Lau revealed another fact he and Stellato had noticed: this photograph of Albert Turner had been outdated even then. Carrie Elliott was assaulted in 1987. But this photograph of Turner was from 1985. Those two intervening years might not have mattered, had Turner kept the same hairstyle. But he hadn’t. In 1985, and therefore in the photograph, he was wearing unkempt dreadlocks. By October 1987 he’d grown a short Afro. Carrie had described her assailant as having bushy hair. Still the HPD had chosen a photograph from two years earlier, showing him in dreadlocks.
Blackburn couldn’t explain this. Typically an officer assembling a lineup would begin with a particular suspect in mind, then pull photographs of others who looked similar to him from a cabinet just outside the lieutenant’s office. Assuming Turner’s photograph was pulled from that cabinet, it should have been current, since any time someone was re-arrested, his newest mug shot replaced his previous one.
Lau flipped the lineup over, and showed Blackburn the name on its reverse. Was that Blackburn’s handwriting?
No. Blackburn didn’t recognize it. Maybe it was Susan Moore’s?
The handwriting wasn’t hers, Moore told them.
Did she recognize whose it was?
“Not a clue,” Moore said. Back in the 1980s, she’d been one of the only HPD investigators who also happened to be a woman. This meant she often was asked to sit in on interviews with rape victims, hoping to put them at ease. Twenty-odd years later, she couldn’t recall every single one distinctly. She didn’t remember Carrie Elliott or Willie Grimes at all.
Like Steve Hunt, Linda McDowell had had nothing to say to Chris Mumma, but now, under subpoena, she remembered that, days after the assault, her neighbor Carrie had told her what happened, and Linda noticed the description of her attacker sounded familiar. “I said that sounded like Woot,” she told Stellato. “ ’Cause of the mole she said was on his face.”
Stellato had read through the HPD reports, she pointed out gently, and it turned out that, in Carrie’s initial description to police, she hadn’t mentioned a mole at all. “It’s not until after she talks to you that she mentions the mole. And we’re just trying to figure out why.” Might Linda have suggested the mole first, even inadvertently, and Carrie had accommodated it?
No. Carrie had said it first.
Did Linda believe it was Willie Grimes who had raped Carrie Elliott?
“Well, that’s who she described to me,” Linda answered. All she knew was what Carrie had told her, which sounded an awful lot like Woot.
At the IIC offices in Raleigh, Albert Turner’s criminal history arrived: three densely printed, single-spaced pages, listing ninety-odd charges, including twenty-three for assault, several with a deadly weapon, one against an officer. Back in November 1985, Turner had begun a three-year prison sentence, but he’d been paroled at the end of April 1986. Meaning he’d been out of custody the following October, on the night Carrie Elliott was assaulted.
Then, eleven months later, after Willie was arrested, Turner had assaulted someone else. Three months later, someone else. Three months after that, someone else, plus larceny and resisting arrest. Two months after that he’d trespassed into housing projects, twice in the same week.
March 1990, assault. July and November, more trespassing. January 1994, May and June 1995, February 1997, January 1999—assault, assault on a female, assault with a deadly weapon, assault on a female, assault on a female. September 2001, June 2002, March 2003, more trespassing. April 2006, assault on a female with a deadly weapon. August 2007, disorderly conduct. April and September 2008, assault on a female, assault on a female. For a few of these he’d served time, but only briefly.
As Willie, meanwhile, was in prison.
From Turner’s records, Lau pulled street addresses that various agencies had listed for him, and placed these onto a map. Five sat within a half mile of Carrie’s apartment. Including the address listed most frequently, which was just around the block. And to the south. The direction Hunt believed her assailant had fled.
For weeks Kendra, Lau, and Stellato struggled to locate where Turner had gone, but finally the HPD officer assigned to help with their investigation heard on the street that Turner’s health was bad, so they phoned around and found him in a nursing home up in Lenoir, a half hour west of Hickory by Route 21. Lau and Stellato drove out. Turner looked terrible; his short Afro was graying, and his shoulders sagged so badly that his features looked uneven. His posture was like melting candlewax. But he remembered Carrie Elliott. That was a white lady who lived in Hillside Gardens, he told Stellato, while seated with the pair at a dining table. She’d been raped? He remembered that now. Personally he’d never talked with the lady.
