Framed

Through the Looking-Glass#2

In her April 5 interview, when asked how tall Vinny was, Arceneaux replied “not that tall, but he’s pretty tall.”

Granger was 5'5"—not remotely tall—and 113 pounds.

His nickname was “Joe Willie.”

He was never called “Vinny”

by anyone who knew him.

Granger was twenty-two with an eighth-grade education and worked occasional odd jobs while still supported by his family.

In 1973, he had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor theft and received a suspended sentence.

He had stolen a valise from the backseat of a car.

When he discovered it was a doctor’s bag, he returned it.

He had had no other charges since.

The next day, Thursday, April 8, Woodring and Moore brought in yet another person, Rene Jackson, for questioning.

How he became a suspect is unknown.

Derouen positively identified him as the third man in Miller’s cab, whom he had referred to as Bumper Face.

Jackson was booked and charged with murder and armed robbery at 12:25 p.m.

that day.

Like Derouen, he had no criminal record and could not read or write.

He could only make a mark for his signature.

Up until his arrest, at age twenty-three, he had lived with his widowed and caretaker father.

With little schooling and unemployable because of his mental disability, he rarely left his neighborhood, and then only to go fishing.

His sole means of travel was his bicycle.

His face was scarred with extensive acne (perhaps why Derouen identified him as “Bumper Face”).

According to a report prepared by DA investigator O’Neil “Sonny”

Tyler, the illiterate Jackson was turned over to Comeaux and eventually “confessed.”

Tyler’s report describes Jackson’s suspiciously detailed and coherent confession to the chief detective, which provided specifics on the Hasty Mart crimes, naming all of those involved and their roles in the murder of Gladu, including his own.

His purported confession coincided perfectly with Derouen’s account of what transpired that day at the Hasty Mart.

Also included in Tyler’s report, however, was an extremely emotional confrontation between Jackson’s father (who had rushed down to the jail when his son was arrested) and Comeaux, who told him of Jackson’s confession.

His father demanded to see his son immediately.

With Comeaux standing there, Jackson, weeping uncontrollably, told his father, “I didn’t do it.

I didn’t do it.

They’re trying to frame me.”

While the deputies were booking Jackson, his father and brother were “raising hell”

and had to be restrained.

Jackson’s father told Comeaux, “I’ll go to my grave knowing Rene did not do this.”

The case was now managed by prosecutor Dracos Burke, first cousin of mystery writer James Lee Burke and the top trial prosecutor in the district attorney’s office that covered Iberia Parish and two other parishes.

On May 10, 1976, a grand jury indicted the six men, all black, for the first-degree murder and armed robbery of Louis Gladu—David Alexander, Harry Granger, and John Collins allegedly in Alexander’s dark blue car; and Ronald Miller, Herbert Derouen, and Rene Jackson allegedly in Miller’s white taxicab.

Mary was also indicted, but she and Derouen were given immunity in exchange for their testimony against the others.

While Mary was freed, Derouen remained jailed because the authorities, mindful of his acute cognitive deficiencies, needed easy access to him for grand jury and trial preparation.

It had been one thing for the sheriff’s investigators to hitch their wagon to Mary and Derouen’s nonsensical stories, but it was no sure thing that a man of Burke’s intelligence and experience would do the same.

Imagine seven people traveling in two cars, one parked seventy-five yards away, the other, a white taxicab with its company name, telephone, and city permit number emblazoned on both sides, parked in front of a store.

The three occupants of this white cab—the thirty-year-old owner of the cab and his two young, mentally impaired passengers—had to wait for the three male occupants of the other car to journey three-quarters of a football field’s length to join them.

Then the six, with no assigned roles, entered the store to rob it.

Imagine these six people, most of whom had no criminal record and none of whom had ever associated with the others, walking unmasked into a small convenience store in broad daylight to commit an armed robbery.

Why would the supposed two leaders, Alexander and Granger, bring along five other people, two of whom were mentally challenged, to assist in the robbery as accomplices?

Dracos Burke knew his star witnesses had told two different stories.

Mary had mentioned only one car and said the three men in it robbed the store.

She had a full and clear view of the Hasty Mart from Alexander’s parked car; yet she never saw the white taxi, its occupants, or Jackson supposedly chasing Derouen.

They were absent from her story.

In contrast, Derouen had two cars and six men committing the crime.

