SOMETIME BETWEEN 6:00 AND 7:00 AM on November 2, 1995, a young paralegal named Kimberly Ernest, out for her morning jog, was raped and murdered in an upscale Center City neighborhood known as Fitler Square. Her body was found in a stairwell at Twenty-First and Pine Streets at 7:45 AM by a man out walking his dog.
The murder of a professional young woman in a nice part of town, dubbed “the Jogger Murder,” was front-page news, the most talked-about murder in years; the city was shocked by the brutality and randomness of it, and there was an outpouring of support for the victim’s family.1 Mayor Rendell, reelected on the day of Kim’s wake, spoke at her memorial service and wept.2
Kim Ernest’s murder, one of more than four hundred in the city that year,3 was exactly the kind of random killing by a stranger that made people feel unsafe. Worse for District Attorney Lynne Abraham, it happened just as she was up for reelection.4 The pressure on police to clear the case was enormous, but the very randomness of the murder made it hard to solve.
High-profile murder, no good suspects: enter John Hall, on his own initiative for sure this time, seeking revenge against his stepson, Herbert Haak.
Hall and Haak had originally been friends; it was Haak who introduced Hall to his mother, Phyllis. But once Hall and Phyllis got together, it hadn’t taken long for Hall to decide that Phyllis’s children, Haak and his sister, Robyn, were against him. And anyone who was against him deserved to be crushed.
“Your kids are pigs,” he wrote to Phyllis at one point. “I love you very much, but it is hardly me who ranks in your life. When it comes to the list of cared about people, it always seems that I’m not even on it. . . . Where do I come in? Definitely after Robyn [and] Herb. . . . How about just in front of the parakeets?”5
He told her he knew Haak had stolen things from them but would let it go for her sake.
“I do nothing because of you,” he wrote. “And it is seething inside of me like a bomb about to explode!!! That piece of shit [Haak] laughs while you cry over your loss. . . . He should be beaten to never walk again for what he has done to you. . . .
“I’ll love you forever. But don’t shit on me. Don’t betray me. It doesn’t work. I would be far more destructive than you could ever imagine. That is why Herb better stay miles from me. He is going to learn a hard, hard lesson.”6
In February 1994, Hall got home from a stint in jail and convinced Phyllis to move from their house to an apartment in the city to stay ahead of various charges he faced. Robyn, twelve, said she wouldn’t go, so Hall and Phyllis decided to leave her by herself. Phyllis promised to visit at least a few times a week to bring supplies.
Haak went by to see his sister a couple of weeks later and found her living alone with little food and no heat in the middle of winter. He called the police. Phyllis was arrested, and because the movie Home Alone had just come out, the case caught the tabloid eye and became a national story. Invitations came for Phyllis to appear on TV programs—Hard Copy, Geraldo, Inside Edition. One rag goosed the story with an old photo of her on vacation in Hawaii, suggesting that’s where she’d been while her daughter froze. She served four months in jail for child abandonment in the spring of 1994.
Ironically, Hall considered calling the police to be the ultimate betrayal.
“He makes me sick,” he wrote to Phyllis of Haak. “He makes everyone sick who comes to know him. He is scum. Immoral jackal! . . . The biggest rat bastard alive, who would (literally) turn in his own mother.”7
Phyllis had to choose between him and her kids, he wrote. No compromise was possible; his decision was carved in stone.8 Haak was a hyena who’d done nothing but lie, a plague on her life, a cancer that had spread from Phyllis to Hall and needed to be eradicated.9 Robyn was an ally of the hyena and a miserable wretch in need of institutionalization; there would be nothing but trouble with her sexually, socially, and academically.
Hall’s hatred for his stepson grew to homicidal proportions. In another letter he wrote that he wanted Haak dead, that it wasn’t in his nature to kill but he wasn’t adverse to letting the state do it.10
Now Kimberly Ernest’s murder gave him his chance.
In the fall of 1995 Herbie Haak and his friend Richie Wise were small-time criminals. In fact, at 8:00 AM on the day of Kim Ernest’s murder, they’d been in a Bucks County courtroom, forty-five minutes from where the body was found, for a preliminary hearing on a theft charge they’d picked up two weeks earlier. Court workers and police who were there would remember Haak, congenial and wearing a three-piece suit, joking with them.11 After the hearing Haak was held in Bucks County Jail. Wise was released and went back to Philadelphia, where he stayed in Haak’s apartment with Haak’s fiancée.
