Part Three: The Confession

‘I didn’t have nothing to hide’

By Phoebe Zerwick

JOURNAL REPORTER

WINSTON-SALEM

CHAPTER 4

A new focus

Detective Don Williams returned to Winston-Salem from his visit with Jill Marker in October 1996 with a new focus for his investigation into her near-fatal beating. He began looking in earnest at the black suspects whose names he had in his files.

Marker couldn’t speak when Williams interviewed her in an Ohio hospital, but she could nod or shake her head yes or no.

From her gestures, Williams concluded that Marker had been attacked by a black man in his 30s with a medium to heavy build, possibly a deliveryman. It is not clear from his report why he concluded that her gestures about the attacker’s race and age were more certain than her gestures about whether he was a deliveryman.

It was now November 1996, nearly a year since Marker, an assistant manager at the Silk Plant Forest store, had been struck some 20 times in the head as she was closing up on a Saturday night, Dec. 9, 1995.

Williams didn’t have much to work with as his investigation took its new turn.

In July, he had interviewed a 25-year-old black man named Kalvin Michael Smith, but he hadn’t gotten around to documenting it. An anonymous caller to Crime Stoppers had claimed that Smith had committed the crime, but Smith had been interviewed and had taken a lie-detector test that indicated he had not been involved. Williams now wrote up that interview in a one-page report.

Williams also tracked down two men who made deliveries to the Silk Plant Forest at the time of the attack. Both agreed to be interviewed and to take lie-detector tests. There is nothing in the police reports to indicate that Williams ever followed through with those interviews or tests. Nor do the reports show that Williams investigated anyone else who made deliveries to Toy R Us, the Drug Emporium, Marshall’s or other stores in the Silas Creek Crossing shopping center, across from Hanes Mall.

One lead that Williams did pursue was a follow-up to a Crime Stoppers tip from the early days of the investigation, about a black man named Michael Fuller.

A witness told police the night of the attack and again in an interview with Williams on Dec. 21, 1995, that he had seen a Mustang, possibly burgundy with out-of-state plates, driving suspiciously in the Silas Creek Crossing parking lot. The car stopped for a minute and a half while directly facing the Silk Plant Forest store, the witness said. Police published a Crime Stoppers notice that they were looking for a black man seen getting into a Mustang, which resulted in a tip about Fuller, who drove a Mustang with West Virginia plates.

By Jan. 12, 1996, Williams had found the car, but he didn’t do anything more concrete for 10 months, until November, when he finally reached Fuller to set up an interview. Fuller skipped the interview and later left Williams a voice mail saying he had no reason to talk with him.

On Dec. 9, exactly a year after the attack, Williams arrested Fuller at his home on an outstanding warrant for failing to appear in court. Fuller refused to speak with the police, but a teenager who knew him told Williams that Fuller had gone to the shopping center the night of the attack with a friend.

Police searched the Mustang, but didn’t find anything.

Today, Fuller talks freely about what happened. He said he knew the police were looking for him in December 1996, and when Williams came to his house to arrest him, he called his attorney before opening the door.

“He (my attorney) said, ‘Go down there and don’t say nothing.’ It was just common sense,” Fuller said. “There wasn’t nothing for me to say. They was trying to get me to slip up and say something. They was telling me they knew I done it.”

Fuller said he remembered the night because he had gone to Toys R Us with his girlfriend to buy a bicycle. He said he and his girlfriend went inside the toy store together, but he left before she did to get the car, and was waiting for her outside when police arrived at the Silk Plant Forest next door. He admits that he could have been the driver the witness reported seeing; he was driving a stick shift, he said, and remembers burning rubber while shifting the gears.

Williams never did anything more with the lead.

Smith spent the four months after his first encounter with Williams in the Forsyth County Jail on a larceny conviction and probation violation. While there, he met a female employee named Beverly Watson, whom he began to date, even though for three years he had been going with a woman named Valerie Williams.

According to Smith and others who knew them, Smith and Williams had a stormy relationship. He was a ladies’ man who almost always had more than one girlfriend. “I got real comfortable with the manipulation of these women,” Smith said. “I wouldn’t never commit to no one.”