Burke also knew that neither the sheriff’s nor the DA’s investigators had developed any evidence or witnesses to refute the defendants’ insistence that they had never known or associated with one another.

And Burke knew that the police could not disprove Alexander’s insistence that he had never seen Mary in his life, let alone dated her for fourteen months; nor had they found one person who called Alexander “Harold”

or Granger “Vinny.”

Yet, unaccountably, Burke went along with this charade and prosecuted the whole lot.

—

What happened next, however, was stupefying.

On July 1, one of the actual Hasty Mart murderers, seventeen-year-old Jerry Paul Francis, voluntarily confessed that he and twenty-four-year-old Preston Demouchet had committed the crime.

It was just one in a long spree of nearly identical crimes they had committed together.

On May 10 (the same day the six men were indicted), Demouchet and Francis committed a midafternoon armed robbery of a hardware store in Rayne, thirty-eight miles northwest of New Iberia.

During the course of the robbery, seventy-four-year-old Curtis Johnson, who’d been working alone in the store, was fatally shot.

On May 24, close to three in the afternoon, the duo robbed another convenience store in nearby Jeanerette, eleven miles southeast of New Iberia.

Demouchet pressed his .32 against the head of one of the store’s two female employees lying on the floor.

A car pulled up, causing the men to flee with money from the cash register, and most likely saving the lives of both women.

The bank robbery that ended their crime spree took place around noon on May 26 in the town of Parks, sixteen miles north of New Iberia.

Demouchet shot the lone female bank teller, forty-eight-year-old Beverly Chauffe, in the head.

She lingered for sixteen months before succumbing to her wound.

Both men were caught on the bank’s camera exiting the building.

Before Demouchet shot her, the teller pleaded with him, “Oh Lord, please don’t hurt me.

It’s only money.”

After taking $10,000 in cash from the Parks bank, the two desperadoes ditched their guns in a sewage canal in New Iberia and fled to Demouchet’s sister’s house in Houston.

The FBI apprehended them two days later based on information provided by Francis’s mother, who saw him on the bank’s camera footage, which was televised.

The feds released them to the Louisiana parish authorities on June 23 for prosecution.

Francis, realizing the law had him cold, voluntarily gave a detailed confession and led the sheriffs to the canal so they could find the guns.

After a two-day search that included draining the canal, both guns were found by Comeaux and sent to the crime lab for tests.

One was a .32 Clerke revolver, which ballistics conclusively established as the gun used to kill Gladu.

Demouchet was a hardened criminal.

In 1969, at the age of eighteen, after serving a one-year prison term for aggravated battery, he was sentenced to six years in Angola for several counts of burglary and another of aggravated battery.

A few months after his release on parole in 1972, he was arrested for attempted murder, but apparently never prosecuted for the charge.

Nevertheless, he was returned to Angola to serve the balance of his six-year sentence due to a number of parole violations.

A month after he was paroled again, in August 1974, he fatally shot a woman in a crowded bar.

On December 13, 1974, in a sweetheart plea deal with prosecutor Dracos Burke, the charge was reduced to negligent homicide with a three-year term in the Iberia Parish jail, not Angola.

His sentencing judge told him, “I think the State is being very lenient with you, permitting you to serve your time here instead of Angola.”

As it turned out, he served only half that time.

By early 1976, he was back on the streets of New Iberia, shortly before the murder of Gladu.

On June 30, a week after confessing to the Parks robbery, Demouchet’s accomplice, Francis, unburdened himself further.

Since he was illiterate, he dictated a letter to another inmate to send to Sheriff Wattigny.

In it, Francis listed five crimes that he wanted to discuss with the sheriff because he knew his life was “washed up.”

Although he didn’t specifically identify the Hasty Mart, one of the crimes he described was an armed robbery and murder on March 30 at 2:55 p.m.

in New Iberia.

This got the sheriff’s attention.

The next day, July 1, Sheriff Wattigny, Captain Comeaux, and DA investigator Sonny Tyler followed up with an interview.

In the course of it, Francis revealed many details about the Hasty Mart job that were stunning in their accuracy and could only have been known by the police and the killer.

Unlike Mary, he needed no coaching, because he was speaking the truth.

Francis said the robbery happened between 2:30 and 3:00.

He and Demouchet went in the front door.

Demouchet shot the man while Francis was behind the register getting the money.

Demouchet hit the man in the back of the head with a gun, then shot him twice where he fell, which was outside the counter area, in “the hall.”

