Inman had walked out of the prison moments earlier, on December 20. Only his parents and legal team had been allowed to meet him. Prison staff had ordered the rest of Inman’s relatives to leave, directing them across the road. The family had driven three hours to Augusta from Adel, in South Georgia, the last place Inman had ever known life as a free man before being arrested in 1998 for a murder he swore he did not commit.

Cars and trucks sped by as the group watched for signs of Inman. Andrekos Pickett, one of several cousins who had come from Adel, said the family had always hoped Inman would be cleared. “We knew this day was coming,” he said. “We just didn’t know it was gonna take this long.” Another cousin, Tamara Pickett, was emotional as she held up her phone to share the moment on Facebook Live. She had been so excited about Inman’s release that she had barely slept the night before. “I was a little girl, like 11, whenever this happened,” she said of the crime. Inman had been one of her favorite cousins; she said she followed him everywhere. “I used to write him all these letters,” she said. But after being transferred from prison to prison, he’d lost track of them. “He said, I’ve been so many places now I don’t know where they are.”

The days and hours leading up to that moment had been fraught with uncertainty. After a Georgia judge overturned his conviction on November 16, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office stayed silent on whether it would appeal until hours before the deadline on December 16. Although the Cook County District Attorney’s Office swiftly announced that it would not seek a retrial, the timing and location of Inman’s release remained unclear even to his lawyers until hours before it happened, contingent on legal filings, paperwork, and the often arbitrary whims of the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Inman’s exoneration was the culmination of decades of work, first by the Georgia Innocence Project, which secured DNA evidence pointing to another suspect, and then by Jessica Cino, a former law professor at Georgia State University, who brought his case to the attention of the Atlanta law firm Troutman Pepper, which took it on pro bono. After spending almost his entire adult life behind bars, Inman now faces a long road to realizing a future that was derailed by his wrongful conviction. His release also leaves open the question of whether anyone will be held accountable for the murder that sent Inman to prison.

Standing in front of the Escalade as his supporters took photos, Inman looked both grateful and overwhelmed. His mother, Dinah, looked on with pride and relief. “My heart was racing,” she said of the wait to see her son. “But when I saw him, then I knew it was real.”

Left: Members of Devonia Inman’s family await his release across the street from Augusta State Medical Prison on December 20, 2021. Right: Devonia Inman embraces Georgia attorney and longtime advocate Jessica Cino. Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept; Claire Reynolds

“Let Justice Be Done”

Inman’s case was the subject of “Murderville, Georgia,” a podcast and written series published by The Intercept in 2018. The investigation revealed how shoddy police work by local law enforcement and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation not only led to a wrongful conviction, but also left the real murderer free to kill again.

Inman was sentenced to life in prison for the September 19, 1998 murder of Donna Brown. Brown, a 43-year-old single mother, was the night manager of the Taco Bell in Adel, a small city not far from the Florida state line. She was shot in the face in the parking lot after work. The killer took a bank bag containing $1,700 that Brown was carrying, along with her car, which was abandoned at a shuttered Pizza Hut nearby. While neither the money nor the bag was ever found, a key piece of evidence was left in the passenger seat of Brown’s car: a homemade mask fashioned from a pair of gray sweatpants with eye holes cut out of it.

Neither the mask nor any other physical evidence tied Inman to the crime. Multiple witnesses who initially implicated Inman recanted their statements even before Inman was tried in 2001. Nevertheless, he was convicted and sent to prison.

Meanwhile, the murders in Adel continued, sending shockwaves through the city of about 5,000. In April 2000 — as Inman was in jail awaiting trial — a man named Shailesh Patel was beaten to death at home after closing shop at a nearby convenience store. His murder has never been solved. Later the same year, a beloved local shopkeeper, William Bennett, and his employee, Rebecca Browning, were bludgeoned to death in broad daylight inside Bennett’s store. A man named Hercules Brown (no relation to Donna Brown) was quickly arrested for the double murder and eventually pleaded guilty.

In fact, Hercules, who worked at the Taco Bell, had long been rumored to be Donna Brown’s real killer. Several people even said that Hercules had confessed to them; two said that Hercules confessed long before Inman was even tried.

A decade after Inman was convicted of Brown’s murder, DNA lifted from the mask left in her car was matched to Hercules. Yet the Georgia Attorney General’s Office fought tooth and nail to uphold Inman’s conviction. Neither Hercules’s proven violence nor the DNA evidence linking him to Donna Brown’s murder — a murder the state alleged was committed by a single perpetrator — was enough to impress the courts, which declined to intervene in Inman’s case.

Inman was finally able to get back into court after the pro bono team from Troutman Pepper found additional evidence pointing to Hercules, which the lawyers alleged had been illegally withheld from the defense at trial. In 2019, Lookout Mountain Chief Judge Kristina Cook Graham ordered a hearing on the new evidence and on a claim that Inman had received ineffective representation at trial. The AG’s office tried to block this from happening, telling the Georgia Supreme Court that Inman was procedurally barred from raising these claims at all.

But where the Supreme Court had previously refused to review Inman’s case after the DNA evidence first came to light, this time they rejected the state’s position, paving the way for the hearing — and, ultimately, Inman’s freedom. In an extraordinary concurring opinion, the court’s then-presiding judge, David Nahmias, expressed deep regret over the court’s previous inaction.

“Of the multitude of cases in which a new trial has been denied, Inman’s case is the one that causes me the most concern that an innocent person remains convicted and sentenced to serve the rest of his life in prison,” wrote Nahmias, who is now the court’s chief judge. “Let justice be done.”

In the run-up to the hearing before Graham, Inman’s attorneys were given access to more than 15,000 pages of records belonging to his original trial lawyers. They were also given permission to interview Hercules Brown in prison. When the time came for that interview, however, Hercules refused to participate.

The hearing, which was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic, finally happened in June. It started off with a bang: Graham granted a motion by the defense requesting that an “adverse inference” be drawn from Hercules’s refusal to cooperate. In other words, she would officially consider Hercules’s silence as an indication that he was guilty of murdering Donna Brown. Although the Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination in a criminal proceeding, for the purpose of Inman’s appeal, which is considered a civil matter, such a conclusion was fair game.

“It is the State’s assessment that continuing to litigate this case is not in the interest of justice.”

The remainder of the hearing focused on the two ways that Inman’s rights had been violated. Troutman attorney Tom Reilly argued that the state had concealed evidence from the defense at Inman’s trial and that the lawyers who handled his trial, and the first appeal of his conviction, had failed to provide him adequate representation.

In November, Graham issued her ruling, overturning Inman’s conviction. “Under the circumstances of this extraordinary case and having carefully considered the evidence presented,” Graham concluded that the ways Inman’s trial and appeals played out “were fundamentally unfair and are unworthy of confidence in their outcome.”

Graham’s ruling left the attorney general’s office with a choice: drop its opposition or appeal the ruling back up to the Georgia Supreme Court. The office was given 30 days to make its decision. There was good reason to think it would appeal. The office spent years defending Inman’s conviction and arguing in court that he was legally barred from even attempting to challenge it.

But in reality, the AG had no meaningful choice: In its 2019 ruling, the Supreme Court made its position in the case clear and had implored the state to stand down and stop trying to block Inman’s access to justice. Still, with the holidays looming, the office dragged its feet, waiting until the last minute to notify Inman’s lawyers and the courts that it would not appeal.

That decision bounced the case back to Cook County, where Alapaha Judicial Circuit District Attorney Chase Studstill, would have to decide whether to drop the case or retry Inman. On December 20, Studstill asked for the case to be dismissed. In a late-morning order, the circuit’s Chief Judge Clayton Tomlinson agreed. “It is the State’s assessment that continuing to litigate this case is not in the interest of justice,” he wrote. Inman was released a few hours later.

Justice Delayed

The day after Inman walked out of prison, Studstill spoke to The Intercept over the phone. A former public defender who grew up in South Georgia, he said he was aware of the case well before he took office in May. He said he spent the next seven months getting up to speed on the case. “Each weekend, in any spare time I had, I spent looking at stuff from this case.”

Studstill pointed to a number of factors beyond the case itself that shaped his decision to facilitate Inman’s release. Foremost among them was Nahmias’s concurrence. “That is a very rare thing to see in the law is this judge almost saying, ‘Dang it, we had a chance to hear this and we decided not to. But now looking at it down the road, we probably should’ve heard this,’” he said. “I mean, that’s what we took from it.”

Nonetheless, Studstill said he had to decide if the evidence would warrant retrying Inman. Graham’s decision to grant the adverse inference against Hercules Brown caught his attention. “I knew when the adverse inference order was issued that I had an uphill battle if this office was going to retry,” he said. When Graham ruled that Inman’s rights had been violated at trial, he said that was “the final nail in the coffin.”

Studstill made clear that the media attention at the local and national level had also made an impact. He cited the “Murderville” podcast as raising the need to renew the efforts to solve the murder of Shailesh Patel, which the GBI has claimed to be investigating with no discernible results. “That’s a case I definitely want closure on,” he said. Although he would not comment on any specific actions he might be taking, he said that cold cases are a priority for him. “Those victims have yet to get their justice.”

Studstill said he was still weighing whether to charge Hercules with Donna Brown’s murder. “The one thing I will say is with Mr. Brown, I would have more of a charge to make a case on him if he weren’t sitting where he is today,” he said. “In other words, because he’s never getting out of prison, the necessity in trying to build a strong case against him isn’t as strong as if he were a free man.”

Asked whether he’d talked to Donna Brown’s family about Inman’s release or about the possibility of charging Hercules with her murder, Studstill said, “I don’t have a comment on that at this time.”

The Intercept tried to reach several members of Brown’s family but did not receive a response.

The Road Ahead

The road ahead for Inman is not an easy one. He’ll have to work to build a future for himself and face the challenge of renewing relationships damaged by his incarceration — including with his son, now a father himself, who was just a toddler when Inman was convicted. And he’ll have to navigate a world much different than the one he left when he was first locked up in 1998. He’ll have to find employment and his own place to live.

And he’ll have to do all of it without any help from the state of Georgia, which is one of 13 states that does not have a law providing compensation for the wrongly convicted. Instead, Georgia lawmakers have taken a piecemeal approach, passing individual bills aimed at compensating individual exonerees. In other words, Inman would have to find a state lawmaker willing to file a bill proposing that he be compensated and then wait to see if that bill would ever become law.

Given the state’s lack of a meaningful compensation scheme, the Georgia Innocence Project this week started a MightyCause fundraising campaign for Inman, hoping that the public might pitch in where the state will not. Without a compensation package, “exonerees like Devonia can be left on their own,” the GIP notes. “With that in mind, this personal fundraiser is a way to help Devonia get back on his feet.”

After his release on Monday, Inman and his family drove back to Adel for a family celebration. Two days later, he would fly home to California with his parents to spend the holidays together for the first time in more than 23 years. Before they left Augusta, David Ray thanked everyone who played a role in his son’s release. “It’s like a dream come true. … My son’s coming home,” he said. “This is the best Christmas ever.”

The post “When I Saw Him I Knew It Was Real”: Devonia Inman Is Free After 23 Years Behind Bars appeared first on The Intercept.

“Either of these constitutional violations, standing alone, demonstrates the fundamental unfairness of Mr. Inman’s trial, undermines the court’s confidence in the outcome of that trial and related conviction, and justifies granting … relief,” Lookout Mountain Chief Judge Kristina Cook Graham wrote in a 28-page order filed November 16.

The ruling sets up a choice for the state: Retry Inman for the 1998 murder of 43-year-old Donna Brown or release him. “We are hopeful that the court’s order will finally bring an end to this matter, and that Mr. Inman will be reunited with his family as soon as possible,” said Tom Reilly, one of Inman’s attorneys.

Inman’s case was the subject of “Murderville, Georgia,” a podcast and four-part series released by The Intercept in 2018. The investigation revealed how shoddy police work by local law enforcement and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation not only led to a wrongful conviction, but also left the real murderer free to kill again.

Brown was a single mother and the night manager at a Taco Bell in Adel, a small town in South Georgia. She was shot in the face on September 19, 1998, while leaving work. The killer took a bank bag containing $1,700 that Brown was carrying, along with her car, which was dumped in the nearby parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut. While the money was never found, a key piece of evidence was left in the car: a homemade mask made from a pair of gray sweatpants, with eyeholes cut out of it.

Neither the mask nor any other physical evidence tied Inman to the crime. Multiple witnesses who initially implicated Inman recanted their statements at his 2001 trial. Nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

In the meantime, three more brutal murders rocked Adel, a town of roughly 5,000 people. In April 2000, as Inman awaited trial, a man named Shailesh Patel was beaten to death at home. That crime has never been solved. Later the same year, a beloved shopkeeper, William Bennett, and his employee, Rebecca Browning, were bludgeoned to death in broad daylight inside Bennett’s store. A man named Hercules Brown was quickly arrested for the double murder and eventually pleaded guilty.

Hercules, who worked at the Taco Bell, had long been rumored to be Donna Brown’s real killer. A decade after Inman was convicted of her murder, DNA lifted from the mask left in her car was matched to Hercules. Yet neither Hercules’s proven violence nor the DNA was enough to convince the courts that Inman’s case merited a second look. And the Georgia Attorney General’s Office has fought tooth and nail to uphold Inman’s conviction.

Inman was able to get back into court after a pro bono defense team from the Atlanta firm Troutman Pepper found new evidence of Inman’s innocence and Hercules’s guilt, which they argued had been illegally withheld from Inman at trial. In the summer of 2019, Graham, the judge, granted an evidentiary hearing to consider claims that the state had violated Inman’s rights by withholding exculpatory evidence and that he’d received ineffective representation at trial. The AG fought back, arguing to the Georgia Supreme Court that Inman was procedurally barred from raising the constitutional violations at all.

The Supreme Court had previously refused to review Inman’s case after the DNA evidence first came to light. But this time, the court roundly rejected the AG’s position, paving the way for the evidentiary hearing. In an extraordinary concurring opinion, then-presiding Judge David Nahmias expressed regret over the court’s earlier decision.

“During my decade of service on this court, I have reviewed over 1,500 murder cases in various forms,” Nahmias wrote. “Of the multitude of cases in which a new trial has been denied, Inman’s case is the one that causes me the most concern that an innocent person remains convicted and sentenced to serve the rest of his life in prison.”

A Trove of Critical Evidence

After repeated delays due to the pandemic, the evidentiary hearing finally took place at the Chattooga County Superior Court this June. In preparation for the hearing, Inman’s attorneys had been granted access to thousands of pages of records held by his former attorney Melinda Ryals, as well as permission to interview Hercules Brown. But when it came time for the deposition, Hercules refused to be interviewed.

At the start of the hearing, Graham said that she would draw an “adverse inference” from Hercules’s refusal to cooperate. In other words, she was going to consider Hercules’s silence as an indication that he was guilty of murdering Donna Brown. This is a quirk of civil law; although the Fifth Amendment would protect Hercules’s right against self-incrimination in a criminal proceeding, for the purpose of Inman’s appeal, such evidence was fair game.

The rest of the hearing focused on what Reilly, Inman’s lawyer, described as “two fundamental constitutional violations” that required Inman to be granted a new trial. First, there was the prosecution’s failure to turn over exculpatory evidence to Inman’s defense attorneys — what’s known as a Brady violation. Adel police reports showed that Hercules Brown had been arrested in September 2000 in connection with an attempted robbery at a local grocery store. Upon searching the car, police found a gun, crack cocaine, and homemade ski mask with eye holes cut out of it.

“The state had these police reports in the fall of 2000, many months before Mr. Inman’s trial in June of 2001,” Reilly told the judge. “But they concealed that.”

The second constitutional violation was the fact that Inman’s trial attorneys did a horrible job representing him. Although she was not Inman’s lead attorney at trial, Ryals had a critical job: investigating rumors that Hercules Brown was the real killer. One of the best ways to do this would have been to see if there was any link between Hercules and the mask found in Donna Brown’s car. But at the hearing, Ryals testified that she didn’t recall any testing being done on the mask before trial. In fact, she said she didn’t remember much about the mask at all.

Ryals’s failures were perhaps even more consequential after Inman’s trial. After his lead attorney left the case following Inman’s conviction, Ryals was charged with handling Inman’s direct appeal. As Inman’s pro bono attorneys discovered after going through her files, at some point Ryals did obtain at least one of the police reports about Hercules’s 2000 arrest for the attempted robbery. Yet “she did nothing with that information. She told no one about it,” Reilly told the judge. The documents would have been crucial to showing that the state withheld evidence that could have changed the outcome of Inman’s trial.

In fact, Reilly and his team found numerous pieces of critical exculpatory evidence in Ryals’s possession that she never used. This included handwritten notes from an interview after Inman’s trial with a man who said that Hercules had confessed to killing Donna Brown before Inman was arrested for the crime. This man was at least the third person whom Hercules had supposedly confessed to around the same time.

The hearing didn’t just reveal that Ryals failed to make use of such evidence as part of Inman’s appeal. After Inman repeatedly wrote to her from prison asking for the files in his case, to no avail, he filed a complaint with the Georgia State Bar. Asked to read from the complaint on the stand, Ryals became agitated. But she had no explanation for how she responded at the time. Asked if she ever provided the files to Inman, Ryals said, “Not to my recollection.”

Fundamentally Unfair

In her ruling overturning Inman’s conviction, Graham was unsparing in her view of Ryals’s performance. She had “professional and ethical duties” that she did not meet, Graham wrote. “The record demonstrates to this court that Ms. Ryals’ unprofessional errors deprived Mr. Inman of his constitutionally guaranteed right to effective assistance of counsel and undermines the court’s confidence in the outcome of the proceedings.”

Regarding prosecutors’ failure to disclose the police reports, Graham echoed what Reilly argued at the hearing: that the state had “repeatedly represented” to Inman’s defense that it had turned over all exculpatory evidence — and that there was “absolutely no evidence linking Hercules Brown to Donna Brown’s murder.”

Ultimately, Graham concluded that if the jury had known about the evidence presented at the hearing, Inman would not have been convicted of killing Donna Brown. “This court is convinced that the trial and post-trial proceedings against Mr. Inman were fundamentally unfair,” Graham wrote.

What happens next is up to the Georgia Attorney General. The office has 30 days to appeal Graham’s ruling. But given the Georgia Supreme Court’s previous ruling in the case, it’s hard to see how the AG would prevail. Nahmias, who wrote the impassioned 2019 opinion in favor of Inman, is now the court’s chief judge. Back then he made clear that the attorney general’s office should back down. “Let justice be done,” he wrote.

If the AG does not appeal, Inman’s case will wind up back at his trial court in Cook County, where the elected prosecutor, a former public defender, will decide whether to retry Inman or dismiss the case. A dismissal would be the “best-case scenario,” said Jessica Cino, a fierce advocate of Inman’s who has been fighting to help exonerate him since 2014.

Cino was a dean and professor at the Georgia State University law school when she first learned about Inman’s case. It is largely through her efforts that Inman ended up being represented by the Troutman Pepper attorneys who won this appeal. “What would be fantastic would be to have a hearing where the state just dismisses the charges,” Cino said. But given what she’s seen from the attorney general’s office over the past seven years, it seems more likely they will fight back. “I would not be surprised if they appealed it. I would love for them to step back, have a little bit of objectivity and say, you know, let’s just do a press release and say we disagree with the court but we’re not going to appeal it anymore,” she said. But until now, Cino said, the AG’s office has committed itself to an “untenable and indefensible position.”

Regardless, no one seems to think this will all end up in a new trial. The evidence against Inman was never strong to begin with — and with DNA evidence pointing to Hercules Brown, it is hard to imagine a jury convicting Inman for the same murder today. For Inman’s mother, Dinah Ray, the judge’s ruling brings her one step closer to bringing her son home. “The tears are rolling down and my heart is pumping so fast right now,” she wrote in a text message shortly after hearing the news. “Devonia is almost home.” When we spoke to her a short while later, she was still in tears. “They keep coming. We got so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.”

The post Devonia Inman Sees His Conviction Overturned After 23 Years Behind Bars appeared first on The Intercept.

After 20 years in prison for a murder he insists he did not commit, Devonia Inman returns to court for an evidentiary hearing that could finally help him prove his innocence. Testimony reveals that the state hid evidence tying Hercules Brown to the 1998 murder of Donna Brown and that Inman’s trial lawyers dropped the ball, sitting on information that could have cleared him years ago. In a rare move, the presiding judge signs an order that could change the case forever.

Jordan Smith: Hi Murderville listeners. It’s been almost two years since we last talked to you about Devonia Inman’s case. And needless to say, a lot has happened since then.

[Musical interlude.]

As you might recall, back in September 2019 we posted an update episode about a truly extraordinary ruling from the Georgia Supreme Court. In a unanimous opinion, the justices sided with Devonia to allow his legal team to pursue evidence that could finally prove his innocence. In fact, not only did they give the green light to keep pushing for a new trial, they also expressed grave doubts about Devonia’s conviction.

Liliana Segura: Here’s what then-presiding Judge David Nahmias wrote at the time:

“During my decade of service on this court, I have reviewed over 1,500 murder cases in various forms. Of the multitude of cases in which a new trial has been denied, Inman’s case is the one that causes me the most concern that an innocent person remains convicted and sentenced to serve the rest of his life in prison.”

We’ve been waiting a long time to be able to update you. And finally, we have something pretty exciting to share.

From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Georgia.

[Musical interlude.]

