by Jim Di Paola

There is no tombstone on Frank Lee Smith’s grave. Smith, who died Jan. 30, 2000 at 51, was buried in a pauper’s grave, paid for by the taxpayers.

What was there to say, really?

On his death certificate, Smith’s address is listed as Florida State Department of Corrections, Death Row unit. And according to his rap sheet, he was a three-time convicted murderer. He first took a life in 1960 at the age of 13, stabbing a classmate to death over 10 cents. In 1966, after being released from juvenile hall, Smith emptied two fully loaded handguns into a man he and his buddies lured to a vacant field in order to rob.

A two-time killer by 19, Smith was given a life sentence. But "life" back in the 1960s meant serving 15 years in prison followed by parole.

At 37, four years out of prison, Smith was convicted of the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl named Shandra Whitehead in her Fort Lauderdale area home. Prosecutors and police said Smith climbed through a broken window and found Shandra and her 9-year-old brother sleeping. He raped the little girl, crushed her skull with a rock and choked her with her pajama bottoms. She slipped into a coma and died a few days later.

Smith’s conviction of Shandra’s murder, his third, prompted the media to label him "Broward County’s most heinous killer."

After serving 14 years on Death Row, Smith succumbed to cancer, dying before the state of Florida could execute him.

What’s there to say about a life like that?

Maybe it was just better to bury him here in this unmarked grave at Sunset Memorial Gardens in Fort Lauderdale, where silence is broken only by the wind blowing through nearby trees and the occasional sound of someone sobbing. Maybe that is better than Frank Lee Smith ever deserved.

But even in death, Smith still haunts. He’s the talk of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, in the State Attorney’s Office and in the county’s main courthouse. His name still appears on missives between the State Attorney General’s Office and powerful state senators.

David Tomkins, the evidence custodian for Clerk of the Courts, which stores Smith’s 16-year-old murder case, has gotten so many calls from the media to look at the evidence that he’s tired of lugging three boxes full of that evidence back and forth from the warehouse. There have been calls from reporters representing the Fox News Network, ABC’s Nightline, The St. Petersburg Times and a documentary team from PBS.

Now, Tomkins keeps those boxes in his office so he’ll be ready for the inevitable requests.

Of course, all this activity over a dusty murder case isn’t typical. But it’s not every day that old files prove — beyond all reasonable doubt — that a man was wrongly convicted of murder and died in prison while fighting for his freedom.

Smith’s name is quickly becoming a political lightning rod in Florida largely due to those who cite his case as an example of why Florida should do away with the death penalty.

No one is claiming that Smith was a saint. And many people could argue that Smith got what he deserved since he was, after all, a twice-convicted murderer prior to the Whitehead killing.

But legal experts say Smith’s case is important because it answers a question that has nagged at the judicial system for decades: Has anyone ever died in prison for a crime they did not commit?

The answer, as we now know, is yes. Smith is the first person in U.S. history to have died on Death Row only to be proven innocent by DNA testing after it was too late.

Everyone who has touched Smith’s case during the past 14 years, whether they be witnesses, police, prosecutors, judges or Smith’s lawyers, can agree on a couple of facts. First, in December, results from tests that compared Smith’s DNA to the evidence found on Shandra Whitehead proved scientifically that Smith could not have committed her murder. Second, they agree that Smith was convicted of the crime despite his innocence.

What that means, however, depends on who you talk to.

Broward County prosecutors say Smith’s conviction was merely a legal aberration, the exception to the rule. Smith was wrongly convicted, but they also point out that a jury heard the case and decided he was guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.

Two weeks ago, state senators said that because of Smith’s heinous prior record (he readily admitted his guilt in the two other murders), that his erroneous conviction of Whitehead’s murder is no reason to consider banning executions in the state.

The case’s two lead detectives at the Broward Sheriff’s Office are not talking to the media. Since January, Capt. Richard Scheff, who was the homicide detective assigned to the Whitehead case, is being investigated concerning allegations that he lied under oath and fabricated evidence to keep Smith on Death Row. Scheff is now the chief of Internal Affairs, making him one of Sheriff Ken Jenne’s most powerful supervisors. Gov. Jeb Bush ordered the probe in January and appointed prosecutors in Indian River County to oversee the investigation, which is still pending.

The string of attorneys and investigators hired to defend Smith at trial and during his 14 years of appeals say the legal files contain damning proof that Smith was railroaded. They say a lethal mix of sloppy investigative work, corruption, perjury and overzealous prosecution let him die behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.

Even so, prosecutors fought Smith’s repeated requests to have a DNA test conducted to prove his innocence. The test costs $1,500 and could have revealed Smith’s innocence in a matter of months. Instead, State Attorney Michael Satz allowed his prosecutors to fight the requests for years. He only changed his mind after Smith had died.

