WALTER’S TESTIMONY WOULD BE the center of the defense case, but before Mark Greenberg put him on the stand, he wanted the jury to understand how flimsy the case against him was. To reinforce that Walter looked nothing like the man with the TV box, Greenberg would put on the two witnesses whom Joseph Casey had conspicuously not wanted to call. Then he would put on witnesses who would make sure the jury understood that for about three years, several of the witnesses and many of the detectives on the case had been sure Ross Felice was the killer.
First, Greenberg wanted the jury to know that plenty of people thought Walter was actually a good person. A woman Walter had worked for, the parents of one of his friends, and a friend of his all testified that he was a good person and a conscientious worker.
Then Greenberg put on Jonathan Jones, the detective who’d become suspicious of Ross Felice on the night of the murder, and other detectives who described the identifications of other suspects—Ross Felice, his brother, Michael, and Raymond Sheehan—that each of the witnesses had made. Greenberg put Detective Joseph Walsh on to confirm that two days after the killing, Michael Massi, the witness Casey had put on the stand to say he didn’t agree with the composite sketch, had told him the composite was “almost exact.”1
Christian Kochan, the paperboy, described squeezing past the man with the box on the sidewalk and said he never got a good look at the man’s face but thought he was in his early thirties with dark brown hair.
David Schectman, the fireman who’d told police on the night of the murder that he’d seen and talked to the man with the box for eleven minutes, was the most important witness. (His wife, Lorraine, had passed away due to complications from her MS.) Greenberg led him carefully through a description of the crucial time between 5:12 and 5:23 on the afternoon of the murder, when Schectman had interacted with the man with the box. But Schectman was now vague on many details. He said he’d really only had about fifteen seconds to focus on the man’s face and during that brief time had been concentrating on the box anyway. He explained that since his wife died he’d started intensive therapy and learned from it that he fixated more on objects than people and was no good at remembering faces. Guilt about not catching the killer right away, he said, had led him to identify the other suspects.2
Greenberg asked if he remembered telling detectives on the night of the murder that he’d spoken to the man with the box for eleven minutes. Schectman said he’d only seen the man off and on. Greenberg asked him about identifying Felice at the basketball court in January 1989 and produced Schectman’s interview from the day after, in which he’d said there was “no doubt in my mind whatsoever” about Felice being the man. Schectman said he didn’t remember that statement and didn’t remember identifying anyone in the gym.3
David Schectman’s evolving story in Barbara Jean’s case demonstrates some of the problems with eyewitness testimony. He was waiting for his kids to come home from camp when a murderer walked up to him carrying a TV box. Schectman couldn’t have known that, of course, but when he finds out he can’t help but think that if he’d figured it out he would’ve caught the guy immediately. He calls the police, wanting so much to help, and tells them he saw the man, even talked to him, for eleven minutes. He knows this because he was checking his watch the whole time. He could identify the man for sure—he was right there.
Schectman and his wife help a police artist make a sketch, it goes up everywhere; the police show him pictures and Schectman picks a guy out. But nothing comes of it. The police come back, they take him to a gym and yes, that’s the guy. That is the guy. Schectman is trying to help so much he eventually IDs three different people, and each time he’s sure. But even the act of working on the composite sketch might have settled certain details in his mind in certain ways, and once the police sketch was up all over town, those details may have been more deeply imprinted on his memory.
These kinds of things happen to eyewitnesses. Because memory isn’t a videotape but a narrative we form of our past, it is more susceptible to revision than we realize. Our brains mix events, louden or soften bits of memory based on later impressions, and lock on these later revisions as truth. By the time of the trial, David Schectman had been through several waves of this.
In Walter’s case, however, the eyewitness testimony was actually very strong—all five of them describe the man as below-average height, slim, with light brown hair, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. They disagreed on whether he had a light mustache or no mustache or cutoff jeans or hemmed khaki shorts, and whether his T-shirt had a pocket or writing on it.
It’s rare to have prosecutors argue that the testimony of eyewitnesses is unreliable, especially when there are five of them. Usually they have to argue the other way, that questionable eyewitness testimony is good enough, and they’re often so persuasive that eyewitness misidentification has played a role in about 75 percent of the DNA exonerations since 1989.4 In this case, Joseph Casey needed to discredit what was, overall, a convincing description, so he did. How many people would have to be freed if the Philadelphia DA’s office was as skeptical of eyewitnesses in every case as it was in Walter’s?