Francis jumped over the counter and knocked some cigarettes onto the floor.

The old man was wearing glasses.

They took $200 in cash and a bag of change and left the register drawer open.

Also, there may have been a witness who saw their getaway car—a woman in one of the trailers across the street.

Additionally, he told the lawmen that he was with Demouchet when Demouchet shot the lady in the Parks bank and the man in the Rayne hardware store.

He added that Demouchet used the same gun to shoot both those two and “the old man”

in New Iberia.

He prefaced his confession by telling the police, “You got them six boys in jail for nothing.

Them boys didn’t do that…it don’t make no sense.

Me and Preston Demouchet and ‘Shine’ [Malcolm Roy, driver of their car] done that…Shine was driving his brother’s car.”

For emphasis, later in the interview he reiterated: “It don’t make no sense to let young boys that’s up there suffer for something they didn’t do.”

Sensing that these lawmen didn’t believe or didn’t want to believe his account of who really did the Hasty Mart job, he twice asked his questioners if they were “willing to put your life upon it that I wasn’t at that store?”

He then added, “I was there!”

Francis was speaking from his heart.

He was conscience-stricken and hell-bent on setting the record straight.

Knowing that Demouchet would never confess, Francis challenged the police to go see Malcolm Roy.

He thought that if Roy knew he had fingered him, then Roy would admit he was there, too.

The sheriff’s department waited five days before they brought the eighteen-year-old in for questioning.

July 6 was a gut-wrenching day for Roy.

He gave several statements.

As Francis predicted, in the first interview with Comeaux, he readily confessed to his involvement in the Hasty Mart stickup.

He said he had borrowed his brother’s car and, at Demouchet’s instructions, had driven Francis and Demouchet to the Hasty Mart.

It was 2:45 p.m.

Demouchet told him to wait in the car with the motor running while they went inside “to get something to drink.”

Next thing he knew, Francis and Demouchet came running out of the store, Demouchet with blood on his hands and a gun, saying he “killed the bitch”

(criminal speak for a victim, male or female); Francis was carrying a sack of change.

Roy returned to New Iberia, dropped them off at the projects, and went to his mother’s house, returning the car to his brother.

His account corroborated important elements of Francis’s confession a week earlier.

Demouchet was the shooter; Francis emerged with a bag of coins; and the time of the crime was 2:45 p.m.

Neither Francis nor Roy knew that an eyewitness had described the getaway car as light blue, which was the color of Roy’s brother’s two-door 1973 Pontiac LeMans.

And then the unthinkable happened.

The police refused to accept the killers’ confession.

They told Roy that they didn’t believe him.

In fact, Sheriff Wattigny threatened him with jail for lying.

Under pressure to recant, Roy came up with another story, one that explained his confession to the sheriff.

He said he wanted to go to jail to get out of his marriage.

Wattigny and his deputies didn’t choose to believe this either.

They dragged his wife down to the station and watched—no doubt amused—as she chewed out her young husband.

At last, dejected and defeated, Roy gave a third statement, this time with the help of the deputies.

He said Iran Alexander (David’s father) had offered him $45,000 to take the fall for his son; that Iran gave him a one-and-a-half-page typewritten story to memorize and instructed him to burn it, which he did.

Once Roy signed this retraction (and false accusation of bribery) at 3:45 p.m.

, he was free to go home with no charges.

Fearful of where it would lead, the sheriff’s investigators did not investigate Roy’s bribery claims, nor did they interview the car’s owner, Roy’s brother Joseph, to see if he had indeed loaned his car to Roy on the day of the Gladu murder.

The sheriffs never showed Roy’s car or took a photo of it to show to eyewitnesses Abney and Eldridge.

They also failed to compare the car’s tire treads to those found at the end of the gravel road.

Two days later, on July 8, Francis, too, retracted his confession, telling Comeaux and Wattigny in a statement suspiciously similar to Roy’s that he had been offered $4,500 by Theresa Collins, John Collins’s mother, to say her son was innocent and that Francis and the others were the guilty ones.

He said that she had visited him in jail, giving him her offer in a typewritten note, which he’d had his cellmate read to him.

Francis said he flushed the note down the toilet and was never contacted again by Mrs.

Collins or anyone else about the offer.

Nevertheless, he said this proposal inspired him to recant his confession.

No charges were ever brought against Theresa Collins or Iran Alexander for their alleged attempts at bribery.

