COLUMN ONE : A Peek at Back Alley Justice : It seems like just another brutal stabbing in a sorry part of town. Police even have a confession. But the case crumbles in court, drawing letters of protest from angry jurors.

For the 13 jurors picked to hear Betty Burns’ trial on assault and attempted murder charges, sitting here in a Hennepin County courtroom last Nov. 14 promised a glimpse into a world far different from their own.

Unfolding before them were the details of a sorry, near-fatal stabbing in a bloody Minneapolis back alley. All the parties involved were of American Indian heritage and uncertain address. Standing in the alley, dull-eyed and drunk on beer when the cops arrived, most needed a bath and fresh clothes.

The jurors knew little of such affairs. They came from well-furnished houses and carefully led lives. To visitors in their homes, they served homemade strawberry shortcake, fresh fruit, hot tea. They spoke politely both to friends and strangers, careful not to interrupt or contradict.

‘The criminal justice system was something out of my realm of activity and particular interests,” Kenneth Winden, an architect, said later. “It was never really a part of my life.”

“I looked at jury duty as a chance to learn,” said Arlene Olson, a housewife who grew up on a farm west of Minneapolis. “I am not employed outside the home. It was a good chance for me to see what the world is like.”

If the jurors had talked at all about the courts before, it usually had been to complain about coddling of defendants and disregard for victims.

“If anything, I probably had the feeling that the bad guy goes free,” said JoAnne Sanford, an accountant.

“I thought the system was full of loopholes,” said Kay Noren, a housewife who regularly throws away brochures mailed to her from civil liberties groups.

Their initial impression of the Betty Burns case did nothing to alter such views. After all, the prosecutor had a statement from the victim accusing Burns, 31, of the assault--and a confession from Burns herself.

“I thought it was a pretty cut-and-dried case,” said Craig Biegert, a potato farmer in suburban Osseo. “I kind of thought right away when it first started that she was guilty.”

But as the jurors listened to the witnesses, what they heard opened yet another new world to them. By the second day, they not only were convinced that Burns was innocent--they were wondering why she had been arrested or charged in the first place. As the case went on, the wonder grew into outrage.

The not-guilty verdict they delivered on Nov. 20 wasn’t enough for the angry jurors. Early last January, they released a 13-page public letter of protest addressed to Minneapolis’ mayor, Donald M. Fraser.

“We are writing to you, Mayor Fraser, because we wish to make public our thoughts regarding issues of justice and fairness raised by this trial,” the jurors explained. “We are chagrined and indignant that justice can be so poorly served in our community. . . .”

So it was that 13 generally cautious, religious, middle-class native Minnesotans found themselves transformed, at least for the moment, into aroused critics of the judicial system and ardent defenders of subcultures.

“The trial was a big eye-opener for me,” said juror Wendi Antoun, a financial aid secretary at the University of Minnesota. “It didn’t take too many days to find out that there are definitely two sides for every story.”

The central question left unresolved by the jurors’ angry response has to do with just what they glimpsed at the Betty Burns trial. Was it something aberrant, a bad mistake, a pack of overzealous cops and prosecutors? Or was it simply how the judicial system works?

Meet Betty Burns

By the time Sgt. Robert Nelson, a Minneapolis homicide detective, pulled his squad car into the alley behind Third Avenue South, the ambulance had already left, carrying Sheldon Geshick--with six stab wounds in his torso and head--to the Hennepin County Medical Center. It was 9 a.m. on Friday, June 23, 1989. Three people appeared, saying they knew the 34-year-old victim. One was Geshick’s brother, Bruce; one was his sister, Jude; one was a barefoot woman named Laura Briggs.

They didn’t know what happened, they said. They’d been drinking beer in Jude’s apartment with Sheldon and his girlfriend Betty all night, straight into the early morning. Jude’s apartment was right here, off the alley. Sheldon and Betty had left to visit Sheldon’s aunt 10 blocks away. That was all they knew.

Nelson considered these people. They were, to him, obviously drunk, especially Bruce and Jude. Bruce’s speech was loud, slow and slurred. Laura was crying. Their clothes were dirty and messy. To Nelson’s nose, they stunk.

Just then, another woman appeared in the alley who did not, to Nelson, look like the others. Her clothes were clean and neat and fresh. She did not seem as drunk. She had an oval face and a still, luminous quality--there was almost a beauty about her.

