McVeigh asked, "Did you, in fact, attend and receive a degree [in 1983] from Georgetown University?"
"On the advice of counsel, I plead the Fifth Amendment."
Robert Madrid said he had a medical degree from Harvard and belonged to Mensa.
(Steve Gates For The Washington Post)
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McVeigh pressed on. What about the medical degree you claim to have earned from Harvard in 1987? And the PhD you claim from MIT in 1988? Are you, in fact, a member of Mensa? Why is the number of the Texas medical license you claim actually registered to someone born in 1918, 45 years before your birth date?
Madrid repeatedly refused to answer.
In a matter of minutes, the reputation and livelihood Madrid had constructed so carefully began to shatter.
Word spread among lawyers and judges in the legal community. Court officials began searching for other cases in which Madrid had testified. One was quickly found in neighboring Talladega County.
Four days after his testimony in Heflin, on Feb. 11, Talladega District Attorney Steve Giddens filed perjury charges against Madrid, alleging he had testified falsely in a 2003 civil case in Talladega involving the estate of a murdered doctor. The criminal charges against Madrid say he lied about holding a "PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
"It's really caused a stir," admits chagrined defense lawyer Nancy P. Vernon, for whom Madrid was to testify as a forensics expert in the Heflin murder trial. "He seemed to have the credentials that would be helpful to my case."
Investigators in Alabama say they know more about who Bob Madrid is not than who he is. They know he was born in Maryland, not San Antonio, as his curriculum vitae claims. They know he graduated in 1981 from DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville. They cannot find a single college from which he holds a degree.
Tim Moylan, now a mortgage banker, played on the golf team with Madrid at DeMatha and remembers him as a good athlete, but without a lot of friends.
"He was a good guy but sort of lived in his own little world," Moylan says.
Eighteen months after his marriage to Selina Volz, Madrid divorced her. She moved back to Salt Lake City with the baby girl she and Madrid had. She remarried.
Madrid appeared in Talladega District Court on March 29 to respond to charges of perjury. He was neatly dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt and tie, and he wore a goatee.
Much of the time Madrid sat patiently by himself in the back of the courtroom, while his lawyer, William M. Dawson, chatted with colleagues and prosecutors. His case was postponed until a later date.
Madrid has declined to discuss his case. Dawson says his client is innocent.
Meanwhile, the house on Glenwood Terrace is quiet.
His car, according to neighbors, is often parked in the driveway of his parents' home, just up the street.
