Trials and tribulation. After months of frustration, failure, and growing public scorn, Sheriff's Thomas Tate, ABI lead investigator Simon Benson, and the district attorney's investigator Larry Eichner decided to arrest Walter McMillan based primarily on Ralph Mayer's allegation. They hadn't yet done much investigation of McMillan, so they decided to arrest him on the pretextual charge while they built their case. Myers claimed to be terrified of McMillan.
One of the officers suggested to Myers that McMillan might have sexually assaulted him. The idea was so provocative and inflammatory that Myers immediately recognized its usefulness and somberly acknowledged that it was true. Alabama law had outlawed non-procreative sex, so officials planned to arrest McMillan on sodomy charges. Okay, so non-procreative, that means sex without the, um... I guess the goal of having a baby.
On June 7th, 1987, Sheriff Tate led an army of more than a dozen officers to a backcountry road where they knew Walter would use on his return home from work. Officers stopped Walter's truck and drew their weapons, then forced Walter from his vehicle and surrounded him. Tate told him he was under arrest.
When Walter frantically asked the sheriff what he had done, the sheriff told him that he was being charged with sodomy. Confused by the term, Walter told the sheriff that he did not understand the meaning of the word. When the sheriff explained the charge in crude terms, Walter was incredulous and couldn't help but laugh at the notion.
This provoked Tate, who unleashed a torrent of racial slurs and threats. Walter would report for years that all he heard throughout his arrest over and over again was the N-word, followed by insults and threats of lynching. I'm going to stop here and make the comment that this is a disgusting racial slur and is used to dehumanize people and is so inappropriate and should never be said.
And I have no tolerance for hearing this word. So although it is printed in this book, because this is a true account of what Walter McMillan went through and what so many people of color go through. Or I should say black people specifically. This is not a word that will be appropriate in our class. We're going to keep telling you.
We're running around with all these white girls. I ought to take you off and hang you like we were done in Mobile, Tate reportedly told Walter. The sheriff is referring to the lynching of a young African-American man named Michael Donald in Mobile, about 60 miles south.
We talked about this a couple weeks ago now, but lynching really isn't just the hanging with a noose of someone. It is the public humiliation, the public killing of someone for entertainment, truly. White people used to set up In the beginning when we were talking about racial lynching, it was said how white people would set it up like a circus.
There would be food tents. There would be popcorn. It was this form of entertainment.
And it wasn't just through nooses, through hanging people. It was through any form of public killing and torture could be defined as lynching. Donald was walking home from the store one evening, hours after a mistrial was declared in the prosecution of a black man accused of shooting a white office. Sorry, a mistrial was declared.
Many white people were shocked by the verdict and blamed the mistrial and the African-Americans who had been permitted to serve on the jury. After burning a cross on the courthouse lawn, a group of enraged white men who were members of the KKK or the Ku Klux Klan went out searching for someone to victimize. They found Donald as he was walking home and descended on him. After several beatings beating the young black man, they hanged him from a nearby tree where his lifeless body was discovered several hours later.
Local police ignored the obvious evidence that the death was a hate crime and hypothesized that Donald must have been involved in drug dealing, which his mother adamantly denied. Adamantly meaning like, um... There was no truth to it. Like she was very, very sure it was false. Outraged by the lack of local law enforcement interest in the case, the black community and civil rights activists persuaded the United States Department of Justice to get involved.
Three white men who were arrested two years later and details of the lynching were finally made public. It had been more than three years since the arrests, but when Tate and the other officers started making threats of lynching, Walter was terrified. He was also confused. They said he was being arrested for raping another man, but they were throwing questions at him about the murder of Rhonda Morrison.
Walter vehemently denied both allegations. When it became clear that the officers would get no help from Walter in making a case against him, they locked him up and proceeded with their investigation. When Monroe County District Attorney Ted Pearson first heard his investigator's evidence against Walter McMillan, he must have been disappointed.
Ralph Myers'story of the crime was pretty far-fetched. His knack for dramatic embellishment made even the most basic allegations unnecessarily complicated. Here's Myers'account of the murder of Rhonda Morrison. So again, Ralph Myers is the white criminal who is Has an altered perspective of reality and is doing anything that he can to shorten his sentence. And so he is trying to blame and help the police blame this crime of Rhonda Morrison, the wealthy white woman, on someone.
