Authors: Tim Junkin
It didn't take long. After a few weeks of being out in general population, Half approached him. “Word is, Blood, that they're trying to hit you,” he told Kirk. “Word is there's a fifty-pack contract out on your ass.” Kirk had been in the weight room every day his first weeks out. He'd met a couple other lifters. One was Bozo; another was Big Tony. He was getting physically strong again. He knew he'd have no life at all if he stayed locked down in protective custody. “Let âem come,” he said.
It happened, though, when he least expected it, when his guard
was down. He was coming out of the weight room in the early afternoon in late May. He wanted to get in a shower before all the scud balls got in there. His mother had sent him a robe, and he went to his cell and changed into it. He wore the robe and a pair of tennis shoes into the shower. Kirk had learned to wash with his back to the wall, always alert. He thought he was alone and started shampooing his hair. He ducked his head under the water to rinse out the suds. Three guys suddenly were there, in front of him, all black men. They must have been waiting for him. One threw a soapy rag in his face, trying to blind him. The idea was to blind you, incapacitate you, flip you around, and then take turns raping you. The idea was to turn you into a punk. As the rag hit Kirk in the face, one of them swung a sock stuffed with batteries, a prison-made bola, and struck Kirk hard in the back of the head. Batteries flew everywhere as Kirk went to his knees.
He flailed back at them with everything he had. They were all slipping on the soapy floor. One tried to get a choke hold around Kirk's neck. Kirk was hurt and woozy, but still strong. He tried to bite the man's arm. He got punched hard and thought he was going to black out, that he was done. That's when Half showed up. Half could act like he was certifiably crazy. He had no fear. The men saw Half run in and they scattered. Half dragged Kirk out of the shower.
“Why did you help me?” Kirk asked him. He was bleeding badly from his head. Blood covered his face, making it difficult to see.
Half shrugged. “âCause I felt like it.” He smiled the snarl that showed off his starred tooth. “âCause I like your name, maybe. Not so much the Kirk but the Noble and the Blood . . .”
Half had picked up a battery. He showed it to Kirk. “You were lucky, man. If that sock hadn't broke, they'd a whacked you over and over.”
Kirk nodded. On the tiled island lay his towel. He used it to try
and staunch the bleeding.
“You know, Blood,” Half went on, “you're gonna' have to do something about this. I don't care how you get them, but you have to. If you don't, there ain't nothing I can do to help you.”
“What?” Kirk said. “What you want me to do?”
“Think of something,” Half answered. “âCause whether you lose or not, you got to retaliate. See, the only way these people will stop messing with you, is if they know they got to fight you every time.”
Kirk's head was badly split open. He needed medical care. Much as he hated to, he had to post at the infirmary. The warden got wind of his injury and gave Kirk ten days lockdown in solitary for fighting. The guards never found out who it was he fought with.
Two days after Kirk got back into general population, he saw the man who'd thrown the soapy rag in his face. For ten days Kirk had been thinking about what Half said. He'd never done a violent thing in his life, but he believed Half that they'd never let him alone if he let this go. The man was talking on the phone and hadn't seen Kirk. Kirk backed up around the corner. A skinhead was mopping the floor, using a bucket with a metal mop wringer. Kirk picked up the metal mop wringer by the handle. It weighed at least fifteen pounds. Just as he had riding in that police car the night of his arrest, Kirk felt that he was in some kind of bizarre movie. The man on the phone still had his back to Kirk. Kirk approached. His last few steps were silent. He knew how to track. When he was close enough, when he could hear the man whispering on the phone, Kirk whistled. The man turned, and as he did Kirk gave him all he had with the mop wringer. He hit him square across the temple and knocked the man up into the air and across the hall into the far wall. The man lay on the tier floor twitching. He remained in a coma for three days. No one ever said a word about it. No one saw anything. That was the way of the South Wing.
Half and Bozo came by to see Kirk that night. “See,” Half said,
“now you'll get some respect around here.”
“I didn't like it,” Kirk said. But there was an aspect to it that had made him feel better. He'd fought back and finally won a battle.
