Story behind the story

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Story Behind the Story

Six Northwestern University undergraduate students conducted a 10-week investigation of a 2004 murder and home invasion case. Their search for the truth included sifting through numerous documents, tracking down a key eyewitness and meeting the man convicted of the crimes. From left: Alex Campbell, Taylor Soppe, Lara Takenaga, Monica Kim, Caitlin Kearney and Jared Hoffman. Marc Zarefsky/Medill

By Alex Campbell, Jared Hoffman, Caitlin Kearney, Monica Kim, Taylor Soppe and Lara Takenaga Published June 7, 2011 Finding the truth took some prying—literally.

Linda Spates said she was busy and wouldnʼt agree to a time to meet us so, on May 6, we decided to drive the 90 miles from Evanston to her apartment in Rockford, Ill., anyway.

We needed to know what she had—the date when her longtime boyfriend, Donald

Watkins, had been shot in the left arm—a key fact in our investigation of his murder conviction, which we were conducting as undergraduate students in the investigative journalism course at Northwestern Universityʼs Medill School of Journalism.

No one we talked to could remember when Watkins was shot, not even the police, which told us that it had no record of the incident when we first submitted a Freedom of Information Act request. Spates, fortunately, let us in. Then she placed a lock box in front of us.

It contained her old journals where she had recorded the day when Watkins—better known as “Speedy”—had been shot. But the lock-box key was missing. So she handed us a screwdriver and—with her permission and a little jimmying—the top popped off. Spates flipped through the pages until she stopped at an entry marked for Jan. 12, 2003.

It read: “Speedy got shot.”

Opening that box led us down a number of avenues of reporting as we moved deeper into our 10-week investigation of Watkinsʼ murder conviction.

What started with a handful of court documents led us to trial transcripts, police reports, prison documents and emergency-surgery notes. Interviews with key sources took us all over northeastern Illinois: a prison in Joliet, a church in Waukegan and fast-food joints on a roughand-tumble stretch of Chicagoʼs West Side. Along the way, we hunkered down over thousands of pages of public documents, knocked on a lot of doors and bumped into some dead ends in our search for the truth.

Getting started We began our investigation by interviewing Watkinsʼ family: his brother Gregory Watkins, his mother Nannette Watkins and his aunt Sharon Blake. Among the first things they told us was how Watkins had been shot in the arm before he was accused of murder. Watkinsʼ injury never came up at his murder trial. His accuser said he dragged her by the collar around her apartment while also wielding a sawed-off shotgun.

The first Freedom of Information Act request we sent to police had the wrong date range for the shooting; Watkinsʼ family couldnʼt recall specifically when it happened. Our second Freedom of Information Act request, which included the right date range, yielded nothing. Thatʼs where Spates came in. With the date from her old journals, we re-submitted the Freedom of Information request for the third time with the specific date of the injury. This time, police found the records.

Meanwhile, we sent to Watkins in prison a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act form to sign that would allow the release of his medical records to us. As soon as we received his signed form, we requested his medical records from the Fire

soon as we received his signed form, we requested his medical records from the Fire Department for the documents from the paramedics who transported him in the ambulance, the hospital where he underwent emergency surgery and the prison where he is incarcerated.

When the first of his medical records emerged from our fax machine at Medill, they showed that Watkins had sustained a life-threatening injury with permanent nerve damage that experts later told us calls into question Watkinsʼ ability to have committed the crime as described by the star eyewitness.

Whoʼs who?

Then there was the matter of who was who. Court documents identified Verlisha Willis as the girlfriend of Alfred Curry, the man who was killed, and an eyewitness to the crime. But people in the neighborhood said we should be looking for a woman named Felisha, not Verlisha. A man we met in a barber shop on West North Avenue in the neighborhood where Curry lived told us we could find Felisha selling cigarettes outside of JJʼs Gyros about two blocks from the crime scene. When we approached her, we told her we were looking for information about the incident. “That was me!” she told us excitedly. She proceeded to explain that the man who died was her boyfriend and that she was there that night.

“So youʼre Verlisha?” one of us asked.

“No, Iʼm Felisha,” she insisted.

Stumped, we found the name for Verlisha Willisʼ sister, Josetta Williams, in court documents. After tracking down her address, we then went to Williamsʼ apartment, and she let us in. Williams explained that her sisterʼs birth name is Verlisha, but everyone calls her Felisha, a nickname from her childhood. Williams gave us the phone number for her mother, Lucille Williams, who we were then able to contact and meet three days later. Lucille said she raised Melissa Willis, Verlishaʼs daughter, who had also witnessed the murder. She declined to make Melissa available for an interview.

Sunday service As part of our reporting, we also wanted to determine the plausibility of Watkinsʼ alleged confession, which we found in internal police reports but was never raised at trial for reasons that remain unanswered; prosecutors and police declined to comment for this article.

According to the alleged confession, Watkins pulled the back door of Curryʼs apartment so hard that screws were dislodged and part of the lock flew off. Before we could ask if this was possible, we needed to know details about the type of door involved. After failing to reach the buildingʼs owner by phone or at home, we drove to a Baptist church in Waukegan where he serves as a pastor. We listened to his Sunday sermon about controversial actor Charlie

Sheen and how the people we think we ought to be arenʼt necessarily the people God wants us to be. Then he let us into his office and gave us the information about the door.

Knocking on doors Using the jury-selection transcripts, we compiled a list of the jurors and found contact information for them based on identifying details from the court records, including their educational background, work history and where they lived. After dozens of phone calls, we reached four. Two consented to in-person interviews; one agreed to go on the record. One angrily declined to be interviewed for our investigation. So we showed up, unannounced, at another jurorʼs apartment and at the office of yet another juror only to be turned away by his supervisor. We also went to the jury foremanʼs former place of employment on the South Side, where a woman agreed to mail him a letter from us but would not give us his contact information.

Meeting Donald After several weeks of haggling with prison officials and undergoing criminal background checks so that we could be cleared to visit Watkins in prison, we met him: a wellmannered man in tortoise-shell glasses with a closely-shaved head and white stubble framing his jawline. Sitting across a table from us in a yellow jumpsuit, he began by reading to us a list of questions he had prepared, such as: How could the jury believe the prosecutionʼs star eyewitness when she didn't know her own age? We then asked him our questions about his background, his past crimes for which he was convicted, his arm injury and what he did the night of the crime, Dec. 6, 2004. His atrophied left arm lay bent on the table, while he waved the right one as he spoke. Among the things he wanted to convey, he said this: “Imagine how I feel waking up every day of my life knowing Iʼm an innocent man in prison.”

We didnʼt make him any promises, only that we would continue to search for the truth.

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