Did Turner know anything about the rape?
“No, I didn’t hear nothing.” But now he remembered he had talked with Carrie Elliott; often she’d invited him inside her apartment, to use her telephone. He even remembered Woot being arrested. Turner had barely known Woot, only that he was quiet and from Shelby. But in fact Turner and Woot had been together when the cops showed up and took him.
The police hadn’t shown up anywhere, Stellato pointed out. Willie had turned himself in.
Oh.
“Do you have anything you think we should know?”
“No,” Turner said. He guessed he hadn’t been with Woot that night, even though he remembered it, the cops showing up, taking Woot away. He was willing to bet money. No? Woot had turned himself in? What night were they talking about, again?
“I’m gonna tell you something, okay? Are you listening? We found some physical evidence that matches you.” Could Turner explain his fingerprints on fruit inside Carrie Elliott’s kitchen?
“I ain’t never ate no fruit at her house,” Turner argued. He’d never been inside her kitchen at all. “So I don’t know.” Now he remembered something. He had brought Carrie fruit that one time, as a gift. Put it in her fruit basket himself.
From Turner’s police records, IIC staffers created a timeline of his every offense, each listed alongside a date and the name of a victim, whom Lau and Stellato set about finding. First was Cookie Walton, a former girlfriend of Turner’s whom court records showed he’d struck over the head with a liquor bottle. That was true, Walton confirmed, when the pair knocked at her door. She and Turner had dated for six or seven years, but the relationship ended when Turner stabbed her. There was no use estimating the number of times Turner had grown violent, she replied, in answer to Stellato’s next question, since it was too many to count. Yes, sometimes he’d forced her into sex. She didn’t want to estimate that number, either. “I just don’t even want to think about it.”
“Is your brother Albert Turner?” Lau and Stellato asked Martha Ferris.
“Oh Lord,” Ferris answered, and swung open her door. “Come on in.” No, Albert no longer stayed with her. In fact, he wasn’t allowed, since that altercation with the housing authority. No, Albert wasn’t violent—although, well, yes, he’d hit her before.
“Lord, no,” Leroy Jenkins told them, when Lau and Stellato shared they’d heard he once ran with Albert Turner. Jenkins had only gone to school with Albert’s brother. “He’s totally different,” Jenkins promised. He’d heard Albert was violent, and a drunk.
“Don’t look at me,” Jenkins’s wife added.
“Lord have mercy,” Jenkins said. He’d never wanted anything to do with Albert.
Wade Hefner had died in 1993, his widow, Shirley, told them. Before then, yes, he’d often hung with Albert Turner. In fact it had provoked arguments, since Shirley had never liked him. “Nothing but a drunk,” she recalled. Would Lau and Stellato do her a favor, and not tell Turner where she lived? “I don’t trust him with a ten-foot pole.”
Juanita Probst had known Turner nearly her entire life, she agreed, so Stellato explained why she and Lau had come: they’d seen her name on a police report, were curious for details.
Probst thought she knew which crime they meant. “Him raping me?”
> Stellato hesitated, startled. The police report she meant had listed only an assault charge.
“I wasn’t but nine years old,” Probst continued. She’d been babysitting some smaller children, left with Turner for a walk through the woods, where under cover of trees he’d pulled her clothes off. Afterward she had tried telling her parents, but they’d only smacked her for it, so she’d never said a word to police. She was glad these investigators had finally learned of it, however they had. “He’s a very cruel person,” she told Stellato.
They drove back to Lenoir, to see Turner again, who recalled now that he had known Carrie Elliott “real good,” in fact had visited her nearly every weekend. “We’d use her telephone.”
Had Turner ever been charged with assault?
One girlfriend he’d hit “a couple times,” Turner admitted. Nothing otherwise.
What about his sister?
Oh, sure. He’d gotten in fights with his sister. But that was all. That one girlfriend, his sister.
