Man Released in O.C. Slaying Dazed, Thankful

Less than 24 hours after being released from the confines of a prison cell, Dwayne McKinney, the Ontario man apparently wrongly convicted of a murder in Orange County nearly two decades ago, on Saturday stood on a patch of the Mojave Desert a free man.

“I just want to run around this place,” said McKinney, still overwhelmed by the sudden turn in his life. “It is very unreal. I know it. I see it, but it is hard to believe it.”

McKinney said he doesn’t harbor any bitterness, and even has come to quietly accept his imprisonment for a crime he always said he did not commit.

“I always believed my deliverance would come,” McKinney said. “I just didn’t know when it would come.”

On Friday, Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony J. Rackauckas, who prosecuted McKinney in 1982 as a young deputy, asked a judge to order his release after an investigation uncovered evidence that another man may have committed the crime.

McKinney, 39, was released shortly after from Lancaster State Prison and taken by friends to the Center Circle Network, a Christian nonprofit home for released inmates at a remote Mojave Desert ranch.

“I suffered a lot of losses, but I also gained a lot,” said McKinney, who was a 21-year-old gang member when he was sentenced to life without parole for the 1980 murder of a fast-food restaurant manager. “The lifestyle that I led put myself in a vulnerable position. . . . I could be free and still be lost.”

McKinney said he sought refuge in street gangs after his mother died when he was 13, a loss that made him a hardened young man.

All through Saturday, a stoical McKinney greeted a stream of reporters and well-wishers at the ranch, including John Depko, an investigator who worked on McKinney’s bid for freedom.

“This is what you live for,” said an elated Depko, a veteran 24-year investigator in the Orange County public defender’s office. “An innocent man deserving of your work.”

McKinney has always maintained his innocence in the 1980 robbery of the Orange Burger King and murder of 19-year-old restaurant manager Walter Bell. During the trial, four Burger King employees identified McKinney as the killer.

Efforts to win his release began two years ago, when prison inmate Charles Hill wrote the Orange County public defender’s office saying he knew the identity of the real killer. Hill said he was present when the robbery was planned.

After a lengthy investigation by the office’s investigators, McKinney’s public defender filed a motion last September seeking a new trial. The motion argued that the new evidence pointed to another man, Raymond Herman Jackett III, who is serving time for drug possession.

Rackauckas on Friday stopped short of declaring McKinney’s innocence, but said his office’s investigation found substantial evidence pointing to Jackett. The case will remain open, but there are yet no plans to file charges against Jackett, Rackauckas said.

McKinney was convicted mostly on the word of the four eyewitnesses who identified him as the killer--not on any physical evidence linking him to the robbery and the slaying. Two of the witnesses have since said they have come to doubt their original testimony, according to court documents. The jury deadlocked 7-5 against the death penalty during McKinney’s trial, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

McKinney said he doesn’t blame anyone, including Hill, for the years he languished in prison.

“I tried to see it from his perspective,” McKinney said of Hill, whom he met briefly in Orange County Jail while the two were awaiting trial. “I wasn’t in his shoes. I don’t know what I would have done.”

Hill is now serving consecutive life sentences for a string of robberies, according to court documents.

McKinney said Hill told him back then that he knew who the real killer was, and McKinney alerted his attorney at the time. But nothing come of it.

On Friday, Public Defender Carl Holmes said that Hill refused to cooperate with authorities until 1997, when he wrote the fateful letter. Since then, the alleged driver of the gateway car, Willie Charles Walker, also has confessed to taking part in the crime, according to court documents.

Dressed in khaki pants and a simple ribbed shirt, a slender and tired looking McKinney said Saturday that he had no immediate plans for the future.

“It is up to the Lord,” said McKinney, a born-again Christian who has worked closely with Center Circle Network’s director Byron Pederson over the last two years.

“I could no longer do it by myself,” he said of his new-found faith. “For 17 years I had done it by myself. . . . My spiritual freedom came two years ago. My physical freedom came [Friday].”

Life on the outside has been a bit too much to take at once, he said, including overpowered car stereos and the size of cell phones.

“I am just overwhelmed,” he said. “I need to let it set in.”

Friday evening, he enjoyed a barbecue meal in a restaurant and then went shopping at a Wal-Mart store. He shed his prison clothes in the store’s dressing room.

“He was like a kid with Christmas piled 100 times over,” said Pederson.

On Saturday, McKinney recounted the whirlwind events of the previous 24 hours. He said he received a call from his attorney Friday afternoon that he was a free man. After getting the news he went back to work in the prison counselor’s office where he had a job as a clerk.

“If I didn’t do it, nobody else would,” he said.

On Saturday, McKinney exchanged a tearful hug with Depko, the investigator who fought for his newfound freedom. It was the first time Depko had seen McKinney out of prison.

Later, Depko described his first encounter with McKinney.

“I expected bitterness. All I got . . . was peace and gentleness. That to me is just unbelievable.”