Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Will arrest in old Michigan murder case
clear the man doing life for the crime?
NOTE: Jamie Lee Peterson is a client of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at
Northwestern University School of Law and the University of Michigan Law
School Innocence Clinic. His attorneys have no doubt that he is innocent.
Michigan State Police on Tuesday arrested
35-year-old Jason Anthony Ryan, of
Davison, Mich., and charged him with
homicide. Legal sources tell NBC News the
arrest occurred after a DNA test of semen
found at the scene of the murder matched
Ryan’s profile in a national database.
The rape and murder of Geraldine
Montgomery, a 68-year-old widow, was the
worst crime in memory in Kalkaska, Mich., a
town of about 2,200 residents in the northern
reaches of the state. In October 1996,
someone broke into her home in the village,
beat and raped her, then shoved her into the
trunk of her running Buick sedan and left her
to asphyxiate.
Investigators homed in on Jamie Lee
Peterson. In a series of interrogations, the 23year-old, already in jail on a sex charge and
with a long history of mental illness,
confessed. Despite quickly recanting, he was
tried, convicted and sentenced to life in
prison without the chance of parole.
The outcome notwithstanding, Peterson’s
defenders insist the now 39-year-old had
nothing to do with Montgomery’s murder.
“We are completely convinced that he is
completely innocent,” said Joshua A. Tepfer,
Jamie Lee Peterson
an attorney at Northwestern University’s
Center on Wrongful Convictions, which has
assisted in a number of the 311 postconviction DNA exonerations in the U.S. and
is working with the Michigan School of
Law’s Innocence Clinic to represent
Peterson. “This is a story about tunnel
vision.”
The arrest of Ryan appears to bolsters that
claim.
During the original investigation, police
interviewed more than 100 people in
Kalkaska County, population 15,000. Among
them was Ryan, then an 18-year-old
convicted felon, who provided a DNA
sample that apparently was never tested.
Police ruled him out as suspect after he
passed a polygraph test.
‘Just a good person’
In a town in which murders can be counted
on one hand, no one has forgotten the killing
of Geraldine Montgomery.
“She was just a good person,” said her
daughter Patty Cox, 67. “She was very
involved in her church. I don’t know of
anyone who disliked her. There was no
reason to dislike her, because she was helpful
and involved in the community.”
Montgomery spent two decades working
as a teacher’s aide before retiring in 1994 to a
life of church events and craft fairs, which is
how she spent Saturday, Oct. 5, 1996, the last
day of her life.
When Montgomery didn’t show up for
church on Sunday, Cox and her husband,
Michael, went to her home in the middle of
town and found her car parked in the garage,
running. They called 911.
Montgomery’s death shocked Kalkaska -a close-knit community where whitetail deer
hunters gather each winter and tourists flock
each summer -- and made villagers begin to
lock their doors at night.
Sometime around 8 p.m. the previous
night, police said, an intruder broke into
Montgomery’s single-story house on West
Dresden Street. There were signs of struggle.
A lamp was broken, and Montgomery’s bra
had been ripped and left in the laundry room.
Investigators determined she was sexually
assaulted in the living room, then taken to the
garage and locked in the trunk of her car.
It was a senseless and brutal crime.
Montgomery was arthritic, just 4-feet, 11-
inches tall and a little over 110 pounds. Only
a few things were missing from the house -$30 from her wallet and a candle.
The perpetrator wiped away prints, but
investigators found two samples of semen—
one in the victim’s vagina, and one, mixed
with saliva, on her shirt. The evidence was
tested for DNA.
Kalkaska police teamed with the Michigan
State Police on the investigation. By the end
of 1996, they had six suspects, but all were
ruled out by the DNA evidence.
Then, in February 1997, an inmate at the
county jail contacted police with a possible
lead. He said a fellow inmate, Jamie
Peterson, had been claiming he committed
the most notorious crime in the county’s
history.
Investigators brought in Peterson, who was
serving time on a statutory rape charge for
having sex with a 15-year-old girl, for
questioning. He failed a polygraph test and
confessed to the crime. Even before he was
arrested, Kalkaska’s sheriff announced that
they had their guy -- an effort, according to
the local paper, “to soothe the jangled nerves
of a community.”
Days later, Peterson, who had spent years
moving between psychiatric wards and
juvenile group homes, recanted. He said he
had made up the story to get sent to a state
hospital. “The DNA’s going to come back
not mine,” Peterson said, according to
transcripts of the interview. “And I got
witnesses that state where I was that night.”
Investigators insisted that Peterson knew
details, such as how much money was taken,
that were impossible to know if had not
committed the crime.
“I believe that the DNA ... it’s going to
come back to you,” said Det. Sgt. Greg
Somers, of the Michigan State Police.
“You have nothing to worry about if the
DNA doesn’t come back to you,” he added.
Police shift their theory
But when the DNA evidence did not
match Peterson’s, police shifted their theory.
Instead, they now maintained, he’d had a
partner in the crime.
Peterson appeared to go along with the
new theory. In further interviews, he said he
had committed the crime with a male friend.