Satz declined to comment for this story. And prosecutors who handled the appeals said they cannot talk about the case because of the investigation into Scheff. But death penalty opponents say the public needs to know what happened to Smith. They fear that another person on Florida’s Death Row may be executed before the public understands that what happened to Smith could easily happen to others.

"If the public is going to support the death penalty, they have a right to know if it’s going to be administered fairly," says Martin McClain, one of Smith’s appellate attorneys who now works in New York City handling Death Row cases. "There must be an independent investigation by the FBI so the facts can come out.

"This was a report card of the system," he says. "And the system failed. The public has a right to know why an innocent man died on Death Row."

That answer is buried in the 17 boxes containing thousands of pages of trial testimony, appeals, depositions, statements to police and evidence gathered in the State of Florida vs. Frank Lee Smith, Case No. 85-4654.

THE NIGHT OF DEVASTATION

The sorry tale begins on April 14, 1985 at Dorothy McGriff’s house in the predominantly black community of Washington Park in unincorporated Fort Lauderdale.

As McGriff steered her ’72 Pontiac Cutlass into her driveway at 11:45 p.m. and the headlights swept across the house, she noticed something by her bedroom window, the one with the board crudely blocking an old hole in the exterior wall.

She thought she saw a man reaching his arms through the cracks around the board and into the house. She almost couldn’t believe it at first, so she repositioned her car and pointed the headlights directly at the window, and realized that there was indeed a man by the window.

McGriff began hollering at the man but he still wouldn’t move. So, she grabbed a slingblade from her back seat to protect her two children inside the house. The man then darted through the back yard, hopped a chainlink fence and disappeared into the night.

The 31-year-old single mother ran inside screaming for her children. She found Reginald, 9, in the back bedroom with the covers over his head. But Shandra, McGriff’s 8-year-old daughter, didn’t respond.

McGriff found her elementary school daughter lifeless on a bed in the second bedroom, blood spilling from her head, her body nude from the waist down. Her pajama bottoms were tightly wound around her delicate neck.

McGriff instinctively scooped her daughter into her arms and raced from the bedroom to the living room, where she placed her daughter on the couch.

Then, she raced back to her car and pounded on the horn — she could not afford phone service — hysterically pleading for someone to call 911 so they could help her dying child.

Soon, a crowd of neighbors gathered around the house and a team of Broward Sheriff’s deputies swarmed the tiny, dilapidated house. Paramedics also arrived and struggled to revive the little girl’s limp body.

THE HUNT IS ON

Homicide detectives with the Broward Sheriff’s Office usually aren’t called out on rapes. So, when detective Richard Scheff was called at 12:15 a.m. on April 15, 1985, to investigate the rape of an 8-year-old girl, he knew it meant the medical personnel didn’t think she was going to make it.

Scheff had worked five years with BSO. His personnel records included an inches-thick commendation file and exceptionally high annual evaluations by his bosses in which they applauded him for putting his career above himself and even his own family.

It probably wasn’t a coincidence that Scheff was assigned the case, because he had a reputation for solving difficult cases. The police brass needed somebody like Scheff because the Washington Park community had been giving the Sheriff’s Office grief for the crime and rampant drug dealing that were suffocating the neighborhood. Washington Park had been hit particularly hard by the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Washington Park residents had seen an increase of rapes and murders in their community. Yet the cops never seemed to make arrests. It was as if you lived in Washington Park, the chance of becoming another corpse in the morgue increased week by week.

While crime scene investigators began scouring the home for clues, Scheff drove to Plantation General Hospital to see if the family knew Shandra’s attacker.

Shandra’s father, Sammie Whited (spelled differently from his children’s surname), was holding a vigil at the hospital, not yet sure if his daughter would pull through. Doctors said she was comatose and had suffered horrible blows to the head that resembled gunshot wounds, although there were no exit wounds. The girl also had been strangled with her pajamas and she was anally and vaginally assaulted.

Scheff took the girl’s pajamas and the bloody towel that McGriff had wrapped around her daughter while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. He also ordered a rape test to be performed.

Meanwhile, Scheff’s partner, Detective Phil Amabile, was at the house interviewing McGriff. Because she was in shock from seeing her daughter so close to death, Amabile couldn’t get much out of her. Through her sobs, McGriff told her story. She worked as a nurse’s aide for a retirement center near her home. She worked the late shift, which meant she got off at 11 p.m. Shandra and Reginald were left home during most of the night, but McGriff was a single mother doing the best she could. Besides, McGriff’s sister, Shirley McGriff, would stop by a couple of times a day to check on the children.

