Minister of Justice : For the Wrongly Convicted, Jim McCloskey Is a Clergyman and Gumshoe Who Opens the Prison Door

IN THE BASEMENT OF AN OFFICE building across the street from Princeton University, an iconoclastic Protestant minister is patiently searching through a box of files on a 17-year-old Los Angeles murder case.

The case was solved long ago to the satisfaction of the police and the courts. Two men were convicted and are serving life terms. But James McCloskey, the only full-time operative of Centurion Ministries, and not incidentally one of the nation’s best detectives, thinks they are the wrong men. “This is a classic frame,” he declares.

Finding what he was looking for in the box, McCloskey pulls out a letter written three years ago by one of the men.

“I’ve written numbers, numbers and NUMBERS of letters like the one I am going to write you now,” it began. “I’ve written to newspapers, ’60 Minutes,’ NAACP, law firms, senators, ‘20/20,’ Phil Donahue, magazines, the FBI, Jesse Jackson and other organizations trying to arrest someone’s interest in my case, with hopes of getting them involved to the point of conducting a thorough investigation that would turn up crucial evidence to set me free.

“I couldn’t have killed this guy . . .

“I was incarcerated in the custody of the L.A. County Sheriff’s dept., IN JAIL!!! when this crime happened!”

McCloskey knows this sounds outrageous, but no more so than other similar claims that, astoundingly, have turned out to be true. A 48-year-old bachelor who considers himself a “radical disciple of Christ,” McCloskey spends his days trying to redeem people who are not supposed to exist. They are the convicted innocent--people, who, because of police or prosecutorial mistakes or corruption, incompetent defense attorneys, faulty or coerced eyewitness identifications or simple juror misjudgments, are convicted of crimes they did not commit.

McCloskey calls his ministry Centurion after the Roman soldier who, the Bible says, was stationed at the foot of the cross, looked up and remarked of Christ, “Surely this one must be innocent.”

He takes on only the most serious cases, involving people who have been sentenced to life imprisonment or condemned to die, whose appeals are exhausted or nearly so and who are too poor to hire investigative help.

Supported by scant contributions from foundations, churches and a few businessmen, McCloskey promises the convicts that he will work for them, at no cost, until they are freed. But he also tells them he will abandon them in an instant if he discovers they have lied.

His extraordinary dedication and investigative skills have resulted in the freeing of eight men and women serving life sentences or awaiting execution for rape or murder in Texas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

His ministry is unique. And there is no secular organization in the United States that does similar work.

“He investigates like no one I’ve ever met,” says Dennis Cogan, a leading Philadelphia defense attorney, “and I’ve come into contact with top-flight police investigators, federal investigators and private investigators. He’s single-minded in his dedication, not taken in by a sob story and wedded to one thing--the truth.”

Cogan helped McCloskey secure the release early this year of Matthew Connor, a Philadelphia man wrongly imprisoned for a decade for the rape and stabbing murder of an 11-year-old girl. The Philadelphia district attorney’s office, which agreed to re-investigate the case at McCloskey’s urging, wound up asking a court to free Connor, with the district attorney himself saying, “The evidence isn’t there to say he is guilty.”

Connor’s release came during an extraordinary nine-month period in 1989 and early 1990 during which McCloskey obtained the releases of five inmates in three states.

One of them, Damaso Vega, was convicted of a 1980 murder of a teen-age girl in Monmouth County, N.J. He had stood in front of the trial judge who had sentenced him to prison for life in 1982 and declared: “I will eat a stone. I will eat dust. I will eat anything worse in the world for me to prove my innocence. I am not the man. I am innocent. I am not the man.”

No one, of course, had believed him. But McCloskey dug up enough evidence to show that Vega had been framed by witnesses who had lied because of pressure from a detective. The officer had also hidden evidence that pointed to the guilt of another. Confronted with this new evidence, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Robert Figarotta said: “There are many aspects of this case which truthfully terrify me.”

As for Vega, he says: “When I describe Mr. McCloskey, I always say the dictionary don’t have words to describe how good is that man.”

