‘Ringmasters’ Unlock Truth, Free Man Who Confessed to Murder

His own words did him in. His confession to the murder of an elderly widow put him behind bars for life.

Johnny Lee Wilson was doomed.

Later, when the young retarded man said that police had bullied him into confessing, that he didn’t do it, that it was all a mistake, authorities didn’t believe him. They wouldn’t change their minds even after a convicted killer confessed to the crime.

But the peculiar chain of events haunted two men. One knew Wilson as a child and couldn’t believe the meek kid with an IQ of 76 had grown into a crafty, coldblooded killer. The other knew the murderer who claimed responsibility and couldn’t believe he was lying.

So Dean Rodgers, a building contractor, and Warren Ormsby, a bail bondsman, joined forces for the challenge of their lives: to free Johnny Lee Wilson.

Naively, Ormsby figured it was a four-, maybe a five-day job.

“I thought it was a matter of telling the law and the law would straighten it out,” he says.

Rodgers, though, sensed it would take much longer: “I told Warren it will be years before we get this done. I said, ‘We’re going to be in trouble for a long time if we do this.’ ”

One year passed, then two, then five. Wilson sat in prison as one court, then another, rejected his appeals. Still the men soldiered on--for eight long years.

“I said, ‘Dean, there’s only one way we’ll ever win this damn case,’ ” Ormsby recalls. “ ‘Don’t ever give up. Regardless of what happens, don’t give up.’ ”

The bid to free Johnny Lee Wilson is more than a tale of righting a wrong. It’s a story of how two men in a small Ozarks town cajoled and connived, told some truths and concocted some lies, manipulated the media and lobbied the law, were admired by some and despised by others.

Their basic strategy was to keep Wilson in the limelight.

That wasn’t hard: They had a good yarn.

“The case was so appealing,” says Mike Atchison, a Kansas City lawyer who joined their cause. “You had this murder in a small town of an elderly woman, a town afraid, a kid with mental retardation, the other guy who confesses to it. It is stranger than fiction.”

By the time Ormsby and Rodgers stepped in, Wilson was serving life without parole for the April 13, 1986, murder of Pauline Martz, a 79-year-old widow who had played bridge with his grandmother. Martz had been beaten, bound and burned alive when her ransacked house was set afire.

After the police received a tip--from a former special-education classmate of Wilson’s who later recanted--they and members of the sheriff’s office interrogated Wilson, who swore he didn’t kill anyone and had an alibi: He was with his mom at the grocery store. For nearly four hours, he was threatened and intimidated, fed facts only the killer would know and told there were eyewitnesses.

At the end, authorities had their confession.

Wilson, only 20 at the time, entered a plea in which a defendant doesn’t admit guilt but acknowledges prosecutors have a strong case to convict. By doing so, he avoided the death penalty.

When he appeared in court that day in 1987, he at first didn’t seem to understand the judge. Then, when asked again to explain why he was pleading, he responded tentatively: “I’m guilty, I guess.”

He was in prison the next year when Ormsby received a call from a Kansas inmate he had bailed out several times for burglarizing carwashes and coin laundries. In fact, the first time Chris Brownfield had repaid Ormsby with two Folger’s coffee cans of quarters.

“I’ve never known him to be a liar,” Ormsby says in his husky smoker’s drawl. “But he’s ornery and meaner than the dickens.”

Brownfield was imprisoned for robbing, beating and murdering an elderly woman in her Kansas home, 16 days after Martz’s killing--and about an hour from Aurora.

According to Ormsby, Brownfield asked him if he knew about Martz’s murder.

“Hell,” Ormsby responded, referring to Wilson, “they got him, he got life in the pen and that’s about where he should be.”

“He said, ‘I got something to tell you,’ ” Ormsby recalls. “He said, ‘That kid didn’t do it.’ ”

*

For three decades, Warren Ormsby was a small-time bail bondsman for small-town criminals, putting up $25 for drunk drivers, petty thieves and the like.

His craggy, hound-dog face and the soot-gray circles under his eyes make him look older than 53, and a cheap cigarette constantly dangles from his lips. His right arm sports a scar from a .12-gauge shotgun wound, a remnant of a long-ago scrape.

