The Myth of the Central Park Five
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12/6/2014 The Myth of the Central Park Five - The Daily Beast
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FALSE WITNESSES 10.19.14
The Myth of the Central Park Five
Edward
Conlon The West Memphis Three, the Norfolk Four, and yes, the Central Park
Five: All were gruesome and horrible crimes, but did all involve false
confessions?
The only time that I’m pretty sure that I locked up the wrong man was during a
gang war in the South Bronx, a few years ago. There were five or six shootings,
and about a dozen people were hit. No one died, and I don’t think any of the
incidents made the papers. My case involved a young man I’ll call J, who
suffered a graze wound to the head. He told me that K had done it. Most of the
shootings in our precinct should have been as amenable to quick arrest as that
one, but one of the more dispiriting aspects of being an inner city detective is
how much time is spent, in vain, begging victims to tell you who shot them.
They know, but they won’t say. While I was delighted to close my case, another
detective in my squad was not: K was his witness, in a prior incident.
“I locked up J’s buddy for one of the earlier shootings,” he said. “J was there.
He’s just trying to dirty up whoever’s testifying.”
It was an interesting theory, but it didn’t change my obligation to my victim. K
hadn’t been inspired to speak up only out of public duty; he was on parole for
an unrelated stabbing, and his PO strongly encouraged his cooperation. At the
precinct, K was persuasive in his denial, but there wasn’t any alibi he could
provide. It was J’s word against K’s, and it wasn’t up to me to decide whose
story seemed the more plausible. That kind of fact-finding—often amid a
scarcity of facts—would be for a jury to determine. As J didn’t appear to testify,
the charges were dropped. I never saw J again, though I did run into K a few
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times after, and we talked. I believed him, but I’d spend no more time
searching for the truth in the case than I would for a sock lost in a dryer.
Shootings are often more challenging to investigate than homicides. With
murders, as has been said, there’s one less liar to deal with. The J-K shooting
was simple enough, in that it was a matter of arithmetic logic that one of them
was telling the truth. The morality of other cases can be far murkier, the
mathematics maddeningly complex, as witnesses, perpetrators, victims, and
informants shift roles from felony to felony, related or otherwise. When
prosecutors and cops make decisions on who to believe, and how to proceed on
those beliefs, the process might be described as a beauty pageant in reverse.
In one of my homicides, I had one wonderful witness, a legit Good Samaritan
with 20-20 vision and photographic memory. I also had a friend of the
defendant, present at the scene, whose conduct was sufficiently ambiguous to
prevent his being charged, but whose motives for being there were not likely
noble. Nonetheless, his account of the murder matched that of the other
witness precisely. We decided to use him, even after he was arrested for a gang
assault. We didn’t change our minds when he was arrested again, for a drug-
related home invasion, and sent upstate for an extended prison term. We felt
that, rotten as he was, the jury might credit his version of events, given how
closely it matched the other, impartial one. We lost the case. For what it’s
worth, I take some consolation from the fact that he’s wearing an orange
uniform instead of a blue one—before his first arrest, he was about to go into
the police academy.
A beauty pageant, and a math problem. How many witnesses do we have who
are willing to talk? Who do we have whose past is so ugly that a jury can’t look
away from it, and see nothing else? Do we put the heroin dealer on the stand
against an armed robber? Yes, probably, provided we can corroborate his
account. Do we take the wife-beater’s word against that of the pedophile? Yes,
probably. That of a murderous serial rapist against a gang of teenagers who
admitted to assaulting and robbing half a dozen people, and admitted and then
denied raping and nearly killing someone else, in the same place, at the same
time? Yes, apparently.
The Central Park Jogger case was recently settled for $41 million dollars to the
five men convicted in the brutal rape of a twenty-eight year old investment
banker. Mayor Ed Koch called it “the crime of the century” when it happened in
1989, and a full quarter of a century has elapsed since its commission. The
jogger had her head bashed in, and she’d lost most of the blood in her body; the
degree to which she ultimately recovered was little short of miraculous. The
five were also convicted, along with five others, in a series of crimes committed
by a loose group of thirty-plus, often-unacquainted youths who went
marauding through the park that night. Some people were chased; some
robbed; two men were beaten unconscious. A cop said one of them looked as if
he’d been “dunked in a bucket of blood.” There were over 1,900 murders in
New York City that year, and over 93,000 robberies. The robbery figure
certainly represents an undercount, as many didn’t bother reporting crime to a
department that seemed unable and sometimes unwilling to guarantee public
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safety. One man approached a scooter cop in Central Park that night after
being attacked, telling him where it happened; the cop promptly scooted off in
the opposite direction.
In the Central Park jogger case—or that of the Central Park Five, depending on
whether alleged perpetrators or victims should be the flagship designee—the
confessions of the teenagers are partial and contradictory. (A sixth young man
was implicated by the others, but he denied responsibility for the rape, and was
ultimately allowed to plead to lesser charges.) Some of the Five said they went
on to other attacks, after the rape; others said it was the final crime of the
night. All said that they only touched the jogger or helped restrain her, while
one or more of the others forced themselves on her. It is not unusual for an
individual criminal to minimize his part in a collective crime; the turbulent
dynamics of crowds drives teenage boys, especially, to do spectacularly awful
things together that they never would do alone. It is a corollary of the
“bystander effect,” in which notions of personal responsibility are diffused
when larger numbers of people are present.
In an investigation, a detective has a responsibility to search for the truth in a
case, in the beginning and at the end. After any number of open-ended
interviews are conducted, a suspect may emerge. The interview then shifts to
interrogation, which is a conversation intended to obtain inculpatory
statements. Denial often breaks down in stages: “I wasn’t there” becomes, “I
was there, but I didn’t do anything,” before you get, “I was only the lookout, my
buddy was the shooter.” The buddy may have made the opposite claim about
who did what.
