The Attack at the Silk Plant Forest

NAVIGATION

Part Five: The Questions

Questions keep tragic case alive

By Phoebe Zerwick

JOURNAL REPORTER

WINSTON-SALEM

CHAPTER 9

Memory and identification

Kalvin Michael Smith had been imprisoned for more than six years when he was transferred to the Piedmont Correctional Institution outside Salisbury in July 2003. As soon as he arrived, he looked for Darryl Hunt.

He knew Hunt's story, how he had been convicted in the 1984 rape and stabbing of a young newspaperwoman in Winston-Salem, a conviction upheld even after DNA showed Hunt wasn't the rapist.

Now, Hunt had won a new round of DNA comparison testing that he hoped might lead to his freedom. He seemed to know how to work the system. Maybe, Smith thought, Hunt could help him. If nothing else, at least he would understand.

Smith spotted Hunt across the prison yard, a quiet man in a knit skullcap who stayed to himself. After 18 years in prison, Hunt had grown leery of inmates who asked about his case, wondering about their motives.

Kalvin Smith's statement to police. You can view the 2 page document here.

But later that day, Smith caught up with Hunt in the canteen. Smith told him how he had been badgered by the police in Winston-Salem into making a statement that put him at the scene of the brutal beating of Jill Marker at the Silk Plant Forest store in December 1995.

Keep the faith, was Hunt's simple advice to Smith.

They saw each other a few more times before Smith was moved to another prison, but they didn't speak again about their cases. The encounter, however, gave Smith hope.

Six months later, Hunt was a free man, exonerated after a new round of DNA testing identified another man as the rapist. Smith saw the picture of Hunt in the newspaper taken in court the day a Forsyth County judge set aside his conviction. Hunt's head was thrown back in an expression of relief and exhaustion.

"That picture just tore me to pieces," Smith said. "A lot of times it's like you're screaming at the top of your lungs, but don't nobody hear you. I look up to Darryl not for who he is, but for what he endured."

Jill Marker said she has never had any qualms about testifying against Smith. What troubles her today is the thought that someone might question her integrity or say that she made a mistake.

"It just bothers me that they think it could be someone else. They knew who it was and they knew I was being honest," she said. "I don't think I made a mistake. I just thought it was him."

Conversation with Marker is difficult, even for those who know her best. She can follow what others say, but nine years after the attack she is still learning how to modulate her voice so that her speech can be understood. When she remembers, she takes a deep breath before she speaks, or presses the tracheotomy so that air doesn't escape too fast and drown out her words.

"I did identify the right person," she said. "I know I did."

Psychologists have known since the early part of the past century how fallible memory can be. Their studies show that the human mind does a poor job of recording an event and recalling it accurately. Until DNA technology, there was no way to show with any certainty that these laboratory findings were valid in the real world of criminal investigations and trials. In the past 10 years, however, the use of DNA testing has led to the exoneration of 153 men wrongly convicted of heinous crimes. Hunt was the 142nd. A study showed that two-thirds were convicted by the eyewitness testimony of victims and witnesses, who were certain they had identified the right man.

In Hunt's case, for example, three witnesses testified that they saw him with the victim at the crime scene and one witness testified that he saw him after the murder leaving a hotel restroom where the witness later found bloody hand towels.

The mistakes are not necessarily intentional, experts say. They are simply a function of the powerful but imperfect human brain.

A video camera takes an exact picture of a scene as it unfolds and stores it. The video can be rewound and replayed hundreds of times and the footage never changes. There is no replay button for the brain. Images, sounds, smells and sensations that form memories are stored as electrical signals and organized into a memory of an event by two portions of the brain called the hippocampi, located in the temporal lobes.

The memory is not a static record. The hippocampi are forever making connections between newly learned pieces of information so that people have the sense of memory as an episode. The hippocampi also help make connections between new memories and those previously stored, allowing us to form revised memories and knowledge.

This constant reorganizing of memory makes it possible to learn. It also explains the mistakes that research subjects make in the laboratory and that eyewitnesses make in the real world. The eyewitness sees a crime and makes some memories of the suspect. Afterward, he might learn more about the crime, through news reports, photographs or conversations with police. Those memories combine with the original memories of the crime to form a new, reconstructed memory.