McGriff recounted how she had just returned from work and saw the shadowy figure by the window. She admitted that she didn’t get a good look at the man. There was a street light near the window, and her headlights were pointed at him, but all she could make out was a black man with muscular shoulders and a beard. He was wearing an orange T-shirt with white letters printed across it. He looked like a husky football player with a chubby stomach. He weighed between 190 and 200 pounds. When Scheff asked her if she could identify the man, McGriff said she could by the man’s shoulders.

Scheff left the hospital, where Shandra was now hooked up to life support and doctors couldn’t predict whether she would ever come out of the coma.

Scheff then met his partner at McGriff’s home, where Shirley McGriff told them she had visited the children twice that day. First, in the late afternoon and again between 10:30 and 10:40 p.m. She said the front door was locked when she arrived and when she went inside, she found both children awake and watching television in the living room.

She stayed about six minutes to make sure the kids were OK and assured them their mother would be home soon. When she left, she made sure she locked the front door.

Reginald was too traumatized to talk, and when questioned by police, said he didn’t remember anything. All he could recall was that he was asleep in his bedroom and didn’t wake up until he heard his mother scream.

Crime scene investigators took the sheets where the attack occurred and dusted the place for fingerprints. The television that Shirley McGriff saw the children watching in the living room when she left at about 10:45 p.m. had been moved to the back bedroom and placed near the window that Dorothy McGriff saw the intruder reaching into.

Scheff and Amabile walked the perimeter of the house, searching for anything. Scheff found a fist-sized rock stained with blood near the boarded window. (Later, the autopsy would conclude that Shandra was beaten with a rock. The force of the blows were so hard that it gave the appearance that she had been shot, as doctors first assumed.)

Police also found a blue windbreaker in the back of an abandoned truck in the field next to the house. Scheff figured it had not been there long because the truck’s bed was covered with leaves and dirt. But the windbreaker looked clean, as if it had just been dropped there. Maybe it was evidence, maybe it wasn’t, but he told the crime scene technicians to bag it just in case.

Meanwhile, detectives back at headquarters were searching for suspects known to have committed similar crimes. Others were working on tips from the community.

Eighteen hours after being called to the scene, Scheff still had no solid leads to follow. So, he pored over his notes and witness statements, and scanned his brain hoping something would jell.

A REAL WHODUNIT

The next morning he met the McGriff family at the hospital, where they were still holding vigil over Shandra.

Doctors said there had been no improvement in Shandra’s condition. The only thing keeping her alive was the life support system.

Late that afternoon, Scheff got word from one of Dorothy McGriff’s neighbors that a teenager named Gerald Davis was walking by the McGriff house just before the murder and was confronted by a man acting strange. Davis lived near McGriff in Washington Park and worked at the Thom McCann shoe store at the Galleria Mall.

Scheff and Amabile followed proper investigative procedures and talked with Davis for a while and then taped his sworn statement.

Davis said that on the night of the attack, he was walking west on Eighth Street to visit a friend when he was approached by a stranger.

He wasn’t sure of the time, but estimated it was between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m. Davis said he was walking near McGriff’s house when a man standing in an open field began hissing at him.

"Slim, Slim," the man called out as he ran up to Davis, "come here, come here."

Davis said the man had an unkempt Afro with a "tacky beard" and a pockmarked face. He said the man also had one droopy eye and was generally pretty scary-looking.

The teenager told the detectives that the stranger was acting as strange as he looked. So, Davis kept walking down the unlit street, hoping the guy would realize that he didn’t want to be bothered. He told the police that he tried not to look at the man directly, hoping he would move on. But the man continued to follow, saying he was from New York and wondered if Davis wanted to do some crack. When Davis said no, the man peppered him with offers. How about cocaine?

When Davis refused again, the man asked if Davis wanted to "get into something."

Davis knew that was street slang for sex and said no way. The man stopped while Davis kept moving along, and finally said he guessed that meant he’d have to go back to his car alone and masturbate.

Davis didn’t respond but he told the detectives that the man walked back to the field across the street from McGriff’s home. He told Scheff and Amabile that the man was about 6-foot-2, between 160 and 170 pounds and muscular with a chubby stomach. He was wearing a plaid cloth jacket or heavy shirt with dark workpants and black workboots.

Davis also gave the detectives what would prove to be a valuable piece of information. He recalled that right before the stranger approached him, a neighborhood acquaintance named Chiquita Lowe drove by and pulled over to talk to him. She also must have seen the man.

A little more than two hours later, police tracked down Lowe, a 19-year-old who lived with her grandmother in Washington Park, and took her sworn statement.