Williams did not take kindly to such treatment.

On Jan. 19, Smith made the mistake of asking Watson to drop him off at Williams’ house. “Valerie went ballistic,” Smith said. He said that Williams had just learned that morning that she was pregnant with Smith’s child. The two women argued, and Watson called the police. According to court records, Williams was charged on Jan. 20, 1997, with simple assault and with breaking a window on Watson’s Honda Accord.

That day, Williams called the police and fingered Smith in the Silk Plant Forest beating.

It was almost a repeat of what had happened to Smith six months earlier when the first Crime Stoppers tip claimed that Smith was responsible for the crime. In that instance, a woman named Andra Wilson called the police. Smith said Wilson later told him that she reported him to police because she was upset that he had left her.

This time, according to police reports, Valerie Williams said to Sgt. Terry D. Ireland that Smith had told her about the crime. She said that Smith and a friend named Kevin smoked a joint together and decided to rob the plant store for money to buy more drugs. Smith, she said, covered his face with a stocking and the friend beat Marker with a brick.

Smith and Williams made up within a couple of days, and Smith said that once they were back together she told him about it. “Guess what I did?” he recalled her saying. “Remember when you told me about taking the polygraph and Jill Marker. I called the police and told them you know something about it.”

Williams declined to be interviewed at length for this article, but she confirmed that she called the police out of jealousy, inventing her story from the accusation she knew Andra Wilson had made earlier in the year.

Smith’s friends and family say that Valerie Williams has apologized to them. “I asked her, ‘Why would you ever say Mike did that?’” said Charlette Stafford, the mother of one of Smith’s three sons. “She said she was mad because he was going with this girl. Valerie was real jealous of him.”

Ireland turned his notes over to Don Williams. In a recent interview, Williams admitted to lying to Valerie Williams to pressure her into bringing Smith to police headquarters for an interview.

“You don’t threaten them, but you have to use tactics,” Williams said. “‘You’re going to be in trouble. There may be enough to indict you if you don’t give me information.’ I told her, ‘You and Kalvin need to come down to the police department. It’s for your own benefit.’

“They came down the next day. That was a bad mistake for them.”

Unlike Fuller, when Smith went downtown to police headquarters, he didn’t think to call a lawyer. Rather, he said, he drank a 40-ounce bottle of beer and smoked a joint.

“Let’s go down there and straighten this thing out,” he remembers telling Valerie Williams.

Don Williams said recently that he was determined to get a confession from Smith.

He put Smith in one room and Valerie Williams in another. He and his supervisor, Sgt. Randy Weavil, teamed up for the interrogation. Williams taped other interviews, but not this one.

“Valerie raised all kind of Cain in there, that we tricked her into coming down,” Williams said. “I just told her, ‘I know he’s involved with it. You know about it because you called Ireland.’ I said, ‘You want to be charged with accessory? If the DA wants to charge you, he’ll charge you.’”

They made sure to tell Smith that he was free to leave, that he was not under arrest. Once they do that, the police are free to interrogate without reading a suspect his rights.

Smith said that he denied knowing anything about the crime but that the two detectives showed him pictures of Marker’s injuries and accused him of the savage beating.

“I’m crying. I’m telling them for two hours I didn’t do this,” Smith said. “They’re telling me, ‘Valerie’s saying this and saying that and telling me if I don’t say that, they’re going to charge her with accessory.’

“They’re going over there threatening her, too. Detective Williams told me exactly what to write. After that I said, ‘Can I go now?’ I’m trying to keep me and Val from going to jail … He said, ‘You’re under arrest for attempted murder.’”

The interrogation lasted long enough for word to spread around the police department that Williams and Weavil had a suspect in the Silk Plant Forest case. Even Police Chief George Sweat listened at the door.

“I said, ‘That dirty son-of-a-bitch that would beat a woman like that,’” Williams said. “I said, ‘Kalvin, you done it.’ I pointed my finger right in his face. I said, ‘You’re crying because you’re feeling some remorse.’ I said, ‘If you didn’t, I’d think you were nothing but a hooligan or a devil.’

“He said, ‘I was down there.’ I said, ‘You was in there.’ He said, ‘I stood inside the door.’ And I said, ‘I got him.’”