He revels in telling tales of his years of chasing bail-jumpers, wolfing down bologna sandwiches and sleeping in his Dodge van. Once, he spent nine days in Texas to snare a guy who skipped out on a $100 bond.

Ormsby describes his moral code with typical bluster:

“I may be a little slick on the sides and I may hustle you for every nickel . . . but I’m not going to put some damn innocent kid in the penitentiary if he ain’t got sense enough to blow his nose.”

Dean Rodgers, 64, was more respectable, a ruddy-faced former horseman who builds homes. His desk is adorned with the nameplate “Boss Hogg,” a gift from his daughter marking his resemblance to the short, paunchy sheriff on TV’s “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

“Dean was a lot bigger man in the society,” Ormsby explains. “He was a Sunday school teacher in the church and, hell, I was just a little roadrunner, running up and down the alleys to make my living. He rode Main Street and dealt with the upper crust, and I was dealing with the same people in a different way.”

The two got together after Ormsby failed to make headway with authorities regarding Brownfield’s confession; Ormsby approached Rodgers because the builder’s nephew was the prosecutor.

There was one more media-tantalizing twist: Rodgers once lived next door to Wilson. He remembers a mild-mannered, bike-riding kid who was so protected by his mother and grandmother that he needed permission to leave his yard.

Rodgers feared authorities had nabbed the wrong man, but his concerns initially were allayed by his prosecutor-nephew, now a judge, who declines to discuss the case.

At first, Rodgers was leery of Ormsby’s unsavory reputation--and skeptical about Wilson’s innocence. But his doubts disappeared as the two men began checking out Wilson’s story.

Ormsby knocked on every door from Wilson’s home to the murder victim’s, but found no one who saw him that night.

After an investigator the duo hired turned up nothing, they launched a massive publicity campaign, printing bumper stickers, spending thousands of dollars on T-shirts and doing scores of interviews, trying to create news.

Rodgers called a news conference early on to announce a petition to recall the sheriff, even though a reporter had told him the night before that state law didn’t allow it.

He went right ahead. “Got a lot of coverage,” he says, smiling.

The two men also put up a billboard--which later was firebombed--reading: “Aurora, Home of . . . Johnny Lee Wilson, The Boy Without A Trial.” (Wilson had, of course, waived that right.)

They organized and promoted a 150-mile march to the capital, Jefferson City. It began with 200 people; a week later, Rodgers says, a few stragglers remained, including a handicapped man, pushed most of the way in a wheelchair.

“We just got mouth exercise from some people from the government,” he says. But it was one more week of news coverage.

They pressured a newspaper in nearby Marionville to write about the case. When it did, Ormsby, who helped sell ads, and Rodgers, paid to print 10,000 copies instead of the usual 800, and blanketed the area with them.

When the paper ran into money trouble, the two men poured in a few thousand dollars.

Bill Maurer, a former reporter at the paper, which eventually folded, says he admired the pair’s tenacity, though Ormsby sometimes stepped over the line.

“Warren always wanted to write outrageous stories about public corrupt officials,” he recalls. “I [said I] don’t have any evidence to prove that.”

Ormsby denies rumors that his involvement in the case was part of a longtime grudge against the sheriff. But the campaign to free Wilson did kick up some dust.

A businessman, Rodgers says, asked him to take the billboard down, saying it gave Aurora a bad name.

The men ran afoul, too, of the local newspaper.

“They lied to me. They sent me on wild goose chases,” says Kim McCully, editor of the Aurora Advertiser. “I have no respect ethically for them at all. They did a lot of show boating, totally for the camera, for regional and outside media. We didn’t like everything being so staged.”

But the outside media did bite.

Over the years, newspapers and magazines, including the Kansas City Star and U.S. News & World Report, weighed in with editorials and stories. The prospect of a young-man-wronged story also lured “20-20,” “The Reporters,” “Unsolved Mysteries,” and “Saturday Night With Connie Chung.”

“The fact these two guys were almost obnoxious about it certainly got me going, and I don’t know that I would have,” says Maria Patrick, a New York free-lance producer who spent months working on a piece for the Chung show.

Lawrence County Prosecutor Robert George, who inherited the case and still believes Wilson is guilty, dismisses it all.