The prosecution now had what they needed to account for the Hasty Mart confessions of Francis and Roy.

On July 14, DA Burke wrote a letter to the defendants’ attorneys informing them of the false confessions and the bribery attempts by Iran Alexander and Theresa Collins.

In this letter Burke stated, falsely, that Jerry Paul Francis’s July 1 confession was “replete with inconsistencies and errors of fact…and the falsity of his account was quickly established.”

The biggest challenge now for Dracos Burke and the sheriff’s investigators was how to get the .32 Clerke out of the hands of Demouchet and into the hands of Alexander so they could make the case that Alexander used it to shoot Gladu.

They came up with a “gun swap”

story.

It began in an interview with Demouchet in Burke’s office on June 29 with Comeaux and Moore in attendance.

According to Burke’s notes, the interview’s purpose was to determine how the .32 got used in the Hasty Mart crime by Alexander when the gun belonged to Demouchet.

A one-hour conversation resolved the problem.

Demouchet said that he loaned the gun to Alexander on March 25 so that Alexander could “pull a job”; and that Alexander returned it to him on April 2.

This gun swap became official history when Comeaux took a statement from Demouchet on July 10.

Demouchet told of “hocking”

the pistol to Alexander on March 23 for twenty dollars with Alexander promising to return the gun to him the following week.

Demouchet said he loaded the gun with five .32 bullets at Alexander’s insistence.

This time he said that Alexander returned the gun to him on April 1.

To make everything appear aboveboard, at an in-chambers meeting with trial judge Robert Johnson and the defendants’ attorneys on August 4, Burke briefed them on Demouchet’s July 10 statement, adding that the same .32 Clerke was used by Demouchet and Francis in a few other crimes, including “a bank robbery in Parks and a store in Rayne.”

He then sent them a transcription of Francis’s recorded July 8 statement and Malcolm Roy’s July 6 statement that recanted their confessions to the Hasty Mart crime and told of the alleged bribery attempts.

The cover-up was complete.

David Alexander and Harry Granger were tried together on September 13–17, 1976.

(John Collins and Ronnie Miller were given a later trial date because Collins’s attorney needed a medical procedure.) Their original indictment for first-degree murder had carried with it a possible death penalty, but the U.S.

Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional in July while they were awaiting trial.

Without a death penalty to aim for, the DA decided to try them solely for armed robbery, because that only required ten out of the twelve jurors to vote guilty.

In the weeks leading up to the trial, Burke offered Granger total immunity if he would testify against Alexander.

Granger refused, telling his lawyer to tell Burke that he had no idea who committed the murder and that he would not lie to point a finger at Alexander or anyone else.

The Alexander family could only gather $8,000 for an attorney.

That was enough to retain the prominent Alexandria law firm of Camille Gravel, which assigned a young and promising attorney, Mike Small, to represent Alexander.

Harry Granger was indigent and therefore had to depend on a court-appointed lawyer, the inexperienced Jerry Theriot, who proved to be inept and in way over his head, explaining to the jury that he would depend on Small since “Mr.

Alexander’s defense will be Mr.

Granger’s.”

He was hardly heard from again, rarely asking a question during cross-examination.

At trial, the defense was hamstrung by Burke’s refusal to turn over his witnesses’ pretrial statements, maintaining that Louisiana law at the time only required him to provide them if they were “exculpatory.”

His response to Small’s request for this information contained this preposterous line: “The State has no evidence exculpating the defendants.”

At trial, Katherine Eldridge testified that she didn’t see any cars on the road when she drove from her house to the Hasty Mart.

Her testimony conflicted with what she had told others before and after the trial; namely that she had seen a light blue car about to turn out of the gravel driveway, which then sped by when she pulled into the Hasty Mart.

This is what she had testified to in her original witness statement and to the grand jury.

But now, she avoided mention of the car at the behest of Captain Comeaux, who had a vested interest in the car being dark, rather than light, blue.

In addition, although the Acadiana Crime Lab had found that Alexander’s tire treads did not match those in the gravel road, the authorities did not reveal this crucial fact to the defense.

Such information, in combination with Eldridge’s original witness statement, could have refuted Ellen Abney’s and Mary Arceneaux’s identification of Alexander’s car at trial as the one used by the killers.

Mary Arceneaux and Herbert Derouen carried the load for the State.

Both enhanced their pretrial statements.

Key among Mary’s many changes was her story about Cypress Island.