In the end, Smith and Valerie Williams each signed statements. In her statement, Williams said that Smith had confessed to a minor role in the crime. “The statement Kalvin Smith has made was he was at the scene of the crime but he did not commit the crime of beating the woman at the Silk Florist flower shop.”

Smith’s signed statement is longer but similar to Williams’. He said that he walked to the shopping center from Waughtown Street, about four miles away, and met up with a man he knew named James Barrows. They smoked a joint together and planned the robbery of the plant store.

“So I went to the Silk Plant Forest with him and I stood at the door on the inside the lady was giving James Barrows change and he tried to snatch it and she reared back and I saw him swing at her and I ran out. After I saw him hit her in the head.”

The statement provides few details, nor does it match the facts. Marker was found at the rear of the store, not by the cash register. In a second signed statement, Smith corrected that error. “While I was in the store,” he wrote, “I saw J.B. run after the girl to the back and I heard her holler and I left. KS.”

According to Williams’ reports, Smith told him that he and Barrows smoked a joint behind the store, where Barrows picked up a metal pipe, which he later used to hit Marker. During the interrogation, police tried without success to find a James Barrows or a James Burroughs in their files. They also showed Smith photographs of men with the initials J.B., but he was unable to identify any of them as his accomplice. Later, Williams would go to the Citgo station where Smith used to hang out; no J.B. was ever found.

Smith said recently that he used the initials J.B. because he had been listening to a song by James Brown on the way downtown to the police station, and that he came up with James Barrows when the detectives pressed him for a name.

Smith never left the police department that day. Williams charged him with robbery and with assault with intent to kill inflicting serious injury. Bond was set at $1 million. He has been locked up since then.

Williams and Weavil both testified about the interrogation at a hearing in November 1997 over whether Smith’s statement had been coerced. Judge Peter McHugh ruled that it could be introduced at trial, should Smith or one of the detectives testify.

During the hearing, Williams and Weavil describe an interview that is much less emotionally charged than the way Williams himself describes it today. They both denied threatening Valerie Williams with arrest, and they both testified that Smith volunteered his statement, without the pointed questioning that Williams now describes.

Weavil, now the lieutenant in charge of homicide investigations, declined to be interviewed.

Police interrogations are not intended to be neutral interviews. They begin with the presumption that the person in question is guilty. The point of the interrogation is to weaken a suspect psychologically until he confesses.

Training classes and textbooks teach investigative tactics. The courts allow detectives to lie, as they did in this case with Valerie Williams. They may adopt a pose of hostility and accuse the suspect. They may feign sympathy and propose explanations for the crime in an effort to reduce a suspect’s guilt.

The courts accept these tactics as legitimate means of forcing suspects to admit to their crimes. Critics say that in some cases, the tactics persuade innocent people that they have no option but to confess.

“False confessions are generally the result of two things — the use of sophisticated police interrogation tactics and particular individual vulnerabilities of the person being questioned,” said Steven Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern University and an attorney at the university’s Center on Wrongful Convictions.

“What these techniques do is they break down a suspect’s resistance to making an admission placing him at the crime scene or that involves him in the crime. These techniques do that by exaggerating the strength of the evidence against the suspect and motivating the suspect to confess with expressed or implied promises of leniency or threats of harm.”

Smith said that Williams and Weavil led him to believe that he would be allowed to leave if he signed a statement.

“What I should have said is not said nothing to him. They tricked me,” Smith said. “I was just the stupid one who wrote a statement.”

“The only reason I went down there is I didn’t have nothing to hide,” he said.

Valerie Williams stopped cooperating with the police after the first interview.

In July 1997, a private detective named Darrell Wilson, who was hired by Smith’s attorney, interviewed Williams. According to the transcript from that interview, she said she lied to police during the interview, using information they provided to write a statement, and that she signed it only to avoid prosecution.

In a brief conversation recently, she said that her statement to Wilson was true. In November 1997, two weeks before Smith’s trial, she signed an affidavit saying that she called the police about Smith because she was angry with him for taking up with another woman. She said she knew that he had been questioned about the crime in the summer of 1996 and used what she knew about that to make up a story.

