Confession Had His Signature; DNA Did Not nytimes.com
[ somewhat on that topic ]
Eighteen years ago, Eddie Joe Lloyd confessed in horrific detail to the rape and murder of 16-year-old Michelle Jackson, solving a case that had terrified this city after a wave of fatal child abductions in the area.
Mr. Lloyd's account, in a six-page statement and an audiotape, was chillingly accurate. It described Michelle's Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and half-moon earrings, the red-handled knife used to threaten her, the long johns that strangled her, the dirty green bottle left in her rectum. The only false thing about the confession was the confession itself.
At a hearing on Monday, prosecutors and defense attorneys will appear together before the judge who sentenced Mr. Lloyd to life in prison in 1985, lamenting as he did so Michigan's lack of the death penalty. They plan to present DNA evidence to show that Mr. Lloyd is the wrong man and request his release.
Mr. Lloyd, who was in a mental hospital at the time of his arrest and had contacted the police about Michelle's case, has maintained since his conviction that the confession was a ruse he cooked up with the detective to smoke out the real killer.
"I knew the statement was false, and he knew the statement was false," Mr. Lloyd, 54, said in an interview at the downtown jail where he is spending his final days of confinement. "I was trying to help. I was thoroughly tricked. Inveigled, enticed, tricked. Sometimes the pressures on you to sign a statement is not them twisting your arm. It can be psychological and mental." . . . |