MCCLOSKEY, WHO usually smokes only when he is alone at night, needs a cigarette during the day to talk about his failures. In one case, he says, he had to give up when he was unable to turn up new evidence. In another, he became convinced that the man he thought was innocent was actually guilty. In the most disheartening, he lost a convicted murderer to the electric chair when the state of Louisiana decided to put him to death, despite new evidence McCloskey turned up at the last minute that pointed to his possible innocence.

In the Los Angeles case, the biggest frustration is not being able to prove conclusively that his correspondent was in jail at the time of the murder.

The murder occurred at 7 p.m. in the restroom of a South-Central Los Angeles gas station in 1973. Records show that Clarence Nathan Chance was indeed a prisoner at Men’s Central Jail on the day of the murder, held on an assault charge. Records also show that the charge was dropped and that Chance was processed out of the jail downtown at 4:53 p.m. But no record has been found that shows how long it took for Chance to complete the processing and actually leave.

McCloskey tracked down the jailer who ran the tier on which Chance was housed, and the jailer recalled that pre-release procedures at the time would have meant an actual release anywhere from 45 minutes to four hours after 4:53 p.m.

If the procedures took two hours or more, Chance would not have had time to meet up with his friend, who was also convicted of the murder, and travel to the gas station to kill the victim--an off-duty Los Angeles County deputy sheriff whom he apparently had never met. But if the release procedures took significantly less than two hours, Chance could have had the time. The jailer who ran Chance’s tier remembered Chance, who had been a trusty, but he could not remember how long the procedures took in Chance’s case.

The issue of precisely when Chance was released was not explored at his trial. Chance’s then-defense attorney, Charles Pope, says Chance told him he was released around 5 p.m., not that he was in jail at the time of the crime. But the transcript of the trial shows Chance saying, “But I was in jail when it happened. I was in the new county jail.” Chance, who, at his lawyer’s urging, did not testify, told that to the judge just before he was taken away to prison.

Because there is a possibility that Chance was released in time to commit the murder, McCloskey has focused on the way police built what even they admit was a weak case. The police, McCloskey says, used witnesses who told “such a concocted story it amazes me.”

He began his investigation, as he does in every case, by making an exhaustive study of official records, looking particularly for witnesses’ accounts that changed after repeated contacts with police. Such changes, he says, are often tip-offs that witnesses lied to get police off their backs.

After his study, he traded his customary sport shirt and suspenders for a black shirt and a clerical collar and hit the streets. “The collar can be a great door opener,” he says. Then he “just parachuted in on” the witnesses--offering them a chance to redeem themselves by telling a lay minister the truth.

He found, as he often does, that two of the key witnesses, who said Chance and a co-defendant had confessed, were “broken human beings . . . absolutely alone in the world.” They admitted to McCloskey that they had lied to police because they were frightened and wanted to say what the police wanted to hear. Over the years, they had told no one of their lies, McCloskey says, because “who would believe them?”

“Forgive me for sounding angry,” McCloskey says as he recounts his findings, “but I am angry.” He jabs at a table top with his finger. “I am (extremely) pissed when this happens!”

A former business consultant who turned to the ministry in mid-life, McCloskey has an easy way with people. He is a bald, round-faced man, with a double chin, a slight paunch and a hearty, ready laugh. But he says these kinds of witnesses “don’t just plunk out the truth. They have to come to like you, respect you, trust you, know that you are well-intentioned and not conning them in any way.” Then, he says, it is usually “a long, delicate walk” before they will tell their stories to a judge.

MCCLOSKEY’S MOST DRAMATIC breakthrough came in a Texas case, in which he was able to take a witness “back through the pain” of a police-inspired lie that put an innocent man on Death Row. McCloskey made sure he knew a lot about this witness--wiry, white-haired John Henry Sessum--by the time they met in early 1987 outside Sessum’s two-room shack on the outskirts of Conroe, a small East Texas town.

Sessum was an alcoholic who had lost his driver’s license for drinking. Every day, on his way home from his job on a highway road crew, he would stop to buy two six-packs of 16-ounce beers, put them in the wire basket of his bike, then peddle the 10 miles home.