While it’s preferable to elicit the unvarnished, unvacillating truth, dishonest
statements can be more illuminating than honest ones. When I went from New
York to Los Angeles to talk to a fugitive who had killed his wife, stabbing her a
dozen times, I was content with his admission that he’d accidentally tripped
and fallen on her, while he was holding a knife. His lie was more revelatory
than a candid disclosure, as he’d admitted not only to his guilt, but also to his
abiding dishonesty and lack of regret. The self-portrait he’d painted for me
would begin the story for a jury; the autopsy report would finish it. He took a
plea.
In the Central Park trials, forensic evidence was nearly nonexistent. A few hair
specimens recovered from two defendants’ clothing were held to be
“consistent” with that of the victim. DNA was in its infancy—the first conviction
based on the science in the United States had only occurred in 1987, and the
first databank in New York wouldn’t be operational until 1996—and larger,
cleaner samples than are necessary today were required to identify or
disqualify a suspect. A recent reevaluation of hair analysis in past cases by the
FBI found that 88 percent of their findings were confirmed by DNA, which
leaves ample room for reasonable doubt. The jogger had no memory of the
attack, and none of the other victims could make an identification of the Five.
Two 14-year-olds were convicted, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana;
two 15-year-olds, Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam; and one 16-year-old,
Korey Wise.
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Testimony was what made the case,
chiefly the confessions of the young
men. Santana, McCray, and Richardson
While it’s made video statements in the presence
of a parent or guardian, and Wise made
preferable to several statements, on his own, as the
elicit the law permits. Salaam told the police he
unvarnished, was sixteen, and he produced
unvacillating identification to that effect, allowing
truth, dishonest police to interrogate him without a
statements can parent. After his mother arrived, the
be more questioning ended, but his oral
admissions were admitted into
illuminating than testimony. In addition to the
honest ones. confessions, one of the other boys,
while in the back of a patrol car, cried
that he “didn’t do the murder,” but that
he knew who did: Antron McCray. The
boy beside him, Kevin Richardson, agreed: “Antron did it.” The jogger hadn’t
yet been found. Later on, after Raymond Santana had been interrogated about
the rape, he was being driven to another precinct. Without prompting, he
blurted out, “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel her tits.”
There was one witness whose statement had not been solicited by the police.
Melonie Jackson, the older sister of a friend of Korey Wise, talked to him after
he called the house from Rikers Island. When she expressed her dismay about
the rape, Wise said that he’d only held the jogger down. Jackson volunteered
this information to detectives, just before the trial, in the mistaken belief that it
would help Wise. When ordered to take the stand, she wept, but she still swore
that the conversation had occurred, just as she’d said. In his authoritative 1992
account of the trials, Unequal Verdicts, Timothy Sullivan relates that the
prosecution thought her a “perfect witness,” but the jurors, oddly, chose not to
credit her testimony in their deliberations.
Thirteen years later, after the boys had served between six and thirteen years in
prison, a man named Matias Reyes confessed to the rape, and DNA evidence
later established that his was the only semen sample recovered from the scene.
Though the brutality of the attack on the Central Park jogger staggered the
public imagination, it was a lesser example of his viciousness. He was convicted
of raping four women and killing one of them, who was pregnant, while her
young children were in the apartment. With some of them, he’d cut them
around their eyes, to prevent them from identifying him. He also admitted to
sexually assaulting his mother. His lawyer called him “the devil,” after Reyes
attacked him during sentencing. A defense psychiatrist concluded that Reyes
was not capable of telling the truth.
What are the odds that an
entirely unrelated rape should
occur in the midst of a violent
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crime spree lasting some forty-
five minutes, in a small,
sparsely populated area? That a
gang who threatened and
assaulted four joggers, among
others, had nothing to do with a
fifth? And yet, Matias Reyes had
raped a woman in the park, two
nights before. Was it negligent
for the police to fail to consider
the two crimes in context? At
least one detective had a leading role in both cases; the same judge, Thomas
Galligan, presided over the trials of Reyes and the Central Park Five. The dots
seem eminently connectable, even given the city averages that would have
amounted to over 500 murders and a thousand rapes between the arrests of
the Five in April and Reyes in August. More pertinent was the loose working
assumption—which I share—that certain kinds of guys only do really bad stuff
in groups, with the worst driving the action and the weak swept up in the
moment, while there are solitary predators who need no incitement beyond
what they hear between their own ears.
That general experience of human behavior seems to have been shared by
Nancy Ryan, the deputy chief of the Trial Division for the Manhattan District
Attorney, in her motion to vacate all criminal convictions of the Five, for both
the rape of the jogger, and the assaults and robberies of the other victims. All
were out of prison by then, and Reyes, hopefully, will never leave it, though
none of his admissions placed him in any additional jeopardy, given the statute
of limitations. The arguments for vacating the verdicts held that the new
factual landscape—admissions without evidence, versus incontrovertible proof
accompanied by the testimony of a psychopath—would have had a very
different impact, had a jury heard then what we know now. And to include a
truly gruesome rape and near-murder among the lesser acts of violence tainted
the process beyond remedy. It was as if the five were charged with fifty counts
of shoplifting, and one of strangling a grandmother. Once the primary
accusation was decided, the rest didn’t matter. The bathwater would go out
with the baby.