Before the police came to question her, Lowe knew all about Shandra’s attack. It was the buzz of the neighborhood and the residents were looking for suspects to offer to police.

The attack was especially painful for Lowe and her family since they were casual acquaintances of McGriff and her children and shared ties to mutual friends. Lowe said it broke her heart thinking about what McGriff was going through.

Lowe told police that she saw a man fitting the description Davis gave them. She had borrowed her grandmother’s car to meet friends in Lauderhill when she was flagged down by a man near the McGriff home.

When she stopped, the man put his hands on the driver’s side door and leaned in the window and asked Lowe if she had 50 cents. She told police the man seemed crazed and his hair was pointing everywhere and he had an unkempt beard. She also said the man had a sleepy eye and was at least 6-feet-tall with a muscular build. But he was so menacing Lowe said she became afraid and curtly told the stranger she had no money and took off.

That had to be around 10:30 p.m., because she remembers stopping to talk to Davis about that time. Neither of them mentioned the strange man during their conversation.

Lowe’s interview ended the second day of the investigation. It wasn’t much to go on, but Scheff and Amabile realized it was very likely the man that Davis and Lowe saw approximately one hour before the attack was the main suspect. So, they arranged for Davis and Lowe to meet with BSO’s sketch artists on the afternoon of April 17, 1985.

That morning, BSO deputies were busy as ever. Some continued their door-to-door cold calls hoping to shake something loose. Others worked their street informants for more leads.

Scheff spent the morning meeting with a potential suspect named James Freeman, according to Scheff’s police notes, which detailed all his investigative work hour by hour for the entire four-day investigation.

McGriff’s neighbors said they saw Freeman watching the paramedics who were trying to save Whitehead. The tipsters told the police that Freeman was acting very strange and upset and neighbors noticed that he recently had shaved his beard. Could it have been to change his identity after being caught red-handed by McGriff?

Freeman had an alibi, but since there were no other real suspects at the time, Scheff decided to put together a photo lineup that included Freeman and show it to McGriff, Davis and Lowe to gauge their reaction.

Scheff knew the protocol of putting together a photo composite of suspects. You dig through the mug shots stored by BSO looking for men that had the same physical characteristics of the suspect: the same haircut, similar facial hair and similar build. Find five guys that look similar to Freeman, then glue the mug shots to a manila folder. Three pictures across the top and three pictures across the bottom.

But when Scheff and Amabile showed the photo lineup to the three witnesses, there was no recognition.

Police said they also questioned McGriff about her cousin, Edwin McGriff. Scheff said in a deposition that Edwin McGriff had been accused of sexually assaulting a girl in 1982, and asked Dorothy McGriff if her cousin could have been the man she saw that night. But McGriff was adamant that she would have recognized her cousin, even if it was dark by that window. She said it couldn’t have been him.

For two hours, Scheff and Amabile had Davis and Lowe describe to BSO sketch artists the man they saw that night. There were two composites drawn up first, one from Lowe’s description and one from Davis’. Lowe quickly decided that the sketch based on Davis’ description was a more accurate representation than hers.

Scheff, Amabile and a slew of deputies distributed the composite sketch throughout Washington Park from 6 to 10 p.m., then called it a day.

"THAT LOOKS LIKE FRANK L."

The fourth day of the manhunt consisted of deputies papering the neighborhood with the composite sketch. At about 1:30 p.m., Scheff got an emergency call that Lowe was home and hysterical because the man she saw that night had just visited her home trying to sell a stolen television.

One of Lowe’s relatives had taken a sketch that was posted at a nearby convenience store and left it on the kitchen table. Soon after, Lowe’s family told Scheff, a crazed man pushing a shopping cart carrying a color television stopped by the house. He wanted to sell the television, the family said, and he pleaded with the grandmother to buy it, saying he would kiss her if she did.

Lowe’s family was finally able to shoo the strange man away and called for Lowe, who was sleeping in the back bedroom. She ran to the door and looked outside, catching the back of the man’s head as he walked through an alleyway next to Lowe’s home. She didn’t see the shopping cart or the TV, but she told Scheff her family was sure that it was Shandra’s attacker. She and her family believed the attacker had used the TV as a ruse to let Lowe know that he knew she had talked to the cops.

Scheff and other deputies ran through the alleyway in hopes of finding the man. As they did, an area resident told police he saw a man looking like the one they described standing by a group of men playing dominoes under the shaded canopy of a large tree, a popular hangout.

Police showed the men the composite sketch and one announced, "that looks like Frank L." The man also said he could recognize Frank if he saw him again. Lt. Phil McCann, who knew the witness, convinced him to go for a ride through the neighborhood to aid in the search.

