SHARON FAHY WAS STILL HOME on the morning of April 6 when one of the detectives called to tell her they’d arrested Walter Ogrod for Barbara Jean’s murder.
“Who?” Sharon asked.
One of the people living with the Greens at the time, the detective explained.
Sharon called her job to say she wasn’t coming in. Who do I talk to now? she wondered. Who do I call? She wanted to call John but didn’t have the number—she’d sent him off to rehab with best wishes but without much hope that he’d really stop drinking. But this was the kind of news that could change everything for him. She called John’s mother, who worried the news might send him out drinking again but gave Sharon the number.
She called and left a message with John’s counselor and had to wait an hour and a half, going nuts, for John to call back. Finally he called and Sharon gave him the news: Walter Ogrod had been arrested for the murder.
“I don’t know who that is,” John said.
Father John Bonavitacola, the director of prison chaplaincy services for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, made a point of checking on newly arrested inmates charged with major crimes or crimes against children to make sure they’d been treated properly by the police and were safe from other inmates. When he arrived to visit Walter on the morning of April 6, there was a copy of that morning’s Daily News on the guard desk, the whole front page taken up with the news of Walter’s arrest and a picture of the original police sketch.
“I’m here to see that guy,” Father John said, pointing to the Daily News.
The guard told him which cell Walter was in, and Father John walked down to it. Walter was asleep, but Father John could see he didn’t look anything like the sketch. He went back to the guard’s desk.
“Woody,” he said to the guard, “I misunderstood. Which cell is Ogrod in?”
“No you didn’t,” she said. “Everyone says he doesn’t look anything like the sketch.”
Father John went back to Walter’s cell. Walter was exhausted, in shock, incoherent, possibly on the edge of a breakdown, and insisting he was innocent.1 Later that day Walter told doctors at the prison hospital he hadn’t slept in two days, that he’d felt suicidal when he first got to jail but wasn’t anymore. He said he was innocent.2
Heidi Guhl, a friend of Greg’s who’d been a regular at 7244 Rutland until Maureen’s murder, heard about an arrest in Barbara Jean’s murder on TV.
Oh God, they finally got him, she thought.
A picture of Walter appeared on the screen.
No way, Heidi thought. No way. They got the wrong guy.
She called Greg. They knew Walter was a pushover and couldn’t stick up for himself, but confess to murder? They went to see him as soon as they could.
“Why are you so stupid?” Greg yelled at him. “How could you sign that?”
“They said I could go home if I signed it,” Walter said.
“Walt, you signed a confession to murder,” Greg yelled. “You ain’t going home.”
That morning, Devlin and Worrell searched 7244 Rutland Street. They didn’t find any evidence of Barbara Jean’s murder but weren’t surprised, given it had been four years.
Devlin, Worrell, and Sergeant Nodiff also went back to the Greens’. They needed the Greens to corroborate their story and had some leverage: Sarge was looking at jail time on the outstanding warrant from when he’d skipped his sentencing for beating Walter up in November 1988. When Devlin told the Greens they’d arrested Walter, Alice didn’t think it made any sense. She didn’t like Walter but didn’t think he was capable of that kind of thing. Plus her parents had been there all day, and she’d gotten home sometime that afternoon; how could it have happened in the house?
Her father felt the same way. He’d been there all afternoon; if something had happened he would’ve heard it and killed Ogrod himself.
Alice told the detectives she hadn’t gotten home on the afternoon of the murder until later in the afternoon; this was a small change from her story in 1988. She told them how obnoxious Walter was—he’d spanked her when she was walking through the house dressed only in a towel, said rude things to her friends. But she still didn’t think he could’ve killed Barbara Jean; he wasn’t smart enough or slick enough to pull something like that off. The detectives asked if Walter had ever gone in the basement and she said he had, to do laundry and use the gym set.
