Before being tried for the rape and murder of Linda Mae Craig, I first had to face trial in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, for the attempted kidnapping and murder of Officer Benjamin Wright – all of which gave the local press a lot of material to play with. They simply accepted the claims of the police about both crimes and filled their pages theorising about my possible motives.
The trial was set for late April 1982 before Judge Robert F. Kelly. As the court process rolled over me, no matter how angry I felt towards others and what they were doing to me, I knew that in truth I had put myself here. This thought was always haunting me, always undercutting any courage I could muster. I was shamed by my own actions into not making a fuss as I placed all my belief in my attorney, Sam Stretton, to help me through this.
The evidence for the attempted kidnapping and murder of Officer Wright essentially boiled down to two different versions of the same event as recounted by the only two people who were there: one, a respected local police officer; the other, a 20-year-old drug addict and car thief. No one expected the trial to last long and there was little doubt about its outcome.
The trial began with Officer Wright taking the witness stand to tell his version. He had, he said, been parked in his patrol car alongside an elevated section of road above the part of Interstate I-95 that cut through the city of Chester, Pennsylvania, where his patrol section was, at 1.45 a.m. when he noticed a bright orange 1970s Chevrolet Camaro with wide rear tyres fail to stop properly at a stop sign. He therefore pulled out of his parked position in order to initiate a traffic stop on this car.
Once the orange Camaro stopped alongside the overpass to I-95, the driver exited the car and then, without provocation, simply attacked Officer Wright. After having punched him twice, knocking his eyeglasses from his face, the driver took his gun. Officer Wright then testified how he had tried to overpower the Camaro driver but the driver attempted to force him into the car and abduct him, having struck him with the pistol across his face while doing so. The officer therefore decided to lunge for the weapon, grabbing the man’s arm, thereby managing to wrestle control of the gun from his attacker, but not before the gun went off inches from his face.
I had heard the officer’s version of events twice before this point, and it angered me how he embellished it more and more each time – but also how he seemed to show real open hatred towards me while doing it. In court I just sat there in my thick plastic jailhouse glasses wanting to cry.
I was unable to look at this man as he testified, as I could never forget that I was a junkie, a car thief and a loser. It didn’t matter that I knew he was lying, it just crushed me that I was now sitting there with my family listening to how I was such a waste. Yet the trial was not about what I felt like, it was about twelve jurors who were there to ensure it was fair. And they could see as well as anyone else in the court that day the open hostility this man kept beaming out towards me, mindless of how it looked to others. I just kept my head down, weighed down by so many stones under which my soul seemed to be buried.
Next it was my attorney’s turn to ask the witness questions. How many times had I struck him with my fists, and how many with his own gun? The officer replied that I had punched him twice and then hit him in the face twice with his gun, a model no. 10 Smith & Wesson .38 pistol. My attorney asked the officer to review the lone photograph of his injuries, which showed a 2-cm scratch on his right hand between the thumb and forefinger, where he said his gun had been taken from him. This photograph was his sole proof of the violence that had apparently taken place. Why, asked my trial attorney, did he not photograph his face? Having had his eyeglasses punched off of his face and having been pistol-whipped; surely there were marks there as well?
After a long beat, the officer quipped, ‘I heal fast. And besides, I’m a good-looking man, I don’t want anyone to see my face all bruised up.’
Many people in the courtroom, including some of the jury, made noises of disbelief at this answer. I think everyone knew at this point that the officer’s story was untrue. Now it was up to me to tell my version and hope that justice would win out. My story was simple. I was driving home from a nightclub, it was late and I had gotten a bit twisted about on the roads going by Interstate I-95.
I was trying to locate the road, which allowed you to access I-95 North, when I saw flashing lights come on behind me. This made me panic-stricken and fearful because of the beating I had taken for running from the police in early December 1981 – and I showed the jury photos of my face from that first beating.
I tried to explain how I literally froze with fear. I even got down from the stand and, with the help of my lawyer, acted out my version of events, showing how the only scratch the officer got was from when he reached for his gun and I panicked and grabbed his arm before the gun went off.
The jury did not take long to come to their decision. Less than an hour.
The reaction in the courtroom was unexpected. As the verdicts of ‘Not guilty’ rang out, the room exploded into angry shouting, mostly from Officer Wright, outraged that a jury had taken the word of a junkie and a thief over his. Judge Kelly let it all go as he thanked the jury and walked out in disgust. Then there was another outburst, this time from the district prosecutor, Barry Gross. As he walked towards the exit, past where I was sitting at the defence table, he turned abruptly and hissed in my face, ‘You will never leave this county alive, do you hear me!’