“It’s a prime example of how people can use the media and fool the public,” he says. “There wasn’t a Million Man March coming down to Aurora to let this man go free.”

He suggests an ulterior motive: money.

Years ago, the two men and Wilson signed a $100,000 deal for a made-for-TV movie (the option has since lapsed), but the state claimed the money under a law preventing criminals from profiting from their deeds.

Both men cashed their first installment and were sued.

But still, their crusade continued. Ormsby and Rodgers gum-shoed their way to Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas--where they met Brownfield several times.

In a bid to win Wilson a trial, they also hired Dee Wampler, a savvy Springfield attorney and former prosecutor whose 10-page resume includes the book “Defending Yourself Against Cops.”

Even though Wampler believed Wilson was innocent, he says, he met with the prosecutor and worked out a deal in which his client would plead not guilty by reason of insanity and be placed in a mental hospital.

A plea, he explains, would have gotten Wilson out of prison and on a fast track to freedom because he would have been eligible for review every six months--and a state doctor already had attested to his mental competence.

But Wilson backed out of the plea at the last minute.

“I said, ‘Accept it, if you’re guilty. If you’re not, we’ll stay with you,’ ” Rodgers recalls.

In arguing for Wilson to have a trial, Wampler also presented evidence of Brownfield’s confession and motel receipts and phone bills suggesting he and an accomplice were in the area when Martz was killed. But a judge rejected the request.

By then, Patrick, the TV producer, had immersed herself in the case. She called Vern Miller, a former attorney general of Kansas, and asked him to visit Brownfield in prison. She also sent him Wilson’s confession.

“I was amazed how bad it was, how absolutely terrible that case had been handled,” he recalls.

When Miller drove 170 miles to interview Brownfield, the convict repeated his story: He and an accomplice had robbed Martz and burned the house because they had lost a stun gun that had fingerprints on it.

Miller knew Missouri officials had dismissed Brownfield as not credible after investigating his story; they cited too many discrepancies and noted he was not able to identify a photo of Martz.

George, the prosecutor, still brands Brownfield a liar who initially was out to collect a reward.

But Miller didn’t see it that way: Using his clout, he got Brownfield temporarily transferred to a county jail near his Wichita home.

Using his AT&T; credit card, he and Brownfield tracked down the con’s purported accomplice in Oklahoma. In a taped conversation between Brownfield and the man, Brownfield mentioned the Martz confession and said he couldn’t “leave the kid laying in there.” The man replied, “It took you a whole hour to cop me out, man.”

For Miller, it showed Brownfield and the alleged accomplice were guilty--and that Wilson was innocent.

The tape was presented in an appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, but Wilson’s plea was upheld in 1991, though the court said it was not the venue to determine guilt or innocence.

It cited other avenues of appeal--including a pardon.

*

It was later in 1991 that one of Kansas City’s largest law firms took on the Wilson case pro bono after being approached by Patrick.

“I just thought this kid was never going to get out,” she says. “Every point along the way, he had fallen through the cracks.”

Mike Atchison, who began tackling the case while he was a law clerk, and his senior colleague, Dave Everson, had an uphill battle: to prove a man’s innocence beyond a reasonable doubt--and explain why he would enter a virtual guilty plea.

Bob Perske, a free-lance writer who attended some of the court hearings, says Wilson’s predicament wasn’t unique. He has chronicled more than 100 cases of mentally retarded people wrongly accused of heinous crimes.

To explain Wilson’s behavior, attorneys called on Denis Keyes, an assistant professor of special education at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, who conducted psychological tests on him in prison.

Mentally retarded people, Keyes says, typically acquiesce to what police tell them. “You give them an inch, they’ll take a mile,” he adds. “The more approval they get, the more they’ll feel like they’re buddies with you.”

Wilson, Keyes says, is very shy and “would have said anything they wanted to get himself out of the situation he found himself in.”

Adds Ormsby, with his trademark swagger: “I bet you in 10 minutes, I can get him to admit he killed Abraham Lincoln.”

In seeking Wilson’s freedom, these attorneys pursued a pardon.

