Fred Rosen - Did They Really Do it?: From Lizzie Borden to the 20th Hijacker

FRED ROSEN

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Did They Really Do It?

From Lizzie Borden to the 20th Hijacker

Fred Rosen

For Lori Perkins,

who helped changed my life

I BELIEVE STRONGLY IN THE LONG ARM OF COINCIDENCE . BECAUSE I KNOW COPS WELL , I KNOW HOW MUCH IT CONTRIBUTES TO THE SOLVING OF REAL POLICE CASES .

E D M CBAIN

P ROLOGUE

By the end of June 2005, two of the biggest criminal cases in United States history had finally been adjudicated by lower courts: Zacarias Moussaoui aka The Twentieth Hijacker, and Edgar Ray Killen, the former KKK Kleagle who was convicted of murdering the three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964. Yet, questions lingered about the guilt of both.

Did Moussaoui really plan to be the twentieth hijacker on 9/11?

Did Killen really finger the civil rights workers, marking them for death?

Did they really do it?

Because most criminal convictions are based on circumstantial evidence, such questions will always linger. When cases have reached the last level of appeal, the courts sign off; the cases are relegated to the history bin. Truth is lost. People who did it are found innocent. Worse, people who didnt do it are found guilty and are executed or forced to serve prison terms for crimes they did not commit.

In 1946, Erle Stanley Gardner formed the Court of Last Resort, a group of criminal justice experts who looked into closed cases, where a defendant alleged he was convicted for a crime he didnt commit. Unfortunately, it has long ceased to exist. But the work needs to be done.

Its time, then, to take a second look at eleven of those cases. They have been chosen both for their historical relevance and contemporary significance. It is no coincidence, for example, that the case of Dr. Mudd began in 1865 and didnt end until the latter part of the twenty-first century. Forever having their family name besmirched, the Mudd family had taken their case all the way to the president to prove their forebears innocence. Nor can any investigator taking a look at the canon of these cases ignore the more popular ones that continue to generate controversy, including Lizzie Borden, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and the Rosenbergs.

Did they really do it? Lets find out.

C ONTENTS

1 H ERO OR V ILLAIN ? P ART I

18651868 D R . S AMUEL M UDD

A heavily armed patrol of Union soldiers filled the front yard of the rural Maryland farm. Inside the farmhouse, Colonel H. H. Wells, an investigator for the Judge Advocate Generals Office, interrogated one of the suspects in the conspiracy to kill President Abraham Lincoln.

Have two strangers been here recently? Colonel Wells asked Dr. Samuel Mudd. Before answering, Mudd became very much excited, and got pale as a sheet of paper and blue about his lips, like a man frightened at something he had done, Wells later recalled.

It was about 4 oclock on Saturday morning, the 15th of April, when I was aroused by a loud knock at my door, Dr. Mudd began.

Going to the window, he pulled back the curtain. There at the door was a young man holding the reins of two horses. On one of them, a second man sat, slumped over in pain. Mudd opened the door. The man who held the horses was talkative and wore a dusty, cutoff jacket and a huge ribbon of a bow tie.

My companion has broken his leg, and desires medical assistance, the young man said.

Mudd helped bring the injured man into his house and laid him on a sofa in the front parlor.

I fell from a horse, volunteered the injured man, apparently in response to Mudds unarticulated question. Did either man identify himself? Wells asked.

Mudd shook his head. The injured man lay there awhile on Mudds couch, catching his breath, until his companion and Dr. Mudd carried him upstairs into the front bedroom and set him on the bed. Carefully, Mudd removed the dusty black boot and gave it to his wife for safekeeping. Examining the injured leg, he saw that the front bone of the foot was broken at right angles about two inches above the instep.

It was a light break that could have been worse, Mudd told his interrogator. That made no sense to Wells. It seemed odd that a broken bone in the foot would stick out at right angles if it was just a light break. Dr. Mudd proceeded to dress the limb, as best as I was able to do with the limited facilities I had available.