Book Review: The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town

The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
John Grisham
Class/Genre: Non-Fiction Mystery True Crime
Non-fiction, Doubleday, 2006, 300 pages; 8 photo pages

“Just tell the truth and you’ll do fine.” How many times has someone innocent been given this naive advice before an interview with the police?

‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is a basic concept of our Constitution. Yet, most lay people believe that if a person is arrested by the police, and charged with a crime, he must be guilty. The police are under tremendous pressure from both their superiors and the public to solve highly-publicized crimes. Before a defendant even appears in court, his mantle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ has been ripped away, replaced by ‘guilty until proven innocent.’

Ada is a small town in southeast Oklahoma. The nearest big city is Tulsa. In December, 1982, fun-loving 21-year-old Debbie Carter argued with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Glen Gore in the parking lot of the Coachlight, a country-western honkey-tonk where she worked as a cocktail waitress. She pushed him away and refused to get into his car. Hours later, Debbie’s father found her viciously-beaten body in her apartment, her panties stuffed in her mouth, strangled with a belt, threats written on her walls and body in nail polish and catsup.

In Oklahoma, high school sports reign supreme, primarily football. In the early ‘70s, a baseball superstar emerged - Ron Williamson, with his windmill pitching arm, and lightning quick speed. Drafted by the Oakland A’s, Ron joined the cream of other high school athletic programs and quickly washed out. Although he was able to talk his way back into the professional ball clubs, by 1980, even the New York Yankees’ farm club in Ft. Lauderdale didn’t want him. Williamson, at age 27, was a has-been, and couldn’t accept that fact. Thus, started Williamson’s duel decline into alcoholism and mental illness, sleeping twenty hours a day on his sister’s couch.

Although no one else remembered Williamson’s, or his good friend Dennis Fritz’s being in the Coachlight the last night of Debbie’s life, one person made that allegation, and the police jumped on that ‘clue’ like iron filings to a magnet. Williamson and Fritz were arrested, charged, and convicted of Debbie’s murder. Williamson received the death penalty and Fritz, life without parole. Police and prosecutorial tunnel vision, jailhouse-snitch testimony, and junk science substituted for evidence in their trials. Not until fourteen years later, did focus shift to the person who actually killed Debbie Carter.

Innocent people are convicted in the justice system. Grisham recounted the stories of three other men wrongfully convicted in Oklahoma alone. Even if freed, the taint of having once been convicted poisons these exonerees’ entire existence. John Grisham is an author I quit reading long ago because his fictional manipulations of legal scenarios were too unbelievable. As an attorney, I found his fiction unenjoyable. However, his dissection of facts and lies in the Williamson and Fritz cases, and his knowledge of the body of criminal case law were highly-skilled, and worded to be readily understandable. I hope Grisham will write other true crime books in the future.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, A. Rolfingsmeier