GIST: The 7-year-old girl, known today only as “M.D.” in court records,
had just endured an unspeakable tragedy. Her mother, JoAnn Tate, had
been murdered before her eyes and M.D. and her little sister, age 4, had
been gravely wounded in a sadistic sexual assault in the Hyde Park
neighborhood of north St. Louis. M.D.’s uncle was the first person to
reach the crime scene and he found M.D. hiding under the covers of her
bed. “Who did this to you?” he screamed. “Bill,” she replied. It was
April 27, 1982. M.D. and her sister both required immediate surgery and extensive
hospitalization. Waiting in the emergency room later that day, M.D. told
a social worker about the crime scene and again identified her mother’s
killer as “Bill.” At the same time, she told an older sister the same
thing. While at the hospital, the 7-year old told detectives that “Bill”
drove a white Volkswagen and lived in Illinois with his drunk mother.
M.D. told her uncle that “Bill” had recently moved or travelled to
Hollywood, that he “had black hair all the way to his ears,” and that he
had been to their apartment three days prior to the murder to fix her
mom’s car. The police aggressively questioned the little girl during her
hospital stay. They showed her many photographs but she identified no
one, reiterating only that “Bill” had committed the crime. A few weeks
later, in May 1982, they brought a sketch artist to her hospital room.
By this time, M.D. had told the police that her assailant resembled a
man named Dennis Smith, a friend of her uncle. When the sketch artist
drew the sketch, however, the uncle told the police that the sketch
resembled a man named Rodney Lincoln, who had had a brief affair with Jo
Ann Tate about a year earlier and who lived about 11 miles from the
crime scene. Now the police ratcheted up their questioning of M.D., while at the
same time giving her candy and spending time with her, buying her
dinners and ice cream. They were, she said three decades later under
oath, “like dads.” Around this time, one of these “dads,” a detective,
told her: “We got a magic door downtown… and we have to go look through
this magic door and see if you can find the bad man. If we get the wrong
man, we let the bad man go.” Then the detective, to whom M.D. had grown
close, showed her two photos. One photograph was of a man M.D. had known as a member of her older
sister’s extended family. The other photograph was a mugshot of Rodney
Lincoln. The detective told her “that the man who had murdered my mother
was in the pictures and I had to pick out the bad man or he would go
free. I picked the photograph of Rodney Lincoln,” M.D. would say in her
testimony decades later, adding that she did so to please the “dads” who
had spent so much time with her following the attack. Within two hours, Lincoln, a man with a criminal record, had been
picked up by the police and placed into a lineup with three other men,
each of whom was much younger than him and with bushier hair. None of
the other men resembled Lincoln or the sketch from which M.D. had
identified him. M.D. identified Lincoln at this time although her
younger sister, who also had been attacked, did not identify anyone.
Based on the identification, the police were confident they had their
man. But they still weren’t confident that M.D. would say so again, at
trial, under oath, before a jury.
L incoln was charged with capital murder and assault. There was M.D.’s
identification and one bit of physical evidence that prosecutors said
linked the defendant to the crime; a pubic hair sample taken from the
room that an expert said matched Lincoln’s DNA. Lincoln’s lawyers
defended their client by offering an alibi. They said he had been with
his mother and girlfriend on the night of the attack and then showed up
at work, on time, the next morning for his delivery job. His boss said
he noticed nothing amiss. The first jury to hear the case, in a trial held in August 1983,
failed to unanimously agree that Lincoln was guilty of anything. The
vote was 7-5 but the trial transcript from that proceeding is lost so
there is no way to tell whether the jury was leaning to convict or
acquit. A second trial was held in October 1983 and this time jurors
convicted Lincoln of manslaughter. He was sentenced to life in prison
and was sent away for more than three decades until an extraordinary
development changed the narrative of the case. Last November, M.D., by then 41 years old, was watching the television show
Crime Watch Daily, a true-crime investigative series. The episode featured Tommy Lynn Sells,
executed in Texas in 2014
for a series of murders, and it posited that Sells, not Lincoln, had
murdered M.D.’s mother all those years earlier. As she watched the
episode, M.D. came to believe that Lincoln was not the man who had
attacked her and her family. “It was the mug shots of Tommy Lynn Sells.