Jordan Smith: First, let’s do a quick recap. Back in 1998, Donna Brown, a manager at the Taco Bell in tiny Adel, Georgia, was murdered in the parking lot after closing up for the night. Twenty-year-old Devonia Inman, who was new to town, was quickly jailed and charged with her murder. The state would seek the death penalty. But while he was awaiting trial, three more people were brutally murdered in this town of about 5,000. One of those murders remains unsolved.

But the others, a double murder of a beloved shopkeeper and his employee, were committed in broad daylight, and the killer, a man named Hercules Brown, was quickly caught and ended up pleading guilty to the crime.

Devonia was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Donna Brown. But he has always maintained his innocence, insisting he had nothing to do with her murder. What’s more, there were rumors around town the whole time that Hercules Brown was the real killer. Hercules — no relation to Donna — also worked at the Taco Bell.

At Devonia’s trial, his lawyers tried to point the finger at Hercules with two witnesses. One witness said Hercules had tried to get her to help him rob the Taco Bell. Another said Hercules had confessed. But, as you might recall, the district attorney, Bob Ellis, balked at this, saying it wasn’t credible evidence. And the judge agreed. So the jury never heard from these witnesses.

Liliana Segura: Devonia reached out to the Georgia Innocence Project not long after he was convicted. They took the case. It took years, but they eventually won permission to test a key piece of evidence for DNA: a homemade mask, made from a pair of gray sweatpants, with eye holes cut out of it. It had been found in Donna Brown’s car after her murder. Almost 10 years after Devonia was sentenced to life in prison, testing of the mask revealed a single genetic profile: Hercules Brown.

Devonia had been tried as the sole perpetrator of this crime. And at trial, prosecutors said the killer had worn the mask. But once the DNA came back as a match to Hercules, the state insisted that none of that mattered. And that it didn’t exonerate Devonia. In 2014, the trial court — and the Georgia Supreme Court — agreed. They denied Devonia a new trial.

Jordan Smith: After this — thanks largely to Jessica Cino, who at the time was a law professor and dean at Georgia State University — Devonia got a crack pro bono defense team from the prestigious firm Troutman Pepper (it used to be known as Troutman Sanders). And they dug up new evidence that the state had failed to turn over to Devonia’s defense before trial, which is a legal no-no; a constitutional violation. Basically, they’d found a new witness who said Hercules had confessed to her. And she tried to tell the cops, way back in 1998.

Liliana Segura: Devonia’s lawyers sought an evidentiary hearing on this issue and a new trial for Devonia. In July 2019, Lookout Mountain Chief Judge Kristina Cook Graham granted their request for a hearing, which didn’t make the state happy. They appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, which shot them down.

And as we mentioned at the start of this episode, that ruling was a huge breakthrough. In September 2019, the justices said in no uncertain terms that the state should stand down and stop blocking Devonia’s efforts to win a new trial. In fact, the justices said that they themselves had gotten it wrong when they reviewed the case back in 2014.

Jordan Smith: We knew that there would be an evidentiary hearing at some point. We just didn’t know when. But before it took place, Devonia’s lawyers were given access to a bunch of new documents. And also, they were going to get the chance to talk to Hercules Brown.

The pandemic slowed this process down a lot. The deposition of Hercules was finally scheduled for December 17, 2020. But when it came time for him to be interviewed, he refused. Prison staff caught this moment on video.

Unknown speaker: Recording has started. Is your name Hercules Brown?

Hercules Brown: Yes, sir.

Unknown speaker: Were you informed that you had a video court appearance that you needed to report for?

Hercules Brown: Yes, sir, about two minutes ago. About a minute ago.

Unknown speaker: Well, are you going to that appearance?

Hercules Brown: No, sir.

Unknown speaker: So you are refusing?

Hercules Brown: Yes, sir.

Unknown speaker: Thank you —

Liliana Segura: In this video, which was provided to Devonia’s attorneys, Hercules is standing in front of what looks like an entryway at Ware State Prison. He’s got on a blue watch cap and jacket over his prison whites. It says Department of Corrections on the back. He’s shifting his weight back and forth and is looking around. It’s not exactly easy to gauge what he might be thinking, but his posture is sort of nonchalant — almost dismissive.

At the time the video was filmed, the evidentiary hearing was supposed to happen in just a matter of weeks. In January 2021. But it was rescheduled because of Covid. In the meantime, however, Devonia’s lawyers filed what’s called a motion in limine — these are filed before a trial or hearing and usually ask a judge to agree to either include or exclude certain evidence. But here, Devonia’s lawyers were asking for something unusual. They asked Judge Graham to draw what’s known as an “adverse inference” from Hercules’s refusal to provide testimony. In other words, to conclude it was a sign that he was guilty of murdering Donna Brown.

Here’s what they wrote: “Mr. Brown’s refusal to provide testimony is not the only factor for the court to consider in determining whether to draw an adverse inference. Substantial corroborating evidence indicates that Hercules Brown committed the murder of Donna Brown.”

Jordan Smith: This adverse inference thing may sound a bit counterintuitive. Under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, a person has the right against self-incrimination. And, in the criminal system, if a person invokes that right, you’re not supposed to assume it is indicative of their guilt.

But even though Devonia’s case started out as a criminal matter, once it moves into post-conviction appeals, it is actually considered a civil case. And in civil courts, a judge can infer guilt if a witness invokes their Fifth Amendment right. This doesn’t happen often, but it’s perfectly legal.

If the judge were to assume Hercules’s guilt, that would certainly be a good sign for Devonia that she’s paying attention and finds the evidence of his innocence compelling.

The state didn’t like any of this, of course. And wrote a reply that was mostly technical bullshit, arguing that Hercules wasn’t actually required to attend the court-ordered interview.

Lawyers rehashed the same discredited evidence prosecutors used at Devonia’s trial back in 2001, including statements from multiple witnesses who later recanted. Some said that investigators with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, had coerced them into saying things that weren’t true.

In any event, the state’s lawyers argued that even if Judge Graham did draw an adverse inference from Hercules’s refusal to cooperate, it didn’t mean Devonia was innocent.

Liliana Segura: So I’m here outside the courthouse. It’s about quarter of 9 and Devonia Inman’s evidentiary hearing is going to start shortly. It’s been a long wait for him and for his family.

The hearing finally happened on Monday, June 28, at the Chattooga County Superior Court in downtown Summerville. It’s a rural town in northwest Georgia even smaller than Adel. The hearing was held here because this is the part of the state where Devonia was incarcerated back when his lawyers sought the hearing in 2018.

The courthouse is on the main drag, and you can hear the traffic going by from inside the courtroom. There’s a gigantic American flag out front. It’s tied to the columns and covers up the whole entrance to the building. And just off to the side, there’s a new Confederate monument — installed in 2014 — extolling the virtues of fallen soldiers who’d fought to “preserve freedom and liberty.”

[Walking into the courtroom.]

All right. I’m going in. 

Inside, Devonia was one of the only Black people in the courtroom. He’d gotten permission to ditch his prison whites in favor of a proper suit. He was wearing a gray collared shirt with a black tie — and a white face mask. His mom and dad, Dinah and David Ray, had driven from California.

Devonia just waved. You can tell he’s smiling under his mask.

Unknown speaker: All rise.

Kristina Cook Graham: Please be seated, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. I’m Judge Graham. Have a seat.

Liliana Segura: Judge Graham wore a gray dress with pink and black flowers on it. No standard black robe. But she did have a blue surgical mask.

Kristina Cook Graham: I don’t mean to be disrespectful. We wear robes in this circuit for jury trials only generally, and in northwest Georgia right now, it is very hot. [Laughter.]

Jordan Smith: Before the hearing officially started, Judge Graham made her decision about the adverse inference thing. She granted it. Exactly as Devonia’s lawyers had asked. They’d written up a “proposed order.” The judge just crossed out the “proposed” part and signed it. Here’s Jessica Cino. She was in the courtroom when this happened.

Jessica Cino: I was not expecting it. The adverse inference is an exceptional and extraordinary rare remedy. It is a ruling from the judge that based upon Hercules’s silence every time he gets asked if he has killed Donna Brown, which again is his Fifth Amendment right, that despite that, she is going to treat that silence as Hercules effectively saying, “I killed Donna Brown.” She’s filling that silent gap that has always existed. You cannot use that in a case against Hercules. If Hercules ever got tried for the murder of Donna Brown, his silence could not be used against him. That’s his Fifth Amendment right.

However, for Devonia, what the judge has done here is said, “We’re now going to, in your post-conviction proceedings, which is asking for a new trial, assume that Hercules has now admitted to killing Donna Brown.” And that, from a legal standpoint, is a tremendous development for Devonia’s case.

Jordan Smith: In his opening statement, Tom Reilly, one of Devonia’s attorneys, laid out the case for Judge Graham.

Tom Reilly: Mr. Inman has been wrongfully imprisoned for almost 23 years for a murder that he did not commit. He has maintained his innocence from day one. He was convicted 20 years ago, almost to the day, in a deeply flawed and unfair trial that failed to uphold and protect his constitutional rights.

We will focus our evidentiary presentation before the court on two fundamental constitutional violations that require that Mr. Inman receive a fair trial.

Jordan Smith: First, there was the prosecution’s failure to turn over exculpatory evidence to Devonia’s defense attorneys.

What’s known as a Brady violation. After a famous Supreme Court ruling that said withholding evidence violates a person’s constitutional rights.

Tom Reilly: Now, we don’t have to show that the state hid this information on purpose. Whether it was intentional or just negligent, it’s still a Brady violation.

Jordan Smith: In particular, Reilly brought up police reports related to Hercules Brown that Devonia’s attorneys had never seen. Back in September 2000 — well before Devonia was tried — Hercules was arrested in connection with an attempted robbery at a grocery store in Adel.

Tom Reilly: When Hercules Brown was arrested, the police found in his car a gun, crack cocaine, and a homemade ski mask with eye holes cut out of it. The state had these police reports in the fall of 2000, many months before Mr. Inman’s trial in June of 2001. But they concealed that. They failed to provide them to Mr. Inman’s counsel despite repeated requests by the defense for all exculpatory evidence.

Despite repeated assurances and representations to the court and to defense counsel by the state that they had turned over everything and that the defense had everything the state had. Despite knowing that Hercules Brown worked at Taco Bell with Donna Brown and that a homemade ski mask was found in her car after she was killed.

Liliana Segura: The second constitutional violation was the fact that Devonia’s trial attorneys did a pretty crappy job. And this compounded the Brady violations, Reilly argued.

Devonia’s lead attorney at trial, a man named David Perry, died in 2015. But his other lawyer was a woman named Melinda Ryals. She was actually appointed to the case first. But she didn’t have any experience with death penalty cases. So she asked for Perry to get involved. Perry led the defense team at trial, but soon after Devonia was convicted in 2001, he withdrew from the case, leaving Ryals in charge. It was up to her to try to get Devonia a new trial.

Tom Reilly: At some point she obtained that report showing Hercules Brown had been arrested with a homemade ski mask, a gun, and drugs in September 2000 in Adel. She did nothing with that information. She told no one about it.

Liliana Segura: Ryals testified at the hearing. She wore a gray woven blazer with frayed edges. Ryals was clearly less than thrilled to be taking the stand. She emphasized that she was only “second chair” on the case — meaning she wasn’t the main person in charge.

But she did have one very important job: looking into the rumors that Hercules Brown was the real killer and finding out if there was concrete evidence to back them up. One of the best ways to do this would have been to see if there was any link between Hercules and the mask found in Donna Brown’s car. But there’s no indication this happened. At the hearing, Ryals said she didn’t recall any testing being done on the mask before trial. In fact, she said she didn’t remember much about the mask at all.

Here’s Ryals, responding to questions from Troutman attorney Tiffany Bracewell.

Melinda Ryals: I do not recall the mask being entered into evidence.

Tiffany Bracewell: And if I represent to you that it was, trial exhibit number 24 was the mask, do you have any reason to believe that it was not, in fact, admitted? 

Melinda Ryals: I wouldn’t, no, I wouldn’t speak that, no.

Tiffany Bracewell: Is this mask unique?

Melinda Ryals: It … yes.

Tiffany Bracewell: Why was the mask significant in Mr. Inman’s case?

Melinda Ryals: I don’t recall. Are you talking significant to the state or —

Tiffany Bracewell: Let me ask different. Was the mask, did the mask have any significance to Mr. Inman’s defense? 

Melinda Ryals: I don’t recall.

Jordan Smith: Honestly, one of the most shocking things to come out of the hearing was just how much critical evidence Ryals had in her possession that she never used. This evidence basically falls into two buckets.

The first is the Brady bucket, which contains the September 2000 police report. It’s clear she did not have this information before Devonia was tried. But she did get it at some point after trial and should have understood that it was Brady material. And just how important it would have been at trial.

Remember, the defense tried to put on evidence that Hercules was responsible for Donna Brown’s murder. But that evidence was in the form of witness testimony, folks who said they’d heard things about his involvement. The police report was potentially more powerful precisely because it came from law enforcement.

And this gets to her second bucket, which is evidence of ineffective assistance of counsel. A nice way of saying that she fucked up.

It seems Ryals didn’t realize the significance of the Brady violation. And if she did, she still didn’t do anything about it — like use it to bolster her motion for a new trial.

There was also a bunch of really important evidence pointing toward Hercules that she got later while she was still Devonia’s only attorney of record. And she didn’t use any of it either. And then didn’t turn it over to the lawyers who later took over the case — including the team from Troutman Pepper.

Liliana Segura: It wasn’t until 2019 that Reilly and his colleagues got access to her full files. There were thousands of pages.

Tiffany Bracewell: How large was your file in your estimation?

Melinda Ryals: I do not recall. Maybe a banker’s box, or two banker’s boxes.

Tiffany Bracewell: If I represent to you that you produced in this proceeding more than 15,000 pages to my office, do you have any reason to believe that’s not correct?

Melinda Ryals: No, ma’am.

Liliana Segura: Among the things buried in these files was a series of handwritten notes. One set documented an interview Ryals conducted with a man from Adel named James Overstreet, after Devonia’s trial. At a time when she was supposedly working on his appeal.

Ryals didn’t recall who Overstreet was. And we didn’t recognize his name either — it’s nowhere in the original GBI report or in our own files. But Overstreet was clearly friendly with Hercules Brown. And according to Ryals’s handwritten notes, Overstreet told her that Hercules had confessed to Donna Brown’s murder before Devonia was even arrested for the crime.

If true, this was obviously a big deal, especially since Overstreet would be at least the third person who Hercules had supposedly confessed to around this same time.

Tiffany Bracewell: What did Mr. Overstreet tell you about the Taco Bell murder?

Melinda Ryals: He said that Hercules had worked at Taco Bell — and I’m not reading the whole thing — told him that he had robbed Taco Bell, that the woman turned around and said, “Herc don’t do this,” or “Hercules don’t do this, please don’t do this.” He had to kill her to leave no witnesses.

Liliana Segura: Did you hear that? He said he had to kill Donna Brown so there would be no witnesses.

Then there was a GBI report that they found. And this one is weird. Apparently at some point after Devonia was convicted, Ryals went to a witness interview conducted by the GBI. One of the prosecutors on Devonia’s case, a guy named Tim Eidson, was there too.

Jordan Smith: Now, why Ryals was at this interview is anyone’s guess. But what happens is pretty wild — a bit convoluted, but important.

The witness being interviewed was a woman you’ve heard from before named Christy Lima. She was Devonia’s girlfriend back in 1998. And she had a story about someone else Hercules had confessed to. This person, a woman Ryals referred to only by the name Hewitt during the hearing, told Lima that Hercules had confessed to killing Donna Brown. According to Lima’s account, Hercules told Hewitt that he’d intended to tell the cops it was him, but his mother talked him out of it. And Hercules’s mom, Lucinda Brown, had threatened Hewitt, telling her not to say anything about what Hercules had said. If Hewitt didn’t stay quiet, Lucinda, who worked for the Division of Family and Children Services, would take Hewitt’s kid away.

In the document, Lima is referred to as Thomas. We’re not entirely sure why. It was actually her sister’s last name. Here is Ryals reading from this report.

Melinda Ryals: As to the Taco Bell murder, on page three of the document that Thomas stated Hewitt said that Hewitt had a conversation with Brown a few weeks ago, and that Brown confessed to Hewitt that Brown committed the Bennett and Browning homicides, as well as the Taco Bell murder.

Jordan Smith: Bennett and Browning are the shopkeeper and his employee. The murders Hercules pleaded guilty to.

Melinda Ryals: Thomas stated Hewitt said that Brown was going to confess to the police that he did the killings in both cases and take whatever punishment was given along and not tell on anyone involved. Thomas stated that Hewitt said Brown told her that Brown’s mother talked him out of confessing and pleading not guilty. Thomas added that Hewitt said that Brown’s mother told Hewitt personally not to tell anything Hewitt knew of this case, again, threatening to take Hewitt’s child.

Tiffany Bracewell: And what did you do with this information?

Melinda Ryals: I don’t recall.

Tiffany Bracewell: Do you recall sharing with Mr. Inman that you had learned this information?

Melinda Ryals: No, I do not.

Jordan Smith: In different ways, the Overstreet and Hewitt stories are just bombshells.

Let’s start with Overstreet. After the hearing, we got a copy of Ryals’s notes from her interview with him. And Overstreet comes across as credible, in part because he offered up some side details that we know are accurate.

Liliana Segura: But there’s something even more intriguing about the Hewitt piece of this. Something that, if true, would confirm an aspect of Devonia’s case that has been lurking in the background for years.

We knew that Hercules’s mom, Lucinda Brown, was a powerful person in Adel. And that she used her power to protect Hercules when he got in trouble. One former Adel cop told us that they frequently bit their tongue with Lucinda because the police relied on her in child abuse investigations. So, for example, when Hercules got arrested in September 2000, Lucinda demanded that the Adel cops release him. And they did.

You might remember, there was another thing we found out about Lucinda, which is one of the most insane parts of this case. It was what the former prosecutor, Eidson, told us. That police and prosecutors never considered Hercules a suspect in the Taco Bell murder because his mom told them Hercules had an alibi. That he was at home, in bed, when Donna Brown was killed. Eidson has since died, but here’s what he told us back then:

Tim Eidson: She said that at the time of the Taco Bell murder, that Hercules Brown was at home asleep. And she gave an alibi for him. In any event, she gave an alibi for Hercules and there wasn’t any reason to disbelieve her at the time, I mean, she was a well-respected citizen.

Jordan Smith: This is obviously ridiculous. And spoke volumes not only about the incompetence of the whole investigation into Donna Brown’s murder, but also about Lucinda’s influence.

We’d always heard that people were worried about coming forward and pointing the finger at Hercules, because they were afraid Lucinda would use the power of her position to retaliate by taking away their kids.

The story about Hewitt is the first time we’ve heard of anyone explicitly saying that Lucinda had threatened this. And telling law enforcement about it. Granted, in this GBI report it’s coming secondhand from Lima, but there was plenty for investigators to follow up on, especially when you consider who Hewitt is, which we didn’t realize until after the hearing, when we got a copy of this document.

Hewitt is Sharon Hewitt, Hercules’s ex-girlfriend — and according to the GBI interview, the mother of his child. According to the document, Hewitt left Adel for Valdosta in order to get away from Lucinda. Given that Valdosta is in a different county, this would make sense if she was actually afraid of Lucinda’s alleged threat.

Liliana Segura: We tried to reach Hewitt years back but we were unsuccessful. We tried her again after the hearing. We never heard back. We reached out to Overstreet too. He didn’t get back to us either.

Voicemail: Hello, we are not available now. Please leave your name and phone number after the beep. We will return your call. [Beep.]

Liliana Segura: Hi, this is a message for Lucinda Brown. Ms. Brown, my name is Liliana Segura and I’m a reporter with The Intercept and my colleague Jordan Smith and I actually reached you a few years ago to talk about the case of the murder of Donna Brown in Adel, Georgia —

Sean Brown: Hello.

Liliana Segura: — many years ago —

Sean Brown: Hello.

Liliana Segura: Oh, hi.

Sean Brown: Hello.

Liliana Segura: Yeah.

Sean Brown: How you doing, ma’am?

Liliana Segura: Hi. Yeah, I’m OK. I was looking for Lucinda Brown.

Sean Brown: I’m sorry, she’s not here right now. This is her son. What can I help you with, ma’am?

Liliana Segura: We actually spoke to her many years ago about the case of Donna Brown, who was murdered in Adel at the Taco Bell in 1998. We specifically reached out because we’ve been investigating that case for a long time, and we actually produced a podcast and series of stories. And as I’m sure you’re aware, Hercules Brown was considered an alternate suspect in that case. [Crosstalk.]

Sean Brown: I’m not aware. Hello, hello, ma’am, I know you want to do an interview. Hey, I don’t give you the authority to record this call, please. Also, we have no comment on anything regarding any of those cases. And I’m her son, Sean Brown. I’m her guardian.

[Hang-up sound.]

Liliana Segura: Hello?

Jordan Smith: I think he hung up.

Liliana Segura: We described the Hewitt and Overstreet information as bombshells because they would have been crucial to Devonia’s appeal. They also confirm what Devonia knew to be true almost two decades ago: that Ryals had documents in her possession that could help him. And he was desperate to get ahold of those files.

