Re: NH Advocate: Case # 76354 - Whodunit? City cops blow another murder probe (Part 1 of 2)
Case # 76354
Whodunit? City cops blow another murder probe.
Bumbling, the state plans a third trial against an accused killer.
By Paul Bass
It's just a case number, 76354. It's the police reference for a murder that took place Dec. 1, 1998. Another murder "solved" by New Haven detectives. The same department that has tried to crack the Suzanne Jovin murder, which also took place in the first week of December 1998.
Three years later, the cops haven't solved the Jovin case. In one important sense, case 76354 remains unsolved, too. The cops did arrest someone, Anthony "Toney" Bazier. But two trials ended in hung juries. This Wednesday, a pretrial hearing will launch the state's third effort to convict Bazier of pummeling a 45-year-old woman to death.
In society's eyes, the protagonists in case 76354 were little more than numbers. The victim was one more woman who sold sex on the street to feed a crack habit; Suzanne Jovin was a Yale undergraduate from a wealthy family. The alleged killer in 76354 was homeless, also on crack. But both cases reflect how New Haven's police department spent the late '90s disintegrating into chaos.
They were but two of a series of mishandled cases from that period. (See accompanying story, "The Butt-Covering & Denial Trail," below.)
Everyone's heard the details of the Jovin debacle. Jovin's family embarrassed Yale and the New Haven cops into eventually conducting a more thorough investigation. The New York Times Magazine and 20/20 broadcast the plight of the Yale professor and one-time naval intelligence officer whom the cops disgraced by naming him as a suspect (although they haven't charged him).
But there's a story to be told about Case 76354, too. The story features errors from the comedic to the sloppy: The cops actually broke a crucial piece of evidence. They failed to test crucial hair samples or even collect blood samples. They built a case around contradictory accounts by confirmed criminals and liars. Once they settled, early, on a suspect and a theory, they ignored other tantalizing leads. After the state charged Bazier, it ignored a strong alibi. Even the lead detective in the case blasts his department's mishandling of the investigation, although he believes Bazier is guilty.
Whether or not Bazier committed the crime, police treated him as guilty until proven innocent. As his case enters round three in court, its tattered investigative trail and ignored alibi show the human and social damage wreaked by that sordid period in the life of New Haven's PD.
Consider the gamble Bazier faces this week.
Looking for Daylight
Bazier spoke about that gamble last week in a cinder block visiting room at the Whalley Avenue jail. The choice: Plead to a crime he says he didn't commit in exchange for a lesser sentence? Or fight the charges again? The stakes: Whether he'll ever live as a free man again.
Bazier has already spent three years in prison waiting to learn his fate; he couldn't post the $500,000 bail. He hadn't publicly discussed his case before; he didn't testify in his first two trials. He agreed to speak to the Advocate because, he said, he appreciated the paper's coverage of We the People, a homeless people's advocacy group he helped organize in the early '90s. "They called us 'bums.' I was one of the pioneers. We helped people." In an hour-long discussion, that episode emerges as a proud moment in a life marked by a broken childhood home in Pennsylvania, a stint in the Marines, then a decade on and off the streets of New Haven and West Haven, in between clerk jobs at stores and restaurants and brushes with the law.
In his gray "NEW HAVEN CC" sweatshirt, Bazier looked relaxed and healthier than the man in the mug shot taken at his arrest, when he was running the streets. When asked how he'll roll the dice, Bazier smiled, paused, answered thoughtfully.
If he pleads guilty or no contest to a reduced charge, Bazier, who's 35, can leave jail in his 40s. If he proceeds with a third trial, he faces 60 years, if he lives that long.
He longs "to see daylight again," Bazier said. But he has trouble making peace with the idea of pleading to the crime.
"I'm innocent of this," he insisted.
Hearing Bazier's story, it's hard to judge whether he's telling the truth. From the moment police found Nancy McCloskey's battered body, the search for truth has hinged on the stories of people hard to believe.
Mothers' Day
Dec. 1, 1998, would normally have brought steady business to the crack operation at Norton and Irving streets. It was "Mothers' Day," when welfare checks arrive. But the cops busted the operation around 5:15 p.m.
Three hours later, other dealers were picking up the business. A man named Cruz walked up for his twice-weekly buy. He would testify he preferred coming after dark. He figured it was less conspicuous.