The woman identified herself as Betty Burns, Sheldon’s girlfriend. She didn’t know what had happened, she said. She had not been with Sheldon. She’d left to go over to Doughnut’s house--Doughnut was Sheldon’s aunt. No, she didn’t know Doughnut’s real name. No, she didn’t know her precise address.

Listening to Betty Burns, Nelson could not get past those clean fresh clothes. She’d been with this crowd drinking all night but she was clean. It didn’t fit. Why wasn’t she dirty and smelly like the others? She must have just washed up and changed her clothes, Nelson figured, and maybe the clothes she’d gotten rid of were bloody.

Betty was quiet and mild, 5 feet, 4 inches tall and 118 pounds, and bore no apparent scratches or bruises. Sheldon was 5 feet, 10 inches tall, 185 pounds and full of old knife scars. Whoever stabbed Sheldon had driven a knife straight through his skull, four inches into the brain. Nelson knew he didn’t have evidence or proof yet, and the physical details did seem improbable, but the 41-year-old detective--a 20-year veteran with 31 commendations in his record--thought he knew who stabbed Sheldon. He thought Betty Burns had.

Two hours later, back at his desk in the downtown homicide division office, Nelson’s judgment grew even firmer when he received an anonymous phone call. It was a woman, claiming to be an eyewitness to the stabbing.

“Yeah, I saw what happened earlier,” she said. “And it was a girl. She’s small built. . . . All I know is, that girl, she pushed her boyfriend down in the alley.”

Nelson ventured a name.

“It was Betty, wasn’t it?” Nelson asked.

“Yeah. . . .” the woman said. “Her name is Betty, yeah.”

Ten days passed before Nelson could interview Geshick, who was recovering from surgery to repair a double skull fracture. When the detective did arrive outside Geshick’s hospital room on July 3, a student nurse, Mary Kay Hobday, 22, pulled him aside. Sheldon had told her who did it, Hobday reported. He’d said his girlfriend Betty Burns had pushed him off his bike and stabbed him.

When Nelson began his own questioning of Geshick, though, he had trouble communicating.

This difficulty was understandable. Lisa Kestel, a speech and language pathologist who visited Geshick that same day, wrote in her log that the patient’s “conversational tracking was quite impaired on 7/3 as evidenced by inappropriate responses to questions and obvious confused behaviors.” In court months later, Kestel elaborated: Geshick in early July suffered from “mixed fluent aphasia . . . he had difficulties with comprehension as well as with verbal formulation . . . He was severely impaired.”

Nelson, leaning over Geshick, straining to make contact, finally had to summon the student nurse. Could she ask the questions for him? he wondered. In his police report he recorded his summary of what then happened:

“Ms. Hobday asked victim if he knew who had assaulted him and he said, ‘Yes, Betty.’ I had her ask him if he meant his girlfriend Betty Burns and the victim said, ‘Yes, Betty Burns.’ I then had Ms. Hobday ask victim if he wanted to press charges against Betty Burns and he said ‘Yes, I do.”’

That was enough for the detective. After leaving the hospital, Nelson issued a formal arrest bulletin for Betty Jean Burns. Copies went everywhere--precinct divisions, deputies, hospital security. “Probable cause aggravated assault,” the notice said.

The ‘Confession’

When Nelson’s partner Sgt. Ronald Snobeck arrived to arrest her on Sunday, July 16, Betty Burns was holding hands with Sheldon Geshick in his hospital room. Outside, against the hallway wall, he searched her, then snapped the handcuffs over her wrists.

She’d never before been arrested, and had no record. “I couldn’t believe it,” Burns later said of that moment. “I was scared.”

Downtown at the homicide division office, Burns stuck by her story: on the way up the alley to visit Sheldon’s aunt, Sheldon had told her to go on alone, he was going back for his brother, Bruce. She’d waited at his aunt’s for half an hour, then had gone looking for Sheldon. When she got back to the alley, it was filled with police cars.

Why would Sheldon identify you as his assailant? Snobeck asked.

I don’t know why he would say that, she said softly. We’ve always gotten along with each other.

Did she have any other explanation for who might have done it? Snobeck asked.

Yes, Burns said. She’d talked on the phone to Sheldon’s sister, Jude. Jude told her that she’d heard from Laura Briggs what happened. Laura had seen something. The person who stabbed Sheldon was a man named Beau.

Snobeck noted this comment in his report, but that was all. No policeman went to re-question Laura Briggs and Jude, or to look for a man named Beau.

