Part five: Threat of death

They investigated. He did the rest.

If they screwed up, he let them know it.

Some said the Gage County attorney ruled with an iron hand. Others took to calling him "King Richard."

"I knew people said that," he would say, "but they sure liked it when I got really tough convictions."

The six convictions he got in the Helen Wilson murder case in 1989 were the biggest of his career. But decades later, DNA testing wiped them off the books and critics would target Smith and the role he played in what has been called a landmark case of injustice.

It was not an outcome the Creighton Law graduate could have imagined when he joined the county attorney's office in 1978. He was appointed county attorney in 1980 when his predecessor became a judge. Voters would keep Smith in office for 27 years.

Law enforcement officers informed Smith of major investigations at their earliest stages. And he didn't hesitate to tell officers how to do their jobs. Police chiefs and sheriffs told him their officers were more intimidated by the prosecutor than the defense attorneys.

"Good, because maybe then they'll make sure to do it right," Smith would say years later.

Smith rarely took a case to trial, preferring to use plea agreements. He oversaw three homicides before Helen Wilson was murdered in 1985. Two cut deals. Before the third case could go to trial, the defendant hanged himself in jail.

Smith made no apologies. Plea bargains were efficient, they saved the county money and helped overburdened courts.

So with six defendants in the Wilson case, it's not surprising he started negotiating with their court-appointed lawyers.

"I was trying to show a distinction between the ones who did the crime and the idiots along for the ride," he said recently.

But the prosecutor needed some of those so-called idiots to be witnesses.

With the exception of type B blood possibly matching one defendant, investigators had next to no physical evidence to put the suspects in the victim's apartment.

The 1985 police investigation was driven by forensic evidence collected from the scene. But four years later, Gage County Sheriff's Deputy Burt Searcey built his case on word of mouth - he paid scant attention to forensics, he would say later.

So the case Smith prepared to prosecute would rely heavily on eyewitness testimony from some of the participants.

And when it came to collecting witnesses, Smith had a sledgehammer - the threat of capital punishment. Like all county attorneys, he knew the possibility of being executed motivated cooperation.

Of the six defendants in the Wilson murder case, Joseph White, who went by the nickname Lobo, seemed the least likely to roll over. He had admitted to nothing since his arrest in Alabama.

Lobo's old friend, JoAnn Taylor, represented a different challenge. She had incriminated herself in her first three statements but became uncooperative after getting a lawyer. Her attorney, Lyle Koenig, filed motions that showed Taylor would fight.

A motion to suppress her confession represented perhaps her best chance. If the judge found Taylor had been improperly questioned, the prosecution's case against her could crumble. And since she had implicated at least two others, those cases would be at stake as well.

Her lawyer argued Taylor gave her statements involuntarily because she didn't know she was under arrest for first-degree murder. He also said officers coerced her by making an improper promise: If she talked, they would protect her and her young daughter from retribution by her co-defendants.

"We have gone past the point in this country where the blood of the accused must still be fresh upon the rack before we can say that coercion has occurred," Koenig argued in a brief. "Coercion can be mental as well as physical, and promises of benefit and leniency are impermissibly coercive."

Even the prosecutor didn't like how Deputy Searcey and Police Sgt. Sam Stevens had interrogated Taylor. The lawmen had mentioned too many details about the crime and tried to get her to change her account so it more closely fit the facts.

There also were interruptions in the tape, which could lead a judge to wonder what happened off-camera.

But Smith didn't think they had violated the law. So in court, he produced multiple forms signed by Taylor that said she had been advised of her rights, waived them and had not been threatened into talking.

District Judge William Rist made his ruling on Aug. 3, 1989.

"No force, fear, oppression or coercion were used against the defendant," the judge said.

Her statements would be allowed in court.

The hammer started to fall.

Innocence on trial

As he sat in the Gage County Jail in 1989, charged with first-degree murder, Joseph White struggled to understand how the case had gotten this far.

Months earlier, when he agreed to come to Nebraska, he thought his innocence would quickly emerge. Surely police would see his accusers were liars. It was all a mistake.

He'd be back in Alabama before he knew it.

