Case of a Lifetime

I'd chosen to work on Kelly's case on my first day at NYU's prison law clinic. The director, Claudia Angelos, said the superintendent of Bedford Hills prison had called personally to ask her to take it on. No one had ever heard of a superintendent doing such a thing.

Under Claudia's guidance, I worked for two years on Kelly's petition for a writ of habeas corpus, through which prisoners appeal their convictions in federal court. I visited Kelly at the prison monthly, sometimes more. I wanted to keep her informed of what we were doing, and I wanted to keep her company.

The second time I met with Kelly, she asked me whether I was gay. I'd had relationships with men and women, so I told her she had good intuition. In the years since, people have asked whether my devotion to Kelly had to do with our shared sexual orientation. But we have always been more different than alike: Kelly is a Southern, small-town, working-class, deeply religious Catholic; I am a Northern, big-city, secular and skeptical Jewish professional. I would have been moved by Kelly whether she was gay or straight.

The crime itself had been brutal. Paul David Hatch, a star athlete who had just graduated from high school, had been working alone at the Sherrill gas station. His body, bound and gagged in a back room, was discovered by his girlfriend shortly after 1 p.m. His throat had been slashed; $279 was missing.

The only evidence placing Kelly at the scene was the testimony of a man named Robert Hyland, a night watchman at a plant up the road, who had driven up to the pumps at approximately 12:50 p.m. With no attendant in view -- these were the full-service days -- Hyland got out of his car and stood there a minute or two. As he was waiting, a blue car pulled up to another pump.

The man who emerged from the station and pumped his gas was someone Hyland had never seen before. There was something peculiar about him; he seemed nervous and had trouble making change. Hyland got a good, close look before driving off with $5 worth of gas.

Two days later, when initially questioned by the police, Hyland gave a detailed description of the presumed killer and helped create a sketch of the man. But he said he hadn't seen the face of the blue car's driver. He remembered "long, black shoulder-length hair," but could not describe age, build, clothing, speech or manner. He couldn't say whether the driver was a man or a woman.

The police investigation rolled on, but the department did not contact Hyland again until December 1975, 28 months after the murder. An officer who had worked on the Virginia case had called to suggest that the New York police take a look at Billy Ronald. An officer showed Hyland two photo spreads. From a set of males, Hyland immediately selected Billy Ronald. From a second group -- all women -- Hyland initially picked two photos, saying they both looked like the person in the car, before settling on Kelly's.

Before the trial, Kelly's court-appointed attorney went to the prosecutor. He pointed to the shaky eyewitness identification, the problem of guilt by association. Unmoved, the prosecutor said his best offer was a plea to robbery, which carried a sentence of five to 15 years. Kelly wouldn't hear of it. She trusted the system: She was sure that if she told the truth, she'd be believed. Everything would be okay.

The trial began in New York on March 14, 1977, more than 3 ½ years after the murder. Kelly and Billy Ronald were tried together, and the evidence against Billy Ronald was overwhelming: His fingerprints had been found on the tape used to bind the body. On the stand, Hyland positively identified Kelly for the first time. When Kelly's lawyer pointed out Hyland's earlier uncertainty, the witness became increasingly adamant.

Multiple studies have shown that a witness's certainty has little to do with the accuracy of identification, but most people don't know this. A common and troubling misperception is that the more confident a witness is, the more accurate the testimony is likely to be. The jury convicted Kelly on March 29, 1977.

I must have gone through the trial transcript 100 times, reading and rereading, indexing, trying to find useful bits to incorporate into the petition. Another clinic student and I visited Billy Ronald at the dreary-looking maximum-security Powhatan Correctional Center in State Farm, Va. He was polite but guarded. He declined to discuss William Sullivan, who we believed had been with him on August 11, 1973. But he was willing to say that he had Kelly's car for the 24-hour period that included the time of the crime, that Kelly was not with him, and that Kelly did not know his whereabouts or actions when he had use of her car.