courtesy
The Miami Herald
Both Detective Scheff (top) and John Walsh were
determined to send Rivera to death |
« BACK The following afternoon, on Valentine's Day, deputies questioned Rivera again after an exterminator happened upon Staci's body in Coral Springs. Sergeant Carney sprang into action. He entered the interrogation room and told Rivera that BSO had the technology to find fingerprints on the body. As in Smith's case, it was a ploy to draw a reaction, and the detective got one. Rivera became "noticeably nervous," Carney later testified, and said, "I bet you guys do have fingerprints."
The BSO detectives also told jurors that at one point Rivera told them he blacked out and didn't "remember killing Staci."
While prosecutor Kelly Hancock used each of these alleged partial confessions in his closing argument, Rivera's side of the story never came out. On the advice of his trial attorney, Edward Malavenda, the accused didn't testify.
To New Times Rivera explained that he believed if he spoke with Scheff and Amabile he would indeed wind up serving a 20-year prison sentence. Not because he'd killed anyone but because any new conviction -- be it for exposure, assault, drugs, or burglary -- would likely put him away for that long.
Rivera also contends the deputies duped him into pretending he was the killer. During that game he made the damaging statements about the killer being short on gas. "I was sick already all right? I mean, I'm fantasizing about this crazy stuff, and I'm thinking, You know, maybe it's not a far step to put myself in the place of this other person and maybe give them some kind of clue," he explains. "Come to find out it was just a whole ploy on their part. I screwed myself."
Rivera contends Carney's testimony was also misleading. "I said sarcastically, sarcastically, that, "Yeah, I bet you do have fingerprints,'" he recalls. "They turned it around like I said it as an admission. Yeah, I got irritable -- I started thinking they were trying to set me up. I thought they were going to get fingerprints of mine, from a glass or something, and say they were on the body."
And Rivera denies saying he didn't remember killing Staci, though he acknowledges telling deputies he might have blacked out that Thursday night while on crack. "When we go to trial, it's, "I don't remember killing Staci.' I never said that," he states. "Jeez, if I killed somebody, I'm going to remember it. It was their suggestion, and I would reject that."
Attorney Marty McClain, who represents Rivera and several other Death Row inmates, says he's often seen police use similar offhand remarks to paint suspects as guilty. "It's the hallmark of police conduct that I find questionable," remarks McClain, who also represented Smith. "These loose comments are taken as evidence of guilt, and it always works out that they're never recorded."
None of these statements would have been made had Rivera invoked his right to counsel. And he claims he asked for a lawyer that first day but was denied by the detectives. "They said, "You don't have enough time to get an attorney. By the time you get an attorney, you're going to be charged with this, so you might as well try to help yourself now,'" he recalls. (The account of another sheriff's investigator, Robert Rios, seems to bolster Rivera's complaint. During an interview with Rivera February 18, Rios recalls, the suspect complained he'd repeatedly been denied an attorney.)
He says he kept talking because it allowed him to leave his jail cell and eat pizza and drink sodas with the detectives. "What we were talking about was like my past, my childhood, my high-school years, past girlfriends, their past girlfriends," he says, a touch wistful. "I guess they were trying to be chummy, you know, buddy-buddy. But I'm almost paying with my life for those few slices of pizza and sodas now."
The trial judge in Rivera's case, John Ferris, is retired, but remembers the case well -- it was the most highly publicized case of his career. Now 79 years old, Ferris says Rivera's admissions to Peck convinced him the defendant was guilty. "I don't remember any particular thing that proved he was guilty, but I had great confidence in the prosecutor, Kelly Hancock." (Hancock, incidentally, had prosecuted Townsend -- who was recently cleared -- prior to the Rivera case. The former prosecutor, now in private practice, was on a long vacation and couldn't be contacted by New Times.)
Ferris exhibited his admiration of Hancock during the trial: He almost uniformly ruled against the defense. The judge allowed not only the hearsay evidence of the BSO homicide squad but also testimony of a trio of criminal snitches who claimed Rivera had confessed to them in jail. One of the inmate informants was Frank Zuccarello, then a 22-year-old, smooth-talking criminal incarcerated for committing a series of burglaries, armed kidnapping, and other offenses. After his 1986 arrest, Zuccarello cooperated with numerous law-enforcement agencies, hoping for lenient sentencing. In court Zuccarello swore that prosecutors had promised him nothing in return for testifying against Rivera, but court records tell a different story: He struck an undated plea deal with the Broward State Attorney's Office that included a clause he would cooperate fully with Sergeant Carney on several criminal cases. Also, Hancock wrote a letter on Zuccarello's behalf to the Florida Department of Corrections just a few months after Rivera's trial. Zuccarello ultimately spent just 26 months behind bars for crimes that could have put him away for life.
Since testifying against Rivera, Zuccarello has admitted he intentionally fingered the wrong man in the 1984 murder of a Hollywood man named Charles Hodek. He's also been the subject of considerable controversy -- and media publicity -- in recent years for his dubious involvement in the 1989 conviction of Joyce Cohen for the murder of her husband, Stanley. Zuccarello claimed Joyce Cohen hired him for the murder, but his failures of three lie-detector tests about his testimony in the case have recently come to light. A former TV newswoman has also come forward, claiming that the lead police investigator admitted to her that Zuccarello wasn't really involved.
Ferris says he allowed the jailhouse testimony of Zuccarello and two other inmates -- prolific burglar Peter Salerno and child molester William Moyer -- because he felt the jury had a right to hear it. Ferris also made other rulings that Rivera's attorneys say tipped the scales against the defendant. The judge: permitted the prosecution to arrange for classrooms full of children to attend the courtroom as observers. Ferris says he wanted to educate the kids about the legal process;
allowed foreman Robert Thornton to remain on the jury after an investigator for defense counsel Malavenda discovered that Thornton was a member of a special club of BSO boosters who had contributed large amounts of money to then-sheriff Nick Navarro's campaign (Navarro had been quoted extensively in newspapers saying Rivera was guilty and testified against him);
allowed the 11-year-old victim in the Green Glades attack to testify in the murder trial, against Malavenda's argument that her presence would prejudice the jury; and
denied Malavenda's motion to admit information about the February 20, 1986, abduction and murder of 29-year-old Linda Kalitan into the record. The body of Kalitan, who was also on a bicycle, was discovered in the same field where Staci was found. That still-unsolved crime occurred while Rivera was in jail. NEXT »