Two Eyewitnesses Recant on Thirty Year Old Murder
Good Detectives investigate crimes, follow where the evidence leads and make arrests based on the evidence. Sometimes they have to change direction in an investigation if a suspect is shown to have an alibi or if the physical evidence just doesn't match.
Bad Detectives often reach a conclusion of "whodunit" and begin to work backwards from there and that appears to be exactly what happened in the case against, a then 18 year old, Anthony McKinney, thirty years ago.
On September 15, 1978, the night of the infamous Ali-Spinks fight, a security guard was murdered with a shotgun outside the Masonic Temple between 9:30 and 9:45 p.m.. The Harvey police were first called about the murder at 10:03 p.m. Detectives saw McKinney running near the scene. They questioned him and released him the next morning.
McKinney was charged with murder four days later. Two alleged eyewitnesses stated they left their homes after the 9th and 10th rounds of the fight, respectively, met up, and saw McKinney commit the shooting. No physical evidence linked McKinney to the crime.
He waited three years to go to trial. Only one eyewitness testified at trial. McKinney testified that he watched the entire fight and left his home at approximately 10:30 p.m. McKinney was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole.
Thirty years later both eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony. Another witness, Anthony Drake, has given a statement that he was present during the shooting but that McKinney was not present . Most importantly, the TV logs from the Ali-Spinks fight show undeniably that the 9th round ended at 10:02:49 and the 10th round ended at 10:07:45.
If the police were first called at 10:03 p.m., they should have been arriving at the murder scene around the time the second so-called "eyewitness" left his home. So, these two witnesses, who the police believed could not have been outside witnessing a shooting between 9:30 and 9:45. Sadly, this isn't a case that needed DNA or other advanced forensics to come along to move justice forward. All it ever needed was the investigating police officers to look at a clock.
