Burden of Proof

Some of the faces are grim and frozen, as if all of the anger from years of incarceration has taken command of their features and won't let go. Others are locked in wide loopy smiles with glazed eyes that betray their amazement. And there in almost every photo, eyes glistening, is McCloskey.

He grew up outside Philadelphia, graduated from Bucknell University, joined the Navy, then became a management consultant. A lifelong bachelor, he woke up one day in 1979 at age 37, looked closely at himself and didn't much care for what he saw. "My life was like a rainbow -- it might have looked pretty, but it was vapor," McCloskey recalls. "I wanted to lead what I felt to be an authentic life. I wanted to get to the real stuff of the world."

He quit his job, entered a theological seminary in New Jersey and made plans to become a minister. Then, in his second year, he began doing field work as a student chaplain at Trenton State Prison. There he met an inmate named Jorge "Chiefie" de los Santos, who was serving life for a murder he claimed he had not committed. De los Santos was so adamant that McCloskey agreed to read the trial transcript. He found that de los Santos's conviction had hinged largely on an alleged confession he made to a fellow inmate. McCloskey tracked down the inmate and got him to admit he had lied. In the summer of 1983, de los Santos won his freedom, and McCloskey found his calling. "I felt this is what God has ordained for me to do," he says. "Chiefie would say I saved his life. But he saved mine."

Centurion Ministries started out as a one-man shop that McCloskey operated from his living room. It now boasts five full-time and four part-time employees, and a $1 million annual budget, financed by foundations and private donors. From the start, innocence was the watchword. McCloskey wasn't interested in whether someone got a fair trial -- he says plenty of guilty defendants get a less than perfect one. "Innocence came to me -- I didn't go seeking it. And being a lay person, not a lawyer, that's all I was interested in."

He was shocked to discover that some police and prosecutors routinely lied or cut corners to make their cases. "I've come to see the criminal justice system as fraught with flaws and frailties."

Yet he sometimes engages in his own sleight of hand, wearing a priest's collar in the field, knowing that it helps get people to talk. "I'm a graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary, but I'm not an ordained person. I introduce myself as Jim McCloskey, not as Reverend or Father," he says.

McCloskey and his team have never lacked for work. Their list of successes includes Clarence Brandley, freed after 10 years on death row in Texas for murder after Centurion found an eyewitness who identified the real killers; David Milgaard, who spent 23 years in a Canadian prison for murder and rape until DNA testing confirmed his innocence; and Clarence Chance and Benny Powell, imprisoned for more than 17 years for the murder of a Los Angeles deputy sheriff until Centurion proved that investigators had coerced witnesses into false testimony. Not every case has been a triumph. McCloskey reckons that four of the inmates his group has worked for turned out to have been guilty. In two of those cases, DNA testing proved the prisoners' guilt. In the other two, the prisoners' accounts unraveled when McCloskey re-interviewed witnesses. He immediately dropped each case, even if he had worked on it for several years.

When Coleman contacted Centurion in 1987, McCloskey read the trial transcript, then spent three hours talking to Coleman. "We went through everything: what he did that night and why, who he encountered." He told McCloskey about The Choice Is Yours, a program that Coleman had organized with help from the Catholic Diocese of Richmond in which he lectured potential young offenders about the price of crime and the miseries of prison.

"He was very calm, collected, rational, didn't come off as slick at all. He wasn't a salesman. He didn't try to persuade me. But he answered whatever questions I had." McCloskey was impressed, and he trusted his instincts. "I walked away believing he was not the kind of person who would commit such a brutal murder."

McCloskey drove straight from the prison to Grundy, where he spent nearly a month investigating the case. He persuaded Judge Persin to let him examine the evidence file. He interviewed those who had seen Coleman that night, and he reenacted the timeline.