It's very far-fetched that it was Walter McMillan, but they're putting all their eggs in this basket and they're going to blame it on him. So this is Meyer's account of it. On the day of the murder, Myers was getting gas when Walter McMillan saw him at the gas station and forced him at gunpoint to get in Walter's truck and drive to Monroeville. Myers didn't really know Walter before that day.
Once in the truck, Walter told Myers he needed him to drive because Walter's arm hurt. Myers protested, but he had no choice. Walter directed Myers to drive him to Jackson Cleaners in downtown Monroeville and instructed him to wait in the truck while McMillan went inside alone. After waiting a long time, Myers drove down the street to a grocery store to buy cigarettes. He returned 10 minutes later.
After another long wait, Myers finally saw McMillan emerge from the store and return to the truck. Upon entering the truck, he admitted that he had killed the store clerk. Myers then drove McMillan back to the gas station so that Myers could retrieve his vehicle.
Before Myers left, Walter threatened to kill him even if he had told anyone what he had seen or done. In summary, an African-American man planning a robbery murder in the heart of Monroeville in the middle of the day stops at a gas station and randomly selects a white man to become his accomplice by asking him to drive him into to and from the crime scene because his arm is injured. Even though he had been able to drive himself to the gas station where he encountered Myers and to drive his truck home after returning Myers to the gas station.
Law enforcement officers knew that Myers'story would be very difficult to prove. So they arrested Walter for sodomy, which served to shock the community and further demonize McMillan. It also gave police an opportunity to bring Walter's truck to jail for Bill Hooks, a jailhouse informant to see. Bill Hooks was a young black man with a reputation as a jailhouse snitch. He had been in the county jail for several days on burglary charges when McMillan was arrested.
Hooks was promised release from jail and reward money if he could connect McMillan's truck to Morrison murder. Hooks eagerly told investigators that he had driven by Jackson Cleaners near the time of the crime and had seen a truck tear away from the cleaners with two men inside. At the jail, Hooks positively identified Walter's truck as the one he'd seen at the cleaners nearly six months earlier. This second witness gave law enforcement officials what they needed to charge Walter McMillan with the capital murder and the shooting death of Rhonda Morrison.
When the indictment was announced, There was joy and relief in the community that someone had been charged. Sheriff Tate, the district attorney, and other law enforcement officers who had become targets of criticism were cheered. The absence of an arrest had disrupted life in Monroeville, and now things could settle down.
So that's what it's all about, folks. They needed to arrest someone. It was creating an uproar in the community, so there was a lot of pressure on the police officers to blame someone or to arrest someone. People who knew Walter found it difficult to believe he could be responsible for a sensational murder. He had no history of crime or violence and for most folks who knew him, robbery just didn't make sense for a man who worked as hard as Walter.
Black residents told Sheriff Tate that he had arrested the wrong man. Tate still had not investigated McMillan himself, his life or background or even his whereabouts on the day of the murder. He knew about the affair with Karen Kelly and had heard the suspicion and rumors that Walter's independence must mean he was dealing drugs.
Given his eagerness to make an arrest, this seemed to be enough for Tate to accept Meyer's accusations. As it turned out, on the day of the murder, a fish fry was held at Walter's house. Members of Walter's family spent the day out in front of the house selling food to pass her by.
Evelyn Smith, Walter's sister, was a local minister, and she and her family occasionally raised money for the church by selling food on the roadside. Because Walter's house was closer to the main road, they often sold from his front yard. There are at least a dozen church parishers at the house all morning with Walter and his family on the day Rhonda Morrison was murdered.
Walter didn't have a tree job that day. He had decided to replace the transmission in his truck and called over his mechanic friend Jimmy Hunter to help. By 9 30 in the morning the two men had dismantled Walter's truck completely removing the transmission. By 11 o'clock relatives had arrived and had started fish frying and other frying fish and other food to sell.
Some church members didn't get there until later. Sister, we could have been here long ago, but the traffic in Monroeville was completely backed up. Cop cars and fire trucks looked like something bad had happened up at that cleaner's, Evelyn Smith recalled one of the members saying. Police reported that Morrison's murder took place around 10.15 a.m., 11 miles or so from the McMillan home, at the same time that a dozen church members were at Walter's home selling food while Walter and Jimmy worked on his truck.
