PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "And then there was White. He declared his innocence from the start. On the night he was arrested, his first question was, “Why am I a suspect in a case of murder?” He said he didn’t know any Helen Wilson. He didn’t know of any murder. “You’re having a hard time remembering," the detective interviewing him suggested, according to a transcript. “Maybe it’s because you don’t want to remember, huh? Could that be, Joe?” No, he said repeatedly, “I was never there." The detectives threatened to test his blood and hair and semen to prove his guilt. White promised it would prove his innocence. But that would take nearly two decades."
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STORY: "Six people were convicted of a murder they didn’t even remember. Now a county owes them $28 million," by Meagan Flynn, published by The Washington Post on March 6, 2019. (Meagan Flynn is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. She was previously a reporter in Houston for both the Houston Chronicle and Houston Press, where she covered criminal and social justice).
PHOTO CAPTION: "In this February,2009 photo, Joseph White, left, one of six people wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of Helen Wilson in 1985, is hugged by Rachel Morgan, daughter of Ada Joann Taylor, right, another member of the "Beatrice Six", following his testimony before the Judiciary Committee in Lincoln, Neb."
GIST: "For years, a group of outcasts in Beatrice, Neb., were convinced they had brutally raped and murdered an elderly woman named Helen Wilson one night in February 1985, even though they couldn’t remember any of it. That was only what they had been told by the detectives and the police psychologist at the Gage County Sheriff’s Office. At first, it was befuddling: Why couldn’t they recall any details about something so terrible? None of the six suspects could even remember being in the woman’s apartment that night. But that was okay, the police assured the group: They had simply repressed the traumatizing memory. The police psychologist, Wayne Price, assured them the memories of the murder would likely come back in dreams or in deep thought, but that it may take a while. For some it didn’t take long. “I block bad things out. I always have,” Ada JoAnn Taylor told police in one of her first interviews in 1989, parroting the psychologist. By the end of the investigation, three of the six suspects — Taylor, Debra Shelden and James Dean — wholeheartedly believed in their guilt. But for at least one of them, Joseph White, it was a different story. Convicted on nothing more than his friends’ false memories and dreams, he would spend the next 20 years seeking to prove his innocence — a pursuit that finally came to an end this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld $28.1 million in damages to the wrongfully convicted, now known as the Beatrice Six. The judgment comes as a result of a civil rights lawsuit that White filed in 2009, the same year the group was pardoned and declared innocent beyond all doubt after DNA evidence exonerated them. They had collectively served more than 70 years in prison. The $28.1 million represents more than three times the annual budget of Gage County, population 22,311. To pay it, the county has already approved the maximum property tax hike allowed under state law, rattling taxpayers and farmers with large acreages, the Omaha World-Herald reported. Gage County had been appealing the ruling at every level, arguing that its actions should be judged based on what they knew to be right back then, not what they know is wrong now. At every level, courts rejected the county’s claims, culminating with the Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the case Monday. White, however, did not live to see the final resolution. He died in a coal refinery accident in Alabama in 2011, about two years after he filed the lawsuit, according to the World-Herald. His mother, Lois White, told the Lincoln Journal Star on Monday, “My main objective in all of it was to see that his name was cleared, and that the folks that put him through all that were held up to the light for the world to see." The wrongful convictions were a product of both aggressive interrogations and flawed science, entangling more and more suspects as their false memories grew more fanciful. Most of the suspects were familiar with trauma in some way, according to the lawsuit. Some were victims of childhood sexual or physical abuse. Some were mentally ill or intellectually challenged. And so for most, the idea that they could have repressed something terrible didn’t strike them as crazy. The “memory repression” pushed by Price, the police psychologist, reflected a popular movement among psychologists at the time. The same theory would lead to numerous wrongful convictions nationwide, including during a brief “Satanic panic” when psychologists led children to believe they were victims of sexual abuse. But the Beatrice Six case was remarkable because some of the innocent suspects believed for years that they were actually guilty, as the New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv reported in 2017. Long after the group went to prison, some still cried to family and friends about their deep remorse, never shaking the gnawing feeling of shame. Eli Chesen, a Nebraska psychologist who evaluated the group after their release from prison, told the New Yorker that they were suffering from Stockholm syndrome, a condition in which hostages develop a bond with their captors — in this case the police.
