In 1987 Florida became the first state in the USA to convict offenders using evidence based on DNA testing. By the time I read about DNA fingerprinting, as it was first called, in February 1988, this was a science that was being spoken about loudly in another way: ‘exoneration’. For, overshadowing any conviction gained in court using this new science was the terrible realisation that the system had ‘gotten it wrong’ in some very highly publicised cases.
People sentenced to as much as 300 years’ imprisonment for a series of rapes were being proven innocent. The whole judicial system was being shaken to its very core. This ‘bolt of truth’ that DNA testing had suddenly become began opening long-locked doors and setting the innocent free like never before.
In March 1988 I became the first Death Row prisoner in the United States to be granted a request for DNA testing. But how can I express to you what it was then like for me to watch 111 other men be exonerated from Death Row as I embarked on my mission to prove my innocence?
I was sitting at my desk in Cell 443 on B-Block on 20 February 1988 when I read it. I will always remember that date. Another inmate was about to throw away a newspaper when I asked him to give it to a guard to pass on to me, and he did just that. I remember looking at a section that had slipped out as I tried to arrange it in my hands and on it I saw a drawing of the two spiralling strands of DNA. Under the drawing was a headline announcing that there had been a forensic science convention in Philadelphia which featured the newly discovered DNA fingerprinting technique being used, for the first time, to catch criminals in rape and murder cases.
As I sat down stiffly at my desk and continued to read, an amazing thought suddenly entered my head and I literally yelled out to my neighbour – the guy who had given me the newspaper – ‘I’m holding the key to my cell in my hands!’ He just laughed and said they must be giving out some really good pills these days to make me see things like that. Several of the others laughed, too. I laughed along with them, but only because I knew that this new DNA fingerprinting could do one thing: prove my innocence.
On Death Row you were entitled to make one phone call per month and you were allowed to speak for fifteen minutes as two guards with clubs stood over you as you talked into the phone piece held in your cuffed hands. The calls were very expensive and often not really worth the time, but it meant a lot to your family to hear your voice. With only two phones, bolted on to the wall beside the stairwell, shared between fifty Death Row men, you were lucky to get even that one call a month.
As soon as I had read that newspaper article to the point when I felt I knew every word off by heart, I put in a request for my monthly phone call so that I could call my attorney Joe Bullen and tell him that I wanted to use DNA testing to prove my innocence. As much as anything, I wanted to hear his reaction to me asking for a science to be used that could either prove me guilty or prove him wrong. I was sure he would either challenge me or patronise me and I was ready for it all. The block officers brought me out of my cell to use the phone on 26 February. It was a Friday and I was hoping that the letter I had sent to Mr Bullen the previous Monday informing him of my request to try and use DNA fingerprint testing had reached him. The phone connection was super slow but, as soon as I got through to him, I launched into telling him the initial steps I wanted him to take for me.
But he cut me short. He said he had received my letter the previous day and he had already spoken to the County Coroner, Dimitri Contostalavos.
Apparently, the Coroner was impressed by my willingness to try DNA testing, and, as all the sperm found during the autopsy of Mrs Craig was now in his care, he felt this was an excellent case on which to try out the new technique. Mr Bullen also told me that he had also spoken to the prosecutor now assigned to my case, and he too saw no reason to stop any testing, as he was clearly confident that this was a ploy on my part and he welcomed the chance to further prove my guilt.
I had psyched myself up for a fight with this man, believing that he would tell me not to waste his time, so now I felt suddenly deflated. I was unsure what to ask for next. But I gathered myself and asked him to speak to the lieutenant standing beside me and request that I be allowed to use the phone again to talk to him some more. I wanted to speak to him about this laboratory in New York State, which was using the new DNA testing procedure.
He agreed, saying that it was important we speak again on Monday, as he had to get written permission from the judge handling my appeals for this process to begin.
I handed the phone over to the lieutenant, who hung up having grunted a response to whatever it was Mr Bullen said to him. Then he turned to the guards who had brought me from my cell and told them to take me back. I tried to ask him to make sure a note was added to my files to say that I could make the call on Monday, but he just turned away and walked off as if I were an idiot for even asking him to respond to me. He was old school and, while he no longer ran the block as harshly as before, he had no time for the scum on Death Row. I did not push my luck by asking again and risk getting a smack in the mouth, so I went back to my cell just hoping that I would be allowed to make that phone call on Monday.