He discovered that the jury had never heard about Phillip VanDyke's timecard, which he punched at 10:41 on the night of the murder -- just minutes, VanDyke said, after he had finished chatting with Coleman. He noted that the Stiltners had originally told investigators that Coleman had visited sometime between 10 and 10:30 that night. Only when Sandra Stiltner testified in court did she nail the time as exactly 10:20. McCloskey believed VanDyke and his timecard rather than Stiltner's testimony. And there were other nagging details: Why did Wanda McCoy have dirt on her hands and arms? What about the medical examiner's conclusion that she had been sodomized as well as raped, a fact the jury never heard? How could one attacker have committed both acts within the space of a few minutes?

In McCloskey's view, the police had jumped on the first plausible suspect, ignoring other possibilities. "A crime of this nature is very rare, and it just inflames the passions and prejudices of everybody in a community. And that was my view of what happened with Roger: They shoehorned him into this conviction."

On his way back to Princeton, McCloskey stopped in Washington to see Coleman's lawyers at Arnold & Porter. The easiest way to prove Coleman's innocence, he told them, was to have the blood and sperm samples from the victim re-tested using newly developed DNA techniques. But the lawyers were not interested. They said the judge was unlikely to order a test and, in any event, samples that had been lying around in an unprotected evidence box for eight years were unlikely to yield a definitive result. But the real surprise was that Coleman himself was not interested in DNA testing. He told McCloskey that after his arrest he had had sex in jail with a female guard, and he feared the authorities had planted his semen from that encounter as evidence. McCloskey dismissed Coleman's fears as classic jailhouse paranoia, "but I also felt a certain amount of discomfort in my mind as to why he wasn't eager for DNA testing."

Enough discomfort that McCloskey says he dropped out of the Coleman case for nearly a year and concentrated on other, more promising clients. Then in 1990, he found a reason to get back into it.

TALL, SLIM AND DEEPLY EARNEST, Kathleen Behan, came to Arnold & Porter in July 1990 as a 28-year-old legal associate with an abiding hostility toward the death penalty. One of the first cases she was handed was Roger Coleman's appeal.

She went down to Mecklenburg Correctional Center in southern Virginia to meet her client and was struck by Coleman's sincerity and mastery of the details of his case. Then she met with McCloskey, who was immediately impressed with her. "She was the kind of lawyer I love to work with -- as much fact-driven as law-driven," he recalls. "She realized pretty fast that if Roger was going to be freed we needed to develop new evidence."

Kitty Behan reversed the firm's previous position and agreed to DNA testing. Judge Persin consented to having the evidence shipped to Edward Blake of Forensic Science Associates in California, one of the pioneers in the newly developing field.

Coleman's legal team got another potential break after Behan placed an ad in the Virginia Mountaineer newspaper seeking new leads in the case. On the day it ran, Arnold & Porter fielded a phone call from Teresa Horn, a 22-year-old woman who claimed that an unemployed miner named Bobby Donnie Ramey had attempted to sexually assault her one night in 1987 at a friend's house. When she resisted, she said, Ramey warned her that he would do to her the same thing he had "done to that woman on Slate Creek."

Ramey and his family lived just 50 yards uphill from Wanda McCoy's house. Over the years Ramey, a high school dropout, had had a number of scrapes with the law, ranging from fishing without a license to assaulting a police officer. His nickname was "Trouble."

But the DNA result that came back in November 1990 was far from helpful to the defense. Blake had had to work from an extremely limited sample -- the cotton swab of semen from the victim had disappeared from the evidence bag, and he was forced to scrape DNA samples from the stick it had been attached to. Nonetheless, he found enough to determine there were two sets of sperm in the victim. One presumably came from Brad McCoy, who testified he had had sex with his wife two nights before the murder. Blake narrowed down the other to approximately 2 percent of the population, including Coleman. The state of Virginia's experts would later argue that the proportion of men who had both type B blood and the DNA match was even narrower -- 0.2 percent.