It was in particular the baby fat on his face and the cheek line, the
stubble,” M.D. would later testify. “Because when I saw that, I like
kind of had a flash of facial hair up against my face.” M.D. was not the only character in this story who watched the
episode. Nathaniel Clenney, M.D.’s uncle, the one who had first
encountered M.D. at the crime scene in 1982, had begun to have serious
doubts about Lincoln’s guilt years earlier. Last Thanksgiving, as he and
his family watched the show, those doubts grew, so much so that M.D.’s
cousin was prompted to reach out to Lincoln’s family to discuss ways in
which they could help bring the case back before a court of law. For decades, M.D. had opposed and resented the Lincoln family’s
efforts to free Rodney. Now M.D. contacted Lincoln’s daughter and said,
“I’m sorry,” over and over again. M.D. also reached out to local
prosecutors to tell them she had made an awful mistake. That call was
not nearly as heartening as the one she had made to the Lincoln family.
T here were many things Rodney Lincoln’s trial lawyers did not know when
their client went on trial, evidence that police and prosecutors failed
to share with them despite the constitutional rule that requires the
disclosure of exculpatory evidence by the government. For example, at
trial and on appeal, prosecutors made much of the fact that both M.D.
had reacted with visible emotion when identifying Lincoln and that she
had “never wavered” in incriminating him. But records made available to
defense lawyers 30 years after the crime indicate that M.D. and her
sister both reacted that way to many different adult males during this
time — including the prosecutor himself. Likewise, prosecutors did not disclose to Lincoln’s lawyers the
extent to which they coached M.D. about the testimony she would give.
Lawyers coach their witnesses all the time, even though they technically
are not supposed to do anything that alters the substance of the
testimony. But M.D. was handled in a particularly smothering way.
Newly-disclosed records reveal that prosecutors conducted half a dozen
or more “courtroom rehearsals” with M.D. and her little sister, all
designed to ensure that the girls incriminated Lincoln. “It makes me feel terrible,” M.D. would later say of the extent to
which she felt she had to identify Lincoln to please the adults back
then.
E ven before M.D. came forward to recant, Rodney Lincoln’s attorneys had
succeeded in undermining the other major piece of evidence that helped
convict him. In 2005, Lincoln’s current attorneys asked for new DNA
testing on that pubic hair found at the crime it. It took nearly a
decade but the new tests proved conclusively that he was not the source
of the hair. Lincoln’s lawyers went to court to ask for his release but
were denied. The DNA evidence,
those Missouri courts ruled in 2014 , was not “the determinative factor” in Lincoln’s conviction; M.D.’s identification was.
A year later, in 2015, M.D. recanted her identification, and
Lincoln’s lawyers filed a new petition asserting his innocence. So there
was no physical evidence linking Lincoln to the crime scene. And there
was no star witness. At this point, the state’s attorneys faced a
choice. They could have simply bowed to the new evidence and walked away
from the conviction, which would have led either to a new trial or
Lincoln’s outright freedom. Instead, they chose to defend the conviction
by attacking the credibility of M.D., the victim whose credibility they
had worked so hard to establish 34 years ago. Now, the state’s attorneys argue, M.D.’s new version of events about
her mother’s murder cannot be trusted because she had been subject to
“false memories” brought on by a television show. Moreover, the state
argues, M.D.’s family “came to the consensus that Lincoln was not the
killer” and helped persuade M.D. that this was so. To undercut their
former star witness, they assert that M.D. was “psychologically healthy”
for many years as an adult, including a five-year stint in the Navy
during which she had “top secret” clearance, and only recanted her
testimony about Lincoln
after she was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In their motion to gain Lincoln’s freedom, his attorneys pointed to
Sells and others as plausible alternative suspects in the 1982 crime—a
standard component of most “innocence” claims. Missouri argues that
Sells could not have killed M.D.’s mother, or attacked M.D. and her
sister, because he was in custody in Arkansas at the time of the crimes
(though there is no documentary evidence that confirms his location on
the night of the murder). And then the state argues that whatever the
merits of Lincoln’s arguments he is procedurally blocked from making
them because he waited too long. In March, a trial judge held a hearing at which Lincoln’s witnesses
all laid out their stories and the state presented its own evidence and
version of events. M.D.’s new account simply was not credible, Missouri
attorneys argued. Three months later, the trial judge, Daniel Green,
signed the government’s proposed order without changing a word of it —without
correcting the basic factual or grammatical errors in it or
acknowledging any of the new evidence Lincoln had introduced.......... Lincoln’s lawyers now have taken their case to the Missouri Supreme
Court. The high court has not scheduled a hearing. As for M.D. she
remains adamant in her belief that the wrong man is sitting in prison
for a crime that has clouded the lives of two families."
