WAS WALTER OGROD A LIAR and a child killer or an absolutely innocent man? One key line in the statement Devlin and Worrell took summed up the whole question: Did Walter say, I could never do that to a little girl—I’d kill myself, as he claims, or did he say what Devlin wrote: I want to kill myself for what I did to that little girl?
Which was the truth?
The first time I spoke to Walter, I was struck by his speech impediment: while the detectives swore they’d never noticed he had one, it was bad enough to me that I had a hard time understanding him on the phone. I’d heard he had one growing up, and later read about it in his school and medical notes going back to when he was eleven.1
And if the detectives would lie about not noticing a speech impediment, what should I make of their claims that Walter never seemed tired, never yawned, though he’d been up for thirty hours by the time they interviewed him, or that they’d never noticed anything “off” about him? Everyone I’d talked to about Walter had said something like that: he was “off” somehow, “slow,” that if you met him you might not pick up on it right away but sooner or later you’d understand. A few told me he was “retarded”; his brother Greg had described him as “not retarded but on the road there.”2
The detectives, I thought, were not telling the entire truth about the interrogation. But that didn’t mean Walter was.
When I began corresponding with Walter I assumed he’d try to manipulate me, to make me feel bad for him. But his letters had no emotional appeals, not even any emotion, really—no long, persuasive descriptions of key events or ideas or feelings that he’d had. There were few sentences about himself in the pages and pages of information and arguments he wrote about his case, and those came only when I prodded him.
Likewise, on the phone he wasn’t articulate about himself or his emotions or his situation, but he understood his case well and could explain the problems with it in detail. He answered questions directly, stating facts; whatever it was that was “off” about him, it didn’t seem to me to be his intelligence. Instead of emotion, he fixated on detail. If I asked him what he’d felt at a certain moment—when he was arrested, for example—he answered with a word or two. If I asked about some aspect of his childhood, he would give a word or two and then revert to talking about his case, urging me to find a particular document or person that would support one of his claims. Once, when I asked him how he was doing, he said prison was “depressing.” Another time he said, “It gets a little monotonous in here.” At first I thought he was just prone to understatement.
I asked him to tell his lawyer to let me review his entire case file and was a little surprised when he did. I ended up in a small conference room at his lawyer’s office with six double-sized legal boxes piled on the oval table and floor. I read everything. I thought Walter could be telling the truth. But the idea of someone giving a false confession to the murder of a child is hard to take.
One spring at a conference I approached Peter Neufeld, one of the founders of the Innocence Project, to ask his advice about what I should look for in investigating the case, which documents I needed to get, what reports I was entitled to see, whom I should be sure to speak with. I explained Walter’s case briefly and he told me I could send him a two-page write-up—“Two pages, not eight,” he said—and he would look it over.
I sent him the write-up, and in a couple of weeks he called. He said that the detectives’ story about Walter not being a suspect until he broke down and cried in the interrogation room was an “MO” he’d seen before in false confession cases—in fact, the Innocence Project had just freed an inmate from Pennsylvania death row in whose case the police had an audiotaped confession that Neufeld said was detailed, chilling, and (as DNA proved) false. He asked me jokingly if I’d made up the case, it was such a perfect example of a setup for a false confession. After I told him Walter’s statement was in the detective’s handwriting, he wouldn’t even refer to it as a confession anymore and stopped me when I did. After more questions he said, “It looks like this guy might really be innocent. I don’t know if we can prove it, but he could really be.”
I thought, We?
Neufeld said I’d have to do the legwork on the case. They didn’t have anyone available, but they’d help me, and I could tell people the Innocence Project was interested. This would prove incredibly helpful, a shorthand way of letting people know that my concerns about the case had something to them. And hearing from one of the most experienced innocence lawyers in the country that Walter’s case was a “textbook” example of a false confession made Walter’s version of events even more credible.
I met Walter in person a year after we began corresponding.
It was a long walk to the high-security visiting cells at the State Correctional Institution at Greene (SCI Greene), down bright linoleum corridors and through several series of iron doors. When I got to the visiting cell I pulled the door open and there he was: he looked the same as in pictures, his black hair greasy and messed, though now gray at the temples, his soft face with dark eyes and pale skin. We sat on either side of a small table divided up to the ceiling by Plexiglas with mesh on the sides so we could hear each other. He was wearing glasses with thick plastic frames and an orange jumpsuit, and his hands were cuffed in front of him. From certain angles, the way his lip curved into his soft cheek gave him a touch of the hallmark facial characteristics of people with Down syndrome. I hadn’t noticed this in any pictures of him, so it suddenly made more sense that people who’d known him had thought he might be intellectually disabled: that quality of his face, along with his speech impediment, poor social skills, and malleability, had combined to give that impression.
We said hi and he said, “It’s pretty empty in here and all,” referring to the fact that we were the only two in the no-contact visitors area that morning. I told him he looked the same except for his gray hair, and he said, “I got gray?” Then he bent over, showing me the top of his head, and asked if he was losing his hair. I said he wasn’t.
We talked for a couple of minutes, a conversation like our phone conversations: he answered my questions about his life in prison without much self-reflection or articulation of feelings and got back to the list of things he wanted me to look into, the documents and witnesses I needed to find.
At a pause I looked at him directly and asked, “Walter, did you kill Barbara Jean Horn?”
He looked back at me and said, “No.”
“Do you know what happened to her?” I asked.
He looked away, then back, confused.
“Do you mean, like, what the trial said and all?”
“No,” I said. “I know about the trials. But aside from all that, do you know what happened to that little girl?”
“No,” he said.
He’d had plenty of time to prepare for that question, so I didn’t give his answer much weight. But I had to ask him to his face, and he’d answered me directly.
