The Innocent Man (24 page)

The state’s last witness was by far its most effective. Peterson saved his knockout punch for the last round, and when Melvin Hett finished testifying the jury was convinced.

Hett was the OSBI hair man, a veteran testifier who’d helped send many people to prison.

Forensic Examination of human hair got off to a rocky start as far back as 1882. In a Wisconsin case that year an “expert” for the state compared a “known” hair
sample with one found at the crime scene and testified that the two came from the same source. The source was convicted, but on appeal the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed and said, strongly, “Such evidence is of the most dangerous character.”

Thousands of innocent defendants could have been spared if that decision had been heeded. Instead, police, investigators, crime labs, and prosecutors plowed ahead with the analysis of hair, which was often the only real clue left at a crime scene. Hair analysis became so common and so controversial that it was studied many times throughout the twentieth century.

Many of the studies indicated a high rate of error, and in response to the controversy the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration sponsored a crime lab proficiency program in 1978. Two hundred and forty of the best crime labs from throughout the country participated in the program, which compared their analytical findings on different types of evidence, including hair.

Their evaluation of hair was dreadful. A majority of the labs were incorrect four out of five times.

Other studies fueled the debate over hair testimony. In one, the accuracy increased when the examiner compared a crime scene hair with those of five different men, with no indication as to who was the cops’ favored suspect. The chance of unintentional bias was removed. During the same study, though, the accuracy fell dramatically when the examiner was told who was the real “suspect.” A preconceived conclusion can exist and slant the findings toward that suspect.

Hair experts tread on thin legal ice, and their opinions are weighted heavily with caveats such as: “The
known hair and the questioned hair are microscopically consistent and could have come from the same source.”

There is an excellent chance that they could
not
have come from the same source, but such testimony was rarely volunteered, at least on direct examination.

The hundreds of hairs collected at the crime scene by Dennis Smith took a delayed and tortuous route to the courtroom. At least three different OSBI analysts handled them, along with dozens of known hairs collected during the round-up-the-usual-suspects sweep made by Detectives Smith and Rogers shortly after the murder.

First Mary Long collected and organized all the hairs at the crime lab, but soon packed them up and handed them to Susan Land. By the time Susan Land received the hairs in March 1983, Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers were convinced the killers were Fritz and Williamson. To the dismay of the investigators, however, her report concluded that the hairs were microscopically consistent only with those of Debbie Carter.

For a brief period, Fritz and Williamson were off the hook, though they had no earthly means of knowing it. And, years later, their attorneys would not be informed of Susan Land’s findings.

The state needed a second opinion.

In September 1983, citing the stress and strain of Land’s workload, her boss ordered her to “transfer” the case to Melvin Hett. Such a transfer was highly unusual, and made more so by the fact that Land and Hett worked in different crime labs in different regions of the state. Land worked in the central crime lab in Oklahoma City. Hett worked in a branch in the town of Enid. His
region covered eighteen counties, none of which happened to be Pontotoc.

Hett proved to be rather methodical. It took him twenty-seven months to analyze the hair, a lengthy period made even more remarkable by the fact that he was looking only at the samples from Fritz, Williamson, and Debbie Carter. The other twenty-one were not as important and could wait.

Since the police knew who killed Debbie Carter, they helpfully informed Melvin Hett. When he received the samples from Susan Land, the word “suspect” was written by the names of Fritz and Williamson.

Glen Gore had yet to provide samples to the Ada police.

On December 13, 1985, three years after the murder, Melvin Hett finished his first report, finding that seventeen of the questioned hairs were microscopically consistent with known samples of Fritz and Williamson.

After spending more than two years and over two hundred hours analyzing the first samples, Hett picked up steam considerably and knocked out the other twenty-one in less than a month. On January 9, 1986, he finished his second report, finding that all the other samples taken from the young men of Ada were consistent with nothing found in the Carter apartment.

Still Glen Gore had not been asked to provide samples.