In Marker's case, the potential for error is even higher.

View our interactive graphic on brain damage.

The traumatic injuries she suffered damaged portions of the brain that store and organize memories. There is also the question of the lead investigator's role in the formation of her memory. Detective Don Williams said he had strong emotions about the case from the start and was determined to find Marker's attacker.

"I can't think of a more suggestive setting than a physically vulnerable person with an incomplete memory and a police officer who is passionate about the case and firmly believes he has the right suspect," said Rich Rosen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Why is she so certain? Is it because the detective told her she was right?"

Rosen is a member of the N.C. Commission on Actual Innocence, a group appointed by the chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court to recommend reforms aimed at preventing wrongful convictions. The commission began its work last year by tackling the problem of mistaken identification.

As its first proposal for reform, the commission recommends that an investigator with no knowledge of the case conduct police lineups to prevent an investigator from influencing the witness's choice, intentionally or unintentionally.

In Marker's case, a detective who has admitted he had an emotional stake asked her to look at a group of six photographs to see whether she could identify her attacker, and she pointed to Smith's picture. Williams did not videotape the interview, so there is no record other than his notes and those of another officer of how Marker came to identify Smith's photograph. There's no way to know for sure what was said or suggested.

Eric Saunders, one of the two prosecutors who handled the case, said that Marker's testimony confirmed for him that she had a reliable memory of the attack.

"I think the questions to her in and of themselves indicated that her memory was reliable," he said. "If she wouldn't have been able to remember all that and respond appropriately, she wouldn't have made a very good witness."

She was the state's star witness. Her testimony brought jurors to the edge of their seats, but they had no context in which to evaluate what she said. Police never found any physical evidence linking Smith to the crime. The case against him relied on Marker's identification and statements from three people, one of whom said he saw Smith at the store, and two who said they heard him brag about the crime later on.

Neuropsychologists have numerous tests for evaluating all aspects of a patient's memory, but none was ever done on Marker. Her doctor testified that she suffered from amnesia, but Smith's attorney did not press him on that point.

With only their own reaction to her emotional testimony, the jurors had no way of knowing whether her memory of Smith's face was an accurate recollection or a reconstruction of what she had seen and heard after the crime.

"I think you can assume that any jury would convict after that," Rosen said. "That's what's so frightening. If you realize how shaky it is, the very power is frightening."

Detective Don Williams (Photo by David Rolfe).

Williams considered himself an expert at interrogating suspects. He said he liked the game of cat and mouse, of catching suspects in their own lies.

As is common with interrogations, he said he had already decided that Smith was guilty before the questioning began. All he needed was a confession or an incriminating statement.

Williams had been trained in the techniques that investigators all over the country use to apply psychological pressure on a suspect so that he feels he has no option but to confess.

"I would do a lot of things to get people to confess," Williams, who retired in 2000, said in a recent interview. "We're allowed to be not entirely truthful. That's the only way we can deal with criminals, because the criminal mind is to lie, cheat and steal."

Investigators are permitted to lie, bait, cajole and harass a suspect to force an admission, on the theory that such methods are needed to make guilty people admit to their crimes. Police officers say they believe that an innocent person would resist the pressure, leaving them with confessions from only the guilty.

The psychological pressure is designed to make a suspect feel that it is in his best interest to confess. As part of the technique, interrogators will often pose a scenario for the crime that reduces the suspect's guilt. For example, an investigator might lead a suspect in a murder case to believe that the police are thinking of the killing as an act of self-defense.

Detectives also are trained to interrupt a suspect's denials, to confront him with false evidence and to accuse him of the crime - all designed to make him feel isolated and hopeless. Williams used these techniques not only with Smith but with Eugene Littlejohn, a friend of Smith's who after three interrogations said he went with Smith to the Silk Plant Forest and saw him grab Marker by the arm.

Critics say that the problem with these techniques is that psychological pressure can force an innocent person to implicate himself.