He asked his regular dealer for two bags. The dealer went behind an abandoned house, leaving an accomplice with Cruz. According to Cruz, another man ran out from behind the building onto the sidewalk, zipping his pants, fixing his belt. "Chill. Peace. I'm out," Cruz would later testify the man said before he fled.
Meanwhile, the dealer returned to the front of the house, then went a block over to Derby Avenue. He flagged down a cop patrolling the neighborhood. He said he'd found a woman's battered body behind the house, according to both him and the cop. The cop found a woman lying face down with a coat and shirt on, her pants and underpants pulled down, her mouth caked with dirt, leaves and blood. She couldn't communicate. She died soon after at the hospital. Her ribs had been cracked and severed from her spine, her neck and face bashed. This was no accidental or single-blow killing.
The victim would be identified as Nancy McCloskey, who'd moved to the neighborhood three months before with her boyfriend and teenage daughter. She had battled a drug addiction; the police had at least once stopped her on suspicion of prostitution. According to the police report, she first denied and then confirmed that she was working. She was trying to clean up her life and go to nursing school, according to family testimony.
The cops sealed the scene to preserve evidence. They started interviewing neighbors as well as the dealer and his accomplice.
The Eyes of the Beholders
They soon obtained three eyewitness identifications. A neighbor said she'd looked out her window and seen a black man and a white woman arguing earlier that afternoon and then again right before the murder. (McCloskey was white. Bazier is black.) The neighbor picked two mug shots out of an "eight-pack" as possibly being the killer; one face belonged to Bazier. She later identified Bazier in court as the man she saw.
The dealer also identified Bazier from mug shots. So did Cruz, the crack customer.
But the eyewitnesses disagreed about the suspect's clothing. Wildly.
The dealer said the fleeing man wore a red-and-blue jacket with the words "Regal Tech," faded black pants, "funny-looking boots" and no hat. According to Bazier's lawyer, the eight-pack of mug shots the police showed him included two people the dealer already knew--because he dealt drugs with them. That narrowed the choices and raised suspicions that detectives may have chosen the eight photos less than randomly.
The neighbor, who said she had only fleeting, distant glances, identified the man as wearing a black jacket and a baseball cap, with no facial hair. She thought he wore blue jeans.
Cruz recalled a man in a black Starter jacket with a big "Chicago White Sox" logo, baggy mustard-colored corduroy pants, white sneakers, a ski hat and a "peazie," a knotty, unkempt beard.
Also, drug dealers and customers don't make the most trustworthy witnesses.
Then there was the dealer's accomplice. He looked at the mug shots, including Bazier's, and said they didn't include the guy.
In an echo of the Jovin case, in which police failed to follow up an eyewitness's description of a possible suspect, detectives in this case encountered several leads but seemed preoccupied with investigating only one.
Hours after identifying Bazier's mug shot, Cruz called the cops. He said he'd just spotted the suspect in the park at Chapel and Day streets. A cop showed up. The identified man wasn't Bazier but looked like him. Cruz told the cop he wasn't sure after all. (The next day Cruz decided it definitely wasn't the guy.)
The cop stuck around and chatted with the man. The man spoke of having a friend named Nancy, a white woman with dirty blond hair. The cop noticed a cut on the man's hand. The man said he'd cut it in front of witnesses in an apartment. The cops never checked that story. They did take him to headquarters for questioning, but they didn't ask for blood or hair samples for DNA testing. Bazier, not this guy, was their focus.
Police decided not to follow up on another promising suspect, a man named Dave. According to a police report, McCloskey's live-in boyfriend said that immediately before the murder, McCloskey had left home for an AA meeting. Dave was going to give her a ride. The boyfriend gave the cops Dave's phone number. A detective called him.
"I tried to ask Dave some questions but he sounded very intoxicated and did not want to cooperate. He began to yell and curse at the undersigned and then hung up the telephone," the detective wrote. Another detective says the department followed up in person with Dave, who again "freaked out" and filed a complaint against the cops. The cops ruled him out as a suspect; the detective doesn't remember why.
Then, nine days after the murder, the police received an early-morning call from a friend of the dealer. He said he'd been riding that night with the dealer and his accomplice in the Fair Haven neighborhood. His friends had identified a man on the street as the guy who'd killed McCloskey. The police took his statement but didn't follow up. Bazier was already in jail, so why go looking for someone else? (Two weeks later, the witness recanted.)
The inconsistencies of the three eyewitness accounts didn't trouble the cops or jurors who made the case for convicting Bazier. They argue that what mattered most was the facial identification. The fact that three people separately identified the same face was what counted, not their faulty memories of clothes, they claim.
