Free Ain’t Easy, He’s Finding After Five Years Behind Bars

The call came from out of the blue, which is understandable, because you never really expect to pick up the phone and have an accused killer on the other end. But instead of this one being from an inmate still swearing he didn’t do it, this was someone who the jury said didn’t do it.

Tom Merrill is 31 now, a couple of lifetimes older than he was five years ago when he first went to jail and then on to two California prisons while his case worked its way through Orange County’s legal system.

He’s been free for three weeks, acquitted in his third go-round on charges he joined another man in the robbery and double homicide in a Newport Beach jewelry shop in March, 1989.

Soft-spoken on the phone, almost as if he were trying to keep from waking a baby nearby, Merrill was calling from Monkton, Md., a Baltimore-area community where he’s from and where his mother and two brothers still live. He described himself as “trying to put my life back together. It kind of got ripped apart there for a while.”

After being imprisoned for 30 days short of five years, Merrill said he’s readjusting slowly to freedom. “I don’t even know where my feet are, so how can I choose a path to walk on?” he mused. “I’m having trouble making normal daily decisions. I wasn’t a dunce before all this. In some ways, I’m not a dunce now, but in some other ways I am.”

Merrill said he wasn’t phoning to give an interview. He had seen a previous column of mine on his case and suggested I call Bill King, the jewelry store owner shot and wounded in the head during the holdup who later insisted that Merrill wasn’t in his shop that fateful day. “He’s a great talker,” Merrill chuckled. “Me, I’ve got to know people before I talk to them.”

King’s support of Merrill, which culminated in a face-to-face meeting a few months ago, had instant credibility in that King’s wife, Renee, and friend Clyde Oatts, were the two murder victims. After the trial, the King and Merrill families met each other, and King’s current wife, Trish, says she hopes the families maintain a lifelong friendship.

I spoke to Trish King last week. Her mother knew Bill King’s mother and had asked Trish to pick up King’s children at the police station the night of the murders. From there, she and King established a friendship and married four years ago.

I asked Trish King how much her husband agonized over his certainty that Merrill wasn’t involved.

“Bill would sit there and question himself all the time,” she said, recalling the early days of the investigation. “He put his faith in them [prosecutors] and said, ‘If you guys say this is so, I guess it’s so and I must not be figuring right.’ ”

Eventually, though, Bill King became convinced he had remembered things correctly from that night and came to believe the authorities misled him about the evidence against Merrill.

He and Merrill never met until a few months ago. That reaffirmed his belief in Merrill’s innocence, Trish King said.

Then, three weeks ago, other members of these two entwined families met after Merrill was acquitted. “Up until we met him, it was more like we felt so sorry for this poor boy,” Trish King, 42, said. “It really was worse for him than what Bill was going through. This kid was in the prime of his life and had been locked up for something he had nothing to do with, and that was devastating.”

The families hit it off immediately, she said. “It felt so good to know we’d helped somebody. Like I told Bill, one reason God kept him alive was to make sure justice was straightened out. Had Bill not lived, Tom probably would have been in jail the rest of his life.”

That fact is not lost on Tom Merrill. “All the evidence that led to overturning the conviction [in his first trial], we got from Bill King,” he said.

The lingering question is why the district attorney pursued Merrill with such zeal. Why pursue a case when the surviving victim eliminated Merrill as a suspect and at least one other witness after the shooting said Merrill wasn’t with the man who was convicted in the case in 1991 and is still in prison?

The Merrills and Kings have their theories, which may or may not be true. The rest of us must assume that the district attorney honestly believed Merrill was the triggerman, despite a troubled case that resulted in a hung jury in May and the acquittal in October.

The Kings have no doubt about Merrill’s innocence, Trish King said. They remain upset that prosecutors came close to dispatching Merrill for life.

And as for Merrill, who said he may explore a career of investigating possible false imprisonments? “Well, the D.A.’s office mouths the words that they’re there to do justice,” he said. “If they are there to do justice, they should be happy I’m out.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.