Thirty years ago, a 76-year-old white widow was brutally murdered in her South Carolina home. Police arrested a 23-year-old African-American handyman who had recently cleaned the woman’s windows and gutters. He was quickly tried and sentenced to death.
Appellate courts twice overturned the conviction. Each time, Edward Lee Elmore was reconvicted and sentenced to death again.
Fast-forward to 2009, when a South Carolina judge decided that Elmore could not be executed because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in another case that states could no longer put to death mentally disabled convicts. Elmore was borderline retarded, with an IQ of 61.
Near the end of 2011, a federal appeals court decided that Elmore was entitled to still another trial based, in part, on evidence of “police ineptitude and deceit.” Finally, just after the publication of this important new book, prosecutors struck a deal with Elmore. If he would plead guilty to murdering Dorothy Edwards, he would be released immediately. Elmore accepted the deal, while still maintaining his innocence, and walked to freedom just weeks ago after three decades behind bars, including 27 years on Death Row.
That is a brief overview of this fascinating case, filled with twists and turns and memorable characters, including defense lawyer Diana Holt, who was consumed by her determination to save Elmore from execution.
Author Raymond Bonner is a lawyer and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent a decade interviewing the chief characters and poring over court records. The result is a riveting account, in the words of the subtitle, of “a murder case gone wrong.”
Bonner argues persuasively that Elmore was innocent and that the actual killer likely was a white neighbor who was never interviewed by police and who has since died.
The neighbor, Jimmy Holloway, was a frequent visitor who even had a key to Dorothy Edwards’ home. Some thought he was having an affair with her, and may have become enraged when he learned that she was planning a trip to visit her boyfriend. Elmore’s lawyer believes that an argument got out of hand and that Holloway killed Edwards and then called police to say he had found her blood-soaked body in a bedroom closet.
Holloway suggested to police that Elmore might have committed the crime, but police never found solid evidence or a motive that would point to Elmore. One of his fingerprints was found on the back door, but it easily could have been from the time he came to clean her windows and gutters.
Police apparently found it convenient to pin the killing on a mentally handicapped black man with no criminal record rather than consider that the real killer might have been a trusted white neighbor.
Bonner found ample evidence of police, prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, as well as a grossly inadequate defense. One public defender regularly arrived in court drunk.
Attorney Holt comes across as a driven, larger-than-life woman determined to see justice done. Her early years included sexual violation at the hands of her stepfather, drug abuse and time spent in prison for armed robbery. But her burning desire to become a lawyer led her to law school and work with the South Carolina Death Penalty Center, where she was assigned to the Elmore case.
When prosecutors recently offered Elmore his freedom in return for a guilty plea, the likely reason is that they doubted they could win another conviction after all the derelictions Holt had exposed, including evidence that police had planted hair samples from the defendant’s groin to make it appear that he had raped the victim before killing her.
Bonner has written an absorbing real-life crime story. My one hesitation is that the narrative tends to bog down in the second half with overly long excerpts from court testimony.
Despite that reservation, Bonner convincingly demonstrates the myriad ways that lying, sloppy police work, incompetent judges and biased juries can skew cases in a manner that literally can cost a defendant his life.
Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, by Raymond Bonner; Knopf, 298 pp.; $26.95.
Bill Williams is a free-lance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at billwaw@comcast.net.