In jail in Bucks County, Haak ran into John Hall. When Haak’s fiancée told him Wise was threatening her and stealing things from their apartment, Haak could only think of one way to get Wise out of the apartment—get him arrested. He went to Hall for advice and on November 8, at Hall’s suggestion, called Philadelphia homicide and told them he thought Wise had something to do with the Ernest murder.12 Detectives went to interview Haak and then picked Wise up for questioning that same day but didn’t have enough evidence to hold him.
Hall gave Haak more advice: talk to Wise more, get more details, don’t hurry.
“Take weeks or months, like I do,” Hall told his stepson. “I know what it takes to build a case. And you can’t just say, ‘He told me he did it.’”13
Hall was springing a trap, and he went about fabricating a story against Haak. The next time Haak ran into him in jail, Hall couldn’t resist hinting at what he was doing.
“John and my mom are up to something,” Haak told an acquaintance during a phone call. “John keeps saying I’m going down big time, and I don’t know what he is talking about.”14
On November 8, Hall met with ADA Roger King about his upcoming testimony at David Dickson’s retrial. He may have snitched out Haak at that meeting, though he later insisted all he did was tell King that Haak wanted to talk to him about Ernest.15 Hall had Phyllis tell police that sometime after the Ernest murder, Haak showed up at her house and threatened to hurt her if she didn’t keep quiet about what he’d “done to that girl.”
Meanwhile, Hall had to finish the Dickson business. He was also still scheduled to testify against Walter.
The witnesses at David Dickson’s retrial later that month were largely the same as at the first trial. The medical examiner adjusted his testimony to accommodate the snitch story by allowing that Wilson could have been strangled by hand before the killer used the extension cord.16 The psychologist with an expertise in sexual violence gave the same testimony as at the first trial but went further, at one point stating that the “fantasy” letter from Dickson’s computer came from Dickson’s sense of triumph after the murder and later referring to the “aggressive components” of Dickson’s foot fetish.17
Dickson’s lawyer, Harry Seay, objected to both statements as speculative and inflammatory and requested mistrials both times. Judge Stout considered declaring a mistrial, given that the remarks had come from an expert and so might have an effect on the jurors, but decided instead to tell the jurors to disregard the comments.18
Roger King’s most important new witness was Hall. Legally and ethically, King was required to let Dickson’s defense lawyer know he was going to use Hall, but he did so only a few minutes before Hall took the stand on November 15. This left Seay no time to investigate Hall or prepare questions. Judge Stout wasn’t pleased but let Hall testify anyway. He went through his Dickson story in his practiced fashion, avoiding Wolchansky’s mistakes, and gave another version of his usual “disgust” answer when King asked why he was testifying.
“Mr. King, I’m a human being, like everyone else here,” he said. “I know Mr. Dickson to be an admitted, vicious killer.”19
Seay objected and asked for a mistrial.
“Listen, I really think it almost is worth a mistrial,” Judge Stout said, “but we have invested too much in this case to have a mistrial now, but I’m afraid you’re going to have another one of those prosecutorial misconducts. I am shocked. I am absolutely shocked. I will deny the mistrial, even though I think one is due. It is.”20
Maybe Judge Stout thought Dickson would be acquitted and that, given this was the second trial, she should just let the verdict play out. Maybe she was sure he was guilty and couldn’t bring herself to declare another mistrial.
Whatever it was, she let the trial continue.
For the defense case, Harry Seay called just one witness, thinking, as he had at the first trial, the case was so circumstantial and the snitch so patently incredible that the jury had to find a reasonable doubt. Dickson didn’t testify.