Sessum, who is white, had been a key witness in 1980 against Clarence Brandley, who is black, in a racially charged murder case that had polarized the town. The murder victim was a 16-year-old white girl.

Days before fall classes started at Conroe High School, she had gone to the school to practice volleyball and had wandered off alone, apparently in search of a restroom. Her body was found a short time later. She had been raped and strangled.

The last people known to have seen the girl alive were school janitors--white janitors, including Sessum, who had been waiting at the bottom of a stairway for their next assignment. Authorities promised panicky parents that they would have the girl’s murder solved by the time school started.

In a move a judge would later describe as “blind,” they arrested Brandley, the only black janitor. Then they assembled Sessum and the rest of the white janitors for a talk. The white janitors, including Sessum, gave statements in one another’s presence in which they said the girl had passed them and gone up the stairs to a restroom, that Brandley had then walked by and the white janitors had left.

The implication was clear. Brandley was the only janitor who could have been alone with the girl and killed her. Largely on that basis, Brandley was convicted and sentenced to die.

McCloskey had gone to Death Row to visit Brandley--he always visits inmates whose cases he may take--but was reluctant to become involved. Brandley already had advocates. A supportive family, lawyers and another private investigator were already working on his behalf.

McCloskey prefers to work alone for inmates who have no help. But he was impressed with Brandley and convinced that he was innocent. And Brandley’s defense team convinced him that the case was stalled, with time running out.

McCloskey moved into a garage apartment at the house of one of Brandley’s lawyers, where he studied the case’s transcripts and police reports. He concluded that Sessum, who had once complained about the lead police officer’s tactics, was most likely the weakest link in the prosecution’s case. And with only 20 days left until Brandley’s execution, McCloskey, along with Brandley’s investigator, Richard Reyna, went to see Sessum.

They met him outside his shack. McCloskey remembers vividly because it smelled of urine.

“I said, ‘John,’ ” McCloskey recalls, beginning in his slightly ponderous way, “ ‘We think there’s a good chance they got the wrong man. As you know, Clarence Brandley is going to be executed in two or three weeks. And we’d like to talk with you about whatever you might know about this.’ We ended up standing in front of his house while he drank three or four 16-ounce cans of beers.”

Then, after two hours of cat and mouse, Sessum made a stunning proposition. He offered to take McCloskey and the investigator to the high school and show them what had occurred. “I got chills,” McCloskey recalls.

They met again, as agreed, in a few days. But when Sessum “got to the actual stairwell . . . (he) froze. He couldn’t say a word.” Later, at home, Sessum finally got a burst of inner strength and opened up.

He told how two of the other white janitors had grabbed the girl and dragged her off and about how he had stood by and done nothing, ignoring her pleas for help. “He said, ‘I let one innocent person go to her death, and I’m not going to let two,” McCloskey recalls.

But telling McCloskey that Brandley was innocent was not enough. McCloskey needed to get Sessum to tell his story to Brandley’s lawyer on videotape, then to a judge. “It’s like a sale now,” says McCloskey. “You’ve got to close it.”

McCloskey, Brandley’s private investigator and his lawyer met at Sessum’s house the next afternoon. The sale fell through. “John gives us a smile,” McCloskey recalls. “ ‘Come in.’ We come into his shack. He turns the TV on. We all sit down on his bed. He goes into the kitchen and comes out with a butcher knife, and just says ‘Get the (expletive) out of here!’ ”

McCloskey and the others left in despair but then thought of calling a friend of Sessum’s--a neighbor who they thought might be able to calm him down. As it turned out, Sessum was already at the neighbor’s trailer. “She convinced him to settle down, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you. These are good people. If that’s the truth, why don’t you give a statement?’ ”

“We came back the next day and took a full 20-minute videotaped statement” in which Sessum said he had been intimidated into going along with the testimony of the other white janitors by the lead police officer, a Texas Ranger, McCloskey says. “He said the Ranger had told him, ‘You go along with this or else you’re going to jail.’ ”

“That’s a common line. They’re all afraid of the law. And they have absolutely nobody who they can confide in who will in any way help them.” But why should anyone believe Sessum now? McCloskey’s answer is to look at whether he has a motive to lie.