"The entire story Littlejohn tells is a story we hear time and time again in cases involving false confessions and potential accomplices. Police officers suggest to a suspect a minimized role in the offense and imply that leniency will follow if they simply place themselves at the scene of a crime and don't admit to an active role in the crime," said Steven Drizin, a professor at Northwestern University and a lawyer with the school's Center on Wrongful Convictions. "This very same tactic was used to get the confessions of the kids in the Central Park jogger case."

In that case, five teenagers confessed in 1989 to raping a young woman jogging in New York's Central Park. At trial, they argued that their confessions had been coerced and were therefore inadmissible, but the judge sided with the police. All five were convicted.

It wasn't until 2002 that DNA evidence matching a convicted serial rapist proved what the teenagers had been saying all along - their confessions were false.

Researchers have tracked many cases of false confession, which they say account for 35 of the first 140 cases of wrongful conviction proven by DNA evidence.

Police argue that false confessions are rare and that only people with mental impairments will succumb to psychological pressures and admit to something they did not do. A recent study of 125 false confessions debunked that argument.

Drizin and Richard Leo, a professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine, looked at cases in which DNA or equally certain evidence, such as an indisputable alibi, later proved the confession wrong. They found false confessions from people of normal intelligence, mostly adults in their 20s and 30s.

"There are legions of cases involving people of normal or average or even high intelligence who confess to crimes they did not commit because police officers convince them it's in their best interests to do so," Drizin said. "In a sense, the interrogation process makes the irrational seem rational."

Police training manuals recognize the potential for false confessions and teach investigators to guard against them by making sure that a confession contains details about the crime that can be corroborated independently. A believable confession will include details that only the criminal would be aware of.

In the Silk Plant Forest case, the witnesses corroborated each other's statements that they heard Smith brag about the crime, but police were unable to corroborate other facts in the case. Littlejohn, the only witness who said he saw Smith after the crime, did not see a weapon. Police could not identify the getaway car.

Michael Grace, a local defense lawyer, said that details are important because they can help investigators separate bogus statements from credible ones. Grace advised Michael Fuller, an early suspect in the case, against answering police questions.

"I know a lot of police officers, and the great majority don't want to convict an innocent person," Grace said. "I think some of them get in their mind that someone is guilty and they go about finding the evidence. The good ones get details. They don't mind a guy talking long enough to convince them that he didn't do it."

Smith's statement, never introduced at the trial, included few details. He gave himself a minor role and said that a man who went by the initials J.B. was the one who did the actual beating. The statement didn't describe a weapon, though police reports say that during the interrogation Smith referred to a brick and later to a metal pipe. Smith didn't say how much money was stolen, or how so much blood came to be splattered on the walls and artificial plants.

The police did not record the interrogation with Smith, so it is not clear whether he was ever asked to provide more details.

The lack of detail left little to corroborate. Police tried to identify the accomplice Smith named but failed. Smith said that after the attack he walked from the Silas Creek Crossing shopping center, across from Hanes Mall, to Skyline Village, an apartment complex near the Bowman Gray Stadium, five and a half miles away. Williams never asked him what route he took and never questioned whether it was even plausible for Smith to have walked that far.

The police used similar interrogation methods with the other witnesses. By his own admission, Detective Williams lied to Valerie Williams, Smith's girlfriend, about her own culpability in the case and threatened to prosecute witness Littlejohn if he did not cooperate. Other witnesses, including Andra Wilson and Pamela Moore, later said that they believed they were suspected of playing a role in the crime.

The statements from these other witnesses presented more facts that could have been corroborated, but neither Williams nor the prosecutors involved in the case ever found the pieces that would have made the case against Smith more coherent. And numerous inconsistencies among the prosecution witnesses that came up during the trial were left unresolved, too. For example, Wilson testified that she didn't meet Smith until after Christmas, yet Littlejohn testified that after the robbery, more than two weeks before Christmas, he and Smith went to Wilson's house.

