QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Court records don’t show any appeals from Hester on his plea all those years ago. Redlich said challenging a plea deal is hard to do, and harder to win. Many can’t pay for attorneys, and innocence groups often won’t take on plea cases. “When I read about wrongful convictions, the term ‘throw away people’ always comes to mind,” Redlich said. “In these cases, time and time again, the criminal justice system treats them like throw away people.”
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Guilty pleas account for almost all of the convictions in the country — about 97% by Redlich’s findings. Plea bargains generally shorten the length of time someone spends in prison, making them especially attractive for people who have serious charges or when a co-defendant has already gotten a harsh sentence. And when that co-defendant just got life in prison or sent to death row, a person is often going to take the deal, she said. It’s usually acceptable that a district attorney prosecuted somebody else for the same exact crime under a different theory or under different facts, Redlich said. “When pleading guilty, the judge just has to accept that he or she believes there’s a factual basis for the crime.”
---------------------------------------------
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "According to data from the National Registry of Exonerations, three Alabama men have been exonerated for murder or manslaughter convictions since 1989 after pleading guilty. A person taking a plea waives all their rights they would have at trial. There is no cross examination of witnesses, no way to put on a defense. And there isn’t an easy recourse for false guilty pleas in the court system. When there isn’t a trial, there’s less record and finding of facts. “When people plead guilty, really the only record is the plea hearing, which tend to be short,” said Redlich. “Without this record, there is less information to later say that there were errors made, or ‘I didn’t understand my plea’ or ‘I was coerced into pleading guilty.’ There’s just not a record, really, to base your conviction appeals on.”
----------------------------------------------
STORY: "He served 24 years in prison. Now Alabama says he may have been wrongly identified," by Reporter Ivana Hrynkiw, published by 000, omitted June 22, 2026.
Now, decades later, the DNA has come back. And with it, the state has changed its theory of the case in its fight to keep Barbour on death row.
In prosecuting Barbour, the state argued three decades ago that Hester raped the 40-year-old victim as Barbour held her down and later stabbed her to death. But, after a federal judge ordered a new trial for Barbour, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office said maybe there was no rape at all.
Maybe Hester wasn’t even there.
Maybe it was a case of “misidentification,” state prosecutors wrote in court records this spring.
Maybe Barbour worked with another man, the state argued in court. Maybe he worked with the man whose DNA was recently found to match the grisly crime scene.
That man, Jerry Tyrone Jackson, lived across the street from Roberts in 1992. Today, Jackson can be found in an Alabama prison. Ten years after the Roberts murder, he was convicted of a separate fatal beating and stabbing of a woman in the northern part of the state.
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office didn’t respond to questions for this article.
It’s not clear if Hester knows the twisting legal journey of his old friend Barbour. He served his time and left prison a free man, and left behind seemingly any connection to the case at all.
It’s unclear if he knows that recent DNA evidence points to someone else.
What is clear is that the tales Barbour and Hester told never matched up, nor do they match the state’s new theories. Hester’s confession, made only once at his plea hearing in a Montgomery courtroom, never compared to Barbour’s. The police and prosecutors pushed through the inconsistencies, closing their case by locking away a duo of homeless young men who lived across the city behind a mall.
The state theorized 30 years ago that Roberts, who worked as a housekeeper at Maxwell Air Force Base and didn’t drink, invited the men in for a beer party that turned violent as Hester raped her and Barbour stabbed her.
There is no evidence the men ever met Roberts.
The Chrises
In 1992, Hester was 20. He had a reputation among teenagers in Montgomery and hung out with a group of runaway kids. He mostly lived out of his car, friends said in their police interviews, and at an encampment behind the Eastdale Mall.
Meanwhile, Roberts lived with her two teenagers across town in the Chisholm neighborhood. She lived in a small home on Manley Drive, a street filled with friends of her kids and with others who were rumored to be in various gangs.
Roberts’ son found her body on the morning of March 21, 1992. There was a butcher knife sticking out of her chest, she was naked, and there was a bag over her head.
Police chased leads for weeks. They initially focused on her estranged husband, who said he was beaten by police before they moved on to other suspects. They even looked at her children before learning about a Caucasian hair found on the sheet her body was wrapped in when it got to the coroner’s office.
