Confession Revives Issues in Notorious ‘Wilding’ Case

It was a crime that sickened New York and stunned the nation: Five black youths savagely beat and raped a lone woman jogging through Central Park, leaving her for dead. They had gone on a rampage, attacking numerous people, and violated the 28-year-old white woman for blood sport.

Or did they?

Thirteen years after the racially incendiary case made world headlines and reinforced New York’s image as a dangerous, lawless place, DNA testing has concluded that another man -- a rapist serving 33 years to life in prison -- may have been the sole attacker. The jogger, now recovered, remembers nothing of the crime.

“I was a monster,” said Matias Reyes, 31, insisting that he alone stalked and brought down the Salomon Bros. investment banker on an April night in 1989 when mayhem filled the park. “And I just had to have her.”

Reyes’ confession has reopened a chilling case that most New Yorkers thought was settled long ago. And it has ignited furious demands by attorneys representing the five youths -- who have served their time and now are grown men -- that their rape convictions be set aside by Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert Morgenthau.

Today, Morgenthau will brief New York Supreme Court Justice Eduardo Padro about his investigation of the newly reopened case. He is expected to ask for a one-month extension for his exhaustive review, which involves going over 15,000 pages of transcripts and re-interviewing dozens of witnesses.

He also is probing the credibility of Reyes, who said a religious awakening prompted him to come forward in January. Because the statute of limitations on rape has expired, he cannot be prosecuted for the crime.

The notion that the so-called Central Park Five might be innocent has triggered recriminations and disbelief, sparking racial frictions that were far more typical here in the late 1980s than in today’s more peaceful climate. When it became public, the crime introduced America to the concept of “wilding,” a frenzied crime spree carried out by juveniles roaming in packs.

Although the jogger case changed the city dramatically -- helping to spur a tough anti-crime crackdown several years later -- its troubling legacy has affected people in different ways.

“Race has always been the 800-pound gorilla in this case,” said Eugene O’Donald, a political science professor at John Jay College of Criminal Law and a former assistant district attorney. “People view this differently from different sides of the racial divide. You want to believe police would act fairly, but you’d be kidding yourself not to see that there could have been a rush to judgment here.”

Although many women were traumatized by the crime and the specter of youths “wilding” in the park, African American parents were equally paralyzed by fears that their sons could be picked up by the New York police at random and charged with crimes they didn’t commit.

“They were innocent of all the charges,” said Michael Warren, who represents three of the convicted men. “They served [time] in prison for something they never did. This terrible stigma has to be removed.”

Once again, city officials are trying to piece together a horrific night of violence that former Mayor Edward I. Koch called “one of the most brutal, unforgettable atrocities in the modern history of this city.”

It was an evening when an estimated 30 to 33 teenagers were roaming through the northern part of the park, throwing stones at cabdrivers, beating up bicyclists and harassing homeless people.

Around 9:30 p.m., the woman entered Central Park on the Upper East Side near the 102nd Street transverse, a popular jogging path. Sometime around 10:05 she was attacked and dragged into a ravine, where she was raped. Her skull was crushed and she lost most of the blood in her body. When passersby discovered her at 1 a.m., the nearly nude woman was barely alive, and investigators were prepared to classify the case as a homicide.

Yet the jogger miraculously recovered after months of intensive care and rehabilitative therapy. Today she is married, lives in Connecticut and is preparing to tell her story in a book to be published next year. Although she suffers from double vision and a greatly diminished sense of smell, she has gone on with her life. She “is as interested as anyone else to know what happened that night,” said her agent, Joni Evans.

When police officers began responding to reports of the frenzied Central Park attacks, they took several teenagers into custody and, after a lengthy interrogation, came up with the names of five suspects who lived in nearby Harlem. Within a week, prosecutors believed they had cracked the case.

Yet facts that seemed etched in stone 13 years ago are now suspect. Although the youths made damning videotaped confessions, advocates say they were coerced by police. Jurors were swayed by physical evidence during the trial, such as a blond hair apparently from the victim found on one teenager’s clothes. New forensic testing has shown that the hair did not come from the jogger.

And the most nagging fact is that there was no forensic or DNA evidence linking the youths to the crime, even though the victim had bled profusely.

Law enforcement officials continue to insist that the right people were convicted. They believe the often-graphic videotaped confessions recorded in the wee hours after the attack remain the single most important evidence in the case. Although lawyers for the defendants attacked the validity of the confessions during the 1990 trials, saying police had bullied their young clients, the court ruled the tapes were admissible.

In addition, police had long believed that one of the attackers escaped because a drop of semen found on the woman’s sock never matched any of the boys’ DNA. After Reyes’ stunning admission, authorities using improved DNA matching technology linked him to that sample. But police do not believe that this necessarily exonerates the five youths.

“While some of the individuals attempted to minimize their participation, each and every one acknowledged some degree of culpability” on the tapes, said Robert Castelli, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Law and a former investigator for the New York State Police.