In the end, the state's theory of the attack on Marker came down to what could be pieced together from Littlejohn's testimony. He said he and Smith drove to the shopping center, parked the blue Buick they drove and walked into the artificial-plant store together, where Smith was going to collect a debt. Littlejohn said he stayed long enough to see Smith ask Marker for money and grab her by the arm, at which point Littlejohn left to steal an electronic game from Toys "R" Us.

If Littlejohn's testimony were true, Smith would have had to beat Marker, dispose of the weapon and follow Littlejohn into the toy store where he, too, stole a game - all in the span of five to 15 minutes. Afterward, according to Littlejohn, they met back at the car and drove back to Wilson's apartment.

If the theory is correct, it suggests not a random robbery but an attempt to collect a debt that turned violent. The state never explained how it was that Marker owed Smith money. Investigators never found a weapon and never persuaded Smith or Littlejohn to identify one. There is no record that investigators looked for the blue Buick. The only blue Buick that they were aware of was Wilson's car, but they had already accepted her claim that she didn't meet Smith until the day after Christmas, three weeks after the crime.

Police had the surveillance tape from Toys R Us, but there is no record that they looked for Littlejohn or Smith. Williams said recently that he checked the videotape, whose images were fuzzy, and did not see Smith, Littlejohn or any of the other suspects.

Saunders, the prosecutor in the case, said that it didn't matter to him that police never identified a weapon or the car that Littlejohn and Smith drove that night. He said that the testimony from Wilson and Moore was strong enough to corroborate Littlejohn's account of the crime. "I just don't believe people are that vindictive to accuse someone of a crime just because they're mad at them," he said.

Jim Coleman, a faculty adviser to the Duke Law School Innocence Project, which has agreed to take Smith's case, said he believes that tips from two angry women sent police down a flawed investigative path. He blamed the guilty verdict on a system of court-appointed lawyers. He said that the system might be adequate for the defense of guilty defendants but doesn't provide for the level of investigation and preparation needed to prove innocence.

"Obviously, (William) Speaks was not able to get into the case in a way we're able to," Coleman said. "If he'd put the time in this case that was required, he probably would have starved. These guys, they earn their money off of volume not quality."

Defense attorneys say that the system of court-appointed and court-paid attorneys left very little money for the expert witnesses needed to put on the best defense. The court spent $14,750 for Smith's defense, paying Speaks $13,000 and $1,750 for a private detective and medical expert. The state spent almost that much alone on airfare and hospital bills so that Marker could testify.

Speaks continued representing Smith on appeal, without being paid, arguing in part that the trial judge should not have allowed Marker to testify. The N.C. Court of Appeals rejected the argument and upheld the conviction in January 1999.

With the technical appeals exhausted, Smith was left to represent himself. In December 1999, he filed a motion for appropriate relief, which can be used to pursue a new trial if a defendant finds evidence that was not introduced at his trial.

Smith accused Speaks of mishandling his case, and he went on to accuse the prosecutors of knowingly relying on perjured testimony. Speaks took it upon himself to answer Smith's motion. He defended his work on the case and went on to defend the district attorney's office, too, saying he found no evidence of a conspiracy.

In January 2000, Judge William Freeman of Forsyth Superior Court denied Smith a new trial.

After that, Smith wrote to anyone he thought might take an interest in his case - the NAACP, the ACLU, Johnny Cochran, Al Sharpton. Each time he would gather up his dog-eared files and transcript from the trial and send them off, hoping that someone would take the time to read the documents that he believes show his innocence.

In January 2003, Smith wrote to the Duke Law School Innocence Project, which looks into cases of possible wrongful conviction.

Coleman said that Smith's case stood out from the many others that his office reviews because it relied on a questionable identification by a victim with brain damage and statements that witnesses made after repeated interrogations.

Coleman said he hopes to get Smith's case reopened without a formal court hearing. He has already spoken with Tom Keith, the Forsyth district attorney, and is waiting for Keith to share his files and the police files to see if there is any new information that Speaks did not have at trial. When his investigation is complete, Coleman said, he intends to share his findings with Keith in the hopes of persuading him to reopen the case.

"If he is serious about not wanting to keep an innocent man in prison, my hope is he will take what we have and reinvestigate the case himself or conclude based on what we show him that he ought to have a new trial and start over," Coleman said.

