Homicide. David Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ man denied that he was on the street when the incident occurred, but he admitted that he heard a gunshot, then from his window saw a police car leaving the 800 block with its lights out. He then saw a second police car turn onto Monroe Street from Lafayette and stop near the mouth of the alley.

      The man also told Worden that after police began gathering in the alley, he had called his son to tell him what was happening. Worden then interviewed the son, who remembered the phone call and remembered further that his father had been quite specific: He had seen a police officer shoot a man in an alley across the street from his house.

      Worden went back at the witness, confronting him with his son’s statement. No, said the man, I never told him that. He stood by his previous account involving the two cars.

      Worden suspected that his newfound witness had seen a good deal more than the arrival and departure of the radio cars, and the detective had two possible explanations for the man’s obvious reluctance. First, the witness was genuinely afraid of testifying against a police officer in a murder trial. Second, there never was a radio car that fled down Monroe Street with its headlights out. The witness had instead seen a confrontation between John Scott and another civilian, a neighbor or friend, perhaps, whom the witness was now trying to protect. For that matter, the confrontation could have involved the witness himself, who had parked his own car at the mouth of the alley a few minutes before the shooting.

      Technically then, this morning’s newspaper article is correct in asserting that the witness can also be considered a potential suspect. But what Roger Twigg does not know—or has not been told by his sources—is that this new witness was not discovered in a vacuum; other evidence is leading Worden back in the opposite direction, back toward the police.

      It’s more than the shirt buttons found at the edge of the alley. And it’s more than the fact that too many of the officers involved seem to be having trouble keeping their stories straight. The most unnerving piece of evidence in Worden’s case file is a copy of the Central District radio tape, which had been sent to the FBI for audio enhancement. Deciphered by the detectives and transcribed weeks after the murder, it revealed a strange sequence of radio transmissions.

      At one point on the tape, a Central officer can be heard broadcasting a description of the suspect seen running from the passenger seat of the stolen car.

      “It’s a number one male, six foot, six-foot-one, dark jacket, blue jeans … last seen at Lanvale and Payson …”

      Then, a Central District sergeant, a seven-year veteran named John Wylie, cuts in. Having followed the chase into the Western District, it is Wylie who first found the body of John Scott.

      “One-thirty,” Wylie says, giving his unit number. “Cancel that description at the eight-hundred block of Fulton … or Monroe.”

      One of the officers involved in the early chase breaks in, assuming that the suspect is in custody: “One twenty-four. I can ID that guy …”

      Moments later, Wylie comes back on the radio. “One-thirty. I heard a gunshot before I found this guy.”

      “One-thirty, where is that, the eight-hundred block Monroe?”

      “Ten-four.”

      Then, several moments later, Wylie can again be heard on the radio tape, acknowledging for the first time that there is a “possible shot victim in the alley.”

      The transmissions presented Worden with an obvious question: Why would the sergeant cancel the description for the suspect unless he believed the man was already in custody? The buttons, the radio tape—such evidence led not toward a civilian suspect but toward the pursuing officers. And yet for every officer working a post anywhere near Monroe Street, Worden and James had checked and rechecked the run sheets—required departmental paperwork that chronicles every uniform’s entire tour of duty from one call to the next. But all of the radio cars in the Central, Western and Southern districts appeared to be accounted for at the time of the shooting. The officers involved in the chase of the stolen Dodge Colt and the subsequent bailout had already given an account of their movements in supplemental reports, and the two detectives reviewed those as well. The investigators had found that most of the officers had encountered one another during the incident and could confirm each other’s reports.

      If the shooter was another police officer who fled before Sergeant Wylie arrived, there was nothing in the paperwork that could identify him. In all, fifteen Western and Central officers had been interviewed, but they could offer little, and Wylie, for his part, insisted that he had seen nothing before or after hearing the gunshot. Several officers—including Wylie and two others who were among the first to arrive at the shooting scene—were ordered to undergo lie detector tests. The results showed no deception for all officers with the exception of Wylie and one other, whose results were deemed inconclusive.

      The polygraph results, coupled with Wylie’s premature broadcast canceling the description for the suspect, led both Worden and James to conclude that, at the very least, the Central District sergeant had seen something before he discovered the body. But in a two-and-a-half-hour interview with the detectives, Wylie insisted that he had heard only the single gunshot and had seen no other officers near the alley on Monroe Street. He did not know why he would have canceled the description of the suspect, nor did he recall doing so.

      Wylie asked the detectives if he was a suspect.

      No, he was told.

      Nonetheless, it was during that interview that the detectives asked the sector sergeant to consent to a voluntary search of his house. Wylie agreed, and the detectives confiscated his uniforms, service weapon and off-duty revolver for examinations that would also prove inconclusive.

      Am I a suspect? the sergeant asked again. If so, I want to be advised of my rights.

      No, they told him, you are not a suspect. Not now. With the sergeant insistent that he had seen or heard nothing apart from the gunshot, what had remained for the investigators was the possibility that some other cop or a civilian had witnessed the shooting or its aftermath. Now, just as that possibility had become very real, a single column of newsprint was threatening to drive their only witness back underground.

      Still, if it was a cop who killed John Scott, Worden believed that the incident probably added up to something less than intentional murder. It was, he reasoned, a fight in an alley that went bad, a tussle that ended when a patrolman—rightly or wrongly—used his weapon, or perhaps another .38 he grabbed from John Scott. A second or two later, the suspect is on the ground, a gunshot wound to the back, and the cop is spitting up adrenaline, panicking, wondering how in the hell he’s going to write his way out of this one.

      If that was the scenario, if a patrolman fled from that alley because he had no faith in the department’s ability to protect him, then it was an inevitable act. If that was the case, then Monroe Street was the last, twisted curve on a piece of bad road on which the Baltimore department had been traveling for a long time. Donald Worden had been there for the beginning of the journey, and he had seen the full swing of the pendulum.

      Only once in that long career did Worden himself fire a weapon in the line of duty. It was a wayward shot, a .38 round-nose with an almost vertical trajectory, spinning high above any conceivable target. That was twenty years earlier, on a summer day when he and his partner caught a robbery on view in Pimlico, witnessing the ever-elusive communion of a criminal with his crime. After they had duly chased the perpetrator for a greater distance than the average cop considers reasonable, Worden’s partner began firing. Worden, feeling an obscure need to show solidarity, then sent his own missile into the ether.

      Worden knew СКАЧАТЬ