The Scarecrow

WALKER: Where and when?

WINSLOW: At the parking lot, when I got up there.

GRADY: How’d you get back to the ’hood?

WINSLOW: I walked mostly. Walked all fucking night down to Oak-wood and then I got a bus.

WALKER: You still had your dog with you?

WINSLOW: No, man, I dropped her with my girlfriend. That’s where she stay ’cause my moms don’t want no dog in the house on account of all the people’s laundry and shit.

WALKER: So who killed the girl?

WINSLOW: How would I know? She dead when I found her.

WALKER: You just stole her car and robbed her money.

WINSLOW: That’s it, man. That’s all you got me on. I give you that. Walker: Well, Alonzo, that doesn’t add up to the evidence we’ve got. We got your DNA on her.

WINSLOW: No, you don’t. That a lie!

WALKER: Yes, we do. You killed her, kid, and you’re going down for it.

WINSLOW: No! I didn’t kill nobody!

And so it went for another hundred pages. The cops threw lies and accusations at Winslow and he denied them. But as I read those last pages, I quickly came to realize something that stood out like a 72-point headline. Alonzo Winslow never said he did it. He never said he strangled Denise Babbit. If anything, he denied it dozens of times. The only confession in his so-called confession was his acknowledgment that he had taken her money and then dumped the car with her body inside it. But that was a long way from him taking credit for her murder.

I got up and quickly walked back over to my pod and dug through the stack of papers in my outbox, looking for the press release distributed by the SMPD after Winslow was arrested for the murder. I finally found it and sat down to reread its four paragraphs. Knowing what I knew now from the transcript, I realized how the police had manipulated the media into reporting something that was not, indeed, true.

The Santa Monica Police announced today that a 16-year-old gang member from South Los Angeles has been taken into custody in the death of Denise Babbit. The youth, whose name will not be released because of his age, was being held by juvenile authorities at a detention center in Sylmar.

Police spokesmen said identification of fingerprints collected from the victim’s car after her body was found in the trunk Saturday morning led detectives to the suspect. He was taken in for questioning Sunday from the Rodia Gardens housing project in Watts, where it was believed the abduction and murder took place.

The suspect faces charges of murder, abduction, rape and robbery. During a confession to investigators, the suspect said he moved the car with the body in the trunk to a beach parking lot in Santa Monica so as to throw off suspicions that Babbit had been killed in Watts.

The SMPD wishes to acknowledge the help of the Los Angeles Police Department in bringing the suspect into custody.

The press release was not inaccurate. But I now viewed it very cynically and thought it had been carefully crafted to convey something that was not accurate, that there had been a full confession to the murder when there had not been anything close to that. Winslow’s lawyer was right. The confession would not hold up, and there was a solid chance that his client was innocent.

In the field of investigative journalism, the Holy Grail might be the taking down of a president, but when it came to the lowly crime beat, proving a guilty man innocent was as good as it gets. It didn’t matter how Sonny Lester had tried to play it down the day we went to Rodia Gardens. Springing an innocent kid trumped all. Alonzo Winslow may not have been judged guilty of anything yet, but in the media he had been condemned.

I had been part of that lynching and I now saw that I might have a shot at changing all of that and doing the right thing. I might be able to rescue him.

I thought of something and looked around on my desk for the printouts Angela had produced from her research on trunk murders. I then remembered I had thrown them out. I got up and quickly left the newsroom, going down the stairs to the cafeteria. I went directly to the trash receptacle I had used after looking over the printouts Angela had pushed across the table to me as a peace offering. I had scanned and dismissed them, thinking at the time that there was no way stories about other trunk murders could have any bearing on a story about the collision between a sixteen-year-old admitted killer and his victim.

Now I wasn’t so sure. I remembered things about the stories from Las Vegas that no longer seemed distant in light of my conclusions from Alonzo’s so-called confession.

It was a large commercial trash can. I took the top off it and found that I was in luck. The printouts were on top of the day’s detritus and were no worse for wear.

It dawned on me that I could have simply gone on Google and conducted the same search as Angela instead of rooting through a trash can, but I was elbows deep now and this would be quicker. I took the printouts over to a table to reread them.

“Hey!”

I turned and saw a double-wide woman with her hair in a net staring at me with her fists balled tightly on her ample hips.

“You just going to leave that there?”

I looked behind me and saw I had left the top of the trash receptacle on the floor.

“Sorry.”

I went back and returned the top to its rightful place, then decided it would be best to review the printouts back in the newsroom. At least the editors weren’t wearing hairnets.

Back at my desk I looked through the stack. Angela had found several news stories about bodies being found in trunks. Most were quite old and seemed irrelevant. But a series of stories in the Las Vegas Review-Journal did not. There were five of them and they mostly repeated the same information. They were reports on the arrest and trial of a man charged with killing his ex-wife and stuffing her body into the trunk of his car.

Ironically, the stories had been written by a reporter I knew. Rick Heikes had worked for the Los Angeles Times until he took one of the early buyouts. He banked the check from the Times and promptly took the job with the Review-Journal and had been there ever since. He had made it over the wall and by all accounts was the better for it. The Times was the loser because it had let another fine reporter go to another newspaper.

I quickly scanned the stories until I found the one I remembered. It was a report on the trial testimony given by the Clark County coroner.

Coroner: Ex-Wife Held, Tortured for Hours

By Rick Heikes,

Review-Journal Staff Writer

Autopsy results showed that Sharon Oglevy was strangled more than 12 hours after her abduction, the Clark County coroner testified Wednesday in the murder trial of the victim’s ex-husband.

Gary Shaw testified for the prosecution and revealed new details of the abduction, rape and murder. He said the time of death was determined during autopsy to be approximately 12 to 18 hours after a witness saw Oglevy forced into a van in a parking garage behind the Cleopatra Casino and Resort, where she worked as a dancer in the exotic Femmes Fatales show.

“For at least twelve hours she was with her abductor and many horrible things were done to her before she was finally killed,” Shaw testified under questioning from the prosecutor.

A day later her body was found in the trunk of her ex-husband’s car by police officers who had gone to his home in Summerland to ask if he knew his ex-wife’s whereabouts. He allowed the police to search the premises and the body was found in the car parked in the home’s garage. The couple’s marriage had dissolved eight months earlier in an acrimonious divorce. Sharon Oglevy had sought a restraining order prohibiting her ex-husband, a blackjack dealer, from coming within 100 feet of her. In her petition she said her husband had threatened to kill her and bury her in the desert.

Brian Oglevy was charged with first degree murder, kidnapping and rape with a foreign object. Investigators said they believed he had placed the victim’s body in the trunk of his car with the intention of burying it later in the desert. He has denied killing his ex-wife and said he was set up as a fall guy for her murder. He has been held