Perhaps he recanted, McCloskey acknowledged, because he wanted to be perceived as a hero. But “if he sees this as an opportunity to become the hero, why would he take a butcher knife and tell us to get out? Because, I’ll tell you why, he’s scared to death. He still doesn’t want to do it. And why would he, sitting on the edge of his bed, have tears rolling down his eyes when he is saying to us that he’s had nightmares all these years?

“His quote was, ‘I guess I’ve got a little bit of the rabbit in me.’ He runs away when there’s trouble. . . . John Sessum had to stand up and tell a judge, TV cameras and an open public that he was a coward and let a girl go to her death without doing a thing. To me, there’s a cost there.

“And not only that. He feels terrible for lying against someone he knows is innocent and sending him away to the chair. I mean, he’s (Sessum) a human being. And this is a chance for redemption, in the most profound way.”

A succession of Texas judges agreed with McCloskey. Sessum’s videotaped statement was the beginning of the end of Brandley’s troubles, leading to a stay of execution and then court-ordered freedom after 10 years behind bars. No one else was arrested.

After District Court Judge Perry D. Pickett reviewed the case, he called it an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. “In the 30 years this court has presided over matters in the judicial system,” he wrote, “no case has presented a more shocking scenario of the effects of racial prejudice, perjured testimony, witness intimidation, an investigation the outcome of which was predetermined, and public officials who, for whatever motives, lost sight of what is right and just.”

But for McCloskey, it was simply another case, the kind he runs into all the time. Despite this country’s system of safeguards based on the philosophy that it is better to let a guilty man go free than to punish an innocent one, McCloskey believes that wrongful convictions occur with great regularity. Less than 10% of all criminal cases go before a jury; the vast majority are settled by pre-trial guilty pleas. McCloskey estimates “that one out of 10 who go to a jury trial are wrongly convicted.”

He thinks a big reason is that some jurors place too much faith in the integrity and thoroughness of police investigations. They do not truly believe that criminal defendants are entitled to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. “People come together in a courtroom and the (defendant’s) sitting there. They think, ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’ ” McCloskey says. “ ‘The police wouldn’t have brought this person to trial unless there was good reason.’ And a lot of times there isn’t.”

As for police in the cases he has investigated, he says, “I can’t look you in the eye and say that (they) believed in their innermost person that these guys were innocent and set about to frame them. They built a case to fit their theory. A name (invariably that of someone with a criminal record) popped up as a suspect. And when information came their way that would lead them in a different direction, they ignored it. They hid it. And they also manufactured it to fit.”

SOCIALLY SMOOTH WHEN he wants to be, McCloskey has a sense of priorities that one friend says would make him leave in the middle of a sentence if his schedule called for it. The eldest of three children, he grew up in an affluent, church-going family in suburban Philadelphia.

His father, a Presbyterian church elder, was executive vice president of the family business, McCloskey & Co., a large construction firm that changed much of Philadelphia’s skyline and built one of the U.S. House of Representatives office buildings and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C. The firm was founded by McCloskey’s great-uncle, Matthew, a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in the Democratic Party and a onetime U.S. ambassador to Ireland. But McCloskey had no interest in joining the firm.

After college at Bucknell University, Navy service in Japan and combat in Vietnam, he returned to Japan as a civilian, helping U.S. companies negotiate joint ventures there, then striking out on his own in a venture to market galoshes. Unfortunately, Tokyo experienced a drought the year he decided to become a galoshes entrepreneur. “It never rained,” he says. “It was unbelievable.”

Back home, broke and disappointed, McCloskey went to work for the Hay Group, a prestigious Philadelphia consulting firm, where he specialized in advising Japanese companies who were doing business in the United States. By 1978, he was making $55,000 a year and had bought himself a house in the Main Line Philadelphia suburb of Malvern. He was on his way to a partnership that year when he announced that, at the age of 36, he felt selfish and wanted to leave, to study for the ministry.