In the early afternoon, Ernst Welch, a white man whose black residence called the Furniture Man because he worked for a local furniture store, arrived to collect money from Walter's mother for a purchase she had made on credit. Welch told the folks gathered at the house that his niece had been murdered at Jackson Cleaners that morning. They discussed the shocking news with Welch for some time.
Taking into account the church members, Walter's family, and the people who were constantly stopping at the house to buy sandwiches, dozens of people were able to confirm that Walter could have not committed the murder. That group included a police officer who stopped by the house to buy a sandwich and noted in his police log that he had bought food at the McMillan house with Walter and the crowd of church folks present. Based on their personal knowledge of Walter's whereabouts at the time of the Morrison murder, family members, church members, black pastors, and others all pleaded with Sheriff Tate to release McMillan.
Tate wouldn't do it. The arrest had been too long in the making to admit yet another failure. After some discussion, the district attorney, the sheriff, and the ABI investigator agreed to stick with the McMillan accusation.
Walter's alibi wasn't the only problem for law enforcement. Ralph Myers began to have some second thoughts about his allegations against McMillan. He was also facing indictment in the Morrison murder. He had been promised that he wouldn't get the death penalty and would and would get favorable treatment to exchange for his testimony. But it was starting to dawn on him that admitting to involvement in a high-profile murder that he actually had nothing to do with was probably not smart.
A few days before the capital murder charges against McMillan were made public, Myers summoned police investigators and told them his allegations against McMillan weren't true. At this point, Tate and his investigators had little interest in Myers'recantation. Instead, they decided to pressure Myers to produce some incriminating details. When Myers protested that he didn't have more incriminating details because, well, the story wasn't true, the investigators weren't having it.
It's not clear who decided to put both Myers and McMillan on death row before trial to create additional pressure, but it was a nearly unprecedented maneuver that proved very effective. It is illegal to subject pre-trial detainees like Walter and Myers to confinement that constitutes punishment. Pre-trial detainees are generally housed in local jails where they enjoy more privileges and more latitude than convicted criminals who are sent to prison. Putting someone who has not yet tried in a prison reserved for convicted felons is almost never done as it's as is putting someone not yet convicted of a crime on death row.
Even the other death row prisoners were shocked. Death row is the most restrictive punitive confinement permitted. Prisoners are locked in a small cell by themselves for 23 hours a day. Condemned inmates have limited opportunity for exercise or visitation and are held in disturbingly close proximity to the electric chair.
Sheriff Tate drove Walter to Holman Correctional Facility, a short ride away in Atmore, Alabama. Before the trip, the sheriff again threatened Walter with racial slurs and terrifying plans. It's clear how Tate was able to persuade Holman's warden Pullman's warden to house two pretrial detainees on death row, although Tate knew people at the prison from his days as a probation officer.
The transfer of Myers and McMillan from the county jail to death row took place on August 1st, 1987, less than a month before the scheduled execution of Rain Witter. When Walter McMillan arrived on Alabama's death row, just 10 years after the modern death penalty was reinstituted, an entire community of condemned men awaited him. Most of the injured or so injured, most of the hundred or so death row prisoners who had been sentenced to execution in Alabama since capital punishment was restored in 1975, were black.
Although to Walter's surprise, nearly 40% of them were white. Everyone was poor and everyone asked him why he was there. Condemned prisoners on Alabama's death row unit are housed in windowless concrete buildings that are notoriously hot and uncomfortable. Each death row inmate was placed in a five by eight cell with a metal door. a commode, and a steel bunk.
The temperatures in August consistently reached over 100 degrees for days and sometimes weeks at a time. Incarcerated men would trap rats, poisonous spiders, and snakes they found inside the prison to pass the time and to keep safe. Ew. Isolated and remote, most prisoners got few visits and even fewer privileges. Existence at Holman centered on Alabama's electric chair.
The large wooden chair was built in the 1930s, and inmates had painted it yellow before attaching its leather straps and electrodes. They called it Yellow Mama. The executions at Holman resumed just a few years before Walter arrived. John Evans and Arthur Jones had recently been electrocuted in Holman's execution chamber. Russ Cannon, an attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta, had volunteered to represent Evans.