Since David Schectman was a defense witness, Joseph Casey’s questioning of him would technically be a cross-examination. In court, this meant that the prosecutor would have to follow certain rules as he tried to discredit the main witness in his case.
Casey had Schectman explain that, while in therapy, he had realized how much guilt he’d felt about not looking into the box when he might have had a chance to grab the murderer. Guilt, he said, and his desire to be helpful, had led him to identify the wrong men.5 Then Casey had Schectman, always willing to help, agree that since he had no idea what the man with the TV box looked like, he couldn’t be positive it wasn’t Walter.
With that, the transformation of Schectman’s eleven-minute interaction with a man he could identify into a fifteen-second glimpse of a man who might’ve been Walter was complete.
Greenberg never asked Schectman about the man’s voice, which he had described as normal, no speech impediment.
Walter’s chance to save his own life came when he took the stand on Friday, October 29, 1993. After a year and a half of insisting he was innocent he now had a chance to tell his story, and if the jury believed him, he’d go home. If not, to prison or death row.
He was twenty-eight but still looked younger, his face still soft, oval. He wore a threadbare tan suit and heavy black shoes.6 He’d spent much of the trial looking through documents and making notes, trying to hold his face steady. On the stand his expression was blank, limned with fear and defiance.
He raised his right hand and was sworn in, his voice barely audible.
“Please keep your voice up so the jury can hear you,” Greenberg said.
Walter nodded. He hunched in his chair. He was scared. He knew his speech impediment made him difficult to understand and that people thought he was strange; he’d heard the names his whole life: “freak,” “retard.” He wasn’t good with expressing emotions and was struggling with so many: fear; anxiety; hope; anger about being in jail for something he didn’t do, about Pennsylvania trying to execute him and the lies the detectives told about him; anger at Joseph Casey, who was always bouncing around the courtroom, waving papers, yelling, lying.
Walter focused on following Mark Greenberg’s advice: pay attention to whoever is talking to you; don’t look at the jury too much, because you never know how they will take it; when you answer a question, get to the point and don’t overexplain yourself; and whatever you do, do not get angry, Casey will try to make you angry so the jury will think that you might be the kind of man who could kill a little girl if provoked.
Sharon and John were in the front row, as they had been for every court session, surrounded by their families.7 Listening to Walter was going to be brutal, maybe the worst part of the whole thing.
Greenberg looked pale and tired. At one point he’d found himself in the hallway standing next to Barbara Jean’s aunt. He’d tried to tell her he was sorry for her loss, but her eyes flashed hatred and she told him if he was so sure Walter Ogrod was innocent, why not take him home to babysit his kids? Greenberg understood her hatred of him was normal, but it still bothered him.
That the case would come down to Walter’s testimony made Greenberg apprehensive. Walter looked and sounded strange and had a very hard time dealing with stress, and what could be more stressful than this? What would happen to Walter on cross-examination? What if Casey got him angry, made him look not just “odd” but like a psychopath, cold blooded enough to sexually assault and kill a little girl?
Greenberg asked Walter how old he was and how old he’d been at the time of the murder (twenty-three), where he’d been living in 1988, how long he’d lived there, how well he’d known the neighborhood. He’d been living at 7244 Rutland Street, he answered; he’d lived there most of his life and knew the neighborhood well.
“And back in 1988, who was living at that address with you?” Greenberg asked, establishing how crowded the house was.
“It was me, Mr. and Mrs. Green, their little son Charlie Jr., their daughter Alice, my friend Hal moved in at the time, and their friend Tom was living in the basement,” Walter said.
Greenberg asked Walter his height and weight and what his height and weight had been at the time of the murder (the same). He asked about the Fahys, and Walter explained that John came over sometimes to have a couple of beers with Sarge Green while Barbara Jean played with Charliebird. Walter said Mr. Fahy seemed like a nice guy and that he’d only run into Mrs. Fahy once or twice and had never met her.
“I want to direct your attention to July the 12th, 1988,” Greenberg said. “Do you remember hearing about the death of Barbara Jean Horn?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill Barbara Jean Horn?”
