truth but also tell the court the truth. Are you willing to do that?”

I was nervous to push so quickly, but I needed to be clear. I didn’t want a private performance.

“That’s why I called you.” He sounded surprised that there could be any question about his intentions. “I’ve been in a group therapy class here. You’re supposed to be real honest. We been talking about honesty for nearly three months. Last week people were talking about all the bad shit that happened to them when they were kids and all the bad things they done.” Myers was picking up steam as he spoke.

“I finally told the group, ‘Well, I can top all you sons ‘a bitches, I done put a damn man on death row by lying in damn court.’ ”

He paused dramatically.

“After I told all of ‘em what I’d done, everybody said I needed to make it right. That’s what I’m tryin’ to do.” He paused again to let me take it all in. “Hey, y’all gonna buy me a damn soda, or am I just gonna sit here all day looking at them damn vending machines and pouring my heart out?” He smiled for the first time since we’d been together. Michael jumped up and walked over to buy him a drink.

“Hey, Jimmy, Sunkist Orange, if they got it.”

For more than two hours, I asked questions and Ralph gave answers. By the end, he did, in fact, blow my mind. He told us about being pressured by the sheriff and the ABI and threatened with the death penalty if he didn’t testify against McMillian. He made accusations of official corruption, talked about his involvement in the Pittman murder, and revealed his earlier attempts to recant. He ultimately admitted that he had never known anything about the Morrison murder, had no clue what had happened to her or anything else at all about the crime. He said that he had told lots of people—from the D.A. on down—that he had been coerced to testify falsely against Walter. If even half of what he said was true, there were a lot of people involved in this case who knew, from the mouth of his sole accuser, that Walter McMillian had had nothing to do with the murder of Ronda Morrison.

Ralph was on his third Sunkist Orange when he stopped his stream of confessions, leaned forward, and beckoned us closer. He spoke in a whisper to Michael and me.

“You know they’ll try to kill you if you actually get to the bottom of everything.”

We would learn that Ralph could never let a meeting end without dropping some final dramatic insight, observation, or prediction. I reassured him that we would be careful.

On the drive back to Montgomery, Michael and I debated how much we could trust Myers. What he told us about the McMillian case all made sense. His story at trial was so implausible that it was easy to believe that he had been pressured to testify falsely. The corruption narrative that he seemed intent to expose was harder to assess. Myers claimed to have committed the Vickie Pittman murder under the direction of another local sheriff; he laid out to us a widespread conspiracy involving police, drug dealing, and money laundering. It was quite a tale.

We spent weeks following up on the leads that Myers had provided. He admitted to us that he had never met Walter and only knew of him through Karen Kelly. He also confirmed that he had been spending time with Karen Kelly and that she was involved in the Pittman murder. So we decided to confirm the story with Kelly herself, now a prisoner at the Tutwiler Prison for Women, where she was serving a ten-year sentence for the Pittman murder. Tutwiler is one of the state’s oldest prisons and the only prison in the state for women. It has fewer security restrictions than the men’s prisons. When Michael and I drove up to the gate, we could see incarcerated women hovering outside the prison entrance with no officers in view. The women eyed Michael and me carefully before greeting us with curious smiles. We were subjected to a very cursory pat-down in the prison lobby by a male officer before being admitted through the barred gate to the main prison area. We were told to wait for Karen Kelly in a very small room that was empty except for a square table.

Kelly was a slender white woman in her mid-thirties who walked into the room wearing no restraints or handcuffs. She seemed surprisingly comfortable, shaking my hand confidently before nodding at Michael. She was wearing makeup, including a garish shade of green eye shadow. She sat down and announced that Walter had been framed and that she was grateful finally to be able to tell someone. When we began with our questions, she quickly confirmed that Myers had not known Walter before the Morrison murder.

“Ralph is a fool. He thought he could trust those crooked cops, and he let them talk him into saying he was involved with a crime he didn’t know anything about. He’s done enough bad that he didn’t need to go around making stuff up.” Though she was calm at the outset of our interview, she became increasingly emotional as she started detailing the events surrounding the case. She wept more than once. She spoke with remorse about how her life had spiraled out of control when she started abusing drugs.

“I’m not a bad person, but I’ve made some really foolish, bad decisions.”

She was especially upset that Walter was on death row.