On November 28, though ten detectives working the case had checked out more than two hundred tips, Kim Ernest’s murder was still unsolved. Detectives contacted Hall to see if he’d heard anything about it, and at this point Hall officially snitched on Haak. He told the detectives Haak and Wise said they got up at 3:00 AM on the day of the murder so they could go out stealing cars and still get to Bucks County in time for their 8:00 AM hearing. Ernest confronted them as they were breaking into a car, so they pulled her into the backseat, raped her, killed her, dumped her body in the stairwell, and drove forty-five minutes to their hearing and arrived on time.21
The story was incredible, and unsupported by evidence: one witness had seen Ernest jogging a few blocks from where Haak and Wise supposedly attacked her a few minutes after the attack had supposedly happened. Also, there were no reports of stolen cars or car break-ins in that neighborhood that morning.22
After getting Hall’s story, Philadelphia homicide detectives brought Haak in at 7:30 PM on November 28 and interrogated him. When he emerged from the room at 1:07 AM with bruises on his arms, neck, and face, they had his confession. He said the detectives made him sign blank interview forms and then filled them in with a confession they beat out of him. A court later agreed that he’d been beaten.23
With Haak’s confession in hand, detectives brought Wise in and interrogated him all night until he signed a confession to the Ernest murder at around dawn. He said later he was beaten with fists and telephone books, was stripped, had a cord tied around his neck, and was psychologically abused.24
The solving of the “Jogger Murder” was big news; Philadelphia breathed a “sigh of relief.”25 That the solution involved John Hall, the well-known snitch who was also the stepfather from the Home Alone situation, was news, too, featured in both the Inquirer and the Daily News on November 30—which was the very day the Dickson case went to the jury.26 Dickson’s lawyer again asked for a mistrial, this time out of concern that jurors who saw in the newspaper that Hall had helped solve such an important murder might think more of his credibility.
Judge Stout, again citing the amount of time and effort that had already gone into the case, denied the motion.27 But she was upset.
“I’m inclined not to grant the motion for a mistrial,” she said. “However, as I’ve said before, there is no doubt in my mind that if there is a conviction, it will certainly be overturned. There is no way, with all of this, that it can stand. But I think, with all the time and money and effort which has gone to bring it this far, I think we ought to go on to the end, and then we’ll see what happens. I don’t know whether that’s a legal decision or not, but to me, that’s common sense.”28
The jury deliberated all day and into the late afternoon the next day, when they informed Stout they were deadlocked and unable to reach a verdict. Stout polled them to determine if continued deliberations would be helpful—something she had not done at Walter’s first trial—and eleven of the twelve jurors said they wanted to continue to talk.
“You’ve only deliberated nine hours and you heard testimony over eleven and a half days,” Stout told the jury. “Eleven [of you] feel further deliberations will be helpful.”
The next morning the jury reconvened and after four more hours of discussion found Dickson guilty of second-degree murder and robbery. He was sentenced to life in prison.
“I told you,” Roger King said to Deborah Wilson’s father, shaking hands after the verdict. “Trust the system. Good things happen to good people.”29
Dickson’s appeals lawyer thought Stout was going to grant Dickson a new trial, but Stout died in 1998 before signing an opinion to that effect.
In March 1996, John Hall went in front of Judge Kenneth Biehn in Bucks County to deal with outstanding possession of stolen property and narcotics charges. In the two years since his arrest after the high-speed chase in June 1994, he’d been on one of the most prolific snitching sprees documented, which included at least six murder defendants—Martorano, Dickson, Ogrod, Tremayne Smith, Haak, and Wise. It was time to get paid back.
Biehn had presided over Hall hearings before and knew what to expect, but even he was surprised by the extent of law enforcement support for Hall this time.
Marc Frumer opened the hearing by explaining that, while no promises had been made to Hall about his sentencing, four Philadelphia homicide detectives had shown up on their own initiative to support him: Frank Miller (Dickson and Ogrod cases); Dennis Dusak (Ernest); Joseph Walsh (Dickson and Ernest); and Patricia Brennan (Ernest and Smith).30
Officially, these detectives showing up for Hall was a coincidence, the result of each of them deciding on his or her own to do so, making the effort because a detective showing up in court carried more weight than writing a letter. But even if each of the four really had followed Hall’s legal journey carefully enough to mark his or her calendar to appear on Hall’s behalf, their boss would’ve needed to sign off on all four of them taking the time to go to Bucks County to plead for leniency for a snitch.31
Each detective took the stand and vouched for Hall, a greatest-hits review of his recent snitch career and a reminder of how important his testimony had been.