“No.”
The Fahys held hands, their hatred surging: Liar. Coward.
“Do you remember where you were at about 3:00 that day?”
“Yes, I was home,” Walter said.
“Can you remember, after you heard the news about Barbara Jean’s death, what you did?” Greenberg asked.
“Well, when I heard about it, I was home with the Greens and all, and we heard about some neighbors saying something about it and all, and that wasn’t until the next day and all, when the cops came around asking people questions,” Walter said.8
The jury was getting a chance to hear how Walter spoke when he was nervous. Whether they thought he sounded like the confession would be as important as anything else in the trial.
Greenberg, countering the prosecution claim he knew was coming, that Walter had moved out of his house to avoid the murder investigation, had Walter explain that he’d lived at 7244 Rutland for more than a year after the murder.
He then put into evidence the business card Detective Worrell left with Walter’s landlord on April 1, 1992, and asked Walter about Saturday, April 4.
“I woke up [at eight o’clock], maybe got something to eat and all, took the dog for a long walk, came home, watched some TV, got to notice it was time to go to work, showered, changed into work clothes, arrived at the bakery at 1:00,” Walter said. “I went to check my load—nothing was ready yet. Got delayed about three hours, waiting for bread from another bakery and all, left about 4:00. I did not return until 4:30 AM the next day.”
When he got back to Bake Rite, his supervisor asked if he could do an extra route. He agreed, finished that route at about ten thirty, got home around noon, and called Detective Worrell.
“He wanted to talk about John Fahy, the stepfather of Barbara Jean Horn,” Walter said. “He wanted to know some information about it. I said, ‘Can I do it over the phone?’ He said, ‘No, you have to come down here.’ [I said] ‘I don’t have that kind of time.’ He said . . . ‘We want to solve the case. A little girl was killed. We just want to ask you some questions. We will be in and out quick.’”
Walter said he got to the Roundhouse at about 1:30 PM on Sunday, April 5, and Detective Worrell came downstairs to escort him up to homicide. Worrell told him not to sign in, which Walter thought was strange. Walter asked him about one of the detectives he knew from the Dunne case. Worrell said he remembered the case and the detective was doing fine.
“I must have been there for about an hour or so,” Walter said of his wait outside the homicide offices. “After about the first forty-five minutes I asked Detective Worrell, ‘Can we do this another time? I am getting tired. I want to go home.’”
“He said, ‘Give it a couple of minutes.’”
He described being put in the interview room, giving the detectives his basic information and telling them what little he knew about Barbara Jean’s murder.
“And this information that you told the detectives, where did you get that information?” Greenberg asked him.
“I remember reading the papers, Northeast Times, Daily News, Inquirer, what I seen on TV,” Walter said.
He described Devlin taking a photo of the TV box, empty, out of a folder, asking if it helped Walter remember. More photos: Barbara Jean in the box with a bag over her, with part of her head showing, and with the bag removed. Walter said Devlin told him he’d seen Barbara Jean that day when she came over for Charliebird, that Linda wasn’t home so Walter let her in.
“They said, ‘Well, you took her downstairs,’ and all, you know.” Walter’s voice faltered again.
“Keep your voice up,” Judge Stout told him.
“I am sorry,” Walter said.
“The jury must hear you,” Judge Stout explained.
“They kept up more and more,” Walter said of the detectives pressuring him.
“Tell us about the ‘more and more,’” Greenberg said.
“They said, ‘Well, you took her downstairs’ and all, you know . . . ”
Walter’s voice trailed off, and Judge Stout asked him again to speak up.
“I said, ‘No, I didn’t take her downstairs,’” Walter said. “He said, ‘Yes you did, man. You took her downstairs to have a little fun. . . . No clothes. She was raped.’ I said, ‘No, I did not rape her.’”
Devlin, Walter said, told him he was “off” and asked if he’d ever seen a psychiatrist. Walter told him about Dr. Ganime. They gave him half a dozen cups of coffee and woke him repeatedly when he dozed off. “We will be all night, you might as well eat,” he remembered one of the detectives telling him when they gave him the cheesesteak. He said the confession wasn’t finished until just before he was taken downstairs to be processed and that he never read it over.