Burns spent the night on a bench in a Hennepin County holding cell. The next afternoon Sgt. Nelson came to question her. Among the several appreciative words that Nelson’s supervisors use to describe him--”fair . . . astute . . . competent”--there is no mention of a particularly gentle manner. “He has a gruff appearance, I’ll admit that,” said Inspector Sherman Otto, commander of the criminal investigation division. “He is a hard-nosed cop.” Burns and Nelson would later offer differing versions of what happened between them that day.

Nelson “got really mad” when she stuck to the story she’d told Snobeck, Burns testified. He threw a chair against the wall. He slammed his fist down on a table. I have better things to do, he said. I want you to tell me the truth. I have a white woman who called us, who saw you stab Sheldon in the alley. I have testimony from Sheldon who says you did it. Cooperate, you get probation; don’t cooperate, you do 20 years.

Nelson recalled the conversation differently. He talked to her about doing what’s right for Sheldon, he later testified. Yes, he mentioned the “white” witness. But that was all. There were no threats or thrown chairs.

Both Burns and Nelson do agree on one matter, though. By the end of the interview, Burns had confessed to the stabbing. At 6:30 p.m., Nelson sat at a typewriter, recording her statement as she spoke.

“He (Sheldon) started looking at me real mean and I got scared,” she said. “That’s when I pushed him down off the bike. Then he got up and started coming after me. That’s when I pulled the knife out. Then I stabbed him, and stabbed him again and again about five or six times. Then I went over by that apartment building and tried to throw the knife on the roof . . . “

When Nelson finished typing, Burns initialed each of the five pages, and signed her name at the bottom of the last sheet.

The next day, July 18, the Hennepin County attorney’s office formally approved a complaint charging Burns with second-degree attempted murder and first-degree assault. Bail was set at $25,000. Lacking such an amount, Burns remained behind bars at the women’s prison in Shakopee. “We had a confession,” Hennepin County Attorney Tom Johnson would say later. “It was a serious crime. The victim identified the accused. We had corroborating evidence. How do we not charge?”

‘Beau Did It!’

That report about a man named Beau, however, would not go away. In early August, Sheldon’s sister, Jude, called Burns’ lawyer, Hennepin County assistant public defender Renee Bergeron. Jude spoke with anger: Why is Betty Burns still in jail? She didn’t do it. Beau did it! Laura Briggs saw it. Two other people saw it, two sisters--Doreen Sam and Alvina Sam. Beau is Alvina’s boyfriend.

All this was news to the public defender--Burns had told her nothing about a man named Beau. Bergeron, 40, six years at her job, wasn’t really surprised, though. With her clientele, she’d become accustomed to cultural differences. Witnesses had first names or nicknames only, and no addresses. Defendants, weighed down by their lives, faced their charges with languor. The Native Americans, particularly, were not inclined to defend themselves. Both the public defender and the cops had seen more than a few dubious confessions come out of that community. “Yeah, I did it, man,” the accused would say with a shrug, rather than argue.

In late August, Bergeron dispatched a public defender’s investigator, Jack Hulseth, to look into Jude’s claims. Besides Jude, Hulseth found Laura Briggs and “Doughnut”--Janet Drift, it turned out, was Sheldon’s aunt’s true name. Their stories all fit together: Doreen Sam had told them that she’d seen Beau stab Sheldon. After the stabbing, Beau had hid from the cops in Alvina Sam’s apartment, running around closing blinds, threatening everyone to keep quiet. Betty was at Doughnut’s, just as she’d claimed.

On Sept. 7, Hulseth wrote his reports and delivered them to Renee Bergeron, who in turn sent copies to the assistant Hennepin County Attorney handling the case, Patricia Kerr. Soon after, the public defender called the prosecutor.

There are eyewitnesses, Bergeron said.

Kerr sounded unimpressed. Yeah, right, she replied.

The Moment of Truth

Looking back months later, most people agreed--some with pride, others with irony--that it was Warner Bellm, the Hennepin County Attorney’s own investigator, who really cracked the case for the defense.

It took him all of two days.

Dispatched by Kerr to look into the stories dug up by the public defender, Bellm on Sept. 21 visited the caretaker of an apartment building next to the alley where Geshick was stabbed. It turned out the caretaker knew Alvina and Doreen Sam very well. Yes, she told Bellm, she’d heard from Alvina and Doreen that a guy named Beau had stabbed Sheldon. And there was another eyewitness, name of Patricia Ambers.