“You know I know every woman you’ve assaulted, right?” Lau asked. He lifted the pages of Turner’s criminal record. “So why are you not telling me everyone?”
“That’s all I know,” Turner insisted.
“You didn’t assault Juanita?”
“Oh. I forgot all about Juanita,” Turner said.
Had he and Juanita ever had sex?
“Yeah,” Turner replied. “But I didn’t rape her.”
LAU: But—she had sex with you when she was twelve?
TURNER: Yeah.
STELLATO: How old were you?
TURNER: I was about fourteen, fifteen.
STELLATO: How old are you now?
TURNER: Sixty-five.
STELLATO: So, Juanita’s forty-seven now.
TURNER: Yeah.
STELLATO: So you probably weren’t fourteen or fifteen when she was twelve, right?
TURNER: I don’t know.
STELLATO: You would have been thirty.
Thirty, Turner repeated, yeah, that sounded right. But Juanita had wanted it. “She was a hot little girl.”
“This record doesn’t look good,” Lau told him, waving the pages again. “So why should I believe you, when you say you didn’t assault Carrie Elliott?”
“Cross my heart,” Turner said. Wait—were they talking about Carrie Elliott now? Or Juanita? Juanita, that was different. But he hadn’t done anything to Carrie Elliott.
How had his fingerprints gotten on those bananas in Carrie’s apartment, then?
That was because he’d brought her those bananas as a gift, put them in that bowl by her front door. That glass one, a green and white bowl. Bananas, that’s right. And sometimes grapes.
“That’s not at all what the bowl looked like,” Lau told him. Carrie’s fruit bowl had been plastic, and she’d kept it in the kitchen. Turner had told them he’d never been inside her kitchen.
“I didn’t do nothing,” Turner repeated. “I ain’t no violent person. I was a nice guy.”
“Would Carrie Elliott say you’re a nice guy?” Lau asked.
“Who?”
“Carrie Elliott,” Lau repeated.
“Who?”
They drove to Gaston Correctional again, to meet with Willie, whose case manager held him back from the bus to work release. Again Willie led the pair through that October Saturday, listed everyone he recalled seeing at that house party.
What about others he’d known before his arrest? Was he still in touch with Brenda Smith, or Betty, his former girlfriends?
Brenda had died way back in ’91, Willie told them. As far as he knew, Betty was still living, though she’d long ago stopped answering his letters. So had her son, Christopher. Back when Betty had come to share his apartment, before all this had happened, Willie had often looked after Christopher, who’d been a small boy then, had even called Willie Dad.
By chance it was Christopher who answered the following morning, when Lau and Stellato knocked on the door to Betty’s apartment.
“You’re Chris?” Stellato asked, surprised. “Willie Grimes was talking to us the other day about you.” That Willie had been trying to get in touch?
That was true, Christopher admitted. He just hadn’t written Willie back. “Tell him I said I ain’t had time. I’ve been working. I’m trying to do it, though. I’ll get to it.”
“He said he was raising you till you were about five?” Lau asked.
That was true, too. Christopher paused to consider this. “He’s been gone that long? I’ll be thirty this year.” He tilted his head. “I remember him. He sent me a picture. I remember he used to buy me about everything, guitars and all that type of stuff. Stayed with him when my mama go to work. He used to watch me, keep me all the time. I thought he was my daddy.” But Christopher had lost track even of which prison Willie was being held at. His eyes widened when Stellato told him it was Gaston Correctional, only a forty-five-minute drive.
“We’re gonna tell him we saw you, okay?” she said.
Christopher nodded. “Tell him I miss him. I just haven’t wrote him back.”
Betty emerged then from another room, so Lau and Stellato explained why they’d come. “Woot was a good man,” Betty told them immediately. “He was nice.”
Had Willie ever hit her, or forced her to have sex? Had she ever heard of him doing either to anyone else?
Not once.
Had she ever spoken about the case with her sister, Linda McDowell?
Hardly. She’d only learned afterward, and from others, that it was Linda who’d given Woot’s name to police. Betty and the others had tried telling Linda it was impossible—Woot had been at that house party, had slept on Betty’s own couch—but Linda hadn’t listened. To this day Betty had no idea why Linda had accused him. “She’s still lying,” Betty said. “If she gets caught in a lie, what happens to her?”