Testimony at the hearing revealed that Devonia had repeatedly asked Ryals to turn over all the documents related to his case. And she basically ignored him. Finally, in the summer of 2003, Devonia filed a complaint with the Georgia State Bar saying that Ryals was not communicating with him — that she was pretty much just letting him languish in prison.

Ryals clearly remembered this. And it seemed to piss her off.

Tiffany Bracewell: What did Mr. Inman complain about with respect to your performance? Not Mr. Perry.

Melinda Ryals: To my performance? “Specifically, due to Ms. Ryals’s unethical conduct, lies, and misrepresentation of a lawyer elected to do only one thing …”

Jordan Smith: Ryals was sort of speed reading the complaint Devonia filed. And as she did, she grew increasingly agitated and defensive, as if Devonia was being unfair to her. At one point, the lawyer questioning her is like, OK, enough of that, but Ryals tries to go on, saying, Oh, I could read more.

Tiffany Bracewell: Thank you, Ms. Ryals.

Melinda Ryals: Oh, it goes further. Do you want the rest of it?

Tiffany Bracewell: No. You don’t need to read the whole document. I’m happy to ask you a question. In this report, Mr. Inman again requests certain files from you. Is that correct?

Melinda Ryals: Yes, ma’am.

Tiffany Bracewell: And did you provide those files to Mr. Inman?

Melinda Ryals: Not to my recollection.

Liliana Segura: After Ryals testified, the court went into a brief recess. I stepped into the hallway to talk to Cino about what we’d just heard.

Jessica Cino: Realistically, ineffective assistance of counsel is a high bar to clear. Now, what generally helps those along is that the original attorney is like, “You know what? I was underwater. I had way too many cases.” And they, in effect, throw themself under the bus in admitting, “It was bad. My representation fell below what we would attribute to a normal lawyer or reasonable lawyer in these circumstances.”

Liliana Segura: But instead, Ryals appeared to be doing the opposite.

Jessica Cino: She has dug in hard. I mean, you saw, she was very upset by just even bringing up the bar complaint. I don’t know what switch flipped. It almost seemed that she was pissed at Devonia for bringing a bar complaint when she wasn’t actually doing her job of giving him the files he kept requesting.

Liliana Segura: We tried to interview Ryals for the podcast years back. But she refused. We tried her again after the hearing. She still didn’t want to talk.

Jordan Smith: The next and last witness was veteran defense attorney August “Bud” Siemon. He was brought on to handle Devonia’s direct appeals. He took over after Ryals just dropped the ball. And it turns out, the failures of the original defense team screwed him over too.

Here’s Devonia’s attorney Tom Reilly asking him about that.

Tom Reilly: And what was your understanding of why you were being retained?

August Siemon: Well, initially, when I was retained, the problem in his case was that he had been sitting in prison for several years and nothing was happening in his case.

Jordan Smith: His first priority was finding evidence that could win Devonia a new trial.

August Siemon: I specifically went looking for the mask, because this case, my representation started right around the time that DNA evidence was just starting to really come out. And I thought that if I could find the mask, it might have DNA on it, and that would be the breakthrough that we were looking for.

Jordan Smith: But it turned out that no one knew where the mask was.

Tom Reilly: And what do you do to try to find the mask?

August Siemon: Well, I called everybody. I called the court reporter, I think, first, to see if she had the evidence, and she didn’t have it. I called the district attorney’s office. And I think I spoke to the district attorney at the time.

Tom Reilly: In any event, you never got your hands on the mask.

August Siemon: I never got my hand on the mask. Apparently, they had two boxes of evidence in the courthouse and they only showed me one.

Jordan Smith: Reilly showed him the September 2000 report detailing Hercules’s arrest for the attempted grocery store robbery. The one where they found a gun and another homemade mask in the trunk.

August Siemon: I never saw this. This was Adel police?

Jordan Smith: He studied the report. And right, away the implications were pretty clear.

Tom Reilly: So you didn’t receive this report from anybody during the course of your representation?

August Siemon: No, absolutely not. I can say with certainty that I didn’t. I would have done something about it if I’ve seen it.

Tom Reilly: What would you have done?

August Siemon: Well, I would have expanded the motion for a new trial and made the specific argument that Brady was violated. Clearly, I mean, this is the Adel Police Department. Adel’s a small town. The state, the local police, and the prosecutors must have known that this evidence existed, and they didn’t turn it over. That would have been, that would have been a slam dunk Brady issue. And it would have tied — it could have tied Hercules Brown into the — it would have tied Hercules Brown even more strongly into the murder that Devonia was convicted of.

Liliana Segura: On cross examination, the state’s lawyer, an assistant attorney general named Paula Smith, asked Siemon a series of pretty confusing questions. The point seemed to be to suggest that Devonia’s lawyers at trial did have information about Hercules’s run-ins with the law. So, you know, that the whole thing about the September 2000 police report wasn’t really such a big deal. But when Reilly took over the questioning again, he asked Siemon to read a portion of the trial transcript out loud. Where DA Bob Ellis is speaking. And denying there’s anything out there to indicate that Hercules was a plausible alternate suspect.

Tom Reilly: And what does Mr. Ellis there on line 14 say?

August Siemon: “There’s not any indicia, whatsoever, that Hercules Brown had anything to do with this.”

Jordan Smith: When Tom Reilly was laying out the case for Devonia’s innocence to Judge Graham, he emphasized the 2019 Georgia Supreme Court ruling that we told you about earlier. Here’s Reilly again.

Tom Reilly: In short, your honor, the question for you to answer after you have considered the entire record before you is this: Is this a conviction worth defending and upholding — a conviction that justifies confidence in the result and in the fairness and integrity of our justice system? On behalf of Mr. Inman, we respectfully submit that it is not.

Liliana Segura: One of the most memorable parts of the hearing was the reaction Reilly’s opening statement got from the law enforcement officers sitting next to Devonia. The guys who were there to transport him to and from court and to ostensibly ensure that people in the courtroom were safe from him. They kept shooting each other looks. Even under their masks, their expressions made clear that they were pretty sure the state’s case, and its efforts to keep Devonia locked up, were a cruel joke.

And again, it was really hard to miss the racial dynamics in the room. Devonia and the guards were Black. Just about all the other people in the courtroom were white — the people holding Devonia’s life in their hands, including the state’s lawyers, who show no signs of giving up their fight to keep Devonia in prison.

Jessica Cino: It’s ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous position to draw this hard line in the sand after you have had such a deliberate, intentional ruling from the Georgia Supreme Court basically saying stand down. Stop pushing or stop fighting this man’s attempt to get a new trial because this is keeping us justices up at night. How can you keep pursuing this when the Supreme Court of your state has said stop?

Liliana Segura: For Devonia’s parents, Dinah and David Ray, the whole thing was emotionally exhausting. For almost a year, Dinah had written to us to make sure we knew that Devonia was going to be in court for this hearing. First it was set for October 2020, then January, then April. When it finally looked like this court date would stick, she sent a text message: “Omg! I’m so nervous and excited at the same time. I will definitely be there with bells on.”

Liliana Segura [in courtroom]: So it’s about, it’s not quite 4:20 and they’re wrapping up, much earlier than expected. Devonia’s parents are going up to give him a hug. His mom is hugging him. You can tell she’s smiling under her mask. Now his dad is hugging him. It was an emotional day for them.

Liliana Segura: I went up to talk to Dinah and David after the hearing. Where David was focused on when Devonia would be coming home, Dinah was relieved that the hearing had finally taken place.

[In the courthouse.]

Dinah Ray: I’m just, I mean words just can’t express the joy I feel for him. This court date, it’s taken its toll on Devonia and the entire family. So I’m really, really happy to see this day come. And I’m hoping and praying that he’ll be coming home soon.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t want to keep you too long, but I’m curious what it was like for you to listen to Melinda Ryals answer these questions about her performance.

Dinah Ray: You know, I’ve been, I was unhappy with her performance then, and I wasn’t too happy with it there.

David Ray: For me, it just brought all these emotions back. It brought the whole trial over and got me all emotional.

Liliana Segura: From the moment they hugged Devonia and throughout Reilly’s opening, David was wiping tears from his eyes. It was the first time they’d been allowed to touch their son in some 20 years.

[In the courthouse.]

Dinah Ray: I got to get two hugs. I’m really happy about that because even when I visit him, it’s been through the window, so this is great.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. What’s it like to see him dressed in a tie and shirt?

Dinah Ray: That’s my old son. [Crosstalk.] He used to love to dress up. So it was great seeing him. I can’t believe how grown up he’s gotten. He left as a boy, now he’s a man. So I was really happy to see him and definitely happy to get a hug.

Jordan Smith: Cino also got to hug Devonia. This meant a lot to her too. She’s been Devonia’s fiercest advocate for years.

Jessica Cino: I’ve seen Devonia over the course of the last 6 1/2 years but always behind glass or behind bars, if you will. I mean, I know it has taken years to get to this point, but none of us have forgotten him and pushing this case forward as much as we can.

Jordan Smith: And she thought it was really nice that the judge got to see how much support there was for him.

Jessica Cino: It’s great for the judge to have that human component to it because I think a lot of times, judges considering post-conviction cases, you’re somewhat removed. You read all of these briefs, you read the evidence, but seeing not a courtroom full of people, but a lot of people in your courtroom for this one guy, I think, has to have some effect.

Jordan Smith: So now it’s up to the judge. And it’ll take a while. The lawyers on both sides will file post-hearing briefs trying to highlight things from the hearing and from the law that support their case. There are a few possible outcomes.

The judge could deny Devonia’s request for a new trial. Or she could grant it. Either way, the losing side would have the opportunity to appeal, again, to the Georgia Supreme Court, which has made its position clear. If Devonia wins, the case would likely be kicked back to Adel, and prosecutors there would have to decide if they want to try him again. But given where the case stands, that seems unlikely. Frankly, there’s no way they would win. And they know that. Or at least they should.

So we’ll be back. As soon as we know what happens next.

For now, thanks so much for listening.

[Musical interlude.]

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. This episode was edited by Andrea Jones, produced by Laura Flynn and Jose Olivares, and mixed by Rick Kwan. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @LilianaSegura and @chronic_jordan. We’re also hard at work on season two: Murderville, Texas. Keep an eye out for it.

The post Update: The Case for a New Trial appeared first on The Intercept.

The ruling itself is brief, but is accompanied by two powerful concurring opinions — one written by the chief justice, the other by the presiding judge — that call on the state to get out of the way of Inman being granted a new trial and “let justice be done.”

Particularly remarkable is the portion of the opinion written by the Presiding Justice David Nahmias in which he laments the court’s previous refusal to review Inman’s case in 2014 and expresses grave doubts about Inman’s underlying guilt. “Everyone involved in our criminal justice system should dread the conviction and incarceration of innocent people,” Nahmias wrote. “During my decade of service on this Court, I have reviewed over 1,500 murder cases in various forms. … Of the multitude of cases in which a new trial has been denied, Inman’s case is the one that causes me the most concern that an innocent person remains convicted and sentenced to serve the rest of his life in prison.”

Inman has been behind bars for more than 20 years for the murder of Donna Brown, a single mother and night manager at a Taco Bell in the South Georgia town of Adel. She was shot in the face on September 19, 1998, while leaving work, carrying a bank bag containing $1,700. The killer took the bag and Brown’s car, which was dumped a short distance away in the parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut. Neither the bank bag nor the money was ever found, but a key piece of evidence was left in the car: a length of gray sweatpants that had been cut into a homemade mask.

Inman has always sworn his innocence but has been repeatedly rebuffed by the courts — even in the face of new evidence that could have exonerated him. A decade after Inman was convicted for Brown’s murder, DNA lifted from the mask left in Donna Brown’s car was matched to a man named Hercules Brown. Hercules, who also worked at the Taco Bell, had long been rumored as Donna Brown’s real killer and is currently serving his own life sentence for a subsequent double murder.

Donna Brown’s murder was just the first in a string of brutal crimes that shocked Adel, a town of roughly 5,000 people not far from the Florida state line. While Inman was sitting in jail awaiting trial, three more murders rocked the community. In April 2000, a man named Shailesh Patel was beaten to death at home. That crime has never been solved. And then in November 2000, a beloved shopkeeper, William Bennett, and his employee, Rebecca Browning, were bludgeoned to death at lunchtime inside Bennett’s store. Hercules Brown was quickly arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to the double murder.

Yet neither Hercules’s proven violence nor the DNA connecting him to Donna Brown’s murder were enough to convince Inman’s trial judge that the case merited a second look. In a flimsy ruling, he denied Inman a new trial and was swiftly upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court, which declined to even review the case — a decision Nahmias now says he regrets.

“I have gone back to review the record regarding Inman’s … motion for new trial,” he wrote. “I have grave doubts about the trial court’s order denying that motion, and I regret that this Court denied Inman’s … appeal of that order in 2014. Unfortunately, I have not found a way, within the confines of the law, for us to undo our decision.”

Thursday’s order is the result of a dedicated group of lawyers — including Inman’s longtime advocate, Jessica Cino, a law professor at Georgia State University, and a team from the prestigious Atlanta firm Troutman Sanders — who have pressed on in challenging Inman’s conviction. In 2017, they found new evidence of Inman’s innocence and of Hercules’s guilt, which they argued had been illegally withheld from Inman at trial. Over the objection of the attorney general’s office, a district court agreed over the summer that Inman should be given a chance to pursue this evidence and prove his innocence. The Georgia Attorney General appealed, winding the case back at the Supreme Court. In their ruling, the justices took issue with the AG’s position. “The evidence that potentially connects a different person other than Inman to the murder in this case raises some very troubling issues,” Chief Justice Harold Melton wrote. The “Attorney General is best suited to closely re-examine this case in order to ensure that justice is truly being served.”

While the Supreme Court can’t direct the attorney general to do anything, the opinions by Melton and Nahmias are unambiguous in their point of view about what should happen next: The state should drop its opposition to Inman’s request for a new trial.

Now it’s up to the Georgia Attorney General to decide whether to read the writing on the wall. The AG’s office could decide to dig in its heels or to agree that Inman be given another day in court. If that happens, Inman’s current confinement would be considered illegal, which could set him free pending a new trial. At that point it would be up to the Adel prosecutor to decide whether to pursue a new conviction or to dismiss the charges.

“This is a watershed moment in Devonia’s case,” Cino said. The order is not only a legal victory for Inman, it calls on the attorney general to prioritize his case, while reminding the prosecution of its “unique duty to do justice. You don’t see that in many opinions. This is the validation of the hard work of so many people who believe that justice was not done in this case. Maybe — just maybe — Devonia can hang on to some thread of hope that after 20 years, the courts are finally listening.”

“We were very gratified to see the Supreme Court’s order, especially the forceful and courageous concurring opinions of Chief Justice Melton and Presiding Justice Nahmias,” Thomas Reilly, a member of Inman’s pro bono legal team, wrote in an email Thursday afternoon. “We look forward to continuing the fight for justice for Mr. Inman.”

The post Georgia Supreme Court Urges State to Stop Stonewalling In Devonia Inman Case: “Let Justice Be Done” appeared first on The Intercept.

Inman, who turned 40 last August, is serving a life without parole sentence for the 1998 murder of a woman named Donna Brown at a Taco Bell in the South Georgia town of Adel. He has always sworn his innocence but until now has been rebuffed by the courts — even in the face of DNA evidence pointing to someone else. Inman’s petition, filed in January 2018, argued that he is wrongly serving a life sentence for a crime committed by another man who is not only implicated in Brown’s murder, but went on to kill at least two other people in Adel. This man, Hercules Brown, is currently serving a life sentence for the double murder.

In her order, Graham gave permission for Inman’s attorneys to pursue his innocence claim and develop evidence to prove that Georgia prosecutors concealed critical information that could have shown from the start that Inman had nothing to do with the crime. “We are pleased that the court denied the state’s motion to dismiss and look forward to proceeding with discovery and a hearing on the merits of Mr. Inman’s claims,” Thomas Reilly, a member of Inman’s pro bono legal team with the law firm Troutman Sanders, wrote in an email on Friday.

That evidence and Inman’s likely innocence were explored in The Intercept’s 2018 investigative podcast Murderville, Georgia. Beginning in the fall of 2015, we repeatedly traveled to Adel and spoke to a number of people who said they had tried to tell police that they had the wrong man in the Taco Bell case, only to be ignored. We also talked to people who had implicated Devonia Inman as the murderer, and then recanted their statements. Those recantations were also ignored. And we spoke to people who firmly believe that if investigators had paid any attention to these things, additional bloodshed would have been avoided.

Brown’s murder was just the first in a string of brutal crimes that shocked Adel, a town of roughly 5,000 people not far from the Florida state line. While Inman was sitting in jail awaiting trial, there were three more murders in Adel. In April 2000, a man named Shailesh Patel was beaten to death at home. That crime has never been solved. And then in November 2000, a beloved shopkeeper, William Bennett, and his employee, Rebecca Browning, were bludgeoned to death at lunchtime inside Bennett’s store. Hercules Brown was quickly arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to the double murder.

Hercules had long been rumored to be the real man responsible for killing Donna Brown. Along with his history of violence, he had been working at the Taco Bell for two years, often on the closing shift — the same shift Donna Brown was working on the night she was killed.

While Inman was sitting in jail awaiting trial, there were three more murders in Adel.

That night, September 19, 1998, was Brown’s second night on the job. She locked up alone, carrying with her roughly $1,700 in a bank bag. As she walked the short distance across the parking lot to her car, Brown was ambushed and shot once through the right eye. The killer took the bank bag and Brown’s car, which was dumped a short distance away in the parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut. Neither the bank bag nor the money was ever found, but the killer had left a key piece of evidence in the car: a length of gray sweatpants that had been cut into a homemade mask.

At Inman’s trial, prosecutors said the mask had been worn by Brown’s killer — Devonia Inman. But they were wrong. In 2011, nearly a decade after Inman wrote to the Georgia Innocence Project asking for their help, GIP lawyers won the right to test the mask for DNA. As Graham noted in her order this week, “Those tests returned only one match: Hercules Brown.”

“Those tests returned only one match: Hercules Brown.”

At a 2014 hearing about the DNA evidence, the judge who presided over Inman’s original trial concluded that the match did not necessarily exonerate Inman. Although the judge also admitted he could have been wrong about that, he nonetheless denied Inman a new trial. The ruling was appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, but they declined to review it.

But the DNA isn’t the only evidence that implicates Hercules. During his 2001 trial, Inman “sought to introduce evidence from multiple witnesses that [Hercules] had confessed to the murder of Donna Brown,” Graham writes, but he was forbidden from doing so by the same trial judge.

Graham’s order means Inman’s lawyers will finally have the chance to pursue that evidence — and in particular, a witness who was not known to Inman’s lawyers during his trial, a woman named Kim Brooks, who was hired to take over Brown’s position as a Taco Bell manager not long after her murder.

An investigator with Inman’s current pro bono legal team found Brooks during a visit to Adel in 2017. Brooks told the investigator that shortly after Brown was killed, Hercules tried to convince her to stage a robbery at the Taco Bell and steal the night’s cash receipts. Another former Taco Bell employee told us Hercules tried the same thing with her. “In addition,” Graham writes in her order, “Mr. Brown told Ms. Brooks he had done something bad and he was aware someone else was going to prison for what he had done.”

Brooks’s recollection was a key part of the petition filed by Inman’s lawyers, in part because Brooks also said that she reported her interaction with Hercules to the police investigating Brown’s murder well before Inman went to trial. Despite the state’s obligation to disclose this to Inman’s attorneys, there was no mention of Brooks or her account in any of the files turned over by the state.

In its motion to dismiss Inman’s challenge, the state acknowledged that “indeed” Hercules had tried to get Brooks to “stage a robbery of the Taco Bell shortly after the murder occurred.” But it was Inman’s obligation to find Brooks before his trial, the state argued, and because he didn’t do so, he shouldn’t be able to raise the issue now in an effort to overturn his conviction. “There is no reason why Brooks could not have been found and interviewed,” a special state assistant attorney general wrote. Interviewing Brooks would have been “a quite reasonable investigative technique.”

Inman’s lawyers have argued that this is nonsense — Brooks wasn’t hired until after the murder, so there was no reason the trial lawyers would have known about her. Regardless, they argue, the state had an obligation to tell Inman’s lawyers about her. Brooks told the lawyers that when she tried to report what she knew, the lead investigator on the Donna Brown case brushed her off, telling her the case was already closed.

In her order, Graham emphasized the state’s failure to disclose exculpatory evidence while rejecting the argument that Inman’s new evidence comes too late and should be dismissed on procedural grounds. She also granted a request by Inman’s attorneys to interview Hercules Brown in prison — a request opposed by the state on a number of dubious grounds. The lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to interview Hercules solely for the purpose of trying to prove Inman’s innocence, according to the state, an act they refer to as “a waste of time and resources.”

The state also argues that such an interview might violate Hercules’s right against self-incrimination.

In her order, Graham found these arguments unpersuasive.

For Inman’s supporters, Graham’s ruling comes as a glimmer of hope in what has been a long and arduous journey. Attorney and law school dean Jessica Cino, his most dedicated advocate, was stunned at the ruling. For years she has tried to be cautious not to raise Inman’s expectations when it comes to his chances in court. “It’s great news for Devonia,” she said in a phone call on Friday. After years of setbacks, “this is a great sign for him.”

Devonia’s family, who never understood why the DNA evidence wasn’t enough to clear their son, has prayed for another chance for him to prove his innocence. His mother, Dinah Ray, wrote in a text message on Thursday, “When I heard it, all I could do was drop down and cry.”

