hen
an older brother was sentenced to life in prison for a murder she
knew he didn't commit, Betty Anne Waters decided it was up to her to
set him free.
A mother of two with a GED who waitressed for extra money, Waters
went to college, got her law degree, and started representing him
herself.
Now, after more than 18 years behind bars in state prisons, her
brother Kenneth is expected to be released today from MCI-Shirley
after she uncovered DNA evidence to prove his innocence in the 1980
murder of Katharina Brow, whose body was found in her trailer home
in Ayer.
''I can't even explain how I feel,'' Waters, 46, said from her
Middletown, R.I., home. ''I had a goal that I just wanted to learn
as much as I could so I could help him.''
With the help of attorney Barry Scheck and his Innocence Project,
Waters, a part-time lawyer whose brother is one of her few clients,
filed a motion yesterday for a retrial.
In a statement, the Middlesex district attorney's office said it
will not oppose the motion and will review the case file to see
whether Kenneth Waters, 47, should be exonerated.
''This is an amazing case,'' said Scheck in a telephone interview
yesterday. ''She was determined - even though she was a single mom
with two kids - that she would go to law school so she could learn
enough to free him because she knew he was an innocent man. And she
did save him.''
The case began in 1980, when Brow, 48, was found stabbed to death
in what police believed was a robbery.
On the day of the murder, Kenneth Waters - then a chef who lived
with his grandfather, girlfriend, and infant daughter - was
questioned by police because of his rowdy reputation in Ayer. He
already was facing charges of assaulting a police officer. But it
took two years for police to arrest Waters, who apparently knew Brow
because her children once rode the bus to school with him. The case
languished until police received a call from a man who was dating
Kenneth Waters's former girlfriend and who claimed that Waters had
admitted to the murder.
Throughout the trial, Betty Anne Waters and her seven other
siblings believed their brother would be found not guilty.
''We all knew that he was innocent,'' Waters said. ''He had an
alibi. He had worked all night that night.''
But during the trial, problems crept up. Kenneth Waters's former
girlfriend - the mother of his daughter - testified that he'd also
told her about the murder. The time cards from his work were never
introduced in court. And all along, the legal system that Betty Anne
Waters had always believed in proved confusing and, ultimately,
wrong, she said.
The public defender who represented her brother did not make
things easier, she said. ''He didn't really want to explain anything
to us. We felt like we were bothering him.''
Kenneth Waters was convicted of first-degree murder and, on May
12, 1983, sentenced to life in prison.
After her mother, a nurse's assistant, spent the family's meager
savings on expensive legal appeals with little results, Betty Anne
Waters made a decision.
''We didn't have any more money for attorneys and by that point
we didn't even trust attorneys,'' she said. ''I thought the last
thing that was left to do was to find out about law.''
It was a long road. Divorced with two young children, Waters
worked weekends as a waitress and a bartender to pay her way through
Rhode Island College. She then went on to graduate from Roger
Williams University School of Law, and became a lawyer at the age of
40.
All the while, she would speak to her brother on the telephone
three times a week and tell him not to give up hope. In law school,
she re-read the transcripts of her brother's trial and realized how
badly it had gone. But her brother's real break came two years into
her studies at law school, when she had to write a research paper on
the use of DNA in post-conviction releases.
''That's how I found Barry,'' she said, describing how she
stumbled across hundreds of references to the work of the Innocence
Project. ''There was something I read about the people who are
wrongly convicted, and that profile fit my brother to the T.''
She started writing to the Innocence Project for advice. After
passing the bar and officially becoming her brother's attorney in
1998, Waters called the courthouse to find out if any DNA evidence
existed that could prove her brother's innocence.
After begging a court clerk to scrounge through the courthouse
basement, she found it: a sample of blood, believed to be of the
perpetrator's, which was taken from evidence at the crime scene. For
nearly two decades, it had been kept in a yellow cardboard box that
could have legally been thrown away years before she found it.
The find, said Scheck, was extraordinary because ''75 percent of
the time'' the crucial DNA evidence that could prove innocence is
''lost or destroyed.''
In November 1999, Scheck asked the Middlesex district attorney if
the blood evidence could be tested and compared to Kenneth Waters's
DNA. This month the results came back: Waters's DNA does not match
the blood found at the crime scene.
Prosecutors have not decided whether Waters will be retried.
His sister, who now supports herself by managing a pub, says she
plans to assist in his defense if she needs to, but hopes it won't
be necessary.
''The more they delve into this case, the more they will realize
that there isn't even a case,'' said Betty Anne Waters, who may end
her legal career if the charges against her brother are permanently
dropped.
''The more they'll realize the injustice of it all.''