“It’s possible both groups [the defendants and Reyes] are telling the truth,” he added. “That is, the group initiated the crime, raped the woman and departed the scene, without seeing Reyes, and then he came along.”

Mike Sheehan, a New York detective who handled the volatile case and is now a local TV reporter, angrily disputed the notion that savvy cops had tricked scared, impressionable youths into a confession that night.

“Where’s the coercion?” he asked, noting that police and district attorneys were scrupulous in their interrogations, well within the law. And others question whether Reyes, who was convicted of the rape and murder of a pregnant woman two months after the jogger attack, can be believed. The serial rapist, who said he came forward after a religious awakening in prison, offered a meticulous description of the jogger attack to investigators and also during an interview on ABC’s “Prime Time Live.”

“It still hasn’t been proved that this guy acted alone, and much of the case turns on this,” said Tim Sullivan, author of “Unequal Verdicts: The Central Park Jogger Trials.” “How credible is his comment? Just because he has said something doesn’t automatically mean that it has to be true.”

Indeed, several experts who have examined Reyes have described him as a psychopath who manipulates people and routinely twists the truth. Morgenthau has said his office has interviewed the confessed attacker several times, trying to determine if his account can be believed.

But the mere mention of these doubts has infuriated the attorneys and prominent black leaders rallying to defend Kharey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Antron McCray. All have completed their sentences but are haunted by a stigma of rape, defenders say.

“My 16-year-old son was taken from me,” said Deloris Wise at a City Hall rally this month, shaking with rage as she talked about Kharey Wise, now 30.

“He didn’t go to a juvenile place, he went to Attica state prison, and things happen there,” she added. “And I can only say to all of the [law enforcement officials] who did this lying, horrible, hideous thing to me: I pray for you. I’m not even angry with you. I feel sorry for you.”

As she spoke, Wise was flanked by a coalition of more than 50 politicians and religious leaders, all demanding that Morgenthau quickly move to overturn the convictions. They derided the idea that he might dismiss the whole case on a technicality, namely that police failed to inform attorneys in 1989 that another rape -- to which Reyes also has confessed -- took place two days before the jogger attack, and in the same general area of the park.

“The sword of justice fell on the wrong people, the wrong people went to jail, and these young men lost precious years,” said the Rev. Clarence Grant, head of the New York Faith-Based Coalition. “This case is still an open wound in our community, and we need exoneration now for real closure.”

Just how Morgenthau will resolve this tricky dilemma is a matter of intense speculation. The veteran prosecutor has said little, except that he will probe all leads in searching for the truth. Yet much of his investigation, apart from Reyes’ veracity, must focus on the confessions.

The grainy videotapes, made a day after the attack, offer convincing proof to some experts of the boys’ guilt. Although the suspects told somewhat different versions of the attack, and none admitted raping the jogger, they all confirmed one another’s presence at the scene.

“We all took turns getting on top of her,” McCray said.

“This is my first rape,” Wise said in one statement, who admitted to having witnessed the crime without participating in it.

Santana, in his videotaped statement, recalled that “she was just hollering, like ‘Help! Help!’ ”

Two juries in separate trials -- torn between the lack of physical evidence and the incriminating statements -- took 10 to 12 days to convict the youths. Now, at least one former juror, Harold Brueland, says he believes the convictions were wrong, in part because of Reyes’ admission. Others also voice doubts.

“I’m coming to believe there was a terrible miscarriage of justice here,” said Stephen Gillers, professor of legal ethics at New York University. “We know innocent people get convicted; that’s not new, and I think these kids were less able to defend themselves than middle-class teenagers caught in the same vise might have been able to do that night.”

Like other critics, Gillers suggests that the boys were probably exhausted by a long night of tough police interrogations. Although they had their parents with them during the videotaping sessions, he noted that adults might have been equally overwhelmed by the authorities at that moment.

“The question we ask ourselves is, would we confess to something if we knew we were innocent?” he asked. “The answer is no, we think we’d pound the table and protest our innocence. But the challenge for a juror, and it is herculean, is to see how innocent people could be pressured.”

The laws regulating confessions gives police wide latitude. They may lie, trick, cajole, posture and otherwise manipulate people into making statements, experts say. But they cannot use tactics that would bully an innocent person into confessing. An example, Sullivan said, would be a detective threatening to kill a suspect’s parent unless he confess.

If nothing else, the Central Park jogger controversy has sparked demands from the New York Civil Liberties Union and other watchdog groups that police videotape all interactions between police and suspects, long before a confession is extracted. That way, critics suggest, there will be a more complete visual record of how someone volunteers information.

Meanwhile, the mystery of what really happened that April night at police headquarters -- and in a Central Park ravine -- continues to haunt New York.

“The full truth may never be known,” said O’Donald of John Jay College. “And that’s the terrible thing here.”