Greenberg tried to get Walter, with all his difficulties, to explain how the intensity of the emotions in that interview room that night and his sleep deprivation led him to confess to a crime he didn’t commit.
“What was going through your mind during this questioning, this interrogation?” Greenberg asked.
“Horror,” Walter said. “They were showing me pictures of Barbara Jean. They set another set of two [pictures on the table] and she was outside the box. . . . I seen the marks on her head, on her body.”
Greenberg had him describe how he’d come to sign the waiver of his Miranda rights.
“I said, ‘I want a lawyer,’” Walter explained. “[Devlin] said, ‘No. You signed it. You didn’t have a lawyer here.’ I went to the door. He shut the door on me.”
The detectives cuffed him into the metal chair that was bolted to the floor and went out of the room. Maybe half an hour later they took him down to booking.
“Now, from the time you got down to the Police Administration Building about 1:45 [PM on Sunday] until everything was completed, did they allow you to sleep at all?”
“No.”
“How were you feeling physically?”
“Tired.”
“Anything else?”
“Little stressed. You know, physical work from before and all, and I wanted to help out. That is why I came down in the first place for, to answer some questions. And that was about it.”
“That is all,” Greenberg said.
Joseph Casey’s strategy for cross-examining Walter was basic: antagonize him by treating him with scorn and calling him a liar, hoping he’d get angry in front of the jury; confuse him by changing topics suddenly and frequently; and, through it all, drop little questions and asides that would let the jury know what kind of scum Walter truly was.
Casey’s first question was one of these.
“Sir,” he asked Walter, “From where your bedroom was in the house at 7244 Rutland Street, if you were to look out, you could see 7245 Rutland Street Is that correct?”
Walter agreed.
“And you can look right out and if you were to look right out, you could see this little girl,” Casey continued. “Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
No one associated with the case had ever suggested Walter watched Barbara Jean, so Greenberg objected, but Judge Stout overruled him. Casey had successfully floated the idea to the jury.
“Now, that day,” Casey continued, “you said you were home, is that correct?”
“I got home around 2:00.”
“Did you go up to your bedroom?”
“I went in the house. Mrs. Green was there. I went to my room.”
“You did go up to your room?”
“Yes, sir,” Walter said.
“You looked out the front window?”
“No, sir.”
“Today, five years later, you can look that jury in the eye and tell them you specifically remember not looking out the front window?” Casey asked.
“I don’t remember anything about looking out the front window as soon as I got home,” Walter said.
“I didn’t ask you if you remembered it,” Casey said. “My question was, ‘Did you look out the window?’ and you said ‘no.’ You want to change that answer?”
“Sir, I do not remember looking out that window as soon as I got home.”
“I didn’t ask you whether you looked out as—” Casey started.
“Let’s not argue with him,” Judge Stout told Casey.
Casey did. “Is your answer, ‘No, I did not,’ or, ‘I don’t remember’?” he demanded. “You tell me which of those two things you want it to be now?”
“I don’t remember now, sir,” Walter said.
“You are not saying you did not look out the window. You are saying you don’t remember?”
“I don’t remember looking out the window.”
Casey had picked a fight, starting the work of getting Walter mad: showing his scorn for Walter, suggesting that Walter liked to watch Barbara Jean out his bedroom window, and accusing Walter of being a liar.9
Next he jumped topics, asking what time Walter went to the Roundhouse for his interview and whether or not he’d told Worrell he was tired. He wanted Walter to admit he’d agreed to go in for the interview, which Walter did.
Casey jumped topics again.
“You said, sir,” he started, “that you heard from the neighborhood or read the following: . . . ‘That the man with the box tried to dump it in the . . . Dumpster behind where I live.’ Did you say that on direct examination?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where did you read that? I want you to be as specific as you can.”
“I read it in the Northeast Times. As far as I can remember, that is where I read that from.”
Casey was suggesting Walter knew that the man with the box tried to put it in a Dumpster before that detail was in the papers. (Later he would put the Northeast Times reporter who had covered the case on the stand to testify she had never written about a Dumpster in her articles. But articles in other newspapers had mentioned the Dumpster, and the story had been around the neighborhood before it was in the paper anyway. Walter could have picked it up anywhere.)
