Grundy is a small colourless town in the bleak backwoods of Virginia down by the border with Tennessee, a poor town where most of the men have black lung from working down the coal mine and almost everybody is just about everybody else’s cousin. There was a murder here, nine years ago.
Wanda McCoy, who was only 19, was raped in the shabby little house where she lived on the outskirts of town. The rapist cut her throat right back to the spine and she was dead long before her husband, Brad, came back from the mine. When the news got around the town, the mood turned ugly and someone hung out a sign that said: “Time for a new hanging tree in Grundy”. Then the police arrested Wanda’s brother in law, Roger Coleman, a miner, and charged him with the crime, and Grundy calmed down again.
Now, Roger Coleman sits in a silent cell 500 miles away in Mecklenberg on Virginia’s death row, waiting for the state to electrocute him. Back in Grundy, however, the peace has been broken again by the intrusion of a stranger, poking around and asking a lot of questions about the murder. The stranger says that Coleman is innocent. He says he is going to find out who really killed Wanda. He is not welcome.
The stranger is James McCloskey, aged 48, a legendary figure in the making. Only eleven years ago, he was a stereotypical middle class American, working as a management consultant in the posh suburbs of Philadelphia, cruising through an easy life in his air conditioned Lincoln Continental, looking forward to years of security and comfort.
Then one Monday morning, in the autumn of 1979, he threw it all away. He told his boss he had had enough of the world of commerce and was going away to find a new and more meaningful life, as a priest in the Episcopalian Church. For an ordinary man, that might have been enough of a rupture for one lifetime, but a year later, as McCloskey studied for the priesthood in a seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, his life took another lurch away from the norm when, as part of his training, he began ministering to inmates of the state prison in near by Trenton, home for the area’s toughest and most incorrigible convicts.
The man who changed his life there was a convicted murderer called ‘Chiefie’ De Los Santos. “I was there in my collar,” McCloskey recalls, “going from cell to cell and, in a very moving and compelling way, this guy Chiefie was proclaiming his innocence. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I got hold of his trial transcripts and read them. I spent hours talking to him. Three months later, I had come to believe he was innocent. I was moved by his plight. Here was this innocent man standing before me with nothing but bars between us. I felt God had led me to him.”
Armed only with his clergyman’s collar and a determination to get to the truth, McCloskey abandoned his studies at the seminary and started tramping the mean streets of New Jersey’s ghettoes in search of clues. It took two and a half years but finally both men were changed for ever: Chiefie De Los Santos was declared innocent and freed from prison, and Jim McCloskey was set on a new life as a cross between Father Brown and the Scarlett Pimpernell.
That was the summer of 1983. Since then, he has married together the two professions of priest and private detective and devoted himself full-time to uncovering miscarriages of justice. He has mixed with Hells Angels, Black Moslems, prostitutes, pimps, street gangs and hit men. He has discovered the sordid side of American justice. And, although he has no legal powers, no training and just about no money he has now liberated eight more prisoners from wrongful convictions and dug out enough evidence for eleven others to launch new appeals.
This week, his most celebrated triumph comes to Britain in the shape of Clarence Lee Brandley, a 39-year-old black man who was wrongly sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young white girl in East Texas in August 1980. Brandley was convicted in a communal spasm of race-hatred and his case became a symbol of the lingering power of the redneck American south. When McCloskey first visited him on Death Row in March 1987, the whites appeared to have triumphed; the young black man was only 24 days away from execution, the victim of a legal lynching.
Eighteen days later, McCloskey had criss-crossed East Texas in search of clues, knocked on doors, stood on street corners, dug out old trial papers, tracked down old witnesses and finally come up with video-taped interviews with two eye-witnesses who named the real killers and exonerated Clarence Brandley. In the process, he showed how white law men and judges had tampered with evidence, intimidated witnesses, lied, cheated and plotted to kill their black man. The case caused a sensation in the state and stirred the black community into protest. The Texas courts reluctantly reprieved Brandley and finally – after two and a half years during which his supporters were threatened, beaten and run off the road – they released him from Death Row in January 1991.
While Brandley tours Britain, talking about White Lies, the book of his extraordinary experience, McCloskey still beavers away in his cramped office in Princeton, working on a shoe string budget, concentrating on those condemned to death or very long sentences. One of them is Roger Coleman, the man Grundy calls a murderer.
In a lay by on a deserted mountain road, 20 miles west of Grundy, McCloskey stops to straighten his clerical collar. After weeks of sleuthing he believes he is on the track of the man who really raped and murdered Wanda McCoy. He can prove, too, that the state’s main witness is a self confessed liar who was rewarded for pointing the finger at Coleman. Right now, he is trying to show that at least one juror at the trial was boasting that he would “burn that son of a bitch Coleman” before he had heard a single word of evidence.
