Bronx Justice (29 page)

“How old was the oldest?” he asked.

“Thirtyish.”

“The youngest?”

“Twelve,” said Sperling. “But I let her go. One thing I'm not is a child molester.”

Maria Sanchez, the fourteen-year-old who'd lied about
her age to escape, and whose parents later refused to allow her to cooperate in the investigation.

Jaywalker spent the next full hour doing everything he could think of to convince Joseph Sperling to admit to the Castle Hill rapes. He tried to show him how doing so couldn't possibly make things any worse for him. In fact, Jaywalker suggested, it would demonstrate his decency and his compassion for someone who'd been falsely convicted. Jaywalker offered to go to court and make a statement on Sperling's behalf at his sentencing. He told him that he could help arrange for a psychiatric evaluation and follow-up care.

He did those things and more, because by now Jaywalker no longer had the slightest bit of doubt. Joseph Sperling was the Castle Hill rapist. It was that simple. The problem was that without Sperling's confession—indeed, with his continuing denial—Jaywalker knew he still didn't have enough to convince anyone else. Jacob Pope would shrug his shoulders, stroke his mustache and say it was interesting, but not enough to act upon.

There came a point during the hour when Sperling, while still maintaining his innocence of the Castle Hill rapes, offered to lie and say he'd committed them. That wasn't good enough, Jaywalker told him. He had to be telling the truth when he said he'd done them. That he couldn't do, said Sperling, shaking his head and telling Jaywalker how terribly sorry he was that he couldn't help him.

 

Jaywalker left Rikers Island with his head spinning. He'd come so close, only to end up empty-handed. And he knew he might not get another chance. No doubt
Sperling would tell his lawyer about the meeting. Jaywalker could expect a complaint and a reprimand of some sort. That was okay. He was a big boy, and he could handle it. What he couldn't handle was being ordered to stay away from Joseph Sperling.

He phoned Jacob Pope, only to learn that Pope had left the district attorney's office two weeks earlier to take a job as an assistant attorney general in North Carolina. Jaywalker asked who'd taken over Pope's cases, but nobody seemed to know. He demanded to speak to a supervisor and was finally put through to a man named Paul Garner. Garner headed up the Major Offense Bureau, the unit Pope had worked in.

Garner knew about the Kingston case, and about Joseph Sperling. While Jaywalker waited on his end of the phone, Garner pulled Sperling's file and read from it. Sperling had been indicted for eighteen rapes committed over a period beginning in November of 1980 and ending with his arrest in September of 1981. He'd admitted seventeen of them. He'd also admitted calling the D.A.'s office when he'd seen the
Daily News
article and telling them they had the wrong man.

“Why was I never told about that?” Jaywalker wanted to know. It had been a serious breach of ethics, if not an actual violation of the law. As Jaywalker, no stranger to breaching ethics or violating the law, knew only too well.

“He hung up without identifying himself,” said Garner. “Hey, come on. Some guy calls to say we've got the wrong guy. For all we know, it's the defendant's brother calling us.”

That was a lame answer, Jaywalker told him. “You still notify the guy's lawyer,” he said, “and let
him
wonder if
the information's worth anything.” He pressed Garner to investigate. “Take a look at the photos,” he said. “Check Sperling's record to see if he was in jail or out on the street during the 1979 rapes. Have somebody dig up the partial fingerprint lifted from one of the lightbulbs, the one of no value. Do
something,
for God's sake.”

Garner said he would ask around and do what he could. But Jaywalker could tell a brush-off when he heard one.

 

He called Darren and Charlene, and told them that he'd finally gotten around to checking the lead, and that it looked somewhat promising. He wanted to give them hope—by that time, he felt Darren needed something to keep him going—but not too much hope. They'd been down too many roads already, and so far all of them had come to dead ends.

He lied and cheated and scrounged, got another special one-day pass, and drove out to Rikers Island again. He was armed with new arguments, new tactics, new strategies. He was determined to get a confession this time, if it killed him.

Joseph Sperling refused to see him.

A wet snow was falling as Jaywalker climbed back into his VW and headed home. He couldn't believe that after all this time he'd come so close, only to end up feeling farther away than ever.

The snow was beginning to stick on the Cross Bronx Expressway, making driving even more hazardous than usual. In addition to the typical array of potholes and hubcaps, now there were skidding cars and jackknifing trucks to contend with.

Through the snow, Jaywalker spotted the sign for the
Jerome Avenue exit. Reflexively, he pulled the wheel hard to the right, swerving around a gypsy cab and almost sliding into a concrete pillar. But he made the turn. He headed down to 161st Street and parked in a bus stop. In Manhattan, they towed. In the Bronx, they only ticketed.

He caught Paul Garner with his overcoat on, getting ready to leave for the day. He took the coat off, and the two of them spoke for the better part of an hour. Jaywalker described in detail his one meeting with Joseph Sperling. He did everything he possibly could to try to convince Garner that, despite Sperling's denial, he had to be responsible for the Castle Hill rapes.