What is fascinating to me about the Ryan document is how she wrestles with
Reyes, so to speak, trying to reconcile his record of unrelenting malignity—he
tried to rape a woman in a church—with his Come-to-Jesus moment that
turned the case upside down. He felt impelled to come forward, he said, when
he ran into the last imprisoned defendant, Korey Wise, in 2001, when they
were both at the Auburn Correctional Facility. His explanations for speaking up
are thin and muddled: He describes a measure of personal growth through
attending religious services, and “positive experiences in prison.” He said he
felt sorry for Wise, and was afraid of what would happen, should Wise find out
that he was responsible for the crime. Of course, in accepting this last claim,
there was no way Wise could have found out that Reyes had raped the jogger,
unless Reyes admitted it in the spectacular public fashion which he proceeded
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to do. Ryan found no evidence of intimidation by Wise or anyone else, or the
slightest connection between the two, aside from a brief period in 1990, when
both were jailed in Rikers Island. She dwells at length on how Reyes was a
“loner,” and how almost everyone saw him as such—neighbors, acquaintances,
even cops from the local precinct—though she concedes that he’d committed at
least one other robbery with friends. Nonetheless, she concludes with a ringing
recitation of reasons why this “self-confessed and convicted serial rapist—who
habitually stalked white women in their 20s” was more persuasive than not in
his claims, including that he had “committed all his sex crimes alone.”
A semi-official rebuttal was provided by Michael Armstrong, a former federal
prosecutor and chief counsel to the Knapp Commission in the 1970s, whose
headline witness, Frank Serpico, told of endemic and appalling police
corruption. Armstrong was appointed by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly
to a three-man panel that included a deputy commissioner for legal affairs, and
another independent attorney. The document had no legal standing, but was
offered to the public as a sharp elbow to some of the assertions made by Ryan.
He concedes the legal arguments relating to vacating the convictions, but
disputes the sharp either/or position that the guilt of Reyes proved the
innocence of the Five. Instead, he offers the theory that it is most probable that
there was an overlap between the two, and Reyes either joined an earlier
assault on the jogger and remained, or was attracted by her screams and
jumped in after the “hit-and-run” violence typical of what had been inflicted on
the other victims.
In support of his assessment, he offers a number of tantalizing theories, only
partially undergirded by fully explored evidence. There is what might be called
the “opportunity” theory for Reyes coming forward when he did, which gained
him readmission to the small, highly desirable prison facility from which he’d
just been thrown out; there is the coercion theory, which speculates that seeing
Wise in the general population at Auburn in 2001 prompted thoughts of
survival rather than remorse. Wise was a member of the Bloods gang, and
Armstrong et al. note that, while inmates cannot write letters to each other,
they can and do write to outsiders who pass on messages back to prisoners.
Two inmates who had separately met Reyes said he’d been threatened by Wise,
pointing to a third inmate, named Mejias, who was the purported
intermediary, and a fourth inmate who could corroborate their accounts.
According to Armstrong, Mejias and the other man refused to be interviewed,
claiming that they had been instructed not to talk to the police by the
Manhattan DA. To add to the conspiratorial flair, they added that the DA told
them not to talk to the FBI or the CIA either. According to prison movement
records, it wasn’t possible for Reyes to have met Wise under the circumstances
described.
The Armstrong report resembles a defense document more than a prosecution
brief in its approach, throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks.
Some parts are stickier than others. Wise and Reyes didn’t just meet in Rikers
Island in 1990; they had a fight there. Reyes later laughed it off as a “run-in”
over what to watch on TV that night. He cited “positive experiences” in jail in
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1990 to his psychologist among the reasons he took a plea, despite exploding at
his sentencing, cursing at the judge, assaulting his lawyer, and injuring several
court officers.
One acquaintance of Wise who said
that he bragged about the rape before
his arrest repeated his story for
What are the odds Armstrong in 2002; another said he
that an entirely didn’t remember what he’d said in
unrelated rape 1989. Melonie Jackson, who testified
should occur in about Wise’s call from Rikers, stuck by
the midst of a her story in 2002. As for the
violent crime reevaluation of forensic evidence, one
spree lasting some hair held to be consistent with that of
forty-five minutes, the jogger was lost, and an FBI analyst
repudiated his predecessor’s testimony
in a small,
about the three others. They were not
sparsely
suitable for comparison
populated area? microscopically, he said. DNA retests
on those hairs, according to Ryan,
tended to disfavor connection to the
jogger, though insufficient material
existed to meet established scientific standards for verification. Armstrong
counters by pointing out that various blood and semen stains had also been
recovered from the clothing of three defendants. He concedes that they didn’t
figure much as evidence then, and the samples, if they exist, might be too
small, too degraded, or contaminated for retesting—but, in the Ryan motion,
they aren’t mentioned at all. Only two of the Five were arrested the night of the
attack, delaying the collection of evidence; three others were brought in the
next day. Armstrong notes that Wise washed his clothes as soon as he got home
that night. Did he do that often? Ever? Without context, it is unfair to draw
conclusions.
Neither Armstrong nor Ryan mention the original supervising prosecutor,
Linda Fairstein, by name, though it was widely reported that the two women
were rivals in the DA’s office trial division , and had battled over the case from
the beginning. Though the survival of the victim likely determined its
assignment to Fairstein, as head of the sex crime unit, reports of rancor
between the two were commonplace in the world of New York law
enforcement, even before the 2002 motion to vacate the convictions. Fairstein
has since claimed that Ryan helped scuttle her chances for nomination as
attorney general during the Clinton administration. Both women were
trailblazers, and remain exceptionally highly regarded among their peers. But it
remains baffling to many why Robert Morgenthau, the legendary Manhattan
DA, would choose Ryan when he had such a deep bench of talent to choose
from among his staff. Such a factually complex, racially incendiary case would
have been difficult enough to revisit without the appearance of an in-house
conflict of interest.
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***
A “Crime of the Century” that takes on mythic dimensions as an allegory of a
city in decline. A killer’s confession that upends the once-obvious prosecution
of a murderous assault. Sensational and often reckless reports in the press
threaten the fairness of a trial. Earnest questions are raised over the coercive
nature of police interrogations. Race lurks, overtly or covertly, in the strategic
decisions of prosecution and defense. The specter of wrongful convictions
haunts the public officials involved. It couldn’t happen twice, could it?
