Silk Plant detective acknowledges errors

The former Winston-Salem police detective who headed the investigation of the 1995 assault at the Silk Plant Forest insisted during an interview with city officials and a citizens committee that he arrested the right man for the crime. But he also acknowledged that he failed to document many aspects of the case.

The city put the 214-page transcript of the interview on its Web site yesterday after Judge Richard Stone of Forsyth Superior Court last week ordered its release.

The Winston-Salem City Council created the citizens committee to re-examine the police investigation into the assault on Jill Marker, a manager at the Silk Plant Forest store on Silas Creek Parkway. The attack, during the Christmas holiday season, left Marker, who was 4½ months pregnant, with severe brain damage. Today, she is blind and living under 24-hour care in Ohio.

Kalvin Michael Smith, who in 1997 was convicted of beating Marker, is serving 23 to 29 years in prison. He has maintained his innocence, but he has failed in his attempts to win a new trial.

Williams, who has retired from the Winston-Salem Police Department, has come under intense scrutiny in recent years for his investigation into the beating, from the Innocence Project at Duke University, a five-part series in the Winston-Salem Journal in 2004, and from the citizens committee.

The committee's final report, released in August, concluded that it had no faith in the police department's work on the case.

Separately, the committee voted 7-2 in favor of a statement that says it found no credible evidence that Smith was at the scene of the crime.

The release of all of the documents accumulated during the committee's investigation remains at issue.

Most of the questioning during the interview with Williams on June 11 was conducted by police Lt. Joseph Ferrelli and Assistant City Attorney Alan Andrews. Williams was represented by attorney Carl Parrish.

The transcript reveals a cat-and-mouse game in which Ferrelli and Andrews frequently asked why Williams did or did not take certain actions or document aspects of the investigation.

They focused on many of the elements that have made the case stand out for years as a possible wrongful conviction:

□ Why Williams abandoned his pursuit of an early suspect in the case, Kenneth Lamoureux. Ferrelli frequently came back to the last date of any reports on Lamoureux -- April 17, 1996 -- long before Smith became a suspect.

Ferrelli noted a portion of a report by Williams in which he says that "contacts between Jill Marker and Kenneth Lamoureux are related to the conflicts between Ellen Lamoureux (his estranged wife) and Kenneth Lamoureux'' in an apparent attempt to understand why that line of detective work was never followed up.

He later inquired as to why Williams did not question employees at a drugstore two doors down from the Silk Plant Forest -- where Lamoureux had prescriptions filled -- about whether they might have seen Lamoureux on the day of the crime.

□ Why Williams is now insisting that Smith took one polygraph examination and that the results were inconclusive when Williams had documented in reports and testified at a 1997 hearing before Smith's trial that Smith passed the exam.

"So I do make mistakes, clerical mistakes, and they're not made on purpose by no means,'' Williams said at one point.

□ How Williams conducted two police lineups in Ohio with the severely wounded Marker in an attempt to make identifications in the case, and why some lineups were identified and some were not, and why one was videotaped and one was not.

Williams was also asked whether he believes that Marker's parents, before the second interview, when Williams said she identified Smith, had been aware of his arrest. He said he believed that they were and that they had seen Smith's photograph in the newspaper.

When asked whether he believed that Marker also had seen Smith's photograph before being asked to pick him out of a lineup, he said he did not think so, but that he had read her an admonition on proper rules before viewing a photographic lineup.

□ The timing of when Williams watched, and the circumstances of what happened to, a surveillance tape from the Toys "R" Us, next door to the Silk Plant store.

Under repeated questioning, Williams insisted that he saw the tape anywhere from two to seven days after the crime, that he watched it with another police officer, and that it was returned to the store because individual faces could not be made out. Yet later in the interview, he said he watched it to see if he could identify Smith or a key police witness, Eugene Littlejohn.

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