“You got to get âem all,” Half told him.
Kirk did. He caught another of the men alone, stoned, smoking a joint in a spot blind to the guards. Kirk's first punch caught him in the ear. Kirk pummeled him as hard and as fast as he could until he ran out of strength. The man lay in the fetal position, crying for Kirk to stop. “You leave me the fuck alone, you hear?” Kirk yelled into the ear he had torn and inflamed.
The third man didn't even resist. When Kirk caught him, he just went limp. Kirk shoved his face into a cell door several times. Kirk was learning to fit in.
U
NDER THE LAW
, when a person is charged with a crime but not yet convicted, that person is cloaked with the presumption of innocence. The burden is on the state to produce evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Once a defendant is convicted in court, however, that presumption is reversed. A convicted felon is presumed to be guilty. To succeed on appeal, he has the burden of convincing a higher court that the trial judge committed a serious error or deprived him of a constitutional right. He must also show that the error or deprivation prejudiced his case and was not merely what is termed harmless error. Alternatively, if he can find what is referred to as newly discovered evidenceâevidence unknown at trial that is sufficient to show his probable innocence, he may get a new trial that way.
Following Kirk's sentencing, Steven Scheinin and David Henninger withdrew as his lawyers. Neither were appellate specialists. Gary Christopher, head of the state public defender's death penalty unit, thought it best to have new, fresh minds review the case. Also, a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, a potential basis for a new trial, is always a possibility on appeal. With Kirk facing
a death sentence, every angle needed to be explored. Scheinin did not object. He offered to help in any way he could. Kirk welcomed the change.
In Maryland each county has its own district public defender in charge of that county's office. The district public defenders are under the supervision of the state public defender. The state public defender had set up a special unit dedicated to countering death penalty prosecutions. Gary Christopher, a University of North Carolina Law School graduate, who had clerked for Judge Marvin Smith on the Maryland Court of Appeals, had been chosen to direct this unit.
Typically, after a conviction, the public defender's office concentrates only on preparing the direct appeal. Julia Bernhardt and George Burns, two lawyers from the state public defender's appellate office, had been assigned this task. They would research and write the appellate briefs. But Curtis Bloodsworth had gone to Baltimore, met with Gary Christopher, and convinced him that there was other information out there that pointed to his son's innocenceâinformation that had not surfaced at the trial. Gary Christopher met with Kirk. He was impressed with this twenty-five-year-old's zeal and his passionate protests that he was not the killer. Even while the appellate process was running its course, Christopher agreed to direct a parallel attack on the conviction.
While Bernhardt and Burns prepared the appeal, Christopher organized another investigation into the crime. Joanne Suder, an assistant trial lawyer, agreed to begin reinvestigating Dawn Hamilton's death, interviewing additional witnesses, looking for new evidence. Joanne worked with an investigator from her office, Doug Cook, a retired state trooper. Christopher also enlisted the help of the district public defender from nearby Montgomery County, Ted Weisman, who had a particular interest in death penalty cases. Weisman was willing to add his support to the effort. He agreed to
work with Joanne and offered to lend two of his more experienced investigators, Sam Wallace and Randy Edwards, to help work the case. Together they coordinated the process of finding and trying to interview witnesses, not just the ones called by the state to testify at the trial but all potential witnesses, whether from Fontana Village, Randolph Road, or from Cambridge. They planned to go after anyone who might be able to shed light on the crime. It was an ambitious undertaking.
One way to clear Kirk would be to find the real killer of Dawn Hamilton. That's what Kirk wanted, what he kept insisting on. His new legal team set about trying to track down other suspects. Suder, Weisman, Cook, Wallace, Edwards, and others from their offices began investigating the crime from scratch, as though they were new detectives on an unsolved case. They were committed to changing Kirk's fate. They didn't know how much time they had before the appeal would be resolved, before the postconviction remedies might be exhausted, before the countdown to execution began. Their work took on a new urgency. Over the next year, Ted Weisman would personally devote thirty to forty hours a week trying to save Kirk Bloodsworth while continuing to supervise an office of fifty people.