Evans filmed the scene. what had become an after-school special for kids where he shared the story of his life with school children and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made. After courts refused to block the Evans execution following multiple appears, Cannon went to the prison to witness the execution at Evans'request.
It was worse than Russ could have ever imagined. He later filed a much-reviewed affidavit describing the entire horrific process. Affidavit, sorry. At 8.30 p.m., the first jolt of 1,900 volts of electricity passed through Mr. Evans'body. It lasted 30 seconds.
Sparks and flames erupted with the electrode tied to Mr. Evans'left leg. His body slammed against the straps holding him in the electric chair, and his fists clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst from the strap holding it in place.
A large puff of grayish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr. Evans'face. An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room. Two doctors examined Mr. Evans and declared that he was not dead.
The electrode on the left leg was refastened. At 8.30 p.m., Mr. Evans was administered a second 30-second jolt of electricity. The stench of burning flesh was nauseating.
More smoke emanated. from his leg and head. Again, the doctors examined Mr. Evans. The doctors reported that his heart was still beating and that he was still alive.
At that time, I asked the prisoner, the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr. Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request for clemency was denied. At 8 40 p.m., a third charge of electricity 30 seconds in duration was passed through Mr. Evans'body.
At 8.44, the doctors pronounced him dead. The execution of John Evans took 14 minutes. Walter McMillan knew nothing about any of this before he arrived at Holman.
But with another scheduled execution fast approaching, condemned prisoners were talking about the electric chair constantly when Walter arrived. For his first three weeks on Alabama's death row, the horrific execution of John Evans was pretty much all he heard about. The surreal whirlwind of the proceedings the preceding weeks had left Walter devastated. After living his whole life free and unrestrained by anyone or anything, he found himself confined and threatened in a way he could never imagine. The intense rage of the arresting officers and the racists, taunts and threatens from uniformed police officers who did not know him were shocking.
He saw in the people who arrested him and processed him at the courthouse, even in other inmates at the jail, a contempt that he'd never experienced before. He'd always been well-liked and gotten along with just about everyone. He genuinely believed the accusations against him had been serious misunderstandings, that once officials talked to his family to confirm his alibi, he'd be released in a couple days.
When the days turned into weeks, Walter began to sink into deeper despair. His family assured him that the police would soon let him go, but nothing happened. His body reacted to the shock of his situation. A lifelong smoker, Walter tried to smoke to calm his nerves.
But at Holman, he found the experience of smoking nauseating. and quit immediately. For days, he couldn't taste anything he ate.
He couldn't orient or calm himself. When he woke each morning, he would feel normal for a few minutes and then sink into terror upon remembering where he was. Prison officials had shaved his head and all the hair from his face.
Looking in a mirror, he didn't recognize himself. The county jails where Walter had been housed before his transfer were awful, but the small, hot prison cell on Holman's death row was far worse. He was used to working outside among the trees when the scent of the fresh pine on the cool breeze. Now he found himself staring at the bleak walls of death row. Fear and anguish, unlike anything he'd ever experienced, settled on Walter.
Death row prisoners were constantly advising him, but he had no way of knowing whom to believe. The judge had earlier appointed an attorney to represent him, a white man Walter didn't trust. His family raised money to hire the only black criminal lawyer in the region, J.L.
Chestnut and Bruce Boynton from Selma. Chestnut was fiery and had done a lot of work in the black community to enforce civil rights. Boynton's mother, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was a legendary activist.
Boynton himself had strong civil rights credentials as well. Despite their collective experience, Chestnut and Boynton failed to persuade local officials to release Walter and couldn't prevent his transfer to Holman. If anything, hiring outside lawyers seemed to provoke Monroe County officials even more.
On the trip to Holman, Tate was furious that McMillan's had involved outside counsel. He mocked Walter for thinking it would make any difference. Although the money to hire Chestnut and Boynton was raised by family members through church donations and by financing their meager possessions, local law enforcement interpreted it as evidence of Walter's secret money.
Horde and double life. Confirmation that he wasn't the innocent black man he pretended to be. Walter tried to adjust to Holman, but things only got worse.
With a scheduled execution approaching, people on the row were agitated and angry. Other prisoners had advised him to take action and file a federal complaint, since he couldn't legally be held on death row. When Walter, who could barely read or write, failed to file the various pleadings, rights, motions, and lawsuits, The other prisoners had advised him to file. They blamed him for his predicament.