Roberts and her family were Black. Hester and Barbour are white.
Montgomery detectives leaned into the rumor mill that plagued the case, grasping onto information from kids in middle school and high school and tales that swirled and pointed in all different directions.
Eventually, interviews led the police to the Chrises.
There were at least six different young men named Chris identified in the interviews with neighborhood kids, police notes show, but Christopher Hester was one who caught their eye. He was 20 at the time and had been wanted in the area for passing bad checks that he had stolen from a family member and on a statutory rape charge for having sex with an underage teen girl he was friends with.
When police started looking for information on Hester, Barbour’s name popped up.
Police found Barbour at the mall he lived behind and “questioned him intently,” the lead detective on the case wrote in a report. The same detective called him a “whimpie little thing, and scares real easy.”
The traits didn’t deter police. They found Barbour again shortly after and asked him to show up for more questioning on what Barbour believed to be about a string of small grocery store fires, which were started in aisles as a distraction to steal food and candy and cigarettes.
Barbour showed up to talk about the small flames. But something happened while he was there: After being questioned, after he was fed dinner at the fire station, and after sitting on a fire truck, he confessed to a grisly murder.
The confessions
Barbour confessed three times that night, court records show. One was audiotaped, one videotaped, and one not taped at all.
Barbour said he and Hester, along with a teenage boy who was never charged, were looking for a place to drink on March 20, 1992. The trio went to Manley Drive to see a friend of Hester’s, but the friend wasn’t home. Instead, said Barbour, Hester went to Roberts’ house and knocked on the door. Hester motioned for the other two men to come inside and said they were going to drink and hang out with Roberts.
No one involved in the case indicated that Roberts knew Hester or Barbour. Roberts did not drink or smoke, and no alcohol was found in her blood after her death. No beer cans were found at the scene.
But regardless, Barbour said he, the teenager, and Hester drank beer and hung out in the living room. At some point, Hester and Roberts went to the back bedroom. Barbour and the teen remained in the living room until they heard shouting and went to investigate. They found a naked Roberts and Hester wearing only his pants. Then, Barbour told police, the three beat Roberts to the ground, where he and the teen held her down while Hester raped her.
After the rape, Barbour said, he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed Roberts. He set several small fires around her body, but the flames never caught.
And then, he said, they left.
That’s the story that police relied on at Barbour’s capital murder trial. Barbour’s lawyers tried to get the confession thrown out, saying Barbour made up the story to fit the police theory and that he was slapped and threatened into confessing. But the judge allowed the confession, and the jury believed it.
Barbour was convicted and sentenced to death.
After his friend’s trial, Hester agreed to a plea deal for felony murder: a lesser charge than capital murder and one that didn’t carry the death penalty. As part of the plea, Hester confessed to what happened the night of March 20.
His tale was different from Barbour’s almost entirely.
Hester said that on the night Roberts was murdered, he, Barbour, and a 16-year-old girl broke into Roberts’ house to rob her. In his tale, there was no rape. He wasn’t invited in by Roberts. There was no drinking in his version, and there was no teen boy. There was no argument with Roberts that escalated, no beating. He also said he didn’t witness a stabbing at all — he didn’t know what happened in the bedroom of Roberts’ house. He said he only learned that Roberts had died two days after the robbery.
The two confessions didn’t line up, but the police and prosecutor pressed ahead anyway. Randy McNeil, the man who prosecuted both cases, acknowledged the inconsistencies in a 2022 deposition.
It was rare to have a stranger-on-stranger rape and murder, he said. And it was unusual that a woman would willingly let in three men of a different race and generation to drink in her home.
The case against Barbour was built on his confession, McNeil said, and he never actually spoke to Hester. Hester’s case was more challenging because he didn’t have a confession.
“Both statements were not necessarily -- they do not match up. I agree,” McNeil said in his deposition.
When Barbour’s lawyers questioned McNeil in 2022 about the differences, an assistant attorney general quipped: “Mr. McNeil prosecuted two people in this case. He used alternate theories. What he truly thinks does not matter. It’s irrelevant to this case.”