Then, when that man was cleared, Peterson
portrayed the crime as a burglary-gonewrong, hatched by a female friend and her
boyfriend. He said he had lied before because
they threatened to hurt his girlfriend.
“When he started confessing, it was like a
gift from heaven,” said Bob Carey,
Peterson’s trial lawyer who has long
maintained his client is innocent. “Then
when the DNA results came back, they
weren’t going to let that stand in the way.”
Carey argued throughout the case that
Peterson’s was a false confession. Though
virtually unheard of at the time, subsequent
study has developed evidence that false
confessions are common. Some 25 percent of
wrongful
convictions
involve
false
confessions, according to The Innocence
Project.
In April, six weeks after announcing their
inquiry had narrowed to a single man,
investigators issued a press release stating
that they now believed “more than one
individual was involved in the death of
Geraldine Montgomery.” Villagers who had
just begun to settle again into normal life
were cautioned to continue to lock their
doors.
Limits to DNA technology at the time lent
some credence to the new theory.
Investigators had two body fluid samples –
one that was sufficient to provide a full DNA
profile, another – from the stain on
Montgomery’s blouse -- was not. They
theorized that the untestable second sample
pointed to Peterson, while the first belonged
to his unidentified accomplice.
The prosecutor would later say that
accomplice was a tall blond man, based on
the account of a witness who saw a man
matching that description through the
window of Montgomery’s house the night of
the murder. Peterson was short and had dark
hair.
Investigators searched for a second man,
interviewing and DNA testing several people
linked to Peterson. They spoke to others, in
and out of jail, who seemed likely
candidates. In July, they brought in a 19year-old jail inmate named Jason Ryan.
Ryan was a wanderer, living, his aunt told
police, “here and there.” He arrived in
Kalkaska about a week before the murder,
and was staying with an acquaintance less
than two blocks from Montgomery’s house.
Police questioned him in the days following
Montgomery’s death.
Early next year, Ryan was arrested in
Flint, Mich., and charged with felony home
invasion. That April he pleaded guilty,
adding to a criminal record that included a
juvenile larceny charge. Then he was
returned to Kalkaska, a convicted felon, to
deal with a hold for an outstanding traffic
court case.
When investigators questioned Ryan in
early 1997, he denied knowing Peterson but
acknowledged he was in Kalkaska the
weekend Montgomery died.
First DNA sample vanished
Ryan told investigators he would
“cooperate in the investigation in any way he
could.” He offered a DNA sample and took
two polygraphs. The first polygraph proved
inconclusive, but the second indicated “Ryan
was being truthful when he stated he was not
involved with and did not have any
knowledge of the Geraldine Montgomery
homicide.”
Records show that Ryan’s DNA was
submitted to a lab in Grayling, Mich., then
apparently sent out to a second lab. It is
unclear if that sample was ever tested.
That November, Peterson went to trial. It
took 23 days before Peterson was convicted,
and sentenced to life without the possibility
of parole. He remains at Oaks Correctional
Facility, a state prison in Manistee, Mich.
Carey didn’t give up on his client. Neither
did Peterson’s appellate lawyer, Al Millstein,
now in his 90s.
In 2012, they asked county officials to re-test
the DNA. The county resisted until last May,
when a new prosecutor agreed to send both
vaginal and partial DNA samples for retesting.
When those tests were done, they showed
a match in the national Combined DNA
Index System database, or CODIS. Lab
reports reviewed by NBC News indicated
that both samples were consistent with the
DNA of Jason Anthony Ryan.
While the results were enough to get
authorities to arrest Ryan, it’s unclear
whether they will free Peterson.
A press release issued Tuesday by the
Michigan State Police stated that “Peterson
ultimately admitted to the crime and had
information that only someone at the scene
should have knowledge of. Evidence at the
time of the trial indicated there were multiple
subjects involved in the homicide.
“Through the use of newer technologies, a
DNA profile was obtained that led to the
identification and arrest of the second
perpetrator.”
But lawyers representing Peterson
maintain there was no second perpetrator.
“This new evidence proves that Jamie
Peterson is absolutely innocent, he was never
in that house, committed no crimes, and has
no idea who did,” said Caitlin Plummer, an
attorney with
the Michigan Innocence
Clinic.
They said they plan to file a motion before
Christmas asking for a new trial, and for
Peterson’s
release.
The
Kalkaska
prosecutor’s office did not immediately
respond to requests for comment.
For relatives of Geraldine Montgomery,
Ryan’s arrest has brought a mixture of relief
and dread.
Patty Cox, Montgomery’s daughter, said
she felt “huge relief” when Kalkaska’s police
chief called her the night before the arrest. “I
thought well, good,” she said. “There’s no
question he was there.”
But the idea that Peterson could potentially
be released from prison has her wondering if
she will ever feel safe in her community.
“I think Peterson was justly convicted on
the evidence that was there,” she said. “There
was stuff that he knew, that he had to have
been there.”
“How long,” she added, “is it going to be
until it’s all over?”