IN FEBRUARY 1992, NOT LONG after John and Sharon split up, John heard Barbara Jean’s case had been transferred to new detectives again, so he called them.
“Well, you’re the new guys,” he said. “When do you want to meet?”
“Come on down tonight,” the detective said.
John and Sharon, though separated, went to the Roundhouse together.
The new detectives on the case were Marty Devlin and Paul Worrell, part of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of Philadelphia homicide. Marty Devlin was known as one of the smartest and hardest-working detectives in Philadelphia. He was short and cocky and wore Ray-Bans, loud Hawaiian-style shirts, and a mustache. He had twenty-seven years of experience, five in homicide, and after all those years as a cop knew, as a fellow detective put it, “as much about character and personality as any good shrink.”1 Devlin didn’t give up on a case until his superiors forced him, and interrogations were his specialty; he could convince anybody, even the worst murderer, that he was his best friend, his only hope, and that he should tell him what happened. Devlin’s intelligence, hard work, and high clearance rate—95 percent, one of the best rates on the force2—had earned him the nicknames “the Golden Marty”3 and “Detective Perfect.”4
A detective’s clearance rate is the most important number by which he or she will be judged. Because homicide detectives “catch” their new cases in turn (when a new homicide comes in, the next detective up takes it), the law of averages says that sometimes you get a “dunker” or “smoking gun”—a killer standing over a body with a gun—and other times you get a “whodunit” with no witnesses and no evidence, impossible to clear. Statistically this should even out over time, so Devlin’s unusually high clearance rate sticks out.
One of Devlin’s most controversial cases—most successful, from his point of view—was still recent when he was assigned to Barbara Jean’s murder. On the night of April 9, 1990, according to five eyewitnesses, Roy Shephard, a worker at Jacko’s Steak Shop in North Philadelphia, shot another worker named Christian Bradley in the face and then shot himself in the head. Another coworker, panicking, picked the gun up and threw it out a window. But Devlin thought the disposal of the gun and the location of Shephard’s wound on the left side of his head (as opposed to the right side, where right-handed people usually shoot themselves) indicated that something was going on, so he brought the eyewitnesses in to the Roundhouse for individual interviews, several of which went through the night. By the time Devlin was through, four of the eyewitnesses—including two teenaged girls whose interviews started at 1:15 and 1:20 AM—had changed their story: they now said that after Shephard shot Bradley he dropped the gun and the owner of the shop, Jack Combs, came in from the kitchen, picked the gun up, and shot Shephard. One eyewitness refused to change his story, and one fifteen-year-old whose interview had started after 1:00 AM retracted her statement immediately, begging Devlin to accept that the shootings had been a murder-suicide. But Devlin used the new version of events he’d gotten from the four witnesses, and Jack Combs was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.5
That case was a kind of Ultimate Devlin: applying pressure in all forms, friendly, helpful, aggressive; going all night, getting the statements he wanted and the information he needed. More recently, in October 1991, just a few months before taking over Barbara Jean’s case, Devlin had solved the rape and murder of a seventy-seven-year-old woman by getting the suspect to confess. The alleged killer, Anthony Wright, a twenty-year-old with a seventh-grade education, recanted his confession soon after, but would be convicted of the murder in 1993 only to be exonerated by DNA testing and freed in 2016.6
Devlin’s partner, Paul Worrell, had twenty years on the force, six in homicide. He was tall, soft-spoken, and solid, wore gray suits and played the good cop to Devlin’s bad cop when they worked an interrogation that way.
The two men, both Philadelphia natives, were new to the SIU and new partners when they were assigned Barbara Jean’s case in early 1992 but had known each other for more than fifteen years.7 They’d first met as young cops in the mid-1970s8 and had both come of age in a police department famous, under Chief and later Mayor Frank Rizzo, for its brutality and coercive techniques. Rizzo had risen through the ranks of the police department to become chief in 1967. One defense lawyer describes Rizzo’s standing instructions to police at the time as “Get the confession by any and all means, and I’ll back you if you go over the line,” and in 1977 the Philadelphia Inquirer won a Pulitzer for a series of stories about dozens of suspects being threatened with pistols or beaten to force confessions from them. Some suspects had been taken from the Roundhouse to the emergency room for broken jaws or fractured skulls before being taken back to booking.9
When the murder rate in Philadelphia skyrocketed in the late 1980s due to a sharp rise in the use of crack cocaine and the violence that came with it, pressure on the police department to clear cases and bring the murder rate down intensified. As Paul Solotaroff wrote in a Rolling Stone article in 2015 about the Anthony Wright case, “For [cops] weaned on Rizzo’s bruised-knuckles ethos, this meant doubling down on the strong-arm stuff, and no worries if an innocent kid got swept up in the net. The jails, after all, were full of such cases. What did one more come to, for the greater good?”10
Devlin and Worrell’s unit, the SIU, had been started informally in the late 1970s and officially founded in 1980 to work high-profile and cold cases like Barbara Jean’s that took more time and attention than homicide detectives taking cases in their regular turn could provide.
