Not Guilty: Thirty Six Actual Cases in Which
An Innocent Man Was Convicted
(1957)
by Judge Jerome Frank and Barbara Frank
Excerpt from Chapter 2 on
Ernest Mattice
The year was 1936 and in that year twenty-two-year-old Margaret Cyckose,
a widow with two small children to support, lived in Denver, Colorado, where
late at night, in October of that same year, several rapes and attempted
rapes had taken place. The crimes received wide coverage in the press, the
criminals were still at large, and few of Denver's residents escaped panic
after dark. Mrs. Cyckose was no doubt as anxious as any woman in the
neighborhood but, as she worked as a waitress in an all-night restaurant,
she had no choice but to brave the dark alone, for her working day ended at
2 A.M.
At that early hour on October 17, 1936, Mrs. Cyckose left the restaurant, as
usual, and started her walk home in the deserted city streets. She had just
reached the corner of Fox Street and West Colfax Avenue, and was about to
cross the street, when a car pulled over to the curb. The street corner was
well lit, and Mrs. Cyckose saw that there were two youngish, clean- shaven
men in the automobile. The driver, rolling down the window, asked her the
best way to get to Fourteenth Street. She must have felt the first dread
then, but she gave him the directions for which he asked. The man, however,
did not drive on; instead he invited her to accompany him and his companion
on a ride.
Seeing her hesitate, perhaps trying to decide whether to stand her ground or
run, both men alighted from the car. Then Mrs. Cyckose tried to run, but too
late. The men moved in on her, dragged her to the curb as she fought and
screamed, and forced her into the front seat of the car. No one heard Mrs.
Cyckose scream or, if someone did, perhaps he waked, but, deciding in that
sleepy instant that the sound derived from a disturbing dream, turned to a
new dream, and the men drove off with their victim, paralyzed in mute terror
now, pinned between them on the front seat.
Several hours later passers-by found Mrs. Cyckose on the sidewalk near her
home. The men had brought her back, pushed her from the car, and left her
lying there. Her nose was broken, her whole face pounded to a swollen pulp.
To the police, immediately notified, she painfully told her very nearly
incoherent story of the assault and rape on the lonesome Colorado prairie
in the early morning hours of that mild October day.
The police, now thoroughly aroused, redoubled their efforts to find the
rapists still roaming Denver's streets.
Late the next evening, on October 18, two frantic parents
arrived at police headquarters. This couple's two young daughters, out for
an early evening walk, had been approached by four men in an automobile who
asked if the girls wished to accompany them to a party in a town nearby.
Heedless of the danger, the girls accepted. At the party, however, one of
them suddenly had qualms about having let herself be picked up by these
strange men, left the party, and returned home alone. There she told her
parents of the incident. A little later her sister returned, unharmed.
Despite the fact that the girls had not been molested the parents insisted
that the police take action against the men. The only clue they had to offer
was the name of the driver of the car, Ernest Mattice. The police
immediately got out a warrant for his arrest.
Mattice was, in 1936, approaching his middle thirties. Born in Canada and
educated there, he came to the United States in his early youth, married
here in 1929, and in 1936 was divorced.
Perhaps for business purposes, to make him look older than his years, or
possibly merely because he fancied one, Mattice wore a large mustache.
In October 1936, Mattice came to Denver on a business trip. He stayed at a
commercial hotel where, on the night of October 16, a few hours before the
rape of Mrs. Cyckose occurred, he asked the desk clerk to call him at six
the following morning. (Later, at his trial, the clerk testified that
Mattice had been in his hotel room at that hour and had received the call.)
By a routine check of the hotels the police easily traced Mattice. They
took him into custody, charged with attempting to corrupt the morals of two
girls who were under age.
The police decided to call the rape victims to headquarters to confront
Mattice, on the theory that he might be one of the
criminals in the cases still unsolved. Only one victim identified Mattice.
Mrs. Cyckose immediately said:
"That is the man."
Mattice had an alibi that, had it been investigated then, would immediately
have proved him innocent, as would the investigation of other sources of
information available to the police. But a witness had identified Mattice,
and the prosecutor no doubt believed that the witness told the truth. He
presented the case to the grand jury, which indicted Mattice for rape,
conspiracy to commit rape, kidnaping, and conspiracy to commit kidnaping,
and late in December 1936 he went to trial. It was now up to him to prove
his alibi.
The prosecutor called Mrs. Cyckose to the stand. Pointing to Mattice, she
said, "This is the man who did those things to me."
Mattice, protesting his innocence, testified that he had been in his hotel
room, asleep, when the rape occurred. The desk clerk took the stand and
swore that Mattice had answered the phone at 6 A.M.
But the crime had been committed shortly after two. Probably unaware that
it was physically impossible for him to have committed the crime, miles away
from his hotel, and return to his room by 6 A.M., Mattice offered nothing
more to bear out his alibi.
Considering the contrast between the evidence for the prosecution and that
for the defense, the desperate Mattice perhaps felt no great surprise when
the jury, after an hour's deliberation, returned a guilty verdict.
A week later the prisoner stood before the trial judge for sentencing. The judge asked him if he had anything to say before sentence was
pronounced.
"I am entirely innocent!" Mattice said despairingly. But usually the same
words are spoken by a guilty man.
"The court has given this case a good deal of thought," the judge said. "The
prosecuting witness, Margaret Cyckose, is not mistaken in her identification
. . . This defendant had a fair and impartial trial . . . You are one with
the heart of a wild beast."
