Class Confession Propels Man Back to Prison to Pay for Past : Justice: He had cleaned up his life and was studying for his college degree. But then he admitted a killing.

He came to Sociology 424 that winter day to talk about his new life.

Kevin Willis had given up crime. He had kicked drugs and booze. He was the Rehabilitated Man.

He spoke as a guest panelist, sharing his tale of transformation, from bad to good, from prison to freedom. He was a respected prison counselor, a loving father and, like his audience, a college student.

He freely answered every question about his past.

Kevin Willis didn’t know it then, but his words were his ticket back to prison.

“I didn’t really feel I had done anything wrong,” he said recently, sitting in a stark prison interview room. “I probably would do it again because I was just being truthful and I feel that God knows my heart.”

What Willis said precisely that February day in 1992 is in dispute. One fact is not: He publicly admitted to the class--including the two students he knew were policemen--that he shot a man 13 years ago in a case that still was classified as an unsolved murder.

Willis left that day, a bit unnerved by all the questions, but secure that he wasn’t in trouble because of a deal he contends he made with prosecutors years ago that prevented him from being charged with the slaying.

The officers left with a different impression. It seemed as if Willis had just spilled an ugly secret--and confessed to murder.

Old police files were pulled. An investigation was launched without his knowledge. And now, one year and one trial later, Kevin Willis, age 31, has a new title: Inmate 269028.

For nearly two years, Willis drove to this prison complex outside Columbus, preparing and counseling inmates about to be released, warning them it would be tough on the outside.

Now he is back as one of them--for 15 years to life.

The irony is too painful to ignore.

“I told them I could very easily one day end up right where they were,” Willis said, wearing a wry smile and a tan prison jumpsuit in his new home, the Correctional Reception Center.

If Willis is angry, he rarely shows it, with his soft-spoken, laid-back manner. But when he spoke of being separated from his 6-year-old son, his frustration surfaced with a disbelieving shake of the head or a twisting of his clasped hands.

Willis was in school, he had money in the bank, and he was saving for a down payment for a home for his girlfriend and their son, Kevin Jr.

“Things were looking pretty good,” he said. “I was sharing all this with my students. I said, ‘You see what you can do if you got out there and keep your nose clean?’ ”

The inmates at the Orient Correctional Institution, he said, were his inspiration.

“Going in every day and hearing that door clank behind me and seeing guys walk around in prison in their uniforms was a reminder of the consequences that I could receive if I chose to give in to some of those temptations,” he said.

If the inmates helped him, his employer, Community Connection for Ohio Offenders Inc., said Willis delivered in return.

“He was probably the best instructor we had,” said April Steffy, the program’s assistant director. “He knew what these guys are dealing with and he knew what it took to get their lives turned around. . . . He was just a shining example of what people could do.”

Willis’ world started collapsing Feb. 10, 1992, at Capital University, where he was enrolled. His adviser, Christ George, had asked him to speak to a juvenile delinquency class.

“I saw someone who was functioning, who had a job, was making close to $20,000 a year, counseling felons, taking care of business, taking care of a family,” said George, a criminal justice instructor.

Willis seemed the perfect before-and-after model.

That day, he told his audience how, at 14, he started out as a shoplifter, a burglar, a car thief. He began drinking and smoking marijuana. He repeatedly was locked up, but as soon as he was out, he was back in trouble.

When asked what diverted him from his kamikaze course, he turned to his prison experiences as an adult.

Willis said he mentioned that he was arrested for shooting a man who died and that a grand jury had returned a “no-bill,” meaning he wasn’t indicted on that charge.

“I really didn’t feel as if I was in a trial or being held under a light,” he said later. “That’s probably the reason why I spoke so freely.”

Several students among his audience of about a dozen people remembered it differently. One was Sgt. Cliff Davis, then a Columbus homicide detective and one of the two policemen in the class.

Davis said he remembers Willis looking directly at him and the other cop, then saying he could talk about the September, 1979, shooting because the statute of limitations had expired--an allegation Willis denied, saying he knew there was no such deadline in murder cases.

Willis, as the sergeant recalls, described how he planned to sell stereo equipment to 18-year-old Todd Glenn, then decided to take the money and keep the goods, then shot him after Glenn taunted him.

Glenn was dumped out of the car; he died two weeks later.

The day after the shooting, Willis was arrested in the car Glenn had been driving. He served five years in prison after pleading guilty in 1980 to receiving stolen property--the car--and aggravated burglary charges from a separate incident.

Once freed, he returned to drugs, drinking and crime. Within two years, he broke parole--he was caught trying to steal bicycles.

The prison doors slammed again.

“I was worn out, tired, disgusted,” he said. “I prayed and asked for God to come into my life and show me some direction so I could get myself together, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison.”

He started taking college courses, and joined Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. After his release in 1989, he continued his schooling.

Last August, Willis received his bachelor’s degree in criminology. The same month, the police came to arrest him as he worked in the prison.

Though he was worried, Willis was confident enough to reject a plea to a lesser charge of manslaughter.

Midway through the trial, Franklin County Prosecutor Michael Miller made a surprising discovery. He found in the previous prosecutor’s file a notation dated April 24, 1980, reading:

“Plea negotiation includes assurance from state that (defendant) will not be indicted in homicide,” followed by a case number referring to Glenn’s slaying.

Jerry Weiner, Willis’ attorney, said that when he asked his client about it, Willis replied: “I tried to tell you and you wouldn’t listen to me.”

But at a hearing, neither the former prosecutor nor the defense attorney could recall a deal--though the prosecutor acknowledged that the note was in his handwriting. A transcript couldn’t be found. And the presiding judge in the case is dead.

Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Richard Sheward refused to dismiss the aggravated murder charge. “I am totally comfortable and convinced my finding was correct,” he said.

He noted the judge in that case was meticulous and would have put such an agreement on the record, and said a plea that would have protected Willis from a murder charge doesn’t make sense.

Willis testified in his own behalf, but was vague on many details. He said, however, that he shot Glenn during an argument in which Glenn pulled out a gun.

No one in the college class remembers any talk of self-defense.

Testimony showed the gun that killed Glenn was the same type as one Willis had taken in a burglary a few days earlier.

Willis was found guilty in February--one year after his talk in Sociology 424.

No one doubts Kevin Willis has made strides in his life.

But should it matter?

“To be honest with you, I don’t look at this kid as Charles Manson or Jack the Ripper,” said Miller, the prosecutor. “On the other hand, he did kill someone and we were as fair with him as we could be and he rejected it.”

Sheward said whether Willis was rehabilitated was irrelevant.

“You have to keep in mind there’s substantial evidence he committed a murder,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Am I going to look his (Glenn’s) mother in the face and say, ‘Too bad your son is dead?’ ”

“There was some justice owed,” Sgt. Davis said. “I felt he was pretty cavalier about the fact that he had beaten the system. It was not the dialogue of a rehabilitated person.”

Those in Willis’ corner see it another way.

“We don’t condone what’s happened, but we support the person we know today. He had really gotten his act together,” Steffy said, adding that Willis has a job waiting for him when he is released.

If appeals fail, Willis won’t be eligible for parole for 10 years.

He says he won’t lapse back into his criminal ways and won’t forget the past--especially Glenn’s death.

“It’s something I feel I’ll always have with me until I die,” he said. “It’ll be something I carry in my conscience.”

But he looks to the future too.

“I’ve had a taste of freedom,” he said. “I was out there for three years, paying taxes, doing everything that I should have been doing. That’s given me the drive to do whatever I have to do to get out of here as soon as I can so I can get back to that. I know I can do it. I know I can make it. . . . I’m really just fighting for another opportunity.”