“The way you win a criminal case on appeal is showing legal or procedural error--not showing factual innocence,” Atchison says. “One of the things courts look for in criminal cases is finality. Every guy in prison says he’s innocent. The governor can look at the facts. In this case, the facts . . . were so supportive of Johnny’s innocence, that was the logical route.”

For three years, he and Everson plowed through volumes of material, examined the issue of false confessions and compiled a 40-page brief and hundreds more pages of exhibits to prove Wilson’s innocence--even if the governor wasn’t convinced of Brownfield’s guilt.

“Warren and Dean had their populist thing,” Atchison says. “What we were doing . . . was very meticulous, very methodical and, unfortunately, very slow-moving.”

That irked Ormsby, who threatened to fire the attorneys--even though they were toiling for free.

“Warren is a real loose cannon-and-a-half,” Perske says. “He might have thrown the monkey wrench in it once in a while.”

But ultimately, he says, Wilson needed advocates.

“The circle of friends around Johnny was a little erratic, but powerful,” Perske says. “Without them, Johnny would be rotting in jail.”

*

Joe Bednar, the governor’s chief counsel, was the final stop on the long trail that Ormsby and Rodgers began charting in 1988.

The former prosecutor spent a year on the case. He traveled to Aurora, interviewed police and prosecutors, examined physical evidence, cross-checked police reports, read press releases, built a list of potential suspects and reviewed and listened to Wilson’s taped confession.

After poring over the transcript, which ran to more than 100 pages, he retyped all the leading questions. The result totaled 42 pages.

“It was incredible,” he says.

Then Bednar retyped the questions that provided Wilson with facts only the murderer would know or were inconsistent with evidence.

They totaled 13 pages.

“There was nothing in that confession that Johnny came up with on his own,” he says. “He didn’t know anything about this crime.”

On Sept. 29, nine years after he was locked up, Johnny Lee Wilson was pardoned by Gov. Mel Carnahan--the first time a Missouri inmate had been freed that way in 42 years.

George, the county prosecutor, calls it “a political decision” and says the pardon does not say Wilson is innocent.

But the governor did.

“It is clear,” Carnahan said, “he did not commit the crime.”

Last week, a federal civil rights suit was filed on Wilson’s behalf. Among the charges: Law enforcement authorities arrested Wilson without probable cause, intimidated and coerced witnesses and prepared false and misleading reports.

Bednar’s investigation did not address Brownfield’s confession, and George says there’s no reason to pursue a case against him because Wilson is the murderer.

The sheriff wouldn’t take calls.

Bednar chalks up the case to a small town pressured to solve a murder and a police force that misjudged Wilson’s mental abilities.

“Mistakes were made in this case,” he says. “It wasn’t an intentional situation of picking on someone and saying, ‘We’re going to get this guy.’ You’re dealing with a rural county in Missouri. They don’t have the experience [handling] a number of homicides.”

“I didn’t see it as something evil,” Bednar says. “They all felt they were doing the right thing.”

*

Johnny Lee Wilson lives with his mother and grandmother in a residential home for the elderly run by Ormsby’s sister.

A slender man with wispy, dishwater blond hair and a pale boyish face, Wilson, now 30, says he is just happy to be free. He tries to block out his years in prison--almost a third of his life.

“I knew I would get out,” he says, dressed in a new Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. “I didn’t know exactly how it would happen. I never gave up the faith that I’d be coming home. “

But not everyone is happy.

“Instead of keeping a murderer in prison where he should be, he’s now living in Aurora, where he shouldn’t be,” says prosecutor George.

But Wilson says townsfolk have been pleasant. He also says he has learned from his ordeal. “I think I’m a little bit smarter than I was when I went in,” he says.

He still sees Rodgers, who is building homes, and Ormsby, whose bail bondsman license was suspended last year in a dispute with the state and who has been struggling with health and financial problems.

Johnny Lee Wilson knows how much he owes them.

“They are the greatest,” he says. “They’re the ones who got me out and got it started. They both knew in their hearts I didn’t do this. They wanted to see an innocent man free.

“I want to repay them somehow,” he says. “I just don’t know how.”

Ormsby barks a suggestion: “Just don’t get into another mess.”

But Rodgers, typically more gentle, says simply: “Just be a good boy.”