by Bridget Heos
Davontae lived nearby and walked over to see the commotion. He struck up a conversation with a police officer, first telling him he knew who the shooter was and then telling them that it was his friends. The police took Davontae to the station for questioning. His mother, Taminko Sanford, thought Davontae would only be sharing information, and so she stayed home. But Davontae was actually in a vulnerable position. Studies show that both young people and people with cognitive disabilities are more susceptible to making false confessions. Indeed, after a long night of being questioned without a parent or lawyer, Davontae himself had confessed to the crime. His defense attorney then convinced Taminko that her son should accept a plea agreement. Taminko recalls being told that without the plea, Davontae would face life in prison. “My baby never wanted to take the plea,” Taminko said. “He kept telling me, momma, no, momma, no. I forced Davontae to take that plea. He was—he got thirty-seven to ninety years.”16
Davontae Sanford confessed to killing four people in Detroit, a crime he likely did not commit.
And he didn’t do it. At least, not according to Vincent Smothers, a professional hit man who claims to be the real shooter. An honor student who hung out with the “good kids,” Vincent was an unlikely hit man. His parents kept him and his siblings on the straight and narrow, even in the midst of rampant crime in the neighborhood. Then two family tragedies struck—his sister was accidentally shot to death in front of the Smotherses’ home, and Vincent’s father died of cancer. Around that time, Vincent began dabbling in crime. Though he got a job making air conditioning and heating ducts, he also stole cars on the side. He then tried a more lucrative but dangerous sideline: robbing drug dealers. That led him to a powwow with some big-time drug sellers, who hired him to be a hit man. He was ruthless, once killing an elderly bus driver at his employer’s command. But in some ways, Vincent was still the responsible person he was raised to be. He married a nurse and had two daughters.
The Runyon Street hit, which targeted a marijuana dealer but also included three houseguests, was among Vincent’s last. About a month later, the police arrested him. The jig was up. An informer had told them about Vincent’s illicit profession. Now, he told police he didn’t care about himself. He just wanted to keep his wife out of prison. (She was in trouble for stashing some of his weapons.) So he confessed to all his killings, including the Runyon Street murders.
Vincent Smothers, a professional hit man who claims to be the real Runyon Street shooter
That one stopped the police in their tracks. They already had a guy for that shooting. But Vincent stuck to his confession, describing the killing in vivid detail. It may seem like a case of one person’s word against another’s. But Davontae had since retracted his confession. And in addition to Vincent’s confession, firearm evidence pointed to him as the killer. Cartridge casings and bullets found at the scene matched a .45-caliber gun and an AK-47 linked to Vincent.
Vincent was sure that his confession would free Davontae. When the two happened to run into each other in prison, Vincent assured the young man that he would be out soon. But that didn’t happen. Davontae’s new lawyer heard about the confession and requested an innocence trial. But Vincent refused to testify. He did file a detailed affidavit stating his role in the killings and saying that Davontae was not an accomplice. In 2014, the Michigan Supreme Court said that though Davontae couldn’t undo his guilty plea, he could pursue an appeal.
Then, in June of 2015—nearly eight years after Davontae was arrested and Vincent subsequently confessed to the crime—the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office asked state police to reinvestigate. About a year later, they issued arrest warrants in the case for Vincent Smothers and an accomplice, Ernest Davis, both of whom are serving prison terms for other murders. They also sought perjury charges against a Detroit police official. Since it is virtually unthinkable that Vincent would have allowed Davontae—who he did not even know at the time—to tag along on a murder job, signs point to Davontae being freed very soon. Meanwhile, Detroit police are investigating their detectives’ handling of the case. The case shows how forensic evidence can shed light on a false confession. Sadly, it also shows how confessions can be coerced, and how difficult it is to undo such a confession once it’s been made.
Since its emergence in the 1920s, firearm analysis has helped to solve some of the most important cases in America, and it’s no wonder, with guns being the weapon of choice for so many criminals. It will be interesting to see if, as with poisonings, stricter laws will be passed in an effort to reduce gun deaths.
ACCIDENT OR FAKED ACCIDENT?
