CHUCK: Part III, What Crime Scene?

"If the prosecutors and investigators are fabricating evidence and putting it together to suit their story..how can you tell who is guilty and who is innocent?"

This series of five posts (see Part I and Part II) comes from Charles Ray Crawford, who goes by Chuck. Chuck was born and raised in Mississippi and is scheduled to be executed by that state on October 15. In this series, he reflects on his childhood, his faith that has gotten him through more than thirty years on death row, some of the evidence in his case that troubles the prosecutors’ narrative, and his experiences trying to convince his lawyers to pay attention to that evidence. You can also read these posts on The GOAT PoL and Humans Remain.

To sign a petition to stop Chuck’s execution and give him the chance to have a fair trial, visit the death penalty action website, here.

Photo by Kenrick Mills on Unsplash

It’s not about innocence or guilt. It’s not just about my case; it’s about everyone’s case. Guilty or innocent, people deserve fair trials and a fair appeals process. If the system gets used to hiding evidence, if they get away with being dirty and corrupt, that is how innocent people get executed. There has to be a fair process in every case. If the prosecutors and investigators are fabricating evidence and putting it together to suit their story—if they’re building their case on lies and manipulation of the facts—how can you tell who is guilty and who is innocent?

If anyone looks my case up online, it looks straightforward and simple. That’s because for thirty years, my attorneys have never put the other side of the story out there. The only story presented has been the story of the prosecution. There were fifty-three pieces of physical evidence in my case, and until very recently, my lawyers refused to follow up on most of them. If my trial attorneys or appellate counsel had listened to me, they would have found out decades ago what we only found out a few years ago. Instead, my trial lawyers claimed insanity, effectively pleading guilt, despite my vehement opposition to this claim. Pleading insanity also meant my lawyers didn’t do any investigation into my case at all. I’ll tell you more about that later.

My current lawyer was the first person who listened to me and was willing and able to put in the work to investigate all these pieces of evidence. In 2023, my current counsel spoke with an expert to review the procedures, notes, documentation, and evidence from this case: this expert, Sergeant Charles Smith, served for thirty years on Crime Scene Investigations and Patrol Operations in Mississippi, and he is a certified expert witness. In his affidavit, Sergeant Smith provides detailed explanations for how officers repeatedly disregarded basic procedures, and he highlights multiple inconsistencies in the casework that challenge the prosecutors’ version of what happened. You can read his entire affidavit here. There are several parts of his affidavit that I want to point out. The list is long, buckle up.

• The fingerprints and handprints found on the victim’s vehicle were tested, and none of them were mine. Two fingerprints were found to be the victim’s, and the rest have never been identified, and no evidence in that vehicle has ever been traced to me. Who drove that car there, got out of it, and left their prints on the car?

• State highway patrol reports state that a tracking dog followed a scent from that same vehicle due east for approximately two and a half miles, which is not the direction they say I went. They never followed up on who may have gone east.

• The knife they say I used does not match the wound that killed the victim. Rather, the wound appears to have been made by something more like the knife found in a tent nearby the crime scene: neither this tent nor the second knife was ever investigated. I was never connected to that tent or that knife, and this second knife disappeared. To my knowledge, none of my trial counsel or appellate counsel—and certainly not me—knew about this tent or the second knife. I only learned of this when my current counsel got an affidavit from Sheriff Paul Gowdy in 2022.

• Two sets of handcuffs were found at the scene of the crime, which are described as being in various locations throughout the case file documents. These two sets can be traced back to a police supply store near Memphis, Tennessee, purchased from the same lot in 1972. This is a company that supplied handcuffs, holsters, etc, to the police in that area. By the way, I was six years old at the time those handcuffs were sold. Who besides a cop would keep two pairs of handcuffs together for over twenty years? There was a deputy sheriff who worked on the crime scene of my case who had previously retired from the county where the handcuffs were sold. Multiple, probably hundreds of officers bought supplies from that company; but for them to turn up at my crime scene twenty-one years later when there’s a police officer who’s in my investigation and retired from that county…could that be a coincidence? People have to be their own judge on that. If we had brought this up at trial, we could have asked “are those your cuffs?” But we can’t, because now that officer is dead.