McNeil answered anyway, saying that he was still sure that Barbour and Hester were involved. He based that on their own words, even if their stories didn’t match up.
His job in taking Hester’s plea was to listen, McNeil said, and ensure the story Hester told lined up with the elements for the state’s felony murder charge. He didn’t need to prove the story.
“Because that’s all I need,” he said. “Why make it more complicated?”
False pleas
False guilty pleas are even more common than false confessions, said Allison Redlich, a professor and researcher at George Mason University who studies wrongful convictions and false guilty pleas.
In interrogations, cops can’t promise leniency or threaten punishment. But that’s what plea deals are all about.
Redlich cited research that shows more than 900 people have been exonerated by DNA or other forms of evidence after pleading guilty. In those cases, data shows innocent people are more likely to plead guilty when threatened with the death penalty.
Guilty pleas account for almost all of the convictions in the country — about 97% by Redlich’s findings. Plea bargains generally shorten the length of time someone spends in prison, making them especially attractive for people who have serious charges or when a co-defendant has already gotten a harsh sentence. And when that co-defendant just got life in prison or sent to death row, a person is often going to take the deal, she said.
It’s usually acceptable that a district attorney prosecuted somebody else for the same exact crime under a different theory or under different facts, Redlich said. “When pleading guilty, the judge just has to accept that he or she believes there’s a factual basis for the crime.”
According to data from the National Registry of Exonerations, three Alabama men have been exonerated for murder or manslaughter convictions since 1989 after pleading guilty.
A person taking a plea waives all their rights they would have at trial. There is no cross examination of witnesses, no way to put on a defense.
And there isn’t an easy recourse for false guilty pleas in the court system. When there isn’t a trial, there’s less record and finding of facts.
“When people plead guilty, really the only record is the plea hearing, which tend to be short,” said Redlich. “Without this record, there is less information to later say that there were errors made, or ‘I didn’t understand my plea’ or ‘I was coerced into pleading guilty.’ There’s just not a record, really, to base your conviction appeals on.”
The girl who never testified
McNeil, the prosecutor, believes the story he heard from the teenage girl he spoke with in the 1990s, the one Hester named in his tale. She said she was there on the night Roberts died. It’s a story the state has recently brought up in its fight to keep Barbour locked away on death row.
The teenager spoke with McNeil before the two men were convicted. The prosecutor described her as “flighty” and nervous throughout her interview, but he believed her.
He didn’t call her as a witness at Barbour’s trial, saying her testimony would “undercut” the confession because it was also different.
Now in her 50s and living in another state, she was never charged in the Roberts case. She talked to police multiple times during the investigation, and her stories varied from interview to interview. Eventually, a year after the slaying and as a detective started the interview saying “this is all a dream you’re having, right,” she said she was there the night Roberts died.
Court records show that a year after the murder, the girl told police that on the night Roberts was killed, she was with Barbour, Hester, and the teen boy. She said that at one point she woke up in an empty car on Manley Drive. She stumbled from the car to the bedroom of Roberts’ house, she told police, and found a woman on the ground with Hester. During that interview in 1993, according to a transcript, the lead detective repeatedly encouraged her to keep talking, despite her getting sick over a trashcan at one point.
“Get it up, get it out darling. Now is the time. You know what’s happened,” he said. “Take a swallow of your Coke, baby.”
The girl said the men were hurting Roberts and were going to kill her. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t see the stabbing.
When asked by detectives during the 1993 interview why she was just now telling police this story, she said: “Because I didn’t remember all of – all of these things I do not remember.”
Barbour’s lawyers have said she was hypnotized during the interview.
No one ever reported seeing a car matching the description on Manley Drive that night.
In a 2022 affidavit, the woman told a similar story. She said when she woke up from the car and went inside, she saw Barbour, Hester, and the teen boy next to a person on the ground and surrounded by trash bags. She said she heard a woman praying, saw a knife in her body and blood everywhere. In her 2022 telling, she recalled leaving the house and ending up at Barbour’s grandparents’ house.
But in the spring of 1992, Barbour’s grandparents said 22-year-old Barbour was living behind the Eastdale Mall and had already been kicked out of their house because he was drinking and generally didn’t follow their house rules.