McCloskey remembers exactly where he was when he heard the news: at a pay phone in Lancaster, Pa., where he was working on another case. "My first thought was, 'Son of a bitch, the guy did it.' "

But Behan was undaunted. She found other experts who claimed that the mixed sperm sample made an accurate DNA reading impossible, and who also challenged the studies on which the percentages were based. And she and McCloskey seized on another possibility -- that the second sample of sperm came not from Brad McCoy but from a second rapist. Since even the police accepted that Coleman was alone that night, the two-attackers thesis, if proved, could have exonerated him. McCloskey put his doubts aside, and he and Behan went back to work.

Blake says that this was the moment when Coleman's defenders lost their ethical bearings. Fixated on Coleman's innocence, they ignored or discredited evidence that pointed to his guilt: "Somewhere along the way these people who were supposed to be in the fact-finding business abandoned their responsibility to facts and truth, and started operating on belief."

McCloskey insists he went where the facts led him. And, by late 1990, the facts were leading him to Donnie Ramey's door.

MCCLOSKEY TAKES A FADING POLAROID FROM A STACK: "This is Wanda's house, and this is the Ramey home. There's a perfect way to get down the hill, kill her and get back up without being seen."

McCloskey and Behan eventually found three other women who claimed to have been attacked by Donnie Ramey. Horn and two of the women gave affidavits. The day after Horn gave an interview to a Roanoke television station repeating her allegations, she died of a drug overdose. Police found no evidence of foul play, but McCloskey was suspicious.

"I interviewed each of these women, I was with them in their living rooms, I saw how frightened they were," he says.

McCloskey and Behan also interviewed Keester Shortridge, a neighbor of Ramey's, who claimed he had found a plastic bag containing clothes and bloody sheets in the back of his pickup truck on the day after the murder. Shortridge said he had dumped the bag in a ravine after police expressed no interest in examining the contents. Behan even rented a backhoe to dig up the evidence from the spot. All she found was a small patch of dirty sheet whose contents were too degraded to be analyzed. Nonetheless, in October 1991, Behan filed a petition with Judge Persin citing newly discovered evidence suggesting that Ramey was Wanda McCoy's killer. In its response, the state attorney general's office poked holes in Behan's claim. Miners are required to provide their blood type in case of accident, and Ramey's employment card identified his as type A, whereas Wanda McCoy's rapist's was type B. Also, Teresa Horn was a known drug user who had had a child out of wedlock and wasn't sure who the father was. Neither she nor Ramey's other purported victims had ever filed charges nor told the police of their suspicions.

"I had serious problems with that woman's credibility," says Tommy Scott, the former prosecutor. "But Arnold & Porter and Jim McCloskey and the national media bought into it hook, line and sinker."

While McCloskey was lining up Donnie Ramey's alleged victims, he did not interview Roger Coleman's surviving victims. Brenda Ratliff, the schoolteacher who had accused Coleman of attempted rape in 1977, refused to talk to him. And he did not attempt to speak with the two librarians who had been confronted by Coleman in January 1981, two months before the murder. By the time he heard about them, he says, he was so immersed in a last-gasp search for new evidence of Coleman's innocence that he didn't have time. And because Coleman wasn't charged with the library incident until after his murder arrest, McCloskey assumed the librarians hadn't identified him until police told them he was a suspected killer; he decided their testimony was unreliable.

Had he talked to Pat Hatfield, the chief librarian, he might have concluded differently.

Hatfield and Jean Gilbert were about to close up on a stormy Monday evening when a young man in a navy blue jacket and dark pants came through the front door. "He had his pants unzipped, and he was masturbating," Hatfield recalls. "He got all the way up to about five feet from the front desk. By then, I had actually looked at him in the face. And that's what really scared me because he had this dead look in his eyes. A cold dead stare. Never blinked. And then he ejaculated on the floor and on the desk. He never said one word to me . . . But what I saw in his eyes, it was so scary. It was like a dead soul."

The man ran out the door, and Gilbert called the police. At an investigator's suggestion, Hatfield and Gilbert pored through old high school yearbooks, and within days they had each identified Roger Coleman. But police persuaded them not to file charges. "I told them it was a pretty serious case, but they told me it's not a big deal, and at the most he'd get a $30 fine. And I knew better, but I let them talk me into it."

