The Marietta Seven
On July 26, 1972, more than a year after the well publicized killings of two pathologists, Drs. Warren and Rozina Matthews, South Carolina State Police notified Cobb County authorities that they had a witness to the Matthews crime in custody on a shoplifting charge. Deborah Ann Kidd, a habitual drug abuser, prostitute, and shoplifter, claimed to have pertinent information and asked for immunity in exchange for her testimony. Desperate for clues, then-Cobb County D.A. Ben Smith immediately sent a letter to Kidd promising blanket immunity in exchange for information about the crimes.
In discussions with authorities, Kidd implicated herself and nine other individuals in the murders: James Creamer, George Emmett, Hoyt Powell, Larry Hacker, Bill Jenkins, Wayne Ruff, Charles Roberts, Mary Ann Morphus, and Carolyn Sue Bowling Johnson. The handprint and fingerprints found at the scene did not match Kidd or any of the nine she implicated; however, all nine individuals were indicted for murder based on Kidd’s story, and seven were prosecuted.
The Informant
Testifying under immunity, Kidd said she met Creamer on May 2, 1971 and became his girlfriend right away. They went to Georgia on May 4th with Powell and Ruff and checked into an Atlanta motel where she met the other men. After a party at the motel with drugs and alcohol, she said the group embarked on an armed robbery ending in the murder of the Matthews couple.
The neighbor who first reported hearing gunshots had a clear view of the house and rear yard, but when he looked out the window, he saw no people or automobiles. According to Kidd, however, the murderous party involved no fewer than 10 people who traveled to the home in three cars.
Kidd said Ruff and Creamer killed Mr. Matthews. Before it was over, she claimed Mrs. Matthews shot Creamer, apparently with her own .38 pistol. Kidd tearfully claimed that she tried to flee the bloody scene, but Roberts caught her and made her shoot Mrs. Matthews in the head with her own gun. Kidd testified that she was able to recall the crime with greater clarity as a result of sessions with a psychologist who used hypnosis.
The Trials
The Marietta Seven were convicted in five separate trials: Creamer and Emmett were tried separately in early 1973; Jenkins, Hacker, Powell, and Ruff were tried jointly in July 1973; and Roberts was tried in January 1975 after an earlier mistrial. Despite Kidd’s testimony, they all consistently maintained their innocence.
After the original trials, it became clear that Kidd had told several significantly different stories about the crime — stories that were at odds with known facts. Authorities had worked extensively with her, including retaining a psychologist, Dr. Edwin P. Hall, who guided Kidd’s story over 12 visits totaling some 35 hours (some with police and prosecutors present). Dr. Hall conducted several “age regression” hypnosis sessions that were supposed to help Kidd “recover” memories and remove inconsistencies.
Defense attorneys were aware of the sessions, but were denied access to tapes and transcripts until much later. The records showed that Kidd’s story was more manufactured than “recovered.” Astonishingly, while the prosecution continued to work with Kidd in an attempt to shape her testimony into credible evidence, Kidd stayed for several weeks at the home of a detective with whom she developed a sexual relationship, and continued to abuse amphetamines supplied by the police.
During the appeals process, defense lawyers discovered numerous documents in police and prosecutors’ files, hidden from the defense at trial, that shattered Kidd’s credibility. The files revealed that during the summer of 1972, Kidd gave three substantially different accounts of the crime that contradicted the physical evidence. For example, she said Rozina Matthews had been severely beaten before being shot, although an autopsy showed no cuts or bruises, and no torn clothing. Additionally, Kidd initially stated that the crime occurred during cold weather, sometime around Christmas or New Year’s Day, when it had, in fact, occurred in May.
She originally described Creamer’s bleeding at the scene as profuse, but later testified that it was light – a more plausible claim, given that numerous samples of blood from the scene all matched the victims’ blood type and could not have come from Creamer. No weapons were recovered from the scene, but ballistics tests indicated that three different .38 caliber guns were fired. Police knew that Creamer had a gunshot wound and that a bullet was lodged in his body. When it was surgically removed, the .38 slug was found to have been fired by a gun other than the Smith and Wesson owned and allegedly used by Rozina Matthews, and it matched none of the slugs found at the scene. During appeals, Creamer testified that he was shot during an attempted robbery near the Atlanta airport on the 19th or 20th of May, 1971.
In Kidd’s first three versions of events given to police, she unequivocally claimed that Carolyn Sue Bowling Johnson participated in the murders. Investigators determined, however, that Johnson was in Hamilton, Ohio on the day of the crime, a fact confirmed by medical records and the testimony of a doctor that had treated her on that day. Further investigation did indicate that Johnson had been involved in a different crime – one in which Creamer was shot – but that this crime had occurred weeks later, around May 21, 1971. This was consistent with Creamer’s explanation of his wound.
Defense lawyers also discovered suppressed documents showing that police had a witness who described seeing two teenagers driving a Mercedes sports car like the Matthews’ near where their car was found. The description matched none of the defendants. A neighbor also told investigators he saw a car in front of the Matthews home near the time of the crime, and gave a description of its two occupants that matched none of the defendants. Other documents showed that on Aug 1, 1971, two witnesses told police that a different man, Willie Lloyd Gauldin, had confessed to them that he was the killer. Gauldin was arrested and taken to the police psychologist, Dr. Hall, who performed a “hypnotic interrogation” and concluded that he was not involved.
