True Confessions?

By Brian Bennett

In the eight years since Carol Moore's daughter Michelle was brutally raped and murdered in Norfolk, Va., the holidays have always seemed to shine a spotlight on that empty chair at the table. This Thanksgiving was one of the worst. Just two weeks before the feast, three Navy sailors who had confessed to killing her daughter and are serving life sentences filed a petition maintaining their innocence and requesting a full pardon. Wounds Moore had hoped were slowly closing were ripped open again. She went through the motions of the holiday like a zombie, forgetting things, unable to focus, crying. She can't imagine those men going free. She knows they did it, because she heard them--as she listened to their taped confessions at the trials--describe the gruesome things they did to her daughter. "They're guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. That's it," Moore told TIME over the phone last week. "How could someone confess to something like that if they didn't do it?"

But giving a false confession is precisely what the three sailors say they did do. In their Nov. 10 petition to outgoing Virginia Governor Mark Warner, Danial Williams, Derek Tice and Joseph Dick Jr. claim that after Norfolk homicide detectives subjected them to hours of harsh and manipulative questioning, they fabricated elaborate details of a rape and murder that they had absolutely nothing to do with. The three were only part of a larger group of eight men who, over the course of a two-year investigation and three trials, were charged with the 1997 murder of Navy wife Michelle Moore-Bosko. Five of the men at one time or another confessed, but just one, Omar Ballard, had any material evidence linking him to the scene of the crime. (One of the men, Eric Wilson, was convicted only on charges of rape and released earlier this fall after more than seven years in prison; charges were eventually dropped against three others.)

Over the past year, a team of lawyers, approached by the nonprofit Innocence Project, spent thousands of pro bono hours conducting interviews, gathering documents and asking experts to compare the confessions of the sailors with the crime-scene evidence. What the team compiled was a laundry list of inconsistencies that it hopes will be enough to sway Warner just as the Governor is about to leave office and possibly make a run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Warner just last week spared the life of death-row inmate Robin Lovitt, citing the destruction of DNA evidence that might have cleared his name. But with no looming execution date for the Norfolk Three, their request could fall to Warner's successor, Tim Kaine.

Hard as their story may be for Carol Moore and others to believe, the Norfolk Three's case is just the latest instance of judicial reappraisal in which DNA evidence seems to contradict previous criminal confessions. In recent years, new DNA sequencing technology has allowed the American justice system to right more than 150 wrongful convictions--and almost a quarter of those had been based on a false confession. The most high-profile example is the 1989 Central Park jogger case, in which five teenagers who had confessed to raping a woman were cleared 13 years later after DNA analysis of evidence couldn't link them to the crime scene.

A 2002 study from Northwestern University showed that 59% of all miscarriages of justice in homicide investigations in Illinois--where a year later Governor George Ryan commuted all death sentences--involved false confessions. But despite such evidence, few confessions are ever thrown out. According to Richard J. Ofshe, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in false confessions, only recently have juries been allowed to hear testimony about the phenomenon, which can occur as a result of coercion, exhaustion or mental impairment. The juries in the Norfolk trials were not among those. Many experts say the solution is to require police to videotape all interrogations and confessions of suspects in capital cases, as is the law in Minnesota, Illinois, Alaska and Maine.

Moore-Bosko's murder resonated in Norfolk, a Navy town, because sailors' wives are often left at home alone while their husbands are at sea. The 18-year-old newlywed was slain in the early-morning hours of July 8, 1997, in her apartment in a low-rent brick building. She had been expecting her husband Billy, a Navy signalman, home that day from his weeklong tour of duty. After Billy discovered her body, stabbed in the chest, on the bedroom floor, the local police were under enormous pressure to solve the crime quickly. By the second day of the investigation, the clues seemed to be falling nicely into place; a witness had identified Moore-Bosko's neighbor Williams as having been stalking her.

Williams went to the police station, thinking he was summoned just to answer a few more questions, he told TIME by phone from prison last week. Since he trusted the police and believed in his innocence, he says, he didn't ask for a lawyer. He maintained he had been in bed the entire night of the rape and murder, with his wife Nicole, who days before had had a hysterectomy. (Williams says the detectives never asked Nicole what she remembered, and she died of ovarian cancer three months later.) But it was at the station, in a windowless room, that the detectives began to browbeat Williams, and he began to, as he now puts it, "question my own memory." By his account, they told him they knew he was obsessed with Moore-Bosko and had raped and killed her. They told him they had an eyewitness who saw him leave the victim's apartment. (No such witness existed.) They told him that unless he confessed and cooperated, he would face the death penalty. Williams asked to take a lie-detector test, which he passed, but he says the detectives told him he had failed.

After close to 13 hours, the detectives had his confession and, in their minds, didn't need to look any further. But six months later, Williams' DNA evidence didn't match blood or semen found on the scene or the skin found under Moore-Bosko's fingernails. The detectives' conclusion was that Williams hadn't acted alone. So they brought in Joseph Dick Jr., who had been living with Williams and his wife at the time. The night of Moore-Bosko's murder, Dick told the detectives at first, he was on duty, a fact they never checked. (Navy senior chief Michael Ziegler, who was Dick's direct supervisor, confirmed to TIME that Dick had been scheduled for duty.) Still, after hours of interrogation, Dick too confessed. His father, who says Dick has been slow since getting hit in the head by a swing when he was 3, believes the police could "convince my son to sign anything." But again, his DNA didn't match, and Dick gave the police more names, one of which led to Tice. "In the light of day, you say you wouldn't confess," says Tice over the phone from prison, "but in that room with [the detectives] standing over you, you get worn down."

In March 1999, detectives finally got a DNA match after Omar Ballard, a convicted rapist and onetime acquaintance of Moore-Bosko's, confessed in a graphic letter to a friend that he had killed her. In his first audiotaped confession, given after just 20 minutes of questioning, Ballard described the rape with previously undisclosed details from the crime scene and said he had acted alone. Ballard changed his story at the behest of the detectives, the petition says, claiming he had perpetrated the crime along with four other men. In the petition, Ballard stands by his original claim that he had acted alone.

Still, even Ballard's testimony won't necessarily be able to turn back the clock. While Tice firmly protested his innocence through two separate trials, both Williams and Dick ended up pleading guilty. The reason may be understandable in retrospect--both their lawyers told them to stick to the story to avoid the death penalty--but the fact that they affirmed their confessions doesn't help their case. No wonder prosecutor D.J. Hansen, who put the men behind bars, says there is nothing new in the petition that wasn't tested in the normal judicial process. "Justice was done," he says. But as Carol Moore has learned the hard way, in the age of CSI and DNA, justice is never truly done, even if it appears as if the truth has already spoken.