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| Impossible
Mission |
Did Crosley Green Kill Chip Flynn?
A Jury Said Yes; A Judge Sentenced Him To
Die
But Five Top Detectives Say Green Is
Innocent |
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MIMS, Florida
Thursday, November 04,1999
- 02:05 PM ET |
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| CBS |
Crosley Green
says that he didn't kill Chip Flynn.
| (CBS) On April
3, 1989, 22-year-old Chip Flynn was shot to death in a Central
Florida orange grove. Soon after, police arrested Crosley
Green, a black man recently released from prison on drug
charges.
On Sept. 5, 1990, all all-white jury
convicted Green, then 32, of first-degree murder. He was
sentenced to death. Ever since, he has been on death row.
This year, five prominent private detectives got
together to try to exonerate Green. They believe he is
innocent. 48 Hours Correspondent Erin Moriarty
followed them as they revisited crime scenes, reinterviewed
witnesses and reinterpreted evidence, in an effort to save
Green's life.
Nine years ago at trial, Green was offered a plea bargain. Had
he accepted it, he'd be a free man today. But he didn't take
it.
"I didn't kill that young man," Green says.
"So why should I have taken that plea bargain?"
The fight to clear Green, who is now 41, began in
1996, when he began corresponding with Nan Webb, a 57-year-old
white Floridian. Webb, a part-time computer instructor who is
also an anti-death penalty activist, became convinced of
Green's innocence.
After corresponding with Green, Nan Webb
persuaded Ciolino to look into the case.
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| She in turn convinced
Chicago private investigator Paul Ciolino to take a look at
the case. When he, too, decided that Green had been
railroaded, he gathered together four other top private
investigators to convince authorities to reopen the case.
And Ciolino has experience with this kind of case.
Earlier this year, he succeeded in having wrongfully convicted
Anthony Porter released from Illinois' death row.
Ciolino believes that men with criminal records - like
Green - are often railroaded by investigators pressured to
solve cases.
"We're not a bunch of left-wing, silly
liberals running around screaming, 'The poor man is on death
row, and we shouldn't kill him,'" he says of the five-man
"dream team" of investigators, all working without pay
on the Green case.
"Quite the contrary, most of us
are in favor of the death penalty when it's properly
administered," he says.
Webb, though, says that
Ciolino has a heart of gold. "He looks like a big old Irish
Chicago cop, but inside there is [a] very humble man," she
says. "I told Paul that he's an angel."
"Crosley Green is systematic of the problem we have
with the death penalty with this country," Ciolino says.
"We're in a rush to judgment to convict people and punish
them to make ourselves feel good."
"This is a
feel-good conviction to ease the tension in the community:
'Let's get them off the street. Let's kill them.' And we can
all get back to normal," he says.
One of the main
witnesses in the case was Kim Hallock, who was 19 in 1990. She
and Flynn, her ex-boyfriend, had gone to Holder Park in Mims,
Fla., a little after 11 p.m. to talk.
Chip Flynn was shot to death in 1990.
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| She told police that
they had been approached by a black man with a gun who robbed
and kidnapped them. She said that the gunman had tied Flynn's
hands behind his back, and, with Hallock sitting in the
middle, had driven Flynn's pickup truck to the orange grove.
Then, she said, the man grabbed her and forced her out
of the truck and onto the ground. Then, according to Hallock,
Flynn, who was still in the truck, got his own gun, which
Hallock had hidden on the car seat earlier.
And
although his hands were tied behind his back, Flynn came out
of the truck shooting, Hallock said.
Hallock told
police that she then got into the truck, drove to a friend's
house, and called 911. Within hours, Flynn was pronounced dead
at the hospital.
Police began investigating that
night. By morning, they had a suspect: Green, who had watched
a baseball game at Holder Park the night before.
Although Ciolino and his four counterparts are sure
that Green is innocent, they have a difficult task. In trying
to reconstruct a nine-year-old crime, they have to run down
scores of leads and interview witnesses who have changed
addresses many, many times.
Dead ends are just part of
the game, says one of the group, Joe Moura, who runs one of
the largest detective agencies in the country. "That's what
it is; just keep hitting it, keep on hitting it, just like
baseball: You strike out here, you strike out there. But every
once in a while, you get a single, a double."
The
first break came when they got a witness, Alan "Moon" Murray,
to admit that he had lied at Green's trial.
In 1990,
Murray had told the jury that Green had told him that he had
killed someone. Now Murray says he lied, because at the time
he had been on parole, and he felt pressured by detectives to
come up with a story about Green.
"Man told me if I
don't say what they want me to say, I go right back to the
slammer," Murray says. The detectives videotaped Murray's
confession, but that was not enough to reopen the case.
To find out what happened next on the case, read "'Dream Team' Gathers Evidence."
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| Produced by David Kohn;
Copyright 1999, CBS Worldwide Inc., All Rights
Reserved.
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"We're in a rush to judgment
to convict people and punish them to make ourselves feel
good."
Paul Ciolino, private investigator
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