Frumer also produced letters of support for Hall from several people, including one from Charles Joey Grant, former head of the homicide office in the Philadelphia DA’s office, and another from a higher source:
“You’re not going to believe this,” Frumer told Judge Biehn. “I also have a letter from His Eminence Cardinal Bevilacqua advising my client, signed by the Reverend John Bonavitacola.”
Frumer explained to Judge Biehn that Hall was willing to accept responsibility and punishment for his actions and was helping the court save time by accepting one charge and agreeing to waive all issues in order to proceed. Frumer said he could talk for hours on end about Hall’s cooperation, but Biehn cut him off.
“I don’t think anyone can argue that Mr. Hall has been of value to a number of different law enforcement people,” Biehn said. “On the other hand, and I don’t mean to be sarcastic, but it seems to me that perhaps the best thing I could do would be to put him in jail for the rest of his life so he wouldn’t commit crimes against others and he would be able to ferret out crime within the state correctional facility. I mean, this is a joke, is what this has become. How many convictions does your client have? Twenty? Twenty-five?”
“Let me address his cooperation,” Frumer said. “He tries to make the best of the situation where he is. . . . When he does testify and assists and gets first-degree convictions in cases, some of them are retrials, where he now testifies and a jury comes back with a verdict of guilty, he is cross-examined for hours on his prior record, and it doesn’t matter—”
“No,” Biehn interrupted, “because people believe him. Because his blessing and his curse is that he is such a con, the first time, or second time, or the third time, and sometimes a fourth time, you believe him.”
Frumer said Hall was at great personal risk for testifying in these cases and reminded Biehn that countless prosecutors had vouched for him simply by putting him on the stand.
“It’s not like they do not want to call him,” Frumer said. “But as you heard from the detectives, without him they would not have a case. Someone, a wrongdoer, would go unpunished.”
Biehn looked over Hall’s record again.
“You have written down that there are twenty-seven misdemeanors, eight felony-three, one aggravated assault, and four burglaries. Is that [right]?”
Frumer said it was.
When Hall stood to address the court, he stressed that his snitching had prevented criminals from getting out and hurting other people, mostly women.
“These have all been women that they’ve attacked,” he said, “and I have a personal problem with that.”
He said he’d been very conflicted about snitching against his wife’s son and mentioned again the letter from Father John Bonavitacola helping him with his moral quandary.
“I have a tremendous problem with this case,” he said. “Obviously, this is my wife’s son—”
“Yes, but it’s your wife’s son who turned your wife in on another occasion,” Biehn said, unfooled, referring to the Home Alone case. “So people could at least look and probably cross-examine you on some of your motives with respect to this.”
“I understand that,” Hall said.
“I recognize,” Biehn continued, “and will accept . . . that you have provided tremendous help to law enforcement which resulted in convictions. The dilemma I have is that . . . your record and your risk to the community is [sic] such that would justify maximum sentence in all these cases. That’s the dilemma I have. . . . Anything else you want to say?”
Hall was nervous. Biehn was talking about giving him the maximum, and in state prison, which was harder time. He told Biehn there are many ways to do penance for a crime, that his career as a snitch was like community service and that he was at great risk from having given the DA all the mob information.32 He told the leg-drilling story again, this time coincidentally remembering that John Veasy, a mob hit man who was just then in the news, had been one of the men attacking him.
Biehn said he understood Hall could be in jeopardy from all his snitching and softened Hall’s punishment by running the sentences he handed down concurrently instead of back-to-back, but gave him one and a half to four years in a state facility.
Frumer asked the judge to reconsider the state time. Biehn said no.
Hall was angry after the hearing and blamed the failure on Frumer, whom he no longer trusted. He was in a bad situation, he felt: no lawyer, no money to hire a new one. But not without assets.
“So, what do we have going for us?” he wrote Phyllis. “There is, of course, the People of Philadelphia. The Fat Lady and the Colored Kid [Judi Rubino and Roger King]. They are forces to be reckoned with. They only have one clear shot at a win with Jogger and Ogrod, and that is with Dadees.” This was the pet name Phyllis had for him. “No Dadees and no cases. Dadees is their only path. Those two cases are priority-one. If they lose them, Lynn [sic] Abraham is going to look really bad to the voters. . . . The country will be watching on these two matters. Lynn [sic] can always blame someone else for Ogrod, but not Jogger. She inherited Ogrod, but Jogger is hers.”