A week after Smith’s arrest, which made headlines in North Carolina and Ohio, Crime Stoppers received another anonymous tip about Smith. The caller said that he had seen Smith with Marker’s husband, Aaron, at a fast-food restaurant on Liberty Street in October 1995. The caller went on to say he had heard that Aaron Marker owed Smith money for drugs and that Smith and another man had gone to the Silk Plant Forest to collect the debt.

The next day, Williams called Aaron Marker and asked him whether he had ever bought drugs from Smith or knew him. According to a note Williams wrote at the bottom of the Crime Stoppers report, Marker denied knowing Smith.

Williams does not mention the anonymous call in any of his reports of the investigation. In a recent interview, he said he received a separate anonymous call from someone who said he was calling from a phone booth on Liberty Street, who told him much the same thing, and that he believed it.

Williams was never able to confirm either tip, but the information from one or more anonymous sources changed his thinking about the case. Now, he had a motive for the attack.

“It’s totally senseless for a few bucks to go and beat a woman down,” Williams said. “I’ll guarantee you he was on drugs when he did it. Kalvin was mean. He was just downright mean. He was seeking not just money but revenge because Aaron owed him money.”

Williams’ belief that Smith was a mean-tempered man with a history of violence is disputed by many of Smith’s relatives and former girlfriends, even women whom he betrayed. They describe Smith as a fickle but warm-hearted person. Smith had no criminal record of drug-dealing.

“When I first met him I thought, ‘Damn, he’s fine looking,’” said Ann Morgan, a former girlfriend. “He’s a sweet, sweet man. He’s not a type that would hit ... a female no matter what she’s doing.”

As far as the connection between Smith and Marker, Williams’ theory is based on unconfirmed, anonymous information. Still, Williams believed the theory, so much so that he shared his suspicions with Marker’s parents.

But other than his attempt to interview Aaron Marker, Williams did little to investigate him. There is no record in the police reports that he interviewed Marker’s work associates or Jill Marker’s friends. He took Aaron Marker’s photograph to some bars on Liberty Street once, but gave up after no one there recognized him, he said. He never pressed Smith to finger Aaron Marker.

Dennis Carter, the general manager at Ryan’s Restaurant, where Marker had worked, said that he kept expecting police to come by the restaurant to question him and others about Marker.

“I thought it was a little odd that none of us, to my knowledge, no one was ever interviewed,” Carter said recently. “But at the same time you assume they got it wrapped up and they knew what they were doing.”

Aaron Marker said in a recent interview that he knew Williams regarded him as a suspect and that his ex-wife’s parents also came to think of him as being involved with the attack.

He said that the pressures of losing his wife and raising a newborn infant on his own overwhelmed him. He said that he suffered psychological problems, though he declined to discuss the details, and that he wished he had been able to confront the suspicions Williams had about him.

“Sometimes I wish I’d asked more questions,” he said. “But being treated like a suspect, I didn’t have the balls.”

CHAPTER 5

Building a case

After Smith implicated himself, Williams built a case against him through a series of interviews with some of the people who knew Smith. Williams began with the address that Smith provided in his statement, in which he said he walked back to an apartment in Skyline Village, Apt. 3-F, on Timlic Avenue.

There, Williams found Wilson, a 26-year-old woman who had lived in the apartment in December 1995. She said to him that Smith had told her about his role in the attack many times and that she was the one who had called Crime Stoppers the previous summer.

She described Smith as a crack user, prone to violent rages, a description disputed by others but that nonetheless helped shape Williams’ image of Smith. She also provided the names of two others who she said heard Smith boast about the crime — Eugene Littlejohn and Pamela Moore.

She took issue with the part of Smith’s statement that says he walked to her apartment after the attack, insisting that was impossible because they did not meet until Dec. 26, 1995 — more than two weeks after the crime.

On Feb. 4, 1997, Wilson gave police two signed statements. In the first, she said that Smith told her he had gone to the Silk Plant Forest with another man, who beat Marker. After she signed the statement, Williams and his supervisor, Weavil, asked her more, whether Smith might have had a role in the attack. Wilson then provided a second statement, in which she said that Smith had admitted to beating the woman himself, and that he had gone there alone.