Emmett’s and Creamer’s cases advanced first through the state appeals process. During the unsuccessful state court appeals, defense lawyer Bobby Cook dispatched an investigator to South Carolina to look into Kidd’s past. The investigator found dated documents, including checks and divorce papers signed and dated by Kidd, showing that she was actually in Greenville, South Carolina on the very day she claimed to be in Marietta with the defendants committing the murders. After exhausting state appeals, their cases went to the U.S. District Court. When presented with the documentary evidence in a federal court hearing, Kidd denied the signatures were hers, but three document experts testified that they were Kidd’s.
Toward Justice
After 17 days of hearings, United States District Judge Charles Moye overturned Emmett and Creamer’s convictions on June 17, 1975. The court, finding numerous and pervasive instances of suppression and destruction of exculpatory evidence, described the undisclosed report of Kidd’s three varying accounts of the crime as “utterly devastating to Kidd’s credibility.” Judge Moye wrote, “The prosecution, though it knew full well the exculpatory and devastating nature of the documents it possessed, did not divulge their existence or contents to either petitioner.”
In addition, the court found that “by the end of August, Kidd’s scenario, riddled as it was with inconsistencies, implausibilities and gaps, was in dire need of shoring up if the prosecution were to obtain convictions.” Dr. Hall acted essentially as a specialized law enforcement investigator, the judge found, who was provided with detailed information about the crime by the police to help build a case out of Kidd’s testimony.
The tapes and transcripts of their sessions revealed that Hall told Kidd to read media accounts of the case (including one taped comment in which Hall tells Kidd that she “ought to read that newspaper and get those names straight”). The judge found the sessions to be “a thinly veiled effort to prop up the prosecution’s case.” Although the hypnotic sessions were taped, the prosecution claimed that some tapes and transcripts of the sessions were inadvertently destroyed. The court concluded that the evidence had been deliberately destroyed, constituting an unlawful obstruction of justice.
Cobb County District Attorney Darden acknowledged during the hearings that the Matthews investigation had been ‘bungled,’ and Judge Moye noted the tunnel vision of investigators in his ruling, writing, “The number and significance of the investigative gaps in this case is truly astounding.” The court’s conclusion was stinging:
The prosecutorial suppression of nearly all evidence concerning Deborah Kidd resulted in a criminal proceeding that bordered on the Kafkaesque … the extreme measures to which the state resorted in extracting information (or more accurately, in supplying information to) this witness and the use of her testimony at trial … the suppression of documents, the firing of police officers skeptical of Kidd’s story, all raise grave questions regarding the single-minded zeal with which these convictions appear to have been sought and obtained. The predictable result is that this Court has before it a pair of criminal convictions obtained in a manner so manifestly and fundamentally unfair that they must be vacated.
Two Confessions
During appeals, Billy Sunday Birt came forward to confess to the Matthews killings and implicated two others he said participated in the crime: Billy Wayne Davis and Willie Hester. Birt had been convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of an elderly couple in Wrens, Georgia. Davis was in federal prison for bank robbery, while Hester was never apprehended.
Birt’s wife initially contacted lawyers representing the seven defendants and told of her husband’s involvement in the Marietta murders. Birt himself contacted Cobb County authorities to tell his story. He was doing time in Illinois for bank robbery when he was extradited to Georgia to face charges in the Wrens killings. In a signed confession, Birt said he killed Dr. Warren Matthews and Davis killed Dr. Rozina Matthews. He was indicted for the Matthews murders in 1979. Birt was already on death row, however, and the case never went to trial.
Kidd, too, finally confessed to her lies. On Monday, August 25, 1975, she admitted on tape to police and prosecutors that she lied in testimony that convicted the seven men. Two days later, after intense negotiations among prosecutors, defense lawyers, and federal and state judges, three of the men (Roberts, Powell, and Emmett) were released on personal recognizance bonds and eventually saw all charges dropped. The other four remained incarcerated for charges unrelated to the Marietta murders.
On September 2, 1975, Cobb District Attorney Buddy Darden announced he was dropping all charges against the seven. He conceded that Kidd, his star witness in the five trials, had admitted to lying, but he refused to prosecute her for perjury. Darden cited several reasons, including possible involvement of others in manufacturing her testimony, legal complications associated with the initial promise of blanket immunity, and “a waste of taxpayer money.” Critics charged that authorities wanted to avoid the embarrassment that would follow shining a spotlight on their gross mishandling of this unreliable witness.
By the time of his release, Emmett had served 35 months, Powell two years, and Roberts 23 months. Roberts pled guilty to drug and gun charges upon release, with credit for time spent on the charges for which he was exonerated. While these innocent men served time in jail, Kidd suffered no repercussions for committing perjury. Proper safeguards monitoring snitch testimony may have prevented this tragic injustice altogether.
