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Beating-case review leaves questions
Duke innocence project wants to know why second part of video interview was not documented
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Published: August 15, 2007
An administrative review of the Winston-Salem Police Department's investigation into the beating in 1995 of Jill Marker fails to explain why the lead detective did not document the second part of a key interview.
But police say that the department didn't tamper with tapes of the interview, and turned over the full taped interview to the district attorney's office.
The administrative review, released yesterday, said that Detective Don Williams, who is now retired, violated department policy by documenting in writing only one part of a videotaped interview with Marker that was done in two parts Oct. 31, 1996.
During the second part of the interview, which was not documented, Marker was shown photo lineups of suspects. She apparently could not identify Kalvin Michael Smith - the man who was later convicted of beating her in the Silk Plant Forest, a store off Silas Creek Parkway.
But she apparently did identify another suspect in the interview, Kenneth Lamoureux, when asked if she saw anyone who had been in the store.
Almost a year later, Williams showed another photo lineup to Marker on Sept. 4, 1997, and filed a report saying that she identified Smith as her attacker. But that interview was not videotaped, although it was documented in writing.
Marker was a manager at the Silk Plant Forest, a store off Silas Creek Parkway that sold artificial plants. She was beaten on the head 20 times on Dec. 9, 1995. She suffered skull fractures, permanent brain damage and later went blind. She was pregnant at the time, and gave birth while in a coma.
The city's review was not a reinvestigation of the case. It was done to look at whether all police-department policies and procedures were properly followed at the time, and was ordered by City Manager Lee Garrity and Police Chief Pat Norris because of continuing questions about the case, city officials have said.
The review was released yesterday on the order of Judge John Smith of Superior Court. In a 15-minute hearing, David Hall, an assistant district attorney, told Smith that the district attorney's office supported the release of the review because of lingering questions about Smith's guilt.
Yesterday's release of the review comes while the Duke Law School Innocence Project is re-investigating the case. Lawyers for Smith have said they plan to ask for a new trial based on what they said is new evidence uncovered by the innocence project.
The city's review concludes that Williams "did not deliberately ignore evidence or avenues of investigation."
But it was not clear how the city made that conclusion - the detectives that headed the review, Lt. Ted Best and Sgt. Ed Reese, never interviewed Williams because Williams would not cooperate with them.
Mike Barker, one of the detectives who helped investigate the attack, recently told Best and Reese that he thought that it was odd that Williams didn't document the full interview from October 1996, the report said.
"Sergeant Barker could not advise who the subjects were in the line-ups presented by Detective Williams, and he thought it was unusual for Detective Williams to not document his actions, as Detective Williams was normally very thorough," the report said.
Williams, who was at yesterday's hearing, declined to comment.
"I ain't got nothing to say," he said.
When asked how the department could conclude that the mistakes were not deliberate without interviewing Williams, Norris said she talked with Williams in court yesterday. She wouldn't say what was said, but said she believes that he didn't realize that he made mistakes in documentation until yesterday.
"I don't think he realized that he failed to do that. That was pointed out to him today," Norris said.
Williams Speaks, who was Smith's defense attorney during his trial, has said that he was never shown the photo-lineup part of the videotape before the trial. In the city's report, police said they gave a full copy of the interview to the district attorney's office. The report also said that the district attorney's office showed the entire video to the defense.
Smith was convicted in December 1997 and is serving a minimum sentence of 22 years and 10 months in prison. He has maintained his innocence.
In addition to the Duke University investigation, a series of stories in the Winston-Salem Journal in 2004 raised questions about the police investigation and prosecution of the case.
The stories examined the methods that police used to interrogate Smith and other witnesses, and quoted medical experts who said that Marker's brain injuries were so severe that her memory of the attack would not have been reliable. The stories also showed how police stopped investigating a suspect when he moved away and focused on Smith after a jilted girlfriend told police that he did it.
Williams was quoted in the Journal series as saying that he didn't document certain information in writing.
"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 in the series.
Jim Coleman, a faculty adviser to the innocence project, said he found nothing new in the city's review. He said that the city should have looked not only at what was on file, but also things that police failed to investigate.
"There's nothing in here that's new," Coleman said. "This is all stuff that is based on the police reports, and we had the police reports. They just basically go through the police reports and summarize the reports. That's all it is."
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