McCloskey drives out of the lay by and stops by a lonely shack, home of one of the juror’s closest friends. The man – grey-haired and pot-bellied – is outside, naked from the waist up, tipping out garbage. There are mangey dogs and rotting cars in the yard. McCloskey approaches with a smile and a wave. The man ducks inside, pretending he has not seen him. “Whoa,” shouts McCloskey. “Don’t be nervous.” Reluctantly, the man steps outside again and stands scratching the curley white hairs on his naked belly while McCloskey goes into a monologue about his work on the case and ends by asking the man about his friend, the juror.
The man wrinkles his face, spits on the ground and finally speaks. “Wayall,” he drawls. “I ain’t sayin’ they oughtta kill the boy. But if he done it, they oughtta take him out in the sun and tie him down and leave him. That’d take care of him.” He has nothing more to say. Back in the car, McCloskey shakes his head: “This is another world. Dear God, this is another planet.”
McCloskey drives on up the mountain road to another shack and another witness. He never gives up. Which is how he wins. Nate Walker, for example, was serving life plus 50 years for a brutal rape, of which he happened to be innocent; McCloskey followed every hint of a clue and discovered there was an untested semen swab from the rape victim. He found it, sent it for DNA testing and proved beyond doubt that Nate Walker was not guilty.
Domaso Vega had just about given up trying to persuade anyone that he was innocent of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl; when McCloskey met him, he was locked up for life with an order that he serve at least 25 years. McCloskey stuck at his case for five years.
At the end of his inquiry, a witness who said he had seen Domaso Vega leave the dead girl’s flat admitted that he had lied under pressure from the police; another witness who claimed Vega had confessed the crime to him admitted that he had lied to prevent himself being charged; and McCloskey had unearthed official files which showed that police had submitted phoney reports to Vega’s trial to conceal evidence which showed he was innocent. Domaso Vega was released.
McCloskey will talk to anyone. And most people talk to him, because he has one great advantage over ordinary private investigators – the white collar round his neck. “I go into some rough places,” he says, “and I mean rough, dangerous neighbourhoods, the kind of places where people look out the window and see a white man in a suit and think it’s a cop. But with me, they see a priest and that’s different. The collar defends me and it helps me to get a rapport. People talk more. Catholics call me Father. I’m not Catholic. I just look like one. But I let them do it if it helps them to talk.”
The collar does not always work. On Domaso Vega’s case, McCloskey believed he knew who the real killer was. One day, this suspect went berserk in a department store, took two women hostage and then blew his own brains out. McCloskey wondered whether in the minutes before he killed himself, the suspect might have said something to clear his conscience over the crime for which Vega had been wrongly jailed. He needed to talk to the two women hostages. One simply refused. The other told him to come to her house in the evening when her husband would be at home.
“So I go along. This is a nice, blue-collar suburban neighbourhood. I knock on the door and the husband comes out. He has very hard eyes and he tells me to come in and I go in and I sit on the couch and start to talk and I turn round and he is holding a gun on me. And he says ‘You motherfucker, if I had been around earlier today I’d have blown your brains out’. And he reads me the riot act. And it’s scarey. So I don’t get to talk to his wife. I have to find another way.”
McCloskey pushes his little Japanese hire car up a particularly perilous mountain slope ten miles from Grundy and stops outside a corrugated iron shed. After knocking on the door for several minutes, a huge old woman appears dressed in faded jeans, sawn off at the knees, and a moth eaten smock. She fixes him with a stern glare as he starts his speech about the murder of Wanda McCoy and his efforts to get to the truth.
Suddenly she interrupts. “I seen it all,” she says. “I seen that car jist blowed up. One of her legs went this way and one went the other. There was meat hanging from the trees. I seen it all.” McCloskey tries to explain that she is thinking of a different local murder, but the huge woman insists, and the interview collapses in confusion as she then offers to help him track down “boot leggers and marri wanna addicts” over the hill.
McCloskey is back in his car, still running on high-octane enthusiasm. Only once has his determination failed him – in June 1987, when he travelled to Louisiana to work on the case of Jimmy Wingo, a petty thief who was due to die in two weeks’ time for murdering an elderly couple in the course of a burglary. It was a tacky story from beginning to end.
It started on Christmas Eve 1982 with Wingo and another petty criminal, James Glass, escaping from prison: they were passing time on a landing; a lift stopped with its doors open; the guard was busy watching TV; the two men shrugged and walked into the lift, the doors closed and Wingo and Glass were gone.
Later that night, an elderly couple were murdered near by. Days later, Glass was recaptured and admitted he had killed them. But Jimmy Wingo, who was caught in another state a week later, said he knew nothing about the killing and that he had left Glass and struck out on his own immediately after the escape. The police, however, charged both of them with the crime.