Fifty years ago, early in the morning of March 13, 1964, a young woman named
Kitty Genovese was driving home from her late shift managing a sports bar to
her home in Kew Gardens, a quiet, middle class enclave in Queens. Her
apartment was one in a series of attached, Tudor-style, second-story residential
units, accessible from the rear, with commercial establishments facing the
street on the ground floor. When she parked her car, she noticed a man
following her. She ran, but he caught her, and began to stab her in the middle
of the street. It was 2:30 am. Her screams attracted attention, awakening one
man who lived on the seventh floor of a nine-story building across the street.
He looked out and “saw this fellow bending over this girl and she was in a
kneeling position.” He yelled out the window—others recalled him shouting,
“What’s going on down there? What’s going on down there?” —and the man
ran away.
Kitty staggered around the corner to the rear of her building, trying to make it
home. One witness said she continued to scream, “Please help me, God. Please
help me, I’ve been stabbed.” She collapsed in a neighbor’s vestibule, where her
assailant returned to find her, stabbing her at least nine more times and
sexually assaulting her. A man who lived upstairs opened his door and
witnessed the attack. He called a friend to ask her what to do; she told him not
to get involved. He made a second call, to Kitty’s next-door neighbor, Sophie
Farrar, who called the police before rushing out to help. Farrar had a baby of
her own at home. She was the only one who either called or helped, and she ran
to Genovese without knowing whether the assailant was still at the scene. She
held Kitty to comfort her until the ambulance arrived. Kitty died on the way to
the hospital. Forty-five minutes were estimated to have elapsed from the time
the stabbing began until the killer left.
In canvassing the neighborhood over the next two days, police identified at
least 37 individuals who had seen or heard some aspect of the attack. They
believed the number to be larger, suspecting that many simply refused to admit
any knowledge of it. The lack of reaction disturbed them, and Police
Commissioner Michael Murphy later shared this concern over lunch with the
metropolitan editor of The New York Times, Abe Rosenfeld. Two weeks after
the death, on March 27, Rosenfeld ran the story he’d assigned on the front
page:
37 WHO SAW MURDER DIDN’T CALL THE POLICE
Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector
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The impact of the story, as well as the next-day follow-up quoting experts on
why and how it might have happened, is hard to underestimate. President
Lyndon Johnson weighed in; national symposia of eminent men were held to
discuss the issue. The lack of reaction was seen as emblematic of the cold
indifference of New York City, or held up as proof of the myopic individualism
of modern life. A psychiatrist who attended one such conference blamed
television for the complacency. The theme of the “silent accomplice,” of
collusion by quiescence, had gained in popular resonance over recent years:
Martin Niemöller’s ironic formulation—“First they came for the socialists, and
I didn’t speak out, because I wasn’t a socialist…”—had become familiar to
college students by the late 1950s; Hannah Arendt’s contentious epigram on
the “banality of evil” entered the language in an essay from 1961. Weren’t we all
to blame for this, in some larger sense?
Who was to be blamed in a narrow
sense had been established, five days
“I bet you also after the murder. Television in general
might not have mattered in what
killed that happened that night, but one in
fifteen-year-old particular brought the case to a close. A
girl in man named Winston Moseley was
arrested after being seen carrying a TV
Springfield out of a home in Hollis, Queens—then,
Gardens in July as now, a middle and working class
of last year.” black neighborhood. It was three in the
Moseley replied, afternoon, and a concerned neighbor
named Raoul Cleary asked Moseley
“Yeah, I did that what he was doing. He replied that he
one too.” was helping the family move. Cleary
checked with another neighbor to ask if
it was true, and was told, “Absolutely
not.” The cops were called, and
Moseley was grabbed a block away. Since he matched the rough description of
the killer in the Genovese case, he was questioned about it. He admitted
responsibility without hesitation, and in meticulous, grisly detail.
Moseley then went on to volunteer that he’d committed another murder, that
of Annie Mae Johnson, a black woman killed two weeks before Genovese. He
claimed to have shot her. One of the detectives present was skeptical; the
medical examiner had determined that Johnson had been stabbed to death,
most likely with an ice pick or similar instrument. It was with a sardonic cast of
mind that he said, “I bet you also killed that fifteen-year-old girl in Springfield
Gardens in July of last year.”
Moseley replied, “Yeah, I did that one too.”
When the body of Johnson was exhumed, the medical examiner was acutely
chagrined when six .22 caliber rounds were removed from it. (It has
subsequently become standard procedure to X-ray a body as part of an
autopsy). Embarrassment didn’t begin to describe the reaction of prosecutors
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to the detective’s wisecrack. Barbara Jean Kralik was the girl murdered the
summer before, stabbed to death in her bed while her parents slept in the room
next door. It had been a headline case, and a task force of over a hundred
detectives had been assigned to investigate. And it had come to a successful
conclusion with the arrest of eighteen-year-old Alvin “Monster” Mitchell, who
was awaiting trial for the murder. The centerpiece of the case against him was
his confession.
Charles E. Skoller was a relatively junior assistant district attorney assigned to
both the Moseley and Mitchell trials. In his memoir, Twisted Confessions, he
relates the hellish complexity of the Mitchell case—Moseley admitted to the
three killings on the stand at his trial, in a failed bid for an insanity defense—
and the predicament of convincing a jury from the mostly white, semi-
suburban county that had cast 45 percent of its votes for Richard Nixon in 1960
that the dead-eyed African American sex fiend was innocent of killing Kralik,
and the handsome blonde teenager was guilty. It was “a prosecutor’s
nightmare,” as Skoller put it, and he often believed that his boss, Queens DA
Frank O’Connor, was throwing him under the bus by sticking him with the
case. Mitchell had denied killing Kralik during five separate interviews with the
police before admitting to killing her during the sixth, after all of his prior alibis
had been disproven. In addition to his police confession, Mitchell had
acknowledged his responsibility on camera, to a TV news crew. Still, Moseley
would be far more consistent in his claims. He’d also gone on record about how
he tried to rape a corpse. When jurors hear that kind of thing, it’s hard to think
about anything else. Doubt was more than reasonable, and the district attorney
shared it.