In his view his career had just taken a huge hit, as I had raped and murdered Mrs Craig and for that he hated me to the core. As I stared into his eyes it dawned on me that I need not be so ashamed any more. A jury had just lifted a huge stone from off my grave, and I could feel my spirit begin to come back. I looked him right in the face and kept my head up. I was no longer going to cower before these people.
I had never even laid eyes on Mrs Craig and now I was going to fight for myself because in my next trial it was not just my word against that of a police officer. I suddenly felt blessed as I looked across the courtroom at my mother and father: my family knew exactly where I had been at the time of Mrs Craig’s death. I looked at Barry Gross and smiled.
My refusal to bow in the face of such hatred pushed the prosecutor over the edge. He took the folder containing the case file and threw it against the wall just by the exit door. Then he stormed out into the lobby and accosted the jury, telling them they had ‘let a murderer go!’ At which point a female juror bravely pointed out to him that they weren’t there to try me for murder, they had only heard this case in which the prosecution witness had clearly lied.
It was my shaken mother who witnessed this exchange, but when she asked my trial attorney if this was something we could use to show that the prosecution case was becoming a personal attack on me, he told her simply, ‘Unfortunately, as the parent of the accused, you have no credibility. You are as much a suspect on trial as your son, so any evidence based on actions by the prosecutor you say you have witnessed will be worthless.’
Every time she would come to visit me in prison and retell this story – which she must have done a hundred times – I would look into my mother’s eyes knowing that the greatest hurt to her in all this was that she and the rest of my family were suffering just for being my family. She too was being put on trial for bearing a child who had been accused of such heinous crimes. I think this is one of the toughest aspects of the trial process: what it does to everyone around the accused. It was exhausting me, but on the other hand I did not care if they hired twenty inmates to claim I had confessed to this crime. I was going to stand up for myself in my next trial. I was not going to sit through it passively and let my family watch me be broken by it all. Sadly, I was going to need every bit of my newly renewed strength and willpower in the days that followed my acquittal.
I was soon to learn exactly what the prosecutor meant when he spat that threat in my face about how I was not going to leave the county alive. One week after the trial for the attempted murder of Benjamin Wright I learned that that same prosecutor had asked to take over the prosecution for the murder of Linda Mae Craig. Further, that he was now seeking the death penalty.
In the months that followed my arrest for the rape and murder of Mrs Craig, not a single factor about that crime had changed, except for one. I was found not guilty in a trial conducted by this particular prosecutor. For him now to seek the death penalty when the record throughout the earlier court proceedings all stated that a general charge of second degree murder (which carried a life sentence) was being sought, was, in my view nothing less than vengeance.
Why was it such a big deal that I be put to death now? The facts of the crime were that Mrs Craig had been abducted in the state of Delaware, as evidenced by her shoes being found in the mall parking lot near to where her car had been parked. However, her body had been found later in the state of Pennsylvania. But no one had witnessed where the crimes of rape and murder had actually occurred. Legally, therefore, only a court in Pennsylvania could hold a trial for the charge of murder, whereas the charges of rape and kidnapping had to be tried in the state in which they had been committed.
By law, any fair hearing in Pennsylvania was going to have to rule that the murder charges could not proceed as a capital case because legally they could not take into account possible exacerbating crimes, which had been committed outside the Pennsylvanian court’s jurisdiction.
That was when I learned that not only was I going to face the same prosecutor as in my first trial, but also the same trial judge.
It looked like both had chosen to take on this prosecution in an effort to right the perceived wrong they each felt had been dealt earlier. Nor did the prosecutor bother to hide his feelings about me – he went to the press with interviews and comments as well.
And Judge Robert Kelly’s first act when he took over the trial for the murder of Mrs Craig was to allow the prosecutor to seek the death penalty. He further ruled that it was not necessary for a jury to decide the exact location and jurisdiction of the lesser crimes of rape and kidnapping as ‘aggravating circumstances’ in order for a capital trial to take place. I do not know how else to put it, but in my view this was nothing less than attempted murder by a public official, using his power in order to try and ensure that I was killed.
My attorney, Sam Stretton, weakly fought this attempt as an outright abuse of the law. And for the prosecutor to seek the death penalty only one month before trial and then withhold crucial witness statements pointing towards other suspects was no less an attempted murder than had this man simply pulled out a gun and shot me in court that day he had threatened me.
The real surprise was how the media seemed to be in concert with the prosecutor. Not once questioning why the county prosecutor was seeking my death having just lost another case against me, the press began to spew forth stories about how I had stalked the victim prior to the murder because she bore a fatal resemblance to my former girlfriend.
A fair trial was out of the question.