His position was firm: he would not testify in either case if he was still in prison.33
That Hall had produced a letter of support from Cardinal Bevilacqua at the hearing before Judge Biehn surprised no one more than Cardinal Bevilacqua. The next day he contacted Father John Bonavitacola, the director of chaplaincy for the Philadelphia prison system, the same priest who’d visited Walter after his arrest and whose job included responding to all inmate mail, to ask what had happened.
Hall had, in fact, written to the cardinal, expressing concern about testifying against his stepson. The letter had gone to Father John, who, knowing Hall’s reputation, had not given him any advice specifically about snitching but had said he should always tell the truth. This was the letter Frumer had tried to pass off as a letter of support from the Cardinal himself, as if Hall somehow had Bevilacqua’s blessing.
Father John contacted Frumer and asked that Hall recant his statements implying that Cardinal Bevilacqua somehow approved of what he was doing, and Hall did so. But Father John was fed up. He had been visiting Walter regularly since his arrest, knew the case against him was weak, and knew John Hall was a liar and that Walter’s case was the kind of case prosecutors used Hall for. To Father John, you could understand how prosecutors worked by looking at the housing assignments in jail and tracking where the jailhouse snitches were put. How else did snitches housed in one place suddenly turn up as cellmates to high-profile murder defendants in another? Father John thought this was clear evidence that prison officials and police conspired to produce phony jailhouse confessions that led to convictions in otherwise weak cases. He’d seen it several times himself with John Hall.
It made him angry to see that authorities manipulate the justice system to get convictions against people with so little power, and that everyone was supposed to accept that this was justified so long as the right people ended up in jail. Eventually he came to feel he couldn’t work in so corrupt a system, gave up his job, and moved away.34
John Hall was supposed to testify at the Ogrod retrial scheduled for September 1996 and the Ernest trial in early 1997, and Judi Rubino, the prosecutor in charge of both trials, was in regular contact with him through the spring of 1996, speaking with him half a dozen times. As late as August 14 Rubino wrote to Mark Greenberg that Hall and Wolchansky would both testify against Walter.35 At some point between then and Walter’s trial—the end of August, according to Hall—Rubino informed Hall she would not be using him against Ogrod because she wanted to use him for the Ernest case.36 Apparently two John Hall trials, back-to-back, was too much for her.
For Ogrod, Rubino would use Jay Wolchansky, despite the rough time he’d had at the first Dickson trial. Though he would later swear, as Hall had taught him, that he came forward against Ogrod only out of a sense of moral outrage, he recorded his real motives in a letter he wrote to Hall in August 1996—probably just after being told he would be the only witness against Ogrod.
“I will not do anything for the Ogrod trial unless I am free first,” he wrote. “And then I will only think about doing it, since I don’t enjoy the publicity. I guess this will be all over the news and I want to avoid this aspect of this.”
That he and Hall were working together on Walter’s case is evident in his closing: “Keep me posted on Ogrod.”37
Rubino took Hall off the Ogrod case but still planned to use him for the Jogger case despite many reasons to be skeptical of his Ernest story. First, Haak’s and Wise’s confessions didn’t match each other, and the physical evidence in the case didn’t implicate either of them: DNA from semen and hairs taken from Ernest’s body didn’t match either of them, and the car Hall said they’d raped and beaten her to death in showed no evidence of a physical struggle, no blood.38
Also, by July 1996 concern about Hall’s role in solving the Kimberly Ernest case was widespread. Will Bunch published an article in the Daily News titled “Cops Try to Plug Holes in Jogger Murder,” which pointed out that the “break in the case seemed to come from left field . . . when John Hall . . . entered.” Bunch laid out Hall’s long, checkered history as a snitch.39 In another article, Bunch questioned why Haak would’ve confided anything to his stepfather, given their well-known antipathy after the very public Home Alone situation.40
All of this doubt pushed Hall to another level of lying. He decided to strengthen his story and the prosecution’s case by telling them Haak had kept a necklace of Kimberly Ernest’s after the murder. He told Phyllis to go to a jeweler well out of town and have a necklace made with the inscription “Kim I love you Ernie Burt” on it.41 He would then claim to have found it by accident in the front casing of a radio he retrieved from Haak’s cell.42 It would be the first definitive evidence linking Haak to the murder.43
But Hall’s hatred for his stepson had swamped his caution and he made mistakes. First, the story he’d told about Ernest’s murder had left him open to an accomplice to murder charge, because of his link to the car he’d claimed Haak had used in the murder. He wrote to Phyllis that he would fix this by arranging for “immunities” with “Lynne [Abraham], Judy [Judi Rubino], Roger [King],”44 and on August 10 he wrote a petition for immunity to Rubino. With so many people suspicious of his involvement with the necklace, he added to the petition that, for the record, he hadn’t known about it until he heard about it from Herb.