Two months later she got a phone call from her mother, "She said, 'Pat, there's been a girl murdered, and it's Roger Coleman's sister-in-law.' And I tell you, I think the blood just left my body because I knew, I knew then."

Hatfield takes out a letter. It's a firm but polite note from Coleman, written from death row six years later. He writes that he's tired of being accused of the library incident. He's got an alibi for that evening, and he accuses another local man who supposedly looks like him. He signs off, "Sincerely, Roger Coleman." What Coleman didn't know is that Pat Hatfield had tutored the other man in high school and knew it wasn't him. "Just an outrageous lie," she says.

In December 1991, Judge Persin dismissed Behan's petition implicating Ramey. Two months later, he set Coleman's execution date for May 20.

"IS IT DIFFICULT TO BE OPTIMISTIC?" Bryant Gumbel asked Coleman on the "Today" show, 15 days before the execution date.

With six days to go, Larry King wanted to know: "How do you feel? Are you bitter? Angry?"

Five days later, Phil Donahue went straight to the point: "Wow. You've 30 hours left to live."

Having failed in the legal process, Jim McCloskey and Kitty Behan turned to the court of public opinion. They sent out press kits to dozens of publications, eliciting a parade of newspaper and magazine stories that tended to portray Coleman as an innocent victim and the citizens of Grundy as hillbillies run amok.

In a piece headlined "Hung on a Technicality," Newsweek portrayed a "small, sooted town" from which had "spun the kind of twisted tale that gives Southern Gothic a good name." As for the original trial, "the courthouse should have had a big top." The Washington Post reported that the crime had "whipped this Appalachian town of 1,500 into a frenzy of hatred and suspicion," and quoted Coleman's claim that "every minute of my time that night was accounted for." The Los Angeles Times reported that "startling new evidence has emerged" in the form of the Ramey allegation and Teresa Horn's untimely death, but neglected to mention Blake's DNA test implicating Coleman.

Then came the television cameras. Coleman made excellent, even mesmerizing TV, as he patiently explained the timeline and the witness statements, analyzed the DNA evidence and coolly dissected his own emotions.

"There's a lot of anger," he told Larry King. "There's a lot of bitterness, and a lot of frustration." During his first years of incarceration, he said, "I had a tremendous amount of hate, and it was consuming me. I had to deal with it, and I did a pretty good job of getting a handle on it . . . But now I'm six days away from being executed, and those feelings are back, and they're multiplied by a factor of 10."

Tom Scott and fellow prosecutor Michael McGlothlin, Pat Hatfield, Jean Gilbert, Brad McCoy and Brenda Ratliff, the woman whom Coleman had attempted to rape in 1977, all journeyed to Richmond to support Coleman's execution. "We tried to set the story straight, but no one ever really listened to us," McCoy recalls. The media had decided that Coleman was the victim. "No one ever really understood that Wanda was the real victim."

McCoy even consented to appear on "Today" to confront his former brother-in-law. Asked by Bryant Gumbel if he had anything to say to Coleman, Brad replied: "Yes, I would like to ask him why he did it, and I would also like to ask him to admit it."

Coleman for once seemed to lose his cool. "I did not kill Wanda, Brad! I didn't have anything to do with it! And if you'd open your eyes and look at the evidence we have now, evidence that the state has withheld . . . I mean, you just listened to what they've said, and you bought their theory, and you just closed your mind to everything that we've uncovered."

Behan and her associates at Arnold & Porter wrote to dozens of celebrities seeking their support, and the firm issued press statements claiming to have uncovered "the real killer." One release claimed "the murderer still lives in Grundy and has continued attacking women ever since."

Behan, who was battling the disease lupus at the same time she was struggling to save Coleman's life, felt crushed by an enormous sense of responsibility. "I'm the only person that stands between Roger and the electric chair," she later told author John C. Tucker. "And, you know, I'm a pathetic substitute for Superman, which is the only person who can save this guy."

