Framed

The Absence of Motive#4

For five days Joe had sat at the defense table and looked on helplessly as the State tried to piece together an unconvincing case that, in the end, did not prove his guilt.

How could it? So many times he wanted to stand up and scream, “I’m innocent! I didn’t do it! You’ve got the wrong guy! The killer is still out there!”

He did not kill Mickey and he’d been confident a trial would prove it.

But after five days of being accused by the respected authorities, even a Texas Ranger, he was afraid.

His fear was caused by the faces and reactions of the jurors, who appeared skeptical at first, but, after hours of hearing the accusations against him, began glancing at Joe with suspicion.

The expert testimony from Thorman seemed to get their attention.

Joe began to understand the presumption of guilt.

It went something like this: In a murder like Mickey’s, the community is shocked and wants immediate justice.

The people want the murderer caught, locked up, and punished.

When a suspect is arrested, the public is relieved and rushes to judgment—the suspect must be guilty, or at least involved, otherwise the police wouldn’t arrest him.

Once presumed to be guilty, the suspect is hauled into the courtroom where he faces the power of the State—the police and prosecutors—the very authorities the public is brainwashed into trusting.

The jurors, average folk selected from the community, place much greater credence in the testimony of the authorities than in anything offered by the defendant, who, of course, is fighting for his life and will do or say anything to save his neck.

Joe realized he was presumed to be guilty.

The trial was not fair.

The field was not level.

He insisted on testifying for himself.

He had done nothing wrong and certainly had no criminal record to worry about on cross-examination.

He was unimpeachable and his lawyers agreed he could speak for himself.

He began by denying everything the jury had just heard.

He was in a hotel room 120 miles away when his wife was murdered.

He did not kill her, had no reason to, no motive.

To suggest otherwise was outrageous. He owned the flashlight but did not put it in the trunk of his car, nor could he remember how it got there.

He was emotional at times, especially when talking about Mickey, but he held himself together and survived the direct examination.

On cross-examination, Robert Lewellen attacked with an endless barrage of accusations that portrayed Joe as a liar.

Joe held firm and insisted he had never left his hotel room that night.

Time and again he said, “I don’t know, I don’t know.

I’ve never understood any of this.”

As Lewellen hammered away, Joe broke into tears and kept saying, “I did not kill Mickey and I don’t know who did.”

Lewellen had the final word, and the last thing the jury heard was his loud and angry summation, ending with “Mickey didn’t go to bed and leave the house unlocked that night.

She locked the door, and a man came in with a key, and after all hell broke loose in that bedroom, he cleaned up, changed clothes, wiped up the lavatory, threw his clothes in the bag, walked out the front door.

Then he went right back, walking in the front door of the Hyatt Hotel, whistling Dixie.”

—

The jury deliberated for only four hours and found Joe guilty of murder.

He was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison.

A week later, he was placed in the rear seat of a patrol car and driven 160 miles to the prison in Huntsville, home of the State’s busy death chamber.

The prison was built with high, redbrick walls and guard towers and looked like a medieval fortress.

Joe’s first glimpse of it was a frightening shock, but by then he was almost numb to another blow to the truth and his freedom.

And, oddly enough, he was not frightened.

He knew God would protect him.

In April 1986, Joe Bryan, age forty-six, entered the Texas prison system, where he would remain for the next thirty-four years.

—

Prison is a dreadful place even for those who deserve it.

For an innocent person it is a continuation of an unimaginable nightmare.

For Joe, it was the endgame, the final stop, the place he would never leave.

Robbed of the person he loved, falsely accused by trigger-happy cops, wrongfully convicted by a corrupt system, and banished to a hellhole where he was supposed to die, he immediately fell into a state of dark, endless depression.

In his first days and nights at Huntsville he was numb to his surroundings and withdrawn.

He felt like a zombie, sleepwalking through the daily routines while trying to convince himself that through some miracle the nightmare would end.

The loneliness was achingly painful. Predators attacked him twice but he fought them off and was left alone.

His cell was five feet by nine, a tight space for any man, but Joe had a cellmate, a “cellie,”

who took the bottom bunk by the rules of seniority.

