On May second, nineteen eighty three, Clyde Coleman was fatally shot at his home in southwest Philadelphia. Multiple eyewitnesses claimed to have seen three black men fleeing the scene, the back of one of their shirts covered in blood. While one witness recognized the blood soak a sailor from a local bar, another witness said that he looked like a man who had visited with mister Coleman just two days prior. Eventually, this witness identified one of the victim's friends, Larry Walker,
from a photograph. Even though the other witnesses were not convinced that the police had the right man, the jury was. But this is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. I really hope you're in the mood to hear a remarkable story about an amazing man. Well, we have two amazing men on the show today. Actually, the person who lived through a nightmare that spent almost four decades of wrongful incarceration thirty eight years plus, Larry Walker, is here
with us. Larry, first of all, I'm sorry you're here because of what you went through to get here, but I'm very honored to have you on the show.
Thank you. For just taking time out to interview.
Me and with him is a guy I can't believe we haven't had on the show before, a luminary in the world of righting wrongs in the criminal justice world. Paul Castellerro, who is the legal director of Centurion Ministry, is a name that I'm sure you're familiar with, the very first innocence organization in the United States. Paul, I'm really really honored to humble to have you here on the show today.
Well, it's a great pleasure to be here.
And this incredible story was in what was certainly almost the epicenter of wrongful convictions. And I'm talking about Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, especially back in the eighties, but unfortunately not just in the eighties. And this was a case that well, I'll just say this, it was so bad that even the trial DA said that it was the thinnest homicide case
he ever tried. That was a quote. So before we get into all the details of the crime itself and of course of the process that led to this horrendous injustice, Larry, let's go back. What was your life like growing up? Did you grow up in Philly?
Yes, I grew up in Southwest Philly. Ten siblings, five brothers and five sisters. Close knit family. I was into sports, on church services, and active to my community. I had my children in an early age, and I was basically just trying to be a father to my children.
Twenty two years old when you went away. Your kids were basically toddlers when you went to prison, right I mean three and five years old?
Yes? Correct? Yes, my daughter was three and my son was five.
And how old were they when you came home?
My daughter was forty and my son was forty two.
That's just I mean, that really puts it in perspective.
The memories, the good times that I had when I was home with my children before this happened is what basically kept me a lot. It was times we went to the zoo and a lot of birthdays I remember with them. That kept me going through autumn thirty eight years while I was incarcerated.
You know, I was hardened when I read that the mother of your kids, they all stuck close to you throughout this ordeal.
Right, yes, correct. Their mother was very supportive even to this day. She was the one that when I wanted to give up, she kept helping me to encourage me to go on, you know. And she was the one that was coming up in the mountains, you know, the van services, getting the kids up early in the morning. She put them through Catholic school, you know, she helped them with, you know, the education that there are successful adults today. She was the glue that kept us together.
Well, I'm happy you had her, even though I wish she never would have had to show that kind of strength. So I want to get to how you were taken away from them, which started way back on May second, nineteen eighty three, when a friend of yours named Clyde Coleman was fatally shot. And let's turn to Paul for the details of this crime for which all accounts always pointed to three assailants, not.
One, and he obviously was not any of them. And they had really very good evidence of who the perpetrator was that they said was Larry in this incident. And the case develops where fourteen or fifteen year old young man is on his way home. He lived in an attached house right next to where the victim lived. As the young man had approached the house, he saw two guys that were lingering in the area. The victim and this young man, they have a joint walkway that they shared.
As he's walking up, the door opens to the victim's house and there's an unknown guy standing in the doorway.
This young man, he sees the victim was lying on the floor, and the victim gets up from the floor and he comes up behind the guy standing in the doorway, which they say is Larry, and he attacks him, and the victim yells to the young man to run, run, run, And it turns out the victim has been shot and is bleeding profusely, and when he grabs the perpetrator, who they say was Larry, from behind, leaving massive amounts of blood apparently on the guy's back shirt that eventually the
perpetrator is able to throw off the victim and he takes off running. The young man said the guy he saw in the doorway look like a guy he had seen a couple of days earlier who was over the house visiting with the victim.
And so the police had interviewed this young man, Victor Hopkins, as well as his mother, Emma Ellis, who had also seen the assailants, three black men who had just run off.
