Demonic (36 page)

Reyes might have been part of the wolf pack attacking the jogger, he could have joined the wolf pack in progress, or he might have come along afterward and raped the beaten, semiconscious jogger. No barbarity was out of the question with Reyes—this is a man who had sexually assaulted his own mother and raped and killed a pregnant woman in front of her children.

Although Reyes made the shocking claim that he had acted alone, there was no new evidence suggesting that this was true—apart from his own word. Unlike the detailed, videotaped confessions given in the days after the rape from all five convicted of rape in the real trials, Reyes’s confession was never subjected to cross-examination. He faced no penalty for his confession.

Reyes’s confession not only cost him nothing, it helped him. When he confessed, he happened to be imprisoned with one of the convicted Central Park rapists, Kharey Wise, who was a leader of the prison Muslim community and a member of the Bloods gang. Before Reyes made his confession, he requested a transfer to one of the most desirable prisons in New York on the grounds that he feared retaliation from Wise’s gang.

Inasmuch as the statute of limitations for rape in New York was five years
⁴
and the Central Park jogger’s rape occurred in 1989, Reyes could have confessed in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, or 2001 and risked nothing. But it was not until Reyes was incarcerated with Wise that he decided to announce that he had raped the jogger all by himself and win a favorable prison transfer.

It’s remarkable how many “confessions” purporting to exonerate others come from people who will face no penalty for the confession, either because the statute of limitations has run out or because they are already serving thirty-three years to life in prison or both—as in Reyes’s case. Confessions that clear the convicted dramatically improve an inmate’s standing in the prison pecking order by sticking it to the authorities, even without an advantageous transfer.

But liberals put enormous pressure on the doddering district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to vacate the convictions. The entire left-wing apparatus, from the media to the defense bar, was fixated on getting those convictions overturned—and overjoyed when they were. Another victory for the Innocence Project!

For the Central Park rape convictions to be vacated was almost as much a blow to civilization at the attack itself. If those juries, under those circumstances, could convict wholly innocent young lads, then the whole legal system was a scam and a fraud.

Here’s the truth about the Central Park rape.

It is undisputed that a mob of about forty African-American and Hispanic teenagers were running wild in Central Park the night of April 18, 1989, assaulting anyone in their path. At least a dozen of them had been arrested leaving the park before the jogger’s body was even discovered. They implicated others, who were rounded up over the next few days, until the police had questioned thirty-seven boys who had been in the park that night.
⁵

Only ten of the thirty-seven interviewed were charged with any crimes. Of those, only five were tried for the rape of the jogger—the five who confessed. Manifestly, the police were capable of interviewing suspects without coercing them to confess. But five confessed anyway, four on videotape with adult relatives present and one with a parent present but not on videotape. All five gave vivid, largely consistent accounts of the attack, implicating themselves and the others.

Other members of the Central Park mob provided various corroborating details to the police, such as one who said Kevin Richardson told him, “We just raped somebody,” and another who heard Raymond Santana and another boy laughing about how “we made a woman bleed.” Various other witnesses said they saw the defendants walking from the 102nd Street transverse area where the jogger was raped.
⁶

As one of the lead detectives on the case, Mike Sheehan, told
New York
magazine: “
They
are telling
us
—the sequence may be off, but they’re essentially telling us the same stuff. They remember a guy they beat and took his food, they remember hitting this guy running around the reservoir. They went through all of these things, each kid. And they also tell you about the jogger. And they place people, so you have a
mental picture of where they were around this woman’s body. And their parents are with them, not only in the interviews but in the videotape, for the record. That’s enough for me. I’m satisfied.”
⁷

Although the suspects accused others of attacking the jogger, too, no one was tried for that crime unless he confessed. Steven Lopez, for example, was implicated by two of the defendants, including Kharey Wise, who matter-of-factly told the police that while Lopez was raping the jogger, he “got sick of looking at her face,” so he picked up a brick to smash it.
⁸
Also, a hair was found on Lopez’s jacket “consistent” with the jogger’s hair but not sufficient to be used at trial.

Lopez did not confess to assaulting the jogger, so he was never tried for any crime against her and only pleaded guilty to the robbery of another man in the park that night. That’s how important the confessions were—and how unimportant the “forensic evidence” was back in 1989.