On several occasions, O’Connor expressed his inclination to dismiss the
indictment against Mitchell, and it took a great deal of effort by Skoller and
other, more senior prosecutors to persuade him to allow the trial to go forward.
O’Connor had been a defense lawyer before his election, and his most
celebrated case had been that of Manny Balestrero, a musician falsely accused
of a series of armed robberies. Five witnesses had identified him in the crimes,
and it was only because the actual robber was arrested during his second trial
that he escaped conviction. Henry Fonda played Balestrero in Alfred
Hitchcock’s grim docudrama, The Wrong Man. The case cemented O’Connor’s
reputation, and made him forever mindful of how justice can miscarry.
Skoller didn’t doubt that Mitchell was guilty, though he despaired of his
chances at prevailing at trial. The investigation that had led to Mitchell’s arrest
had been painstaking and persuasive: Mitchell had dated Kralik’s best friend,
who was supposed to be sleeping over with her that night. He had been at the
house before, and his familiarity with its layout allowed him to enter through a
window, move quietly past Kralik’s brother and grandmother, asleep on the
first floor, and find the girl’s bedroom on the second. He had a history of
violence, especially when he’d been drinking, and he’d been drunk that night.
He’d burglarized a school with a friend earlier, and had stolen a pair of scissors,
which he had in his possession when his friend dropped him off in Springfield
Gardens. The wounds Kralik suffered were consistent with what the scissors
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would have caused. The friend testified that they had broken into the school;
that he had dropped Mitchell off near the house; that he picked Mitchell up
shortly after the murder, and left him at a bus stop, just after; that Mitchell had
admitted to killing Kralik when she reacted out of shock to finding him in her
bedroom, and his own surprise at not finding his girlfriend there.
Though the only person who heard
“The crime was Barbara Jean Kralik speak before she
tragic, but it died was a detective who testified that
did serve she’d said only, “It was dark, it was
dark,” an article in the Daily News
society, urging claimed that she’d said of her assailant,
as it did for its “I never saw him before in my life.”
members for Other stories suggestively conflated “It
was dark” with “He was dark.” When
come to the aid Moseley testified at Mitchell’s trial, he
of those in was wrong about significant details: the
Kralik house was in the middle of the
distress or block, not on the corner; he’d said the
danger.” weather was clear and dry, when it had
been rainy; the serrated steak knife he
claimed to have used would not have
caused the kind of wounds found on
the body. Skoller relates how lucky he
was for a hung jury—the final,
deadlocked vote was eleven to one, for
acquittal. O’Connor grudgingly allowed Skoller to pursue a retrial, but he told
him that his next attempt would be his last.
In the months that passed before the second Mitchell trial, in February, 1965,
Skoller was able to locate a witness of the caliber that a lawyer is lucky to come
across once in a lifetime. James Lewis was a bus driver with the mind of a
savant. When cross-examined on how he knew a particular date fell on a
particular day of the week, Lewis didn’t miss a beat—he knew August 29, 1963,
was a Thursday, after it was tossed out as a random pop-quiz—and he was able
to provide turn-by-turn descriptions of routes he hadn’t driven in four years.
He remembered Mitchell getting on the bus, seemingly drunk, with a bloody
hand; he remembered exactly what Mitchell was wearing; he remembered
Mitchell looking out the window when the route took them back near the
Kralik house. Asked if there was any reason why he’d remember the night of
the Kralik murder, July 20, with such vividness, Lewis replied that his wife had
given birth the day before; the day after, July 21, he’d visited her in the
hospital, bringing newspapers that were full of stories about Kralik. He hadn’t
associated his passenger with the incident, but, now that he saw him, he was
certain it was the same man. Defense counsel asked for a recess, visibly shaken.
Still, Moseley had yet to take the stand. Skoller offered him immunity from
prosecution relating to the Kralik murder, as he had in the previous trial.
Though called as a defense witness, neither side knew what would come out of
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his mouth when the moment came. Suffice it to say that only one attorney was
pleased when Moseley denied having killed Kralik, and refused to say anything
further on the subject. Skoller writes, “Repeatedly, Judge Thompson held him
in contempt of court, but it was a meaningless threat for someone already
under sentence of death.” Mitchell was convicted of manslaughter, and
sentenced to 10 to 20 years.
Looking back at the case, one of the most striking things to me is procedural:
Moseley was convicted in June, 1964, for a murder he committed in March.
That would be considered breakneck speed by modern standards, especially in
the Bronx, where cases often linger for four or five years. The other is
psychological, the anomalous prospect that Moseley presented: he was 29, and
had never been arrested. He had a steady job as a machine operator, and
owned his own home. He was married to a nurse, and had two children. If he’d
quit committing crimes after killing Genovese, he might have never been
caught. In 1967, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison, because the
judge hadn’t allowed expert testimony relating to his mental health at
sentencing, reckoning that the jury had already rejected an insanity defense. In
1968, Moseley shoved a tin can into his rectum, occasioning a hospitalization
from which he escaped to go on a rampage of rape and hostage-taking. In 1977,
he published an op-ed in the Times, advocating for prison reform, and noting
his own transformation, which included gaining a bachelor’s degree in
sociology: “The crime was tragic, but it did serve society, urging as it did for its
members for come to the aid of those in distress or danger.” Moseley wasn’t
altogether wrong about his social service, in that his case helped propel the
implementation of the 911 system. Now, you don’t have to find the number of
the nearest precinct to reach the police. Maybe more of Kitty’s neighbors would
have called the cops, if it involved dialing three numbers they knew, instead of
seven that they didn’t.
