Anatomy of Injustice (24 page)

Was your testimony about what Edward Elmore told you about the murder of Dorothy Edwards true?

Was your testimony that Edward Elmore confessed to you in the Greenwood County jail true?

Gilliam answered no to all.

“There was no deception indicated in any of Mr. Gilliam’s responses,” concluded the examiner, L. Stan Fulmer.

The night before the hearing, Gilliam stayed at his mother’s home in Greenwood. A police car pulled up and remained out front all night. It wasn’t to protect Gilliam but to intimidate him, and Holt was still uncertain whether Gilliam would take the stand. Next morning, when Gilliam walked up to the courthouse to testify, Townes Jones spotted him. The prosecutor was surprised and hurried over to talk to him. When Holt saw
Jones talking to her star witness, she quickly inserted herself between them; she wasn’t sure how much damage Jones had already done. Jensen confronted Jones. What the hell was that all about? Just protecting the witness, Jones answered, with what Jensen took to be a smirk.

In the courtroom, Gilliam put his hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, just as he had three times before in Elmore’s case. Then he took the witness box, the same place he had sat in 1982 and 1984. He was wearing a three-piece dove-gray suit, which one of Holt’s colleagues had managed to get cleaned over the weekend.

State your name, please, Holt began.

Kinard interrupted.

Was this the witness who was going to recant? Zelenka had alerted him.

Holt, examining a witness for the first time, was so nervous she could only nod.

Kinard addressed Gilliam. “Mr. Gilliam, of course, you just swore to tell the truth and the whole truth. You understand that?”

Yes, Gilliam said.

Kinard swiveled in his chair and reached for a volume of the South Carolina criminal code on the bookshelves behind him. He opened to the page marked by his clerk. He read the South Carolina law on perjury to Gilliam: “It is unlawful for any person to willfully give false, misleading, or incomplete testimony under oath in any court or regulatory proceeding in this state.” And anyone who violates that law, that is, who gives false testimony, can be sent to jail for five years, he read to Gilliam. Gilliam said he understood.

Holt tried to go on. Her knees were shaking; she felt like she was going to wet her pants.

“Mr. Gilliam, are you prepared to tell the truth today?”

“I want to tell the truth, but I don’t want to be impeached,” he said, misusing a word he had just been hearing from Jones about what might happen if he testified.

“Are you afraid?”

“Sure, I’m afraid, but I don’t want to go to jail.”

“But you’re prepared to tell the truth?”

“What about this perjury thing?”

Holt nervously tried to get into the substance of his recantation. “Mr. Gilliam, do you remember where you were …?”

Gilliam wasn’t quite ready.

“No, no, no,” he said, turning to Judge Kinard. “What about the perjury? I want to talk about the perjury.”

Kinard advised him that he might want to get a lawyer and reminded him that he could be guilty of perjury. (Was Kinard trying to protect Gilliam or the state’s case? Holt wondered.)

“Mr. Gilliam, will you tell the truth today?” she asked.

“I want to tell the truth, but I don’t want to go to jail for no five years. I mean, it sounds strange. I came in here, and I told a lie. Now I come back to tell the truth, and now you’re going to lock me up because I want to tell the truth.”

Oh, shit, we’ve lost him, Jensen said to himself. No way he is going to tell the truth now. The courtroom was full of police. It was hard to miss the message.

Holt was flustered, uncertain what to do.

“All right. I’ll testify,” Gilliam said.

Holt wasn’t quite sure she had heard him correctly.

“Sir?”

“I’ll go ahead and testify.”

When she realized what he had said, she told him softly, “I think you’re brave.”

Under questioning by Holt, Gilliam said one of the senior police officers at the Greenwood County jail had asked him “to help out with Mr. Elmore” and had put the two men in the same cell. But all Elmore had told him was that he had not killed Mrs. Edwards.

“Did Mr. Elmore say, ‘If you have sex with a woman and wash it off, can they tell’?” she asked.

“No, he didn’t.”

“Did Mr. Elmore say, ‘They won’t find any fingerprints, because I wiped them down’?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Did Mr. Elmore say, ‘I didn’t mean to kill her, but she started screaming, so I had to’?”

“No, he didn’t,” said Gilliam.

“Did you testify in 1982 and 1984 and 1987 that he did?”

“Yes, I did.”

“But today you’re telling this court that’s not true?”

“I’m telling this court the whole truth.”

Gilliam asked to address the judge: “I’d just like to apologize to the court, to my mother, and to myself. That’s it. If they’re going to lock me up for telling the truth, I’m ready to go.”

And go he might well. Don Zelenka stood up and began his cross-examination. In answer to Zelenka’s first questions, Gilliam repeated what he had just told Holt: a senior official at the jail had said to him, “You help me out on the Elmore thing, and we’ll look out for you.” But Elmore had never talked to him, Gilliam now testified.

But hadn’t Gilliam written a letter to Sergeant Johnson shortly before Elmore’s first trial saying that he wanted to talk to him about the Elmore case? Zelenka now asked.

“Yes, I told a lie,” Gilliam answered.

“Well, you did write the letter to Mr. Johnson?” Zelenka asked.

“I did write the letter, but it was a lie,” Gilliam said.

“And did you talk to Mr. Johnson”?

“Yes, to try to benefit myself,” Gilliam answered. “That’s the only reason I did it.”