“I feel like I’m the reason that he’s in prison. He’s just not the kind of person that would kill somebody, I know that.” Then her tone turned bitter. “I made a lot of mistakes, but those people should be ashamed. They’ve done just as much bad as I’ve done. Sheriff Tate only had one thing on his mind. He just kept saying, ‘Why you want to sleep with niggers? Why you want to sleep with niggers?’ It was awful, and he’s awful.” She paused and looked down at her hands. “But I’m awful, too. Look at what I’ve done,” she said sadly.

I began getting letters from Karen Kelly after our visit. She wanted me to tell Walter how sorry she was about what had happened to him. She said she still cared about him a great deal. It wasn’t clear what we could expect from Karen if we got a new hearing in court, other than to confirm that Ralph had never met Walter. It was clear that she saw Walter as the kind of person who would never kill someone violently, which was consistent with the opinion of everyone who knew him. She hadn’t dealt with the police much around the Morrison murder and didn’t have useful information pointing to their misconduct, aside from being able to show how they were provoked by her relationship with Walter.

Michael and I decided to spend more time looking into the Pittman murder; we thought it might give us some perspective on the coercion that was leveled against Myers. We now knew that because Myers had recanted his accusations against Walter before the trial, the State might not be entirely surprised to hear that he was denying McMillian’s involvement in the crime. We needed as much objective evidence as we could find to confirm the truth of what Myers was now saying. Understanding the Pittman case and documenting the other demonstrably false things Myers had asserted would strengthen our evidence.

Vickie Pittman’s murder had been all but forgotten. Monroe County officials had reduced Myers’s and Kelly’s sentences in exchange for Myers’s testimony against Walter. How they managed to reduce sentences in the Pittman case, which was outside their jurisdiction in another county, was another anomaly. Myers insisted that there were other people besides him and Kelly involved in the Pittman murder, including a corrupt local sheriff. There were still questions about why Vickie Pittman had been killed. Myers told us that her murder had everything to do with drug debts and threats she had made to expose corruption.

We had learned from some of the early police reports that the father of Vickie Pittman, Vic Pittman, had been implicated as a suspect in her death. Vickie Pittman had had two aunts, Mozelle and Onzelle, who had been collecting information and desperately seeking answers to the questions surrounding their niece’s death. We reached out to them on the off chance that they’d be willing to speak with us, and we were astounded when they eagerly agreed to talk.

Mozelle and Onzelle were twin sisters—they were also colorful, opinionated talkers who could be bracingly direct. The two middle-aged, rural white women spent so much time together that they could finish each other’s sentences without even seeming to notice. They described themselves as “country tough” and presented themselves as fearless, relentless women who could not be intimidated.

“Just so you know: We’re gun owners, so don’t bring no drama when you come.” This was Mozelle’s last warning before I hung up the phone with her the first time we talked.

Michael and I traveled to rural Escambia County and were greeted by the twins. They invited us in, sat us at the kitchen table, and wasted no time.

“Did your client kill our baby?” Mozelle asked bluntly.

“No, ma’am, I sincerely believe he did not.”

“Do you know who did?”

I sighed. “Well, not completely. We’ve spoken to Ralph Myers and believe that he and Karen Kelly were involved, but Myers insists that there were others involved as well.” Mozelle looked at Onzelle and leaned back.

“We know there’s more involved,” said Onzelle. The sisters voiced suspicions about their brother and about local law enforcement but complained that the prosecutor had disrespected and ignored them. (Vic Pittman was never formally charged for the murder.) They said they were turned away even by the state’s victims’ rights group.

“They treated us like we were low-class white trash. They could not have cared less about us.” Mozelle looked furious as she spoke. “I thought they treated victims better. I thought we had some say.” Although crime victims had long complained about their treatment in the criminal justice system, by the 1980s a new movement had emerged that resulted in much more responsiveness to the perspective of crime victims and their families. The problem was that not all crime victims received the same treatment.

Fifty years ago, the prevailing concept in the American criminal justice system was that everyone in the community is the victim when an offender commits a violent crime. The party that prosecutes a criminal defendant is called the “State” or the “People” or the “Commonwealth” because when someone is murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted, it is an offense against all of us. In the early 1980s, though, states started involving individual crime victims in the trial process and began “personalizing” crime victims in their presentation of cases. Some states authorized the family members of the victim to sit at the prosecutor’s table during trial. Thirty-six states enacted laws that gave victims specific rights to participate in the trial process or to make victim impact statements. In many places, prosecutors started introducing themselves as the lawyer representing a particular victim, rather than as a representative of the civic authorities.