He said that Smith's case may be tougher to prove than some of the other wrongful convictions because there is no physical evidence that could be tested and linked to someone else. He said he hopes that Keith will ask the questions that he says prosecutors should have asked eight years ago. "Remember, the prosecutor's duty is to do justice. They have an independent responsibility not just to bring the case that's presented to them. They have an obligation to seek the truth."

For Keith, interest in Smith's case comes as police and prosecutors are still smarting over the mistaken arrest and prosecution of Hunt in the 1984 murder of Deborah Sykes.

Keith had spent 10 years defending Hunt's conviction without ever reading the case file.

It wasn't until last year, when DNA evidence identified a new suspect, that Keith finally read the trial transcripts and police reports in the case and saw the flaws that Hunt's attorneys had been trying to point out for nearly 20 years. In February, Keith joined Hunt's attorneys to ask the court to set aside his conviction. In April, Gov. Mike Easley gave Hunt a pardon of innocence.

In Smith's case, Keith declined to open prosecution or police files for the Journal's review.

He said that prosecutors often have witnesses with sketchy pasts and rely on police investigators and their own judgment to evaluate whether a witness is telling the truth. In the end, he said, it's up to the jury to decide whether a witness is truthful.

"When you try the devil, you go to hell to get witnesses. Most of our witnesses have criminal records," he said. "The ethical duty is not to put up a case we don't believe in. It's not our job just to win - let's go get a conviction. Our job is to do justice."

Keith said his office went to trial with the evidence it had in 1997. If Coleman provides new evidence, Keith said, he would keep an open mind.

"If they came up with two witnesses who recant and forensic evidence that matches someone else, ah, heck, it'll be just like Darryl Hunt," he said. "I'll be filing a motion to set aside."

Keith's promise offers some hope for Smith, except that in Smith's case there is no physical evidence that could point to another suspect with the certainty of DNA.

Jurors who convicted Smith said they are still haunted by the responsibility of deciding a case that rested on such uncertain evidence.

"I just felt that it just wasn't right and I just didn't like it," Etta Branson, a juror from Winston-Salem, said recently. "I don't know if I was right or I was wrong. Who knows what really happened? The truth may never come out."

She said she decided early in deliberations to convict because she felt that without any witnesses for the defense she had to rely on the state's witnesses.

The judicial system expects jurors to evaluate testimony from witnesses, both what they say on direct examination by the state and on cross-examination by the defense.

In Smith's case, Judge Peter McHugh instructed jurors to decide for themselves whether the witnesses were reliable. But Branson and at least one other juror said they voted to convict, despite their doubts about Smith's guilt, because they didn't think they were allowed to make their own judgment about a witness' testimony.

Penny Hayes of Kernersville held out for three days against convicting Smith. In a recent interview, she said she never believed that Marker was capable of accurately identifying her attacker.

"With that much brain damage, when someone beat her like that, there's no way she could have recognized him," Hayes said. "If they'd a put her in front and had three black guys dressed the same and she'd a had no coaching, she'd have never picked him out."

"If that had been a black woman and a white man, I don't think it'd have been so much pressure. But it was a white woman and they were accusing a black man," she continued. "When she pointed him out, that was it for him."

Hayes remembered other flaws with the case. She never believed that Smith would have bragged to his friends about such a vicious assault on a young woman. She said she thought that the attack was a crime of passion, committed by someone who wanted Marker dead.

In the end, Hayes was left with two reasons to convict. Littlejohn put Smith at the scene, and Speaks' decision to rest without putting on witnesses convinced her that Speaks didn't believe in his client enough to fight for him.

"I don't believe he done it, but you can't go with your gut," Hayes said. "You have to go with the facts."

CHAPTER 10

Lingering questions

Smith began his prison sentence of nearly 29 years in December 1997. A full year later, Marker went home. She had spent the three years after the attack in hospitals and nursing homes and now, at least, she had the means to pay for the private-duty nursing care that she would need to live at home. In June 1998, six months after Smith's conviction, the shopping center and artificial-plant store agreed to pay $9.25 million to settle the civil lawsuit that her husband had filed on her behalf. Claims against the security company were dismissed.

