Evidence, Exculpatory and Unheard
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Everton Wagstaffe, in prison, has refused to accept any parole conditions that would amount to an admission of guilt in the kidnapping of a girl, 16, in 1992.
By JIM DWYER
Published: April 21, 2011
Here was a police tow truck, helping to solve a murder.
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Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
Reginald Connor served a prison sentence after he was convicted in the kidnapping. He wants his verdict overturned, claiming a cover-up of evidence.
At least, that was the story.
On a cold January day in 1992, a tow truck pulled into a parking lot behind a housing project in Brooklyn. Guided by a detective, the driver hooked up a brown Buick Skylark and hauled it to a police garage. Inside the car was a headband. Prosecutors said later that it belonged to a 16-year-old girl, Jennifer Negron, whose body was found at dawn on New Year’s Day 1992, dumped on the street a few blocks from where the car was parked. She was Homicide 001 of 2,020 in New York that year.
A prosecutor later told a jury that the headband, beyond all other evidence, proved the guilt of two men charged with snatching Jennifer off the street and forcing her into that brown Skylark. Both men were convicted in 1993 of kidnapping her.
Now the men, Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor, have filed motions in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, arguing that the verdict should be thrown out on the grounds that the police and the prosecutors covered up evidence that would have saved them from a guilty verdict in a crime they had nothing to do with.
During an extraordinary hearing last fall, a retired woman — with no known ties to anyone in the case — appeared. She had driven from Cottageville, S.C., to Brooklyn to testify that she used to live in the housing project where the car was found, that she was the owner of the Skylark, and that it could not possibly have been used in the crime because she had it at church that night.
The car owner, Betty Bonner-Moody, testified that she and her three daughters had driven to a Watch Night service at their church, arriving early to get a spot. Double-parkers quickly lined up along the street, she said.
“I was blocked in,” Ms. Bonner-Moody testified. “I couldn’t get out even if I wanted to.”
The service ran from before midnight until around 5 a.m., she said, and when she came out, her car was exactly where she had left it. Ms. Bonner-Moody said she had told the detectives, in 1992, that “it couldn’t have been” her car that was involved in the kidnapping.
The hair accessories in the Skylark — including the headband — were shared by the women in her family, she said, and the detectives knew that: “I told them they were my daughters.’ ”
One or two days after the church service and the murder, the car was seized, based on the word of a police informer who was a prostitute and a heroin addict. She said she had seen the crime — and a day or two later, also happened to pass the car on the street.
If detectives did, in fact, speak with Ms. Bonner-Moody about the headband and where the car had been on the night of the killing — which would seem to have been routine investigative steps — there is no record of any such interview. Even if the interview was not written down, the prosecution was obliged to inform the defense of what Ms. Bonner-Moody had told them, a team of pro bono lawyers for Mr. Wagstaffe and Mr. Connor argued in briefs filed last month with Sheryl L. Parker, an acting justice of the State Supreme Court.
The lawyers, led by Myron Beldock of Beldock, Levine & Hoffman, and David Toscano of Davis, Polk & Wardwell, said the verdicts should also be overturned because the defense lawyers had failed their clients by not seeking out Ms. Bonner-Moody. Mr. Wagstaffe hasrefused to accept any parole conditions that would amount to an admission of guilt, and remains in prison on a 12 1/2- to 25-year sentence. Mr. Connor has completed his term.
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office, represented by Joyce Slevin and Mark Fleidner, challenged Ms. Bonner-Moody’s credibility, saying that she had been motivated by sympathy for Mr. Connor’s mother and that Mr. Connor’s mother had first approached Ms. Bonner-Moody in 1998. The prosecutors noted that details in Ms. Bonner-Moody’s account shifted between a 1998 affidavit and her October 2010 testimony. Among the discrepancies, they pointed out that she said at one time that she had left the church at 4:30 a.m. and later said it was 5:30, and that in one version, she swore that after church she had parked in front of her home but later said it was behind it.
Prosecutors said that until Ms. Bonner-Moody took the witness stand in October, she had never mentioned telling the detectives that the headband belonged to her daughters. Family and friends of Jennifer testified that the headband in the Skylark looked very much like one she had worn.
From the beginning, both Mr. Wagstaffe, who had a criminal record for drug sales, and Mr. Connor, who had two convictions for robberies, insisted they had nothing to do with the car, the crime, or each other. Two days after the murder, the informer, Brunilda Capella, told detectives she saw Mr. Wagstaffe force Jennifer into the Skylark around 2 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1992. Behind the wheel, she said, was Mr. Connor. Although she had been a regular informer for the police in the precinct, that information was not disclosed to the defense until last year. She died in 1999.
At trial, the prosecutor, Anne M. Gutmann, argued that the physical evidence from the car cinched the case. “Jennifer Negron’s headband,” Ms. Gutmann said, “speaks louder than almost every witness that has taken this stand.”
The defense has asked for DNA tests on the headband, but prosecutors say they cannot find it — making Ms. Bonner-Moody’s account all the more important. “That information would have destroyed the prosecution’s case,” Mr. Toscano wrote.
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