In death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1987 that introducing evidence about the status, character, reputation, or family of a homicide victim was unconstitutional. The prevailing idea for decades had been that “all victims are equal”—that is, the murder of a four-year-old child of a wealthy parent is no more serious an offense than the murder of a child whose parent is in prison or even than the murder of the parent in prison. The Court prohibited jurors from hearing “victim impact” statements because they were too inflammatory and introduced arbitrariness into the capital sentencing process. Many critics argued that such evidence would ultimately disempower poor victims, victims who were racial minorities, and family members who didn’t have the resources to advocate for their deceased loved ones. The Court agreed, striking down this kind of evidence in Booth v. Maryland.

The Court’s decision was widely criticized by prosecutors and some politicians, and it seemed to energize the victims’ rights movement. Less than three years later, the Court reversed itself in Payne v. Tennessee and upheld the rights of states to present evidence about the character of the victim in a capital sentencing trial.

With the Supreme Court now giving its constitutional blessing to a more visible and protected role for individual victims in the criminal trial process, changes in the American criminal justice process accelerated. Millions of state and federal dollars were authorized to create advocacy groups for crime victims in each state. States found countless ways for individual victims in particular crimes to become decision makers and participants. Victims’ advocates were added to parole boards, and in most states they were given a formal role in state and local prosecutors’ offices. Victim services and outreach became critical components of the prosecutorial function. Some states made executions more accommodating of victims by increasing the number of people from the victim’s family who could watch the execution.

State legislatures enacted harsh new punishments for crimes, naming statutes after particular victims. Megan’s Law, for example, which broadened state power to create sex offender registries, was named after Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by a man who had previously been convicted of child molestation. Instead of a faceless state or community, crime victims were featured at trial, and criminal cases took on the dynamics of a traditional civil trial, pitting the family of the victim against the offender. Press coverage hyped the personal nature of the conflict between the offender and specific victim. A new formula emerged for criminal prosecution, especially in high-profile cases, in which the emotions, perspectives, and opinions of the victim figured prominently in how criminal cases would be managed.

However, as Mozelle and Onzelle discovered, focusing on the status of the victim became one more way for the criminal justice system to disfavor some people. Poor and minority victims of crime experienced additional victimization by the system itself. The Supreme Court’s decision in Payne appeared shortly after the Court’s decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case that presented convincing empirical evidence that the race of the victim is the greatest predictor of who gets the death penalty in the United States. The study conducted for that case revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. These findings were replicated in every other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place. In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white. Black defendant and white victim pairings increased the likelihood of a death sentence even more.

Many poor and minority victims complained that they were not getting calls or support from local police and prosecutors. Many weren’t included in the conversations about whether a plea bargain was acceptable or what sentence was appropriate. If your family had lost a loved one to murder or had to suffer the anguish of rape or serious assault, your victimization might be ignored if you had loved ones who were incarcerated. The expansion of victims’ rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: Some victims are more protected and valued than others.

More than anything else, it was the lack of concern and responsiveness by police, prosecutors, and victims’ services providers that devastated Mozelle and Onzelle. “You’re the first two people to come to our house and spend time with us talking about Vickie,” Onzelle told us. After nearly three hours of hearing their heartbreaking reflections, we promised to do what we could to find out who else was involved in their niece Vickie’s death.

We were getting to the point where, without access to police records and files, we wouldn’t be able to make more progress. Because the case was now pending on direct appeal, the State had no obligation to let us see those records and files. So we decided to file what is known as a Rule 32 petition, which would put us back in a trial court with the opportunity to present new evidence and obtain discovery, including access to the State’s files.

Rule 32 petitions are required to include claims that were not raised at trial or on appeal and that could not have been raised at trial or on appeal. They are the vehicle to challenge a conviction based on ineffective counsel, the State’s failure to disclose evidence, and most important, new evidence of innocence. Michael and I put a petition together that asserted all of these claims, including police and prosecutorial misconduct, and filed it in the Monroe County Circuit Court.