Today, Wilson said, she suffers from bipolar disorder and cannot remember whether Smith ever told her about the crime. She said she remembers testifying in court and she remembers talking with Williams. She said that she also remembers being afraid that she would be implicated in the crime. In her interview with Williams, she said that one reason she came forward was to remove suspicion from her, “because this look like I’m involved.”

Shortly after her interview with Williams, Wilson wrote to Smith in jail, asking: “What have you gotten us into? Why are the police questioning us? I thought that you were my homie. The only thing I have done to you is care for you and this is how you repay me.”

Wilson said she remembers writing the letter. “I just wanted to know why we was being questioned for something we didn’t have anything to do with,” she said.

Six months after Smith’s arrest, the private investigator, Darrell Wilson, spoke with Andra Wilson. She contradicted several times the statements she had made to police and even denied that she was the one who made the call to Crime Stoppers. Instead, she blamed Smith for getting her involved in the case, saying police told her that Smith had already admitted to bragging about the crime to her and three others.

“What is the truth, what — does anybody know the truth?” the private detective asked her.

“Yeah,” she replied. “I know the truth. The truth could set Michael free.”

The interview ended with no explanation about what she meant.

Eugene Littlejohn didn’t impress Williams any more than Smith had. Williams said that Littlejohn, too, began to cry when Williams first asked him about the robbery at the Silk Plant Forest. For Williams, the tears were a sign that Littlejohn had something to hide.

According to Smith, he and Littlejohn had been friends since the end of December 1995. They liked to drink beer together, and for a while they both stayed at Wilson’s place in Skyline Village, along with Littlejohn’s girlfriend at the time, Pamela Moore.

In his first interview with police on Feb. 10, 1997, Littlejohn said he, Wilson, Moore and another man were drinking beer when Smith told them about the crime. “He said he had to beat a bitch ’cause she…wouldn’t let him out,” he said, according to a transcript of the interview.

In March 1997, Williams began to think of Littlejohn as a potential suspect.

“Again it comes back to that instinct,” Williams said recently. “Once you got that gut feeling, you got to prove it.”

According to Williams’ reports, he asked Littlejohn to come to police headquarters for a second interview on March 3 because of the “possibility of Eugene Littlejohn being with Kalvin Smith at the Silk Plant Forest.”

By then, Williams had heard several versions of the crime, one with Smith acting alone, others with Smith as the accomplice. Williams also was working with the theory that Marker’s husband had sent Smith to his wife’s store to collect a drug debt, though he never developed any evidence to support that theory.

Williams taped two separate interviews with Littlejohn on March 3, though it appears from the transcript that significant portions of the interviews were not recorded.

In the first recorded interview, Littlejohn said that Wilson drove him, Smith and Moore to the shopping center because Smith said he needed to collect some money from someone and he wanted to go to Toys R Us. Until this interview, no one police had interviewed had ever described a scenario where Smith went to the Silk Plant Forest to collect money. Littlejohn said that he and the two women waited in the car while Smith went in the direction of Toys R Us. Smith returned several minutes later and they drove back to Wilson’s apartment.

In the second statement, Littlejohn puts himself at the scene, saying that he went inside the store next to Toys R Us with Smith while the two women waited in the car. He said he heard Smith ask Marker for the money, but left when Smith grabbed her by the arm. Littlejohn waited back at the car for Smith and when he returned, all four went back to Andra Wilson’s apartment.

The statements leave significant questions unanswered. Although forensic experts say there is no guarantee that blood would have been noticeable on the attacker, the police reports do not indicate that Littlejohn was ever asked if he saw blood on Smith afterward.

Also, according to the transcript from the taped portion of the interview, Littlejohn told the police that he didn’t see a weapon before or after the attack. Police reports clearly indicate that the back door was locked from the inside, which means that Smith would have had to depart through the front door, either leaving the weapon behind or dropping it outside in the parking lot. The police found no weapon. It’s possible that the attacker could have hidden a small weapon, such as a hammer, in his pocket, but Williams did not ask about Smith’s clothing.