McCloskey had started to attend church for the first time since high school a few years before, and the minister’s preaching gradually “drove me into the Scriptures. As I’m reading the New Testament, I’m really starting to feel that Christ was speaking to me.”

“I was feeling an emptiness,” McCloskey recalls. “The job and the business career were going well. But I didn’t feel that I was doing anything really worthwhile. I’ve been a bachelor all my life. I (decided I) wanted to do something more with my life than just feed myself.”

McCloskey deferred his departure from the business world for a year while he trained his replacement. Then he rented out his house and drove his Lincoln Continental to the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he checked into the dormitory. During his second year, he opted to do his field work by counseling inmates two days a week in the maximum-security section of nearby Trenton State Prison.

And there, in 1980, McCloskey, naive in the ways of the criminal justice system, met George “Chiefie” De Los Santos, an illiterate junkie from the streets of Newark, who put him on his present path.

Chiefie--the name tattooed across his chest--was in the sixth year of a life sentence for the murder of a Newark used-car salesman. He admitted to having earned heroin making deliveries for small-time dealers. But he claimed to be innocent of the murder.

After hours of conversation over a period of weeks, McCloskey agreed to review the transcript of Chiefie’s trial. There it was, in black and white: Chiefie had confessed. He had admitted the murder to Richard Delli Santi, another petty criminal in jail.

Chiefie had played him for a fool. “It really shook me,” McCloskey recalls. He confronted Chiefie. But Chiefie’s explanation was simple: Delli Santi had made it up.

“Why would anybody do that to you?” McCloskey demanded. “Why would Delli Santi lie?”

“Well,” Chiefie said, “he was in trouble with the law.”

McCloskey thought that was pretty lame. But “I’d never been associated with the low lifes of the world,” he says. “I’d never thought about police pressure.”

Chiefie explained to him, and McCloskey came away convinced. He offered to take a year off from the seminary to investigate Chiefie’s claims. “That was my Christmas gift to him,” McCloskey says. “I was moved by his plight. So it seemed to me I couldn’t just offer up prayers for him and move on.”

Besides, McCloskey was tired of school. Living on his savings, he moved out of the dormitory and into the home of an elderly woman who allowed him to live rent free in exchange for doing her weekly shopping. Then he began his probe.

Delli Santi turned out to be a longtime jailhouse informant who repeatedly claimed that cellmates confessed serious crimes to him. Despite 40 arrests as a junkie and burglar, Delli Santi had managed to avoid being sent to state prison by trading the supposed confessions to authorities.

McCloskey persuaded a smart and cynical Hoboken defense attorney, Paul Casteleiro, to help him win Chiefie’s freedom. Together, they convinced a federal judge that Delli Santi had “contrived the alleged confession.”

What’s more, U.S. District Court Judge Frederick B. Lacey said, the prosecution had known it and had suppressed evidence of perjury: Delli Santi had sworn that he had never before testified about confessions he’d supposedly heard in jail. “It is a virtual certainty that there would have been an acquittal if the jury had had all the evidence,” the judge concluded.

It took McCloskey 2 1/2 years to free Chiefie. By then, McCloskey had given up his original plan to become a conventional church pastor. “I now know that I could never do that work,” he says, “because you get sucked up into all this petty administrative handholding stuff that doesn’t mean a hill of beans.”

He had returned to the seminary and written his senior thesis on what he called “radical disciples”--men who challenged society’s ways and obeyed Christ’s teachings at great worldly cost. They were: civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.; George Fox, a 17th-Century Englishman who was jailed for founding the Society of Friends; George Whitefield, an 18th-Century evangelist who died from exhaustion, and Toyohiko Kagawa, a 20th-Century Japanese labor activist repeatedly jailed for pacifist teachings.