Fight for yourself. Don't trust your lawyer. They can't put you on death row without being convicted. Walter heard this constantly, but he couldn't imagine how to file a pleading in court himself. There were days when I couldn't breathe, Walter recalled later.
I hadn't ever experienced anything like this before in my life. I was around all these murderers, and yet it felt like sometimes they were the only ones trying to help me. I prayed, I read the Bible, and I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that I was scared, terrified just about every day.
Ralph Myers was faring no better. He had also been charged with capital murder and the death of Rhonda Morrison, and his refusal to continue cooperating with law enforcement meant that he was sent to death row too. He was placed on a different tier to prevent contact with McMillan.
Whatever advantage Myers thought he could gain by saying he knew something about the Morrisons'murder was clearly gone now. He was depressed and sinking deeper into emotional crisis. From the time he was burned as a child, he had always feared fire, heat, and small spaces.
As the prisoners talked more and more about the details of Evans'execution and Wayne Ritter's impending execution, Myers became more and more distraught. On the night of the Ritter execution, Myers was in full crisis, sobbing in his cell. There's a tradition in death row in Alabama that at the time scheduled for the execution, the condemned prisoners bang on their cell doors with cups in protest. At midnight, while other prisoners banged away, Myers curled up on the floor in the corner of cell, hyperventilating and flinching with each clang he heard.
When the stench of burned flesh that many of the row claimed they could smell during the execution wafted into his cell, Myers dissolved. He called Tate the next morning and told him he would say whatever he wanted if it would get him off death row. Tate initially justified keeping Myers and McMillan on death row for safety reasons. But Tate immediately picked Myers up and brought him back to the county jail the day after the Ritter execution.
Tate didn't appear to discuss with anyone the decision to move Myers off death row. Ordinarily, the Alabama Department of Corrections couldn't just put people on death row or let them off without court orders or legal filings, and certainly no prison warden could do so on his own. But nothing about the prosecution of Walter McMillan was turning out to be ordinary.
Once removed from death row and back in Monroe County, Myers affirmed his initial accusations against McMillan. With Myers as his primary witness and Bill Hooks ready to say that he saw Walter's truck at the crime scene, the district attorney believed that he could proceed against McMillan. The case was scheduled for the trial in February of 1988. Ted Pearson had been a district attorney for nearly 20 years. He and his family had lived in South Alabama for generations.
He knew the local customs, values, and traditions well. and had put them on the good use for the courtroom. He was getting older and had plans to retire soon, but he hated that his office had been criticized for failing to solve the Morrison murder more quickly. Pearson was determined to leave office with a victory and likely saw the prosecution of Walter McMillan as one of the most important cases of his career. In 1987, all 40 elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, even though there were 16 majority black counties in the state.
When African Americans began to exercise their right to vote in 1970, there was a deep concern among some prosecutors and judges about how the racial demographics in some counties would complicate their re-elections. Legislators had aligned counties to maintain white majorities for judicial circuits that included a resident, what, a majority black county. Still, Pearson had to be more mindful of the concerns of the black residents than at the beginning of his career. Even if that mindfulness didn't translate to any substance, stub, sub, stansive, changes during this tenure.
Like Tate, Pearson had heard from many Black residents that they believed Walter McMillan was innocent. But Pearson was confident he could win a guilty verdict despite the suspect testimony of Ralph Myers. Of Ralph Myers and Bill Hooks and the strong doubts in the Black community.
His one lingering concern may have been a recent United States Supreme Court case that threatened a long-standing feature of high-profile criminal trials in the South, the all-white jury. When a serious felony case went to trial in a county like Monroe County, which was 40% Black, it was not uncommon for prosecutors to exclude all African Americans from jury service. In fact, 20 years after the Civil Rights Revolution, the jury remained an institution largely unchanged by the legal record.
requirements of racial integration and diversity. As far back as the 1880s, the Supreme Court ruled in Stratter v. West Virginia that excluding Black people from jury service was unconstitutional, but juries remained all whites for decades after. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of Black jurors to exactly one per case.
In deep South states, jury rolls were pulled from voting rolls. which excluded African Americans. After the Voting Rights Act passed, county court clerks and judges still kept jury rolls mostly white through various tactics designed to undermine the law.