New York Medical Examiner Dr. M. Edward Marten received news the evening of July 4, 1937, that a middle-aged woman had been shot and killed. Her distraught husband explained that at five thirty p.m., he had pulled a gun out from under a couch cushion and told his wife he intended to fire it into the air for Independence Day. She told him he would do no such thing. Mad at her for ruining his fun in the name of stupid old gun safety, he threw the weapon, still in its holster, onto the couch, and in the process tragically proved his wife right.
Immediately, she cried, “I’m shot.”17 As he walked her into the bedroom to lay her on the bed, she collapsed onto the floor. He ran and cried out for help and then returned to his wife’s side. Two men came running and found the husband on the floor, kissing the wife and saying, “I killed her! I killed her.”18
Marten had to decide whether the story was true. Examining the body, he determined that the time of death coincided with the husband calling for help (leaving no time for him to have staged the accident). The hole in the holster showed that the gun had fired while in the holster. Added to that, the entry wound suggested that the bullet trajectory had come from the couch cushion, an awkward angle from which to purposely shoot someone. Marten concluded that the husband was not guilty of murder—only carelessness.
7
Blood Is Thicker: The First Blood Pattern Cases
Blood pattern analysis actually dates back to ancient times, when in 72 CE in Rome, the father of a blind boy was found murdered. Bloody handprints were found along the stairway leading away from the body, as though the boy had been feeling his way along the wall. But the handprints were too perfect. Investigators said the prints should have faded as the boy got farther from the scene. Instead, they remained as bright as a children’s handprint mural. To appear as they did, the boy would have had to have redipped his hands in the blood. He hadn’t, but his stepmother had. She was determined to have killed the man and framed the boy.
In modern times, at least in America, blood pattern analysis wasn’t done in earnest until the 1950s. Then it played a major role in the Marilyn Sheppard murder investigation, a sensational case that inspired the television show and movie The Fugitive. Marilyn and Samuel Sheppard were beautiful, young, and rich. They lived in Bay Village, a suburb outside of Cleveland. Sam was a doctor at the Bay View Hospital, along with his father and two brothers. Marilyn had been Sam’s high school sweetheart, and together they had a son, Sam Reese Sheppard, nicknamed Chip. From the outside, it looked like the Sheppards had a perfect life, but in fact their marriage was unhappy, the details of which would come out during the trial.
Early on the morning of July 4, 1954, Sam Sheppard called his friend Spencer Houk, saying, “For God’s sake, Spen, get over here quick. I think they’ve killed Marilyn.”1
Dr. Sam Sheppard and his wife, Marilyn
Spencer and his wife, Esther, drove to the house, where they found Sam in the den, looking dazed. Houk asked what happened, and Sam said, “I don’t know. I just remember waking up on the couch and I heard Marilyn screaming and I started up the stairs and somebody or something clobbered me and the next thing I remember was coming to down on the beach.”2
Esther ran upstairs and back down, saying, “Call the police, call an ambulance, call everything.”3
Patrolman Fred F. Drenkhan responded to the call at about six a.m. He found Sam slouched in a chair in the
study, wearing slacks but no shirt, his face swollen and discolored. Esther told Drenkhan to see about Marilyn upstairs. The officer found her badly beaten, the bed soaked in blood, the walls splashed in red. Seven-year-old Chip was still sound asleep, and the family dog, Koko, was quiet.
Drenkhan asked Sam what happened, and he repeated the same story he had told the Houks. Drenkhan further investigated the scene. There was no sign of a forced entry. The doors of a desk in the study had been removed and lay on the floor. In the living room, the drawers of a desk were pulled open and papers strewn about. However, nothing of value appeared to have been taken. Drenkhan radioed for a doctor and the chief of police. Soon, a detective from the Cleveland Police and the Cuyahoga County coroner, Sam Gerber, also arrived.
Sketch of the Sheppards’ house, which was used in the murder trial
After examining the body, observing the crime scene, and speaking to Sam, Gerber told a detective, “It’s obvious that the doctor did it.”4 Gerber’s autopsy would reveal that Marilyn received thirty-five blows—many of them strong enough to have been fatal. Her teeth had been chipped during the attack. Though her pajamas had been partially pulled off, there were no signs of rape. She was also four months pregnant.