Sergeant Nodiff, who hadn’t been in the interrogation room when Walter’s statement was taken and who’d been concerned enough about it to call in ADA Casey at 2:30 AM to review it, apparently was still wondering. He asked Alice if Walter was the kind of person who would confess to something he didn’t do. She said no.3
The detectives got a story from Charliebird, now ten: Walter once showed him pornographic magazines and told him how to use “jerkoff cream.”4
(Walter denies this. He says he absolutely never showed Charlie magazines, let alone said anything to him about jerking off. If Charlie saw pornographic magazines, Walter insists, they were the biker magazines Sarge left all over the house.)
When the detectives told Linda her childrens’ new, damning stories about Walter, she said she’d never heard them before. She said she’d never seen Walter with any blood on him that day and that his behavior was normal all day, even after Barbara Jean’s body was found. When the detectives asked if Walter ever impressed her as having “an unusual interest in children” she said, “No, not really; he really had no time for kids.” She also said she’d seen Walter’s pornographic magazines in his closet and it was all “normal”; she’d never seen any child pornography in the house.5
What if Sarge didn’t hear anything on the day of the murder because he was passed out on the couch? the detectives asked. What if Linda hadn’t heard anything because the air conditioner in the dining room, which rattled like some ancient warplane, blocked the noise?
Possible, the Greens agreed. But it didn’t make much sense to them.
With that, the detectives had all they were going to get from the Greens. It didn’t exactly explain how Walter could’ve beaten a little girl to death in the middle of the afternoon in a tiny house with at least two other adults and two large dogs in the living room without anyone hearing or seeing anything—not Barbara Jean coming in, not Walter taking her to the basement, not the beating or screaming, not the dogs barking or the foundational house buzz of the garage door raising and lowering as Walter supposedly came and went, looking for garbage bags in which to hide the body, not any change in Walter’s behavior even as more people came home and talked about Barbara Jean and the people and police filled the street outside, talking about it.
The information from the Greens didn’t exactly explain any of this, but it would do.
Other than the follow-up visit to the Greens and the minimal search of 7244 Rutland, Devlin and Worrell made little effort to corroborate Walter’s statement. They didn’t take his photo to the witnesses for identification; they didn’t use luminol, a blood-detection agent that even years later can show where blood was spilled, to search his basement; they didn’t test the scrapings from under Barbara Jean’s fingernails to see if there was skin that matched his. They never spoke to Hal Vahey, Walter’s friend who was living at 7244 at the time of the murder, who got home a little later that afternoon and would’ve told them that Walter was home at around 5:00 PM, the same time the man with the box was walking on Castor Avenue, and that Walter seemed normal, not excited or stressed. Vahey also would’ve told them that he and many other people did their laundry in the basement of 7244 and that after Barbara Jean’s murder it looked just the same as it always had—junk everywhere and a transmission blocking the back door, no blood, no signs of struggle or of sudden cleaning. Vahey also would have said that his Doberman, Angel, was a “well-trained and protective” dog who would’ve heard a child screaming in the basement and barked “loud and long” until someone checked it out. No one in the house that day remembered the dog acting strange that afternoon.6
Something else the detectives didn’t do was unusual: they didn’t search Walter’s apartment in Glenside. Though he’d moved there a little more than a year after the murder, he still might have had the weight set or the pull-down bar from it, which they claimed was the murder weapon. Wouldn’t they want to look for some trophy of Barbara Jean, or, God forbid, some other victims? Or maybe child pornography or some other evidence of a deviant interest in children?