“It’s very important to solve a murder within the first hours,” a lieutenant who ran the SIU in the early 1990s explained to the Philadelphia City Paper in 1994. “You can never recreate a crime scene. Witnesses forget what they saw or become hard to find. That’s why it is so important to solve crimes right away, and that takes a lot of work. As the number of killings increased, it became harder to work on the older ones or those that take more time.”11
Known as the “Wacker Squad” because it attracted detectives with “wacky” personalities, the SIU was successful, solving nearly four hundred murders in a four-year stretch in the late ’80s and early ’90s, making Philadelphia Homicide among the best in the country during that period.12 Devlin’s cockiness was evident around the time of Walter’s case when he posed for a “Wacker Squad” profile in a local paper, walking down the street wearing his Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, a shotgun resting on his hip.
When Devlin and Worrell took over Barbara Jean’s case in early 1992, they thought the original detectives had been too fixated on the sketch, too interested in Ross Felice. Barbara Jean had to have been killed nearby by someone she knew, they thought, so they would focus on her block unless something convinced them the murder happened somewhere else.13 They wanted to know who lived nearby: Was there somone on the block Barbara Jean had been comfortable with? Were there any trouble houses on the block?
It had been almost four years since the murder, so new evidence in the case was unlikely. In order to solve it, they needed a confession.
Cue Detective Devlin.
John and Sharon arrived at the Roundhouse in the evening of a cold day at the end of February, expecting to meet the new detectives and get an update on the case. Instead, they were put in separate interview rooms and interrogated, just as they had been on the night of the murder.
Detective Devlin told Sharon she knew John killed Barbara Jean and was covering for him. She said no. Devlin insisted.
“Listen to me,” Sharon fumed. “I am not even with this man right now. If I thought he killed my daughter, I’d kill him. He’d be dead. Get that through your head: I’m not protecting him for anything. I would not protect him.”
“You’re protecting him,” Devlin insisted.
“You don’t understand,” Sharon said. “I would not protect somebody that did that, I don’t care who he is. There’s no way.”
Devlin and Worrell pressured her for hours without any luck.
Sharon couldn’t believe it.
“You gotta be kidding,” she told them. “This is almost four years down the line here, and you’re gonna tell me we’re back to this?”
With John, Devlin and Worrell started friendly, taking down his information, listening to him describe the day of the murder. They left the room for a while, and when they came back, Devlin said, “Here’s the problem. You changed your statement [from 1988]. You’re a fucking liar. You fucking did this.”
“No way,” John said.
“You’re lying to us now, just like you were lying to us then.”
John couldn’t believe it.
“You listen to me, you fucking assholes,” he said. “You go get the fucking file, you bring it in here, and you show me where I changed my fucking statement. That was the worst day of my life. I know what the fuck happened on my end. I ain’t changed nothing.”
Devlin insisted John was lying, but it was a bluff; John’s story was the same.
“I can’t believe we’re four years in and this is where we’re at again,” John told Devlin. “You’re pointing the finger at me? Fuck you. You ain’t pinning shit on me ’cause it’s the easy fucking way out for you.”
Devlin and Worrell worked back and forth between the Fahys, sometimes leaving one alone for a while to work together on the other one, sometimes splitting up to speak with them individually. But neither John nor Sharon would change their story, so after several hours Devlin let them go.
“We’re getting a lawyer,” Sharon told John as they left the building. “Because if they think they’re just gonna wrap this up in a neat little bow and pretend that you did it after all this time, they’re crazy.”14
The Fahys’ lawyer called the detectives and told them that from now on they wouldn’t talk without him present. A couple days later the detectives asked for a meeting and explained to John and Sharon that the tough interview was part of starting an investigation from scratch, going over every detail, reinvestigating every possibility. That’s how they did these things. But they’d known as soon as Sharon and John left that John had nothing to do with the murder. No hard feelings?
John and Sharon hated Devlin but didn’t care about that. The way John saw it was, Look, you don’t know me, I don’t know you, I don’t care how you treat me—just find whoever killed Barbara Jean. Just find him.
No hard feelings, the Fahys agreed, but they were angry that after four years the police were back at square one: no leads, no information, nothing. Sharon told the detectives again to look at 7244 Rutland and at the house down the block where, a few days after the murder, the drunk father had shown them where he’d ripped out the carpet in his basement.
After their new interrogations by Devlin and Worrell, the Fahys remained separated. John went through an outpatient rehab program and on March 30, their anniversary, called Sharon to tell her he’d been sober forty days. Sharon was torn but felt he’d start drinking again if she gave in.
“Just leave me alone,” she said. It was the hardest thing to do. She hung up the phone and cried at her desk at work.
John went to a bar and got drunk. When he sobered up he knew he had to go to an inpatient clinic. He called Sharon to make sure his insurance was in place, then went back to his AA group and told them he needed to go away. They sent him to a rehab place, a cross between hospital and camp. During detox John roomed with a religious former cop who kept telling him that if he wanted the police to find the killer, if he wanted to heal himself, he needed to get on his knees and pray. For days the guy just annoyed John, but eventually he decided to try it. He got on his knees and prayed. It was April 5, 1992.