The judge then sentenced the prisoner: On each of the first two counts of
the indictment Mattice was to serve two life sentences, to run concurrently;
on each of the second two the sentence was seven years consecutively.
The harshness of the sentence caused six of the jurors who had sat at
Mattice's trial to join in a petition stating that they regretted their
verdict, and asking the judge either to suspend sentence or to grant Mattice
a new trial; and Mrs. Cyckose, although not appealing directly to the judge,
publicly stated that she considered the sentence much too severe. But the
trial judge, unmoved, ignored these pleas.
On January 4, 1937, Mattice arrived at the state penitentiary, a lifetime
ahead in which to contemplate eternity.
A few months after the trial Cooney and Williams, officers on Denver's
police force, began to doubt Mattice's guilt. Their theory of his innocence
rested on these facts: In each of the recent rapes, including Mrs.
Cyckose's, the rapists had abducted the victim in a stolen car, which had
been started, not with an ignition key, but by crossing the ignition wires.
Later the cars had been abandoned on some city street. After Mattice's
conviction three more rape attempts occurred, and in each case the police
soon found an abandoned car in the same
district where the attempt had taken place. In each instance the car's
ignition wires had been crossed. Cooney and Williams, reasoning that the
same men had committed all the rapes and rape attempts, were certain that
Mrs. Cyckose's assailants were still at large.
It was an open secret on the force that two brothers, Frank and Robert
Neill, were car thieves. Cooney and Williams thought the time had come to
arrest the brothers on suspicion of robbery, on the urgent possibility that
they were the rapists. But, before they took that step, the officers
consulted Police Detective Lee Raedel, also dubious about Mattice's guilt.
Raedel, working on the same theory about the Neills, showed Cooney and
Williams the rogues' gallery photographs of Frank Neill and Mattice.
"Take a good look at the profiles of these two," Raedel said. A casual
inspection showed a startling resemblance.
But Raedel thought it wiser to obtain more facts to support the theory of
Mattice's innocence before picking up the Neills.
The three officers, probing further, learned that, in her report to the
police who brought her to headquarters after the attack, Mrs. Cyckose had
described her assailants as clean-shaven men. This was a fact perhaps not
known by the officers who arrested Mattice two days after the rape occurred,
at which time he had been wearing a thick mustache.
Cooney, Williams, and Raedel now checked Mattice's alibi by driving several
times to the prairie where the rape occurred and then back to town, clocking
the trip each time. This check proved that Mattice could not have made the
trip, much less committed the crime, and returned to his hotel by 6 A.M.,
the hour when he received the desk clerk's call.
With Mattice's innocence clear to them, but thinking that they might need
more conclusive evidence to convince higher
authorities, on June 16 the officers arrested Frank and Robert Neill on
suspicion of robbery. Concentrating on Frank, the brother who looked like
Mattice, Raedel closely questioned him.
At first stubbornly unwilling to respond, eventually Frank, obviously
feeling the intense relief confession often brings, admitted that he had
raped Mrs. Cyckose. With the police stenographer taking down his words
Frank reported the grim details of his criminal attack. He also supplied
facts about the crime the police had not known before. He refused, however,
to reveal the name of his accomplice.
But a few hours later, after he had time to realize the consequences of his
guilt, Frank repudiated the confession he had made. Raedel subjected Frank
to further intense questioning, and Frank confessed again. After another
interval, with more time to think, Frank retracted his confession for the
second time.
Raedel, although reluctant to bring Mrs. Cyckose back into the case to be
reminded of the suffering she had endured, could think of no other way to
prove the truth, for it seemed clear that Frank would continue to shift his
ground.
Mrs. Cyckose had left Denver shortly after Mattice's trial, with no
forwarding address. Raedel finally traced her to Gunnison, Colorado, where
she had gone with her children, changed her name, and found a job. On June
24, Raedel sent a police car to bring her back. When she learned that her
return to Denver might clear Mattice, she agreed.
At police headquarters Mrs. Cyckose instantly picked Frank out of the
line-up. "That is the man," she said. "I was mistaken before. He looks like
Mattice but it was not Mattice, I know that now."
Raedel asked her again to describe the crime. Mrs. Cyckose,
in telling of the rape this time, added details she had not initially
revealed. Her account matched Neill's confession down to every last
repudiated detail.
But Neill, confronted with Mrs. Cyckose's statement, still sulkily denied
his guilt. It was Mrs. Cyckose who finally got through to him.
"You have told things only you and I could know," she said. "You know you
are the guilty one and, knowing that, you can't let an innocent man stay in
the penitentiary."
Either Neill's lethargic conscience was finally aroused or he realized that
the game was up. He confessed for the third time, and this time the
confession stood. He also named his accomplice in the crime: Earl Arthur
Parker, then in the state reformatory. Raedel sent for Parker; Mrs. Cyckose
immediately recognized him. Mattice's vindication was now complete.
Six months after he had been convicted for a crime in which he played no
part, Mattice was pardoned and released. Four years later the state granted
him $4000 as compensation for his "false arrest, conviction and
imprisonment," an error resulting from the heightened feelings of the
community, which lent credence to the anguished victim's terrible mistake.
SOURCES
1. Denver Post, June 27, 1937.
2. Copy of confession by Frank Neill to the criminal attack on Mrs.
Margaret Cyckose.