The post In Georgia’s “Murderville,” Devonia Inman May Finally Have a Chance to Prove His Innocence appeared first on The Intercept.

Jessica Cino, a dean and law professor at Georgia State University, has spent countless hours over more than three years trying to find a way to help Inman prove his innocence, a monumental feat that means battling a court system rigged to keep him behind bars. He’s exhausted his normal appeals and courts are loath to accept a new filing based only on a contention that someone is actually innocent. In order to raise the issue, Cino would need to find new evidence of a constitutional violation — one that hasn’t been included in any of his other appeals, and one to which she could bootstrap the innocence claim.

The pro bono legal team that Cino helped to assemble has been on the hunt for this new evidence, well-aware that with the passage of time, the odds of finding a fresh constitutional violation are slim. And then, last year, they found Kim Brooks.

Brooks took a job at the Taco Bell not long after Donna Brown was murdered — in fact, she took over Brown’s position. Hercules was still working at the Taco Bell, and his behavior toward Brooks was disturbing, she said. He would “play” like he was going to rob her and asked her if she wanted to help him pull off an “inside job” to rob the store. He told her that he would “rough her up” to make it look realistic, and they could split the take.

It was the same scenario that Inman’s cousin Takeisha Pickett, then a shift manager at the Taco Bell, had reported to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation not long after Brown’s murder. No one had paid attention.

Brooks also told the legal team that Hercules had all but confessed to her. He said he’d done something “bad.” When she asked if someone else was paying for his mistake, he replied, “It’s better their life than mine.”

And like Pickett, Brooks tried to report her troubling interactions with Hercules. She first tried to tell a local Adel cop, a sergeant who would escort her to the bank to make night deposits. But he brushed her off, eventually telling her that she’d have to talk to Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent leading the Brown murder investigation. She tried, but he apparently wasn’t interested. He told her that Donna Brown’s murderer had already been found and that the case was closed.

This all happened before the end of 1998, Brooks told the lawyers, meaning that Inman hadn’t even been indicted yet, let alone tried. The information should have been recorded in the GBI report and it should have been turned over to Inman’s defense team. Neither happened — and that’s a constitutional violation that could get Inman back into court. “I do think that a ‘bombshell’ is the best way to describe it,” says Cino. “It’s yet another corroborating witness in this whole cesspool of facts that never got untangled or even looked at by the GBI.”

In January 2018, the lawyers filed a special appeal in state court seeking to overturn Inman’s conviction based on the new evidence. The appeal is pending. Despite its strength, it’s still a longshot. “A judge should read this and be outraged and give [Inman] an evidentiary hearing,” Cino says. “Politics and realities being what they may, I can’t at all say that I am even more than 50 percent confident that that’s the outcome.”

The Wrong Man

It was in mid-2015 that we received the first email from Cino. She was writing to see if we might be interested in looking into Inman’s case.

Cino did not represent Inman, but she was convinced that he was innocent, and had taken on his case as an advocate, she told us. She shared some red flags pointing to a wrongful conviction. There was no hard evidence connecting Inman to the murder, which had taken place around 2 a.m. on September 19, 1998. The victim, a single mother named Donna Brown, was the manager at Taco Bell; she was leaving the restaurant carrying the day’s receipts when she was apparently ambushed, shot dead with a .44 revolver. The gun was never recovered, nor was any of the cash or the bank bag that was stolen from her. And none of the fingerprints lifted from her car — which was stolen and dumped nearby — matched Inman.

Instead, there was a rogues’ gallery of witnesses who fingered Inman, an outsider from California who had only been in town a little more than a month before being accused of the crime. By the time he was tried in 2001, two of the prosecution’s key witnesses had recanted their statements to the GBI, insisting on the stand that they had lied. Ten years later, yet another witness — a man who was locked up briefly with Inman and claimed that he’d confessed details of his crime — also recanted, saying he’d been coerced by police.

But most significantly, in 2011, DNA testing revealed the genetic profile of another man, Hercules Brown, on the key piece of physical evidence found at the scene: a makeshift mask fashioned from a length of gray sweatpants with two eyeholes cut into it. Not only had Hercules gone on to commit a brutal double murder in the fall of 2001, but his name had also come up in rumors about a previous murder that same year — the killing of an Indian immigrant named Shailesh Patel — which remains unsolved. In sum, during the 17 months since the murder at Taco Bell, three more grisly slayings had taken place in Adel, a town of just more than 5,000 people. The DNA evidence was damning proof that law enforcement got the wrong man in 1998 — and by failing to treat Hercules as a suspect, they were indirectly responsible for further carnage in Adel. “I mean, it’s convenient, right?” Cino notes. “The minute, he gets locked up, people stop dying in this little town. That says a lot.”

Yet in 2014, the same judge who presided over Inman’s trial declined to grant him a new one, claiming that the DNA evidence was not persuasive enough. The Georgia Supreme Court subsequently declined to intervene. This left Inman in an impossible legal predicament. As Cino explained, “All the stars have to align for somebody to be able to challenge their conviction … to have lawyers who are going to work for them and to have a judge who’s receptive to those claims.” Inman had been given that shot but was still denied, even with DNA evidence, which only exists in a fraction of cases. The state of Georgia was “pretty crafty,” Cino said, in that “they left open this sliver for Hercules Brown to just creep into the picture and still leave Devonia in prison because they were able to at least create some inference that, well, we found Hercules’s DNA at the scene but that doesn’t mean Devonia wasn’t there too. … And it makes it now impossible or almost impossible for him to use that DNA to successfully challenge his conviction.”

As we began to review the materials in Inman’s case, we were horrified by what we found: a panoply of bad practices known to wreak havoc in the criminal justice system, all of which are regularly implicated in wrongful convictions. It started with an incomplete police investigation. Law enforcement latched onto an early narrative about the crime and then consequently ignored all signs — even screaming ones — that conflicted with their chosen theory. Such tunnel vision and confirmation bias are common in cases of innocent people sent to prison. In Inman’s case, agents with the GBI failed to follow several substantial leads, including rumors that Hercules was the real man responsible for Brown’s murder.

The Impossible Witness

We first went down to Cook County in November 2015, meeting Cino in Atlanta and making our way south down I-75. Cotton fields were ripe for harvest along the interstate; at Exit 39, the main entrance to Adel, a sign advertised the King Frog, an old Adel institution that once billed itself as the “Flea Market of the South,” but now mainly sells discount clothing in the shadow of a newly arrived Walmart. Although Thanksgiving was more than a week away, Christmas decorations adorned the storefronts in sleepy downtown Adel, surrounded by magnolias and palm trees.

The Taco Bell where Donna Brown was shot sits just off the interstate, across from a truck stop and surrounded by a handful of fast-food joints. We retraced the steps Brown would have taken as she carried the cash to her car, examined the area where her assailant was allegedly lying in the weeds, then drove the short route taken by her killer, turning east across the overpass covering I-75 and making a right towards the still-abandoned Pizza Hut lot several blocks away.

Around the corner from the Pizza Hut was the awning where Virginia Tatem — the newspaper delivery woman who was a key eyewitness against Inman — once stood. The shelter used to house gas pumps but is now just an empty shell facing out toward the street on the corner of 4th Avenue and Adams Street. Around 2 a.m. on the night of the murder, Tatem said she was standing under the awning waiting for the nightly delivery of the Valdosta Daily Times when she heard what sounded like a gunshot coming from the other side of the highway. She then claimed to see two cars following each other, going so fast that they fishtailed when turning the corner. Despite their high speed, she said she saw clearly into each car. In the first, a black car that matched the description of Brown’s Chevrolet Monte Carlo, she saw a lone black man she would later identify as Inman. In the second, a rusty-brown-colored car, she saw four or five other black people. The cars continued down the road before coming to a stop at the boarded-up Pizza Hut and disappearing from view.

Looking out onto the street from the spot where Tatem said she stood, her claims seemed absurd. The sound she allegedly heard from the Taco Bell to the west would have had to cut through the noise from multiple lanes of traffic, both from the overpass, as well as the sound from I-75 below. The voices she supposedly heard from the Pizza Hut would have been similarly hard to hear, unless the subjects were loud, which would seem unlikely from anyone who just committed a robbery and murder. What she claimed to have seen seemed just as unlikely. She described the first driver as wearing a ribbed white tank top and dark slacks, along with a thin gold chain. But looking down toward the Pizza Hut from the awning — in broad daylight — it was hard to make out much of anything.

There was good reason to be skeptical of Tatem from the start. It had taken her more than a month after Brown’s murder to come forward with this account — and only after news of a $5,000 reward for information related to the Taco Bell murder was published in the Adel News Tribune. In two subsequent interviews and then on the witness stand at Inman’s trial, Tatem offered additional details she hadn’t previously disclosed to police — embellishments that should have been a cause for concern. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable — a leading factor in wrongful convictions — and an account that gets more detailed with the passage of time is even more suspect. Yet both police and prosecutors ignored this fact, accepting Tatem’s dramatic tale at face value.

As we explored the area between the awning and the Pizza Hut, Cino theorized that prosecutors felt that they needed Tatem to move forward with the case. Inman did not get indicted until January 1999, she pointed out. “So that means they didn’t think they had enough until they got Virginia Tatem’s last statement.” Prior to that point, “none of the forensics matched up. They don’t get any really credible witness statements.” Then “suddenly Virginia Tatum comes in and they get more until they’ve got, basically a perfect statement from her” — a description that matched their theory of the crime.

Particularly disturbing is that GBI agent Jamy Steinberg seems to have completely missed an early sign suggesting that Tatem’s story might be fabricated. On October 26, 1998, the same afternoon he first talked to Tatem, Steinberg called a man named Lee Grimes, a fellow newspaper carrier who was reportedly waiting with Tatem on the night of the murder. According to the GBI report, Grimes said he didn’t remember anything about that night. More importantly, he told Steinberg that Tatem had actually called him to talk about what she was now claiming to have seen. If this was a hint that Tatem may have been trying to gin up her story before offering it to the police, there’s is no indication that Steinberg — or anyone else — ever considered it.

Grimes was called to testify for the defense at Inman’s trial, but the examination was lackluster. He repeatedly said he didn’t remember anything about that night, including after an odd exchange: Lead prosecutor Bob Ellis recounted how, according to Tatem, Grimes had allegedly joked with her about not walking into the street to get a good look at who was driving down by the Pizza Hut because she might get shot. Grimes said he didn’t remember that “at all.”

Could it be that something did happen, and Grimes just didn’t remember it? We went to see Grimes to find out.

“None of That Happened”

We located Grimes in a quiet town nearly two hours northeast of Adel, in a house that is a shrine to his first love: music. A former school band director, Grimes’s house is a maze of record albums — more than 20,000 of them, alphabetized on seemingly endless rows of shelving. Beatles paraphernalia is displayed throughout the house, and a collection of album covers stretches back into the laundry room.

Grimes explained that in the fall of 1998, he was on hiatus from teaching, living in Adel and delivering papers. He remembers the night of Donna Brown’s murder as well as the day he testified in Inman’s trial. And he has a singular regret: that he wasn’t more forceful when answering questions about what Tatem said she’d seen. “None of that happened, and I’ll swear on 10 stacks of Bibles … none of what she said, absolutely, positively, did not happen at all,” he said.

Grimes traced Tatem’s story to a conversation he had with her on a totally different night following the murder, after the notice of the reward had run in the paper. The two were waiting for the newspapers to be delivered when a car carrying some black people passed by. They began talking about the murder at Taco Bell. “She was telling me, ‘You know, there’s a $5,000 reward for that. It sure would be nice to get that reward.” She then made a pointed comment: “‘You know, those people right there, they could have committed that crime,’” Grimes recalls her saying. “I just thought, well, she’s looking for money.” He said he had no idea that Tatem had gotten involved in the case until sometime later, when he was contacted by Inman’s attorney. Tatem’s story, he said, was “just totally made up.”

Grimes was not sure whether Tatem ever collected the money, but he was willing to bet she had. A few years later, Tatem wrote a lengthy war novel, titled “Tripwire,” which she self-published in 2008. It centered on two women in Adel whose husbands had gone to fight in Vietnam. Grimes said there was some speculation that she had used the reward money for that — “which would be something frivolous she would do.”

Grimes last saw Tatem at a bank, several years after the trial. He decided to confront her. “I walked up to her and I asked her, ‘How are you sleeping at night?’ And she just walked away.”

Several people have tried to speak to Tatem about the Donna Brown murder over the years. She has not welcomed the attention. Aimee Maxwell, the founder and former executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project, told us that the first time she showed up at Tatem’s door, her husband ran Maxwell off with a rifle. In Cino’s experience, phone calls to the house would be picked up by a woman claiming to be Tatem’s “friend,” but who Cino and her colleagues suspected was Tatem herself.

We went to see Tatem during a subsequent visit to Cook County, stopping by her home in Hahira, a rural town just south of Adel. She was not expecting the visit. Upon answering the door, she cracked it open just a sliver, allowing for the briefest of exchanges. We said we were looking for people willing to discuss the murder of Donna Brown. “Good luck with that,” she answered. She denied that she’d been an important part of the case — “I don’t think I was key,” she said. “I was a witness. That was it.” More surprising, despite her presence at the evidentiary hearing in 2014 — which had been held to consider the DNA evidence found on the ski mask matching Hercules Brown — Tatem repeatedly claimed that she had not heard anything about any DNA evidence. “I don’t even know anything about it,” she said, adding that anything more she had to say about the case she had already said in court. “That was it and basically I don’t have any other kind of comment,” she said. “And please don’t come back.”

Despite Tatem’s insistence that she had nothing more to say, she later agreed to speak to Bill Rankin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In an interview outside her home, with her grandchildren playing nearby, she cried over the fact that people kept questioning her claims and motives when it came to what she saw. She also confirmed that she had collected the reward money, just six months after the trial ended. But as she did on the stand, she adamantly denied that she had been motivated by greed. “I’m a mother of five children,” she said. “I don’t take something like that as a joke.” She told Rankin that she felt something in common with Brown, who was a mother working a dangerous night shift. There were plenty of times she felt she was in danger herself, she said. “It could have been me.”

True Detective

Tatem’s wasn’t the only door that closed in our faces as we tried to look into the Donna Brown murder. Several key players refused to talk at all, chief among them the lead investigators. GBI agent Steinberg, a rookie with the department at the time, was laconic: The case has “been adjudicated,” he said over the phone. “You can ask, but I’m not going to discuss it with you.” This was far more than we got from then-Adel Police detective Jimmy Hill, leaving the extent of his involvement in the investigation uncertain.

Over repeated visits to Adel, it became clear that while Steinberg officially led the investigation into Brown’s murder, Hill played a key role in the case. Defense investigator Earline Goodman named him as one of the only people who could really explain why the investigation went as it did. And according to Christy Lima, Inman’s girlfriend at the time of the murder, it was Hill and the Adel police who were hounding her sister Marquetta Thomas, who implicated Inman in the crime in the days and weeks after Brown’s slaying. “They kept interrogating her,” Lima said. “They picked her up every day.”

Hill’s name appears all over the GBI’s official report, yet none of the documents are actually written by him. This is not entirely surprising: None of the officers who first responded to the call about a body in the Taco Bell parking lot recorded their initial contacts with witnesses or their observations of the scene. This basic information is simply absent from the GBI report. In fact, there are no reports from the Adel Police Department at all. At Inman’s trial, Adel Police Chief Kirk Gordon explained that his officers didn’t write reports because “we’re not going to interfere” with the GBI. Even when an Adel officer was the first to receive or develop some bit of information, he said. “What’s the use in writing it down when you can explain it to [the GBI] face to face?”

This lackadaisical approach raises serious questions, not only about what leads were communicated by local officers to the GBI in the Donna Brown case, but also about who might have exerted influence on various players — like Thomas — or on the direction of the investigation — like the decision to focus on Inman and not Hercules. Of particular concern is whether Hill held sway over such decisions. Goodman believes that is exactly what happened: “I think he’s the one that put the case together,” she said.

Inman’s relatives are certain that it was Hill who targeted Inman. They say he mouthed off to Hill and a couple of Adel police officers during his last arrest. According to his uncle, Ben Pickett, Hill said about Inman, “He ain’t getting out of here. He won’t never see the daylight of dawn around here, in this jail.” Dinah Ray, Inman’s mother recalls speaking to Inman in jail. “He told me that he had smart-mouthed a police officer,” she said. “I strongly believe this is the reason [he was targeted]. Him disrespecting authority. Does that equal to life in prison?”

Hill, a portly, bald sexagenarian with a smile that is half glower, is a polarizing figure in Cook County. Depending on who you ask, he’s either a crack investigator with a spotless record of arresting the right person, or an aggressive and vindictive man who used whatever means necessary to clear his caseload. There seems to be no in between when it comes to Hill; a number of people we spoke to for this story refused to say anything about him on the record, but had strong opinions to share once the interview was over.

Several of his law enforcement colleagues described Hill as exceptionally talented. “Jim Hill was always a very aggressive detective. I mean, he was like your true detective. If he had the evidence you were going to get arrested. I mean, that’s all there was to it,” Tim Eidson, the former assistant district attorney, recalled. “And I will tell you, if Jim Hill ever made an arrest, I had no doubt that he had the goods.”

To Gordon he was very smart, but “a little bit loose-tongued, rough around the edges, I should say.” And former DA Bob Ellis said the investigator had a “strong personality” that some people found intimidating — though he said he never did.

But others saw Hill as a racist bully. Ben Pickett said he was “always pinning stuff on young black men.” Takeisha Pickett, Inman’s cousin, agreed, saying that she’d always heard that he was a bad cop who liked to get black people off the street whenever possible. They’re not alone in their negative assessments. Former Cook County Sheriff John Daughtrey did not mince words: “He’s a vicious little man,” he said. “He’s threatening something all the time.” And he agrees that the city’s black residents have an especially hostile view towards the man that they believe is “out to get them specifically.”

Hill, says Daughtrey, is “the most hated guy in Cook County, there’s no doubt about it.”

We got in touch with Hill in the spring of 2017, after a number of failed attempts to reach him that included trying to track him down at home, leaving phone messages with a close friend, and camping out in the lobby of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office where he now works; we left a series of notes with the receptionist. When we finally reached him by phone, he was decidedly surly. “Isn’t it a clue when I don’t return your call I don’t intend to talk with you?” he asked. He hung up before we could ask any real questions.

As we pursued our investigation, it seemed that everyone who might actually be in a position of power to correct the mistakes made in Inman’s case — from police to prosecutors to judges — had abdicated their duty to see that justice is served. Yet, others wished desperately that they could do more to help. Where Grimes regrets that he was not more forceful in pushing back against Tatem’s apocryphal story about what she saw the night of the Taco Bell murder, Marquetta Thomas harbors deep regret about the role she played sending Inman to prison.

We met Thomas in July 2016, in Baldwin, a small town two hours northeast of Atlanta, and roughly half the size of Adel. Her two-story, white clapboard house sits on the edge of the Chattahoochee National Forest, which spills down from Tennessee. “I never heard of this town in my life,” she said, but she had settled there after being released from Lee Arrendale State Prison, just five minutes away. Wearing glasses, a red sweater vest, a bowtie, and a short-sleeved shirt that showed off an old tattoo, she reflected on her role in the case — and how much she wishes she could take it back.

Thomas was the first to insist that Inman was responsible for Donna Brown’s murder. Her motivation was twofold: She hated the way he treated her sister, Christy Lima, she said, while she also felt hounded by investigators in the days and weeks after the murder. She still doesn’t understand why the cops came to her in the first place. “It’s just like they picked me out [at] random,” she said.

Whereas her sister told investigators from the start that Inman was with her that evening — and has never changed her tune — Thomas said she was coerced into implicating Inman. “I think they were just looking to pin the crime on somebody to make their job lighter, easier, and I was a pawn in their game that they used,” she said. “It was verbal coercion because they would say, ‘Wasn’t this this?’ and I just agreed. I guess the story started getting formulated with bits and pieces they were telling me, and I just fused the story together to get [them] out of the picture.”

Thomas arguably had a further incentive to advance a narrative in which Inman alone committed the crime. There were rumors that Thomas might have played a role to herself in the crime at Taco Bell, something the state tacitly acknowledged over the course of Inman’s trial, albeit not in front of the jury. She even fit the description of the woman in the second car that Virginia Tatem allegedly saw that night. Although Thomas denies having had any role — she told us she did not know Hercules Brown — by the time the state called Thomas to testify in June 2001, she was facing bigger problems of her own, having been arrested for acting as a getaway driver in another unrelated armed robbery. Thomas was ultimately convicted and sent to prison, spending 14 years locked up for her role in that crime.

It was a life-altering blow. Thomas had four young kids when she went to prison, whose childhoods she missed completely. She described facing beatings and rape — but she was also able to turn her life around, enrolling in vocational training and getting involved with a traveling choir, in which she was able to sing and share stories of redemption at area churches. When she was released, the church helped her get back on her feet. Today she is 41; when we met, she had a good job and dedicated much of her time to the ministry as a worship leader, youth minister, and minister of music in the congregation — and was deeply involved in church outreach.

Thomas says she thinks about Inman’s case and her role in it almost every day — “every time I open my refrigerator, because the liberties of just being free and walking in the grass barefoot or being allowed to open my own refrigerator when I want” — and particularly when her son calls home. Now in his 20s, her son is serving 80 years in prison for participating in an armed robbery that ended in murder. “I’m thinking, ‘This is my karma or my reap-what-you-sow,’ because I allowed another young man’s life to be gone for a murder and robbery that he did not commit,” she said.