The document, which alleged that Walter McMillian was unfairly tried, wrongly convicted, and illegally sentenced, drew a lot of attention in Monroeville. Three years had passed since the trial. The initial confirmation of Walter’s conviction on appeal had generated significant press in the community, and most people now felt that Walter’s guilt was a settled matter. All there was left to do was wait for an execution date. Judge Key had retired, and none of the new Monroe County judges seemed to want to touch our petition, so it was transferred back to Baldwin County under the theory that the postconviction appeal should be handled in the same county as the initial trial. This made little sense to us, because a Monroe County judge had presided over the trial, but there was nothing we could do.

Surprisingly, the Alabama Supreme Court agreed to stay our direct appeal process so that the Rule 32 petition could proceed. The general rule was that the direct appeal had to be completed before a postconviction collateral appeal under Rule 32 could be initiated. By staying the case, the Alabama Supreme Court had signaled there was something unusual about Walter’s case that warranted further review in the lower courts. The Baldwin County Circuit Court judge was now obligated to review our case and could be forced to grant our discovery motions, which would require disclosure of all police and prosecutorial files. This was a very positive development.

We needed to have another meeting with the district attorney, Tommy Chapman, but this time we’d be going in armed with a court order to turn over police and prosecutorial files. We would also finally meet, in the flesh, the law enforcement officers involved in Walter’s prosecution: the D.A.’s investigator, Larry Ikner; ABI agent Simon Benson; and Sheriff Tom Tate.

Chapman suggested that we come to his office in the Monroe County courthouse so that they could turn over all the files together. We agreed. When we arrived, the men were already there. Tate was a tall, heavy-set white man who had come to the meeting in boots, jeans, and a light shirt. Ikner was another white man in his mid-forties, wearing the same outfit. Neither of them smiled much—they greeted Michael and me with the bemused curiosity to which I was getting accustomed. The men knew that we were accusing them of misconduct, but for the most part they remained civil. At one point Tate told Michael that he knew, as soon as he saw him, that he was “a Yankee.” Michael smiled and replied, “Well, actually, I’m a Nittany Lion.”

The joke died in the silent room.

Undeterred, Michael continued, “I went to Penn State. The mascot at Penn State is—”

“We kicked your ass in ‘78.” Tate made the statement as if he had just won the lottery. Penn State and the University of Alabama had been football rivals in the 1970s, when both schools had had successful programs and iconic coaches, Bear Bryant at Alabama and Joe Paterno at Penn State. Alabama had defeated the number-one-ranked Penn State team 14–7 to win the 1978 national championship.

Michael, a huge college football fan and a “JoePa” devotee, looked at me as if seeking nonverbal permission to say something reckless. I gave him a cautionary stare; to my great relief, he seemed to understand.

“How much is ‘Johnny D’ paying y’all?” Tate asked, using the nickname Walter’s friends and family had given him.

“We work for a nonprofit. We don’t charge the people we represent anything,” I said as blandly and politely as I could.

“Well, you’re getting money from somewhere to do what you do.”

I decided to let that pass and move things forward.

“I thought that it might be a good idea to sign something that verifies these are all the files you all have on this case. Can we index what you’re turning over to us and then all sign?” “We don’t need to do anything that formal, Bryan. These men are officers of the court, just like you and I. You should just take the files,” Chapman said, apparently sensing that this suggestion had provoked Tate and Ikner.

“Well, there could be files that have inadvertently been missed or documents that dropped out. I’m just trying to document that what we receive is what you give us—same number of pages, same file folder headings, et cetera. I’m not questioning anyone’s integrity.” “The hell you ain’t.” Tate was direct. He looked at Chapman. “We can sign something confirming what we give him. I think we may need a record of that more than he does.” Chapman nodded. We got the files and left Monroeville with a lot of excitement about what we might find in the hundreds of pages of records we’d received. Back in Montgomery, we eagerly started reviewing them, and not just the files from the police and prosecutors. With our discovery order from the court, we were able to collect records from Taylor Hardin, the mental health facility where Myers was sent after he first refused to testify. We got the ABI file from Simon Benson, the only black ABI agent in South Alabama, as he had proudly told us. We got Monroeville city police department records and other city files. We even got Escambia County records and exhibits on the Vickie Pittman murder. The files were astonishing.

We might have been influenced by the pain of Mozelle and Onzelle or drawn in by the elaborate conspiracies that Ralph Myers had described, but we soon started asking questions about some of the law enforcement officers whose names kept coming up around the Pittman murder. We even decided to talk to the FBI about some of what we had learned.

It wasn’t long after that when the bomb threats started.