With a Wink, Alleged Plot To Foil a Trial Set in Motion

Lamiek Fortson wasn't liking his chances in D.C. Superior Court.

He was about to go on trial, accused of killing a man over a dice game, and was looking at a lifetime behind bars. Then, out of nowhere, came a wink from across the courtroom, from a long-forgotten face among the prospective jurors.

It was, investigators say, the beginning of a brazen effort to thwart the prosecution, a plot that has implicated Fortson, his wife, a fellow jail inmate and the winking juror in allegedly trying to sabotage the case. Even Fortson's original defense attorney has been caught up in the turmoil.

From rigging the first trial, which ended in a hung jury, to plotting the killing of a key witness before the retrial, which ended last week in a conviction, Fortson was not, prosecutors say, going down without a fight.

No one, in the end, did more to bring down Fortson, 28, than his wife, the woman he had called a "true soldier," confident that she would never betray him. Ultimately, Erica Williams, 27, deserted her husband for a deal with the government and testified against the father of her three children at his retrial.

Williams's testimony provided a vivid account of how Fortson's first trial became derailed. It was backed by recordings of telephone conversations with her husband from the D.C. jail complex; the Corrections Department routinely records inmates' calls.

The sight of his wife, uncomfortable but unwavering on the witness stand, implicating Fortson in a murder, itself seemed almost an indictment of how wrong things went June 28, 2002, in the alley behind 1647 Holbrook St. NE.

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It was there, in the Trinidad neighborhood, that Gerald Lee Whitfield was killed by Fortson and Fortson's friend Harry Ellis, prosecutors said. Beaten and kicked to death in an attack that might have lasted as long as a half-hour, Whitfield, 27, was unrecognizable even to his mother, who could identify him only by a tattoo.

Ellis, now 29, was identified almost immediately by a witness as one of the assailants. Fortson was identified by another eyewitness. But that did not happen until August 2003, and it was another couple of months before Fortson joined Ellis in custody.

When the case was called for trial last May, it looked promising for the prosecution. Along with the two eyewitnesses, prosecutors said, they had found Fortson's blood at the crime scene. Soon after the slaying, police had also recovered Ellis's car, which matched the description of the car seen leaving the alley and in which investigators found Fortson's blood, Whitfield's blood and a shirt with Whitfield's blood.

Then the jury selection began -- and in walked Jovanda Blackson.