The cops, and they go around the neighborhood looking. A young woman a couple of blocks away says she saw three guys going down the street and one guy was holding a gun and he had blood on the back of his shirt. And I know that guy. He hangs out in a bar where I've been. The police totally and completely ignored it.
I also would like to add that one of the three men that was fleeing from the scene of crime had a cast on his hand. They should have went to maybe the nearest hospital in the community.
But they never explored any of those other avenues.
They made no effort none whatsoever.
Instead, they focused solely on the description from the fifteen year old kid, Victor Hopkins, that the purp looked like someone who he had seen at mister Coleman's two days earlier.
And that person, it turns out, was Larry. Larry knew the victim. They were friends, and Larry had been over there visiting him on a Saturday afternoon. This happened on a Monday, so he said it looked like him, And so the police try to figure out who is the person over there that Saturday that this young man says he looked like, and they identified Larry's photo and boom, Larry was in the case.
And our audience has heard many times we've talked about the incredibly unreliable practice of identification procedures. So, Larry, how did you first learn about this? This is a friend of yours that got killed. So that's a terrible piece of news to get and then to be wrongfully accused and ultimately tried and convicted. How did you first find out about this murder?
Jason? I basically found out the word on the street. People was talking about it. I heard it from a friend.
When did the cops first come and talk to you or did they arrest you?
The incident happened on the second. It was about two weeks after that round at thirteenth. They came to my home.
Did they look for the bloody shirt? Did they look for the gun?
Yes, they came with a warrant. They searched my home.
They found nothing, no evidence whatsoever they would indicate any kind of connection to this crime or is there any other crime?
So that didn't deter them at all. They went ahead and took you downtown and they interrogated you. How long did the interrogation last. Did you have an.
Attorney didn't have an attorney. I just knew that I was innocent. I told him constantly over that I had nothing to do with it.
He was fully cooperative with the police. He waived his rights to, you know, not speak to them. And whether they're doing this they know about this other person who's identifying the guy that is in a bar that matches the description to a t of the perpetrator. It is just mind boggling that they could persist in going after him or at the same time not investigate who this woman says is the person.
I was taken to I think fifty fifth and pounds and I was locked up. I never saw the streets ever.
Since nineteen eighty three to twenty and twenty one.
My family paid for a paid attorney for me, and he didn't interview the witnesses. He didn't interview me before I went to trial.
It's kind of frightening how you could represent somebody on a murder trial and not interview the basic witnesses in the case. He didn't interview the police officers, he didn't interview the young man who was identifying Larry. He had the report of the police officer interviewing this woman and what the woman said about seeing these guys running away
from the scene and never spoke to the woman. And then once the trial begins, he tells the judge, well, there's this witness, and we don't know where she is or anything about her. He does get the judge involved, and the judge says to the prosecutor, we'd better find this witness. There's another witness, which was the young man's mother. Initially she identifies Larry also, but when you get the trial she says, no, I'm not sure that this is
the person, and so she takes away her identification. But he didn't interview any of these people.
So going in to trial they had at least they thought they had two white witnesses identifying Larry, Victor Hopkins and his mom, Emma Ellis. But then on the first day of trial, with the mom recanting, it goes down to just one, the young teenage kid.
And incidentally, the young man when he testifies, when he asks can you identify the person you saw at Larry's sitting at the defense table, he basically says worth the de fact, well do I have to be.
Sure Jesus Christ. So even he was unsure and then on the second day of trial, the third witness, the woman who had seen the three men fleeing the scene and who knew one of them from a local bar. She was subpoened and did come in to testify.
The night before the second day, the police go to the hospital where this young woman was with her fiance who had been shot and paralyzed from the waist down, and they subpoena her and tell her she's got to be in court the next day.
She came and testifying and said that I wasn't one of the men, So I was very hopeful that the jewry took that into account.
By the defense counsel because he doesn't know the facts of the case, where he hasn't even read the police report, he doesn't elicit the fact that the guy that saw running had blood on the back of his shirt and that I know him, which is kind of critical. I
know who he was from a bar. It never gets elicited from her, and that's the testimony, And then the prosecution doesn't ask her any questions and then brings on one of the investigating cops to say, after he learned about her existence, he tried to find her, but he couldn't find her. According to this cop, there's no report or anything of him ever doing anything to find her. And then the cop says, when we went to the hospital to subpoena her, she didnied who she was. She's unreliable.