Meanwhile, I was looking forward to Jacque’s visit on Sunday even more than usual. I really needed to talk to her. I had sent her the original newspaper article with the words ‘We need to talk’ scrawled across the margin. I wanted to tell her why it was so important that I tried DNA testing: not only was it my chance, it was fast becoming ‘our chance’. Oh, how I wished for time to fly so that it was Sunday already and I could tell her why I had written those four words. I wanted finally to look her in the face and tell her that I had not killed another woman. I wanted finally to tell her that I had not raped that woman either. And science was going to prove this.
I exhausted myself with exercise and slept as much as I could in order to make time move forward as fast as possible. This wonderful new gift of hope had been handed to me out of nowhere and I had to use it.
But time passed that weekend just as slowly as it always does when you want the future to unfold quickly. As I waited impatiently for Sunday to arrive, I went through every imagined response to all I had to tell Jacque regarding the DNA testing article. For I knew this was either going to be the first step towards a new life together. Or I was about to take her for a ride through hell itself.
How do you look at someone and tell them that you did not murder or rape another human being, while inside you know that by telling them this you will only trap them in the battle to prove your innocence? I don’t know what anyone else would have done, but I was filled with trepidation of the moment when I would have to tell Jacque the truth. And not just about the case, but about ‘us’ as well.
I had left so many things for Jacque to decide alone in the early part of our relationship. I hardly felt I was in the position to say much – I was at the mercy of both the prison administration and her willingness to drive so many hours to see me. And I had allowed us to grow close, despite my fears about the likely doomed outcome of our relationship.
But now, as I walked into that visiting room, I was being presented with the chance to tell the most important person in my life not only that I was innocent, but that I could prove it. For the first time since my return to Huntingdon, I had been sent a seemingly God-given new hope. And it had arrived just when, having reached as far as I could in my understanding of the world by myself, I had found a woman prepared to teach me how to develop as only a woman could. In this frightening yet empowering moment I felt there were so many symbols of fate and destiny pulling me towards a new future.
Sundays were very busy days, so it took a long time for visitors to get through the search process. However, they were allowed to bring in little things to pass the time with the inmate they were seeing. Jacque often brought a Scrabble set and we would just sit there and chat, the game providing a backdrop to our conversation as Jacque arranged my tiles according to my directions in their little holder facing the partition.
This Sunday there was nothing in her hands but a notepad and pen. She just walked in and said hello. Then, having touched fingers by pressing them through the metal screen between us, we sat down eagerly and both started to talk at once. Not only had she read the article I had sent to her, Jacque said, but she had been to the library and found some more articles and other materials, which she had copied for us to look at. It was obvious we needed a really good DNA expert, she rattled on, and we should also appeal to different organisations for help.
I couldn’t stop smiling as she talked, while of course holding my cuffed hands up to my face in order to cover my missing teeth. She kept saying ‘we’ over and over – that’s what made me smile. I managed to pause her long enough to say, ‘I have two really big things to tell you. One is: I never even met Linda Mae Craig, so I had nothing to do with her rape or death. The second is: I know you are in love with me and I think I am in love with you as well.’
She wanted to make it easy for me, so she said, ‘Why don’t we worry about the second one, and leave the first one until later?’ It was obviously the reverse thing to say, but that was the whole point. We both snickered as we shared our oh-so-clever way of allowing us not to linger on the fact that the words ‘I love you’ were out there finally.
Moving swiftly on, I told Jacque about how I’d shouted out loud when I’d read the article and Jacque said that when she’d mentioned it to Pam Tucker, Pam had told her there was a group in New York State called the Federal Defenders who were getting DNA cases tested and also that there were some new DNA labs there which specialised in rape cases.
I told Jacque all about my phone conversation with Joe Bullen and how he had surprised me with his positive response. She was so relieved to hear that my attorney was actually going to assist us in our efforts. There were tears and laughter and all sorts of things as we hatched our plans for the future.
For the first time, Jacque’s leaving that day hurt me so much that I lay on my bed face down, crying bitterly. It hurt being that close to willing myself alive again. It hurt to think what I’d been through those past seven years before Jacque. It hurt just to think how I had nearly lost everything to hatred and anger. I was so grateful that I had met Jacque. This was surely the beginning of the end of my ordeal.
My fingers were cramped like you would not believe by that Monday afternoon when I got to make my phone call to Joe Bullen, as arranged. I had been writing letters all weekend to anyone and everyone in my life, telling them about this exciting new development with DNA testing and how I would have the chance to use science to overturn my conviction. My right hand ached as I flexed it over and over while holding the phone in my left, both hands cuffed in front of me. I must have looked like one of those crabs you see in nature shows, its oversized claws constantly on the move.
But I did not have a whole lot of time to dwell on what I looked like because as soon as I got through to Mr Bullen, he said simply, ‘I got a phone call from the Delaware County Coroner who said they accidentally threw away all the autopsy material from this case.’