Now, at trial, she testified that after the robbery, she and her fellow criminals drove to Cypress Island to kill time, making no mention of her earlier story about burying the gun and bloody shirt there.

In fact, she now said she had no idea what Alexander had done with the gun.

The last she knew, it was under his car seat wrapped in his bloody T-shirt.

According to her, after Cypress Island they had returned to St.

Martinville around dusk and gone to the Candle Light Lounge to talk for a while.

Mary also testified that she had never been convicted of any offenses other than the 1974 forgery charge, when, in fact, she had at least twenty convictions when she was in her thirties alone.

That’s not counting however many she had in her twenties.

Burke stood silently by and let that falsehood go uncorrected.

In post-conviction appeals, Burke inaccurately asserted that Mary’s “trial testimony was consistent with her initial statements to law enforcement officers.”

Derouen’s trial testimony added significantly to what he had originally told his sheriff’s office interviewers.

Key among his additions was an account of a so-called dry run by all seven participants, who drove in two cars to the Hasty Mart the night before.

Also for the first time, Derouen described Alexander running out of the store after shooting the victim and telling Miller to meet him in St.

Martinville at the Candle Light Lounge.

According to Derouen, Alexander was still wearing his bloody shirt when they met in St.

Martinville and had put the gun under the driver’s seat.

Small’s cross-examination ridiculed Derouen’s nonsensical version of events.

Derouen had testified on direct that he got off work that day at 2:10.

Small asked him to look at the courtroom wall clock and tell the time.

He couldn’t.

Under Small’s cross, Derouen admitted that none of the six who entered the store had any assigned roles to play there; that he just went along for the ride; that he didn’t know any of them well; that he never gave any thought as to why six men and two cars were needed to hold up a store in broad daylight; that it didn’t bother him that he was going to do something “bad”

with people he didn’t know; and there had not been any talk the night before about meeting at the club after the robbery.

It just happened on the fly when David Alexander fled the store after shooting the man.

Burke intended to wrap up his case with witnesses Preston Demouchet and Jerry Paul Francis, but Demouchet came prepared to double-cross him.

Demouchet denied he ever loaned the .32 Clerke to Alexander.

He said it wasn’t even his gun.

He also disavowed the statement he had given the police on July 10 about the so-called “gun swap.”

Comeaux was the one who came up with that story, he said, and Demouchet had agreed to it just to get Comeaux, who was constantly harassing him, off his back.

He concluded his testimony stating, “I’ve never given David Alexander no kind of pistol.

None whatsoever.”

When questioned in front of the jury by prosecutor Burke and cross-examined by defense attorney Small concerning his involvement in the Hasty Mart crimes, Jerry Paul Francis pleaded the Fifth a total of twenty-three times, repeatedly asserting his constitutional right not to incriminate himself.

Both sides tried to use him to their advantage, asking questions that introduced their version of events.

Burke asked him if he’d told Comeaux he was promised money to take the blame for the Hasty Mart killing.

Small asked him if he recalled giving a detailed statement to Comeaux admitting that he committed the crime with Demouchet and Malcolm Roy.

In both cases he pleaded the Fifth.

With that, the State rested.

The defense attempted to establish Alexander’s alibi for the afternoon of March 30 through the testimony of one Gail Guidry, who told the jury that Alexander picked her up in his cab at 2:30 to take her to work that day.

Under cross, she conceded that she’d had help from the defense recalling that the day was March 30.

Alexander’s mother, the cab’s dispatcher, was ready to present the taxicab logs for Alexander’s fares that day, but Small did not call her because he noticed that the log for the 30th was printed neatly, unlike the log’s other days.

Granger was unable to present an alibi because his witnesses could only account for his presence on the 31st, not the 30th.

The key witness for the defense was Malcolm Roy.

One week before the trial, Roy testified at a preliminary hearing, once again confessing to the Hasty Mart crime.

Angered by his effrontery, the authorities arrested and charged him with filing a false police report—that is, his Hasty Mart confession.

At trial, Small read his confession statement of July 6 and the recantation statement he made that same day.

Roy bravely insisted that his confession was true and his retraction was false.

He agreed that Small had warned him that by testifying he could be prosecuted for armed robbery and murder, and now for perjury, and that no one at any time had promised or provided him with any kind of benefit for his testimony.

He then, once again, told the story of how he had committed the Hasty Mart crime with Demouchet and Francis.