It was tedious work, and not without its uncertainties. Hett flip-flopped several times as he labored with his microscope. Once he was certain a hair belonged to Debbie Carter, but later changed his mind and decided it came from Fritz.

Such is the nature of hair analysis. Hett flatly
contradicted some of Susan Land’s findings, and even managed to impugn his own work. He initially found that a total of thirteen pubic hairs came from Fritz and only two from Williamson. Later, though, he changed his numbers—twelve for Fritz and two for Williamson. Then eleven for Fritz, plus two scalp hairs.

For some reason, Gore’s hair finally entered the picture in July 1986. Someone down at the Ada Police Department woke up and realized Gore had been neglected. Dennis Smith collected scalp and pubic hair from Gore and from the confessed killer Ricky Joe Simmons and mailed them to Melvin Hett, who, evidently, was quite busy because nothing happened for a year. In July 1987, Gore was asked again to provide samples. Why? he asked. Because the police couldn’t find his earlier samples.

Months passed with no report from Hett. In the spring of 1988, the trials were approaching, and there was still no report from Hett on the Gore and Simmons samples.

On April 7, 1988, after the Fritz trial was under way, Melvin Hett finally issued his third and last report. The Gore hairs were not consistent with the questioned hairs. It took Hett almost two years to reach this conclusion, and his timing was beyond suspicious. It was another clear indication that the prosecution so firmly believed in the guilt of Fritz and Williamson that it found it unnecessary to wait until all the hair analysis was completed.

In spite of its perils and uncertainties, Melvin Hett was a staunch believer in hair analysis. He and Peterson
became friendly, and before the Fritz trial Hett passed along scientific articles touting the reliability of evidence that was famously unreliable. He did not, however, provide the prosecutor with any of the numerous articles condemning hair analysis and testimony.

Two months before the Fritz trial, Hett drove to Chicago and delivered his findings to a private lab called McCrone. There, one Richard Bisbing, an acquaintance of Hett’s, reviewed his work. Bisbing had been hired by Wanda Fritz to review the hair evidence and testify at trial. To pay him, Wanda was forced to sell Dennis’s car.

Bisbing proved to be far more efficient with his time, but the results were just as conflicting.

In less than six hours, Bisbing refuted almost all of Hett’s findings. Looking at only the eleven pubic hairs that Hett was certain were microscopically consistent with Fritz, Bisbing found that only three were accurate. Only three “could” have come from Dennis Fritz. Hett was wrong about the other eight.

Undaunted by such a low estimation of his work by another expert, Hett drove back to Oklahoma, ready to testify without changing his opinion.

He took the stand on Friday afternoon, April 8, and immediately launched into a windy lecture loaded with scientific terms and words, designed more to impress the jurors than to inform them. Dennis, with a college degree and experience teaching science, could not follow Hett, and he was certain the jurors couldn’t, either. He glanced at them several times. They were hopelessly lost, but they were obviously impressed with this expert. He knew so much!

Hett tossed out words like “morphology,” “cortex,” “scale protrusion,” “shallow gapping,” “cortical fusi,” and “ovoid bodies” as if everyone in the courtroom knew exactly what he meant. He seldom slowed long enough to explain himself.

Hett was the star expert, with an aura of reliability that was bolstered by his experience, vocabulary, confidence, and strong conclusions that some of the known hairs of Dennis Fritz were consistent with some of those found at the crime scene. Six times during his direct testimony he said that Dennis’s hair and the suspicious hairs were microscopically consistent and could have come from the same source. Not once did he share with the jury the truth that the hairs could have just as easily
not
come from the same source.

Throughout his testimony, Bill Peterson continually referred to “the Defendant Ron Williamson and the Defendant Dennis Fritz.” At the time, Ron was locked away in solitary confinement, strumming his guitar, completely unaware that he was being tried in absentia and that things were not going too well.

Hett wrapped up his testimony by summarizing for the jury his findings. Eleven pubic hairs and two scalp hairs could have come from Dennis. It was the same eleven pubic hairs he’d driven to the McCrone laboratories in Chicago and shown to Richard Bisbing for a second opinion.

