Joseph White shakes hands with Ada JoAnn Taylor at a February hearing before the Nebraska Legislature's Judiciary Committee on a bill that would compensate wrongly convicted people for time they spend in prison. Taylor, who also spent nearly 20 years in prison, told police she and White killed Beatrice widow Helen Wilson. (WILLIAM LAUER/Lincoln Journal Star) JOE DUGGAN / Lincoln Journal Star
Editor's note: This story first was published on May 11, 2009.
The Journal Star's award-winning 2009 series walked readers through the crime and its aftermath -- from the rape and murder of Helen Wilson in her downtown Beatrice apartment to the day in 2008 when the last member of the Beatrice 6 walked out of prison to freedom.
For nearly 20 years, Joseph White never lost faith that DNA would clear him of a 1985 murder in Beatrice.
Back in 1989, when he was known as Lobo, a jury convicted him of rape and murder in the death of 68-year-old Helen Wilson. What made the case historic were the five others who pleaded guilty to the murder, including three who testified against White.
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Finally, his years of patience were rewarded on Oct. 15, 2008. A judge overturned his conviction and released him from prison.
Two days later, the judge freed Thomas Winslow, one of White's five co-defendants.
The tests White fought so hard to obtain excluded all six as sources of DNA found in Helen Wilson's apartment. The only contributors: the victim and an unidentified man.
Authorities quickly assembled a state and local task force to try to find that man.
They set up a war room in the Beatrice Police Department, where they covered the walls with crime scene photos. They scrutinized 11 volumes of police reports, five volumes of trial transcripts and six files full of court documents.
Unlike police who investigated the crime in 1985, these investigators could track the rapist's DNA. So they checked state and federal databases for a match.
They struck out.
Then they turned to a list of early suspects. Their top two prospects came back negative.
A third intrigued them. His blood type matched the killer's. His name was Bruce Allen Smith.
Beatrice police considered Smith a strong suspect in 1985 until a blood test eliminated him. But they had preserved the saliva, hair and blood samples Smith gave back then, so a DNA comparison could be made. The lab analyst selected the root of Smith's pubic hair to obtain the genetic markers.
They matched exactly.
It was Smith's blood and semen in Wilson's apartment.
While police on the task force looked for Smith, the prosecutors started dreaming about convicting him. They couldn't wait to see the look on his face when they arrested him for a 23-year-old murder.
They found him - in an Oklahoma City cemetery. He died of AIDS in 1992.
"We were absolutely crushed," said Corey O'Brien, a 38-year-old assistant attorney general and one of the leading members of the task force.
180-degree flip
Before the discovery of Bruce Smith, task force members assumed the original six played some sort of role in Helen Wilson's murder.
"We couldn't really wrap our heads around the idea that these six people could have given up their liberty and not been involved," said Gage County Attorney Randy Ritnour.
Bruce Smith changed their thinking.
He also created more work for them.
They had to go back to the 1989 investigation. And that meant talking to Burt Searcey, the investigator who broke the case open. So they invited him to a task force meeting.
Searcey, who had rejoined the sheriff's department after owning a liquor store for 11 years, still thought White and the others raped and killed the victim. He also thought White tried to rape three elderly Beatrice women in 1983; a case never solved.
But at the time of the 1983 attacks, White would have been a member of the Army stationed at Fort Hood, Texas.
O'Brien was stunned. How could the man who solved the Wilson case not know something so critical about the main suspect?
Once the task force started looking at the possibility Searcey arrested the wrong people, they saw the entire investigation and prosecution in a new light.
And the light absolutely glared off the crime scene.
Wilson's apartment exhibited every hallmark of a sex crime, not a robbery. The original police investigators also had thought it was a sexually motivated killing.
At White's trial, two witnesses testified the apartment had been searched for cash. But investigators found no sign of ransacking.
More to the point, why was $1,300 in cash left in Wilson's purse, which sat in plain sight? How had criminals living on the edge, desperate for money, not bothered to look in the purse?
In addition, investigators on the task force had never known rape to be a spectator crime. None could think of a sex assault in which the rapist took women along to watch.
The DNA results decimated the eyewitness testimony of JoAnn Taylor, Debra Shelden and James Dean - testimony that was the heart of the prosecution's case. Clearly, White and Winslow did not rape the victim.
And if they were telling the truth, where was the blood Shelden left on the bedroom wall from a head wound? The wall blood was Bruce Smith's.
Where was the Type B blood from Kathy Gonzalez - blood the witnesses said she spilled in the bedroom after being kicked in the nose? Again, it was Bruce Smith's.
"If anyone else was involved, they miraculously left no biological evidence behind," O'Brien said.
So task force members interviewed the witnesses.
Taylor and Dean said they had lied in 1989 to cut deals with the state. Both gave polygraphs to the task force that indicated they were telling the truth this time.