Casey jumped topics again and debated Walter on when exactly during his police interview he’d asked for a lawyer. Didn’t you say you only asked for a lawyer half an hour before you were taken downstairs, Casey pushed; no, Walter insisted, he’d been asking all night. Casey asked a dozen more questions along this line, his voice stretching toward outrage as he pushed Walter about when he’d asked for a phone call versus when he specifically asked to talk to a lawyer.
“Objection, tell him not to yell at the guy,” Mark Greenberg intervened at last.
Casey said he would stop yelling. He asked more questions about when Walter asked for a lawyer but couldn’t move Walter on that point.
Then came the most important question of all.
“But you never confessed, you never said you killed Barbara Jean,” he said.
“No, sir,” Walter said. “They are the ones who wrote the confession, the so-called confession that I signed.”
“Sir, that is the alleged confession,” Casey said, holding it up. “Whose signature appears at the bottom of that page?”
“Mine, sir,” Walter said.
Casey held up every one of the sixteen pages and got the same answer, then did the same with the rights waiver.
Walter said he’d signed what the detectives told him to sign.
“You did everything they told you?” Casey asked.
“Yes, sir,” Walter said.
“So if they said, ‘You killed Maureen Dunne,’ you would have said ‘yes’?” Casey asked.
“No, sir,” Walter said.
“You wouldn’t have signed a confession which contained that? Is that correct?”
“That is right.”
“The only confession you would sign is the confession saying you killed Barbara Jean Horn?”
“That’s the only one that has my signature, sir.”
“That’s the only confession you would have signed?”
“Sir, I never killed Barbara Jean Horn.”
“That’s not my question. You signed a confession admitting you killed Barbara Jean Horn. You would not have signed a confession admitting you killed Maureen Dunne.”
“Because that one, when that statement there [was taken],” Walter said, referring to his interview after Maureen’s murder, “I was up, I had my sleep prior to that incident, and I didn’t have cops coming down on me, throwing photographs of the dead child’s body in front of me.”
“But had they done that, you would have confessed to that, wouldn’t you, if you had been sleep deprived?”
“Who knows what would have happened in the police department,” Walter said.
Casey bristled; he’d just lost an exchange with the supposedly low-IQ murderer he was supposed to be breaking down.
He pressed on: Would Walter have confessed to killing his mother? To killing Maureen Dunne?
“As many hours as it was and the time they had me down there and done the same thing they done with this one, probably,” Walter said.
Casey switched to Walter’s work sheets from Bake Rite Rolls. He asked questions about the dates and times of Walter’s shifts, to try to muddle what the time sheets clearly showed and what Walter’s supervisor said during his testimony: that Walter had been up all night driving before his interrogation.
Then Casey took on Walter’s claim that he’d gotten to the Roundhouse at about 1:30 PM on the day of his interview, pointing out that Walter’s name appears in the logbook at 3:45 PM. Walter explained that Worrell had told him not to sign in when he got there. Didn’t the officer at the front desk usually sign in visitors, Casey asked. No, Walter said; every time he’d been to the Roundhouse for the Dunne case, he’d signed himself in.
These lines of questioning were meant to establish Walter as a liar, and now Casey started his main assault: going over Walter’s statement line by line, derisively asking which things Walter actually said and which the detectives made up.
“Sir,” Casey said, “I will go through the document . . . and I will ask you which words are yours and which words are not yours. ‘Question: Walter, did you know Barbara Jean Horn?’
“‘Answer: Yes, I did, she was the little girl who lived across the street from me when I lived on Rutland Street, the little girl they found dead in the box.’ Did you say that?”
“Part,” Walter said. “I knew Barbara Jean Horn . . . yes, I did.”
“Did you say that?” Casey asked.
“Yes, I know her,” Walter said.
“Did you say, ‘Yes, I did’?”
“Yes, I did, yes, sir.”
“That’s a yes. ‘She was the little girl who lived across the street from me when I lived on Rutland Street.’ Did you say that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘The little girl they found dead in the box.’ Did you say that?”
“I didn’t say ‘in the box,’ sir.”
“But you knew she was found dead in the box?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But today, eighteen months later, you can specifically remember that you did not say ‘the little girl they found dead in the box’?”