Yusef Salaam started talking immediately after Detective Thomas McKenna told him, “I don’t care what you say to me. We have fingerprints on the jogger’s pants.” At that point, Salaam said, “I was there, but I didn’t rape her.”
⁹
A juror later told
60 Minutes
, “We never doubted the veracity of Detective McKenna for a minute.”
¹⁰

If the police had manufactured the confessions, how did the defendants know facts about the crime that the police couldn’t have known? On April 21, 1989, Kharey Wise told a detective that someone he thought was named “Rudy” stole the jogger’s Walkman and belt pouch.
¹¹
The jogger was still in a coma and the police had no way of knowing that a Walkman had been stolen from her.

Indeed, that was one of the DA’s main reasons for buying the entirety of Reyes’s jailhouse confession in the Show Trial: the false claim that Reyes was the only one who knew about the jogger’s Walkman. Kharey Wise told the police at the time about the Walkman, and it was Wise who was in the same prison with Reyes when, thirteen years later, Reyes had his sudden attack of conscience.

Two of the defendants, Santana and Richardson, independently brought investigators to the precise location of the attack on the jogger.
¹²

Moreover, their videotaped confessions were not vague, five-minute statements that anyone could have given. They were multiple, lengthy statements that included damning minutiae. In separate interrogations
taken by various investigators, all five of the defendants independently identified where the jogger was when they first saw her. All five said they charged her, dragged her into the woods, beat, molested, and raped her before leaving her lying on the ground, semiconscious and half naked. None of them admitted to raping her themselves, instead pinning the rapes on others. But all of them admitted to assisting in her rape, which is all that was required for a rape conviction for all of them.

McCray confessed to participating in the attack on the jogger only after his mother said to him, “Tell the truth. We brought you up better than this.” He proceeded to give a vivid account of a wolf pack attack in the presence of both his parents. This was before law enforcement, much less the media, knew exactly what had happened that night.

Here is a small part of McCray’s confession given the day after the attack (the full excerpt from New York
Newsday
is printed in the
Appendix
):

Prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer (Q):
What happened as she came closer?

A:
That’s when we all charged her.

Q:
Did you charge her?

A:
Yes.

Q:
What happened when you charged her?

A:
We charged her, we got her on the ground, everybody started hitting her and stuff, she was on the ground, everybody stompin’ and everything. Then we got each, I grabbed one arm, some other kid grabbed one arm and we grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we all took turns getting on her, getting on top of her.

Q:
Did you hit her?

A:
Yes, kicked her.

Q:
Where did you kick her?

A:
I don’t know, just kicked her, I felt it, just kicked her, it was like a whole bunch of us.

Q:
Who else kicked her?

A:
Um, um, Kevin [Richardson, another defendant], um, all of us.

Q:
That tall thin black guy I was asking you about, did you see him hit her in the ribs?

A:
I heard it. I heard it.

Q:
What did you hear?

A:
It sounded like when you get hit in your chest. Sounded like that.

Q:
Was she screaming, is that how you could tell she was being hit?

A:
She wasn’t screaming. She was hurt, though. She wasn’t screaming.

Q:
How could you tell she was hurt?

A:
’Cause she was lying there.

• • •

Q:
Did you see her get hit in the head?

A:
I heard it, not only, I seen it.

Q:
Who did it?

A:
The tall, black kid.

• • •

Q:
What was she wearing?

A:
I think a white T-shirt, something like that.

Q:
Who took off her shirt?

A:
The tall black kid.

Q:
Who took off her pants?

A:
I think it was him.

• • •

Q:
Did somebody have sex with her?

A:
Yeah.

Q:
Did a lot of people have sex with her?

A:
Yeah.

Q:
Who was the first person to get on top of her?

A:
The tall black guy.

Q:
Did somebody else get on top of her then?

A:
He grabbed one of her arms, this other kid got on top of her.

Q:
Who was that?

A:
This Puerto Rican guy.

Q:
Did you have your fly open?

A:
Yeah, but my penis wasn’t in her.

• • •

Q:
How long did you do that for?

A:
I don’t know, a couple of minutes.

Q:
What happened after Kevin was done?

A:
Then we left her then, then this guy hit her in the head. Then we left.

Q:
Who hit her?

A:
I don’t know. I just, the pipe, I think the tall skinny kid.
¹³

As an article in the
New York Times
said at the time, the case was won not in the courtroom “but in three grubby New York City police station houses, where detectives smoothly convinced the three young men to confess.”
¹⁴

In addition to the videotaped confessions and written statements, the defendants also made incriminating statements to the police and to their friends. When Santana was picked up by the police, he blurted out, “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman’s tits.” Which is a little like saying, “I didn’t shoot him, Officer, I just tied up the victim, bought the gun, and loaded the bullets. Someone else pulled the trigger. Can I go now?”