Only Shelden stood behind her trial testimony - six killed Wilson.
But none of them knew Bruce Smith.
Interrogations and statements
The more task force members dug, the more they doubted the convictions.
They discovered the deep rift that existed between the police and sheriff's departments over the Wilson case. They learned some police investigators never bought Searcey's theory of the six.
Several of former police Chief Don Luckeroth's officers raised concerns about the deputy's investigation. Luckeroth recalled recently how the county attorney told one officer, "You're trying to prove these people not guilty. Stay out of it."
The task force had to confront one more compelling question: If Taylor, Dean and Shelden lied, how did they tell essentially the same lie on the witness stand?
They found their answer, in part, in the interrogation tapes.
The six surviving tapes revealed multiple examples of leading questions posed by Searcey and Beatrice Police Sgt. Sam Stevens. The interrogators also mentioned details from the crime scene never released to the public, details which may have helped witnesses seem more credible.
A couple of times, the suspects changed their stories or produced more accurate details after breaks in the tape. Task force members were deeply troubled by the recording breaks.
"The mind wanders far afield when the videotape is off and you wonder what sort of techniques they were using," O'Brien said. "When you're talking about a murder investigation, you need to be as transparent as humanly possible and you're not doing that when you turn off the video."
While Searcey insists every interview was recorded, about a dozen are missing. For example, no recordings exist of Dean or Gonzalez. The task force was unable to find them.
Another unorthodox and troubling practice: A sheriff's psychologist helped witnesses recover so-called repressed memories through dreams. Forensic psychologists typically observe interrogations from afar to help investigators determine if a suspect is mentally competent. They almost never assume the role of therapist for the suspect.
"It's mind-boggling," O'Brien said. "I never heard of it happening before this case."
Showing the crime scene video and photos to the witnesses also could have helped them get on the same page. As did driving them to Wilson's apartment building to fine tune their recollections.
The record also showed that some of the defense attorneys had a hand in helping refresh their clients' memories. For example, attorneys for Dean and Taylor gave their clients written statements by other co-defendants. Certainly, that could have helped Dean, Taylor and Shelden shape their versions of events.
Task force members also talked to one other person from the original investigation - Lisa Brown, aka Confidential Informant No. 1.
Searcey had said Brown told him she and Taylor talked at 7:30 a.m. on Feb. 6, 1985, as they watched police outside Wilson's apartment building. Taylor told Brown she had killed an old woman.
Brown, who still lives in Beatrice, told task force members essentially the same story in 2008.
There's a significant problem with the story - a discrepancy originally overlooked by investigators and defense attorneys.
The timing was wrong.
Wilson's brother-in-law didn't dial 911 until 9:29 a.m. Police cars would not have arrived until Brown's school day was well under way.
It's also interesting what Brown could not recall in 2008. For example, she now said Taylor did not mention an accomplice. In the past, she maintained Taylor implicated White.
Task force investigators also learned Brown and Taylor despised each other. Taylor had beat up Brown and tried to break her arm in a car door.
Investigators asked Brown to take a polygraph test. She refused. So they sent Searcey, thinking perhaps he might have some pull with his former confidential informant.
She refused him too.
In past interrogations or depositions, Taylor sometimes said she talked to Brown about the murder and sometimes said she didn't recall such a conversation.
Now, Taylor said, she's positive it never happened.
Making amends
On the morning of Nov. 14, Attorney General Jon Bruning called a meeting of the task force. He listened to reports about the original investigation and about the man identified by DNA.
"I said, 'Is there anybody here who has any doubt this guy is the sole killer?'"
No doubts.
That afternoon, Bruning called a news conference to announce DNA tests had identified Bruce Allen Smith as the lone rapist and killer of Helen Wilson. The same tests, paired with an investigation by the task force, exonerated the six people who served a combined 70 years in prison for the crime.
The state's top attorney said they were wrongly convicted.
"Certainly these people have my sympathy," he said. "It is tragic."
White and Winslow had been freed a month earlier. Shelden, Gonzalez and Dean had been out since 1994, having served four to five years of their 10-year sentences.
Taylor, whose testimony was so central to White's conviction in 1989, was the only one still in prison. Bruning said his office would seek her parole and work to obtain pardons for all of them.
He placed the blame firmly on the former prosecutor, Richard Smith, and to a lesser degree, investigators.
"I'm disappointed that 20 years ago in zeal to make a community feel safe again, to solve an unthinkable crime, the former county attorney and some members of law enforcement bullied six people into admitting to crimes they didn't commit."
Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, who authored the DNA testing law that led to the exonerations, could think of no finer moment in his public life.
"In this case, justice was wounded, she had a lacerated face, the blindfold had tipped akimbo and she was able to look upon the countenances of those who had assaulted, who had abused her. (She) shook her head and said, 'Can this thing ever be made right?'
"Well now, justice is probably dancing."
Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or [email protected].
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