"He Was Innocent"

As the top crime reporter on the Detroit Free Press (circ. 394,302) Ken McCormick, 45, picks his own assignments and takes as much time as he needs on them. One assignment he worked on brought the Free Press a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for exposing legislative graft in Michigan. Last July, McCormick picked another story he thought promising. He went to the State Prison of Southern Michigan to talk to a convict who had written the Free Press that he was innocent. McCormick was skeptical of the prisoner's story, remarked to Warden William Bannan that he had talked to more than 50 convicts who said they were innocent, but that not a one had ever convinced him. The warden agreed, but added: "There's one man in prison who has convinced me he's innocent. He's Willie Galloway, at Ionia [prison] doing life for a holdup."

Reporter McCormick went to see Galloway, 28, a Negro who had already served eight years of a life term as an accomplice in the holdup-slaying of a Detroit housewife. McCormick listened to Galloway's story, then for five weeks checked the facts himself. He dug up witnesses who said that at the time of the murder, Galloway was working at his job as a porter and handyman in a Detroit restaurant. An anonymous phone tip led him to another witness, who admitted he was at the scene of the murder and that Galloway was not involved. Finally, he found one man in prison and another not yet arrested whom the evidence "strongly indicated . . . may have been guilty of the crime" that Calloway paid the penalty for. Three months ago, the Free Press began a Page One series, pointing all this out. Two months after the series started, the state ordered a new trial for Galloway. Last week, across Page One of the Free Press, was the triumphant headline: GALLOWAY FREED BY COURT AS STATE DROPS CHARGES.

Said Recorder's Court Judge Martha W. Griffiths: "Without the careful and painstaking investigation of Free Press Reporter Ken McCormick, Willie Galloway would of course still be in prison." Added Willie Galloway: "When the judge said I was freed, I didn't know what to say, the water was just running out of my eyes so."

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