But ultimately, Thomas blames the police for everything that went sideways for Inman. “I think it’s them, Adel all day long — Adel city police and the GBI.”

No Country for Black Men

Dinah Ray no longer feels safe in her hometown. After her son was convicted, she wrote letters to anyone she could think of who might be able to help but came to fear that the letters might make her a target. Once during a visit to Adel, the heater in the hotel room caught fire. “Me and my wife, we thought they was trying to kill us,” her husband, David, says. “I get a little paranoid when I go there,” Dinah admits. She is afraid of the police and authorities in Adel. “I don’t know what they may do.”

Growing up, she had been aware of the racial divisions in Adel — a ditch near her mother’s house separated the black side of town from the white side. “We would cross that ditch to go to the store sometimes,” she said, and an elderly white couple would let their dog loose after her and her siblings. Still, Dinah had felt it was a good place to live. But not anymore. “After that trial, it changed my whole perspective on Adel,” Dinah says. “I told my sisters, ‘Adel is no place for a black man. You need to take your boys away from here.’”

Dinah and David still live in Sacramento, in a white house with a basketball hoop over the garage. On a weeknight in September 2016, they shared old photographs of Inman growing up. There is a photograph of his sister reading to him as a toddler, a shot of teenage Devonia wearing denim from head to toe, standing next to a Christmas tree. In another, he is dressed in a white suit and sunglasses. Even when he was a little boy, he had loved to dress up, often in military garb, mimicking his biological father. “He loved to look nice,” Dinah says.

Left/Top: A childhood photo of Devonia Inman with his cousins and sister. His sister, Christy Inman, is in the hat. Right/Bottom: Dave and Dinah Ray at their home in Sacramento, Calif. Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept

It was hard for Dinah to leave Inman in Adel. “He didn’t want to stay, and my wife didn’t want to leave him,” David says. “She cried the whole ride back.” Dinah calls it “the worst thing I could have ever done. It destroyed our lives.” The family attended the trial but was not allowed in the courtroom for most of the proceedings. “Even with the little information that we heard during the trial, I still thought my son was coming home,” David says. “To me, the evidence that they had, they didn’t have nothing.”

After the verdict came down, they remember a young woman who was a witness for the state had approached Dinah. They later identified her as LarRisha Chapman, who first claimed to see Inman in the weeds but later recanted in a letter and on the stand. “She was crying, and she said that she was sorry, that she didn’t even know my son,” Dinah says, “that they were just harassing her, and they made her say it.”

Inman writes frequent letters to his family; Dinah was going to find some letters to share when Inman’s cousin, Takeisha Pickett, arrived at the house. Pickett, who previously lived in Adel and worked at the Taco Bell prior to the murder, could have been a crucial source of information, had investigators taken her seriously. On multiple occasions, she tried to provide a critical tip: In the months leading to the crime, Hercules Brown had asked her if she would help him rob the Taco Bell. “He said it to me maybe twice and I brushed him off on it,” she said. “Then a month or two later, this happens.”

In high school, Pickett knew Hercules as a football player from a well-to-do family. “When I started working at Taco Bell, I was introduced to a different Hercules,” she said, a guy who had gotten into drugs. Regardless, the two got along, she says. As a shift supervisor, she would sometimes close the restaurant with him. “He gave me a ride home one night and we came in for a little while,” she said. That’s when he said, “‘Man, you should let me rob you one night,’ or whatever.” Pickett scoffed — there wasn’t enough money at the Taco Bell to make it worth robbing, she said. “He just left it alone for a little while. Then maybe a couple of weeks later, he brought it up again. Then I think we might have been at work. He was like, ‘Man, you should let me do it, Keesh.’ I was like, ‘Man, you trippin.’ That was that.”

By the time she heard about the murder, Pickett had left her job to work at Lowe’s. When Steinberg came seeking information about Inman, she says, “I was like, ‘Hercules Brown wanted to rob the Taco Bell.’” In response, she remembers him saying, “That’s not relevant to what we’re talking about.” She never heard anything further until she was subpoenaed for trial.

In a two-page summary included in the GBI report, Steinberg makes no mention of this part of his interview with Pickett. Indeed, despite the constant chatter among members of the community that Hercules was involved, there are virtually no indications that Steinberg looked into the rumors. Later, Pickett says, when she went to court to testify at trial, she met in a small room with Jimmy Hill and Bob Ellis, repeating to them what she had told Steinberg. But she was dismissed.

By then, Hercules already sat in a jail cell for the brutal killing of William Bennett and Rebecca Browning months before. Bennett’s death still saddens Pickett — she knew his daughter from school, she said, and “I loved him because he made the best chili dogs ever.” Like so many others in Adel, Pickett is certain that their deaths could have been prevented if Hercules had ever been considered as a suspect for the murder at Taco Bell.

David suggested that the murder of Shailesh Patel might have been avoided too. “To this day, I think if they would have listened to us, the other three people that got killed later … they would be still alive,” he says, “and then my son would be home with us.”

Sealed Away

For all the lingering trauma over the bloody chapter in Adel, among the members of the Patel family, the death of their loved one has gone largely unspoken for years.

Today Manishh Patel has no recollection of speaking to the Adel News Tribune about his uncle’s death in 2001. At the time he was a college student in Atlanta, majoring in business. He now manages a cheap motel in Macon, Georgia, where we met last summer, along with his uncle, Haribai. Like several members of the family’s older generation, who began arriving in the U.S. in the late 1970s, Haribai does not speak fluent English, relying on Manishh to translate. Shailesh Patel was his younger brother, Haribai explained through his nephew. After he was killed, “I couldn’t think for three months.”

Manishh explained that his uncle’s murder was only the first in a series of horrible tragedies that gripped the family in 2000. After his death, Shailesh had been cremated and the family had gone to Savannah to spread his ashes in the ocean. On the way home, the family got into a car accident, which killed Shailesh’s young daughter. Soon after that, Shailesh’s mother died. The family was in a constant state of shock and mourning. Haribai “was nervous all the time. Just scared all the time,” Manishh says. “It was just a bad time for our family.”

If the Patels were too emotionally burdened to keep tabs on the investigation into Shailesh’s death, the authorities were not providing any information. On the profile of the unsolved murder, the GBI website puts two names as the officers in charge: GBI agent Mike Clayton, who also participated in the Donna Brown investigation, and Adel Police detective Jimmy Hill. The names don’t ring a bell within the Patel family. Nobody from law enforcement ever called them, Manishh explained. Instead they got word that something bad had happened from another Indian acquaintance in Adel, who called them the day after the murder. Manishh’s father went to the scene but was turned away. The first time an agent came to talk to them it was days later, at a motel the family owned in Locust Grove.

It is hard to piece together who spoke to the GBI and when. Harabai “was there, but he didn’t talk to anybody,” Manishh explained. “It was always some relative or a cousin or somebody that did all the talking and then told him what they said.” He estimated that the GBI agent stayed for 20 to 30 minutes, asking basic questions. “And then that was the last what they heard from him.”

At one point during our interview, as he translated for Haribai, Manishh was told something he had never heard, a revelation that stunned and confused him. According to his uncle, “the GBI came up there and said, ‘If y’all want to proceed on this case, y’all have to help us pay for the investigation, at least 30 to 40 percent of it.’” The claim sounded bizarre: Families of victims are certainly not expected to cover the cost of a state investigation. It is unclear whether there was a miscommunication or even who had the conversation in question with the GBI. (Mark Pro, the GBI agent who insists that the investigation into the case is ongoing, called the claim “ridiculous.”) Regardless, the Patels have remained under the impression for years that the murder of their loved one had gone unsolved because they could not afford to pay for it.

“We never had any kind of crime like this in our family even before or after,” Manishh explained. The older generation in the immigrant family were outsiders to the criminal justice system in the United States. They did not feel empowered to push or question the GBI. And the language barrier made things that much harder. When a news station put together a public service announcement asking for tips to solve the murder, the job fell to Manishh’s cousin, who was similarly young at the time.

“I remember the cousins used to talk about it like, ‘What’s going on?’ Like, ‘What happened?’” Manishh recalls. But they did not want to upset their parents by bringing it up. “Even just bringing this up right now is even hard for them,” he said. “Because they kind of sealed it away a little bit, you know? … They’d rather be free, not have to think about this no more.”

Still, Manishh wishes that he could know what happened. “What kind of investigation they did. … Was it a forced entry or not? What was the story?” He wonders if the killer targeted Shailesh or meant to go after his brother-in-law, Vishnu, who was the one living at the house on Gordon Avenue, where Shailesh was killed, the one who brought Shailesh to Adel in the first place. “What happened?” Mannish asks. “Even if it was Hercules Brown, what was he thinking?”

It has been more than seven years since the DNA results from the mask came back with a match to Hercules. Inman’s parents remember exactly where they were when they got the phone call from the Georgia Innocence Project. “All we could do was cry,” says Dinah Ray. “We thought, this is it.  He’s going to be coming home soon. But that didn’t happen.”

David Ray becomes emotional as he describes their attempts for help. His wife wrote to everybody she could think of — even the president, he says. “We still can’t believe this. This is supposed to be the justice system?  My son been wrongly accused,” he said. “Something is wrong with this system.  It needs to be checked again.”

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Kirk Gordon was Adel’s police chief at the time. “You’re not going to find many smaller counties that’s going after the death penalty if they can get by with life,” he says. “The cost of a big trial can bankrupt a county.” But 2001 was no ordinary year in Adel. A string of murders had recently gripped the small rural town, stirring fear, anxiety, and collective cries for justice. The first was the murder of  Donna Brown, who was shot in a Taco Bell parking lot in September 1998, for which Inman stood trial. The second, in April 2000, was the brutal killing of an Indian immigrant named Shailesh Patel, a crime that remains unsolved — and largely forgotten in Adel today. The third was a brazen double murder committed in broad daylight in the fall of 2000. In that case, a man named Hercules Brown had been arrested for killing two beloved members of the community — William Carroll Bennett and his employee, Rebecca Browning — at a popular grocery store and lunch spot, Bennett’s Cash and Carry. As Inman’s trial came to a close — ultimately ending in a life sentence — Hercules was facing his own capital trial.

Prosecutors had every reason to feel confident that they could win a death sentence this time. The state had come close to sending Inman to death row, despite its relatively weak case — in their first vote during deliberations, nearly half the jurors favored the death penalty. By comparison, the evidence against Hercules was airtight. What’s more, the Bennett family wanted the death penalty — and Bennett’s older brother, Buck, was one of the county commissioners who voted to make sure there was money in the budget.

Yet it would never come to pass. Shortly before his trial was set to begin in 2002, Hercules cut a plea deal with prosecutors. In exchange for a life sentence, he would divulge a piece of evidence that had eluded the Georgia Bureau of Investigation: the identity of his accomplice, whom Hercules had long refused to name. The man, 23-year-old Wesley Mason, had remained on the streets for more than a year, much to the anger and dismay of Adel’s residents. In one of several outraged columns, News Tribune editor-in-chief Ann Knight chided the GBI for leaving the town vulnerable to a killer on the loose, calling on Adel residents to make their voices heard. “Do you want the next crime victim to be you or your father, your grandfather, maybe your wife?”

After giving up Mason, Hercules swiftly went from protecting his co-defendant to pinning everything on him. It had been Mason’s idea to rob the store, Hercules said, and it was Mason who attacked both Bennett and Browning with a baseball bat. Although Hercules admitted that he grabbed the store’s cash register — throwing it at two eyewitnesses immediately following the crime — he implied that this, too, had been Mason’s idea. But Mason, who had initially denied being there at all, told GBI agent Jamy Steinberg the opposite: It was Hercules who committed the murders, beating both Bennett and Browning to death, completely out of the blue.

There is no indication in the available records that anyone sought to determine who actually committed the grisly crime. The lack of clarity still distresses Bennett’s widow, Gail, who left Adel following her husband’s death. “Which one did what, I have no idea,” she says about Mason and Hercules. “It frustrates you, because you don’t know. You don’t.”

With Hercules headed to prison for life in May 2002, it was Mason who now faced a possible death sentence. It would be up to his appointed defense attorneys to prove that Mason was the less culpable party, that only Hercules was capable of such heinous acts. This would mean finding out whatever they could about Hercules’s history of violence, a search that would soon raise new questions about other murders in Adel.

What Really Happened at Taco Bell?

Defense attorney Josh Moore works in a large office building in the heart of Atlanta that is home to the State Bar of Georgia. On a weekday in 2017, he sat at his desk, surrounded by case files, a drawing by his young son hanging on the wall. As the appellate director of the Office of the Georgia Capital Defender, Moore has spent more than 15 years trying to save his clients from death row — including Wesley Mason, back in 2003. As Moore recalls, Mason insisted that although he was present when Bennett and Browning were murdered, he had no idea that Hercules would go on a killing spree and he did not participate in the violence. “So the question was, how much of it was Wesley Mason and how much of it was Hercules Brown?” Moore recalls. The answer would be key to keeping his client off death row.

“I quickly recognized that a deeper understanding of Hercules Brown was critical to our defense,” Moore says. He drove the three hours south to Adel on I-75. Almost immediately he began to hear stories about how Hercules was the person responsible for the murder of Donna Brown at the Taco Bell in 1998 — and that the wrong man had gone to prison for life. The rumors were “rampant,” Moore recalls, but he could not get anyone to go on the record. “Everybody was saying that this is what happened. And everyone was saying, as is typical in a place like Adel, they didn’t want to talk about it.”

Indeed, while Mason had no violent criminal history, Hercules’s recent past was checkered with violent incidents. In June 1999, he was accused of attacking a woman — the mother of a drug dealer — by pulling her out of a car and kicking her in the head. “It looked like she had been in a fight with Mike Tyson,” former Adel police Officer Tim Balch recalled. But the case was never prosecuted because the woman declined to cooperate. In July 2000, Hercules was accused of knocking a man on a bicycle to the ground and wailing on him until witnesses restrained him. The man was hospitalized for three days. Hercules was sentenced to 12 months of probation.

And just weeks before the murders of Bennett and Browning, in September 2000 Hercules was arrested again — for an attempted robbery at another grocery store less than a mile from Bennett’s. Balch had received word from a confidential informant that the robbery was about to go down; he made a beeline to the market and spotted Hercules driving his blue Cadillac. After pulling him over and searching the car, Balch found crack cocaine, a 40-caliber pistol, and in the trunk, a black cloth cap with two eyeholes cut into it — a makeshift mask not unlike the one that had been found in Donna Brown’s car in 1998.

But as he had in the past, Hercules was able to escape consequence thanks to one person: his mother, Lucinda Brown. When Balch arrived with him at the police station, Lucinda was already there. She began “cussing me out about how her son would never have done any of this,” he recalled. Balch is not easily intimidated. But he held his tongue. Lucinda was well-known among local cops and prosecutors — and well-respected among Adel’s mostly white leadership. As a top employee at the Division of Family and Children Services, officers like Balch relied on Lucinda to help them solve child abuse cases. She was not shy about intervening when her son got in trouble. The dynamic “led to a lot of…problems,” Balch said. Hercules was quickly released.

That Hercules was not locked up then haunts Gail Bennett. She’s certain that he should have been jailed — and likely long before the attempted robbery. If police had ever considered him seriously as a suspect for the earlier murders in Adel, she believes that her husband would still be alive. “Starting with the Taco Bell [murder] on forward, as much stuff as Hercules had gotten into, yes, I thoroughly believe it could have been prevented,” she said.

Josh Moore soon began to suspect the same thing. In fact, the more time he spent investigating, the more he heard that Hercules might be responsible for yet another murder. “There was another case too,” he said. As he recalls, it was “maybe an Indian fellow who got murdered, maybe a television or an air conditioner smashed over his head.” And in fact Shailesh Patel had been beaten and murdered seven months before the killings at Bennett’s grocery. “I heard that very quickly too,” Moore said. “That’s what people were saying about Hercules, that he had committed … those two murders prior to the Bennett murder.”

Moore’s familiarity with Patel’s murder stood in sharp contrast to much of Adel today. Although most longtime residents recall the era between the murder at Taco Bell and the killings of Bennett and Browning as a terrifying time, many people have only a faint memory of Patel’s death — if they have any at all.

There was little Moore could do to probe the Patel case, which remained open. But since it was closed, documents relating to the murder of Donna Brown should be public record. “I started aggressively investigating the Taco Bell case,” he said. He didn’t get far. Not long after he’d sent an open records request seeking the GBI’s investigative file, Moore’s inquiry was shut down — by the lawyer appointed alongside him to defend Mason.

The lawyer, Clark Landrum, was not a defense attorney but a full-time prosecutor from a neighboring judicial district. That a prosecutor would be tapped to lead a capital defense team may be startling, but Moore says this was par for the course in South Georgia. “I grew up in Georgia, but I’m an outsider when you go down to Cook County,” he explains. “This is not a place where the judicial system runs in any kind of recognizable way to most lawyers.”

According to Moore, Landrum wrote him a formal letter demanding that he stop his investigation. “It turned into a huge conflict between us because I basically said, ‘I’m not willing to do that. I don’t really care what you’re saying, I’m going to go ahead and investigate this because my allegiance is to my client.’” Stunned and disturbed by Landrum’s behavior, Moore turned to the judge in the case to ask that Landrum be removed. “That turned into a big ugly brawl too,” he said.

As Moore prepared to meet the judge, accompanied by Mason and his mother, he recalls seeing Landrum leaving the office of Bob Ellis, the same prosecutor who convicted Devonia Inman for the murder at Taco Bell — and who would now prosecute Mason. Inside chambers, noting that there was “a difference of opinion” between the two lawyers assigned to Mason’s case, the judge chose to remove Moore instead of Landrum.

That is not what Mason wanted, Moore said. “The family had no faith in Clark Landrum at all and didn’t want him representing Wesley.” Moore stood firm: He and another lawyer from Atlanta would be taking the case pro bono, and that was final. The judge retorted that they’d better not ask for any money for their defense, because he wouldn’t give them a dime.

Over email, Landrum described the incident differently. Moore was “difficult to supervise,” he claimed, and would interview witnesses and then refuse to share any information with him. But he denied trying to stop Moore from looking into the Taco Bell case. “That is ridiculous,” he wrote.

Moore prevailed in taking over the case — but his investigation into Hercules’ involvement in the Taco Bell murder quickly came to an end when Mason was offered a deal for life in prison. He took it. The message was clear: Between the GBI and the prosecutors in Cook County, nobody wanted Moore to revisit the murder of Donna Brown. “As you have seen, I’m sure, in looking into this again,” he says, “a lot of doors close in your face.”

DNA Test Results

Devonia Inman was just beginning his life sentence in 2002 when he wrote a letter to the fledgling Georgia Innocence Project, pleading for help. “We started looking at his case very early on and have stayed with his case,” said Aimee Maxwell, the group’s founding executive director. To Maxwell, who has since left the GIP, the case immediately stood out for all the wrong reasons — the lack of any physical evidence tying Inman to the crime and the confounding stories offered by a parade of witnesses who either recanted or had something to gain from testifying against him. “It was very telling who the witnesses were,” she said. “You can’t figure out when they’re telling the truth. Do you really want [them] to put a man in prison for life without parole? That’s the shocking thing — and it could have possibly been death.”

Maxwell began a hunt for evidence that could be tested for DNA. Tape lifts with fingerprints recovered from Donna Brown’s car that might have contained skin cells suitable for testing had disappeared, she said. But one key piece of evidence still existed: the makeshift mask recovered from her car. In March 2011, Maxwell got the go-ahead to have it tested.

Just two months later, DNA testing linked the mask to a single source: Hercules Brown.

The revelation all but confirmed what many in Adel had long suspected: The real killer in the Taco Bell murder was Hercules — and the state had imprisoned the wrong man. To Maxwell, it was clearly grounds for Inman to receive a new trial.

As the GIP lawyers in Atlanta geared up to make the case to Judge L.A. McConnell — the same judge who presided over Inman’s original trial — down in Cook County, few had heard about the DNA. No story ran in the Adel News Tribune. Nonetheless, one man who had been a key player in Inman’s conviction had received the news: Tim Eidson, the assistant district attorney who helped send Inman to prison for life.

Eidson was no longer a prosecutor by this time. He had moved on to head the public defender’s office in neighboring Cordele, later becoming a sort of roving defense attorney, based in Alabama and representing clients all over South Georgia. In an office in Douglas, Georgia, in the fall of 2016, Eidson recalled hearing about the DNA. “Now I know that my ex-wife called me one day,” he said. “She was kind of in a tizzy because they had got a call from someone and she says, ‘Do you remember that mask you found?’ I said yeah. ‘Well they found that it had Hercules Brown’s DNA in it … and they’re saying that he might have been involved in the Taco Bell murder.’”

There was good reason for Eidson’s ex-wife to have heard the news before him: Hercules had killed her uncle. In a typical small-town connection, Eidson had once been married to William Carroll Bennett’s niece. They had recently divorced when Eidson got the phone call in 2000 that Bennett had been beaten to death. “I was like, ‘Lord have mercy,’ because I knew him. … I knew his entire family.”