The initial Times reports of dozens of witnesses taking in a 45-minute murder
as if it were a late-night movie have largely been debunked. Most of the
witnesses had heard or seen something, sort-of; several were elderly, many
roused from sleep. Only two exhibited the apathy and cowardice that the
murder later exemplified: Joseph Fink, a superintendent at the building across
the street, had a clear view of the first phase of the stabbing. He watched for a
while, and then took a nap. And Karl Ross, Kitty’s neighbor, who opened his
door to see her being stabbed a flight below, made calls seeking advice without
including the police among his advisers. Two others did intervene—Robert
Mozer, whose shouts drove Moseley away, and Sophie Farrar, who called the
police and rushed out to try and help her. Otherwise, the only other semi-
newsworthy fact to emerge is that Kitty lived with her lover, a woman, rather
than the “roommate” discreetly reported at the time. But the bystander effect,
which psychologists began to examine after the Genovese murder, has been
repeatedly been confirmed in experiments. In 1995, Moseley sought a new trial,
on the grounds that one of his lawyers had also represented Kitty Genovese in a
minor matter in 1961. He is presently the longest-serving inmate in the state.
In a 50th a-anniversary reflection for
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Fals e confes s ions The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann
wer e once cons ider ed notes that race didn’t figure in coverage
r idiculous rarities , of the case, but publishing side-by-side
the pr ovince of lonely photographs of the black male killer
attention-s eekers , and white female victim made overt
like the two hundr ed discussion unnecessary. Moseley
who called in to take became a symbolic figure in many
r es pons ibility for the ways, but he was hardly representative
kidnapping of the
of the welfare-kid, drug-addict, ghetto-
Lindber g baby in the
dweller seen as driving the rising city
1920s , or the s ix ty in
the Black Dahlia crime rates—murders went from 435 in
mur der in Los 1960 to the then-shocking 681 of 1965.
Angeles in the 1940s . The case remains in the “What’s wrong
with us?” column of public debate,
rather than being filed as an exhibit in
what was then called “The Negro
Question.” I’ve spoken to friends about the case as I’ve written this, and one, a
highly-educated, widely-read crime buff, didn’t know that Moseley was black. I
found that to be oddly heartening, and then slightly depressing in how unusual
it was for an interracial crime to be remembered in color-blind terms.
***
Though I spent most of my career in the South Bronx, I was, for a period, the
NYPD liaison to the Jordanian National Police. In retrospect, 2009 and 2010
were halcyon days in the Middle East, now that we seem just one horseman
short of an apocalypse. I spent most of my time on police training, particularly
in regard to domestic violence and child abuse, though I did give lectures on
interrogation. In collecting material for the bilingual, English-Arabic Power
Point slides, clips from The Wire were easier to come by than NYPD
curriculum material on interrogations. In researching how to systematically
explain the trade I’d learned in an entirely unsystematic way, I came across
numerous prescriptions on how to read body language that I knew to be, at
best, gross oversimplifications. Some people looked me in the eyes when they
lied, and others looked away when they told the truth. One especially
pernicious—and persistent—bit of pseudoscience was a diagram of a face,
showing that when the eyes look up and to the left, it indicates that a person is
imagining, and hence lying, while looking up to the right means they’re
remembering. Or it could be the reverse. And it’s reversed again for lefties. I
quit trying to use that one early on, since I’d forget which side was which, and
watching for eye movements while listening to someone talk, and double-
checking to see if they were left-handed made me cross-eyed. But I’d been
taught it, and I’d seen the diagrams in squad rooms over the years. Some of the
Jordanians were familiar with the premise as well. I told them to throw them
away whenever they found them, because they weren’t true. And if a good
detective believes that he’s talking to a bad man, he’ll try to keep on talking
until he hears something he can use against him.
False confessions were once considered ridiculous rarities, the province of
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lonely attention-seekers, like the two hundred who called in to take
responsibility for the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby in the 1920s, or the sixty
in the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Or the result of
torture, like the Soviet show-trials of the 1930s, and the frozen-faced
denunciations of imperialism by prisoners of war. The “Birmingham Six,” the
“Guildford Four,” the “Maguire Seven” were all Irish Catholics collected
haphazardly in England in the 1970s after a series of IRA bombings. Dogs were
used in the interrogations, and the accused were subjected to mock executions.
Most confessed; all were later cleared, and offered large settlements and public
apologies by the government.
With juries, admissions tend to trump other evidence as much as a full house
beats two of a kind. Thirty percent of those cleared by the Innocence Project
had confessed to their crimes. Many were innocent in attitude as well as in fact,
young and deferent, without any history of police interaction, intellectually
limited or emotionally fragile. They had been subjected to hours and hours of
interrogation, and they said what they said just because they wanted the
conversation to end. Some said that they were sure that the truth was bound to
come out eventually; others came to believe that they had to be responsible, in
some way, as if hypnotized, doubtful of reality. Twelve hours or 18 before,
they’d been home on the couch, watching TV, and now they were struggling to
help a firm but gentle stranger in a suit understand why they raped children. If
one bad dream had come true, why couldn’t another? One such case,
persuasively argued by Lawrence Wright in Remembering Satan, is that of
Paul Ingram, a devout Pentecostal for whom demonic possession and divine
revelations were accepted as ordinary phenomena, regular as rain. He came to
believe, after long talks with his pastor and the police, that he had to have
raped his daughters if they said so. He’d raised them not to lie. Ingram trusted
law enforcement, not least because he was a sheriff himself.
There is a list of famous cases involving false confessions: Martin Tankleff,
Jeffrey Deskovic, the “West Memphis 3,” the “Norfolk Four.” Tankleff, a 17-
year-old, awoke one morning to find his parents brutally beaten and stabbed.