“She didn’t testify,” Stellato explained. Linda had never been called at trial. Since she’d never been under oath, she’d never committed perjury.
“Oh,” Betty said.
Lib King had attended that same house party, still recalled seeing Woot there, even recalled—accurately—that he’d been arrested on a Tuesday. “Just knowing him, I don’t believe it,” she told Lau and Stellato.
Did King know a woman named Linda McDowell?
A little. King had always felt closer with Linda’s sisters, Betty and Rachel and Carolyn, the latter two of whom had passed away since then. That was where she’d learned it was Linda who’d accused Woot; Linda’s sisters had told her.
“What did they say about that?” Stellato asked.
“They thought she was just doing it for the money.”
Richard Wilson, who’d held Willie’s tax money that night, and happened to live across the street from that house party, remembered the same thing: Woot had crossed over to his house, retrieved his tax money, then crossed right back to the party. “So he couldn’t have done that,” he told Lau, meaning the rape. “He wouldn’t have done it anyway. Woot wouldn’t have done that. I’d stake my life on it. That’s the wrong man.”
Les Robinson remembered it, too. He’d dropped into that house party to borrow a pot for his wife, seen Woot there, returned later to watch television. Today Les and his wife, Turnell, were still married; she remembered the same sequence of events, though the couple couldn’t agree on what exact time it had been. Before sunset, Turnell thought, since she’d needed that pot for dinner.
So both Robinsons believed Willie had never raped anyone?
“I’m sure he didn’t,” Turnell said. “I know he didn’t. He was the most gentle person.”
“I was sorry what had happened to the lady,” Les added. “But get the right person.”
Lau and Stellato offered their business cards, in case either Robinson recalled anything else. Before they could leave, however, Les spoke up again. Could he ask something he was curious about?
Of course, Lau told him.
“I’m just very c
urious about it,” Les said. “We don’t even see the young man no more. If he went to prison and spent all that time for nothing, why y’all wait so long to investigate on it, again?”
Ed de Torres still practiced law in Newton, still remembered those banana peels that police had neglected outside Carrie Elliott’s apartment, still felt incredulous about it. “He’s been the one client I’ve had that I really felt should not ever have gone to the Department of Corrections,” he told Lau.
“So you do, in fact, believe he’s innocent?”
“I do,” de Torres said. “That’s the reason I’ve assisted him throughout the years. Obviously, you know, I believe the woman was raped. It’s obviously a terrible experience. But she was older and was just, I think, overwhelmed.”
Lau peered at de Torres’s desk, where he noticed an unfamiliar sheet of paper, and asked de Torres what it was. That was his original timesheet, and handwritten notes, from his work on Willie’s case, de Torres answered. He slid this over to Lau and Stellato. They were welcome to see or photocopy it, or anything else from his files.
Stellato examined the page, pointed to a particular line. “Can you tell me what that says?”
“Sure,” de Torres agreed. He leaned forward and squinted. It had to do with the party that night at Rachel Wilson’s house and the affidavits he’d gotten, de Torres explained, which seemingly no one had read. “It says, ‘Other people saw him there.’”
A third time, Lau and Stellato drove out to Gaston Correctional. “You’re completely innocent of this crime?” Lau pressed.
“Yes, sir,” Willie told him.
State law required that the IIC contact a victim’s family to share what was unfolding, though the truth was Kendra would have done this anyway. She, Lau, and Stellato had all worked personally with crime victims, and knew what a trial verdict could mean to a family, as well as news that verdict was being investigated. They deserved to know what the IIC was doing. So Stellato phoned funeral homes around Hickory until she found the one that had handled Carrie Elliott’s service, and asked an employee to fax her whatever it had kept. Carrie, a Baptist, had died on a winter evening in 1989, after a “brief illness,” according to the death record that arrived. She’d been seventy-one. Before retiring, she’d worked as an aide at the Brian Center, a local nursing home and rehabilitation center.
Ghost of the Innocent Man Page 30