Avoiding physical contact required nimble feet and patience.

When one needed to use the toilet, the other one disappeared.

Before long, Joe realized that a week had passed, then another.

Then a month.

He was slowly becoming institutionalized and moving through each day as he was told.

Virtually every aspect of his life was dictated for him: waking up, eating meals, showering twice a week, working, exercising, visiting with family and his lawyers.

In his sparse free time he played the piano in chapel services, taught other inmates seeking their GEDs, tutored officers taking college courses, and read at least two books a week.

His lawyers professed optimism for his chances on appeal, though they knew firsthand the harsh reputation of the Texas criminal appellate courts.

Joe relived his case, reading and studying everything—the briefs filed by his lawyers, the court transcripts, the motions, and the rulings from the judge.

He met with his lawyers as often as they could make it to Huntsville.

In their filings they argued strenuously that the State’s case was insufficient, that Thorman’s work lacked scientific integrity, and that there was simply no reasonable cause for accusing Joe, the husband, as the suspect.

Joe Wilie’s cocky testimony caught the attention of the appellate court.

He was dead wrong when he suggested to the jury that Mickey was worth $300,000 to Joe if she was dead.

The actual amount of her life policy was about half that, but such testimony was prejudicial, regardless of the amount.

Two years after the trial, Joe’s conviction was overturned.

He was ecstatic, and thought—for a moment—that the injustice might be coming to an end.

However, the State moved quickly to indict him again and schedule a second trial.

It was a repeat of the first, with the same prosecutors and witnesses.

Robert Thorman was even more certain of his findings and once again ventured far away from his field of “expertise.”

The only significant difference was the lack of support from Joe’s friends.

Only a few volunteered to testify on his behalf.

The rest had waved goodbye.

In July 1988, Joe was found guilty of murder and again sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison.

—

As bloodstain analysis became more popular in the 1980s and ’90s, it also became more controversial.

Defense lawyers attacked it relentlessly as bogus science.

Other experts, real scientists, studied it and found no shortage of flaws.

Several notorious cases cast serious doubt on its reliability.

Perhaps its most egregious abuse was in the case of David Camm, an Indiana state trooper who spent thirteen years behind bars for a horrible crime he had nothing to do with.

On a spring night in March 2000, Camm was playing basketball with some friends, and when the game was over he drove home.

In his garage, he found a bloody scene that was indescribable—his wife and two children had been shot to death.

In spite of a lack of motive, and in spite of the testimony of numerous alibi witnesses at the basketball game, the authorities believed Camm was the killer.

They found eight specks of blood on his T-shirt, and they also found a couple of experts who testified that the specks were “high-velocity impact spatter.”

In other words, the T-shirt was present at the murders.

Camm’s lawyers produced experts who sharply disagreed and testified that the eight specks were “transfer stains,”

or bloodstains caused when Camm was frantically trying to render aid.

He was put on trial, found guilty, appealed, won a reversal, was retried, found guilty again, appealed again, won another reversal, and was tried for the third time.

At the end of his third trial, thirteen years after he was arrested, he was finally acquitted and walked free.

A burglar with a rap sheet was convicted when his DNA matched evidence from the crime scene.

More notorious wrongful convictions followed, and bloodstain analysis grew even more controversial, as did other types of shady forensics such as the analysis of hair, boot prints, arson, and bite marks.

Criminal courtrooms in America were flooded with unscientific testimony offered by unqualified experts paid nice fees by prosecutors.

With time, many of the wrongful convictions began to sour as defense lawyers and innocence advocates hammered away and DNA testing became more widespread and accurate.

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences issued an exhaustive report with seismic implications in the field of criminal law.

In response to a tidal wave of complaints from defense lawyers, legal scholars, and forensic scientists, and also in response to the growing number of sensational DNA exonerations of innocent men and women, the NAS went to work and put the forensic disciplines under the microscope.

What it found was unsettling.

Much of what passed for expert testimony was highly speculative and not grounded in scientific research.

Regarding bloodstain analysis, the report issued a number of critical warnings and ended with: “The uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous.”

—

Joe’s appellate lawyers, Walter Reaves and Jessica Freud, took his case to federal court with a writ of habeas corpus.