Gilliam said that neither Sergeant Johnson nor Solicitor Jones had told him what to say. (Wise wasn’t surprised at this. He knew Gilliam had enough street smarts, and enough experience with the criminal justice system as a defendant, to figure out what the state wanted to hear.)

Zelenka asked Gilliam about each of his prior statements, under oath, at the three trials. Had they been lies? Each time, Gilliam repeated that they had been.

“Like you said, I testified to that all four times; but I am here today to tell you the testimony was a lie. There ain’t nothing that you can get out of this, sir.” (Holt didn’t know why Gilliam said
four times. Maybe he was referring to the letter to Johnson, but it didn’t really matter.)

Gilliam was firm, sat erect, head held high. Holt knew that Gilliam was streetwise, slick, and very self-interested. Coming back to tell the truth about Elmore was probably the most decent thing he’d ever done. Watching him hold his own with Zelenka, his resolve tangible, she thought he was the picture of a man speaking truth to power. Steeled, unblinking, he didn’t slouch but instead seemed to lean into Zelenka when he answered.

Wasn’t Gilliam just trying to save Elmore from the electric chair? He asked, You don’t believe in the death penalty, do you? No, not really, said Gilliam.

Jensen had harbored doubts about Gilliam, wondered, as would most, why his recantation should be believed. But after listening to his testimony in that environment, with perjury charges hanging over him, when he had everything to lose and nothing to gain, when he could have stepped off the stand and been tossed in jail, Jensen changed his mind. “At that moment I was certain, to a moral certainty, that he was telling the truth.”

“It was on my conscience. I went back and cleaned it up,” Gilliam said years later. “I made peace with myself, and I told the truth.”

As the first day of the PCR ended, Jensen and Tony Miles picked up their briefcases and started to go, leaving Diana to carry boxes of their files. “I’m not your f’ing file girl, and you’re going to move the f’ing boxes, or the f’ing boxes aren’t moving,” she said. It wasn’t uttered in anger. The men shrugged and helped carry the boxes.

T
HE TONE OF
the hearing changed dramatically on the second day, from hard rock concert to classical symphony performance. After Harris and Gilliam, Jensen called Dr. Jonathan Arden, a pathologist, to the stand. His list of degrees and credentials was nearly as long as Gilliam’s rap sheet. He had studied at Johns
Hopkins University, graduated from the University of Michigan with distinction, then gone on to earn a medical degree there; spent three years as a resident in anatomic pathology at New York University Medical Center; and became deputy medical examiner–pathologist in Suffolk County, New York, before joining the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, where he was then employed. On the side, he took consulting work, without any juridical bias it seemed. In criminal cases, he testified for the state and for the defendant; in civil cases, for plaintiffs and defendants. He would acquire international renown a few years later when, as the chief medical examiner in Washington, D.C., he performed the autopsy on Chandra Levy, the congressional intern whose disappearance and murder in the summer of 2001 became front-page news after it was revealed that she had been having an affair with her congressman, Gary Condit. (A decade later, another man was convicted of the crime.)

Arden was one of the two medical examiners John Blume had recommended to Holt when she was searching for experts to help Elmore. The other was from North Carolina, and she would have preferred him because he lived nearby, didn’t charge as much, and was a southerner. When he wasn’t available, she contacted Arden. Over the phone, she briefly summarized the case. He asked her to send him Dr. Conradi’s autopsy report, her testimony at the three trials, and the photographs the police had taken of Mrs. Edwards’s body. Studying them, Arden reached a conclusion that no one else had, including Holt and Jensen.

Arden, with a black beard, neatly trimmed hair, and rimless glasses, was on the witness stand longer than anyone else during the PCR. He spoke rapidly, uttering full paragraphs in a single breath like a true New Yorker. Jensen kept trying to slow him down to Judge Kinard’s southern rhythms, just as he had done himself.

Arden knew Dr. Conradi from various professional organizations and medical conventions, and he was uncomfortable criticizing her (just as lawyers are reluctant to testify against lawyers, and engineers against engineers). But he had to say
that Dr. Conradi’s report reminded him of something that might be written by one of his first-year interns (he was a clinical assistant professor of pathology at the State University of New York Health Sciences Center in Brooklyn). For starters, Dr. Conradi had confused lacerations with stab wounds, Arden told Judge Kinard. A laceration is caused by a blunt blow, which splits soft tissue. With a bit of dry humor, he added, “The so-called cut that a boxer receives of course is never a cut—assuming they don’t allow knives in the boxing ring—but the cut that a boxer receives is a perfect example of a laceration.”

It might seem academic—stab versus laceration—but Arden made clear it was serious. “Obviously, the implication of what the injury means is different and this is the underlying reason that I am so adamant about this point and why maybe I’m getting too worked up about this point.”

As put forward by the police and the prosecution, aided by newspaper reporting, the public perception was that Mrs. Edwards had been slashed with a butcher knife, à la Hitchcock’s
Psycho
. That was not what happened. A blunt instrument, such as the ashtray or bottle tongs, and not a knife, had caused most of Dorothy Edwards’s injuries, Arden explained for Judge Kinard’s benefit. This suggested an entirely different kind of perpetrator and crime. Why would a robber or a rapist bash Mrs. Edwards with an ashtray
and
take bottle tongs to her? And though murderers usually stab their victims violently, the knife wounds on Mrs. Edwards were shallow, all less than an inch deep, suggesting the perpetrator had jabbed her repeatedly, but not in a frenzy.