These men, McCloskey wrote, “separated themselves from one life and blindly began another at the beckoning of Christ. Their work was both risky and revolutionary. Their personal inner knowledge of God and His Truth led them to challenge existing unjust structures, orders and systems. It led them to witness against and try to amend, reform, or eradicate terrible injustices. And in the end, except for God, their journey and work of discipleship was lonely. They were solitary and almost forlorn figures in trying to live out their faith.”

McCloskey clearly saw himself as one of them. He incorporated his ministry as a nonprofit organization and went to work on the cases of two other convicts he had met through Chiefie. He had a three-year dry spell before his next client was freed. Wrongly convicted murderer Rene Santana walked out of a New Jersey prison in 1986, when McCloskey proved that the state’s star witness, motivated by a secret deal with prosecutors to have charges against him dropped, had lied.

That year, McCloskey won freedom for Nathaniel Walker, an Elizabeth, N.J., man who also spent a decade behind bars for a rape he did not commit. The case rested on the blessed simplicity of physical evidence. McCloskey persuaded authorities to search for a vaginal swab that he knew had been taken but never tested. It turned up in a test tube, in a yellowed envelope, on a police property room shelf. FBI tests showed conclusively that Walker and the rapist had different blood types.

McCloskey’s victory in the Walker case led to a burst of publicity. McCloskey, who had exhausted his own funds, had been getting contributions from friends and from the missionary fund of the church he had attended when he joined the seminary. But with the publicity came contributions from foundations and wealthy individuals, as well as an assistant.

Kate Hill, a born-again Christian who had operated restaurants, bars, inns, a soup kitchen, boutique and shoe store, was looking for work when she read articles about McCloskey who, in published photographs, had “piles of stuff around him.” “I thought, ‘I could organize this guy,’ ” she says. She began commuting by train from New York to Princeton.

Two years ago, McCloskey and Hill moved into their present office, across the street from the university, which a former Yugoslav prisoner of Tito rents to them at a below-market rate. The office consists of three rooms. There is a small storage area with boxes of letters from convicts labeled “no’s and nuts.” There is a much larger outer office, occupied by Hill and some volunteers, who mainly handle correspondence from inmates wanting help. And there is McCloskey’s inner sanctum.

McCloskey lives monkishly, on about $22,000 a year, on the outskirts of Princeton. Far removed from the town’s precious shops, his home is a studio apartment; the only decoration is a crucifix. But his office is cheery and shows a taste for the bizarre. Across from his desk is an oil painting given to him by Percy Foreman, the legendary Texas criminal defense lawyer. The painting is of a beautiful young woman posed seductively in the nude, a Foreman client who was accused of shooting her husband. There is a hole in the canvas--the fatal bullet must have passed through her image before it entered him.

McCloskey is overwhelmed with requests for help. He received 160 in the first quarter of this year alone. Initially, inmates who write receive a form letter in which he apologizes and says that there is only a remote chance he will take their case. A grease pencil board on the wall shows how slim the odds really are. It lists active cases. There are only six.

CHANCE MADE THE LIST in large part on the strength of his claim that he was in jail when the crime occurred. “That got my attention big-time,” McCloskey says.

Although the jail claim remains unproven, McCloskey is convinced that Chance and his friend, Benny Powell, are innocent of the crime for which they were sentenced to life in prison: the murder of off-duty Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff David Andrews, 24.

All that was known was that on Dec. 12, 1973, Andrews, dressed in civilian clothes, pulled into a service station at Normandie Avenue and Exposition Boulevard, parked his car at a phone booth, called someone, then went to the restroom. Two men entered behind him. Shots rang out. The men fled. Andrews was shot numerous times, and his gun was missing.

Police canvassed the neighborhood. Their best witness was an 11-year-old girl who said she had been riding her bicycle and had seen the two men enter and flee. Her descriptions did not fit Chance, whom she knew from the neighborhood, or Powell. She said one of the men had pimples and wore a Godfather-style hat. The other was short and wore a gold earring.