Like Gail Bennett, who believes that Hercules should have been arrested for the murder of Donna Brown at Taco Bell, other members of the Bennett family were upset by the implications of the DNA. Yet Eidson maintains that, although “we had our suspicions at the time,” there was never enough evidence to indict Hercules. Lucinda Brown had provided an alibi for her son, after all, and she was well-respected in the community. Besides, Eidson said, the DNA evidence merely linked Hercules to the crime. It did not mean Inman was innocent. If the state had known there was DNA on the mask matching Hercules, Eidson said, “his name would have been there along with Devonia Inman.”

Yet Eidson and Ellis had convicted Inman by arguing that he alone had committed the crime. The DNA was compelling evidence that they had gotten it wrong — and that Inman deserved a new trial.

The State Changes Its Story

In January 2014, Maxwell traveled to Adel for an evidentiary hearing before Judge McConnell. She felt confident.

After the DNA results from the mask came back, GBI agent Jamy Steinberg, who with Adel Police Department detective Jimmy Hill led the investigation into the murder at Taco Bell, had gone to see Hercules in prison. In a recorded interview in June 2011, Hercules denied any involvement in Donna Brown’s murder and ever wearing the mask containing his DNA. He also denied knowing Inman. “Steinberg explained to Brown that the only profile shown in the mask was his and that DNA was very specific and if somebody else tried it on, it would show their profile as well,” Steinberg wrote in his report, adding that Hercules said “he did not remember anything about it; it had been a long time.”

Maxwell was thrilled with the interview. “It was this genius interrogation because they gave [Hercules] all the outs; he took none of them,” she said. “They backed him into a corner and he has no place to go. He can’t come back now and explain, ‘Oh, well, yeah, you know we were best friends and we were hanging out that night and, oh yeah, I had this makeshift mask that I was using, but I loaned it to him.’ He can’t do any of that now.”

At trial, Inman’s attorneys had sought to admit evidence showing that, during their investigation into Donna Brown’s murder, police had been repeatedly told that Hercules was responsible for the crime. But prosecutors balked, insisting that the allegations were unreliable and should be excluded. McConnell had agreed, ruling that absent any solid link between Hercules and the crime, speculation about his involvement would be kept from the jury. Now, standing in the Cook County courthouse, Maxwell argued that the DNA was precisely that link. “That’s the witness that tells us the truth. That’s the one piece of evidence that tells us who was actually there.”

In response, the state did an about-face. “The evidence was never that Mr. Inman acted alone,” prosecutor Jess Hornsby argued, completely contradicting the state’s theory at trial. The DNA did “nothing to exonerate Mr. Inman,” he said. “All that does is possibly implicate another person that may have been involved.”

In all, the hearing did not go particularly well. The transcripts suggest that Maxwell’s argument was scattered and rushed, and the state fought at every turn to keep additional witnesses off the stand. They included Kwame Spaulding, the jailhouse informant who previously testified that Inman had confessed to him while the two were locked up together. Now, Spaulding said he had been coerced into making this claim, through promises that the GBI would get him released. “I mean, he was telling me he’ll let me go home and he was telling me stuff to say about the man,” Spaulding said, presumably referring to Steinberg, who had taken his statement back in 1999.

Maxwell also sought to call Virginia Tatem, the witness who at trial had been so adamant that she had seen Inman driving Brown’s car the night of her murder (and whose claims about what she had seen were far-fetched at best). Maxwell wanted to ask Tatem whether she had ever received the $5,000 offered by Taco Bell for information. Tatum refused to answer any questions.

Finally, there was Hercules Brown. Not surprisingly, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Steinberg’s testimony was terse. Maxwell wanted to know if he’d done any further investigation after learning that Hercules’s DNA was found on the mask.

“There’s been no additional investigative acts after that,” he replied.

“Did you compare the latent fingerprints [from the crime scene] which did not match my client to Mr. Brown?” she followed up.

“I just answered that question,” Steinberg said.

Steinberg has been similarly testy toward others who have questioned his work. In the wake of the murders of Bennett and Browning, Gail Bennett wrote a letter to the editor of the Adel News Tribune, complaining that she had been unable to get any answers from the GBI about its hunt for Hercules’s accomplice. Steinberg met with the family soon afterward. “He was very ugly,” Gail said. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’”

If Judge McConnell was more interested in the implications of the DNA evidence than Steinberg appeared to be, he did not seem motivated to do much about it. While his decision to hold the hearing in the first place was an important step — plenty of trial judges deny such hearings when it comes to questionable convictions won in their courtrooms — it would not matter in the end. McConnell sided with the state and denied Inman a new trial — and he asked the DA to pen his ruling for him.

The eight-page ruling endorses the state’s revisionist history — adopting prosecutors’ new theory of the crime — and faulted the GIP for not offering additional evidence linking Hercules to the crime, the very evidence that McConnell had barred from Inman’s original trial. “At the hearing, Defendant presented no evidence that would implicate Hercules Brown as the killer other than the DNA on the ski mask,” it reads. The ruling acknowledged that “the DNA on the ski mask is not irrelevant,” but concluded that it was not significant enough to “produce a different verdict” if Inman was granted a new trial.

In its appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, the GIP argued that the shifting theory of the crime was improper. The law does not allow the state to charge a person with one crime and then argue at trial or on appeal that he is responsible for an entirely different crime — a legal disconnect known as a fatal variance. The state had charged Inman as solely responsible for the robbery and murder of Donna Brown, but with Hercules’s DNA found on the ski mask they now argued that there were multiple people involved in the crime. That convenient shift essentially denied Inman the right to effectively defend himself.

But like McConnell, the Georgia Supreme Court shrugged off the argument. On December 19, 2014, it rejected Inman’s appeal. Maxwell was bewildered and devastated. “I pretty much think about this case almost every day, and I can’t figure out how I lost it,” she said. “I can’t believe that this young man … is in prison for the rest of his life based on a bunch of liars.”

Down in Adel, people were mostly unaffected by the ruling. News of the DNA match to Hercules didn’t even make the local paper until after The Intercept began its investigation into the case in 2015. To Charles Shiver, longtime reporter and editor of the News Tribune, the discovery of Hercules’s DNA on the mask had been “kind of disturbing to me,” but he deferred to the conclusions of the court. “I mean, I can’t second-guess the judge,” he said.

A Clear Miscarriage of Justice

It wasn’t long after Maxwell’s loss before the Georgia Supreme Court that Jessica Cino stopped by her office to discuss a case.

Cino, now 40 and an assistant dean at the Georgia State University College of Law, grew up in a poor family in rural Kansas. She didn’t know anything about the criminal justice system or its failures until she went to college, when she took a class on the death penalty that changed the course of her life. “I was profoundly disturbed for the entire semester,” she recalls. It “opened my eyes to this hidden system of justice that I had no idea even existed.” Where she once hoped to become an actor, she instead applied to law school, winning a scholarship to the University of Miami based in part on her determination to open an innocence project at the school, which she did. After graduation she went to work at a silk-stocking firm in San Francisco, where she spent much of her time working on capital cases that the firm took on pro bono and developing an expertise in forensics and DNA evidence.

It was one of those pro bono cases that woke her up to the real-world injustices of the system. Her firm had taken on the case of a black man named Cory Maye who faced execution after being wrongfully convicted for shooting a white police officer in Mississippi. During a hearing in the case, Cino remembers seeing for the first time a dramatic representation of a racial divide in the justice system. The courthouse in Hattiesburg was an old-fashioned, two-tiered courtroom, complete with a gallery where black attendees were once forced to sit before integration. But that day, the courtroom was segregated anyway. When she walked in, she said, “all of the people who supported the officer and his family and the prosecutor were all white; they were all on one side of the courtroom. And then, Cory’s supporters were mostly African-Americans, so they were on the other side.”

Later, when Cino was offered a job at GSU, she jumped at the opportunity. She knew how badly the South needed skilled death penalty lawyers. After arriving in Atlanta in 2009, she quickly developed a relationship with the GIP.

On the day Cino stopped by to chat with Maxwell, she had a different case on her mind. But Maxwell had just lost Inman’s appeal. “She started telling me about the case. It sounded horrendous,” she said. Maxwell told her about the court rulings and the DNA evidence that pointed to a clear miscarriage of justice. That the Georgia Supreme Court had basically turned its back meant that Inman was out of meaningful options to challenge his conviction. “I think even my own notions of how the criminal justice system worked and how pivotal DNA evidence is in cases was tested,” she said. It wasn’t like anyone was asking the state to just set Inman free, Cino thought, only that he deserved a new trial, based on the DNA. After all, if jurors had known about it in 2001, it is hard to imagine that they would have convicted him.

Maxwell sent Cino a copy of the trial transcript. She devoured it. “I would just keep turning the page and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. How did this guy get convicted?’” she recalls. The miscarriage of justice was so clear, she knew she had to do something. If she didn’t, she remembers thinking, it would alter the way she thought of herself as a lawyer. “This is a case that cries out for people to look at and to re-examine, and I wouldn’t be able to just walk away from it.”

That July, Cino and a research assistant packed into her silver convertible Mini Cooper and headed out from Atlanta, driving more than three hours southeast to meet Inman in the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. She wanted to get a read on him. “I’ve met a lot of guys behind bars over the years. Some of them are totally trying to bullshit me, some of them are brutally honest and candid about their history,” she said. “So I wanted to go and just size him up and see what he had to say about the case, but also, how sincere was he?”

At the prison, she spent an hour talking with Inman. She would return four more times over the next few months. He was clearly “seriously depressed” and living under horrible circumstances. And she believed him when he said he did not kill Donna Brown. “When he started talking about the case, it rang true.” He told her about his run-ins with the law in California and about his rocky relationships with women, and how he’d gotten into an argument with his girlfriend, Christy Lima, on the night of the murder. “So he was forthcoming with all of that, but he was adamant … that he did not kill Donna Brown and that he had never killed anybody.”

He also expressed remorse about not taking more seriously the state’s case against him. “He was just so sure that a jury wouldn’t convict him,” she said. “That’s sort of where, I think even emotionally, his development stopped. He very much just relives the two to three weeks surrounding the Taco Bell crime every single day of his life, and that’s what he focuses on.”

Talking to Inman is not easy. More often than not his voice is flat and he is despairing about his circumstances. He doesn’t understand why no one believes him, particularly since the DNA evidence points to Hercules Brown, a man Inman insists he did not know, except by reputation. Without any good answers, Inman lives in a perpetual melancholic loop, reliving often minute details about what was going on in the weeks and hours before the Taco Bell murder and punishing himself with a string of what-ifs.

He returns to the same set of memories over and over: how Marquetta Thomas, Lima’s sister, was not at home most of that evening; how a car had arrived at the house late that night, shining its bright lights through the windows, possibly dropping someone off. And he remembers playing outside in the dirt with his young son earlier that afternoon and how his son pleaded with him not to leave. “I kind of feel bad when I think about it now because it’s like he was really trying to tell me something that he seen, I guess. It was like, I’m gonna go away for a long time,” he recalled. “If you look at the way he was crying, because he was really crying, he was holding my shirt and wouldn’t let go.”

Inman has not seen his son in more than 20 years. And there is a good chance that he might never see him again — not free in the world, at least — unless Cino can find a way to convince the courts that Inman is innocent. She is determined to do so and since 2015, has spent hundreds of hours working on his case.

A Rigged System

At the heart of Inman’s predicament is a problem that many Americans do not understand. For all of the rights offered to people accused of crimes, there is no right that explicitly protects a person against a wrongful conviction. The Constitution is mostly silent on this point, concerned instead with whether a defendant received a fair trial. Did you have minimally competent lawyers? Were you able to cross-examine the state’s witnesses? Barring any violations of due process, the system is satisfied — even if the wrong person is convicted.

“I think one of the biggest myths about the criminal justice system and the way it functions is that most of the time we get it right, but in the slim chance we get it wrong, we’ll be able to correct it down the road,” says Cino. “That’s just not true. That’s not true on any level.” In many ways it is a rigged system. “Once you’re convicted, it’s meant to keep you there. It is not meant to re-examine your case, no matter the circumstances” — say, if a victim or witness recants, or if a jailhouse snitch was proven to be unreliable. “The system is designed to keep you wherever they put you once they convict you,” she says. “That’s why there’s that presumption of innocence before you get convicted, but once you’re convicted, it’s a presumption of guilty, and that is almost impossible to undo.”

The rise of DNA evidence has helped some — but has also lulled people into a belief that it is able to rectify all wrongs. DNA is only available in a fraction of cases. In many, it has proven critical in correcting miscarriages of justice — for example, in rape cases in which a person has misidentified their attacker. But as Inman learned the hard way, even when DNA is available, it is only as good as the people considering it. Often, the state fights against testing DNA, then denies its significance when it is matched to another person. And, like McConnell, many judges will decline to grant a new trial, even when forensic evidence points to a wrongful conviction.

This harsh reality has left Inman with little legal recourse. His best shot is a true Hail Mary pass: a writ of habeas corpus based on actual innocence — what amounts to a legal unicorn. But in order to create the best odds, Cino would have to find a constitutional violation in the case — that Inman’s previous lawyers were deficient, for example, or that prosecutors failed to turn over important evidence — to serve as the basis for the appeal. “It’s a shot in the dark,” she says. But she is determined to try and has wrangled a pro bono legal team from one of Atlanta’s prestige firms, Troutman Sanders, to help her.

Cino constantly worries about the case and wonders if she’ll actually be able to help Inman. “Because whenever I talk to him on the phone…he always asks me, ‘What are the chances of me getting out? Do I have a good chance?’ He wants to be optimistic,” she says. “The lawyer in me knows the reality of what he faces.” So she’s caught, trying to “manage his expectations without crushing his last hope.” She wakes up in the middle of the night, sweating, worrying about Inman’s case, as well as Inman himself. “I don’t know what it’s like for him day to day in prison, let alone day to day in prison where you’re an innocent man,” she says. “I can’t imagine that. Then, to have your one chance [at freedom] be so slight, I feel horrible as…a human being that this is how bad this system is.”

But there is one thing that could help Inman’s case almost immediately, Cino says: “You would need Hercules Brown to come forward and admit to the crime and also say that Devonia didn’t have a role in it.”

In the three years since we began working on this story, we have written numerous letters to Hercules in prison. He has responded just once, in July 2016. He did not explicitly deny committing the murder of Donna Brown, but wrote, “I don’t have any thing to say about Devonia Inman nor his conviction or any thing pertaining to his case.” If Hercules continues to stay silent, it seems likely that the truth behind the Adel murders will remain untold.

On a Sunday afternoon in 2017 we finally got in touch with Hercules’s mother, Lucinda Brown. We had hoped to ask her about the alibi she had provided for Hercules, and how she felt about the many rumors about her son. Over the phone, we asked her if she could help us sort out the truth of the matter. Not surprisingly, she refused. “You’ll never know what’s true and what’s not,” she said. “So I don’t have anything to give you.”

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The post Revisiting the Taco Bell Killing appeared first on The Intercept.

Crumley, Bellflower, and another colleague, conductor Wayne Peters, often dropped into Bennett’s Cash and Carry for lunch when working in town. The owner, William Carroll Bennett, was a legend in the community where his family went back generations. He was known for his generosity and would often extend credit to families who needed groceries but couldn’t afford to pay for them. “He was a saint,” said former Adel police Officer Tim Balch.

Peters hopped off the train and headed to the store ahead of Crumley and Belflower, who followed not far behind. In his nearly 40 years working for the railroad Crumley had seen beauty — pristine landscapes stretching out for miles; a river flowing past as his train moved across a truss high above. He’d also seen tragedy; he’d lost count of the number of people who had perished on the tracks when his train was too close to stop. That did not prepare him for what he saw that day inside Bennett’s grocery.

As he and Belflower approached the store, a man exited, holding a bat of some kind that appeared to be stained with paint. As the two men reached the store’s front door, a second man, carrying a cash register, burst through to the outside. Crumley asked what he was doing. The man threw the cash register at them. Crumley fell backward, but Belflower avoided the blow and raced toward the man as he hopped into the driver’s seat of an older blue Cadillac. Crumley scrambled to his feet and as the car raced away, the two men called out the license plate number, which Crumley scribbled onto his hand with a pen he always kept in his shirt pocket.

Just inside the store’s front door, Crumley and Belflower found their colleague, Peters. He’d been hit in the head and part of his scalp was peeled back. He was alive. Further inside, the men realized that Bennett and his employee, Rebecca Browning, had been bludgeoned to death. Although Peters would recover from his injuries, he would have no recollection of what happened that day — of who hit him and with what.

The brazen lunchtime murder of two beloved community members stunned a small town still reeling from the brutal murder of Shailesh Patel just seven months earlier. Despite a grisly crime scene filled with physical evidence, no arrests had been made. The crime remains unsolved to this day. But this time, the cops got a break. Crumley and Belflower’s quick action to copy down the plate number of the blue Cadillac produced almost immediate results: Less than an hour later, Hercules Brown was arrested while driving the car.

Hercules’s ankles were shackled that afternoon when he was brought in for an interview with Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Jamy Steinberg, the same man who had led the investigation into the September 1998 murder of Donna Brown outside the Adel Taco Bell. Steinberg had been given information back then that strongly implicated Hercules as being responsible for Donna Brown’s death, but judging from the police report he never followed the lead. Instead, Steinberg focused his attention on a 20-year-old from out of town, Devonia Inman, who the state said had acted alone in ambushing Donna Brown in the Taco Bell parking lot, robbing her of the evening’s receipts before shooting her in the face. Inman insisted that he was not involved in the crime — he was at his girlfriend Christy Lima’s home at the time — but was nonetheless arrested and charged with the murder. The day that Bennett and Browning were beaten to death Inman was still in jail awaiting trial.

Under questioning, Hercules denied that Hercules was even his name, so Steinberg called in Adel police investigator Jimmy Hill. The town’s veteran and only detective, Hill had worked with Steinberg on the Donna Brown case. Hill positively identified Hercules. The 20-year-old relented; yes, that was his name — but he didn’t know anything about any crime at Bennett’s grocery. Hercules was booked into jail.

What Happened to Hercules

In Greek mythology, Hercules is the half-mortal son of Zeus. The goddess Hera was furious that Zeus had cheated on her and was vengeful toward Hercules. She sent two snakes into his crib to kill him, but it didn’t work; the powerful infant crushed them both. Indeed, Hercules became known not only for his strength, but also for his temper. He wore a lion skin with the head still attached that came up over his forehead like a mask, and he carried a large club, his favorite weapon.

In Adel, the life of Hercules Brown has become something of a legend. Everybody remembers him, giving some version of a similar tale: a formidable young man from a good family who took a bad turn.

Hercules was funny and did well in school, and he excelled in both football and baseball. He was such a large and muscular child that he needed a special-ordered uniform; he could easily have used his strength to dominate on the field, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, recalled his youth sports coach. Hercules stopped playing sports in high school and instead joined the band, playing trombone and baritone. In a 1997 quiz for band members titled “Getting to Know You,” Hercules wrote that his favorite piece of music was “Mozart” and that his greatest extravagance was his hair. He kept a Bible at his bedside, would like to visit Australia, and should play himself in the movies, he wrote. He described himself as “carefree.” Hercules also worked at the Taco Bell in Adel, often as a closer.

If Hercules was as carefree as he claimed, at some point things changed. Why is not entirely clear, though many who knew him as a teenager blame drug use for his change in temperament. Tim Balch, the former Adel police officer, said that in those days Hercules was trying to build “street cred.” He had heard that Hercules was selling drugs out of the Taco Bell drive-thru, although police never proved it. Tim Eidson, assistant district attorney of the Alapaha Judicial Circuit, said that Hercules was obviously high on something when he was arrested for the Bennett and Browning murders, though Hercules denied it.

Others say that Hercules was simply a “thug.” He threatened his girlfriend and was known for trying to rob people or burglarize houses and cars, according to Lima, Inman’s girlfriend in the summer of 1998. “This boy had a violent streak in him, and everybody in Adel knew that,” she said. “Everybody was scared of him.” Many people were also scared of his mother, Lucinda, who worked at the state Division of Family and Children Services, which had the power to take people’s children away. Lucinda had “pull,” Lima said — the kind of pull that kept people from saying anything bad about her son, regardless of the circumstances. If the extent of her power was less real than perceived, numerous people nevertheless recall Adel residents being wary of coming forward when Hercules acted out, afraid that Lucinda Brown would take away custody of their children or cut off access to benefits like food stamps.

Balch had a similar impression. “His mother was always very, very, very overprotective,” he said. Whenever her son had a run-in with the Adel police, Lucinda did not hesitate to come to the station to complain. Officers would hold their tongues in response. They knew they had to rely on her cooperation in child abuse cases, and they did not wish to ruffle her feathers. “I don’t know a good way to put this without being ugly,” Balch said, “but you don’t want to do something to mess the relationship up.”

Still others, like Balch’s then boss, former Chief Kirk Gordon, and prosecutor Eidson recall Lucinda and her family as kind, respected members of the community. “Just super good people, just as nice as they could be,” said Gordon.

Indeed, in a rather jaw-dropping revelation, Eidson said that it was actually Lucinda who provided an alibi for her son on the evening Donna Brown was killed. According to Lucinda, Eidson recalled, Hercules was either at home asleep or possibly returning from a school trip at the time of the murder. “In any event, she gave an alibi for Hercules,” he said. Despite the obvious conflict of interest, officials apparently accepted her explanation at face value. Sure, there was “innuendo” that Hercules might have been involved in the crime, Eidson recalled, but there was nothing that would outweigh Lucinda’s assurances. “There wasn’t any reason to disbelieve her at the time,” he said. “She was a well-respected citizen.”