Though the expert’s affidavit speaks for itself, I will also add that when my attorney spoke to this expert, she asked him to describe the crime scene; he said, “What crime scene?” It was so contaminated that there was no crime scene left. Shouldn’t that give pause to the way that some of this evidence has been used against me, uncontested for decades?

There are several other pieces to this case that I’d like people to know about, but, because of time constraints, we may not be able to link to the documents. In 2014, my attorneys at the time brought me an envelope of documents connected to my case. They hadn’t done any work with these documents, but I had asked to see everything they had. I laid them out on the table and connected the dots. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle: I had dozens of pieces and I didn’t know how they connected until I could put them side by side. Some of these documents, I still have with me here in my cell, and I don’t think we’ll be able to show them to you. But I hope that you might still consider how these next pieces complicate the version of events told by the prosecution.

• The handwritten ransom note found at the victim’s home was not tested with my handwriting, though they had the chance to do this test. When I was in jail after the arrest for this crime, FBI agents went to my house and asked my wife for some handwriting samples from me. My wife gave them, I believe, six handwritten letters that I wrote her while I was in the military. They kept those letters for two or three months and then gave them back to my wife. Meanwhile, prosecutors used the handwritten ransom note found at the crime scene at trial to convict me. There was no testimony given at trial that my handwriting matched that note. You can be sure that if those handwriting samples had matched the ransom note, they would have had experts testify to that at my trial. I can only speculate that they didn’t use those letters at trial because they could not find an expert to state that the handwriting was a match.

• There are remaining mysteries about the dog team. There are three documents that show how the dog tracking team got to within fifteen feet of the body before the search was called off. According to the FBI investigators’ and prosecutors’ version of the story at trial, they didn’t find the body on that initial search, even though they were fifteen feet away. Unless that dog dropped dead right after finding evidence, how could it have not also found a body so nearby? My current lawyer finally got to talk to the dog handler. He said they got up to that point in the woods when the dogs found pieces of evidence, and the dog was “alerting” that something else was near, the FBI agent who was with the dog handler walked toward where the body would later be “found,” which was near a brush pile; the handler stated that the agent turned and said, “Look it’s getting late, we’re calling the search off, y’all can leave now.” This statement from the handler is not documented, but it was stated to a credible person, my lawyer.

• Who let the dogs out? At trial, the lead FBI investigator was asked who handled the dogs during this investigation, and he stated that he had no idea: if he had to guess, he would say it was either members of the Mississippi State highway patrol or a team from Parchman. But he knew exactly where those dogs came from, which we can see from two documents. First, in a press release on the day of my arrest, he describes the tracking team as coming from Parchman. Second, he had written a letter to the superintendent at Parchman thanking him for sending the dog team; he writes in this note that they used the tracking team to find evidence in the case. So he lied at trial. Why would he lie about this? In my mind, this casts further suspicion over this strange failed search attempt with the dogs.

• There is an FBI 302 form suggesting that this case may have involved entrapment. Whatever people who work for the FBI do in a case, they need to document that work in a 302 form describing who, what, when, and where (among other information). Somewhere around 2014, my lawyer at the time discovered an FBI 302 form about my case. The form is dated March 1, 1993. Part of this form is redacted, but the part that remains states the officer concludes “...and did not feel that there was any problem with entrapment.” In the legal sense, entrapment is when the police or someone working for them entices someone to commit a crime and then arrests them for that crime. This is illegal. Why did entrapment come up in this case at all? To me, this looks like somebody they knew had been involved, and I wonder if they had to cover some things up. If you believe their version of what happened, the word “entrapment” never would have come up at all.

Until very recently, almost none of this was ever brought out in my filings. This has been my whole point all along. If the jurors were presented with what I have presented now, could anyone say for sure that a jury would have convicted me?

If I am executed, it won’t be because of the crime they convicted me of—it will be because throughout most of my case, my attorneys have refused to do what I have asked them to do.