On July 19, the Clarion Ledger did just that, finding wires, broken concrete blocks, parts of childrens toys and a plastic dog bone. In October 2015, some 20 years after the murders, Katie Ali, one of Flowers attorneys in his appeal, recognized him in the photo lineup law enforcement used to implicate Flowers: In those Alabama crimes, store employees were shot execution-style with a .380 handgun the same type weapon used in the Tardy Furniture Store killings that might have jammed, and a suspect was wearing Fila shoes the same type shoe found from a bloody shoe print at the scene. Presley was the tougher of the two, and he didn't say much. December 6, 1948 August 11, 2018. Willie James Hemphill has done many terrible things. Hemphill supposedly had an alibi for the time of the murders, but when In The Dark dug into it, they were able to determine his alibi was barely credible if at all. When we finally found Hemphill, living in Indianapolis, he had some very surprising things to say about the case. "Best I remember is somebody brought it to the attention of the investigators that they wanted us to talk to him, and he came in and we talked to him," Matthews said on the stand in the sixth trial. She said the shoes had belonged to her son, who no longer lived there. Jessie Mae Hemphill; Jimmie Gordon; Jimmy "Duck" Holmes; Jimmy Burns; Jimmy Dawkins; Jimmy Holmes; Jimmy Johnson; . State investigator Jack Matthews, one of those who had read Hemphill his rights, said hed only talked to Hemphill for a short time before realizing he didnt know anything. For Ali and the other lawyers working on Flowers' appeal at the time, this was a significant revelation. Detective Goldberg got Presley and Gamble to confess their roles in a pair of murders at a Birmingham pawn shop less than two weeks after the Tardy Furniture murders. And so, in the corridors of the courthouse last week, a female journalist with In The Dark confronted Hemphill about his airtight alibi. It hurts my feelings.. Maybe theyll cover that in their next season. Wiilie Hemphill passed away in Bryan, Texas. The shooter, Marcus Presley (16) and his accomplice, Lasamuel Gamble (18) were arrested in Norfolk, Virginia on August 9, 1996 after two weeks on the run. On July 2, the podcast, which has been downloaded more than 24 million times in its second season, laid out a lengthy argument that a different man, Willie James Hemphill, committed the 1996 murders. But we found a document showing that another man, Willie James Hemphill, had also been questioned just days after the murders. And in the first Flowers trial, in 1997, he testified that "there were numerous suspects" in the early days of the investigation. Also known as Willie L Hemphill, Hemphill Wilie. Contacts (5) Locations (10) Family (3) Social (2) John Johnson, the DAs investigator, told the jury, I think they talked to him for five minutes. 4). When the podcasts reporter Parker Yesko confronted Hemphill about whether he committed the murders, he denied it, and the show included audio of the hideous, misogynistic things he said in response. It wasn't until Flowers' sixth trial that jurors heard anything about the Alabama suspects. Username. At a hearing, the attorney generals office told the judge that prosecutors knew of no such gun. EPISODE 16. 0 Add Rating Anonymously. . But how could a single person (especially a man like Curtis Flowers) dispatch four victims with a bullet to the back of the head? He's shown a fearlessness about committing brazen attacks and thefts in daylight with high risks and low payoff, in places close to where he's lived and where people are more likely to recognize him. Marcus Presley sometimes accompanied by LaSamuel Gamble had committed a string of robberies in 1996 in and around Birmingham, with the same modus operandi. He was nominated for an Academy Award in the category Best Sound for the film Belfast. The criminals used a .380-caliber handgun that sometimes jammed. Before he left on July 3, he said she gave him $30. Quantico National Cemetery. Selected filmography. He said he called Tardy the next day, asking if he still had a job, and she said he didnt. That day in October 2015, Ali was looking at a photo lineup that law enforcement had used to implicate Flowers in the Tardy case. The show revealed that the district attorneys office bullied and threatened people into lying on the witness stand. Who was he? And Hemphill had a history of committing crimes in Winona and Memphis. It was June 21 just an hour before the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn Curtis Flowers' conviction and reporters for In the Dark had intercepted Hemphill at a courthouse in Indianapolis. The ordeal of Curtis Flowers screams for correction. used to implicate Flowers in the Tardy case. On April 30, 2018, American