They drove around for hours, until the man spotted "Frank L." standing in front of a house in the 800 block of Northwest 14th Terrace, about a mile and a half from McGriff’s home. McCann noticed that the suspect had a knife slipped behind his waistband, the large handle bulging beneath his shirt.

McCann jumped out of his patrol car, drew his weapon and shouted for the suspect to freeze. Then, McCann tackled him, handcuffed him and drove him down to BSO headquarters. McCann told the man he was being arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.

Police never did find the shopping cart or the television.

HOW THE WRONG MAN GETS CHARGED

Scheff and Amabile met Frank Lee Smith at the BSO headquarters about 4 p.m., one hour after his arrest. The detectives told Smith they were questioning him about the attack of the little girl in Washington Park and spent 15 minutes going over his Miranda Rights, which Smith signed.

For the next hour, Smith told the detectives he had nothing to do with the crime and had not been in that neighborhood for months.

He also gave police an alibi, according to Scheff’s notes. "Smith states that he remained at 828 N.W. 14th Terrace, Fort Lauderdale, for the entire night/morning of April 14/15. Smith tells us that he slept in a Rambler automobile that was parked in the driveway. Smith says that on April 14, he had a large dinner of short ribs, which his grandmother had cooked for him."

Scheff would later testify that he and Amabile could not connect with Smith during the interrogation. He would talk to them for long periods of time, never asking for his attorney. Still, every time the detectives switched the conversation back to the murder, he would clam up.

So, Scheff rode Smith a little to gauge his reaction.

"I tell Smith that we have two witnesses that saw a b/m who resembled him in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene moments before the crime was committed," Scheff wrote in his notes. "I tell Smith that the victim’s mother got a good look at the suspect upon her return home. Smith is listening but makes no comment."

Scheff decided to use an old detective trick: He lied and said that Reginald, the 9-year-old brother of the victim, saw the attacker and could identify him.

"Smith interrupts," Scheff wrote in his notes, "and states, ‘No way that kid could’ve seen me, it was too dark.’ "

"I say, ‘Really, Frank?’ " Scheff wrote in his report. "And Smith replies, ‘The lights were out.’ "

To Scheff, Smith’s comments were a stunning mistake. He asked Smith how he could have known the lights were out if he wasn’t there. Smith shot back: "I thought you said that the lights were out."

Scheff told Smith that he had no idea if the lights were on or off. But privately, Scheff would later testify, he was confident that Smith’s spontaneous statement was proof that he was the attacker.

Frustrated with the hour-long questioning, Smith finally blurted out: "I’ve been here before, and if you want me, you’ll have to come and get me, but don’t expect me to help you."

For another hour, Scheff repeatedly went over the details with Smith but wrote in his notes that "Smith continues to deny any involvement in the case."

Fed up, Scheff and Amabile let two other detectives question Smith for another 30 minutes, but they couldn’t get Smith to cooperate, either.

After Smith was booked on the weapons charge, Scheff began making another photo lineup, this one including a picture of Smith.

At the end of the fourth day of the investigation, with Shandra still comatose and on life support, Scheff showed Davis the new photo lineup. Davis said Smith "looked like the guy; he had the same hair." But he needed to see Smith in person before he could positively identify him as the man who had talked to him the night of the attack.

Early the next morning, Scheff and Amabile visited Dorothy McGriff. They told her they were going to show her pictures to see if she could identify the man she saw by the window. When Scheff opened the manila folder, McGriff started crying and said, "That’s the man. That’s the man that did my baby."

She pointed to mug shot No. 2: Frank Lee Smith.

Eight hours later, Scheff showed the same photo lineup to Chiquita Lowe. He reported that she also positively identified Smith as the man who flagged down her car.

The next day, Scheff brought Davis in for a live lineup. Smith and five other men stood in the lineup room, but Davis, standing behind a two-way mirror, said he still wasn’t sure. Eventually, Davis signed a statement saying that he positively identified Smith as the man he saw.

On April 19, five days after the attack, Scheff and Amabile arrested Smith on charges of burglary, sexual battery on a child under 11 years old and attempted murder.

McGriff and her estranged husband agreed on April 23 to allow doctors to remove Shandra from life support. She was pronounced dead at 7:50 p.m. The cause of death was severe blunt trauma to the head. Her funeral was held on April 27 at the Evergreen Missionary Baptist Church, not far from her home.

A few days later, Scheff and Amabile were given the Deputies of the Month award by the Broward Sheriff’s Office for a job well done.

HOW THE WRONG MAN GETS CONVICTED

In 1985, Andrew Washor was assigned to defend Smith on the murder charges, his fees paid by the taxpayers of Florida because Smith had no money.

