Chicago Tribune, Dec. 17, 2000

Cracks in a solid case

subsection of article
3 cases weaken under scrutiny

By Steve Mills, Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong
Tribune staff writers

On June 8, 1987, in the hours before his execution, convicted murderer Alvin R. Moore Jr. sat calmly in his cell in Louisiana's maximum-security prison in Angola as his spiritual adviser opened a Bible and read from the Book of John.

With only minutes left before prison guards would arrive to walk Moore to the death chamber, Rev. Roger Stinson finished and closed the book, he recalled in an interview. "Now is the time to ask for forgiveness," Stinson said.

But as he had done every other time, Moore just shook his head.

"I didn't do it," Stinson recalled Moore saying. "I don't hold anything against anybody--I just didn't do it. They can kill my body, but they can't kill my soul."

In leg irons and handcuffs, Moore, 27, was escorted to the electric chair just after midnight. Electrodes were attached to his left leg and shaved head. Minutes later he was pronounced dead.

In the eyes of then-Bossier Parish District Atty. Henry Brown, the case against Moore was solid.

The victim, JoAnn Wilson, 23, was the wife of a former co-worker of Moore's, and police said she identified Moore as her attacker in a dying declaration.

Moore was arrested shortly after the 1980 murder with a drop of blood on his pants. DNA testing was not yet available, but tests showed it was Type O, the same as the victim's. Moore did not have Type O blood, the most common of all blood types. The pants can no longer be found, according to Bossier City police and local officials.

A stereo and a plastic jug containing $18.80 in pennies from Wilson's home were found in Moore's car. Two of Moore's friends said he admitted to them that he killed the woman.

But a Tribune examination shows that although the prosecution case had the patina of certainty, beneath it lies a troubling mix of shifting accounts and questions that were not raised at trial.

The two friends who implicated Moore at trial recanted and now say he is innocent.

Also, a witness never interviewed by police told the Tribune that Moore's car was parked near the Wilson house around dusk, supporting Moore's claim that he was there before dark. Wilson's call to police for help came at 9:35 p.m., about 40 minutes after dark.

And the Tribune, through an open-records request, obtained police files that Moore's appellate attorney said never were given to him or the trial attorney. One report has the woman's husband saying he saw his wife alive at home at 9 p.m.

This information differs from the husband's trial testimony and could have been used by defense attorneys to bolster Moore's account that he left before the stabbing, which the prosecution said occurred between 9 and 9:30 p.m. Under Louisiana law at the time, prosecutors were not required to give police reports to defense lawyers unless they contained information helping the defendant.

The night of July 9, 1980, was the third of what would be more than a week of consecutive 100-degree days in Bossier City, a city of 50,000 in the northwest corner of Louisiana.

Police were sent to JoAnn Wilson's home after she telephoned and said, "Somebody stabbed me." An officer said that he broke down the door and that Wilson identified Moore in her dying breaths. After she was taken to the hospital, her husband, Aron, then 19, drove up.

In an interview, he said the officers asked if he knew someone named Alvin and he gave them Moore's name.

Moore, who had socialized with the Wilsons, was in custody in less than four hours. Questioned by police, Moore said he had met JoAnn Wilson through her husband. Moore said he and Aron Wilson had both worked in the maintenance department at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bossier City and at times drove to work together.

Moore had a criminal record that included misdemeanor convictions for taking a swing at a store owner in a dispute over shoplifting and for hitting a janitor at school.

He told police that he and JoAnn Wilson were having an affair and she gave him money before he left. He identified Arthur Stewart and Dennis Sloan as being with him at the Wilson house, and both were arrested the next morning.

In tape-recorded statements to police, the two said they saw Moore having sex with the woman, but never described it as a rape. Both said they took the stereo and jar of pennies while Moore was in the bedroom.

Both told police that they then went outside, that Moore came out 5 minutes later and that as they drove over the Red River back to Shreveport, Moore told them he had stabbed Wilson to death. Within days all three were indicted on charges of murder, rape and aggravated burglary. The state said it would seek the death penalty against them.

Moore's father, Alvin Sr., a mechanic, hired Shreveport defense lawyer Stacey Freeman for $10,000--equivalent to Alvin Moore Sr.'s take-home pay for a year.

Freeman, a flamboyant attorney who died in a car wreck in 1990, had a reputation for rhetorical flourishes in court and for cutting deals out of court. He interviewed few witnesses before Moore's trial and conducted no investigation of the prosecution case except to visit the crime scene, court records show.

Lawyers who later represented Moore on appeal would criticize Freeman for failing to question why no blood was found in Moore's car even though the struggle in the Wilson home left blood spattered on the wall and floor in the living room and bedroom. Freeman never examined the car.

The appellate lawyer thought it was remarkable so little blood was found on Moore's pants and none was found in the car.

Defense lawyer Randall Fish, who was Freeman's assistant at trial, said they both believed Moore was probably guilty.

"Stacey didn't handle it like a death penalty case should have been," Fish said in an interview. "I was somewhat embarrassed at the time. He had no real strategy."

On the day that jury selection was to begin, District Atty. Brown announced that Stewart and Sloan had agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges and testify against Moore. Freeman was taken by surprise.

He had planned for all three men to be tried at once, which would have prevented the prosecution from using Stewart and Sloan's statements to police against Moore. Freeman demanded a continuance, but the judge refused.

Freeman petulantly told the judge: "I'm not going to announce ready for trial, your honor. I'm not ready. I'm just going to sit here and let her go."

At trial, Sloan and Stewart both testified that Moore told them, "I stabbed the bitch nine times." Stewart told the jury that while standing outside, he heard a woman scream in the house and Moore came out with a knife in his hand.

Bossier City Police Officer Bill Fields testified that he and fellow officer Matthew Nycum were the first police to arrive and found Wilson choking and gasping, bleeding from 13 stab wounds.