By then the Markers had separated, and Bud Hoisington had assumed his daughter's guardianship. After legal fees, Marker was left with $5.5 million, which has been invested in a trust fund to pay for the medical care she will need for the rest of her life.

The money also pays the mortgage on a house that her parents had built in a subdivision south of Akron. It is equipped for Marker's disabilities; one room is set aside for physical therapy and another is a nurse's lounge. Marker's bedroom is furnished with a hospital bed and the ventilator that keeps her breathing steady while she sleeps. The bedroom's only personal decoration is a framed photograph of her son, Barron, now 8.

Bud and Edna Hoisington sold their house and moved in with their daughter. At ages 81 and 79, they are her caretakers.

There was so much news coverage in Akron about the money involved in the settlement that the Hoisingtons are careful to point out that they pay their own expenses. Her money pays for her care, which runs as high as $25,000 a month.

The Hoisingtons say they could never have arranged for such top-quality care without the settlement.

Smith's conviction helped Marker win the settlement by depriving the shopping center and the other defendants in the civil case of a clear defense.

The law holds a business liable for injury only if reasonable security measures could have protected the victim. Smith's conviction made the attack against Marker a random act, which in theory could have been prevented.

Joseph Moss, a Greensboro lawyer who represented the shopping center, said that if Smith had been acquitted, he would have been better able to try to prove that one of the other people police at some point considered suspects had set out to harm her.

"In my opinion we were in pretty bad shape when they convicted the young man," Moss said. "We would have to go out and prove not only were the police wrong, but the jurors and the court system were wrong. We'd have to convict someone else of the crime in order to get off the hook."

The investigation of a violent crime typically begins with a thorough examination of the victim's life, with the idea of discovering a motive for the attack. The civil attorneys learned that about a year before the attack, Aaron and Jill Marker had separated, and that Aaron Marker had moved back to Ohio. During that period, Jill Marker had her own apartment. According to a deposition of Aaron Marker for the civil case, the couple reconciled sometime in 1995, and shortly afterward Aaron Marker tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists.

Williams, the lead detective in the case, never knew any of these details. There is nothing in his reports to show that he looked into Jill Marker's life, interviewed her friends and work colleagues or her family.

Williams tried to interview Aaron Marker during the trip he made to Ohio in September 1997 to show Jill Marker a photo lineup with Kalvin Michael Smith's picture. Aaron Marker and William Bartel, the Ohio lawyer who brought the civil suit, met Williams in a hotel room outside Akron. Williams showed Smith's photograph to Marker. According to Williams' report, Aaron Marker said that Smith looked similar to a man who once worked with him in a restaurant but he didn't think he knew him.

"I still feel like he didn't believe a word I said," Aaron Marker said in a recent interview. "He'd look at you and say, 'I'm going to figure out how to get you.' He's got that Southern-charm-type thing down. He kind of makes you feel guilty when you haven't done anything wrong."

Bartel wouldn't allow a polygraph, and that was the last Williams did to look into Marker, whom he said he still believes was involved in the attack.

Williams had no evidence to link Marker and Smith, but that didn't stop him from sharing his suspicions with Jill Marker's family, which continues to drive tensions between Aaron Marker and the Hoisingtons.

Speaks, Smith's attorney, said that shortly before the trial the assistant prosecutor, Mary Jean Behan, mentioned the theory that the crime grew out of a drug debt between Marker and Smith. "She said there was a theory being floated around that it was a drug deal but she didn't believe that," Speaks said.

Speaks went ahead and asked Smith, believing that if Smith implicated Marker, he might be able to cut him a deal with prosecutors. "I said, 'Please tell me if that's true. That's something that might help you,'" Speaks said. Smith said then, as he does now, that he never knew Aaron Marker.

Today, Marker is reluctant to discuss his past troubles, but he allowed Bartel to share a copy of his deposition in the civil case in June 1998, in which he said that after his wife was attacked he had a psychological breakdown. It was all he could do to look after his newborn son and himself.

