OT: NY Daily News: Central Park Jogger Case Confession (2 of 2)
Retracing gruesome trail
of mayhem & violence
By TRACY CONNOR
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Let's go wilding.
On April 19, 1989, those three words ushered in one of the most traumatic episodes in city history - a senseless rampage by marauding youths that ended with the gang rape and near-death of a young woman.
An explosive fusion of violence, sex and race, the crime was so shocking that three other words - "Central Park jogger" - can still produce a shudder in New Yorkers more than a decade later.
It started at 8:30 p.m. as a band of Harlem youths, 12 to 16 years old, gathered at 117th St. and Madison Ave. - at loose ends until someone suggested a "wilding."
As they neared Central Park, they met up with a second group of teens. Now a pack of 33, they entered the park at 8:50 p.m.
The spree was frenzied, chaotic, terrifying, witnesses said. They harassed one man and bludgeoned a second, then splintered into smaller groups.
Over the next hour, roving bands assaulted two male joggers and a couple on a tandem bicycle. At 10:05 p.m., police said, a posse came upon the last victim.
She was a 28-year-old Salomon Brothers investment banker, a Wellesley College grad from Pennsylvania pounding across the park's 102nd St. transverse on her nightly jog.
What happened next is now uncertain because of new evidence. But there's no question the woman was beaten, raped and left for dead.
At 10:40 p.m., as a group of teens was leaving, cops arrested five boys. Several others were picked up later.
The jogger had not been found, so the detectives questioned the suspects only about the earlier attacks.
Near dawn, as cops were about to release them with desk-appearance tickets, they got word of a woman, barely alive, discovered in a pool of blood.
Suddenly, the investigators had more questions to ask.
Casting blame
The answers they got were confusing and sickening. In their videotaped confessions, the youths began pointing fingers at one another and downplaying their roles.
One boy was named as the ringleader, supposedly shouting, "Let's get a female jogger. Let's rape her." He denied being there.
Another claimed he tried to stop the assault. A third said he only simulated sex.
Cops pieced together this account: The woman was chased, grabbed, punched, pulled to the ground and dragged 200 feet into the woods.
Her body was battered with a pipe, her thighs slashed with a knife, her skull smashed by a brick.
"They were going to kill her so she won't identify us," said Kharey Wise, 16. "Yusef say, 'Don't kill her, man. Bad enough you're raping her. ...'
"Kevin and Raymond picked up a rock. Kevin hit her in the face with a rock. ... Steve was using the knife to cut her legs.
"I moved out of the way. Blood was scattering all over the place. I couldn't look at it no more."
Police charged six teens with the gang rape: Wise; Raymond Santana, 14; Antron McCray, 15; Yusef Salaam, 15; Kevin Richardson, 14, and Steve Lopez, 15.
As the jogger clung to life at Metropolitan Hospital, with strangers across the city praying for her recovery, more startling reports emerged.
The youths were remorseless in custody. In a holding cell at the 24th Precinct, they sang a Tone Loc tune: "That's what happens when the bodies start slapping, doing the wild thing."
But if the city was horrified, the teens had their defenders. If the statements were damning, other evidence was sketchy.
Hazy findings
Genetic tests of semen found on the victim were inconclusive, and blood matching the jogger's was found on only one teen. The jogger didn't remember a thing.
The defense lawyers - activists Alton Maddox and Colin Moore among them - tried to get the confessions thrown out.
The confessions were coerced, they argued. The minors were improperly handled by cops. They were railroaded because they were black and Hispanic and the jogger was white.
Wise's lawyer claimed detectives beat him. Richardson's mother complained she was kept waiting for hours while cops interrogated her son.
Santana was questioned with only his grandmother, who didn't speak English, as his advocate. McCray's father said he made his son lie and confess.
But the judge ruled the confessions were admissible, and as the first three defendants went to trial in the summer of 1990, the defense took a new tack, suggesting no rape had occurred.
Prosecutors put the jogger on the witness stand. Walking with a limp, her face scarred, she held the courtroom spellbound for 12 minutes of testimony.
Salaam, Santana and McCray were convicted of rape, robbery and assault, and sentenced to five to 10 years in prison. In a second trial, Wise and Richardson were convicted and got five years.
Lopez never went to trial because he cut a deal and pleaded guilty to attacking one of the male joggers.
It was over. But a decade later, the story of what happened in Central Park may have to be rewritten, Wise's 1989 confession reinterpreted.
"We went to the park for trouble. We got trouble," he told cops. "Now what we got to do is pay up for what we did."
All contents © 2002 Daily News, L.P.
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DA rapped for missing rapist in park wilding
By ALICE McQUILLAN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Attorneys for Reyes meet with an NYC councilman to discuss the 1989 Central Park jogging case.
Supporters of five youths who say they were wrongly convicted of the 1989 wilding attack in Central Park blasted authorities yesterday for letting the real culprit slip away.
The Manhattan district attorney's office quietly reopened the jogger case in January after convicted killer and rapist Matias Reyes admitted to the crime that left a young investment banker near death.
From behind bars, Reyes confessed that he acted alone when he raped and savagely beat the woman - an assertion recently backed up by DNA tests that link him to the crime.
"They had made up their mind, they had somebody else, they didn't want anything to spoil their neatly tied package of convictions and they used these children as scapegoats," lawyer Roger Wareham said.
The defendants, now all adults, ranged in age from 14 to 16 at the time of their arrests.
Wareham and another lawyer, Michael Warren, said they will go into Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday to ask a judge to reverse the convictions of their clients Antron McCray, Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson.
Another lawyer, Myron Beldock, said yesterday he intends to file a similar motion on behalf of defendant Yusef Salaam.
The last of the five, Kharey Wise, will soon have a lawyer, according to City Councilman Bill Perkins (D-Harlem), who has been advising the defendants and their families.
"There is good reason to believe that the original convictions were unjust," he said.
Laying blame
Wareham blasted authorities for failing 13 years ago to link Reyes, who is now 31, to the attack themselves.
Noting there was genetic evidence from the jogger rape, Wareham asked why it wasn't compared with Reyes' DNA when he was arrested for raping and killing an upper East Side woman in June 1989, two months after the jogger was attacked.
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has declined to comment on the case.
But a law enforcement source said that no one made the connection back then because there was a pattern to the Reyes attacks that didn't fit the Central Park case.
Accused of raping three women in the months after the attack on the jogger, Reyes liked to stab his victims in the eyes so they couldn't identify him. His motto was "your eyes or your life," but nobody was blinded, according to the source.
The Central Park jogger was not stabbed in the eyes, although in an interview in the April issue of Oprah Winfrey's O magazine, a jagged scar near her eye was described as "the only visible sign of her ordeal."
But law enforcement sources also point out that DNA technology back then didn't allow the kind of precise testing available now. And the defendants confessed to taking part in the attack - four of them making the statements with their parents present.
Wareham and Warren insisted yesterday that those confessions were coerced by authorities.
The woman has remained anonymous but will publicly identify herself in an upcoming memoir about her life and recovery. It will be published next spring, said her agent, Joni Evans of William Morris.
In the O magazine interview, the jogger said, "Another thing that may have helped my healing was that I didn't harbor resentment toward the boys who attacked me. I focused on all the positives. And I realized that I had seen both the best and the worst of humanity."
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