Saul Kassin calls that a "difficult argument." Kassin teaches psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts and has studied eyewitness testimony. He serves as an expert witness at criminal trials.
Research shows that witnesses do sometimes "trade off" attention to one part of an identification at the expense of others, says Kassin, who did not take part in either Bazier trial. If witnesses stare at a person's face, they may not notice the background. If a person pulls out a weapon, eyewitnesses' ability to remember the person's face drops by 15 percent.
But no research has shown a trade-off between clothes and facial identification, he says. Moreover, the fact that the witnesses were confident of their clothing descriptions--and those descriptions were so different that some had to be wrong--casts doubt on their testimony, he says. It would have been different if they said they hadn't noticed the suspect's clothes. But by confidently giving conflicting (and therefore in some cases false) descriptions, the witnesses showed they had "a low threshold" for accuracy. Studies prove that witnesses with the most confident descriptions aren't necessarily the most accurate, according to Kassin.
The Snitch
Kassin's main expertise is in the field of snitchology: how to judge the claims of criminals who give damning testimony about other arrestees. One such snitch offered the state's prime evidence against Toney Bazier.
The snitch's name is Joseph Young. He shared a cell with Bazier in Suffield the weekend of Dec. 11, 1998. Young is serving two 18-year sentences for robbery and assault, for shooting a prominent doctor in downtown New Haven and mugging a woman. He claims he's innocent and is seeking a reduction in his sentences.
In both Bazier trials, Young told the jury that on Saturday morning, he and Bazier were playing cards and rapping about the Lord, when suddenly Bazier blurted out a detailed confession. He said Bazier described smoking crack with a "white lady," bugging her for sex, then bashing her to death over the head with a cinder block when she refused. He said Bazier described stashing his clothes behind a red building that housed a temporary employment agency. Bazier described the victim as having been naked from the waist down, according to Young.
According to Young and the state prosecutor's office, Young reported Bazier's confession not to authorities, but to another "Christian brother" inmate. That inmate told the authorities. Then an investigator from the prosecutor's office interviewed Young.
To Bazier's defenders, that story is laughable. It neatly fits the police theory of the case--even down to the victim having been killed by a cinder block, an idea later disproved by the medical examiner's office. Young's tale also has the murder taking place in the morning, not at night. Plus, Young has appealed to the state for a reduced sentence.
Bazier says he did tell Young a story--he told Young what the police claimed he did. That's how Young knew those details, he says.
The prosecutor and a majority of jurors found Young's confession compelling. They believe that Young never intended to approach authorities with the story, that he wasn't hoping for the "Christian brother" to pass the story along. They note that the state's attorney's office hasn't backed (to this point) a sentence reduction.
The authorities, incidentally, never looked for the clothes Bazier allegedly stashed behind the employment agency. At that point the case was in the hands of the state's attorney's office, not police.
Kassin's take: "Snitches are totally unreliable." Period. They have too many motives to lie. You can't build a credible case on their testimony.
The Cinder block Test
You can build a strong case on physical evidence. Unless you break some of it and ignore other parts of it, as the New Haven police did in this murder.
Consider the two cinder blocks police examined near the victim's body. They seized one of the blocks, though not until late the next day. They theorized that the murderer used the cinder block to kill McCloskey after she refused to have sex.
They figured the cinder block might have left an impression on the victim's jacket if the murderer had dropped it on her body. So, at police headquarters, they lifted the 50-to-60-pound block about 18 inches from the ground, then dropped it on a piece of vinyl to see if it would make an impression.
It didn't the first time. So they tried again.
Oops. The block shattered.
Police sent only a small piece of the cinder block to a state lab to see if the victim's jacket contained residue of the block. (It contained just a trace, which according to the state lab was probably the result of a cop laying the jacket on the block.)
The lead detective in the investigation, Frank Roberts, says he asked the department to send the whole block for testing for blood or hair traces. He was frustrated that they didn't.
He says he also asked to have the victim's fingernail scrapings tested for blood, since he figured there'd been a struggle. (Bazier had a cut on his arm when he was arrested.) The nails were never sent for testing. More echoes of the Jovin investigation, in which cops waited years to test the DNA under her fingernails and to look for a van witnesses had seen nearby.
They never tested blood found on the ground at the scene, either. ("If this was the Jovin case," suggests Bazier's attorney, Bill Bloss, "they would have tested the blood.")