Public Medias true crime podcast In The Dark began airing its second season, an investigation of the case of Curtis Flowers, a black man in Mississippi accused of a quadruple homicide at a furniture store in 1996. That said, I dont see a compelling motive, and none of these people is any more capable of pulling off an outrage on this scale than poor Curtis Flowers. Updated: June 22, 2016 . Nationwide News Pty Ltd 2023. In The Dark also found out that prosecutions star witness, Odell Hallmon, secretly received special treatment prosecutors dropped charges in seven felony cases against him in exchange for his false testimony that Flowers made a jailhouse confession. Prosecutors said repeatedly at trial that the only suspect seriously investigated was Flowers. At the time of his first known arrest, in 1990, he was an 18-year-old high school dropout bouncing back and forth between his mother's house in Memphis, Tennessee, and Winona, where his grandmother lived. But instead of stopping there, its reporters started snitching to the same system whose injustice they had just unmasked. Find 23 people named Willie Hemphill along with free Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok profiles on PeekYou - true people search. Montgomery County Sheriff Bill Thornburg searched Moores home and found a size 10.5 Fila Grant Hill shoebox in a dresser at her house. Evidence of false testimony by prosecution witnesses could potentially get Flowers' conviction overturned, Bennett Gershman, a former prosecutor who now teaches law at Pace University, told the APM reporting team. A Hearing. A surveillance camera revealed that the killer was wielding a 380 pistol that jammed repeatedly. Authorities put together alineup later that day of black-and-white photos, and she identified Flowers from the lineup as the man she briefly saw that morning when she came outside to move her car. According to testimony in Flowers' first trial, authorities found $255 hidden in the headboard of Flowers' girlfriend. The case status is Pending - Other Pending. 704-***-**** View Phone. Katie Ali had been researching parallels between the Tardy Furniture murders and a string of similar crimes that had happened that same summer in neighboring Alabama. Evidence suggests that Marcus Presley was a psychopath who enjoyed random violence for its own sake. NEWS & ADVICE. 5 Visits. That same day, Horace Wayne Miller, a lieutenant with the Mississippi Highway patrol, asked Norfolk officials to keep him apprised of their investigation. It might mean letting someone get away with an abominable crime. Armstrong said a law enforcement officer told him the gun had been sent to the state Crime Lab, determining this .380 handgun wasnt the murder weapon. When In The Dark spoke to Woods, she denied the two were together. listing of 6209011-20040428-Willie-James-Hemphill-Criminal-Civil_jp2.zip; file as jpg timestamp size; 6209011-20040428-Willie-James-Hemphill-Criminal-Civil_jp2/ The judge denied Flowers' request to attend his mother funeral here on July 21. Matthews never responded. "I haven't heard anything about them," John Johnson, the investigator for the District Attorney's office, had said when questioned about the Alabama suspects at the sixth Flowers trial. The show has won rightful fame for its work helping to save Flowers life. A burglary took place at Tardy Furniture just eight days before the killings. The justices wrote that it was as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge. Record for Willie James Hemphill 27 May 1919 - 14 July 2000 in Quantico National Cemetery, Triangle, Prince William, Virginia, United States from BillionGraves GPS Headstones. It was all make believe. Flowers has remained imprisoned the entire time, for more than 20 years. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008); The Social Network (2010) The crime had a random and senseless quality to it. Share to Tumblr. Illuminating Journalism from American Public Media. Miller also asked the investigator to interrogate Presley and Gamble about the Tardy Furniture murders. Six trials and six successful appeals. Like LaSamuel Gamble, Hemphill wore Fila shoes and had a criminal record. His misdeeds, while abhorrent, are also likely inseparable from his decades-long history of poverty and addiction. His full criminal history is too lengthy to reproduce here. Presley wasnt the only suspect defense attorneys didnt know investigators had seriously considered. It wasnt until 2016 that defense lawyers took a closer look at Armstrongs statement that he found a .380 handgun. According to Yesko and Mann (2019), Hemphill dropped out of high school and was living back and forth from his mother's house to his grandmother's. According to court records, he was "swinging a machete and causing a. But he believed