Burden of Proof

Each came to believe in Coleman's innocence. And each worked hard to help him prove his case. Between them, McCloskey and Behan made more than a dozen trips to Grundy, the coal-mining town in southwest Virginia where the murder took place, interviewing dozens of people. They concluded that Coleman had been framed by police and prosecutors, defended by incompetent lawyers and condemned to death by a small-town jury bent upon vengeance. They pushed for a new blood test of the evidence, and when the test implicated Coleman as the killer, they sought to discredit their own expert. And they accused a local man of being the "real killer," a claim they stuck with even after they learned of information indicating he had the wrong blood type.

When their efforts to get a stay of execution failed, they conducted a high-profile media campaign to compel then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder to commute, or at least delay, the sentence. In the weeks before Coleman was put to death, his picture was on the cover of Time magazine ("This Man Might Be Innocent. This Man Is Due to Die"). He was interviewed from death row on "Larry King Live," the "Today" show, "Primetime Live," "Good Morning America" and "The Phil Donahue Show."

Opponents of the death penalty also seized on the case, staging vigils outside the governor's mansion in Richmond and the Greensville Correctional Center, where the execution was due to take place. Pope John Paul II made a public plea for mercy, and Mother Teresa personally phoned the governor's chief counsel. What started out as a shocking crime in a remote corner of Virginia became an international cause celebre.

"The anti-death penalty movement has never had much in the way of sympathetic visuals or symbols," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. "Other movements have trees and whales, positive images. Well, an innocent person is a positive image."

Back in Grundy, a scrappy community of 1,500 in the heart of Appalachia, many people were appalled. They viewed Coleman's supporters as a powerful group of lawyers, activists and journalists who were blinded by their loathing of the death penalty and taken in by a clever psychopath. "They were trying to build this case for Roger's innocence, and they didn't care who they threw to the dogs," says Pat Hatfield, the victim of an earlier incident, in which Coleman had exposed himself and masturbated in front of her at the public library. "It didn't matter whose life was destroyed as long as they could save Roger."

Two years after Coleman's execution, Arnold & Porter paid a substantial sum to settle a libel claim by the man it had identified as the "real killer." After that, Behan and the firm stopped commenting publicly on the case. They declined to discuss it for this article, except for a brief statement issued by the firm: "We complied with our professional responsibility and stand by our representation of Roger Coleman."

Jim McCloskey has taken a much different approach. Within hours of the DNA test results in January, he told a press conference that he was wrong and that Roger Coleman had betrayed his trust. Like a patient determined to take his medicine, he answered every question, proclaimed the DNA result a victory for the truth -- "even though this particular truth feels like a kick in the stomach." And he spent hours with a reporter going over the case, sifting the clues, acknowledging errors of judgment.

He concedes that someone looking in from the outside, with the benefit of hindsight, would ask: "How in the hell did McCloskey ever believe that Coleman was innocent, given what we know today?"

"I keep asking myself: Where did I go wrong? What did I miss?" And so he begins to go over it all again, starting with the night nearly 25 years ago when a young woman was brutally raped and murdered.

THEY WERE HIGH SCHOOL SWEETHEARTS, Brad McCoy and Wanda Faye Thompson, married after his graduation from Grundy Senior High in 1978, when he was 18 and she was 16. He got a job as a United Coal parts clerk, while she dropped out of school and stayed at home. Brad says his wife "was a good-hearted person. Just very quiet, considerate of others." They rented a small house amid Grundy's hills and hollows, across Slate Creek from the main highway.

On the night of March 10, 1981, Brad came home from the swing shift shortly after 11 to find Wanda's body on the bedroom floor in a pool of warm blood. She had been stabbed twice in the chest, and her throat had been slashed with such force that she was nearly decapitated. She was 19 years old.

Investigators quickly focused on Roger Coleman, 22, a bright but troubled young man who was married to Wanda's 16-year-old sister and worked at the TJ&M Coal Co. mine up on Looney's Creek. Raised mostly by his grandparents and his uncle after his parents separated, Coleman first got in trouble with the authorities for making obscene phone calls as a teenager. Just before graduating from high school in 1977, he was accused of attempting to rape a local schoolteacher. She testified that he gained entry to her home, forced her to tie up her terrified 6-year-old daughter and threatened her with a gun before she was able to escape. He denied the charge, and his high school principal testified that he had seen Coleman at school at the time of the crime. But the jury believed the victim -- Coleman served 20 months in prison. Then, two months before the murder, there was the library incident. All of that, plus Coleman's family ties to Wanda, led police to his door.