Under cross, Burke warned him that he was waiving his right not to incriminate himself.

Undeterred, Roy told the jury that he was confessing because he hadn’t been able to sleep and it had been on his conscience ever since March 30.

He said that he had no idea Demouchet was going to rob the store, let alone kill anyone.

Morris Lee, Derouen’s carpenter boss, informed the jury that he was positive Derouen worked for him from 1:00 until 3:30 the afternoon of March 30 and that he always drove him to and from work because Derouen had no means of transportation.

He had shown Derouen’s work records to Deputy Chief Jim Desormeaux.

Under cross by Small, Desormeaux testified that he had known Lee for some time, and had no reason to doubt him, stating, “I thought he was telling the truth.”

Alexander testified, declaring his innocence.

Granger reluctantly agreed not to testify, given his highly agitated emotional state throughout the trial.

Unfortunately, when it came time for his summation, Small was not up to the task.

To the defendants’ detriment, he gratuitously praised local law enforcement, including the sheriff’s investigators and Burke, as men who would not lie or encourage their witnesses to lie.

Other than currying favor with Iberia Parish law enforcement, his unwarranted defense of their integrity was inexplicable.

He also expressed a hint of uncertainty concerning the defendants’ innocence: “If they did this, they deserve to go to the penitentiary.”

At the same time, Small properly ridiculed the State’s reliance on the conflicting and obviously false stories offered by Mary and Derouen, and mocked the State for dismissing clear and convincing evidence pointing to the guilt of Demouchet and Francis.

Theriot’s summation was incredibly brief—a mere two pages of transcript.

He did little more than ask the jury to consider the concept of reasonable doubt that the judge would explain to them in his charge.

Absent an advocate, Harry Granger never had a chance.

When the second day of testimony had concluded, the case went to the jury at 8:00 p.m.

It is unclear from the record how long the jury was out, but it was the same day, September 17, that in a 10–2 vote, it returned verdicts of guilty for both defendants.

When the verdicts were announced, Granger was so angry that he punched Steve Woodring, who was standing next to him, and then promptly fainted.

On October 16, Alexander and Granger, standing together, faced the judge for sentencing.

When asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, Alexander replied, “I didn’t rob nobody.

I didn’t kill nobody.

All of you here know it.

They got a God in heaven, man.”

When he, too, was asked, Granger simply said, “I agree with him.”

The judge then sentenced each man to ninety-nine years of hard labor for the crime of armed robbery.

Their next stop would be the infamous Angola state prison.

Not knowing what to do with Rene Jackson, the third man in Miller’s cab according to Derouen, Burke decided to dismiss all charges against him.

On November 30, Burke had Jackson committed to the Central Louisiana State Hospital for clinical evaluation.

The treatment team diagnosed him with a severe intellectual impairment and noted that he didn’t know his age and could not recite his ABCs or count.

The report stated he had spent the last nine months in jail for crimes he insisted he didn’t do.

He was not considered dangerous by his team of doctors, and they returned him home a completely free man on December 7, one week after admission.

This was the same man who Derouen claimed to the police in his first statement had chased him outside the store after the shooting and forced him back to Miller’s car at knifepoint.

On December 6, the day before Jackson was released from custody, his devoted father, who had vowed that he would go to his grave knowing his son was innocent, died of an asthma attack.

John Collins and Ronald Miller were terrified at the prospect of serving a ninety-nine-year sentence at Angola.

Their trial was set for Monday, January 24, 1977.

The chances of acquittal were slim, since the same witnesses used to convict Alexander and Granger would incriminate them.

Surprisingly, Dracos Burke offered a lifeline.

If they would plead guilty to accessory after the fact, he would dismiss the armed robbery and murder charges and allow them to spend their sentence in the parish jail rather than Angola.

If the judge gave them the maximum, five years, they would be out in two to three years.

He threw in home visits as a sweetener.

Because the prospect of Angola prison was more than either could bear, and with the encouragement of their families and friends, they reluctantly swallowed the bitter pill of admitting involvement in a horrible crime in which they had not actually been involved.

Collins had a wife and three children to consider and Miller, unmarried, had his mother to think of.

Several days before the trial, the judge gave them the five-year maximum.

They served two of those years and then came home on parole.

Ironically, both men lied, incriminating themselves, to avoid a possible life sentence in Angola, but earlier had refused to lie in order to incriminate Alexander and Granger as part of an immunity deal offered by Burke.