Garner listened patiently. He was sympathetic but skeptical. He explained that he had four victims and twelve jurors who were absolutely certain that Darren Kingston was the right man. “I'd love to help you, Jay, but I can't. I just don't have enough.”

Jacob Pope couldn't have said it any better. Only Pope was gone. This was his boss, and this was where the buck finally stopped.

The awful silence was broken by the ringing of a telephone. Garner excused himself to answer it, something he'd generously refrained from doing for the past hour. Jaywalker could tell he was being dismissed.

So he'd struck out once more.

Try as he had, he'd been unable to get Joseph Sperling to own up to the Castle Hill rapes. Now he'd tried to convince the only person who mattered that it made no difference, that he already had enough to go on, even without Sperling's confession. And he'd failed at that, too.

He wandered over to the window. Down toward River Avenue, the snow was falling on Yankee Stadium. Street
lamps lit up the crosswalks. Cars were inching along, bumper to bumper. People filled the sidewalks. They were all heading home, leaving their work in their offices. As Jaywalker should have been doing. Only his work wouldn't stay in his office. It kept following him around, wherever he went, and it seemed it always would.

Somewhere behind him, he became aware of a voice. It took him a moment to realize it was Paul Garner's. Jaywalker turned to face him, to say goodbye. Garner's hand was still on the phone he'd just cradled, and he was looking directly at Jaywalker.

“We have enough,” he said softly. “That was Detective Squitieri, from the latent unit. The fingerprint on the lightbulb is Joseph Sperling's.”

 

Nearly thirty years have passed, but Jaywalker can still recall the moment as though it's happening to him today. His tears catch him by surprise, and his first impulse is to fight them back, to be an adult. Then he gives in to them and lets them come. Two years of battling to keep a young man out of prison because he knew in his heart he didn't belong there. Two years of nothing but frustration, failure and defeat. And now in one instant, in one split second that means nothing to the rest of the universe, the nightmare is suddenly over. He feels the tears well up, spill over and flow freely down his cheeks. Garner stares at him as though he's lost his mind. But Jaywalker couldn't care less. He's earned these tears; he's entitled to them. Darren is free. They've won. It's all over, just like that. He feels his knees begin to shake and buckle. He reaches out behind him and grabs the windowsill for support.

O
n December 16th, 1981, twenty-eight months to the day after the rapes of Eleanor Cerami and Joanne Kenarden, Darren Kingston's conviction was set aside, and the indictment dismissed. For one last time Jaywalker stood beside him at the defense table in Part 16.

For Max Davidoff, the event marked his last act as a Supreme Court Justice, the end of a distinguished career as lawyer, prosecutor and judge. He had reached mandatory retirement age and was stepping down from the bench that very day.

The press was assembled, including representatives from all the city's newspapers and television stations. Some of the detectives who'd worked on Joseph Sperling's case had shown up.

As had, as always, Darren's family.

Jaywalker and Paul Garner had submitted papers, citing the body of evidence supporting Darren's innocence: the fingerprint, the hypnosis, the sodium amytol—and the myriad other things that everyone, with hindsight, now
agreed pointed away from Darren and directly at Joseph Sperling. Now Garner rose and moved to vacate the judgment, Jaywalker joined in the motion, and Justice Davidoff granted it. What had taken two years to accomplish took two minutes to wrap up.

Outside the courtroom, a shy Darren Kingston faced the lights and cameras, and thanked his family and his lawyer for standing by him. As Jaywalker watched from a distance, he felt a hand come to rest on his arm. He turned to see Marlin.

“Jay,” he said, “I got to thank you.”

Jaywalker caught him even as he reached for his wallet. “No, you don't,” he said. “Not this time.”

For once, Marlin yielded. He wrapped both his strong arms around Jaywalker, pulled him close and embraced him, the same way Jaywalker had seen him embrace his wife the morning following their son's arrest, some twenty-seven months ago. The stubble of his beard felt like wet sandpaper against Jaywalker's face.

“Jay,” he said, between sobs, “you gave me back my son.”

It was the nicest thank-you Jaywalker would ever hear.

T
he fingerprint that exonerated Darren Kingston turned out to be the original cellophane tape “lift” taken from the lightbulb in the stairwell where fourteen-year-old Maria Sanchez had been attacked. A photo of the lift had proved worthless. Even the lift itself had been of no value until the known prints of Joseph Sperling had been available. And even then, it had taken Detective Vincent Squitieri more than six hours, hunched over a microscope, to find eleven
points,
or matching characteristics, more than enough to make a positive comparison.

Contacted in North Carolina, Jacob Pope conceded that if it had been Sperling who'd attacked Miss Sanchez, then it only stood to reason that he'd attacked the other four victims, as well.

The victims themselves reacted with a certain amount of bitterness to the final turn of events. To this day, they no doubt continue to believe that Darren Kingston is the man who attacked them. Given the absolute certainty of their identifications of him, for them to suddenly believe
otherwise and be forced to confront the fact that they'd been instrumental in convicting an innocent man would be nearly humanly impossible.

The post office took Darren back the same day his conviction was set aside.