Instead, he waited. If convicted, he could fry, or at best, spend the rest of his days in prison.

But White put his faith in the system. He read books as the days crawled past. He wrote short stories and poetry.

But in court, things weren't going well.

Judge Rist denied every significant motion made on White's behalf, with one exception. He ruled Searcey and Stevens had improperly continued their interrogation in an Alabama police station after White made it clear he wanted an attorney.

The judge set a trial date of Oct. 30, 1989.

Meanwhile, others were lining up against him.

Debra Shelden, who White said he didn't even know, had already pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree murder. She told authorities she saw White beat and rape her great-aunt Helen.

James Dean was next. Initially he said he had no involvement in the crime. But he got scared after he failed his polygraph test.

"I knew I was so screwed at that point," Dean would say 20 years later.

So he started talking. His first recollections were fragmentary, but he said he was with a group of people who broke into the apartment and attacked Wilson.

The county attorney, who sat in on several of Dean's interrogations, interrupted with a question.

"Prior to this time … you denied you were there," Smith said. "Can you tell me now why you were saying you were not there?"

"Well, I feel I remembered it in my sleep," Dean said. "I obviously had some kind of subconscious block or something. I don't know what it was for sure. I couldn't remember and I thought I was telling the truth."

At about the same time, the county attorney and Dean's lawyer, Dick Schmeling of Lincoln, began discussing a plea bargain.

Schmeling appeared eager to cut a deal and even tried a little flattery. In one letter to the prosecutor, he said he appreciated all the hard work Smith was doing, and he doubted the other defense attorneys understood the dedication it took to prosecute such a complex case.

Soon thereafter, Dean transformed from a reluctant suspect into a cooperative chatterbox. In the course of two months, he gave authorities five more statements, for a grand total of nine since his arrest.

Each was different. Deputy Searcey took at least six of them.

But nothing had a greater effect on Dean than the crime scene video. Searcey played it on May 17, 1989, and when Dean saw Wilson's lifeless body, he buried his head in his attorney's coat, sobbed and said he was ready to plead to aiding and abetting second-degree murder.

In so doing, he agreed to "give total cooperation to the state of Nebraska regarding the homicide of Helen Wilson."

The plea bargains reduced the possible punishment for Dean and Shelden from death to a maximum of 10 years in prison.

During depositions presided over by both the prosecution and defense lawyers, Dean and Shelden said much of what they recalled about the murder came from dreams. Dean estimated 90 percent of his memories were revealed to him as he slept.

And the stories they told were devastating for White. They said a group of six - White, Taylor, Shelden, Dean, Tom Winslow and Kathy Gonzalez - had broken into the apartment with a plan to rob the woman. White and Winslow took turns raping Wilson. Taylor helped hold her down and put a pillow over her face.

"Is there any part of it that you remember from actually being there?" White's attorney, Toney Redman, asked Dean during a pretrial deposition.

"Oh, well, when you dream about something that you did, you're actually there."

Dean also credited the crime scene video with jogging his memory. And he mentioned conversations with his attorney in which they developed "a scenario as to what happened in the apartment."

Dean's ability to recall supposed details from a 4-year-old crime - yet be unable to keep straight what he told authorities a day before - left lawyers for other defendants skeptical.

During their hours of questioning, they also extracted two other interesting admissions.

Deputy Searcey, Dean said, had shown him a piece of paper with the names of his co-defendants to confirm where they were sitting in the car as they drove to the victim's apartment.

And when asked to physically describe Joseph White, the man Dean claimed he saw commit a rape, he could not.

"I wouldn't know him if I seen him," Dean said during a deposition.

More dominoes tumble

On Sept. 1, Taylor pleaded guilty.

Her deal with the prosecution convicted her of second-degree murder and kept her from becoming the first woman on Nebraska's death row. It also meant she would testify for the state.

Then, stunningly, White got his own shot at a deal. On Sept. 28, the prosecutor offered him second-degree murder and 25 years to life.

White refused it.

A few days later, Gonzalez pleaded no contest to aiding and abetting second-degree murder.

The state now had four potential witnesses.

All liars, White contended.

All he could do now was hope a jury would agree.

Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.