All these years later, McNeil was “flabbergasted” to learn about the DNA match to Roberts’ neighbor Jackson, according to the 2022 deposition. He never spoke with Jackson, and neither did the police. He didn’t know Jackson had been arrested months prior for breaking into a woman’s house nearby. He didn’t know that Jackson was later convicted of murdering a woman in north Alabama.
It still doesn’t shake McNeil’s belief. It does complicate the confession, though.
“I really truly believe that confession,” McNeil said in 2022 of Barbour’s decades old statements to police. “And I also believe that (the teen girl) was correct.”
Written out of the latest narrative
Time has taken its toll on the case of who killed Thelma Roberts.
One of Hester’s former attorneys died more than a decade ago. The other is now a judge in Montgomery and said he wouldn’t comment on cases he handled before taking the bench. The private investigator who worked on his case has also died.
Hester hasn’t been charged with any violent crimes since leaving prison, court records show. He’s gotten a few tickets and slaps on the wrist for failing to update his address on the sex offender registry as he’s moved around.
He did not respond to letters sent to previous listed addresses, nor reply to emails. No phone number was available.
Hester’s story is settled, according to the state. But now, despite the two decades he spent in prison, they seem to have simply written him out of the narrative.
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office said that the DNA match to Jackson doesn’t exonerate Barbour. The record “supports an obvious third explanation,” prosecutors wrote, “that Barbour participated in the crime with Jackson but named Hester instead, whether out of fear, confusion, or some other motive.”
But the state in a court filing this spring also wrote that Hester’s comments from his 1993 plea are “direct evidence” against Barbour, as the state continues to keep Barbour in line for execution.
Hester’s plea “directly corroborates Barbour’s confession placing him at the scene and supports the inference that Barbour murdered Ms. Roberts.”
In a filing to the appeals court this spring, the state said Hester could have been misidentified. “...even if Barbour lied or was mistaken about Hester’s involvement, there are plenty of other explanations for the misidentification,” the Attorney General’s Office wrote. “The most obvious of the reasonable alternatives is that Barbour was afraid of Jackson.”
Court records don’t show any appeals from Hester on his plea all those years ago. Redlich said challenging a plea deal is hard to do, and harder to win. Many can’t pay for attorneys, and innocence groups often won’t take on plea cases.
“When I read about wrongful convictions, the term ‘throw away people’ always comes to mind,” Redlich said.
“In these cases, time and time again, the criminal justice system treats them like throw away people.”
GIST: Christopher Hester is hard to find.
He was 20 years old when police found him, homeless in Montgomery. He lived for the next 24 years inside Alabama’s prisons. After serving his time, he’s seemingly disappeared and appears to be homeless yet again.
Hester went to prison for the 1992 slaying of Thelma Roberts, a single mother of two who was raped, beaten and stabbed inside her own bedroom. After his friend was sentenced to death, Hester pleaded guilty to being at the scene before she died, saying that he never saw the woman being harmed. His friend Christopher Barbour was convicted of her murder and sent to wait on the electric chair.
He was 20 years old when police found him, homeless in Montgomery. He lived for the next 24 years inside Alabama’s prisons. After serving his time, he’s seemingly disappeared and appears to be homeless yet again.
Hester went to prison for the 1992 slaying of Thelma Roberts, a single mother of two who was raped, beaten and stabbed inside her own bedroom. After his friend was sentenced to death, Hester pleaded guilty to being at the scene before she died, saying that he never saw the woman being harmed. His friend Christopher Barbour was convicted of her murder and sent to wait on the electric chair.
Now, decades later, the DNA has come back. And with it, the state has changed its theory of the case in its fight to keep Barbour on death row.
In prosecuting Barbour, the state argued three decades ago that Hester raped the 40-year-old victim as Barbour held her down and later stabbed her to death. But, after a federal judge ordered a new trial for Barbour, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office said maybe there was no rape at all.
Maybe Hester wasn’t even there.
Maybe it was a case of “misidentification,” state prosecutors wrote in court records this spring.
Maybe Barbour worked with another man, the state argued in court. Maybe he worked with the man whose DNA was recently found to match the grisly crime scene.