"I asked her who stabbed her," Fields testified. "She told me Elvin. I asked her again to repeat it and she said Elvin. I asked her a third time and she told me Elvin. I asked her if she knew the subject. She told me that he used to live down the street and he was black. She repeated that twice."

Moore, who was black, testified that he had consensual sex that night with Wilson, who was white. He denied killing her.

The all-white jury returned its guilty verdict in 40 minutes. During the penalty phase, Freeman called not a single witness to speak on Moore's behalf. His presentation was 2 minutes and 15 seconds long, and he never asked the jury to spare his client's life. Freeman later said he would have felt "silly" asking the jury to spare Moore.

Stewart and Sloan spent nearly 20 years in prison and now live in Shreveport, working together at a body shop. Both men, in interviews with the Tribune, say that they implicated Moore because they believed the police already had enough evidence to convict him and that they lied on the stand because they feared execution.

"I didn't want the death penalty," Stewart said. "When I said I heard a lady scream--that wasn't true. When I said I saw him come out with a knife--that wasn't true either. I'm not proud of it. I thought I needed to tell what the police wanted. ... I made up a story."

At a 1986 clemency hearing for Moore, Stewart and Sloan recanted in sworn affidavits. They said that the victim was alive when they left with Moore and that they did not hear Moore say he stabbed her, according to a newspaper account of the hearing and interviews.

"I saw her in the doorway," Sloan said in a recent interview. "She looked fine to me."

But Stewart, in an interview with the Tribune, has altered his account again. Though he maintains he never saw Moore with a knife or heard the woman scream, he said his statement in the affidavit that he did not hear Moore say he stabbed the woman was false.

"I did hear him say that," Stewart said. "But I never believed it. I saw her close the front door. I didn't think anything was wrong."

Stewart said that for the clemency hearing, he would have said anything to spare Moore's life. "I lied about some things," he said. "But now, I don't think he did it."

Nycum, now the general manager for a Bossier City car dealer, said in an interview that he was an auxiliary officer in 1980 when he accompanied Officer Fields to the Wilson home. He said he never heard JoAnn Wilson make the statement that Fields claimed she uttered in her dying breath.

"She was incoherent, spoke in a heavy Southern accent and said what sounded to me like `elephant,'" Nycum said. "I never heard her say, `Alvin did it' or `Elvin did it.'"

Fields, in an interview, said, "I know what I heard. I don't want to know anything else."

Former prosecutor Brown, now a state appellate judge, said Moore's version of events was "ridiculous" and Stewart and Sloan's recantations were equally unbelievable.

The time line of the evening was not an issue at Moore's trial, but an analysis of police reports, court transcripts, fire department records and interviews suggests it could have been if defense attorneys had the documents later obtained by the Tribune.

There is no official time-stamped record of when JoAnn Wilson's emergency call came to the Police Department that night, but a dispatcher said at Moore's trial that he took the call at 9:35 p.m.

After being arrested, Stewart told police that he, Sloan and Moore arrived "about nightfall" at the Wilson home. Sloan said it was "about 7 or 8:30."

Stewart told the Tribune: "It was daylight, getting to sundown. It wasn't dark. You could still see. It was still light when we left."

Robert Temple, the Wilsons' landlord, told the Tribune that on the evening of the murder, he was working in the area and drove by the Wilson home. "I saw Alvin Moore's car out there," Temple said. "It was daylight, around dusk."

Records at the U.S. Naval Observatory show that sundown that night was at 8:25 p.m. The period between the moment when the top of the sun dips below the horizon and darkness is called "civil twilight," ending when the sun has gone about 6 degrees below the horizon. Civil twilight ended and darkness began that night at 8:53 p.m.

Bossier City detective reports said Aron Wilson was not at the home when police arrived, but drove up after his wife had been taken to the hospital. He told police he had left home earlier in the evening to work on the car of Perry Goodwin, who lived about a mile away, the report said.

The report quoted Wilson as saying he came home at 9 p.m. to get a tool and his wife was alive. Goodwin told police that Wilson went home at 9 and returned about 10 minutes later. On the witness stand, however, Wilson testified he wasn't home at 9 that night.

In an interview at a restaurant near his home in Flint, Mich., Aron Wilson was shown the police report. "I came home at 7:30 that night," he said. "That's wrong."

Asked about Goodwin's statement, Wilson said Goodwin also was mistaken.

After Moore's conviction, the question of his innocence fell to the side as the case was appealed and upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court. When attorneys Rebecca Hudsmith and Wellborn Jack Jr. volunteered to handle his federal appeal in 1983, they focused on the issue of inadequate legal representation at trial instead of challenging his guilt.

"It looked like we had a real good chance of winning on the attorney competence issue," Jack said. "And if we could get a new trial for Alvin, then we could turn our attention to the evidence."

That strategy almost saved Moore's life. U.S. District Judge Tom Stagg in 1984 vacated Moore's death sentence, citing Freeman's poor lawyering, and ordered a new sentencing hearing. But before that hearing could be held, the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans overruled the lower court decision and reinstated Moore's death sentence.

It was not until a last-ditch appeal for clemency before the Louisiana Pardon Board that a question about the prosecution's evidence was raised when Stewart and Sloan gave their sworn affidavits.

Howard Marsellus, chairman of the pardon board at the hearing, said he believed Moore was innocent. Marsellus, who later was sent to prison for taking a bribe to vote for clemency in an unrelated case, said he thought Moore never had a chance.

"We went back to deliberate," he said. "I said that from the time the cops arrived on the scene, that boy was dead. I said, `I'm not voting to kill that boy.'"

Moore lost his bid for clemency, which would have commuted his sentence to life in prison, by a 3-2 vote.