A Witness Recants

On a winter day in early 2001 — less than three months after the brutal murders of Bennett and Browning — defense attorney Melinda Ryals received a letter at the public defender’s headquarters in neighboring Tifton, Georgia. For months she had been working on one of the most significant cases of her career, defending Devonia Inman, who faced the death penalty for the murder of Donna Brown — the first death penalty trial in Cook County in a generation. The letter that arrived at Ryals’s office that day was dated January 30. To her surprise, it came from LarRisha Chapman, who was poised to take the stand as one of the state’s key witnesses against Inman.

Chapman, then 16, worked the closing shift at Taco Bell the night Brown was murdered and was one of the last people to see her alive. She initially told investigators that she’d seen nothing “unusual or suspicious” outside the restaurant that night, but eventually changed her story, claiming that while waiting for her ride, she actually heard Devonia Inman’s voice coming from some weeds near the parking lot curb line, a detail that neatly fit the cops’ theory that someone had been lying in wait to attack Brown.

Ryals had recently gone to see Chapman, who expressed gratitude for the visit in her letter. “I’m so glad that you came to speak with me on this situation,” Chapman wrote. She was writing to Ryals now so that she could “clear up the huge lie I told years ago.”

“I, LarRisha Nicole Chapman, admit that I lied on the statement I wrote about I could recognize the voice of a Mr. Inman,” she wrote. “I don’t even know what his voice sounds like. I’ve never even heard his voice before. I didn’t see anyone in the bushes either.” Investigators had relentlessly harassed her, Chapman explained. “I was sick of it and so I lied to stop them from bothering me and I thought it was over. I only made it worse by lying. I’ve got to get the truth out because I haven’t been able to sleep good since I said this.”

Chapman wrote that she wanted to replace her previous statements with this confession, which she insisted was the truth. She did not want to take the stand and lie. “I was young and I didn’t know how to handle this kind of thing. But now I’m sorry that I lied. Please can you help me to get off the stand and try to straighten this huge lie that I told?”

Ryals shared the letter with prosecutors.

Chapman was not the only one who tried to recant what she said about the crime at Taco Bell. According to Marquetta Thomas, the first person to implicate Inman, she herself had twice tried to tell authorities that she wanted to change her statement, including after she’d been subpoenaed to appear as a state witness against Inman. “They kept getting smart with me, telling me they was going to hold me in contempt of court. I was like, ‘He didn’t do it, yo.’ They never paid any attention.”

If the state’s theory of the crime seemed to be falling apart in the months before the trial, prosecutors did not seem troubled. Nor did they seem concerned with the possibility that Hercules, who had long been rumored to be truly responsible for the murder of Donna Brown and now sat in a local jail cell accused of brutally killing Bennett and Browning, might have been responsible for Donna Brown’s death too. All the while, the horrific murder of Shailesh Patel had yet to be solved. If any of these factors should have given prosecutors pause, perhaps to reconsider their case against Inman, they instead were ignored. The capital trial continued to move forward.

The Trial

The trial of Devonia Inman began on June 19, 2001, at the Cook County Courthouse in downtown Adel. Representing the state was Robert “Bob” Ellis, the judicial circuit’s elected district attorney. In his 40s, with a conservative side-part and moustache, Ellis had the politician’s skill of projecting folksy humility while harboring ruthless tactics. “The Southern gentleman is how he presented himself,” says Earline Goodman, who worked on Inman’s defense team, attending the trial from start to finish. Ellis’s image would later be tarnished after he was exposed, over the course of a federal corruption probe, of sexual misconduct with a confidential drug informant. The informant accused him of rape, but Ellis insisted that his acts were consensual. He eventually pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Today, Ellis is a boat salesman and part-time Baptist preacher. In a 2015 interview, he defended his prosecution of Inman, while insisting that remembered very little about the case. “I can only tell you at the time, that we felt strongly that he was guilty, or we wouldn’t have gone forward,” he says.

Ellis was accompanied by Eidson, the assistant DA, an affable, slightly younger attorney who would go on to head the public defender’s office in nearby Cordele, Georgia. He, too, ran afoul of the law after Inman’s trial; in 2007, Eidson was indicted on federal corruption charges after allegedly interfering in a drug case involving his wife. He was acquitted, but was later sued in a class-action brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the firm Arnold & Porter, which charged him and others in his office with shockingly inadequate defense work on behalf of indigent clients. (The case was settled in 2015.) Eidson also defends Inman’s conviction, although he says he believed at the time that he had not acted alone, which contradicts the theory that he and Ellis presented to the jury. “If the courts give Devonia Inman a new trial you’re not going to see me arguing about it in the papers or getting mad about it,” Eidson said. Still, he insists, “from the evidence that was presented during that time … I just believe Devonia was involved with it.”

Leading Inman’s defense was David Perry, who has since died, along with Ryals, his co-chair. According to Goodman, it was Ryals who first took the case, aggressively gathering evidence the police had ignored. The two were a close team, Goodman says, with a shared sense of adventure — a local judge used to joke that they were like Thelma and Louise. “Melinda and I, we went to so many people’s houses. We learned street names. Every lead we got, we’d go to,” Goodman said. But Ryals, who now works at the Georgia Capital Defender’s Office, felt daunted by the challenge of a capital trial, Goodman says. She asked Perry to join her — and he ended up taking over the trial strategy. “David was first chair. We had to go along with what David said,” Goodman said, with obvious frustration. In her opinion, Ryals could have won the case herself.

Indeed, among the leads Goodman and Ryals had pursued was that Hercules was actually responsible for the murder of Donna Brown. They’d heard persistent talk about this around town. Ryals tried to get into evidence testimony from a number of people who pointed to Hercules as the real culprit but was rebuffed — both by Perry, who seemed disinterested in an alternate-suspect defense, and Judge L.A. McConnell who refused to allow jurors to hear any of it. None of the evidence implicating Hercules was reliable, he concluded.

Goodman is 61, with white hair, a warm smile and a slightly self-deprecating air. She was eager to talk about the case — and firm in her belief that what happened to Inman was a miscarriage of justice. “My first impression of Devonia [was] that he was a punk, but he wasn’t no killer,” she said. Like others, she described him as having a big mouth but little to back it up. “He was the pretty boy. He wore the nice shoes, the up-to-date clothes. A lot of those people from Adel are below poverty, so I think they were jealous of Devonia.” He was also spoiled. It was Goodman’s job to “babysit” him throughout the trial. “He’d be telling me he wanted a cigarette or he wanted to see his mama. I’d have to go over [to the jail] and be real nice and get them to let his mama come in there to see him and things like that. I just don’t think Devonia had guts enough to pull the trigger.”

Inman’s weeklong trial was lengthy by Cook County standards. “South Georgia, baby, you going to be tried in just a few days,” Goodman said. Even as he faced a possible death sentence, she remembers him being calm — perhaps even overconfident. “I don’t really think that Devonia really understood what he was up against,” she said. He seemed to think, “Well I didn’t do it, so they can’t do nothing to me.”

There were certainly reasons to doubt that the state would win a conviction. In his opening statement, Eidson conceded “there was really no physical evidence in this case.” No gun or money was ever found. Fingerprints taken from the scene did not match Inman. But Eidson spun these glaring holes in the case as proof that Inman was a mastermind who had left no traces behind. “Whoever had thought this out had planned it quite well,” he said.

With no hard evidence, Ellis and Eidson relied on an array of witnesses whose testimony was contradictory, confusing, and at times completely counter to the prosecutors’ theory of the crime. Several did little more than paint Inman in a vaguely criminal light, rather than offer proof that he had actually committed the murder of Donna Brown. Among the first was Zachary Payne, the man who first tipped the GBI to the fact that Inman had access to a gun — although not the same type of gun used to murder Brown. Payne was brought from a drug detox facility in order to testify and he told a disjointed tale about Inman showing up at his door and pointing a gun at him. It was not clear what had prompted the alleged confrontation or what connection it had to the murder two weeks later.

If Payne’s testimony was more prejudicial than probative, other witnesses were wildly improper, at least by prevailing legal standards. Under the justification of presenting “similar transactions” to the crime in question, the state called a slew of Sacramento police officers to describe Inman’s previous run-ins with the law in California. Most dated back to when he was a juvenile — and none rose to the level of violence in the killing of Donna Brown. There was a car theft when he was 18, the robbery of a pizza delivery person when he was 15, and a traffic stop in which drugs were found. The third incident prompted a call for a mistrial by Perry, which was denied. McConnell would later instruct the jury to disregard the testimony of a police sergeant who described the drug incident, but by then, jurors had heard plenty about Inman’s checkered past. In a significant leap, the state cast Inman as intrinsically criminal, a man whose previous record showed that he was as a natural-born killer. “It’s a logical progression of a propensity to commit crimes,” Ellis said in his closing statement during the sentencing phase, urging jurors to hand down the death penalty. He compared Inman to a leopard hunting its prey. “He won’t change his spots.”

The witnesses from California would likely not have made it to the stand had the trial taken place today. In 2011, Georgia legislators finally overhauled the state’s ambiguous and antiquated rules of evidence, imposing desperately needed guidelines on trial lawyers and judges for what qualified as admissible testimony. For decades prior, Georgia had been the only jurisdiction in the country where prosecutors could admit evidence of previous crimes to show “bent of mind” or “course of conduct” — language that the state supreme court itself had described as “difficult to define and slippery in application.” In the hands of the wrong prosecutor, such evidence could prejudice a jury completely against a defendant, making it more likely to convict, no matter how weak the evidence.

Eidson was one such prosecutor. “He was the king of similar transactions,” Goodman recalls. “But I never understood how that little penny ante stuff in California was a similar transaction to [the Taco Bell murder].” The phrases “bent of mind” and “course of conduct” appear again and again in the trial transcript, which also captures the generally slipshod approach to evidence. Over numerous tedious passages, McConnell wonders aloud about the propriety of a given witness, including when it’s too late. “It seemed like everybody forgot they went to law school, including me,” he joked at one point after having allowed improper questioning of a witness to go unchecked.

It’s unclear how much of an impact the California witnesses had in the end. “To me that was a total waste,” says Steven King, one of the jurors at Inman’s trial. Their testimony “didn’t really matter at all back in the jury room.” In fact, King remembers most of the state witnesses being fairly unconvincing.

King, a tall white man in his 40s, lives in rural Hahira on family land dense with pine trees that mark the border of neighboring Lowndes County, visible just outside his window. King’s relative isolation made him attractive to both sides when it came to jury selection: In a place as small as Adel, finding jurors unconnected to a high-profile case was a major challenge. Today, King is a mail carrier and knows a lot of people in town. But at the time of Inman’s trial, King had just finished six years in the Army. “I didn’t even know we had a Taco Bell, let alone a murder here,” he said.

The jury was sequestered — a rare phenomenon in Cook County. King remembers police deputies escorting him and his fellow jurors around town in a little yellow school bus. Although he wasn’t thrilled at the circumstances, he took the job seriously, making detailed notes throughout the trial and recording his impressions of various witnesses.

Among those King found least convincing was the newspaper carrier, Virginia Tatem, despite her being presented as the state’s star witness. On the witness stand, Tatem swore that she had seen Inman fleeing the scene of the crime — a memory so significant that she compared it to remembering where she was the day Ronald Reagan was shot. “I’ll never forget for the rest of my life what he looks like,” she said. “His face will be etched in my memory forever.” But during cross examination, Perry picked apart elements of her testimony, to show that her recollections were hardly reliable. She claimed to have seen police cars racing to the Taco Bell with their lights and sirens on, which contradicted testimony from the officers, who said they had never turned on either. And while the GBI report showed that Tatem had told Steinberg she saw “four or five black people” in a brown car that was following Inman, on the stand, she insisted that she had only seen three people.

Like many eyewitnesses who give repeated statements, Tatem’s claims to police evolved significantly since she first came forward with information, getting increasingly detailed as time passed. Even her courtroom testimony included details she had never brought up before. “I could see the Pound Puppy in the back window when the car went down the road,” she said at one point, only after being shown a photograph of the car in question.

Under cross-examination, Tatem was asked why she had waited a month to call police — and only after seeing the ad in the paper offering a hefty cash reward in exchange for information. “The $5,000 didn’t have anything to do with it,” she insisted. “It had to do with the fact that this woman had died, and she had a son. I have children of my own. I cannot live with the idea to think that someone took this boy’s mother from him for a robbery.”

In the jury box, King was skeptical. Tatem was probably out for the reward, he thought. And even if she wasn’t, the things she claimed to have seen and heard while standing on the corner of Adams and Fourth Street at 2 a.m. were pretty much impossible. Tatem maintained that she had heard a gunshot (despite being across multiple lanes of interstate from the Taco Bell) and that she had seen the cars pull into the Pizza Hut and heard the group speaking to one another some five blocks away. It struck King as totally implausible. “Anybody that’s from Adel knows you can’t see the Pizza Hut because the Dairy Queen is right there,” King said. He dismissed her testimony, he said, and he remembers other jurors doing the same.

If Tatem lacked credibility, other witnesses were far more disastrous. Despite their attempts to recant their statements months before, the state put both Marquetta Thomas and LarRisha Chapman on the stand. In his opening statement, Eidson alluded to their attempts to recant their statements. “I don’t know what she’ll testify to here at trial, whether she’ll change her mind or whatever,” he said about Thomas, vowing to confront her with her earlier statements if she tried to change her story.

He did the same with Chapman. In fact, under direct examination, Eidson had Chapman read her letter to Ryals out loud, then walked her through her previous statement to the GBI, including how she had recognized Inman’s voice from the weeds. If the point was to confuse the jury while impeaching his own witness, Eidson succeeded; as he concluded his questioning, he went so far as to blame Chapman for Donna Brown’s death. Showing her a photograph of Brown’s lifeless body, Eidson said that if Chapman had told somebody that she’d seen a man in the weeds that night, “Ms. Brown would still be alive.”

“But I didn’t see nobody,” Chapman said, reiterating that she had made up the story. Eidson ignored her: “If you had gone in and told Ms. Brown there was somebody hiding in the bushes, she might still be alive today.”

While Marquetta Thomas initially threw Inman under the bus by claiming that he had not been at the home she shared with her sister on the night that Brown was murdered — and that he had showed up the next day with a wad of cash — on the stand, Thomas mostly changed her tune. She insisted that she had been harassed by law enforcement until she provided them with the information they wanted to hear. She was motivated to do so, she said, because she got the feeling that the cops were angling to pin the crime on her, so she went on the offense, implicating Inman.

For all of the confusion and changing narratives, to King there was only one credible witness brought by the state — so credible, he would vote to convict, despite all the questions about the state’s evidence. “Without Kwame Spaulding,” he said, “they had no case.”

Spaulding was 19 and locked up on cocaine-related charges in January 1999 when Inman was indicted for Donna Brown’s murder. The two briefly shared a cell, and it was during that time that Spaulding said Inman gave up the details of his crime. Spaulding asked the jailers to contact the GBI, saying that if he could get some kind of consideration on his case, he would tell investigators what Inman had said. There is no paperwork commemorating any particular deal that DA Ellis might’ve offered, but Spaulding still shared his story, suggesting that he was assured there was something in it for him. According to Spaulding, Inman said that he’d done the job with his girlfriend’s sister and that the two had waited in the weeds for Brown to emerge from the restaurant. He said Inman confessed to shooting Brown with a .44 caliber gun and that the two then split the proceeds of the crime, leaving the deposit bag in Brown’s car.

The details in Spaulding’s testimony caught King’s attention. He seemed to have information that only the killer would know — like the caliber of weapon used to kill Brown. “It wasn’t discussed and then Kwame knew it, knew what the caliber was,” he recalled. “Kwame to me was a very credible witness.”

Although Eidson told jurors that the detail about the .44 hadn’t been released to the public before Spaulding came forward, it was not true. That fact had been repeatedly printed in the newspaper. Spaulding’s story also included the assertion that the bank bag was found in the car; it wasn’t, but that erroneous detail was also reported more than once.

It took just two rounds of voting for the jury to decide that Inman was guilty. In a paradoxical twist, when it came to sentencing, the same evidence that convinced King to convict Inman was not enough to overcome his doubt about imposing a death sentence. “The murder weapon wasn’t found and there’s no eyewitness,” he said. “There was not enough evidence for me to vote for the death penalty.”

The jury ultimately decided that Inman should be sentenced to life without parole.

Inman’s girlfriend Lima was dismayed by the outcome. Of all the witnesses, she was the only one to maintain her original story throughout the case — from police questioning through trial testimony and beyond — without either embellishing or recanting. Inman was home with her the night that Brown was killed, she said. But in his closing arguments, Eidson painted her as an unreliable whore whose testimony should be dismissed, which infuriated Lima. “They just kept trying to put me down because I was a stripper, and I had kids from different dads,” she recalled. “And I was like, wait a minute, what does that have to do with Devonia being on trial for murder? You know, the trial was just a mess. To me it wasn’t even a trial. It was whatever the prosecutor said.” She insists that her background is irrelevant. “I don’t care what my life was like, what I did; what I said was true,” she said. “He’s innocent and I’ve been saying that from day one.”

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The post A Small Town Rocked by a Series of Violent Murders appeared first on The Intercept.

There’s no photograph of Patel on the GBI profile, only a forensic artist’s sketch of “a man seen in the area several hours prior to the incident” – a possible witness. Patel had been “stabbed and beaten,” it says, although this hardly captures the brutality of the crime. Former Adel Police Officer Tim Balch remembers arriving at the house, on a quiet block on the north side of town. “When I got there,” he says, “I just peeped in and it was like, ‘We’re calling GBI. This is bad.’” There was blood everywhere and signs of struggle throughout the home. Patel had been bashed over the head with a television. Balch, a large tattooed Army veteran who drives a Hummer, had seen his share of bloodshed. But the savagery of this scene stands out in his mind. Whoever committed the crime had to be “a straight psychopath.”

The GBI concluded it was a robbery gone bad but was otherwise tight-lipped. Additional details were published in the local Adel News Tribune. Patel, a 37-year-old immigrant from India, was only in Adel temporarily to help his brother-in-law with the convenience store attached to a gas station near the home where he lived. According to his nephew, Manishh, a college student in Atlanta at the time, Patel would ordinarily eat dinner in a neighboring town after his shift. But that night, he had apparently walked the few blocks back to the house and discovered a burglary underway. After Patel failed to show up at work the next morning, police were called.

There was a cruel irony to his death. Manishh told the News Tribune that Patel planned to move to Adel with his wife and two kids, in part to avoid the crime he had encountered in other places. Murders in Adel were rare — and the neighborhood where Patel was killed was particularly peaceful. “The only noise you ever heard around here was children playing,” the minister at the church next door told the newspaper.

Yet Patel’s death was the second violent killing in Adel in less than two years. In the fall of 1998, a woman named Donna Brown, the single mother of a 7-year-old son, had been robbed and shot dead in front of the Taco Bell where she worked, less than two miles away. A suspect was quickly arrested and jailed in that case. But now there was another murderer on the loose, a terrifying prospect in a town of just more than 5,000 that covers only eight square miles. “We have never had anything like this happen here before,” an elderly neighbor told the newspaper after Patel’s death.

Still, Patel’s family had warned him to be careful. His brother-in-law, Vishnu, had been robbed at the EZ Mart several months earlier by a “masked man brandishing an Exacto knife,” according to a separate newspaper report. Patel told police that a “stocky black man” had forced him to the store counter after 10 p.m. on October 26, 1999 and said, “Give me all the money or I’ll kill you.” He then punched Patel in the mouth and fled.

Whether police sought a link between the 1999 robbery and the 2000 murder is unclear. Nor is it clear what was done with all the physical evidence left at the house on North Gordon Avenue, which was ripe for forensic testing. The case was presumably in good hands: The GBI routinely took over cases in the rural towns of South Georgia, which did not have the resources or technology to investigate major crimes. In the year Patel was killed, the GBI was taking full advantage of new DNA technology; by 2002, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the agency boasted that it was matching an average of “six crimes a month” to criminals in the state’s DNA database.

Yet the trail to Patel’s murderer quickly went cold. In contrast to the swift arrest following the murder of Donna Brown at the Taco Bell in 1998, the Patel case would be handed off to “a plethora of agents” over the next 18 years, according to GBI Special Agent Mark Pro, who insists that the agency is still working on solving the crime today. “We’re dealing in an area in South Georgia that is very small, and the neighborhood and the people that live in that area are very close-knit,” he said, explaining that he did not want to tip off any potential suspects by divulging further details about the agency’s investigation. But at least one man who worked on the Patel case was surprised to hear it was never solved. Former GBI agent Richard Deas remembers taking photos and dusting for fingerprints. He retired in 2001, figuring the killer was someone who had been in trouble with the law “or would be in trouble with the law again.”

Regardless, the Patel family says it has not heard from the GBI in years. Now in his 40s, Manishh Patel says the family never received basic answers about what happened or why the crime was not solved. He could understand this coming from a rural police force in a town like Adel, he said. But the GBI is “like the FBI of Georgia, the highest criminal investigators in our state,” he says. “So that’s the question that I have. What did they do?”