Sitting in the visitor’s cell, trying to establish a rapport with this person I’d read so much about for so long, I was struck by his lack of ability to connect even in the small ways we all do in conversation: someone tells you something, you have eye contact, body language, and gestures that communicate your feelings even more than your language does. But that level of communication didn’t happen with Walter, and, as in his letters, not only did he not try to use emotion to get to me, I had to pry at his feelings and then only got them in one- or two-word answers: something “felt bad” or made him “pissed.”
The longer I spoke with him, the more I thought he must have developmental disabilities. But that didn’t answer the question of whether this hunched, handcuffed person was a murderer or a victim.
At one point I tried to come at the subject sideways by asking him about his sex life. He wasn’t going to admit to an interest in underage girls if he’d had one, but I needed to at least draw him out on the subject a little. He told me he’d had sex with several women, a total of maybe a dozen times. I asked him if he’d ever been in love, and he told me the following story: One Halloween night years before his arrest he’d gone to a strip club in Northeast Philadelphia called Visions and talked to a beautiful dancer named Autumn. He’d talked to her all night, she was special, and after that he went to see her dance a few times but never talked to her again. Then, years later, when he was in jail, some guy he knew was on the phone with a friend who was at Visions and she was there. The guy’s friend at Visions told her Walter was on the line, and she remembered him, she couldn’t believe it, she was too excited to talk to him just then and ran off to the bathroom, crying. But she’d told the guy’s friend to tell Walter she would write to him. He got a letter from her, and they wrote back and forth a few times. Walter thought they were falling in love, but then she stopped writing.
Walter’s idea of love, then, was something he’d felt about a stripper who’d been nice to him. But it was also a strange story: why would a stripper remember a customer for four years and write to him after he was arrested for murder? It didn’t make sense, but Walter insisted it was true.
I spent my first day interviewing Walter going over his version of events, on the lookout for a change in his story of either the day of the murder or his interrogation by detectives, but his stories hadn’t changed. I’d hoped it would be easier in person to get some better understanding of what he’d gone through from his perspective, but that hadn’t happened either; he explained his days and memories like listings.
The contrast between the detail of his memories of dates and locations and his lack of ability to describe his own thoughts or feelings was striking. When I asked about his mother, he said, “She had her own problems and stuff.” Even without knowing the medical terms for her “problems”—paranoid schizophrenia and Munchausen syndrome by proxy—there might have been a lot for him to talk about; he’d wanted nothing to do with her in her final years, and the last time he’d seen her, by chance on a bus, he’d ignored her. He learned only later that after his arrest she’d put posters up around town, trying to find evidence of his innocence, and had gone to see a local columnist to beg her to write about his case. (Instead, the columnist wrote about the obviously mentally ill mother doing the best she could for a murder-defendant son.)3 Soon after that she’d died in her apartment, and her body went undiscovered for weeks.
I asked Walter about all that, but he didn’t say much. On the other hand, when I asked him how long it took to drive from Rutland Street to the shack on the Jersey Shore he stood up, gesticulating with his cuffed hands on the Plexiglas, and for several minutes gave me street-by-street directions. Later he wanted to tell me every stop he made on the three-hundred-mile delivery route the night before his meeting with detectives. I told him it wasn’t necessary. A few months later he sent me a map, hand drawn on six or eight regular-sized sheets of paper taped together, of his delivery route, with every stop and the number of pallets of rolls he’d left there.
In person, it was clear that Walter does have emotions, though he doesn’t process and express them like most people. And that he has difficulty reading and responding to eye contact, gestures, tone of voice, and emotional cues.
It was also clear that he hated that people think he’s stupid or mentally ill; he told me he was worried that someday he’d have an appeals lawyer who wanted him to plead insanity to get off death row.
“They’ll try to say I’m mentally ill,” he said. “They like to say everyone’s a little screwy. I’m not going to say I’m mental. Because I didn’t do it.”
As I left the prison after my first six hours of talking to Walter, I was convinced it was impossible that Devlin and Worrell, who had him in the homicide office for at least fourteen hours, didn’t notice that he was “off.” But what did “off” mean? I didn’t think he was slow—that wasn’t the problem. He understood his case very well. But it was something.
That night in my hotel near the prison it occurred to me that Walter behaved like some of the students with developmental disorders that a friend of mine taught. He reminded me of the kids who had what was called, at the time, Asperger’s syndrome (now part of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD), which is characterized by difficulty in picking up emotional cues, lack of empathy or emotional connection, and lack of ability to process emotions. I knew from Walter’s medical records that some of the diagnoses he’d received as a child—organic brain dysfunction, ego weakness—corresponded with aspects of Asperger’s syndrome, so I described Walter’s behavior to my friend over the phone and she said it sounded like Asperger’s but obviously couldn’t diagnose him over the phone.4
I thought of the passage Devlin had written down at the alleged moment in the confession when Walter broke down: in addition to “I feel like killing myself over this,” Devlin alleged that Walter had said, essentially, You’ve got to give me a minute. You have no idea how hard this is for me, I never meant to kill that little girl.
Walter was not capable of conceiving or expressing that many layers of emotional information—balancing an understanding of the detectives’ frustration with an expression of his own powerful emotions and a plea for more time and stating it all clearly in a high-pressure situation.
Even with all of the problems with the case against Walter, I’d always wondered how some people could be so sure his confession was false. But it wasn’t just that the language in the confession was smoother than Walter’s or that he’d supposedly spoken coherently for more than two and a half hours without being interrupted. The detectives, I realized after meeting Walter, had put complex emotions and feelings in the mouth of a man whose brain didn’t operate that way.