“Their new beliefs superseded their previous life experiences, like paper covering a rock," Chesen said. Attorneys for the county and Price could not immediately be reached for comment. For
four years after Wilson’s murder, police couldn’t find a culprit. By
1989, they were seeking suspects who were sexually unconventional and
who collected pornography. That was who the FBI believed had committed
the crime, the New Yorker reported. White and Taylor appeared to fit the bill. Each
lived on the fringes. White, who had been a nude model and pornographic
filmmaker, met Taylor in California in the early ’80s. They returned to
Beatrice, where Taylor had previously lived, and had resumed filming
porn not long before the killing. Eventually,
based on street rumors, investigators sought to interview Taylor — and
it wasn’t long before she was convinced that she was guilty of Wilson’s
murder, too. According
to transcripts contained in federal court records, Taylor told
detectives that she “was told” she was at Wilson’s apartment by the
police who brought her to jail. They had “worked on bringing back little
bits of memory,” she said. She couldn’t seem to remember anything
accurate about Wilson’s apartment, or what Wilson was wearing, or why
she even went inside. But police told her not to worry. “Let me try and help you refresh your memory,” they would say, according to the transcript. She ultimately confessed that she suffocated Wilson with a pillow while White raped her. The
investigation couldn’t end there, however, because there was a problem:
Neither Taylor nor White had type B blood, which was found at the
scene. And so police believed there had to be more suspects involved. Taylor’s
false recollections would help lead them to the others — whose own
false memories and dreams then snowballed into a progressively wilder
investigation. First,
Taylor mentioned offhandedly to police that “another boy” was with her
and White during the crime. She picked a high school friend, Thomas
Winslow, out of a photo lineup police presented her. He didn’t have type
B blood either, but he was still arrested. The fourth suspect, Shelden,
was targeted because she hung around the group. After interviews with
police and Price, she also bought into the idea that she had repressed
the memory of the crime, leading to her own false confession. She helped
police wrangle a fifth suspect after dreaming that another man, Dean,
was at Helen Wilson’s that night too. After interviews with Price, Dean believed he had simply forgotten the violent assault too, according to the federal lawsuit. The
final suspect, Kathy Gonzalez, however, tried to hold her ground. She
fell under suspicion because both Shelden and Dean said they dreamed
about her at the scene, according to the lawsuit. Gonzalez
could have sworn she was just doing laundry on the night of Feb. 5,
1985. But in an interview with Price, the psychologist assured her that
she had probably witnessed Wilson’s murder — she just might not
remember. “Have you ever had memory problems before?” Price asked, according to a police transcript of the interview. A befuddled Gonzalez assured him that, no, she didn’t have a memory problem, at least besides memorizing lessons for school. “How about something really terribly frightening, like something really had an impact emotionally?” he asked. She said no. She could vividly remember traumatic things that had happened to her in the past. How could she forget a murder? “I
just don’t understand,” she said to him. “I mean, this isn’t something I
would not say anything about. I’m not saying I’m perfect here, and I’ve
done my share of little sins. But we’re talking about killing an old
person." She
was arrested and charged anyway. Gonzalez, it turned out, also had type
B blood, and so finally, the investigation came to an end. Gonzalez
pleaded no contest. So did Taylor’s high school classmate, Thomas
Winslow. Taylor, Dean and Shelden each pleaded guilty. And then there was White. He
declared his innocence from the start. On the night he was arrested,
his first question was, “Why am I a suspect in a case of murder?” He
said he didn’t know any Helen Wilson. He didn’t know of any murder. “You’re
having a hard time remembering," the detective interviewing him
suggested, according to a transcript. “Maybe it’s because you don’t want
to remember, huh? Could that be, Joe?” No, he
said repeatedly, “I was never there." The detectives threatened to test
his blood and hair and semen to prove his guilt. White promised it would
prove his innocence. But that would take nearly two decades. A
court denied White’s own motion for the DNA test, and it wasn’t until
2007 that he successfully petitioned the Nebraska Supreme Court to go
through with it. The test ultimately led to his and his five
co-defendants’ exoneration. By then, the real
suspect identified by DNA tests was dead. The semen and blood found at
the scene matched Bruce Allen Smith, a one-time Beatrice resident who
died in 1992. Police now believe he acted alone."
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