That man, Jerry Tyrone Jackson, lived across the street from Roberts in 1992. Today, Jackson can be found in an Alabama prison. Ten years after the Roberts murder, he was convicted of a separate fatal beating and stabbing of a woman in the northern part of the state.
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office didn’t respond to questions for this article.
It’s not clear if Hester knows the twisting legal journey of his old friend Barbour. He served his time and left prison a free man, and left behind seemingly any connection to the case at all.
It’s unclear if he knows that recent DNA evidence points to someone else.
What is clear is that the tales Barbour and Hester told never matched up, nor do they match the state’s new theories. Hester’s confession, made only once at his plea hearing in a Montgomery courtroom, never compared to Barbour’s. The police and prosecutors pushed through the inconsistencies, closing their case by locking away a duo of homeless young men who lived across the city behind a mall.
The state theorized 30 years ago that Roberts, who worked as a housekeeper at Maxwell Air Force Base and didn’t drink, invited the men in for a beer party that turned violent as Hester raped her and Barbour stabbed her.
There is no evidence the men ever met Roberts.
The Chrises
In 1992, Hester was 20. He had a reputation among teenagers in Montgomery and hung out with a group of runaway kids. He mostly lived out of his car, friends said in their police interviews, and at an encampment behind the Eastdale Mall.
Meanwhile, Roberts lived with her two teenagers across town in the Chisholm neighborhood. She lived in a small home on Manley Drive, a street filled with friends of her kids and with others who were rumored to be in various gangs.
Roberts’ son found her body on the morning of March 21, 1992. There was a butcher knife sticking out of her chest, she was naked, and there was a bag over her head.
Police chased leads for weeks. They initially focused on her estranged husband, who said he was beaten by police before they moved on to other suspects. They even looked at her children before learning about a Caucasian hair found on the sheet her body was wrapped in when it got to the coroner’s office.
Roberts and her family were Black. Hester and Barbour are white.
Montgomery detectives leaned into the rumor mill that plagued the case, grasping onto information from kids in middle school and high school and tales that swirled and pointed in all different directions.
Eventually, interviews led the police to the Chrises.
There were at least six different young men named Chris identified in the interviews with neighborhood kids, police notes show, but Christopher Hester was one who caught their eye. He was 20 at the time and had been wanted in the area for passing bad checks that he had stolen from a family member and on a statutory rape charge for having sex with an underage teen girl he was friends with.
When police started looking for information on Hester, Barbour’s name popped up.
Police found Barbour at the mall he lived behind and “questioned him intently,” the lead detective on the case wrote in a report. The same detective called him a “whimpie little thing, and scares real easy.”
The traits didn’t deter police. They found Barbour again shortly after and asked him to show up for more questioning on what Barbour believed to be about a string of small grocery store fires, which were started in aisles as a distraction to steal food and candy and cigarettes.
Barbour showed up to talk about the small flames. But something happened while he was there: After being questioned, after he was fed dinner at the fire station, and after sitting on a fire truck, he confessed to a grisly murder.
The confessions
Barbour confessed three times that night, court records show. One was audiotaped, one videotaped, and one not taped at all.
Barbour said he and Hester, along with a teenage boy who was never charged, were looking for a place to drink on March 20, 1992. The trio went to Manley Drive to see a friend of Hester’s, but the friend wasn’t home. Instead, said Barbour, Hester went to Roberts’ house and knocked on the door. Hester motioned for the other two men to come inside and said they were going to drink and hang out with Roberts.
No one involved in the case indicated that Roberts knew Hester or Barbour. Roberts did not drink or smoke, and no alcohol was found in her blood after her death. No beer cans were found at the scene.
But regardless, Barbour said he, the teenager, and Hester drank beer and hung out in the living room. At some point, Hester and Roberts went to the back bedroom. Barbour and the teen remained in the living room until they heard shouting and went to investigate. They found a naked Roberts and Hester wearing only his pants. Then, Barbour told police, the three beat Roberts to the ground, where he and the teen held her down while Hester raped her.
After the rape, Barbour said, he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed Roberts. He set several small fires around her body, but the flames never caught.
And then, he said, they left.