The civil case was settled shortly after Marker gave his deposition. Jill Marker's attorneys had prepared a videotape of her life, which documented the extent of her disabilities. They decided, however, against taking her deposition or calling her as a witness if the case went to trial because they had doubts about her memory.

"Even though she apparently pointed out this guy, what she knew and what she didn't know is hard to tell," Bartel said in a recent interview. "She really couldn't testify. She couldn't communicate that well. And it wasn't necessary."

Moss, the attorney for the shopping center, said he saw how powerful Marker's testimony was during the criminal trial. He said he doubted her identification, but he didn't dare risk having her before a civil jury.

"They were asking her questions and they were saying she was nodding. They wheeled her over in front of that young man and it was hard for me to watch. She was so sad," Moss said. "We settled the case; we wanted out of it. She would never be able to hold and cuddle that baby. That would bring a jury to tears."

In April 1999, less than a year after the settlement, the Silk Plant Forest closed.

Kenneth Lamoureux, the first suspect in the case, lives today in a well-kept subdivision outside San Antonio.

Police had the beginnings of a circumstantial case against Lamoureux, including two eyewitnesses who saw him in the store an hour before the attack and evidence that Lamoureux knew Marker and had visited her at the Silk Plant Forest store. Police lost interest in Lamoureux when he moved to Charlotte and dropped him altogether when Marker indicated that her attacker was a black man.

Lamoureux said he met Marker once, when his daughter dragged him into the store before Thanksgiving 1995, but he denied knowing her.

In a recent interview, Lamoureux said he followed the investigation and Smith's trial in the newspaper. Several years ago, Lamoureux said, he took a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and thought about looking up Marker and her family. He said that even though he didn't know Marker, she knew his daughter.

"I was going to stop and see her. I felt like I needed to go to talk to her," to tell her about his daughter, he said. "She lost a helluva lot more than I ever would have lost."

Shane Fletcher, the psychiatric patient whose confession to beating Marker led to a two-month diversion for Williams, lives in Winston-Salem with his father. He declined to be interviewed for this story. Police had ruled him out after confirming that he was on the locked psychiatric ward at Forsyth Medical Center at the time of the crime. Fletcher's hospital stay overlapped with that of Lamoureux.

Michael Fuller, also questioned in the case, lives in Winston-Salem. He is on probation for a drug violation and works for a cement company. He said he got dragged into the investigation because he happened to be at Toys "R" Us the night of the crime buying a bicycle, and someone reported his car.

He remembers reading a newspaper story shortly after the crime that said that police were looking for a man seen leaving the shopping center in a burgundy-colored Mustang.

"When I saw that in the paper, I was like, 'Oh, Lord,' because I knew I had been down there," Fuller said.

Mark Rabil, a local lawyer who represented Hunt until his exoneration earlier this year, said that the loose ends in Smith's case remind him of Hunt's case.

"I think police chase the wrong people a lot, not only here but everywhere," Rabil said. "It's scary to think about how many suspects have been encountered but not pursued and how many people have been wrongfully convicted."

Williams, the lead detective, talked openly about a case that has consumed him for nine years.

"I think about Aaron all the time," he said. "I think about wanting to get him."

Williams keeps in regular contact with Marker and her parents. About a year ago, he and his wife spent several days with the family at their home outside Akron. He returned with a video of the trip. It is filled with scenes of the affection between Williams, Marker and her parents.

Williams said he has no doubt that Smith beat Marker. Even though he could never confirm the anonymous tip about Aaron Marker's role, he is certain, too, that Smith went to Marker's store to collect a drug debt from her husband.

"Somebody's trying to get Kalvin off. I think that's a joke," he said. "Since Hunt got off, every criminal in there thinks, 'I got a chance to get off.'"

"I'm a person where truthfulness and integrity comes first and foremost in cases I handle. I'm not going to put no one in jail that I got the slightest doubt in my mind that there's not sufficient probable cause to charge him."

Speaks, Smith's former lawyer, is a reserved man, a self-described loner who doesn't show his passion. He said he thinks about the case often because it's the only one he has ever had in which he believes an innocent man was wrongly convicted.