Gamble's denial. Check resumes and CV, arrest records, places of employment, social media profiles, photos and videos, public records, skilled experts, publications and memorials . As the investigators interviewed for theWrong Man episodes on Flowers point out, the family members of the victims should have been considered suspects until evidence suggested otherwise. But at Curtis Flowers' trials, the prosecution downplayed any investigation of other suspects. Two weeks later, a picture of Marcus Presley, the shooter in the Birmingham murders, was included in a photo array shown to Porky Collins, a witness in the Winona, Mississippi case. "After a short time, we realized that he didn't know anything about the case.". But this week she told journalist Madeleine Baran that she was wrong. You said that was an airtight alibi we talked to Twanda and she said she wasnt with you that day., Hemphill: They released me based on that. Saums said it makes sense the killers would have left through the side door, rather than go out the front door onto busy Front Street, the small towns main drag. While he was working July 3, he loaded golf cart batteries into the back of a truck. He said he knew nothing about the burglary. According to the July 8, 1996, police report, store owner Bertha Tardy reported to police that a burglar or burglars smashed through a skylight, tried to break into the safe and stole the side door key. LOW HIGH. When Jeffrey Armstrong heard his dog barking, he went outside tosee the reason for the commotion. "If he's guilty, he's guilty.". For Flowers, the new information including Flemings changed story adds weight to his case for a full acquittal. That was a lie, Hallmon told APM Reports in an interview on a contraband cellphone from his prison cell. He never responded. James Graham, was a blues pianist and her mother, Virgie Lee Graham, was skilled in many instruments, though she did not . Free this man. His father had, for just a few months, been the first sheriff in the county, but returned to farming his land. But Curtis Flowers is somehow still not cleared of the gruesome quadruple murder on July 16, 1996. Gamble and Presley are serving life in prison for their Alabama crime spree. During the sixth Flowers trial, Matthews, who worked with Miller at the Mississippi Highway Patrol, said the only suspect in the case aside from Flowers was Doyle Simpson, whose gun the prosecution argued Flowers stole and used as the murder weapon. The podcasts reporters spent months methodically proving that prosecutors systematically denied black people a seat in the jury box, and how a man who is likely innocent has been repeatedly sentenced to death. Flowers parents have long believed in his innocence, visiting him in prison. Nor was there any record of the evidence gathered from Hemphill. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person's profile. Store employees were threatened with death and forced to lie on the floor. In fact, it appears Miller had specifically asked for the photo of Presley from an investigator in Virginia, where Presley and his accomplice, LaSamuel Gamble, were apprehended. Curtis Flowers is on Mississippis death row, convicted of the murders after six trials, but his lawyers, APM Reports In the Dark podcast, the Starz TV program The Wrong Man and others have raised questions about his guilt. The July 16, 1996, killings of Tardy Furniture owner Bertha Tardy, 59, and three employees, Carmen Rigby, 45, Robert Golden, 42, and Derrick Stewart, 16, have haunted this town ever since. What are we supposed to think? (1909). You may also light a candle in honor of Willie James . More importantly, Woods said she was certain that she didn't make the trip with Hemphill that day. Initially, Hemphill refused to provide further details of his whereabouts on July 16, 1996. "It just kind of jumped out," Ali said. Actually,In the Dark hasnt weighed in on the guilt-innocence issue (thats not what they do), but their careful dissection of DA Doug Evans case against Flowers has left the case in a shambles. Due to a planned power outage on Friday, 1/14, between 8am-1pm PST, some services may be impacted. They have also lived in Franklin, NC and North Fort Myers, FL. Resides in Greenwood, MS. Suppressing the evidence theyve already gathered might mean denying justice to the victims. . How do we create a person's profile? (1870), A.M. (1872), and LL.D. It was a .380-caliber automatic handgun, coated in dirt and rust. He explained his suspicion that the gun might have something to do with the Tardy murders. Willie Headen; Willie James Lyons; Willie Love; Willie Mabon; Willie Smith; Willie Trice; Willie Williams; Willie James Hemphill didn't come up until the sixth Flowers trial, and law enforcement officers said he was eliminated as a