All I could do was stand there against the wall, still holding the phone to my ear, in chilled silence. Then I started trembling, before replying in a shaken voice, ‘Please, Mr Bullen, don’t do that to me.’
Mr Bullen responded angrily. He assumed – wrongly – that I was implying he had had something to do with the entire case evidence against me having been ‘accidentally’ thrown away. So we spent four or five minutes arguing over his part, or not, in my ‘mental conspiracy’ issues. He went on to tell me that the Coroner had managed to find two ‘slide preparations’ made from the autopsy evidence, which had not been thrown out; however, they were ‘stained’ with a solution that allowed them to be examined under a microscope but which would probably render them useless for our purposes. Nevertheless I should be grateful there were even these around, he told me, as if that were proof he had nothing to hide.
I started to shout that this was not about him, but about where the evidence was. The guards came and stood over me as I bellowed down the phone, ‘This is so unfair! Only on Friday you said that the Coroner had the evidence and was on board with the testing and now you’re telling me that in the span of three days it’s all gone?’ Then finally: ‘How can I prove my innocence with those two “specks of nothing”, as you put it, which have had chemicals poured all over them?’
As if talking to a particularly dim-witted child, Mr Bullen retorted that there was no reason for me to yell at him – as he had just done what I had requested and asked about ‘these DNA things’.
I was beyond being mocked or condescended to by this man, so I continued shouting: ‘Too bad you can’t be proven wrong about my guilt by these DNA tests, as God forbid you could be wrong, you bastard!’
That was when one of the guards yanked the phone out of my hand. I had had my chance to act like a real live human being, one who could yell at others and have the luxury of getting angry – all this was pointed out to me forcibly as I had my hair yanked by the second guard as they both shoved me back towards my cell.
I boiled over with anger as they made sport of the words they had overheard me yell during my phone call. If they were capable of thought, I spluttered, they would realise what the obvious outcome to any DNA tests would be, and that was why the evidence had gone missing!
The guard who had yanked my hair – a tall, slender man – started taunting me by copying what I had been saying: ‘Don’t you see what DNA means?!’ To which the other one – a very overweight man with a full facial beard typical of the men around Huntingdon – replied in this exaggerated ‘Hillybilly’ voice, ‘Whoa! Slow down there, college boy! You need to just slow yer roll down, as yous can’t jus’ get up outta yer grave and go home!’
Now we were in front of my cell and they were both doing this ‘retarded-person walk’ routine with exaggeratedly stumbled and stuttered steps. By this time I was so angry that I could feel my stupid brain shutting down, as it always did. That, to me, was the worst humiliation of all. When people tormented me I just closed down, unable to defend myself. I lost all verbal skills and the ability to see out of my left eye as pain shot across my forehead. I had no clue what they were saying as they pushed me back into my cell. I was inside that part of my head, which used to eat me alive back then. I flung myself on my bed, defeated once more.
Only the previous day I had been lying on that bed aching for today to come. And now here I was covered in the tear stains of a whole new sorrow. I had no idea what to write to my parents or to Jacque or to any one of the other people I had just told about the DNA fingerprint testing. Lying there crying hot, angry tears was about all I had the energy for.
I knew my anger would get me back up on my feet, though, and that I would hurl that ‘ball of fire’ which was beginning to burn inside of my guts at someone. But right then I was as down as I could ever be and I had no will to do anything. I found myself sitting there on my bed until about 4 a.m. the next morning, reading voraciously through my trial transcripts, which were now scattered all about my feet. I was feverishly searching for any mention of semen or blood or of any other bodily fluid used as evidence during the trial. Somehow, I had to find out who else had been in contact with any of that evidence, as we needed every little bit we could find.
With there being only minuscule amounts of DNA left to analyse, I may not have the best tools to work with, I realised. I may not have money or the best law firms defending me. And the size of this challenge was so great that I could not possibly face it alone. The good thing was, though, that now I had Jacque fighting alongside me, saying how much she cared for me and loved me. I’ll take those kinds of odds every time, I told myself.
Little did I know then, but my fight for DNA testing was to last fifteen long years. It was to become my ordeal within an ordeal. And I have never been so hurt nor so tested by any one thing as my fight to prove my innocence with science, and therefore to make others believe me.
Despite the early reality check on my efforts to have DNA testing, Joe Bullen did get the trial court to agree to send the contaminated slides off to a laboratory, in June 1988, to see whether they were suitable for testing. However, in August Cellmark diagnostics laboratories in Maryland confirmed that the two slides were indeed unusable.