Jimmy Wingo’s trial lasted less than a day. His attorney spent only one hour with Wingo before going into court. Wingo could produce no witnesses to prove that he had been hitchhiking across the state at the time of the crime. He was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair. “He should never have been convicted,” says McCloskey. “Dear God, there was no evidence. Louisiana is a banana republic. They just don’t care.”
With only 14 days till Wingo was due to die, McCloskey started a whirlwind investigation. He traced Wingo’s old girlfriend who had told his trial that “Jimmy said something about how he had knocked off a house.” The girl tearfully confessed to the priestly detective that one of the deputies had threatened to take her children away and, in her fear, she had not only agreed to lie but had also let the deputy have sex her.
With seven days to go, McCloskey took a video tape of the girl’s story to the Lousiana authorities. They said they would consider it. With only four days to go, Jimmy Wingo’s friend, James Glass, was executed for his part in the crime, to which he had confessed. McCloskey waited all night by his telephone hoping that the condemned man might have used his last words to exonerate Jimmy Wingo. But Glass had gone to his death, swaggering and sneering and saying he would rather be going fishing.
With three days to go, McCloskey spent five hours pleading Wingo’s case before the state Board of Pardons. After a two minute discussion, the board denied his plea. The chairman of the board was subsequently convicted of selling pardons. With only one day to go, McCloskey went to the Governor’s office to beg for a delay; they told him they were impressed by the video of Wingo’s girlfriend and believed she had been abused and they promised to get back to him.
With only six hours to go, McCloskey sat with Wingo waiting for news. The hours passed. Wingo smoked and wrote letters. Then McCloskey had to leave so they could shave Wingo’s head and fit him with a nappy for when the electric charge sent his stomach into shock. There was still no news from the Governor’s office when, at sixteen minutes past midnight, Wingo was electrocuted, still protesting to the end: “I’m an innocent man. The state of Louisiana is murdering an innocent man.”
Recalling the incident, McCloskey’s eyes fill with tears. “He was so calm,” says McCloskey. “In a way, he taught me how to die.” McCloskey is a Christian and a patriot but he long ago stopped believing that justice was some kind of automatic virtue of American life.
In Grundy one night, he was poking around the scene of the murder when a senior policeman came upon him, threatened to arrest him and made it very clear that he would be better off forgetting about Roger Coleman and leaving town that night. McCloskey believes that as many as ten percent of American prisoners are probably innocent of the crimes for which they were jailed.
“”It is not uncommon for innocent people to be jailed or sentenced to death. People say it might happen once or twice, but they are wrong. I see it all the time in my work. The presumption of guilt not innocence is deeply ingrained in the system. I see small town attorneys who are incompetent and craven. I see judges who are cynical and indifferent. I see these prosecutors who deliberately manufacture evidence and who are themselves immune from prosecution.
“I meet police who have a tremendous amount of racial bias. A nigger is a nigger and a spic is a spic and if they have already been in trouble with the law, they are easy throw aways. They are a thorn in the flesh of the local police department and if a detective gets any information, however circumstantial, that happens to point to one of them, then they narrow the focus and set out to convict that person.
“In Roger Coleman’s case, they set out to kill him. Nobody wanted to help that man. It was not a fair fight. The case against him was not even circumstantial, just inferential. Weak soup. I strongly believe in his innocence.”
There are frustrations. Last year, McCloskey put weeks of work into a man who claimed to be innocent only to discover that his alibi was phoney. McCloskey dropped the case. And there are problems, too, for those he has liberated. “They find it very difficult to adjust – much more difficult than I had anticipated.” Chiefie De Los Santos, whose protests of innocence first moved him, took to drugs after his release and has recently been jailed again.
But McCloskey’s biggest problem is money. In 1983, he set up a charity named Centurion Ministries after the Roman centurion who looked at Christ on the cross and said “Surely, this one is innocent”. He and his one assistant, Kate Hill, take poverty line annual salaries of $22,000, but the expense of travelling the country looking for evidence costs at least another $100,000 each year. And McCloskey can’t stop working for long enough to raise funds.
On Virginia Death Row, Roger Coleman is hoping he doesn’t stop. After months of door-stepping in Grundy, McCloskey has found three new witnesses. All are women. All have confided that they were raped by the man who is McCloskey’s prime suspect for the rape and murder of Wanda McCoy. One of them says that while the man was attacking her, he told her he had killed Wanda and would do the same to her if she did not keep quiet. Grundy has not heard the last of the clergyman detective.
** White Lies, the true story of Clarence Brandley. By Nick Davies. Published by Chatto and Windus, February 11. £14.99.