That’s the story that police relied on at Barbour’s capital murder trial. Barbour’s lawyers tried to get the confession thrown out, saying Barbour made up the story to fit the police theory and that he was slapped and threatened into confessing. But the judge allowed the confession, and the jury believed it.
Barbour was convicted and sentenced to death.
After his friend’s trial, Hester agreed to a plea deal for felony murder: a lesser charge than capital murder and one that didn’t carry the death penalty. As part of the plea, Hester confessed to what happened the night of March 20.
His tale was different from Barbour’s almost entirely.
Hester said that on the night Roberts was murdered, he, Barbour, and a 16-year-old girl broke into Roberts’ house to rob her. In his tale, there was no rape. He wasn’t invited in by Roberts. There was no drinking in his version, and there was no teen boy. There was no argument with Roberts that escalated, no beating. He also said he didn’t witness a stabbing at all — he didn’t know what happened in the bedroom of Roberts’ house. He said he only learned that Roberts had died two days after the robbery.
The two confessions didn’t line up, but the police and prosecutor pressed ahead anyway. Randy McNeil, the man who prosecuted both cases, acknowledged the inconsistencies in a 2022 deposition.
It was rare to have a stranger-on-stranger rape and murder, he said. And it was unusual that a woman would willingly let in three men of a different race and generation to drink in her home.
The case against Barbour was built on his confession, McNeil said, and he never actually spoke to Hester. Hester’s case was more challenging because he didn’t have a confession.
“Both statements were not necessarily -- they do not match up. I agree,” McNeil said in his deposition.
When Barbour’s lawyers questioned McNeil in 2022 about the differences, an assistant attorney general quipped: “Mr. McNeil prosecuted two people in this case. He used alternate theories. What he truly thinks does not matter. It’s irrelevant to this case.”
McNeil answered anyway, saying that he was still sure that Barbour and Hester were involved. He based that on their own words, even if their stories didn’t match up.
His job in taking Hester’s plea was to listen, McNeil said, and ensure the story Hester told lined up with the elements for the state’s felony murder charge. He didn’t need to prove the story.
“Because that’s all I need,” he said. “Why make it more complicated?”
False pleas
False guilty pleas are even more common than false confessions, said Allison Redlich, a professor and researcher at George Mason University who studies wrongful convictions and false guilty pleas.
In interrogations, cops can’t promise leniency or threaten punishment. But that’s what plea deals are all about.
Redlich cited research that shows more than 900 people have been exonerated by DNA or other forms of evidence after pleading guilty. In those cases, data shows innocent people are more likely to plead guilty when threatened with the death penalty.
Guilty pleas account for almost all of the convictions in the country — about 97% by Redlich’s findings. Plea bargains generally shorten the length of time someone spends in prison, making them especially attractive for people who have serious charges or when a co-defendant has already gotten a harsh sentence. And when that co-defendant just got life in prison or sent to death row, a person is often going to take the deal, she said.
It’s usually acceptable that a district attorney prosecuted somebody else for the same exact crime under a different theory or under different facts, Redlich said. “When pleading guilty, the judge just has to accept that he or she believes there’s a factual basis for the crime.”
According to data from the National Registry of Exonerations, three Alabama men have been exonerated for murder or manslaughter convictions since 1989 after pleading guilty.
A person taking a plea waives all their rights they would have at trial. There is no cross examination of witnesses, no way to put on a defense.
And there isn’t an easy recourse for false guilty pleas in the court system. When there isn’t a trial, there’s less record and finding of facts.
“When people plead guilty, really the only record is the plea hearing, which tend to be short,” said Redlich. “Without this record, there is less information to later say that there were errors made, or ‘I didn’t understand my plea’ or ‘I was coerced into pleading guilty.’ There’s just not a record, really, to base your conviction appeals on.”
The girl who never testified
McNeil, the prosecutor, believes the story he heard from the teenage girl he spoke with in the 1990s, the one Hester named in his tale. She said she was there on the night Roberts died. It’s a story the state has recently brought up in its fight to keep Barbour locked away on death row.
The teenager spoke with McNeil before the two men were convicted. The prosecutor described her as “flighty” and nervous throughout her interview, but he believed her.
He didn’t call her as a witness at Barbour’s trial, saying her testimony would “undercut” the confession because it was also different.