All of these would be good reasons to search Walter’s apartment. Walter’s landlord, Howard Serotta, shocked as he was by Walter’s arrest because Walter had never seemed like a violent person, understood this. He assumed the detectives would be back to search the apartment, so he waited a few weeks to clean it out but never heard from them. The only police he heard from after the arrest were local animal control officers, asking about Walter’s dog. After a few weeks Serotta finally did clean out the apartment, wondering again as he did why the detectives had asked about a weight set. He found nothing of interest—no weight set, no kids’ things, nothing suspicious. He found a lot of Star Trek books and magazines and he found some pornography, none involving children.7
Devlin and Worrell didn’t search for evidence everywhere they could have, but they did try to find people with bad things to say about Walter. Several neighbors had already told them he was weird, but they needed more than that. Devlin and Worrell pressured Dawn Vahey, Hal’s sister, to give them a creepy Walter story but she was adamant that he didn’t look anything like the sketch, so the detectives gave up.8 And after Robert Fritz, Walter’s friend who’d been living at 7244 when Maureen Dunne was murdered, got a phone call from Walter in jail, two homicide detectives—Fritz couldn’t remember their names—came to the Pet Center, where he worked. They told him he and Walter had spoken about the murder. Fritz told them no, they’d talked about school and old friends. The detectives insisted he and Walter had talked about the murder and took him down to the Roundhouse to scare him. They told him what Walter must have said to him about the murder and he told them again that Walter hadn’t said anything about it. They pushed, said they didn’t believe him, but finally he got so upset they let him go.9
As an expert homicide investigator hired by Walter’s defense on appeal wrote years later, “Given the hedging language of [Walter’s] statement itself, the fact that portions of it were not consistent with known facts, and the lack of corroborating evidence, the police should not simply have closed the case upon receipt of Mr. Ogrod’s ‘confession.’”10
But that’s what they did.
Peter Blust made it to the detention center to see Walter on the evening of his arrest. Walter told him he’d been forced into giving a false confession. The next day, feeling very much in over his head in a capital case, Blust reached out to private eye and former Philadelphia homicide detective Joe Brignola, who’d served a subpoena for him once. Blust asked to meet that night.
They met at a McDonald’s near Brignola’s house. Blust explained Walter’s situation, and Brignola asked who the cops involved were; when Blust told him he said, according to Blust, that given the detectives involved in Walter’s case he wasn’t surprised that the confession had been coerced. Blust cracked a half-kidding joke that Brignola should wear a wire and engage his old colleagues in a conversation about Walter’s statement.11
Brignola didn’t offer any help. After the meeting he called his old friend, Joseph Casey, the prosecutor, and told him about it.12 Casey took advantage of this heads-up and would be ready to discredit Blust at a key moment.
A few days after Walter’s arrest, Mark Greenberg was appointed to be his attorney. Greenberg was not a public defender; the Philadelphia public defender’s office had a good reputation but didn’t take homicide cases in 1992. Homicides were handled by private lawyers appointed by judges. The problem was that although a private lawyer hired to defend a wealthy client could expect to charge $50,000 for a capital murder trial, the lawyers appointed to defend poor defendants in capital cases got a $1,700 flat fee and $400 for each day in court—an average of $2,700 per case for cases that required, on average, five hundred hours of work. Also, it could take up to two years to get paid even this small amount, and there was so little money for expert witnesses that judges often denied defense requests for funding. Many experts wouldn’t testify in Philadelphia cases anyway, because they knew their fees would be cut sharply or not paid at all.13
Not surprisingly, few lawyers were willing to take state-funded capital cases in Philadelphia in the early ’90s; out of eight thousand lawyers in the city at that time, only eighty were qualified and willing to take on death penalty cases.14 Mark Greenberg was young but had done capital murder trials before. He would work Walter’s case essentially alone; the court authorized $300 for an investigator, and a private investigator put in eight hours and forty-five minutes of work; Greenberg was also able to hire a forensics expert to review some physical evidence in the case.15
The year after Walter’s arrest, judges in Philadelphia admitted there weren’t enough private lawyers willing to take death penalty cases and allowed the public defender’s office to take one case in five. Each defendant who was assigned a public defender got two lawyers, a mitigation specialist (someone trained to investigate a defendant’s background to provide reasons why he shouldn’t be executed, if the case came to that), and an investigator, as well as a fund for outside experts and a staff psychiatrist to evaluate him. The importance of resources to mounting a strong defense became clear very quickly: between April 1993, when public defenders started taking murder cases, and July 1995, defendants with public defenders were not given a single death sentence while those represented by private attorneys were given thirty-three.16
Walter remembers the DA offering a deal, a life sentence if he pled guilty.
“Greenberg told me I could face the death penalty, and I said I’d rather be dead than plead guilty,” Walter told me.
Later, one of Walter’s prosecutors told me that was a standard deal they offered in murder cases. He didn’t take it. That was the gamble of going to trial: his life would hinge on whether the jury thought he was a liar.