The cross-examination by Greg Saunders yielded little. Hett was forced to admit that hair analysis is too speculative to be used for positive identifications. Like most experts, he was able to talk his way out of tough questions by using his endless supply of vague scientific terms.

When he was excused, the state rested.

The first witness called by the defense was Dennis Fritz. He testified about his past, his friendship with Ron, and so on. He admitted that he had been convicted of cultivating marijuana in 1973 and had lied about this on his application to teach school at Noble seven years later. His reason for doing so was simple; he needed a job. He denied repeatedly that he had ever met Debbie Carter and certainly knew nothing about her murder.

He was then handed over to Bill Peterson for cross-examination.

There’s an old adage in bad trial lawyering that when you don’t have the facts, do a lot of yelling. Peterson stomped to the podium, glared at the murderer with the suspicious hair, and began yelling.

Within seconds, Judge Jones called him to the bench for a little chastising. “You may not like this defendant,” the judge whispered sternly, “but you’re not to be angry in this courtroom.”

“I’m not angry,” Peterson angrily shot back.

“Yes you are. This is the first time you’ve raised your voice to this bench.”

“All right.”

Peterson was incensed that Fritz had lied on a job application. Thus, Dennis simply could not be believed. And Peterson dramatically produced another lie, a form Dennis had filled out when he hocked a pistol at a pawnshop in Durant, Oklahoma. Again, Dennis had tried to hide his felony for cultivating pot.

Two clear incidences of outright deception; neither, of course, had anything to do with the Carter murder.
Peterson harangued him for as much mileage as he could possibly beat out of his self-confessed lying.

It was ironic, and would have been comical had things not been so tense, that Peterson worked himself into such an indignant lather over a witness who couldn’t tell the truth. This, from a prosecutor whose case was built on the testimony of convicts and snitches.

When Peterson finally decided to move on, he had no place to go. He hopscotched from the allegations of one prosecution witness to another, but Dennis did a credible job of holding his ground. After a contentious one-hour cross, Peterson sat down.

The only other witness called by Greg Saunders was Richard Bisbing, who explained to the jury that he disagreed with most of the conclusions reached by Melvin Hett.

It was late on Friday afternoon, and Judge Jones adjourned court for the weekend. Dennis made the short walk back to the jail, changed clothes, and tried to relax in his stuffy rat hole of a cell. He was convinced the state had failed to prove him guilty, but he was far from confident. He had seen the nasty looks from the jurors when they were shown the gruesome crime scene photos. He had watched them as they listened to Melvin Hett and believed his conclusions.

For Dennis, it was a very long weekend.

Closing arguments began Monday morning. Nancy Shew went first for the state and plodded through a recitation of each of the prosecution’s witnesses and what had been said.

Greg Saunders countered with an argument that not much at all had been proven by the state; that its burden of proving Dennis guilty beyond a reasonable doubt had clearly not been met; that this was nothing more than a case of guilt by association; and that the jury should find his client not guilty.

Bill Peterson had the last shot. For almost an hour, he rambled on and on, regurgitating the high points from each of his witnesses, trying desperately to convince the jurors that his crooks and snitches were worth believing.

The jury retired to deliberate at noon, and six hours later came back to announce it was split eleven to one. Judge Jones sent them back with the promise of dinner. Around 8:00 p.m., they returned with a verdict of guilty.

Dennis listened to the verdict in a frozen silence, stunned because he was innocent, shocked because he’d been convicted with such paltry proof. He wanted to lash out at the jurors, the judge, the cops, the system, but the trial was not over.

Yet he was not totally surprised. He had watched the jurors and seen their distrust. They represented the town of Ada, and the town needed a conviction. If the cops and Peterson were so convinced Dennis was the killer, then he must be.

He closed his eyes and thought of his daughter, Elizabeth, now fourteen and certainly old enough to understand guilt and innocence. Now that he’d been convicted, how would he ever convince her he was innocent?