Billboards along the I-75, north of Adel. Photos: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept

Adel, Georgia, the seat of Cook County, sits just off Interstate 75, a north-south artery that runs from South Florida all the way north to the Great Lakes. Six lanes of highway slice through the west side of town, with an overpass bridging the divide. An Alabama news columnist once described Adel as “a little town nestled between billboards,” which remains an apt description. The highway is lined with dueling displays offering nostalgia or redemption; approaching from the north, signs aggressively promote the Magnolia Plantation, an oversized Greek revival-style home where travelers can buy peach marinades and praline pecans. Farther down the highway, a series of eye-popping religious billboards — sponsored by the defunct website I-Will-Be-Back.org — portray the harrowing alternative to Christian salvation, with ashen zombie-humans depicting the damned. In one fiery scene, Jesus’s flowing white robes are surrounded by tanks and gun-pointing soldiers, below the words “I Am Still In Control.”

Located some 40 miles from the Florida border, Cook County was built up along the Georgia Southern and Florida Railroad, which first opened in 1890, the year after Adel was incorporated. The tracks ran from Florida to Macon, part of a rapidly growing network of railroads throughout the state that would be key to its economic recovery from the Civil War. By 1910, according to a historical marker in downtown Valdosta, some 30 miles south of Adel, the region was home to one of the largest cotton markets in the world. “The railroads were the life line that connected Valdosta to its market centers and led to the economic growth of the town,” it reads. The trains were a selling point for towns like Adel, advertised by a turn-of-the-century real estate broker as “the best little town in south Georgia, growing bigger and better every day.”

But for black residents of Cook County, it was a different story. The cotton industry had been built on the backs of their enslaved ancestors — and the railroads were built under brutal conditions using convict labor, which became plentiful as the state criminalized its black population following abolition. By the time Cook County (named after Confederate general Philip Cook) was founded in 1918, chain gangs were common, while the short-lived political representation of black Georgians gained during Reconstruction had come to an end.

The legacy of slavery is all around Adel. A historical marker in Hahira, some 10 miles south, commemorates “one of the deadliest waves of vigilantism in Georgia’s history” in 1918, when a notorious white landowner was allegedly killed by a man sent to work for him from the local jail. Eleven black residents were rounded up and lynched, including a woman who was eight months pregnant. The site where Union soldiers captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis, about 40 miles north of Adel, is home to a park, museum, and gift shop.

Today, Adel remains small and segregated, and the railroad tracks, now in the hands of the Norfolk Southern Railway, are the de facto divider between black and white residents. Officially designated as the City of Daylilies by Georgia lawmakers in 2006, the city website lauds Adel for preserving “its friendly atmosphere and small-town charm.” But the perception is not universally shared — especially where police are concerned. Black residents have long complained about harassment from cops in Adel. For those just passing through Cook County, it is hard to miss the police cars swarming I-75, bearing the names of myriad small cities and towns clustered in the area, each with its separate police force. And for strangers who come to town, perhaps to ask questions about old crimes, the reception from law enforcement can be downright hostile.

Another Killing

It was not long before the murder of Shailesh Patel was dramatically eclipsed by a third gruesome murder in Adel. Just seven months after Patel’s body was discovered on North Gordon Avenue, a beloved local grocer and his employee were beaten to death in broad daylight at a small store near the railroad tracks, just two miles away. The murder “horrified and revulsed the community,” the News Tribune reported on November 15, 2000, with a mugshot of the perpetrator on the front page: 20-year-old Hercules Brown.

It was a familiar name. In fact, for nearly two years, “Hercules Brown” had been whispered and muttered out loud — by callers to the newspaper, by gossiping teenagers at the car wash on 4th Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard, and by locals interviewed by the GBI. It was a name that came up in rumors, not only after the brutal killing of Shailesh Patel earlier that year, but also following the 1998 death of Donna Brown at the Taco Bell, where Hercules had worked for two years, often on the closing shift. As a different man sat in jail awaiting trial for that crime — swearing he was innocent — the brazen double murder in the fall of 2000 resurfaced old questions in Adel. Did police get the wrong man in 1998?

It is often said that the tragedy of wrongful convictions is not just what they mean for the innocents who lose their freedom, but also the threat they present to communities as a whole. When a person is imprisoned for a murder they did not commit, the real perpetrator is free to kill again. Among longtime residents of Adel, the period between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2000 is a bad memory, a time when four people were violently murdered across a four-mile radius. Whether some of the murders could have been avoided is a question few seem willing to confront.

Almost 20 years later, Adel residents have moved on from that era in the town’s history. Yet the man convicted for the murder at the Taco Bell, Devonia Inman, has continued to proclaim his innocence while facing the prospect of dying in prison. Today, there is good reason to believe him, including compelling new evidence showing that police got it wrong. Many involved in the original case do not understand why Inman is still in prison. Others simply refuse to revisit it. From the Cook County Sheriff’s Department to the State Supreme Court, his pleas have proven futile. In Georgia, the truth will not set you free.

The Taco Bell Murder

It was well after midnight on September 19, 1998 and 40-year-old Taco Bell manager Donna Brown was still trying to close for the night. It was only her third day on the job, and she was having a problem with the staff time cards. Employees working the closing shift usually left the restaurant together, but Brown told the two teenagers with her that night to go on home. Brown said she would call the Adel Police Department for an escort when she was ready to leave — a courtesy routinely extended to employees making late-night bank deposits. That evening, the Taco Bell’s deposit would be roughly $1,700.

Robin Carter and LarRisha Chapman, both students at Cook County High School, were working with Brown that night. Carter was picked up first; she remembered seeing Chapman pacing back and forth as she waited for her boyfriend to pick her up, which he eventually did shortly before 1 a.m. It was 1:52 a.m. when Brown finally clocked out.

A call came in to Adel police dispatch 12 minutes later. Customers at a nearby Huddle House restaurant had seen someone lying outside the adjacent Taco Bell, possibly passed out drunk. An employee called the cops. When police arrived on the scene, they found Donna Brown’s lifeless body in the middle of the otherwise empty parking lot. She was on her back; her employee uniform was intact — her white, short-sleeve collared shirt was tucked into pleated navy pants; a green chile-shaped nametag was still attached to her shirt — and her arms were splayed out to each side. Her head was cocked slightly to the left, her wavy hair matted from blood that had spread out across the asphalt. She had been shot once through her right eye with a bullet that police would later conclude had been fired by a .44 revolver.

A medical examiner would eventually testify that abrasions on Brown’s palms and left knee suggested she had fallen and tried to catch herself. Investigators would theorize that she had been killed by someone lying in wait, based on strands of vegetation found on her pants, which matched the weeds that ran along the parking lot curb. In one spot, those weeds were tamped down — a sign to the police that the killer had sprung from the bushes, surprising her before shooting her to death.

There had recently been a similar ambush at a fast food restaurant just over the interstate from the Taco Bell. Two Hardee’s employees were heading out after midnight on August 11, when a man in a ski mask emerged from the bushes next to the drive-thru window, pointing a pistol and demanding cash. But there was nothing to hand over — “we don’t take the money out at night anymore,” one of them told him. She and her co-worker drove straight to the police station, but officers lost the masked man as he ran off across a field.

If the murder of Donna Brown just one month later had any connection to the attempted robbery, police would never find out. Adel Police Officer Kevin Purvis was the first to arrive at the Taco Bell that night. He secured the area, putting crime tape around the scene. Then he waited. Later he would testify that, although there were people in the surrounding area at the time he found Brown’s body, he did not know who they were. He didn’t interview them to see if there was a possible witness. Nor did he find out who called 911. There was no police report; none of the Adel police officers at the crime scene that night documented their discoveries or recorded their actions. “We don’t usually do reports for murders,” Purvis explained. Everyone knew the case would be handed over to the GBI.

It was true that the GBI would take charge when a serious crime occurred in Adel. The agency had investigative resources far beyond that of rural police forces in South Georgia, some of which did not even have an investigator on staff. Although the Adel Police Department employed a full-time detective — a man named Jimmy Hill — the murder at Taco Bell would soon be led by GBI Agent Jamy Steinberg.

A thickset man with an imposing presence now in his mid-40s, Steinberg was a rookie when he was tasked with solving Brown’s murder. He had previously been a member of the South Georgia Drug Task Force, one of several narcotics units born of federal funding to fight the war on drugs. Tim Balch, the former Adel police officer who would later respond to the Patel murder scene, remembers Steinberg as methodical, a stickler for paperwork, and comically clumsy at times. “If there’s a court day, you’ll know it because he’ll spill something on his tie that day at lunch,” Balch recalled.

Steinberg arrived at the Taco Bell at 3:30 a.m. accompanied by members of the GBI crime scene unit. As the team began processing the murder scene, two things were immediately clear: The bank deposit was missing, as was Brown’s black 1995 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. The car was soon found in the parking lot of a long-shuttered Pizza Hut just over the interstate overpass. But neither the money nor the deposit bag was ever found — even though the Adel News Tribune would report, repeatedly, that the deposit bag had been recovered from the car.

Interior photographs of Donna Brown's car, showing car keys visible on the floor next to the driver's seat, and a makeshift mask in the front passenger's seat. Photos: GBI

There was plenty of physical evidence at the scene. Brown’s keys were wedged between the driver’s seat and the door; her purse was in the trunk. A pink bath towel was lying on the ground next to the car. Several finger and palm prints were lifted from the car, and investigators found tire tracks from a single vehicle leading into the parking lot, along with a shoe print near the abandoned car. Yet investigators somehow overlooked the key piece of evidence among these items, despite it being clearly visible in crime scene photos. Draped across the front passenger seat of the Monte Carlo was a makeshift ski mask, constructed from a length of gray sweatpants, with two eyeholes cut into it. The mask went undiscovered for approximately two weeks, until it was found in the car by Brown’s family.

That missed ski mask would be something of a harbinger for the investigation to come. The nearly 1,000-page GBI report on the murder of Donna Brown is thick but shallow, filled with leads never followed. Describing the GBI investigation to a jury years later, prosecutors claimed it was exhaustive: “They went down every path, they went down every road until they could exclude a person,” Assistant District Attorney Tim Eidson promised. But in fact, the opposite was true. After perfunctory efforts to match the finger and palm prints to several seemingly random people, the GBI quickly zeroed in on a single suspect who matched none of the physical evidence. With Adel Police Detective Jimmy Hill by his side, Steinberg turned to a 20-year-old who was new in town, with a recent history of run-ins with the police. His name was Devonia Inman.

A Troubled Teen

Devonia Tyrone Inman was born on August 24, 1978, to Dinah Pickett and Eddie Lee Inman. He was delivered at home in a small house on Tomlinson Drive, just one mile southeast from where the Taco Bell would later stand. His father was in the military; when Inman was very young, his father’s post moved the family out of Georgia, leading them to Sacramento, California. His parents divorced when he was about 4 — Dinah would testify that her husband was abusive to her, including in front of their son. She remarried and stayed in California; Eddie Lee returned to Adel, eventually going to prison.

The move to California might have helped Inman avoid his father’s fate. As Inman’s aunt Ethel Pickett recalls, in her day, “when a black child graduated from high school, they went to the army. … They got out of Cook County, because if they hadn’t of got out of Cook County, they was going to jail.” Inman’s uncle, Ben Pickett, returned after a year deployed with the Marine Corps in Vietnam. “They didn’t have as many police then to really harass everybody,” he remembers about Adel in the 1970s. But like any segregated southern town, the law had a way of coming down hard on black folks. In 1982, Adel made national news after two white police officers fired their guns at a car carrying four black youth who were allegedly speeding. The car overturned, prompting calls from the NAACP for the cops to be fired.

By the time he was a teenager, Inman began getting in trouble in California. There was an arrest for armed robbery at 15, which landed him in juvenile hall, followed by an attempted robbery and car theft a couple years later. There was also a burgeoning pattern of domestic abuse. When Inman was 16, he was accused of choking and threatening to kill a girl he’d been dating for two weeks. Later, the family of a live-in girlfriend named Veronica filed several complaints against Inman, referring to him by his middle name. “Tyrone beats up Veronica all the time, but lately he has been getting much more violent,” her sister told police in 1997. An aunt described a phone call she overheard between her niece and Inman, who became enraged that her family was not letting her see him. “Fuck your aunt, fuck your grandma, fuck the law, I’m gonna get rid of them all,” he said.

Yet Inman also had a reputation for making empty threats, even among those who had been on the receiving end of his violent temper. “His bark is bigger than his bite,” said Marquetta Thomas, who met Inman when he returned to Adel in 1998. Her sister Christy Lima was dating Inman at the time of the murder at Taco Bell. He was violent toward her, Thomas said, but mostly he was a “pretty boy” who bullied girls because he wasn’t tough enough for real fights. For her part, Lima insisted that she was usually the one who got physical during fights with Inman, like the time she struck him in the face with a belt buckle. “Devonia probably hit me once, you know what I’m saying?”

There are different rumors for why Inman returned to Adel in the summer of 1998. One, still repeated among law enforcement, is that he was fleeing a murder rap in Sacramento. But according to his family, his mother simply thought he would stay away from trouble under the protection of his large extended family. That summer, the family was traveling South for a family reunion; before they returned to California, Dinah told Inman that she was going to leave him in Adel with his grandmother. He was angry, but his mother made it clear he did not have a choice.

It did not take long for Adel cops to remember the newly returned Inman. His relatives had deep roots in town, and his father had only recently gone to prison. Besides, Inman had already had his own run-in with the local law, after fathering a child with a girl during a visit to Adel in 1995. Inman showed up at the hospital that December, apparently against the mother’s wishes. “I just didn’t want him in there,” she later testified, denying she was afraid of him. “I just wanted him to leave.” But her mother and the nurses took out a warrant on Inman. Cook County prosecutor Bob Ellis charged him with terroristic threats and acts. He received 10 years’ probation, which he promptly violated by returning home to California. Breaking the terms of his probation would later come back to haunt Inman.

Case Closed

It’s unclear why investigators first set their sights on Inman for the murder of Donna Brown. The GBI report shows that his name was first provided by a man named Zachary Payne, a sometime drug dealer in his early 30s, who had once lived near Inman’s aunt. On the evening of September 20 — just over 24 hours after the murder — Jamy Steinberg went to see Payne in the trailer park where he lived. The one-page summary of the meeting is short on details, but it says that Inman had recently come to Payne’s door to harass him with a couple of friends. Payne suggested that Inman was mad because Payne “knew” Inman’s girlfriend, Christy Lima. But whatever their original beef, it was clearly far less important than what Payne claimed to have seen Inman carrying: a gun pulled from his waistband and pointed in Payne’s direction. There was little else beyond that. Payne had no specific information about the murder at the Taco Bell, but “believes Inman would be very capable of committing this crime,” according to the GBI report.

On September 22, Steinberg and Hill went to see Inman’s girlfriend Lima at the home she shared with her sister, Marquetta Thomas. According to the GBI report, Lima said that Inman had a bad temper, but she had never had problems with him. She said that he had once hidden a revolver “between the mattress and box springs in her bedroom,” but she hadn’t seen it since. Perhaps most importantly, she said Inman had been with her the night Donna Brown was killed. A third person, Victoria Allen, also said Inman had been at the house all night, except for a brief time when he left around 11 p.m., and that she did not think he was capable of committing the crime.

But Thomas told a very different story. Thomas told Steinberg and Hill that Inman had recently talked about “jacking and robbing” places in order to get enough money to “come up” in the Adel drug trade. He’d tried to involve her in his robbery plots, she said, but she declined. And she said Inman was not home the night of Brown’s murder — and that her sister would probably lie to protect him.

The next day, Jimmy Hill went to see Inman at the Adel jail. Conveniently, he had been picked up on a warrant for violating probation in connection with the incident at the local hospital several years earlier. Inman reluctantly admitted that he’d briefly possessed a gray .38 snub-nosed revolver that he’d found in his uncle’s closet. And he said that he’d been at Lima’s house all night on the night of the murder.

But police didn’t believe him. Investigators began re-interviewing individuals they had spoken to before. A big break came almost immediately, when 16-year-old LarRisha Chapman met again with Steinberg on September 24. Chapman had originally told him that nothing out of the ordinary had happened at the Taco Bell on the night of the murder. But now she had a new story to tell. Waiting outside the Taco Bell for her boyfriend, she said, she did see something — or rather, she heard something: While sitting on the curb tying her shoe, she was startled to hear Inman’s voice coming from the weeds. The person had a “bald head and a white tank top,” she said. She told Steinberg that she had been too scared to say anything earlier.

From there, the evidence against Inman began to stack up. A little over a month after the crime, a white woman named Virginia Tatem, a newspaper carrier, came forward with a damning account. On the night of the murder, she said she was under an awning outside the Howard Johnson’s just up the block from the abandoned Pizza Hut — the place where Brown’s car would later be found. It was around 2 a.m. and she was waiting for the papers to be brought up from Valdosta, when she heard what might have been a gunshot coming from the direction of the Taco Bell on the other side of the interstate. Shortly after that, she said, two cars came roaring across the overpass: the first, being driven by a black man wearing a gold chain, was a black two-door that matched the description of Brown’s Monte Carlo and going so fast that it fishtailed as it made the corner in front of her. Following close behind was a second car carrying at least two other black men and one black woman. They drove down the dark road that led to the Pizza Hut parking lot and disappeared. Steinberg showed Tatem a photo lineup, where she identified the driver of the first car. “Oh my God, that’s the one,” she said, according to the GBI report, covering her mouth and pointing at a picture of Inman.

The witness who would clinch the case against Inman came forward early in the new year. In January 1999, a man named Kwame Spaulding contacted the GBI from a jail in Valdosta, where he was being held on cocaine charges. Spaulding had been locked up with Inman, who remained in jail after being arrested on the probation violation. According to Spaulding, Inman had confessed to killing Brown, telling him he’d done the job with his girlfriend’s sister — presumably, Marquetta Thomas — and that the two had waited in the weeds for Brown to emerge. Then Inman shot her with a .44 caliber gun and the two had split the proceeds of the crime, leaving the deposit bag in Brown’s car. Spaulding asked if his jail time might be reduced for having provided this critical information. Steinberg said he would see about it.

On January 11, 1999, Inman was indicted for Donna Brown’s murder. His trial would not take place until 2001. In the meantime, elected District Attorney Bob Ellis announced he would seek the death penalty.

Inman’s relatives expressed disbelief. Ben Pickett recalls contacting Adel Police Chief Kirk Gordon and telling him repeatedly that the police had rushed to judgment, that word around town was that someone else had committed the crime. “I said, ‘You need to put the mens out on the street and find out what’s going on,’” he said, but was told, “No, we got our man.” Pickett answered, “Chief, you got the wrong man.”

Unreliable Witnesses

For all the circumstantial evidence pointing to Inman, there were reasons to think that his uncle was right. For one, Marquetta Thomas, whose story was so dramatically different from that of her roommates, had numerous potential reasons to lie. There was the fact that Inman mistreated her sister, which made Thomas hate him and gave her a motive to implicate him. More inconvenient for the GBI’s investigation, numerous people said Thomas — who would eventually be sent to prison for acting as a getaway driver in an unrelated armed robbery — had bragged that she herself was involved in Brown’s murder. She even fit the description of the woman in the second car that Tatem allegedly saw that night. Yet there is little indication in the GBI report that Steinberg investigated Thomas’s potential link to the crime.

Tatem’s story was also questionable. It was highly unlikely that she would have been able to see and hear everything she claimed from the spot where she stood that night. She had also waited more than a month to come forward — only after a $5,000 reward for information in the case had been published in the Adel News Tribune.

Finally, there were problems with Spaulding’s story. Like any jailhouse snitch, it was clear he sought to trade information to help himself, regardless of how accurate it was. But more importantly, many of the details he offered had been published in the newspaper by the time he came forward — including the erroneous detail about the deposit bag being left in Brown’s car. Spaulding also said that Inman had shot Brown with a .44 — a detail prosecutors would later say was never made public, convincing Steinberg that Spaulding was telling the truth. But that detail, too, had repeatedly appeared in the paper.

But the most significant reason to doubt the case against Inman was the GBI’s failure to pursue alternative suspects, central among them, Hercules Brown. In a brief interview with Steinberg, who had secured a list of all current and former Taco Bell employees, Hercules was asked questions that might implicate other people in the case, for example, whether Hercules knew of any trouble Donna Brown might have had with a boyfriend. Not surprisingly, Hercules said no.

Hercules, then a high school senior, worked at the Taco Bell for two years, often on the closing shift with LarRisha Chapman. He was not at work the night of the murder, allegedly because he was either at home or had been on a school band trip that evening. Yet numerous people came forward with information pointing toward Hercules. Though some of the information is included in the GBI report, there is no indication that Steinberg or Hill ever acted on any of the tips.

One man told investigators that his brother said Hercules had admitted that the crime was an inside job and that LarRisha Chapman was supposed to help him rob the store that night but that she’d chickened out. A second man also told police that he knew who did it — that the man had confessed to him that he’d used a .44 and that he’d worn a ski mask because Donna Brown knew who he was. The man would later say that the story had come from Hercules, while the two of them were talking at a local car wash.

Finally, Takeisha Pickett, Inman’s cousin, said she told Steinberg that before she quit her job at Taco Bell in July 1998, on two separate occasions, Hercules had asked whether she would join him in a plot to rob the store. Pickett turned him down. While Pickett is adamant that she gave Steinberg that information just two weeks after Donna Brown’s murder, it is not included in his report.

If Steinberg had followed up on these leads, there is a good chance that at least two, if not three, additional murders in Adel, Georgia, could have been prevented.

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