Joseph Sperling's lawyer gave Jaywalker hell but never filed a formal complaint.

Jaywalker sent off a letter to Miles Michael, the Housing Authority examiner, requesting that he withdraw the specifications and permit Darren and Charlene to keep their apartment. Michael phoned Jaywalker to say he'd seen them on the evening news and had already done so on his own.

Jaywalker sent off another letter, this one to the New York Police Department, asking that Darren's fingerprint cards and mug shots from both his arrests be returned to him, so that they wouldn't remain in the drawer of some precinct, waiting to be picked out by some future victim. It took almost a year, but on November 17, 1982, a letter arrived, informing Jaywalker that the prints and photos were ready to be picked up.

For a while Jaywalker got calls and letters from people who'd seen his name in the newspaper and thought he could save them, too. None had the money to hire a lawyer, even a young one who worked at modest rates and was looking to rebuild his practice. Almost all were crazy.

Joseph Sperling was sentenced to serve twelve to twenty-five years in state prison.

Jaywalker kept in touch with Darren and the Kingston family for several years. But Jaywalker tends to be a poor custodian of friendships, and eventually they lost contact. To Jaywalker's way of thinking, that was probably for the
best. To the Kingstons, he would always be a reminder of a terrible chapter in their lives. It was time for all of them to move on and try to forget.

That said, after his wife would lose her struggle against cancer, Jaywalker would continue to stay in touch with both her sisters, the younger one, who'd brought him Darren's case the first time, and the older one, who'd brought him the newspaper that would ultimately set Darren free.

The last Jaywalker heard of Carolyn Oates, she'd moved out west and written a couple of mystery novels. Jaywalker learned that not too long after he began running from the law and hiding out behind a typewriter himself. It seemed they'd ended up with the same editor, these two lawyers who'd briefly shared a client, thereafter to be separated by a continent.

Among the many other ironies of the case is the fact that had Darren Kingston been arrested ten or twenty years later, a simple DNA test would have cleared him in a matter of days or weeks, just as it eventually would have established with astronomical certainty that Joseph Sperling was the man responsible for the Castle Hill rapes. But largely overlooked in the DNA revolution is the impact that the tool
should
have on the public's understanding of eyewitness identification and confessions but has so far failed to. Long considered the sacrosanct pillars of criminal trial evidence, both cry out for reexamination. Behind every conviction of an innocent man lies a faulty eyewitness identification, a false confession, or both. According to one conservative estimate, there are today upwards of ten thousand individuals serving time in prisons across the country for crimes committed by others.

 

Jaywalker's ancient Volkswagen finally gave out some years back, and he's yet to find a suitable replacement. He's been holding out for something special, say a 1970 Gremlin or a '59 Studebaker Lark. Still, not long ago, he took one last trip up to Castle Hill. It was a bright weekday morning in March, a Friday. His daughter supplied the car and did the driving. Now in her early thirties, what little she knew of the case had come from having had an absentee father for two years of her life, and from hearing him mention it now and then over the years. Now Jaywalker wanted to show her the area, wanted to point out the spot where he'd come so many afternoons to stand for endless hours in the cold, searching for a man he knew had to exist. And he wanted to see for himself what the passage of a quarter of a century had done to the place.

He'd expected to find that urban blight and decay had completely taken over the project, much the same way the jungle has a way of reclaiming clearings left uncared for. He'd expected to see huge mounds of trash piled up and blowing everywhere; endless carcasses of cars stripped, torched and left for dead; roaming packs of feral dogs, their ribs showing beneath their flanks.

Instead, he found the tall redbrick buildings cleaner than ever. There was almost no trash in sight, no broken glass, no boarded-over windows. The streets were clean, the playgrounds well kept, the lawns raked and neatly trimmed. Brightly colored row houses marked the way to the southeast, toward the water.

The population in evidence that morning was largely Hispanic, with a distinct black minority. Make that African-American. But to Jaywalker's surprise, there were
some whites, too, as well as some interracial couples and families. Mothers were walking their children to school-bus stops, pausing to greet blue-uniformed crossing guards. Men were leaving for work. Trucks were making deliveries to stores along Havemeyer Avenue.

Jaywalker had his daughter circle the blocks and read off the names of streets and avenues long forgotten but still familiar. Randall, Turnbull, Seward, Lacombe, Pugsley. She made a turn onto Stickball Boulevard and drove up Olmstead Avenue, where Darren's uncle Samuel had once lived. The improbable Roman names were still there. Homer, Cicero and Cincinnatus Avenues. Caesar and Virgil Places. Lafayette was there, too.

“It's not such a bad area,” his daughter remarked at one point. “I expected much worse.”

“Me, too,” said Jaywalker.

 

Sometimes, in the early morning hours, before he climbs out of bed to get ready to go to court, Jaywalker lies awake alone and listens to the sparrows, and wonders how he ever lost the trial in the first place. But then he reminds himself that had he not, he never would have learned what he did from it, or grown into the lawyer he ultimately became.

There are those who believe that everything that happens in our lives happens for a reason. Perhaps they're right. Who's to say?