“To the best of my knowledge, yes, sir.”
“You are qualifying it again,” Casey said. “Is it that you did, you didn’t, or you don’t remember?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I did, sir.”
“You did?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I did remember saying everything but ‘the little girl they found in the box.’”
Casey turned to the weight set, establishing for the jury Walter’s ownership of the pull-down bar and repeating Alice Green’s story that Walter had lifted weights for two hours each day in the month or so before the murder but stopped after Barbara Jean was killed.
“For approximately a month before Barbara Jean Horn was murdered, were you downstairs working out virtually every day for two hours in the evening?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you work out at all in a two-month period before Barbara Jean was killed?”
“No, sir.”
“So sitting here today . . . you can tell us you specifically remember going back from July 12, 1988, and telling this jury that you never worked out during that month. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Back to the [statement],” Casey said. “Page three, right after the answer that you did not give. ‘Question: When was the first time you knew Barbara was missing?’
“‘Answer: When her father John came over to my house and asked me if I had seen Barbara because he couldn’t find her.’ Did you say that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘Question: Did you tell him that Barbara was inside your house that afternoon? Answer: I am pretty sure I must have told him.’ Did you say that?”
“No, sir,” Walter answered.
Casey pressed Walter on every line, tossing in unrelated questions to keep him off balance. He kept up the innuendo, too; at one point he asked if Walter had ever dated an adult female while Alice Green was living in the house, implying that Walter didn’t date adults while underage Alice was occupying his thoughts. Walter denied every petty smear Casey slipped into his questions to make him seem like a pervert and a liar, but any one of them might stick with a juror, or, after so many, the jury might decide some had to be true.
“Did you break down crying, sobbing [in the interview room]?” Casey asked.
“After a while they were throwing pictures of the dead child in my face, sir. Who wouldn’t?” Walter answered.
Casey questioned Walter about what he’d told detectives about his mother and childhood and suggested that Walter told the detectives a sob story about his life as an excuse for the murder.
Casey switched back to the statement.
“Did you say, page eight: ‘This is going to be hard for me to say. Please be patient and let me take my time.’ Did you say that?” Casey asked.
“No, sir,” Walter said.
“Did you say, ‘I never meant to do anything bad to that little girl’?”
“No, sir.”
“The word before ‘meant’ is crossed out and there are initials, ‘WJO.’ Whose initials are they, sir?”
“Mine, sir.”
Casey was emphasizing that, since Walter had initialed changes to the confession, he must have read, understood, and agreed to it.
“Did you say, ‘I feel like killing myself over this’?”
“No, sir, that is not what I said, sir.”
“Did you say something like that?”
“They said, ‘You are sick.’ I said, ‘I would not do that. If I did, I would have killed myself.’ Not ‘feel like killing myself.’”
“So although you were sleep deprived and they were throwing pictures at you, you said, ‘I would not do anything like that or I would kill myself’?”
“I would not have done anything like that, sir.”
“Give me the exact words you told them?”
“They were saying I was sick and I said I wouldn’t do that. I said, ‘If I hurt a kid, I would have killed myself.’”
“And you specifically remember saying that, today?”
“Yes, sir. Never hurt little kids, sir.”
“The jury will decide that,” Casey snapped. “I am getting these speeches and I have to protect myself,” he said to Judge Stout.
Casey asked about Barbara Jean knocking on Walter’s door on the afternoon she was killed.
“Did you say,” Casey asked, “‘I got the idea to ask Barbara Jean to come down to the basement with me and she followed me down the basement’?”
“No, Detective Devlin, sir.”
“Detective Devlin said what?”
“He was saying, ‘She came in your house, we got people [who saw her]. Look, you decided to take her downstairs and have some fun.’ That’s what Devlin was hitting me with. ‘You took her downstairs, you wanted to have some fun . . .’ He was telling me what happened. ‘Look, you took her down, you wanted to have some fun,’ sir.”
“Did you agree with Devlin that that is what you did?”
“No, sir. He kept on saying, ‘You did it, you had to have done it. We have people who say they seen you take the girl in the house.’”
“Did you believe that, that people saw you take Barbara Jean in the house?”
“He pressured me all night.”