You know, she can't be trusted, that kind of stuff. And that's the evidence they present.
And you didn't know at the time that this investigator hadn't tried to find her, and the jury had no reason to doubt him. But something came out years later about that testimony, which we're going to get to it
just a bit. But as far as his trial, the jury was left with two witnesses casting doubt on Larry's guilt, the investigator casting doubt on one of those witnesses, and then ultimately the jury sided with the young man who made a sort of a hesitant could we call it in court identification of Larry.
I was really hoping that, you know, that it would have been in my favor. I couldn't believe that they came back with that verdict. I had a life sentence. It was like a nightmare. It was like an out of body experience. I was numbed, and it's just it was unreal. When I first came into prison, I went down to Greatest Ford. It was like a new world to me. I had never been incarcerated before. I heard rumors and stuff about prison. You go walk down the block,
they be yelling and so forth and all. Just knowing that you're around actual murderers, I was very nervous and scared. You know. A couple old heads told me, if you stay in your lane and you just mind your business, you'll be all right. And that's what I basically did for them thirty eight years. You know, I try not to get involved in certain things that I seen. I witness some murders one time with a guy with a shank,
and you know, just human nature. You want to help someone, you know, you want to let them come in your cell. But you know, people tell you that you can't get involved in them type of things because the people that are looking for that person, they would come after you. That sympathy that I have for people, you can't show them type of emotions when you're in prison you ask
them for trouble. It's completely opposite to that human nature and you just basically have to try to hold on to just a little bit of it to keep you from going insane. I lost both of my parents. While since I've been down, my mother and my father always believed in my innocent. My mother was coming up to see me all the many years, and to her health prevented her from coming. And even when her and my father was called home, me being a lifer, I wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. That was one of
my most darkest days. Not being there for them was really some of my roughest days. By being incarcerated for something I didn't do.
One of the things rationing about his survival for thirty eight years is so much of it is I think he had the benefit of fail He had this course, this family of his. They never abandoned him. They knew he was innocent. They stuck by him through everything thirty eight years. When you think about.
It, that's what kept me going, Paul, my daughter and my son. I had family. They supported me all them thirty eight years coming up in the mountains. That's what kept me going. Besides my faith in Christ. You know when I had bad days in prisons, that's what kept me going and supported my family and my faith. Instead of being pessimistic about life, I'm more optimistic. I had faith that one of the courts would, you know, get this right, that will correct the wrong that was done to me.
And so your appeals raised a number of issues. Chief among them, of course, was an effective assistance of counsel.
And Larry had read this lawyery, you know, or a lawyer who did nothing but took the retainer and pocketed it, and that was it.
And despite that, the appeals were repeatedly denied, and without knowledge of what had been hidden by the state about the third witness who was so badly the disparaged by the investigator. Trial is unreliable. The years just continued to tick off and roll on by.
After over so many years and times going from one court to another court, my faith started to you know, waiver. But I really believed that the truth was going to come out, that one of the courts would roll in my favorite to overturn my life sentence.
You know.
I try to reach out to different state representatives. I wrote Temple Innocent Project, I wrote dressful innocent projects, but no one basically really listened to my cry until I wrote a centurin ministry.
And centurion ministries took over around twenty fourteen or fifteen before Paul came on as their legal director, and at that time, an investigator named Alan Maymon was hard at work reinvestigating the case.
I'd like to speak a little bit about Alan and how he tried to get my records. He went down the city Hall with my daughter and my son trying to get these records to and so forth. For many years. It wasn't just you know, going down here one time.
So Alan Maymon and your family were just getting stonewalled by the previous DA Seth Williams. That name man. That was a dirty, dirty guy man. He ended up in prison himself. Meanwhile, they were reinterviewing witnesses. One of them gave them the name of a more likely alternative suspect with a rap sheet a mile long, who had been convicted of an eerily similar murder to mister Colvin's.