Experienced investigators never know where the key to the puzzle may lie. They pursue every lead. They chase down the clues. They wring out every rag. When Joanne Suder met with Kirk following his sentencing, she promised him that her office would not rest until they found some way to aid him. Joanne came across to Kirk as someone who believed in his innocence, someone who sincerely cared about his plight. She told him not to worry too much, to keep up the faith. Once again, his hope flared.
Richard Gray was an obvious candidate for further study. Doug Cook interviewed ex-Detective Mark Bacon at his home and Bacon was cooperative, forthcoming. Much of what he offered,
though, was suspicion rather than fact. Investigators questioned the residents of Fontana Village about Gray, but they learned little that was new. Detective Darden, the polygraph operator from the county police department, gave a short interview to Randy Edwards.
Darden was the detective who had administered the lie detector test to Richard Gray two weeks after the murder. Darden admitted that Gray had failed the polygraph. But he was suspicious and cryptic during the interview. He wouldn't disclose the precise questions that were asked Gray or which ones he supposedly lied about. Darden said he'd talk more freely only if Ann Brobst would give him permission.
Edwards tracked down Richard Gray and cajoled him into talking. Gray told him that he wore size 8½ shoes. Edwards pressed him about some of the questions that had bothered Detective Bacon. Gray explained that he had eaten his lunch just prior to hearing over his police scanner the report about the missing girl. Before eating he had washed his hands at a gas station, which is why they were clean. He told Edwards that the reason he had picked up the underwear that was found in his car was that he always grabbed used rags when he could. He used them for cleaning his cars and shining his boots. Gray denied that he had a spot of blood on his shirt. It was red paint, he explained. He had been painting a gutter for someone the week before.
Gray seemed to have an explanation for everything. The investigators continued to probe.
They went to the
News American
offices where Gray had been employed and began asking around for any information about Gray, about Kirk Bloodsworth, looking for any clue. It was October 1985 when Doug Cook ran into a woman working at the
News American
who told him she was disturbed about the Bloodsworth conviction. She felt uneasy not so much about Richard Gray but
about another colleague there, John Michael Anderson.
Anderson looked like the composite, she said. He was over six feet tall and wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots most of the time. Her fifteen-year-old daughter had ridden with him once delivering papers and had returned home spooked. She'd told her mother she would never get in his car again. He had trash, razor blades, and dirty magazines all over the back and had acted weird and frightening.
Doug Cook found another
News American
employee who told him that after the Bloodsworth conviction, he'd overheard a colleague mention how closely Anderson resembled the composite sketch. A lightbulb flickered. This man had called the Fullerton Police Station and asked them whether Anderson had been investigated. He told them about Anderson's resemblance to the composite. The detective he spoke with told him that no, Anderson had not been investigated. Nor did they have any interest in Anderson. The man thought the detective had been rude.
Cook discussed this information with the lawyers. Maybe in Anderson they'd found their “Cowboy Bob,” the suspect who kept appearing on the earlier police reports, the one mentioned repeatedly by the residents of Fontana Village the day of the crime.
Cook learned that Anderson often rented cars from Betz Auto Leasing in Rosedale. Randy Edwards and Sam Wallace visited there. On July 25, 1984, Anderson had rented a 1975 Pontiac LeMans in the morning, then returned it that afternoon and exchanged it without explanation for a different car. The Pontiac had a red interior and the carpet inside was a burgundy color. The carpet was made up of red fibers. A Betz employee who rented the car that day, recalled having seen child pornography in the car when Anderson returned it. It also had boxes of sweets, candy, and gum in it. She believed at the time that the sweets were to lure little girls into the car and advised her boss to call the police. There was also a large
stain on the carpet in the trunk. Another Betz employee told the investigators that she remembered a car Anderson returned on a different day, in early August 1984, an Oldsmobile with a trunk full of trash. She'd been the one who had to clean it out. There was a half pint of whiskey, she recalled, a half joint, some gay magazines, a box of child pornographyâpictures of children and adults having sex, and some chewing gum wrappers. Big Red gum wrappers, she specifically recalled. It also had empty candy boxes in it.