Casey asked a series of questions about little Charlie Green, culminating in one about Charlie’s claim that one day a few weeks before the murder Walter had asked him if “that little girl”—Barbara Jean—was coming over to play. This was meant to suggest that Walter had had some kind of unnatural interest in Barbara Jean prior to her death.
Walter said he’d never asked Charlie that question.
Casey jumped back to the interrogation.
“After you believed that someone saw you taking Barbara Jean into the house and the detectives started suggesting things as you have said, did you agree with them that that is what happened?” Casey asked.
“No. Not at all. I said ‘no,’” Walter answered.
“Not at all?”
“They said, ‘Was it this way?’ I said, ‘No,’ and if I look down they take it like, ‘All right, you agree.’ I just looked at them and all.”
“Did you read this document before you signed it?”
“They read it to me as I stated before, sir.”
“Did you know the content of the document at the time you signed it?”
“Not that much, sir. I wasn’t very awake.”
“So for all you know, you could have been signing a document admitting to killing Maureen Dunne, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa, Heather Coffin, Olga Terpeluk Ogrod, and Gregory Ogrod. Is that correct?”
“I could have,” Walter said.
“And you were so, so tired, you just signed it?”
“I didn’t know, they were putting a story in my head, complete with pictures, sir.”
“But you were so tired and all these things had been done to you, you just signed it?”
“I don’t know what was going on at the time, sir.”
“‘Play doctor,’ did you say that?”
“No, sir. They suggested that, ‘You probably took her down to play doctor.’”
“‘And she said “yes,” so I started to take her clothes off.’ Did you tell them that?”
“No, sir. They wanted to know what happened. They said, ‘You probably did it because there were no clothes there.’ They said this is probably what happened down there. ‘Because she had no clothes, nobody was there, so you figured you could have a quick time with her.’”
“‘I remember she didn’t have nothing on her feet,’” Casey read. “Did you say that?”
“No, sir,” Walter said.
“‘Anyway, after I got her undressed, I started stroking her shoulders and her back,’” Casey read. “Did you say that?”
“No, sir.”
“Had you ever touched her in the past?”
“No, never had.”
“Just to pat her on the head?”
“No, sir, not at all.”
“Never touched any little kid. Is that correct?”
How sinister it would seem in this context if Casey could get Walter to admit that he’d patted one kid on the head, once. Greenberg objected and Judge Stout sustained the objection.
Casey returned to whether or not Walter had understood what he was signing when he signed his statement. Walter said again that he didn’t know what was going on when he signed.
“At the time you signed this document,” Casey said, “do you know that it said you killed Barbara Jean Horn”—Greenberg objected that the question was repetitive but Casey ignored him—“by hitting her with this bar? Did you know that?”
“Yes, sir,” Walter said. He said the detectives pushed photos of the dead girl at him, telling him he had to have beaten her to death.
“As of the time they were asking you about this, you did not know she was beaten, you said ‘yes.’ Is that correct or is that not correct?”
“Yes, I did not know she was beaten.”
“Didn’t the Northeast Times you read say she was beaten? Didn’t every paper?”
“Not the way they described it, sir. I didn’t see the photos [in] the Northeast Times.”
“You didn’t see the photos,” Casey scoffed. “I am not talking about the photos. I am talking about being beaten. You told this jury that at the time you talked to Worrell and Devlin, April 5, 1992, you didn’t know she had been beaten. Did you read it in the Northeast Times before April 5 she’d been beaten?”
Walter said it was very different to read it in the paper than it was to be sitting across from two detectives showing you pictures of the dead body. Casey pressed him, and he said again that reading was different than seeing photos.
On the subject of the pull-down bar, Walter was clear: the detectives had told him, “That’s how you did it, you hit her with the bar. Look at her. You hit her in the head. She was bleeding a lot.”
Casey asked which detective asked about the pull-down bar first.
“I don’t know which one because I was like this,” Walter said, his face in his hands, “and crying and they kept saying I killed a child.”
“And at that time you believed you did?” Casey asked.