Local jury commissions use statutory requirements that jurors be intelligent and upright to exclude African Americans and women. Does any of this feel very familiar from the sum of us? It's like the way we... use these myths to perpetuate racism and de facto segregation.
Like even when we were supposed to integrate or desegregate, I mean, juries, even though it wasn't the law to have segregated juries, we still continued to have all white juries because of these myths that continue to perpetuate racism. And they are using this hidden messaging. that is used to exclude people of color, the jurors be intelligent and upright.
Okay, so if they, if in your mind only white people are intelligent and upright, it's excluding African Americans and then also women. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that underrepresentation of racial minorities and women in jury pools was unconstitutional. which in some communities at least led to black people being summoned to the courthouse for possible selection as jurors, if not selected. The court had repeatedly made clear, though, that the Constitution does not require that racial minorities and women actually serve on juries. It only forbids excluding jurors on the basis of race or gender.
For many African Americans, the use of wholly discretionary preemptory strikes to select a jury of 12 remained a serious bearer to serve bearer to serving on the jury in the mid-1960s the court held the the court held that using preemptory strikes in racial racially discriminatory manner was unconstitutional but the justice create justices created an evidentiary standard for proving racial bias that was so high that no one had successfully challenged preemptory strikes in 20 years The practice of striking all or almost all African-American potential juries continued virtually unchanged after the court's ruling. So defendants like Walter McMillan, even in counties that were 40 or 50 percent black, frequently found themselves staring at an all-white jury, especially the death penalty cases. Then in 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Bateson v. Kanducky that prosecutors could be challenged more directly about using preemptory strikes in a racially discriminatory manner, giving hope to black defendants and forcing prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude black jurors.
Walter was learning some of this history as the months passed. Everyone on death row wanted to advise him, and everyone had a story to tell. The novelty of a pretrial capital defendant on death row seemed to motivate other prisoners to get in Walter's ear every day. Walter tried to listen politely, but he'd already decided to leave the lawyering to his lawyers. That didn't mean that he wasn't very concerned about what he was hearing from folks on the row, especially about race and the kind of jury he would get.
Nearly everyone on death row had been tried by an all-white or nearly all-white jury. Death row prisoner Jesse Morrison told Walter that his prosecutor in Barber County had used 21 of the 22 preemptory strikes to exclude all the black people in the jury pool. Vernon Madison from Mobile said the prosecutor struck all 10 black people qualified for jury service in this case.
Willie Tabb from Larmau County, Willie Williams from Houston County, Claude Raines from Jefferson County. Gregory Akers from Montgomery County and Neil Owens from Russell County were among the many black men on death row who had been tried by all-white juries after prosecutors struck all of the African American prospective jurors. Earl McGee was tried by an all-white jury in Dallas County, even though the county is 60% African American.
In Albert Jefferson's case, the prosecutor had organized a list of prospective jurors. summoned to court into four groups of roughly 25 people identified as strong, medium, weak, and black. All 26 people in the jury pool could be found on the blacklist, and the prosecutors excluded them all. Joe Duncan, Grady Bankhead, and Colin Guthrie were among some of the white condemned prisoners who had told a similar story. District Attorney Todd Pearson had been concerned about the new Bateson decision.
He knew veteran civil rights lawyers like Chestnut and Boynton would not hesitate to object to racially discriminatory jury selection, even though he wasn't too worried about Judge Robert E. Lee, key, taking those objections seriously. But the extraordinary publicity surrounding the Morrison murder gave Pearson another idea. Sorry.
In high-profile cases, it's fairly standard for defense lawyers to file a motion to change venue, to move the case from the county where the crime took place to a different county where there is less pretrial publicity and sentiment to convict. The motions are almost never granted, but every now and then an appellate court finds that the atmosphere in a county had been so pre- judicial, that the trial should have been moved. In Alabama, asking to change venue was an essentially futile act.
Alabama courts almost never reversed a conviction because the trial judge had refused to change venue. When the court scheduled a hearing in 1987 on pretrial motions in Walter's case, Chestnut and Boynton showed up with no expectation that any of their motions would be granted. They were more focused on preparing for trial, which was scheduled to begin in February 1988. The pretrial motions hearing was a formality. Chestnut and Boynton presented their change of venue motion. Pearson stood up and said that due to the extraordinary pretrial coverage of the Morrison murder, he agreed that the trial should be moved.