But Hall had another problem: Phyllis didn’t want any part of fabricating a necklace. She was angry enough at her son that she’d started to listen to Hall’s relentless attacks against him; she’d even gone along with telling the police Haak had threatened her. But she wasn’t going to help forge evidence that would stick her son with a death sentence.
Hall wrote to her, employing his full palette of manipulation: accusation, flattery, sentimentality, threat, condescension.
“Maybe you secretly want to sabotage this case,” he started, then switched tones: he loved her, they didn’t fight, they were in it all together, he could protect her, but she had to stop telling people things they didn’t need to know. He then touched a menacing chord: her son was finished, and if she changed her story now about Haak threatening her, she would alienate the DA and no one would be able to protect her. But, he went on, she was smart, she was capable, she could do this. He explained how to testify at Haak’s trial when the time came.
“Answer ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘I don’t know,’” he advised. “Do not volunteer anything. Let them ask and you answer with the facts as you know them. Remember that you control the attorneys. They must respond to your rhythm. You can slow them down by answering at your pace.”45
Personally, Hall wanted Phyllis to know, he was eager for the combat of trial. Her son’s lawyer was going to wish he’d never seen the Ernest case.
“I’m going to kick his fucking teeth in at trial, and you tell him I said so, too,” Hall wrote.
But Phyllis struggled with what would happen to her son, and Hall intensified his attack.
“He is scum,” he wrote in his anger and impotence at trying to convince her to hate her own son enough to stick him with a death sentence, digging the tip of his Bic pen into the paper: “Faggot . . . rapist . . . woman beater . . . fucking sludge . . . demented faggot who hates his mother and needs to injure her . . . if they gave him the death injection I sure as hell wouldn’t lose any sleep.”46
The case against Haak and Wise for murdering Kimberly Ernest would collapse early in 1997 when the truth about the “Kim” necklace forgery leaked. This proof that Hall was a liar finally made him too toxic for a courtroom; he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to testify at the Ernest trial. Rubino pressed on, arguing that Hall wasn’t central to proving her case but was only a “straw man” defense lawyers wanted to use to distract the jury from the real issues.47 She went to trial with only Haak’s and Wise’s disputed confessions and on March 14, 1997, after less than three hours of deliberation, the two men were acquitted. The jury believed their confessions had been coerced.48
The embarrassment Hall caused the Philadelphia DA’s office with his necklace stunt permanently damaged his brand and ended his most prolific two-plus year run of snitching. He would never again have the same kind of access to power that he had enjoyed so much.
For what it’s worth, Hall later said he thought Rubino didn’t know he was lying about the case until she found out about the necklace. Marc Frumer, Hall said, knew all along.49
As for the Ogrod case, Hall’s letters to Phyllis at the time suggest Frumer knew generally what Hall was doing (Marc tells me I am teaching him things outside the system), but he never wrote or said that Frumer specifically knew the Ogrod story was a lie.
After the Biehn hearing in 1996, Hall’s relationship with Frumer deteriorated. He wrote to Phyllis that Frumer was incompetent and had betrayed him. This was Hall’s pattern with his lawyers—even if he liked them at first, at some point they would prove unable to completely rescue him from his own pathology, and he’d turn on them.