Detective Roberts says he's "100 percent convinced" that Bazier committed the murder. He says the eyewitnesses were solid in their accounts shortly after the murder. He discounts one alternative theory, that McCloskey was a police informant killed in retaliation for the raid that day. He says that to the best of his knowledge, McCloskey wasn't a snitch.
But Roberts blames a mismanaged police department for failing to back up the eyewitness testimony with competent testing of physical evidence. "You don't test-drop your evidence," he says. Usually police conduct such a test with a facsimile.
"Our police department dropped the ball," Roberts argues. "It's not very demonstrative to the jury when you break the evidence. Try to sell a car like that. Some of these were basic, rudimentary detective procedures."
Roberts, a detective respected by both fellow cops and community people, loved his job. But a year after the McCloskey murder, he retired to work on his boat and raise bees. He says he concluded he could no longer do his job effectively because "the whole department" wasn't "paying attention" to solving crimes, a tone set by top brass. "The fish stinks from the head," he says.
Police did send hair found on McCloskey's body for testing. But the state waited until the eve of the first trial to ask Bazier to submit a hair sample. It didn't match. But the lab did find that the hair could have matched the victim's boyfriend's hair.
That gives some credence to Toney Bazier's claim of innocence. But not nearly as much credence as his unique alibi.
Three Judges
Bazier couldn't have killed McCloskey. At the time of the attack, he was across town in Westville at the Three Judges Motel with his girlfriend, Jane--where, Jane says, he was beating her up.
Detective Roberts, investigating, confirmed that Jane had rented a room on Dec. 1, 1998. The clerk remembered seeing her there, but not Bazier. That's understandable; you enter rooms at the Three Judges from the parking lot, not by going through the front door.
Roberts says Jane confirmed Bazier's story that he'd been with her. Roberts says he believes her, but he still believes Bazier committed the murder. Why? He says Bazier probably slipped out of the motel room while Jane slept.
Roberts says he probably asked Jane what time she went to sleep. But "that was years ago," he says, so he doesn't remember for sure, and he doesn't remember the answer.
Jane does. Asked by the Advocate last week, she says she didn't go to sleep that night until 1 a.m. Nancy McCloskey was pronounced dead at 9:47 p.m.
Jane and Bazier tell the same story about why they were at the hotel: Bazier was no longer allowed at the Woodbridge house where Jane and their little son, Anthony Jr., lived with Jane's uncle and grandfather.
You can understand why the family wasn't thrilled with the couple's relationship.
They'd met a few years earlier. Jane was just 17, a student at Amity High School. She'd been arrested for shoplifting. Sentenced to community service, she volunteered at the Community Soup Kitchen on Broadway in downtown New Haven. She met Bazier there. They struck up a friendship. He even hung out at her Woodbridge home. Like Bazier, Jane came from a broken home and was raised in part by relatives.
Then one night Jane announced to the family that she was pregnant with Bazier's child. They fled to Pennsylvania, eventually living in a housing project in Bazier's hometown outside Pittsburgh. The couple returned to New Haven and lived for a while on Lombard Street. Toney worked odd jobs. But, says Jane, "he was always taking off, doing his street shit." He also beat her, she says. Bazier's four previous arrests include a third-degree assault charge in '98 for beating Jane with his fists. ("I really wasn't a good person to her or my son because of things I was doing," Bazier said, declining to elaborate. He said he pleaded to the assault charge on his lawyer's advice because the plea bargain allowed him to go free.)
What strengthens Bazier's alibi is the fact that Jane has every reason not to protect him, but to help send him away for life. The two aren't talking now. They're fighting over custody of their son. Jane wants Bazier to relinquish custody rights. He refuses--even if that means she wouldn't back up his story, he said last week: "I wouldn't trade him for my freedom.")
Jane was willing to testify in the two trials. But neither side called her.
Jane says she'd still tell the truth if called to testify in the third trial--assuming that trial takes place.
Despite his reluctance, Bazier may decide to plead to a lesser charge. Majorities of both juries wanted to convict him. The three years Bazier has spent behind bars awaiting trial would count toward any sentence he'd receive. In his first trial the state offered him 12 1/2 years, rather than 60 year, if he pleaded no contest to manslaughter. Even then, before two hung juries, Bazier came within seconds of taking the plea.