Nor could Littlejohn describe the merchandise in the Silk Plant Forest, which sold artificial plants and other home decorations.

Williams: Okay. What did it look like on the inside?

Littlejohn: I don’t really remember.

Williams: Did it – I mean what did it have...

Littlejohn: Clothes, I think.

Williams: Clothes or what?

Littlejohn: Clothes.

Williams: What else did it have on the inside of it?

Litttlejohn: I can’t recall.

Williams: Do you remember any kind of artificial trees or anything?

Littlejohn: Yes.

Williams: It did have that?

Littlejohn: Yeah.

Williams: Okay, and I’m not putting them words in your mouth. It did have artificial trees?

Littlejohn: Yes.

That afternoon, Williams interviewed Andra Wilson again. According to Littlejohn’s morning statement, she and Moore were both potential accomplices to a robbery, having driven Smith to the store knowing that he was planning to collect a debt.

Wilson denied driving Smith and Littlejohn to the shopping center, and she agreed to take a lie-detector test. The examiner ruled that she was telling the truth when she said she had not driven Smith to the store. The examiner never tested whether her original statement about Smith boasting about the crime was truthful.

After Wilson denied driving the car, Williams arranged a third interview with Littlejohn, for the following day. He confronted Littlejohn with Wilson’s denial.

This time, Littlejohn offered up another version of his story, saying that he and Smith drove to the Silk Plant Forest together. Again, Littlejohn said that he left after Smith asked Marker for money and grabbed her arm. He could not recall what kind of car or whose car they drove.

Williams also asked him to recall exactly what Smith said to Marker. When Littlejohn had trouble with the question, Williams provided a hint.

Williams: What did he say? “Where’s my money,” or what? What did he — what were his actual words?

Littlejohn: His words was “Where’s my money at?”

Littlejohn agreed to take a lie-detector test. The examiner ruled that he was truthful when he said he did not hit Marker or see the beating itself. But as with Wilson, the questions were limited to Littlejohn’s role in the crime. The police did not test whether his statements about Smith’s role were truthful.

Drizin, the law professor at Northwestern University who has studied interrogation methods, reviewed the transcripts of the interrogation interviews at the Journal’s request.

“The use of polygraph during an interrogation is not done to rule the suspect out. It’s done as a tool to get the suspect to make a confession,” he said. “It’s a selective kind of questioning in the polygraph that really doesn’t go to the heart of the matter, which is whether or not Kalvin Smith was in the store on that day when this woman was beaten.”

Drizin said that the threats police made, the lack of detail and the minor role that Littlejohn gives himself all suggest that police coerced him into making the statement that placed Smith at the crime scene.

“To me, what’s important is there are a number of markers that suggest that these statements are false,” Drizin said. “It’s devoid of details that make a statement credible.

“The fact that there are so many corrected statements is something we see a lot in false-confession cases. Law enforcement always says it’s because the witness lied in the earlier statement, but it could just as easily be evidence that he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Littlejohn declined repeated requests for an interview for this story. In a brief discussion at the door of his mother’s house in Winston-Salem, he insisted he had nothing to do with the crime. He appeared frightened by the Journal’s interest in the case and said that police told him that Smith had named him as an accomplice and that he could get 40 years for the crime.

In June 1997, after Smith’s arrest, Littlejohn told Smith’s private investigator essentially the same thing. In a rambling interview, Littlejohn said he was afraid that he would be implicated in the crime. Littlejohn said that police told him that Smith had given him up as an accomplice and that he could get 42 years in prison. He said the police told him the location of the Silk Plant Forest and even drew a map for him.

Littlejohn told the private detective that he knew nothing about the Silk Plant Forest until the police questioned him about Smith’s role in the attack there.

“Did you see him go in the silk plant place?” the private detective asked.

“No, I didn’t.”

“OK. Did you see him beat the woman?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Littlejohn also told the private detective about going to Toys R Us to steal a Nintendo game and that somehow Smith, Wilson and Moore were involved in that theft. It’s not clear from the interview when this theft happened, but it would not be the last time the issue came up.