His mother was dead, and his father was in a coma. Despite the fact that the
father had a business partner who owed him $500,000, and who had recently
threatened him, and who had been in the house the night before, detectives felt
that Tankleff was too cold and unemotional in the aftermath, and they
concentrated on him as a suspect even after the business partner faked his own
death and moved to California. When Tankleff was in the interrogation room,
he was told that his father had awakened and identified him. Invited to explain
how that might be possible, he offered a confused conjecture about how he
might have blacked out. Deskovic was another 17-year-old, but he struck police
as overly emotional in his reaction to the rape and murder of a classmate,
visiting her wake three times. He was interviewed several times, and likely
raised alarms by sharing his own research on the case, offering tips about
suspects he considered likely. He confessed after six hours of questioning, and
was convicted despite the fact DNA from the crime scene implicated someone
else. With Jesse Misskelley, the only one of the West Memphis 3 to confess to
the murder of three young boys, his IQ was reported to be 74, and the
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admission came after 12 hours of questioning. Issues of police conduct were
raised by defense counsel in each case, with varying degrees of credibility, and
have been examined at length elsewhere, particularly with the West Memphis
3. With Tankleff, it isn’t unreasonable to point out to that for the lead detective
to open a bar with the defendant’s half-sister, who became the primary
beneficiary of the estate, shows a robust indifference to what other people
might think.
The case of the Norfolk Four is the most disturbing, in that four adults—all
servicemen, active-duty members of the Navy—confessed to the rape and
stabbing murder of a woman in 1997. The first two were roommates, and
neighbors of the victim. One confessed to have killed her alone; the other said
he did it with his roommate. When the sole DNA sample recovered didn’t
match either, the second man added a third conspirator. The third man
confessed, but his DNA didn’t match. So too with a fourth man added by the
second—yes on the confession, no DNA—who volunteered three more names,
who denied any involvement. Charges were eventually dropped against them,
in part because two had lock-solid alibis. What appeared to be a sole-
perpetrator homicide, committed by someone known to the victim—no forced
entry, the neat, 700-square foot apartment showing few signs of struggle, a
consistency in the pattern of multiple wounds, a single DNA profile—had to
accommodate an elastically expanding theory of gang assault. Almost two years
after the murder, a man named Omar Ballard, who was serving a long prison
sentence for rape, sent a threatening letter to another woman in which he
bragged about the murder. He was a friend of the victim, and his DNA
matched. He said he did it alone.
Two of the Norfolk four pled guilty, and
“If you did it, two were convicted at trial. Ballard
it would didn’t testify, but when he pled to the
crime, he changed his story to include
better if you four accomplices. Prosecutors
accounted for the inconsistency with a
said you reverse-racism theory, saying Ballard,
were sorry, who was black, didn’t want to be
associated with white rapist-murderers.
sooner One of the Four was released in 2005,
instead of
and the three others were offered
conditional pardons by then-Gov. Tim
later.” Kaine in 2009, the culmination of an
effort supported not just by the
Innocence Project, but an atypical
coalition that included thirty former
FBI agents, four former Virginia
Attorneys General, and a dozen former
prosecutors and judges.
One detective, Robert Glenn Ford, obtained the confessions from all four
defendants, and secured the amended version Ballard provided as part of a
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plea bargain that spared him the death penalty. Ford had been thrown out of
the Norfolk homicide squad earlier in his career, after confessions he’d secured
from other suspects were shown to be false. Ford continued to maintain that
the Four were guilty. He also insisted that the three against whom charges were
dropped had also escaped justice, even if one had an ATM receipt that placed
him hundreds of miles from the crime. In 2010, Ford was arrested for
extortion, among other crimes, mostly relating to taking payoffs from criminals
to claim they helped him in homicide investigations, reducing their sentences,
or setting up informants to call a government-funded, cash-for-tips hotline. As
he was convicted after trial, and was sentenced to the maximum of 12+ years,
I’d assume that he never admitted anything himself.
In viewing the case of the Central Park Five in the context of substantiated false
confessions, they are characteristic of them in several ways. The defendants
were young, and none had ever been arrested. The first two brought in had
waited overnight in a precinct before they were interrogated, although they had
eaten and slept at intervals, and one had been with his mother, the other with
his friends. Korey Wise was learning disabled and emotionally disturbed, and
he’d also been held overnight. Excerpts of his video statements fill the highlight
reels when unreliable confessions are the subject of TV programs. He says that
someone cut the legs of jogger, when no one had, although her legs were
covered with scratches. At one point, he could be channeling Lenny from Of
Mice and Men: “See, I knew it was no rabbit because rabbits don’t make noise
coming towards trees and stuff, but I heard a lot of giggling and a lot of
running…”
Cops are allowed to tell certain kinds of lies to suspects, such as saying that
they have evidence against them, when they don’t. Yusef Salaam was told that
his fingerprints were found on the jogger’s pants, and a detective testified that
he told him as much. They cannot promise leniency, directly or indirectly, in a
transactional sense; they certainly can’t tell young men accused of grave
felonies that they’re home-free as soon as they sign on the dotted line. Saying
something like, “If you did it, it would better if you said you were sorry, sooner
instead of later” would pass muster for most judges. Courts have ruled
differently on what’s acceptable, in the totality of circumstances, as long as the
quid pro quo wouldn’t lead an innocent person to confess. I don’t doubt the
defendants and their families when they recall a sense of raised expectations of
diminished consequences.