Judge Key nodded sympathetically. Chestnut, who knew his way around the Alabama courts, was sure something bad was about to happen. He was also certain the judge and the DA had already conspired.
The defendant's motion to change venue is granted, the judge ruled. When the judge suggested that it be moved to a neighboring county so that witnesses wouldn't have far to travel, Chestnut remained hopeful. Almost all of the bordering counties had fairly large African-American populations.
Wilcox County was 72% Black. Kona Key was 46% Black. Clark County was 45% Black. Butler 42, Escambia, was 32% black.
Only affluent Baldwin County to the south, with its beautiful Gulf of Mexico beaches, was atypical, with an African-American population of just 9%. The judge took very little time deciding where the trial should be moved. We'll go to Baldwin County. Chessa and Boynton immediately complained, but the judge reminded them that it was their motion. When they thought, To withdraw their motion, the judge said he couldn't authorize a trial in a community where so many people had formed opinions about the accused.
The case would be tried in Bay Minette, the seat of Baldwin County. The change of venue was disastrous for Walter. Chessa and Boynton knew that there would be very few, if any, black jurors. They also understood that while jurors from Baldwin County might be less personally connected to Rhonda Morrison and her family, It was an extremely conservative county that had made even less progress leaving behind the racial politics of Jim Crow than its neighbors.
Given what he'd heard from other death penalty death row prisoners about all white juries, Walter worried about the venue change as well. But he still put his faith in this fact. No one could hear the evidence and believe that he committed this crime.
He just didn't believe that a jury, black or white, could convict him of the nonsensical story told by Ralph Myers. not when he had an unquestionable alibi with close to a dozen witnesses. The February trial was postponed.
Once again, Ralph Myers was having second thoughts. After months in the county jail, away from death row, Myers again realized he didn't want to implicate himself in a murder he had not committed. He waited until the morning that the trial was set to begin before he told investigators that he could not testify because what they wanted him to say was not true.
He tried to wrangle for more favorable treatment, but decided there was no punishment he was willing to accept for a murder he didn't commit. Meyer's refusal to cooperate sent him back to death row. Back at Holman, it wasn't long before he again showed serious emotional and psychological distress. After a couple of weeks, prison officials were so concerned that they sent him to the state hospital for the mentally ill. The Taylor Harden Secure Medical Facility in Tuscaloosa did all of the diagnostic and assessment work for courts managing people accused of crimes who might be incompetent to stand trial due to mental illness.
I'd frequently been criticized by defense lawyers for almost never finding serious mental disabilities that would prevent defendants from going on trial. Meyer's time at Taylor Harden did very little to change his predicament. He hoped that he might be returned to the county jail after his 30-day stint at the hospital. But instead, he was returned to death row. Realizing he could not escape the situation he'd created for himself, Myers told investigators he was ready to testify against McMillan.
Oh my god, this Myers guy is a shitshow. A new trial date was scheduled for August of 1988. Walter had been on death row for over a year. As hard as it had tried to adjust, he couldn't accept the nightmare his life had become. Although he was nervous, he had been convinced that he was going home. going home back in February when the first trial was scheduled.
His lawyers seemed happy that Myers was struggling and told Walter it was a good sign. when the trial was continued because Myers refused to testify. But it meant another six months on death row for Walter.
He couldn't see anything encouraging about that. When they finally moved him to Baldwin County Jail in Bayman End for the August trial, Walter left death row confinement he'd never return. Whoa, okay, Walter left death row confident he'd never return.
He'd become friends with several men on the row, and he was surprised by how conflicted he felt about leaving them, knowing what they would face soon. Yet, when they called his name to transfer office, he lost no time gathering his things and getting into the van to leave. A week later, Walter sat in the van with shackles pinching his ankles and chains tightly wound around his wrist.
He could feel his feet beginning to swell because the circulation was cut off by the metal digging into his skin. The handcuffs were too tight and he was becoming uncharacteristically angry. Why you get those chains? Why you have got these chains on me so tight?
Why you got these chains on me this tight? Whoa. The two Baldwin County deputies who had picked him up a week earlier had not been friendly on the trip from Death Row to the courthouse.