On re-examining the trial transcripts, though, I found that some material from the autopsy had been sent to National Medical Associates (NMA) in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, but had not been returned. Maybe I was in with a chance? I wrote to the lab’s director, Vincent Cordova, who responded personally to say that yes, they did indeed have some DNA evidence left over from my case. I had my misgivings about telling Mr Bullen of this development, but I did anyway, on the condition that he did not inform the prosecution until we had obtained the court’s approval to use a new, improved DNA testing technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR. But he ignored my request and told the prosecutor, Dennis McAndrews, who then sent two detectives, David Piefer and John Davidson, without a court order to NMA, allegedly in order to take these new DNA slides back to Cellmark.
The slides never arrived. Instead, they remained in the personal possession of Detective Davidson for the next two years as I tried – and failed – to get them handed over to the Coroner for testing/safekeeping.
Stung by this final betrayal by Mr Bullen, I filed a motion to have him removed from my case and the Delaware County court appointed Scott Galloway as my attorney instead. I was forced to represent myself in the hearing to have Joe Bullen removed in order to achieve this.
In June 1989 I again tried to file a motion by myself, this time for a new trial based on my own discovery that the police had found a pair of black leather men’s gloves in Mrs Craig’s car, the evidence for which had been improperly withheld before my murder trial. After hours of reading the trial transcripts, I had unearthed this fact in the so-called ‘sidebar’ transcripts – that is, conversations not heard by the jury, which took place between the trial judge and the defence and prosecution lawyers.
My motion went unheard in both the local court in Delaware County and the State Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. I had asked Mr Galloway to file it for me, but he refused, saying he did not want to alienate Judge William R. Toal Jr, who had assigned him to the case. Scott told me that Judge Toal had been a Delaware County prosecutor for twenty years before becoming a judge, and that his father had been a Delaware County prosecutor before him. When I asked Scott why it mattered so much who had assigned him to my case, he replied simply, ‘The courthouse annexe is named for William R. Toal Sr. Do you really think you are going to get any kind of fairness from his son, the judge now handling your case, especially since his grandson, William R. Toal the Third, is a member of the prosecution team that is defending your DNA challenges?’
I appreciated his honesty, but felt that I was now completely left to my own efforts legally. It seemed that Scott Galloway was just a ‘manager’ appointed to a case no one else wanted to handle.
Eventually, I did file my own motion, based on my discovery about the gloves. I knew they were hugely important in tracing the identity of the real killer and I pursued this line of enquiry from my prison cell as best I could. But no files on the gloves existed, I was told, despite the fact that a police crime lab had examined and noted everything found in Mrs Craig’s car. Insane. How could you collect all sorts of evidence, but have no files on that evidence? Also, what efforts had been made to determine whose gloves they were, given that the car had been found with its doors locked and the engine still running?
Having been turned down without a hearing by both the Pennsylvanian courts, my next step was to draw up a habeas corpus motion and seek help from the United States federal courts. This meant I was challenging my case at the highest level of appeal, the last one before they execute you. So, unlike other men on Death Row, who try to delay their approach to this last level of appeal, I was jumping ahead and seeking extraordinary relief to prove my innocence.
It took nearly two years of hard work on my part, but eventually the federal court ordered a hearing on the gloves and also on what the prosecutors knew about the missing DNA slides, which were, I pointed out, still in the personal possession of Detective Davidson. Dennis McAndrews, the Delaware County prosecutor, went before the Federal Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, saying that he had no knowledge of any gloves, and that no reference had been made to them prior to, during or after the trial. He denied that any files on the gloves existed and asserted that therefore no files had been withheld improperly.
He asked that my appeal be dismissed on the grounds that I was attempting to represent myself whilst being represented by a court-appointed attorney, Scott Galloway. It worked. The federal court accepted this and dismissed my appeal. However, the president judge of the court personally called defence attorney Peter Goldberger, of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and asked him to take over my case as it related to the federal courts. A modest man and a former professor of law, he was the type of lawyer Death Row men dream of getting assigned to their case.
Meanwhile, back in Delaware County, Judge Toal ruled that it was up to the District Attorney to decide which laboratory to use for any future DNA testing. So, instead of having the best laboratory available to carry out the tests, as I had sought, it would be up to a newly opened police laboratory in Alabama, which had no previous experience of dealing with such materials.
I was returned to Huntingdon immediately after the Delaware County court ruling knowing that to try having any advanced form of DNA testing done would be a real joke. I was not being treated fairly, and I knew it. What lengths would these people go to to ensure I never had proper DNA testing done? Or never lived to tell this story?