Sam’s brothers took him to Bay Side Hospital to be treated for neck and head injuries. But detectives believed the injuries to be self-inflicted, and they made it clear that Sam was the prime suspect. Detective Robert Schottke said, “I don’t know about my partner, but I think you killed your wife.”5
The press was of the same opinion. Newspapers called for Sam’s arrest. An editorial in the July 30 Cleveland Press criticized investigators for letting Sheppard’s well-connected family and friends protect him:
This man is a suspect in his wife’s murder. Nobody yet has found a solitary trace of the presence of anybody else in his Lake Road house the night or morning his wife was brutally beaten to death in her bedroom.
And yet no murder suspect in the history of this County has been treated so tenderly, with such infinite solicitude for his emotions, with such fear of upsetting the young man.
Gentlemen of Bay Village, Cuyahoga County, and Cleveland, charged jointly with law enforcement—
This is murder. This is no parlor game.6
Sam was eventually arrested and put on trial. He was represented by attorney Bill Corrigan, whose strategy was to let Sam testify and hope that the jury would believe him. Sam told the jury the same strange story that he had told his friends when they arrived at the scene. He had been asleep in the den when he heard his wife cry out. He awoke and, in his own words:
As I went upstairs and into the room I felt that I could visualize a form of some type with a light top. As I tried to go to Marilyn I was intercepted or grappled. As I tried to shake loose or strike, I felt that I was struck from behind and my recollection was cut off. The next thing I remember was coming to a very vague sensation in a sitting position right next to Marilyn’s bed, facing the hallway, facing south. I recall vaguely recognizing my wallet.7
He was questioned as to what happened after that:
A. Well, I realized that I had been hurt and as I came to some sort of consciousness, I looked at my wife.
Q. What did you see?
A. She was in very bad condition. She had been—she had been badly beaten. I felt that she was gone. And I was immediately fearful for Chip. I went into Chip’s room and in some way evaluated that he was all right. I don’t know how I did it. I, at this time or shortly thereafter, heard a noise downstairs.
Q. And what did you do when you heard the noise downstairs?
A. And I—I can’t explain my emotion, but I was stimulated to chase or get whoever or whatever was responsible for what had happened. I went down the stairs, went into the living room, over toward the east portion of the living room and visualized a form.8
Sam went on to describe an altercation on the beach, during which he was again knocked out by the “form,” which he said he now saw had bushy hair. He awoke with his body partially underwater and went back to the house to check on Marilyn. Seeing that she’d been badly beaten, he paced around the house, confused and horrified. Finally, he called Spencer Houk.
Sam’s story must have seemed suspicious to the jury. For one thing, his description of the intruder was incredibly vague. He called the intruder “a form of some type with a light top” and “someone or something”—as though he had no idea whether it was a person or—what? A bear? An extraterrestrial? The prosecution told the jury that neither the evidence nor the rules of time and logic matched Sam’s story. If he had run upstairs as soon as he heard Marilyn cry out, only to find that the attack was complete when he reached the room, then that would mean that the attacker had managed to land thirty-five blows while Sheppard ran upstairs. The prosecution also argued that there were no signs of a struggle—either in the bedroom or on the beach. The killer would have been bloodied from the attack, and so blood would have transferred to Sheppard and then onto the floor and ground. But no such bloodstains were found in these places.
Dr. Sam Sheppard on trial for the murder of his wife
There was blood found on Sheppard’s watch—tiny droplets consistent with the blood that sprays during an attack. If Sheppard had been wearing it when examining his wife after the attack, it should have been smeared instead. In other words, when compared to Sam’s story, there was blood where it shouldn’t be, and there wasn’t blood where it should be. The prosecution also presented more speculative blood evidence. Gerber, the coroner, said that he’d found on the pillow a bloodstain that looked like it was the result of a tool being laid down. He theorized that it was a surgical instrument—and the murder weapon.