His "Inner Man" Speaks
As that first jury deliberated, Bazier told the state he would take the offer. "I was thinking of my son," recalled Bazier. "I'm saying, 60 years out, I would not see daylight again. Twelve years, I'm saying, I can see daylight, and I can still do something with my son."
He prepared to plead as prosecutor Michael Dearington presented the deal to Superior Court Judge Joseph Licari.
"I'm standing there. I'm listening to Michael Dearington saying I did something I didn't do. My inner man, my spiritual man, said, 'You didn't do this.' I was saying this to myself, and it just came out." "It" was a remark that he'd changed his mind.
If he does see daylight again, Toney Bazier says, he'd like to become a counselor to help other people who made the mistake of "running the streets."
His son, meanwhile, is growing up in a large Woodbridge home with his mom, her new boyfriend, her grandfather and her uncle.
Nancy McCloskey's family attended both trials. It wants to see a conviction. (Family members declined requests to have their stories included in this article. Prosecutor Dearington says he can't comment on pending cases.)
New Haven Police Chief Mel Wearing, meanwhile, says he's not troubled by the two hung juries in case number 76354. He defends the department's handling of the case.
"There are hung juries all the time," Wearing says. "Jurors are jurors. They acquitted O.J. Simpson! All we can do is present the evidence. I don't think the detectives botched the case."
Whatever gamble Anthony Bazier makes, the truth may never emerge in case 76354. Did he really do it? Was this just another case of sloppy police work? Or both?
This much is probably true: Either the state has the killer but lacks the evidence to keep him away from society for decades to come. Or the killer, like Suzanne Jovin's killer, remains on the street.
Paul Bass can be reached at pbass@newhavenadvocate.com.
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The Butt-Covering & Denial Trail
New Haven's police chief and mayor claim they've responded to the scandal of bungled cases from the late '90s by making changes in the department. Chief Melvin Wearing brought in a new head of detectives, shuffled around others below him. He changed procedures for handling evidence.
But Wearing and Mayor John DeStefano haven't exactly rushed to bring justice to the sordid trail of lives ruined by the bungled cases. Nor have they sent the message, to the public or to the cops themselves, that the department needs to change how it investigates major crimes.
Take the case of Anthony Bazier. Since the police arrested him for murder, a compelling alibi has emerged, and new evidence has cast doubt on the case and pointed to other suspects. Two juries have failed to bring a conviction. Yet the cops haven't revisited the case in any meaningful way. Officials defended the case instead of ordering an aggressive investigation into whether an injustice occurred.
That repeats a pattern of other high-profile screw-ups (details of which can be found online here):
The police waited years to do basic work on the murder investigation of Suzanne Jovin, until after Yale hired a private detective and media exposés revealed sloppy police work. Officials still defend naming a suspect--and destroying his career and private life--on the basis of nearly enough evidence to make an arrest.
When the FBI concluded that a crooked cop had framed two drug dealers for a murder they didn't commit, the police chief failed to launch a new investigation, even after revelations about the cop's misdeeds poured into public view. The two men, Scott Lewis and Stefan Morant, remain locked up, destined to serve most of their lives in jail. In fact, the local cops protected the crooked cop after the FBI caught him fleeing criminal charges.
When the state proseuctor's office revealed that New Haven detectives had hidden crucial testimony in a stalled investigation of the 1996 murder of North Havener Philip Cusick, city police officials and the mayor at first didn't act--beyond keeping the named detectives in place. The police chief pooh-poohed the significance of the event until a cover-up culprit tried to implicate him in the scheme. Instead, the police chief tried to silence and punish the department whistleblower who brought the scandal to light. Eventually a grand jury confirmed the cover-up, heads rolled in the department--and, armed with the newly rediscovered evidence, police made an arrest in the case.
In another 1996 case, police quickly decided that a young man named Michael Tricaso had accidentally fallen to his death from the Crown Street garage. Case closed. Compelling testimony later emerged that a gang member may have killed him. The police barely pursued the new evidence. After the Advocate reported on the case in 2000, officials continued to insist they had the case right, while ordering a brief second look at a by-now colder trail.
The chief defended a detective after a trial revealed that the detective steered a Spanish-speaking witness to identifying a shooting suspect from a series of mug shots by highlighting that suspect's picture with a yellow background and whispering "numero dos," the number of the photo. Neither the chief nor the mayor expressed concern over the incident or ordered a change in police procedures.
Paul Bass can be reached at pbass@newhavenadvocate.com.
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