Washor had been a prosecutor for five years and had worked cases involving second-degree murder. As well, he had been a defense attorney for six years, an experience that he says gave him the legal instincts to know that Smith’s case was hardly a slam dunk for prosecutor William Dimitrouleas.

Despite the bloody attack on Shandra, the crime scene investigators could not match any of the blood, semen, fibers or fingerprints found at the scene to Washor’s client.

Washor also says that he knew through the pretrial depositions of McGriff, Davis and Lowe that none of them got a really good look at the suspect they saw lurking near McGriff’s home.

But Washor says he also was convinced that unless some miracle occurred, like a startling confession by the real killer, Smith would be found guilty. And if Smith were convicted, with his prior record, there was no doubt he would get the death penalty.

Despite the shaky witness identifications, Scheff’s report that Smith made a quasi-confession during the interrogation could seal up the prosecution’s case. Scheff was going to tell the jury that Smith said that Reginald Whitehead could not have seen the attacker, "because the lights were out." That statement alone, Washor figured, would be enough to convince the jury that Smith had to have been at the scene of the crime.

Not that Washor believed Scheff’s account of Smith’s interrogation. During meetings with Smith in the weeks leading up to the trial, Washor could barely get Smith to string together a few coherent sentences. Three psychiatrists evaluated Smith before trial and all ruled that he was suffering from psychotic delusions, but two of those doctors concluded that Smith was still mentally fit to stand trial.

How could Scheff have gotten Smith, Washor wondered, to discuss what was said during the nearly four hours of interrogation? Besides, Smith had told Washor several times that he could not help in his own defense because he had nothing to do with the crime because he wasn’t there.

To make matters worse, Washor decided he could not risk putting Smith on the stand to defend himself. He feared that Dimitrouleas would somehow get Smith to talk about his prior murder convictions which could horribly taint the jury’s decision. Besides, Smith’s rough appearance and surly attitude wasn’t going to play well with the jury.

"Frank was a weird-looking guy and I couldn’t put him on the stand because he had a real bad record," Washor said during a recent interview. "There were times he was hearing voices. He was telling me he was hearing things from satellites."

Washor concluded that Smith’s only chance was to attack the case in three parts. First, discredit the testimony of the three eyewitnesses. Then, try to raise serious questions about Smith’s supposed confession. And finally, attempt to raise reasonable doubt in the jury by showing the police had not checked out other suspects before arresting Smith.

Washor says he never doubted Smith’s innocence. But he had worked alongside Dimitrouleas for years as a prosecutor and knew that he was a worthy legal adversary. Meanwhile, Circuit Judge Robert Tyson, also a former prosecutor, had a reputation at the courthouse as being a jurist who gave no leeway for criminal defendants or their attorneys.

So, the day the trial began, Washor says he had this sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that a grave injustice was about to unfold.

Dimitrouleas, the prosecutor, first brought to the stand the crime scene technicians, who testified that all the evidence they collected — the fingerprints, fibers and the blue windbreaker found in the truck near McGriff’s home — did not prove that Smith was the attacker. But they also said that it did not prove that Smith wasn’t the attacker.

McGriff was questioned on the stand by Dimitrouleas. She explained how she was shown two lineups by the police. In the first, she could not pick out a suspect. But in the second lineup, she immediately selected Smith as her daughter’s murderer.

"I know this is hard for you," Dimitrouleas told her. "I will ask you to look around the courtroom and see if you see the man."

McGriff then started sobbing. Washor motioned for a mistrial, saying McGriff’s emotions were tainting the jury. Judge Tyson denied it.

"Do you see the man, Mrs. McGriff?" Dimitrouleas continued. "I need to ask you for a yes or no answer. Do you see the man?"

Through her tears, McGriff eked out a "yes" and pointed to Smith.

"Mrs. McGriff, are you sure that is the man you saw outside the window?" Dimitrouleas asked.

McGriff whispered yes again and then fell into heavy sobs. "My baby, my baby," she cried, tears spilling down her cheeks.

The judge granted a short recess for McGriff to compose herself before being questioned by Washor.

Washor focused his questions to McGriff on her inconsistent statement to police about the suspect’s description.

Washor asked McGriff if she had identified Smith from a photo lineup four days after the attack. She said she had.

"[But] you weren’t sure on April 15 what the man looked like, were you?" Washor asked.

"No," McGriff responded.

"Isn’t it true you weren’t actually paying too much attention to the man? You were basically interested in getting him away from your window?"

"That is true," McGriff responded.

"You can’t describe the person’s face, correct?"

"Yes," McGriff countered, "from the side of it."