suspect in about five minutes. Finding the truly guilty person (or people) strengthens the case that Flowers is innocent. Willie Hemphill's passing at the age of 97 has been publicly announced by Arnold Family Funeral Services Inc. - Hillside Chapel in Altadena, CA.Legacy invites you to offer condolences and share memori Sign the Guest Book . . Relatives were alarmed to see a swarm of police cars descending on their homes in search of Willie James. That might not be so if the whole world wasnt watching, but it is. "Yes, sir," Snow replied. Curtis Flowers, as any prison guard who has ever worked with him can tell you, has no demons. This score is (-15%) Above the National Average View Actual Score View Reputation Details . He said: "If it wasn't for the fact that I had an airtight alibi, I could be the one on death row right now. Usually if somebody starts shooting, he said, others will run.. They fell out and broke. If, hypothetically, theIn the Dark team was charged with defending Curtis in a seventh trial even an all-white jury selected entirely of Winona residents couldnt find him guilty. "Because once you get people on a roll to admitting to crimes, they just don't stop. Courtroom testimonyshows that Presley was the shooter in the pawn shop murders in Birmingham even though, prior to being shown video of the crime, he insisted that Gamble had been the gunman. A wealthy lawyer who killed his wife and son at close range has been sentenced in one of the most troubling cases the judge said he had seen. Who was he? One of them, LaSamuel Gamble, had more money in his possession when he returned to Alabama, Presley said. 0 Reputation Score Range. And, unlike Curtis, Doyle had more than a passing acquaintance with organized crime (a mobster once left him for dead in a field outside of New Orleans). Ive been confused of the day from the beginning. He said he wondered what happened with the gun. Evidence that prosecution witnesses may have given false testimony could potentially get Flowers' conviction overturned, said Bennett Gershman, a former prosecutor who now teaches law at Pace University. Are you a wh*re?, Reporter: Did you commit the murders on Front Street? On July 14, his mother, Lola, died of surgery complications. After finding the weapon, Armstrong wondered how the gun had wound up under the house his mother was renting on Knox Street, only 700 feet or so from the furniture store. Hemphill said he was wearing his Filas when in walked into the Sheriffs Department. But maybe she didnt see anyone at all. Menu. Shooting a handgun with accuracy is more difficult than people think, said private investigator Charlie Saums of Ridgeland. Hired by Starz to examine the case, Saums said the crime"suggests somebody who has done it before. But there was a three-week gap in the Alabama crime spree right at the time of the Tardy murders. The ugly facts of Hemphills past werent ugly enough for the podcast In The Dark emphasized its clear disdain of him. "I was here in Winona," Woods said. It took the In the Dark team a full year to track Hemphill down in an Indianapolis courtroom (he's still getting into trouble). In the sixth, he was again convicted and sentenced to death, and his latest appeal was ongoing when the podcast started. Despite raising earthshaking doubts about the justice system, the show ultimately conforms to the systems logic that crime, denuded of context, must be solved and punished. What an Alabama crime spree might reveal about the Curtis Flowers investigation. Asked if she remembered where she was when the murders happened, she recalled the morning clearly. Menu. The whole time Ive been telling them, I dont remember the day, Fleming said. In other words, Evans committed two egregiousBrady violations that will, in the days that lie ahead, force the courts to grant a new trial and, just as likely, insist that Doug Evans recuse himself from this case. They didnt question him about other suspects or bring up Flowers name. Hemphill: A lot of people dont like to talk to the press and the police., Reporter: She was actually pretty talkative., Hemphill: Maybe she dont recall the day in question., Reporter: She actually has a really clear memory of that day., Hemphill: I dont know what she told you. … A bunch of lies., Asked about Hallmons recantation, District Attorney Doug Evans, who has prosecuted Flowers in all six trials, said, Thats why the judge instructs the jury that a jailhouse informant is not very reliable, because they can change their statements very easily, for any reason. If Gamble and McKenzie were in Mississippi the day of the Winona murders its very possible that Presley was with them. He died on July 14, 2000 at age 81. One, Rigby,was killed with two shots to the head.
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