“Yes, sir,” Walter said. After hours in the interrogation room he’d begun to believe that he’d done it, so he either repeated back to the detectives suggestions they made for what happened—that he hit her with the pull-down bar—or didn’t answer their questions at all, which Devlin took as a “yes.” Sometimes they told him something must have happened—someone must have washed Barbara Jean after killing her because her hair was wet when she was found—and, getting Walter to agree that it happened, wrote it down as if he’d said it himself.
Walter said the detectives drew a map of the neighborhood and asked him the route he’d taken with the box, correcting him when he got it wrong: No, people saw you here, you must have gone this way.
Casey asked him about telling the detectives he put the box down because it was getting heavy. Walter answered that he’d never said that.
“You didn’t say anything about it getting heavy?” Casey asked.
“No, sir,” Walter said.
“And it wouldn’t have been heavy because you worked out with weights. You were a pretty strong guy?” Casey asked.
“I wasn’t working out in weights,” Walter said. “I didn’t touch those weights since before what happened to my brother.” With the Greens’ friend Tom living in the basement in July 1988, he said, the mess and furniture in the basement made it impossible to use the weight set.
“Sir, you knew you had a little air vent in your garage. Is that correct?” Casey asked.
“No, sir,” Walter said. “There was no air vent. They were saying, ‘Where did you put the clothes? You had to hide it. Any place you can stuff it?’ and all.”
Casey pressed but couldn’t make any headway.
When Casey finished, Mark Greenberg was relieved: Walter had come through cross-examination well. He’d gotten a little rattled but had not lost his temper and had told a consistent story. The defense rested.
Casey then had a chance to present “surrebuttal evidence,” a final round of witnesses to firm up his case. His first was criminalist Louis Brenner, who told his story of locating a single sperm head on a slide of material from Barbara Jean’s mouth. Under questioning from Greenberg, Brenner admitted that a defense expert hadn’t even been able to locate the sperm on the slide when he examined it and that he himself had no real way to tell a human sperm head from a cat sperm head or from any other random particle that could’ve been in the little girl’s mouth.
Then Casey called the reporter from the Northeast Times who’d written about Barbara Jean’s murder to say she’d never mentioned a Dumpster in any of her stories. Greenberg objected to her testimony, since Walter could’ve just been mistaken about where he read or heard that detail. Judge Stout let the reporter testify. She had a folder of all her stories about the case and said none of them mentioned a Dumpster.
Finally, Casey told the jury he had “irrefutable proof” that Walter had lied: the Roundhouse logbook showing Walter signed in at 3:45 PM on April 5, 1992, and a fax machine time stamp on Walter’s statement showing it was faxed to the charging DA at 12:04 AM on April 6. Casey put Devlin on to testify about when Walter was signed into the Roundhouse and what time his statement had been faxed to the charging DA. He argued that the fax time stamp proved Walter was lying when he said the interrogation wasn’t over until just before he was taken to be booked the next morning.
When it was his turn to ask questions, Greenberg asked Devlin about another time stamp on the cover of Walter’s statement —3:38 AM, April 6. What was that fax time?
“We had sent another document to the charging unit,” Devlin answered, “that we had to get approved, as we are, as we asked to get a copy of that document back we asked them, requesting to send us a copy of the statement back we had sent them earlier that morning.”
This stumbling answer didn’t clear up the mystery of the 3:38 AM time stamp, but Greenberg didn’t ask what this other document that needed approval may have been. The timeline of that night offers a plausible explanation: at midnight, realizing their time under the six-hour rule was nearly up and that Walter’s statement wasn’t done yet, the detectives faxed a portion of it to the charging DA. When the statement was actually finished a couple of hours later, Sergeant Nodiff called Casey. This would explain why he got Casey out of bed, something he didn’t need to do if the statement had been accepted by the charging DA two hours earlier. Casey arrived at the office at about 2:30 AM and would later testify he spent about an hour looking over documents—which fits with the final statement being faxed to the charging DA at 3:38 AM.
This theory would still mean Walter was wrong about what time he signed the rights statement—at 3:30 AM instead of 6:00 AM—but given that he’d been awake for over forty hours and in a small windowless room for at least ten, it’s not clear if that makes him a liar. He has always said he didn’t follow time that night, that all he knows is that he signed the rights waiver just before being taken downstairs for processing.
After Devlin’s testimony, Judge Stout sent the jury to their lunch break. Closing arguments would be that afternoon.