To be successful, they would have to present new evidence of his innocence.

They convinced the court to allow DNA testing of the cigarette butt and flashlight lens.

Both proved futile—no DNA profile could be obtained from either.

However, one test revealed a startling conclusion: There was no proof that the blood on the lens was actually blood!

In 2017, in a hearing to determine if Joe should be given a new trial, his lawyers stunned the courtroom with an affidavit from Robert Thorman, since retired.

Thorman wrote: “My conclusions were wrong.

Some of the techniques and methodology were incorrect.

Therefore, some of my testimony was not correct.”

But, he concluded, “in no way did I lie in my report or testimony, as I was doing what I thought was correct as a result of my training at the time.”

During the same hearing, a DNA analyst from the Texas crime lab testified that he’d tested six tiny stains on the flashlight lens.

Five were negative for the presence of blood.

The sixth was positive, but it could not be determined whose blood it was.

DNA samples were taken from the handle of the flashlight.

Joe and Mickey were both excluded.

Walter Reaves and Jessica Freud destroyed the State’s case against Joe.

Nonetheless, his request for a new trial was denied.

As were his requests for parole.

In spite of his near-perfect record in prison—no misconduct, no reprimands, nothing but high marks from his guards, bosses, and fellow inmates—Joe was denied parole seven times.

By March 2021, Joe had developed congestive heart disease and was in failing health.

Plus, the Covid epidemic had prison authorities on edge.

The parole board, for reasons it never explained, reversed itself and set Joe free.

He was welcomed by his family and went to live with his older brother in Houston.

—

Who killed Mickey Bryan? Because the investigation was so thoroughly botched, the truth will never be known.

Once the investigators decided Joe was gay and therefore capable of murder and therefore willing to kill his wife to keep her quiet, and also to collect her life insurance, they arrested him a week after the murder.

At that point, gripped by a severe case of tunnel vision, they abruptly stopped looking for other suspects.

They had their man.

Instead of following several suspicious leads, they poked around for any trace of Joe’s sordid secret life.

They found nothing.

The real killer remained free.

If they had bothered to look closer, they might have found the killer in their midst.

Strong evidence pointed to a rogue cop named Dennis Dunlap, a Clifton city policeman.

Judy Whitley was the seventeen-year-old who was raped and murdered four months before Mickey was killed.

Her nude and bound body was found less than a mile from the Bryans’ home.

Joe Wilie was also in charge of that investigation, which remained open.

The pressure from the first murder could have motivated Wilie to act quickly to “solve”

the second one.

Dennis Dunlap was a drifter who worked for several small-town police departments and had trouble keeping a job.

He had a history of violence against women and was known to harass and stalk them while on duty.

He was not a homicide detective and did not investigate the Whitley murder, but he surprised his colleagues by knowing so much about the case, even to the point of describing how the victim suffocated.

He was briefly considered a suspect, but when he abruptly resigned and left town the investigators lost interest in him.

The evidence in the case was stored in a police locker, and it, too, disappeared.

He was known to return to Clifton periodically.

Joe Bryan has always suspected that the Clifton police told Dunlap to leave town to prevent an embarrassment.

Once he was gone, he was no longer investigated.

In 1996, Dunlap was working as a janitor in the town of Rosenberg, Texas.

His girlfriend called 911, and when the police arrived they found him in the garage hanging with a cord around his neck.

He did not leave a suicide note, but shortly before he died he admitted to his girlfriend that he had killed Judy Whitley.

He had bragged to his ex-wife, not his girlfriend, that he’d had an affair with Mickey and was with her the night she was murdered.

When the police went through Dunlap’s personal items, they found letters and newspaper clippings that led them back to the murders in Clifton.

A new police chief there reviewed the Whitley case and interviewed Dunlap’s former associates.

They recalled his intimate knowledge of the most gruesome aspects of the rape and murder.

In June 1999, fourteen years after the murder, the Clifton police declared the crime solved.

The headline in the town’s newspaper declared: Dunlap Officially Named Murderer of Whitley Teen.

There would be no justice for Mickey Bryan, nor for her husband.

The police have not reopened the case because Joe’s conviction still stands.