Moving methodically, detectives compiled lists of pimpled criminals, criminals who wore earrings and criminals who matched other facets of her descriptions. There was a lot of pressure to solve the case. Andrews had three brothers in local law enforcement, and, an investigator said, they wanted results. Police organizations offered thousands of dollars in rewards. But the police detectives assigned to the case were getting nowhere. They were removed, and a new team was instructed to work on the case full time until it was solved.

For reasons now lost to time, the new detectives decided that the answer to the crime was on 38th Street, where Chance lived, a block away from the station. Powell also sometimes lived on 38th Street, where he was known as a troublemaker.

Perhaps unwittingly, the investigators then constructed what McCloskey contends was a “classic frame.”

They began with Powell. His name had already come up in the investigation. It appeared on a list of miscellaneous suspects compiled by the first set of detectives. And Powell hung around with Chance. Again and again, police visited the girl who had been riding her bicycle around the service station.

Could she recognize photos of Powell or Chance? No, she said, she could not. They took her to a lineup in which they had placed Chance. She said he was not the man. But the police kept coming, and finally she changed her mind.

McCloskey argues she succumbed to police pressure. Detective William Hall, a member of the team of new detectives, who now investigates officer-involved shootings, says the girl changed her mind on her own. He says she had not identified Chance at first because she had been afraid and that she finally decided to identify him because the Chance family house had burned down and the family had moved.

Whatever the truth, it is clear that shortly after the girl identified a photograph of Chance, police developed their best information on Powell. It came from another suspect in the case, Wayne Henderson, who now says he implicated Powell to divert attention from himself.

“I said things about (Powell) to throw the cops off me,” Henderson told McCloskey. “I never thought (Powell) did it.” Henderson led police to a woman who he knew “was a liar who would do anything for money and really wanted that reward.”

She told police that Powell--whom she had known as a child but had not seen for many years--suddenly showed up at her house two weeks after the murder, told her he’d killed a man, needed to leave town and offered to sell her a gun.

Then she apparently put police in touch with two teen-age girls who sometimes stayed at her house and who provided most of the rest of the police case. One of them, 16-year old Bernadine Kelly, was confined to a juvenile hall for a robbery when she was interviewed by the police. She told police that Powell had casually confessed to her.

Tammy Jackson, 14, was on probation for the same robbery. After repeated visits from police and prompting from Henderson, who was acting at the behest of police, she said that, in a separate incident, Chance and Powell had confessed to her.

Based on the teen-agers’ assertions--which they have told McCloskey they made up--in 1974, police arrested Powell, who had moved to Kansas City, and then Chance.

The 11-year-old eyewitness was taken to her second lineup. She testified that police showed her pictures of Chance on the way to the lineup and suggested that they wanted her to identify the same man whose photo she had belatedly picked. She did.

But she said she still couldn’t identify Powell. Then, suddenly a week before trial, Larry Wilson, a notorious jailhouse informant, claimed that Powell had proclaimed news of his guilt from the tier where he was housed in the county jail. Chance and Powell say they can’t understand how a jury could have bought it.

“Put this on record,” Chance says from Folsom Prison, “I would have preferred to have been judged by a computer.”

But the jury did buy it, and persuading a court to overturn a jury conviction is tough. McCloskey has secured volunteer lawyers for Chance and Powell, and they expect to begin the slow process of petitioning courts for their release in the spring.

Meanwhile, McCloskey keeps talking to witnesses. Kelly, now a grown woman, says she lied “because the police, they kept on asking me all kinds of questions and like they was putting words in my head and so, I just went along with them and kind of made up stuff in my head.”

Jackson says she lied because the police had threatened to take her away from her grandmother unless she told them what they wanted to hear. She says she made up three stories until she finally found one that satisfied them. “I just said anything,” she told McCloskey. “I wanted them to get out of my hair.”

To McCloskey this is a familiar refrain. Half of his cases have involved alleged confessions, ones that, as it turned out, never took place. For a long while, he couldn’t understand how a human being could lie about someone confessing to murder. Then two recanting witnesses in two different cases explained it to him.

“ ‘It’s a matter of survival,’ ” he quotes them as saying. “ ‘Either I go away or your guy goes away. And I ain’t going away.’ ”