Marie Deans says she was uncomfortable with the defense team's strategy. She recalls participating alongside McCloskey at a media briefing in which he pointed the finger at Ramey. "Jim said some things that were just shocking to me, because we didn't have any proof," she says.

If the media were convinced, the courts were not. "After a review of the alleged 'new evidence,' " declared a federal judge in dismissing Coleman's final appeal eight days before the execution date, "this court finds the case against Coleman as strong or stronger than the evidence adduced at trial."

Behan and McCloskey made a last-ditch effort to persuade Gov. Wilder to intervene. The governor's office received more than 6,000 messages, 95 percent of which favored Coleman. McCloskey and Behan were elated when Time put Coleman on the cover, figuring the governor would have no choice but to delay the execution. But Wilder, a proud and prickly man who resented the pressure, wasn't about to cave. Instead he offered Coleman the chance to take a polygraph.

The defense attorneys were outraged by the gesture. They believed it was unfair to compel a condemned man to take a test under such stressful circumstances. But in the end they felt they had no choice. Coleman was helicoptered to state police headquarters on the morning of execution day. He emerged in manacles, his arms lifted above his face to shade his eyes from the harsh sunlight, shuffling slowly through the door with armed state troopers on either side. None of his lawyers or friends was allowed to attend. Later in the day, Wilder's office announced Coleman had failed.

That evening, McCloskey and Behan sat on the concrete floor next to Coleman's cell; they were on one side of the bars, Coleman on the other. For his last meal, he requested a Pizza Hut pizza, fudge cookies and Sprite. When it arrived, the pizza was cold and the Sprite warm. Still, Coleman wolfed it down.

"He showed no sign of fear, even anxiety," McCloskey recalls. "It was surreal. Here we are sitting with a man we all know is about to die, and we're talking about everyday life. We were all floating."

Coleman told McCloskey he saw a positive side to his ordeal. "He said, 'If I hadn't been wrongly convicted, I would be a nobody from Grundy for my entire life. And here I am, I've met Sharon, she means the world to me, I'm famous, my face is on Time magazine. I'm a somebody.' "

The guards said it was time to go. McCloskey met Coleman's eyes and solemnly promised to prove his innocence. Then he and Behan left Coleman with the death row chaplain. Neither McCloskey nor Behan witnessed the execution.

One of the journalists who did, Kathy Still of the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier, vividly recalls Coleman entering the execution chamber. He was a few steps ahead of the chaplain and the guards, and he walked directly to the electric chair. Then he rapidly read his last words, which he had written on a paper towel, proclaiming his innocence and declaring his love for Sharon. "He held his head up the whole time," Still recalls.

AFTER THE EXECUTION, a devastated McCloskey spent a week at a religious retreat. "I reflected, and I grieved and came out of that with no answers at all." He eased the pain by plunging into other cases.

Donnie Ramey filed a libel suit against Arnold & Porter, Behan and Deans for $5 million that the firm eventually settled for an undisclosed amount. But not before the defense lawyers deposed Ramey, who denied he had attacked any of the women who accused him of sexual misconduct. He also vehemently denied that he had anything to do with Wanda McCoy's murder and rape or that he had ever claimed otherwise.

"We weren't saying he was a model citizen," says Charles H. Smith III, Ramey's attorney. "But he wasn't a rapist and a murderer. They had no justification for the claim."

Behan, who argued that her accusations against Ramey were "well-founded and reasonable," adamantly opposed the settlement. Still, she made partner at the firm and became one of its most influential rainmakers. In 1998, she made Washingtonian magazine's list of "Young Guns" -- top lawyers under 40.

The libel suit dried up funding for Marie Deans's small organization, and she was forced to close it down in 1993. Inmates on Virginia's death row lost their guardian angel. Deans says that before his execution Coleman had elicited a promise that Arnold & Porter would donate funds to her group for the many hours she put in on his behalf. But when the time came, "I got a call from Kitty to say they had decided to put that money somewhere else."

Looking back, Deans says she believes McCloskey and Behan did their best for Coleman but shouldn't have accused Ramey without solid proof. "I don't blame Kitty. She was young and had never done one of these before, and she worked very hard. But I didn't like the spin. I felt used, I guess."