The week after his final interview with Littlejohn, Williams found Pamela Moore, the third person named by Wilson as having heard Smith boast about the crime. Moore was in jail in Surry County, charged with drunk and disruptive behavior and filing a false police report.

She told Williams and Detective Robert G. Cozart that she, too, heard Smith boast about the crime and heard him say, “I had to beat the bitch down to get out of the store.”

Moore declined to be interviewed for this story. In a brief telephone conversation, she said she was worried about being accused of perjury. Smith provided a letter she wrote him in jail while he was awaiting trial that is similar in tone to the letter Wilson had written him, implying that she and the others spoke to police to avoid being prosecuted themselves.

“The D.T.’s are making it seem like if we don’t say you said (something) … we all going to jail,” the letter from Moore says in part.

“Boy, I seen you on T.V. today. You need to cut your hair. You look like a … wolf. I love you. See you soon. You know where to find me. The ‘G’”

The police interviewed other potential witnesses during this period, who say now that their statements pointed toward Smith’s innocence. Williams never wrote about these interviews in his case reports.

For example, in February, after Williams first interviewed Wilson, the police talked with her neighbor, Felicia Morrisson. She was questioned about whether Wilson had ever told her that Smith had boasted about the crime. Morrisson said recently she told the police that she had never heard Wilson talk about Smith’s role in the crime. She knew Smith fairly well, too, and never heard him boast about beating a woman.

“Michael,” she said, referring to Smith by his middle name, “he was a mild-tempered person. He wasn’t a person that flew off the handle.”

Police also interviewed Stafford, the mother of one of Smith’s sons. She said that two detectives came to her house and asked whether Smith had ever beaten her. She said she told them that they argued but that he never struck her unless she hit him first.

“He wasn’t violent,” she said recently. “I was.”

She said that when she insisted that Smith was not violent, the detectives asked her about a warrant that she had drawn against Smith, charging him with assault on a female. Smith did plead guilty to one charge of assaulting her, but she said she had dropped another charge because she had filed it when she was drunk and angry with him.

“They said, ‘We can get you for filing a false charge.’ I wasn’t going to say that he was violent when he wasn’t,” Stafford said. “I guess they thought they could scare me. But I’d rather get tried for filing a false police report than help them put someone away that I know is not capable of that.”

There is no record of that interview in the police reports, either. Williams, however, does refer to the charges that Stafford filed against Smith as proof that Smith fit the profile of a man who would commit a savage beating. “He hit this girl on the back of the head just like he hit Jill,” Williams said.

A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Brady vs. Maryland requires prosecutors to share information with a defense attorney that could help the defendant’s case. That would include information about other potential suspects, such as Aaron Marker, as well as information that could support a defendant’s claim of innocence, such as the interviews with Stafford and Morrisson. The failure to share such information can be grounds for a new trial.

Forsyth District Attorney Tom Keith declined to comment on Smith’s case, but he said that, often, his office does not get all the information it needs from police to fully comply with the Brady requirement.

“The problem is you have what should be done and what is done. What is done is law enforcement doesn’t give us a lot of things because they don’t think it’s important,” Keith said. “We’re trying to convince them that even though they don’t think it’s exculpatory that they give it to us and we’ll give it to the defense attorneys. We want everything they have. Even their notes.”

The prosecutors in Smith’s case didn’t get all of Williams’ notes. And neither would Smith’s court-appointed attorney.

Williams admitted recently that he intentionally left information about Aaron Marker out of his reports because he did not want Smith’s attorney to learn anything that could help his case.

“There’s a lot of investigative work you do that you don’t put on paper because you open yourself up to the defense bringing it up in court to take it off Kalvin,” Williams said.

He said he even told Eric Saunders, Keith’s top prosecutor, that he had reams of information that he never included in his reports.

“I told him I could write a whole other book on it,” Williams said. “He said, ‘Well, you know and I know that the only thing you’re doing is giving it away to the defense.’”

In a recent interview, Saunders said that he never encouraged Williams to exclude information from his reports and that he found it hard to believe that a police officer would knowingly do so.

“They don’t ask us what to put into the reports,’’ Saunders said. “We get the report as it is. I never told him to leave anything out of his report and I wouldn’t do that.”

• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com

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