Now in her 50s and living in another state, she was never charged in the Roberts case. She talked to police multiple times during the investigation, and her stories varied from interview to interview. Eventually, a year after the slaying and as a detective started the interview saying “this is all a dream you’re having, right,” she said she was there the night Roberts died.
Court records show that a year after the murder, the girl told police that on the night Roberts was killed, she was with Barbour, Hester, and the teen boy. She said that at one point she woke up in an empty car on Manley Drive. She stumbled from the car to the bedroom of Roberts’ house, she told police, and found a woman on the ground with Hester. During that interview in 1993, according to a transcript, the lead detective repeatedly encouraged her to keep talking, despite her getting sick over a trashcan at one point.
“Get it up, get it out darling. Now is the time. You know what’s happened,” he said. “Take a swallow of your Coke, baby.”
The girl said the men were hurting Roberts and were going to kill her. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t see the stabbing.
When asked by detectives during the 1993 interview why she was just now telling police this story, she said: “Because I didn’t remember all of – all of these things I do not remember.”
Barbour’s lawyers have said she was hypnotized during the interview.
No one ever reported seeing a car matching the description on Manley Drive that night.
In a 2022 affidavit, the woman told a similar story. She said when she woke up from the car and went inside, she saw Barbour, Hester, and the teen boy next to a person on the ground and surrounded by trash bags. She said she heard a woman praying, saw a knife in her body and blood everywhere. In her 2022 telling, she recalled leaving the house and ending up at Barbour’s grandparents’ house.
But in the spring of 1992, Barbour’s grandparents said 22-year-old Barbour was living behind the Eastdale Mall and had already been kicked out of their house because he was drinking and generally didn’t follow their house rules.
All these years later, McNeil was “flabbergasted” to learn about the DNA match to Roberts’ neighbor Jackson, according to the 2022 deposition. He never spoke with Jackson, and neither did the police. He didn’t know Jackson had been arrested months prior for breaking into a woman’s house nearby. He didn’t know that Jackson was later convicted of murdering a woman in north Alabama.
It still doesn’t shake McNeil’s belief. It does complicate the confession, though.
“I really truly believe that confession,” McNeil said in 2022 of Barbour’s decades old statements to police. “And I also believe that (the teen girl) was correct.”
Written out of the latest narrative
Time has taken its toll on the case of who killed Thelma Roberts.
One of Hester’s former attorneys died more than a decade ago. The other is now a judge in Montgomery and said he wouldn’t comment on cases he handled before taking the bench. The private investigator who worked on his case has also died.
Hester hasn’t been charged with any violent crimes since leaving prison, court records show. He’s gotten a few tickets and slaps on the wrist for failing to update his address on the sex offender registry as he’s moved around.
He did not respond to letters sent to previous listed addresses, nor reply to emails. No phone number was available.
Hester’s story is settled, according to the state. But now, despite the two decades he spent in prison, they seem to have simply written him out of the narrative.
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office said that the DNA match to Jackson doesn’t exonerate Barbour. The record “supports an obvious third explanation,” prosecutors wrote, “that Barbour participated in the crime with Jackson but named Hester instead, whether out of fear, confusion, or some other motive.”
But the state in a court filing this spring also wrote that Hester’s comments from his 1993 plea are “direct evidence” against Barbour, as the state continues to keep Barbour in line for execution.
Hester’s plea “directly corroborates Barbour’s confession placing him at the scene and supports the inference that Barbour murdered Ms. Roberts.”
In a filing to the appeals court this spring, the state said Hester could have been misidentified. “...even if Barbour lied or was mistaken about Hester’s involvement, there are plenty of other explanations for the misidentification,” the Attorney General’s Office wrote. “The most obvious of the reasonable alternatives is that Barbour was afraid of Jackson.”
Court records don’t show any appeals from Hester on his plea all those years ago. Redlich said challenging a plea deal is hard to do, and harder to win. Many can’t pay for attorneys, and innocence groups often won’t take on plea cases.
“When I read about wrongful convictions, the term ‘throw away people’ always comes to mind,” Redlich said.
“In these cases, time and time again, the criminal justice system treats them like throw away people.”
The entire story can be read atL
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