Now that he had been convicted of a capital murder, they were downright hostile. One seemed to laugh in response to Walter's question. Them change.
Chains is the same as they were when we picked you up. They just feel tighter because we got you now. You need to loosen this, man.
I can't ride like this. It ain't going to happen, so you should get your mind off of it. Walter suddenly recognized the man.
At the end of the trial, when the jury had found Walter guilty, his family and several of the black people who had attended the trial were in shocked disbelief. Sheriff Tate claimed that Walter's 24-year-old son, Johnny, said somebody's going to pay for what they've done to my father. Tate asked deputies to arrest Johnny and there was a scuffle.
Walter's son, Walter saw the officers wrestle his child to the ground and place him in handcuffs. The more he looked at the two deputies driving him back to the death row, to death row, the more convinced he became that one of them would have had tackled his son. The van began to move. They wouldn't tell Walter where he was going.
But as soon as they got on the road, it was clear that they were taking him back to death row. He had been upset and distraught on the day of his arrest, but he was so sure he'd be released soon. He got frustrated when the day turned into weeks at county jail.
He was depressed and terrified when they took him to death row before trial, before being convicted of any crime. After 15 months, and the weeks became months. But when the nearly all-white jury pronounced him guilty after 15 months of waiting for vindication, he was shocked, paralyzed. Now he felt himself coming back to life, but all he could feel was seething anger. The deputies were driving him back to death row and talking about a gun show they were planning to attend.
Walter realized that he had been foolish to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. He knew Tate was vicious and no good, but he assumed that the others were just doing what they had been told. Now he was feeling something that could only be described as rage.
Hey, I'm going to sue all of y'all. He knew who was screaming and that it wasn't going to make a difference. I'm going to sue all of y'all, he repeated.
The officers paid no attention to him. Loose these chains, loose these chains. He couldn't remember when he'd last lost control, but he felt himself falling apart.
With some struggle, he began silent. Thoughts of the trial flew back into his mind. It had been short. methodical and clinical jury selection lasted just a few hours Pearson used his preemptory strikes to exclude all but one of the handful of African Americans who'd been summoned to the serve on the jury his lawyers objected but the judge some summarily dismissed their complaints the state put Myers in the stand to tell his absurd story about Walter forcing him to drive to Jackson cleaners because his arm hurt This version had Myers going into the cleaners where he saw Walter standing over the dead body of Rhonda Morrison.
Bizarrely, he also claimed that a third person was present and involved in the murder. A mysterious white man with salt and pepper hair who was clearly in charge of the crime and who directed Walter to kill Myers too. But Walter couldn't because he was out of bullets.
Walter thought the testimony was so nonsensical, he couldn't believe that people were taking it seriously. Why wasn't everyone laughing? Chestnut's cross-examination of Myers made it clear that the witness was lying.
When Chestnut finished, Walter was sure that the state would simply announce that they had made a mistake. Instead, the prosecutor brought Myers back up to repeat his accusations as if the logic and contradictions in the testimony were completely irrelevant, as if repeating his lies enough times in this quiet room would make them true. Bill Hooks testified that he had seen Walter's truck pull up out of the cleaners at the time of the murder and that he recognized the truck because it had been modified as a lowrider.
Walter instantly whispered to his lawyers that he hadn't turned his truck into a lowrider until several months after Morrison was murdered. His lawyers didn't do much with that information, which frustrated Walter. Then another white man, Walter had never heard of, Joe Hightower, took the stand and said he had seen the truck at the cleaners too. There were a dozen people who could talk about the fish fry and sis that Walter was at home when Rhonda Morrison was killed.
His lawyers called only three of them. Everybody seemed to be rushing to get the trial over with, and Walter couldn't understand it. The state then called a white man, Ernest Welch, who said he was the furniture man who collected money at the McMillan house on the day they were having the fish fry.
But it wasn't the same day that Rhonda Morrison was murdered. He said he remembered better than anyone when she was murdered because he was her uncle. He said that he'd been so devastated that he went to the McMillan residence to collect money on a different day.
The lawyers made their arguments, the jury retired, and less than three hours later, they filed back into the courtroom. Stone-faced, one by one, they pronounced Walter McMillan guilty.