By the next day, Bellm had addresses for all three women. He visited Doreen first, waiting outside until the bus had come to take her 6-year-old to school.

“I’m here to talk about the stabbing,” he began. “I know you know about it.”

Doreen Sam started weeping.

Bellm didn’t realize it then, but Doreen had tried to tell her story once before. Just three days after the stabbing, crying and shaking so bad she could barely speak, she’d told Darlene Fairbank, her county-sponsored family service counselor, that she’d seen Beau stab Sheldon. Fairbank had driven Doreen that same day to the Fifth Precinct Station at 25th and Nicollet to repeat her story, but the policeman at the desk had told them to call homicide downtown. From a pay phone, without giving her name, Doreen had related her story to the woman who answered the phone there, but nothing had ever come of that. Although Fairbank had recorded everything about that day in her caseworker’s log, Doreen’s phone call somehow never made it into a police report.

“It’s time someone came forward and told the truth,” Bellm said to Doreen.

So she told her story again:

Sheldon was down in the alley. Beau was yelling, coming out of Alvina’s apartment, heading down the stairs, telling Alvina to toss him “baby” and his boots. “Baby” was his name for one of the knives he keeps. Alvina tossed down the boots and the knife. Sheldon was standing in the alley, swaying back and forth, drunk, waving a knife around that looked like one of Beau’s. Beau kicked the knife out of Sheldon’s hand, grabbed Sheldon, stabbed him two or three times in the stomach and then in the head. Sheldon fell.

By the time Doreen finished talking, Bellm did not know what to think. He was an ex-cop who’d worked seven years as a police detective in a suburb outside Minneapolis. “I work for the prosecutor now, but my primary job is to gather facts that are truthful,” he liked to remind people, staring at them and biting off the words, as if daring anyone to disagree. In this Burns case, he’d started out just checking a defendant’s alibis. Now he was wondering whether they had the wrong person in custody.

Leaving Doreen, Bellm that same day visited Patricia Ambers. Three days later, he drove the six hours to the Moose Lake Regional Treatment Center, where Alvina Sam was under care for alcohol abuse. Both woman were reluctant, both needed coaxing, but both, finally, told much the same story as had Doreen. Certain details differed here and there--the color of a bike chain lock, who advanced on whom first--but they all had Beau stabbing Sheldon after Alvina tossed him his “baby” and his boots.

By now, Bellm was convinced Beau had done the stabbing--it was clear, the police just had never talked to any of these people. All the same, one question still troubled him.

“Do you know Betty Burns?” Bellm asked Alvina Sam when she’d completed her account.

“No. Couldn’t even pick her out of a lineup.”

“Why would Betty Burns confess to stabbing Sheldon?”

“I don’t know,” Alvina said.

A Dubious Deal

That was precisely the question that occurred to Kerr, the assistant county attorney, when she received Bellm’s reports on Sept. 26. The prosecutor was not overly impressed. The witnesses Bellm interviewed weren’t credible, she said later. They all gave different versions.

Kerr was a short, petite woman with a reputation for being blunt and tough, qualities which some admired and others described as “lacking social skills.” She couldn’t buy someone confessing if they didn’t do it, the prosecutor told Bellm and Nelson at a meeting in late September. She was going to prosecute Burns. This case was one for the jury to decide.

In time, Kerr did offer Bergeron a deal: Betty pleads guilty to first-degree assault, she gets 20 years probation. She’s out of jail that very day.

Bergeron found that tempting, and from her knowledge of the Native American community, Bergeron guessed that Burns would accept. Unable to make bail, even after it was reduced from $25,000 to $5,000, Burns had already been sitting in jail for four months.

But Burns said no. She was adamant. One false confession was enough. “I can’t get up in court and say I stabbed Sheldon,” she said simply.

Bergeron felt happy--but terrified. Just because the eyewitnesses had talked to the investigators didn’t mean they’d take the stand. They drink, go to the reservation, go to alcohol abuse treatment centers. They’d been threatened by Beau and were scared. If they wanted to get lost, Bergeron knew, she couldn’t find them.

“I was scared not just for Betty Burns, but also for justice, for the whole damn system,” she said later. “I don’t think I could have gone on operating within the system. I would have had trouble.”

As it happened, one member of the prosecution’s team shared Bergeron’s feelings just then. “I was petrified they’d convict this person,” investigator Warner Bellm recalled. “I told people, ‘Hey, if that happens, I don’t think I can live with this.’ It didn’t feel good.”