In addition to blood evidence, the prosecutor focused on Sheppard’s private life. A former coworker of Sheppard’s, Susan Hayes, testified that she’d been having an affair with Sheppard for some time. Marilyn was revealed to be unhappy in the marriage for other reasons, too. She had told Houk that Sam was “a Jekyll and a Hyde.”9 After deliberating for several days, the jury found Sheppard guilty, and he was sent to a maximum security prison. But the story didn’t end there.
In 1955, Corrigan hired criminalist Dr. Paul Kirk to analyze the crime scene. Kirk focused on the scene of the attack: the bedroom. He said that, looking at the blood spatter on the walls in the room, there was a space where there was little blood. This would have been blocked by the killer. He argued that the killer would have been covered in blood, not just have a stain on the knee of his pants, as Dr. Sheppard had. Kirk also debunked Gerber’s theory that the weapon was a surgical instrument. He ran blood spatter tests, akin to those now seen on the show Dexter, and determined the weapon to be a flashlight. (A neighbor of the Sheppards’ found a flashlight in Lake Erie near the home around the same time.) Kirk said that the mark on the pillow could have come from the pillowcase being wrinkled at that spot—as opposed to a surgical instrument being laid there. He further theorized that the killer was left-handed, whereas Sam was right-handed. Finally, Kirk said that the chipped teeth found with the body meant that Marilyn had probably bitten the killer’s hand, and the killer would have bled. Kirk said that he found type O blood on the scene that was different from Marilyn’s type O blood. He concluded that it must be from the bleeding hand, and that the killer must have type O blood, whereas Sam had type A blood.
A judge said that Corrigan had been free to present this analysis at the first trial, and so no new trial was granted. Corrigan died shortly after the appeal, and Sheppard hired a new attorney, F. Lee Bailey. Bailey argued that the guilty verdict should be overturned based on the fact that the press coverage cast a negative light on Sheppard, denying him the right to a fair trial. The appeal made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, which agreed that the “carnival atmosphere”10 of the trial potentially prejudiced the jury. The conviction was overturned.
Both sides of the bloodstained pillow on which Marilyn Sheppard was murdered
The State of O
hio tried Sheppard again in 1966. This time, Bailey was able to use Kirk’s expert testimony. Public opinion had also changed. A popular TV show, The Fugitive, reflected remarkable similarities to Sam’s account of the murder. The Fugitive’s title character, Dr. Richard Kimble, was also a doctor accused of murdering his wife. He had seen the real attacker, in this case a one-armed man, not the bushy-haired form that Sam described. Kimble had escaped federal custody and was now trying to track down the real killer. Bailey himself seemed aware of The Fugitive’s possible positive effect on the jury; he asked them if they’d heard of the show.
But instead of having Sam testify, Bailey kept his client off the stand. The attorney presented a rather outlandish new theory as to who the true killer could be. He said that Marilyn was having an affair with Spencer Houk and that it was his wife, Esther, who’d killed Marilyn. Because Sam didn’t testify, prosecutors couldn’t cross-examine him about the bushy-haired form he’d reported seeing, which conflicted with the new theory. Sam was found not guilty and released. A grand jury never indicted Esther Houk. Sam became a professional wrestler known as Killer Sheppard, and in 1970, he died. But that wasn’t the end of the story either.
In 1996, Marilyn and Sam Sheppard’s son, Sam Reese Sheppard (previously nicknamed Chip), brought a case against the State of Ohio for the malicious prosecution and wrongful imprisonment of his father. He and his attorney, Terry Gilbert, had a new theory regarding who committed the murder. They blamed a window washer who had worked for the Sheppards, Richard Eberling. Whereas Esther Houk was a rather unlikely suspect, Richard actually had a checkered past. In 1989, he was convicted of murdering Ethel Durkin, an elderly woman in his care, and forging her will to make himself a beneficiary. Richard wrote a letter to Sam Reese from prison saying he knew who really killed Marilyn. He said it was Esther Houk, and that her husband and Sam covered it up. Sam Reese wanted to clear his father’s name, but he didn’t believe the Esther Houk story. He thought Richard might have done it. And there was some evidence pointing to that. For instance, an acquaintance of Richard’s said that he had confessed to murdering Marilyn. The plaintiffs also said that blood found on the scene matched Richard’s DNA. Richard died before the civil case went to trial.