For eight years, McCloskey did little to redeem his pledge to Roger Coleman. It was, he says, just too painful, and he was immersed in other work. But, with DNA testing becoming more sophisticated, he decided it was time to seek a re-testing of the evidence. Then-Gov. Warner broke precedent by deciding to authorize the test. "I believe we must always follow the available facts to a more complete picture of guilt or innocence," he said in a statement.

By then, most of the evidence in the Coleman case had been lost or destroyed. But Edward Blake, the California forensics expert, had adamantly refused to return to Virginia authorities the DNA extract from his 1990 test -- less than a drop of fluid in a thimble-size microfuge tube. He agreed to provide the material to the Toronto crime lab.

Many activists in the anti-death penalty movement enthusiastically embraced the re-testing effort. Here was a chance for the Holy Grail: proof from a test tube that an innocent person had been executed. But others, citing Blake's earlier results, were wary. "We already knew the odds were 49 out of 50 that he was guilty," says David Bruck, director of the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse at Washington and Lee University. "I warned people to be cautious."

McCloskey was not unaware that a finding of innocence could strike a huge blow to the death penalty. But he says this was not his motive. "We're part of no movement except ourselves and those we serve. I believed in Roger Coleman, I made a promise to Roger Coleman, spent our precious resources on him. I wanted the truth to be known."

IT'S TWO MONTHS AFTER THE FINDINGS WERE ANNOUNCED, and McCloskey has finally removed from his wall the framed Time cover of Coleman in chains. Gone as well is a sheet of drawing paper with the handwritten inscription: "This certificate is awarded to Jim McCloskey in recognition for being the best darn ivestigator [sic] in the whole US of A! [signed] Roger K. Coleman, Chairman, Selection Committee."

"The last file boxes are going into storage," says McCloskey. "We've erased him from our Web site and our brochure."

Each of Coleman's closest supporters had expected the test results to exonerate him, and each has had to deal with the news of his guilt. Marie Deans and Sharon Paul say they do not feel betrayed. "I have to believe something," says Paul, "and what I believe is, if Roger committed the crime, he had no memory of it, and that's why he was able to be such a strong advocate for his own innocence right until the end."

Still, the result has made her wonder about Jim McCloskey and Kitty Behan. "I just can't believe they were so wrong. I mean, these are people who do this for a living; they're not naive, they don't get duped. And that Roger, this little person from southwest Virginia, could have fooled them for so long -- that's the most difficult part for me to believe."

Behan has told friends that she still believes Coleman was innocent and that she doesn't accept the test findings. "This was a huge piece of Kitty Behan's life and how she sees herself," says author John C. Tucker, who wrote the 1997 book May God Have Mercy about the case. "It was not easy for anybody to find out that you were wrong. It's easy to try and rationalize these results."

Unlike Paul and Deans, McCloskey doesn't buy the theory that Coleman somehow had erased Wanda McCoy's murder from his memory, but he's not surprised that Coleman stuck to his claim of innocence even when sitting in the electric chair. "It was too late to tell the truth," says McCloskey. "What would all those who were near and dear to him think if he ever admitted that he did this? He couldn't allow that to happen. So he had to go down to the end drowning in the lies."

McCloskey points to photos of the 24 inmates whom Centurion is currently working to exonerate. At the top of the list is Walter Lomax, who has spent 38 years in Maryland's prison system in the killing of a night manager during a Baltimore grocery store robbery. There's Barry Beach, locked away in a Montana prison for 22 years in the killing of a young woman after police falsely claimed to have recorded his confession. And Timothy Howard, sentenced to death in 1977 for bank robbery and murder, and whom McCloskey recently helped win a verdict of "actual innocence" from a Columbus, Ohio, jury.

This is his work, his life and his answer, finally, to the Roger Coleman case. "I don't think I'll ever put the pieces together. I've tried, and I can't, and I'm just moving on."

Glenn Frankel is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.