"Isn’t it also fair to say everything was dark from this person’s head down to his shoulders?" Washor continued. McGriff agreed.

Washor also got McGriff to admit that she told police she would not be able to identify the man she saw by his face, only his shoulders.

"Isn’t it true you couldn’t see the person’s face at all, describe it, because it’s just a flash you saw?"

"Yes," McGriff told the jury. She also testified that she told police the man she saw was about 5-foot-9 with a build like a husky football player. Smith, sitting by Washor, was 6-feet-tall with a thin build.

"I know it’s hard, Mrs. McGriff, and I know you have to look at Mr. Smith, but does he look like 5-8 to 5-9 and like a husky football player to you?"

McGriff paused for a long time and would not answer.

"No further questions," Washor told the judge.

Dimitrouleas then presented Chiquita Lowe to the jury. She explained how a "delirious" man flagged her down, but during their seconds-long conversation he was 18 inches from her face. She described the man to be about six-feet-tall with wild hair and unkempt beard with pores like "open holes" all over his face.

Dimitrouleas then asked Lowe to explain what happened on the day that the man came to her house to sell a television.

Lowe told the jury that after shooing away the man with the television, her family awakened her in a panic and said they were sure the man that just left was the same man in the sketch Lowe had made. Lowe went out the back door and caught a fleeting glimpse of the man as he was walking away from the house.

Dimitrouleas asked Lowe if the man selling the television was the same man she saw the night of the murder. She said yes.

"Any doubt in your mind it was the same man?" Dimitrouleas asked.

"No doubt in my mind," Lowe said. She also testified that when Scheff showed her the photo lineup including Smith, the detective did not try to give her "any hints" or "suggestions" that Smith was the main suspect.

Washor tried raising questions about Lowe’s credibility by showing inconsistencies in her statement to police, her pretrial deposition and her trial testimony.

She admitted that before the trial, she never mentioned that the suspect was wearing a blue windbreaker. Instead, in her sworn statements to police and in depositions, she said the man was wearing a white shirt with red stripes.

She also never mentioned to police that the man she saw had a scar under his eye, which Smith had. He also questioned her about neglecting to mention during testimony that she described the suspect as having "muscular arms and a big chest," which did not match Smith’s build.

After her testimony, Lowe would say years later, she felt sick. She confided to her grandmother, the only person she knew she could truly trust in the world, that her testimony would put that man in prison. Yet she was not sure that Smith was the right guy. Her grandmother told her to get on her knees and pray. Pray hard for forgiveness.

The surprises were not over in the trial, however. Before Dimitrouleas put Gerald Davis on the stand, he asked the judge to grant an unusual request.

Since identifying Smith in a photo lineup, Davis had become a shaky witness who was now saying Scheff and Amabile were twisting his words to get him to identify Smith. So, Dimitrouleas wanted to put Davis on the stand as a hostile witness so he could impeach Davis’ lies about police misconduct.

"I can’t vouch for his credibility," Dimitrouleas told the judge, who granted the motion.

Under questioning by Dimitrouleas, Davis relived the encounter with the strange man who offered him sex and drugs. He said the police showed him two lineups, one of Freeman and one of Smith. He didn’t recognize Freeman, but he testified that he told police that Smith "looked like the guy; that the hair was the same." But he also told the police that he wanted to see Smith in a live lineup before he signed a sworn statement saying he was the man he saw on the street just before the murder.

He also testified that even after the live lineup, he couldn’t positively identify Smith.

"I said he looked like the guy," Davis told the jury. "The only thing that bothered me, he seemed as tall as the guy was then. [The detectives] said to me that the reason it’s like that is because all the guys are between 6-1 and 6 feet and that is why they all seem the same size."

"When the police told you about his height," Dimitrouleas continued, "did you have any other reservations about his identification?"

"No," Davis answered.

Washor attacked Davis’ credibility, showing numerous inconsistencies between his police statements and trial testimony about the live lineup. Washor was trying to prove that detectives Scheff and Amabile had shown Smith’s picture to Davis just before he went to view the live lineup, inferring that Davis was coached by the cops to identify Smith.

"You were shown that photograph of Frank Smith right before you went to the live lineup, correct?"

"Yes," Davis answered.

"Didn’t it take you awhile to pick Mr. Smith out because he didn’t look as tall as the guy on the street?" Washor asked.

"Yes."

"Didn’t you indicate to the police that you weren’t sure the man you picked out that was standing there was the man that was standing on the street?"

"Yes," Davis answered.

Washor then pointed out to Davis that some of the men in the live lineup were several inches shorter than Smith and also much younger, some by as much as 14 years. But Davis said when he told Scheff he wasn’t sure Smith was the guy, Scheff told him not to worry about it because they were all six-feet-tall.