But the differences are also pronounced. The arrests were far from
indiscriminate: Thirty-seven young men were interviewed regarding the
attacks in the park; 12 were arrested, with 10 charged as adults; five went to
trial for the rape of the jogger. Antron McCray, who had been accused of “the
murder” by two boys, appeared at the precinct with his mother, before the body
of the jogger had been discovered. He denied any responsibility, and was sent
home. Salaam was brought in the next night, and admitted to the rape after 90
minutes of questioning. A large number of detectives were involved, with long
and distinguished records, from three different squads. The inconsistencies in
the statements suggest, at least, that there was no concerted effort to force
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admissions to fit the evidence. None of the Five admitted to the actual rape of
the jogger; none noticed the copious blood loss, or seeing the victim bound and
gagged. Ryan acknowledges errors in Reyes’ later confession—he said he raped
the jogger, and then she ran, and then he beat her head with a rock, whereas
the rape and skull fractures followed an escape attempt; he recalled nothing of
his signature ligature. Armstrong also reminds us that the detectives had to be
cognizant of the possibility that the jogger might wake up and say that it hadn’t
happened that way at all. For cops, reports from a hospital that a victim is
“likely to die” routinely prove to be premature. The judge was dismissive of
claims of coercion because the defendants, once reunited after their
confessions, laughed and joked, comparing versions of the stories they told.
They sang songs—including, infamously, Wild Thing—and catcalled at a female
detective.
On the matrix of circumstances under which false confessions have occurred,
you have a great number in which police misconduct was the decisive factor;
you have a lesser number in which some aspect of disability led a vulnerable
suspect to confess, under inherently intimidating circumstances. Instances of
multiple false confessions are still more infrequent, though a pair of mentally
retarded half-brothers were recently exculpated after serving decades in prison
for a murder in Virginia. As for cases of multiple, parentally supervised, false
confessions, it’s harder to say. Family members were present for the
questioning of three of the five, and they were there for the video recordings.
When a teenager is asked about a rape in front of his mother, is he more or less
likely to deny it? And when several admit to rape, sitting beside their mothers,
sisters, grandmothers, fathers and stepfathers, what do we make of that? On
video, Raymond Santana was smug, boastful, and nonchalant by turns, vividly
reenacting who did what during the rape. Antron McCray was with his mother
for most of his interrogation, his stepfather for all of it. He signed a written
confession after an hour and 45 minutes. Even defense counsel would have to
acknowledge that there isn’t an abundance of comparable cases in the available
literature.
Was what happened to the Central Park Five completely wrong, or simply
incomplete? I read Sarah Burns’ book, The Central Park Five, expecting a
plaintiff’s brief, and it is that—she was an intern for lawyers pursuing civil
claims on their behalf as a college student, in the summer of 2003. She believes
passionately that the Five hadn’t raped the jogger; she is more circumspect in
her treatment of their other felonies: “At some point, the metal bar from
Korey’s house that Yusef had carried in the park had been used to beat
Laughlin.” She is enthusiastic in her support of Ryan’s assessment, but doesn’t
include this quote on their conduct that night: “The other crimes committed on
April 19 were grave and inexcusable—unprovoked attacks on strangers,
apparently undertaken for the fun of it, which left some terrorized, two
knocked into unconsciousness, and one seriously injured.”
Burns is nonetheless impressively detailed and mostly fair-minded,
acknowledging the exceptions and complexities in the cultural and evidentiary
records: the term “wilding” had been in use before it made its way onto racially
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charged tabloid headlines, as “street slang for acting crazy, although it didn’t
necessarily have violent connotations.” Melonie Jackson’s tale of Wise’s call
from Rikers is “puzzling.” Burns vividly recounts the raw racial tensions of the
time, in which New York seemed to be in a simultaneous state of explosion and
collapse. A three-way tabloid circulation war was being waged amid a three-
way mayoral election. Crack and AIDS were burning through the city, and there
was an epidemic of violent street crime, overwhelmingly inflicted by black and
Hispanic men on other black and Hispanics, though there was a greater
diversity of robbery victims. (I was one, as were most white city kids I knew.)
Except in cases with the highest body count, or the most grotesque cruelty,
white victims were the only ones that mattered. Burns recalls, as a point of
contrast, the barely noticed case of a woman raped and thrown from a rooftop
by multiple assailants in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the same night as the jogger
attack. She also observes that the leading black newspapers, The City Sun and
The Amsterdam News, seemed to take the guilt of the Five for granted.
Dead white people were symbols; dead blacks were statistics, unless white
people killed them. There were gang assaults by white racists in Bensonhurst
and Howard Beach that left innocent black men dead. Reactions from those
neighborhoods to protest marches would have made a Klansman proud. The
facts were ugly enough, and the fictions were worse: New York had the Tawana
Brawley hoax, in which a young black woman lied about being kidnapped and
raped by whites, including police; Boston had the Charles Stuart hoax, in which
a white man killed his pregnant wife and invented a black culprit. A black man
he identified was arrested, and might have gone to prison, had Stuart’s brother
not confessed to hiding the victim’s jewelry, in the belief that he’d only agreed
to an insurance scam, and not a kill-your-pregnant-sister-in-law-and-blame-
an-innocent-black-guy scam. Stuart jumped off a bridge before cops could talk
to him again.
Though Burns is intriguing when she explores the problems with the
prosecution of the Five, she is devastating on their defense. She concurs with
Sullivan’s Unequal Verdicts in reviewing one lawyer as experienced and able;
one she finds middling; the rest did more harm than good, as hacks and
screamers. Two veterans of the Tawana Brawley hoax, C. Vernon Mason and
Alton Maddox—both of whom would later be disbarred—joined in at various
stages. Burns doesn’t mention that Brawley herself made an appearance at the
trial, to offer her moral support to the defendants. The implicit racial context
was forcefully brought to the fore, as a cadre of black militant supporters
crowded the courtroom and the sidewalks to denounce the female prosecutor
and the jogger as “whores.” One lawyer said as much, in his cross-examination
of the jogger, suggesting that her boyfriend had raped her, and that she slept
with every male friend she had. Other lawyers claimed that she hadn’t been
raped at all. The tactic backfired with the two carefully selected, majority-
minority juries, who unanimously refused to accept entreaties to racial
solidarity over slender evidence and compelling testimony.
The testimony included that of two
defendants, Salaam and Wise, who took
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