"I don't think police go out looking to arrest the wrong person, but I do think if they think they have the right person they'll do what they have to do to convict him," Speaks said.

Saunders, who handled the case, is the top prosecutor in the Forsyth district attorney's office. He said that he remains convinced by the three witnesses who testified against Smith.

A photo from 1996 of Aaron Marker and his son, Barron (File Photo). You can view the entire photo gallery.

Aaron Marker, a chef for a company that runs corporate dining rooms, has remarried and lives with his wife and son in Canton, about 20 miles south of Jill Marker's home. He takes Barron to spend Sunday afternoons with his mother, and in the summer, when Barron is out of school, be takes him to see her on Wednesday afternoons, too.

Marker said that the public, the police and his former wife's family all misunderstood his behavior after her attack as indifference, but he said he was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of raising his son and looking after his disabled wife. Knowing that Williams and his wife's father considered him a suspect made it all that much harder.

"I just wanted to raise my kid and hide," he said.

Jill Marker's parents said they are surprised at questions being raised about Smith's guilt. Yet they, too, have questions about the case that no one has ever been able to answer.

"My husband and I from the word go always said, 'Why would someone go in there and try to kill her?'" Edna Hoisington said. "We always thought it was someone who knew her."

Bud Hoisington has similar questions.

"I always did wonder why he beat her so bad. It was just a small robbery," he said. "That's why they kind of thought it was a put-on robbery. Why would they do so much damage to her for a simple robbery?"

EPILOGUE

Lives forever changed

Marker leans forward to listen. She can hear the ball bounce across the room, the giant-size blue ball that her 8-year-old son likes to play with when he comes to visit.

"One, two, three, four...," she counts the bounces. "Twenty, twenty-one."

Listen to audio from an interview with Jill Marker and her parents, Edna and Bud Hoisington.

The ball bounces past the foot of her recliner with Barron in pursuit. The room goes quiet again. He's in the kitchen, out of earshot and, as always, out of sight.

Marker went blind five years ago, another blow after the 1995 attack.

She falls back in the chair, waiting for her son's return.

Later, they improvise with a card game of war, three-way. Marker's mother sits at her side, Barron at her feet. Hoisington deals out the cards and calls out the values as they each turn over a card.

"Barron has a two," Hoisington tells her daughter. "I have a nine. What does Mommy have?"

Barron rests his head on his mother's lap for a quick embrace. She reaches for his head. She would like to hold him all afternoon and run her fingers through his hair.

But the ball beckons, and he is off again.

In the evening, mother and daughter listen to books on tape. Marker likes mysteries and Danielle Steele novels. Her head against her mother's shoulder, Marker closes her eyes.

At 11, the nurse on duty interrupts.

It's time for bed.

After she is settled in the hospital-style bed and the rails are locked in place, Marker's father pulls his chair up to her bedside, takes her hands in his and kisses them.

"I love you, Daddy," she says, in a raspy voice, tired by the day's exertion.

She reaches for his face and strokes his head. They are quiet for a moment. "Maybe next year we'll get you walking," he says.

Kalvin Smith at the Alexander Correctional Institution (Journal Photo by Megan Morr). You can view the entire photo gallery.

Smith has not adjusted well to prison life. He disobeyed an order once again in September and spent 10 days in segregation, locked in a cell day and night, with an hour in the yard. He was busted on his way to an appointment with his prison counselor so that he could call Coleman, the Duke University law professor who has promised to help. A guard ordered him back to his cellblock and he refused.

In prison, there are no excuses, only rules.

"It bothers me being in here for something I know I didn't do. It's an unexplainable feeling. It tears you up on the inside," he says in an interview at Alexander Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison outside Taylorsville. "In January, it'll be eight years that I've been incarcerated. Eight years of my life, gone."

The other inmates use the weightlifting machines and play basketball in the yard. Smith wants nothing to do with prison routine.

"I can't get that comfortable in here," he says. "I feel if I get comfortable in here, then I accept it."

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

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A Special Report