"Isn’t it true that you can’t honestly swear to me right now that the man you picked out in the live lineup is the same man you saw that night?"

"No, I can’t say he is exactly the same guy, but he looks like the guy," Davis testified.

"Isn’t it true if the guy came up to you right now you couldn’t say whether it was the guy you saw on the street or not?"

"No," Davis answered.

So Washor asked Davis why he identified Smith.

"I identified him as the guy I picked out of the lineup and the guy I talked to but," Davis stammered, "which I have been saying from the beginning, I don’t remember how the guy looked."

The other key witness to testify was Scheff. He told the jury how the investigation was conducted, and how his homicide team looked at several other suspects before zeroing in on Smith. He denied showing Smith’s picture to Davis moments before taking him to the live lineup.

Scheff said that such interviews usually are taped, but Smith’s was not because the suspect feared the interrogation room was bugged. Fearing that Smith would not cooperate, Scheff and Amabile decided not to tape their questioning.

Scheff also said that when he showed Smith’s photo lineup to Dorothy McGriff, there was no question in his mind that he had arrested the right man. He said when she looked at the six pictures, McGriff immediately pointed to Smith and began screaming and crying.

"Certainly, at the time she made the photo lineup identification, it was easily the most positive ID I have ever witnessed as an investigator," Scheff testified.

After that, Dimitrouleas rested his case.

After a court recess, Washor had to make a tough decision. He had one witness to put on the stand, an optometrist who would testify that Smith’s eyesight was so poor that he was legally blind without his glasses. Washor thought the testimony might help sway the jurors into believing that it would have been impossible for Smith to run through a dark back yard and jump a chainlink fence.

But he also knew that putting on a defense would mean that he would lose a strategic bonus for defense witnesses. If no evidence was brought forward by the defense, Washor could make a two-part closing argument, giving him the chance to get the last argument in before the jury was ordered to deliberate. He decided that was too risky and rested his case without a defense.

The jury deliberated for eight hours. Halfway through deliberations, the jury told the judge that they were deadlocked and needed Lowe’s testimony to reach a verdict.

After reading her transcribed testimony, the jury came back the next day with a unanimous verdict: guilty on all charges.

Smith, stunned that he was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, shot up from his chair and began yelling that the police and prosecutors were conspiring against him.

Washor says he couldn’t sleep that night, wrestling with his demons on how he could have better represented Smith.

"The confession or the supposed confession was the killer," he now says. "It put him in the house."

On Feb. 5, 1986, the jury deliberated an hour before advising the judge to give Smith the death sentence.

After the jury’s decision, forewoman Caron Cersosimo told reporters that the jurors were "really unanimous, basically because of what we heard today about his past and his attitude throughout the trial."

A STUNNING REVELATION

In May 1989, Gov. Bob Martinez signed Smith’s execution order. That gave Smith’s appellate attorneys 30 days to come up with new evidence to grant Smith a stay.

A young investigator named Jeff Walsh was hired by Smith’s attorneys to find out what he could. He spent hours poring over the trial records, hoping that something had been overlooked.

He asked the police to give him all the files on Smith’s case, then asked for mug shots of all the other suspects investigated besides Smith.

One of those photos came from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. It was of a man named Eddie Lee Mosley. When Walsh saw it, he was stunned at the striking resemblance to the composite sketch used to track down Smith. Besides that, Walsh learned that Mosley was McGriff’s cousin and lived just a few houses away from McGriff. He also was suspected by police to have committed a string of murders and rapes in the Washington Park area throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

"When I saw the photo, it was a very emotionally charged moment," Walsh recalled during an interview earlier this month. "I was overwhelmed. I almost wanted to run out of the police department with the photo. I was in almost disbelief, because I realized, oh my God, Smith didn’t do it."

So, he raced over to Chiquita Lowe’s house, three years after the trial. When Walsh identified himself, Lowe invited him in and said, "I’ve been waiting for somebody to come. I feel so bad."

Then, when Walsh showed Lowe a picture of Mosley, she broke down and cried. She said she was hurting so bad because she sent a man to Death Row for a crime he didn’t commit.

Even though she had been the state’s star witness, Lowe now signed a sworn statement saying she "swears on her mother’s grave" that Smith was not the man she saw the night Shandra Whitehead was killed.

Smith languished in prison for another 11 years before the truth was finally revealed.

Next week: How prosecutors and police waged an 11-year legal battle to keep Smith on Death Row despite overwhelming evidence that proved beyond all reasonable doubt that his conviction was a miscarriage of justice.