And this is before Larry Krashner became the district attorney. They were kind of faking that they had a conviction integrity unit in the Philadelphia DA's office. And when Centurion had some evidence that some guy indicated he was involved in the murder, this woman had received a statement from him. You know who they sent out to interview the woman. They sent out the son of the investigator in Larry's case to investigate whether his father's investigation of the murder was incompetent.
The sun I've heard everything. I've never heard that beare ya.
No.
Yeah, it was just it's mind boggling when you look at it.
But fortunately Larry Krasner was elected DA and your team was finally given access to those police files in twenty nineteen.
I just want to say a little bit about Larry Krasner. I just want to thank him for as creating the Integrity Unit and giving information over to Sinturnity. That's where I found out that the prosecutor, as far as the letter that he had wrote on my behalf is referring to that my case was the thinnest case that he ever prosecuted.
Yeah, this was from a twenty twelve and a twenty fifteen letter that your trial prosecutor, Richard P. Myers wrote to then DA Seth Williams. He continued saying, quote, it is the only homicide case that I tried in which I had a doubt regarding the guilt of the accused end quote. But this was just the beginning with Larry's files. The witness who had seen the three men fleeing and testified at trial that Larry was not one of the assailants,
if you remember. The lead detective god understand and said that she was first that she was unfindable, and then when they did find her, she was uncooperative and unreliable.
The prosecution didn't disclose the fact that this woman who witnessed these three men running away from the scene was a witness and was cooperating with the police in another murder investigation involving her boyfriend who had been shot along with another young man who had been killed, and her boyfriend was in the hospital paralyzed from the waist down, and she was cooperating with the police in that investigation, and they present her as this unreliable person. You know.
The cop actually says he tried to find her. Meanwhile, this woman's in the police station in the same homicide division, given interviews to this officer's colleagues. Is't this other murder case? And he gets on the standing Larry's trial and says, she was uncooperative, We couldn't find her. You know, she's unreliable.
Strangely enough, she seemed to have been easily locatable and reliable when she was being helpful to the state, but she quickly became a target for character smears and other dirty tricks when she began to testify to actually clear a man who was innocent.
And the tragic part of the whole case, on another level of many tragic components to it, is this young woman, based on her cooperation in that other case, got murdered about three months after Larry's trial, So she was always unavailable to us and to anybody trying to reinvestigate this case because she had been killed previously. The lord of Pennsylvania was if anything appeared in a public record, you're
responsible for it. And so if it appeared in a public record in nineteen ninety two, well that's when there's that's where the limitations began to run.
This is an awful and an often ignored element a post conviction for a lot of cases in Pennsylvania. If something is a matter of public record and therefore findable, the burden is and was on you and your attorney to have found it before being procedurally barred from using it, which means only six months from the date it was entered into the public record. That's all you got.
The Conviction Integrity Unit. They felt that in Pennsylvania that the course would say, you should have found the fact that this woman who witnessed these three men running away from the scene was cooperating with the police in another murder investigation, that the course would say, you should have
found this evidence earlier. Meanwhile, there had been a number of cases that come down from the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that basically said, no, you can't hold somebody accountable for something that's in the public record that they have no ideas in the public record.
So where was it part of the public record? Where were you expected to.
Affect there's a kernel in a case. It's a published case and it refers to her and being killed. But the case has no application to anything, you know, no legal principle. It wasn't anything your cite for president for any kind of legal issue. And they were saying, you should have found this case has learned that you know she was cooperating in this other case. You should have found out earlier that we suppressed evidence. The fact that
you have some evidence now too bad. He stays in jail because you could have found it earlier.
You'd think a conviction integrity and one of the reasons they would be created would be the circumvent these type of very stringent legal standards. So anyway, how was this ultimately resolved.
They wouldn't vacate the conviction. The only way we were getting Larry out was is if he took a plea to a reduced charge. So that's what we did. We had to take a plee to a reduced charge, and he walked out based on under reduced charge. The idea that we somehow should have been able to find this evidence of their perjury at his trial, and because we didn't find it out until when they gave us access to the records, too bad. Take the plea, you can walk out, or we can litigate the issue of whether
or not you should have found this earlier. And of course if we litigate it, you know where Larry is prison, Well, we litigate it. So Larry had his joy said, but fifty eight to either come out to a family he has been deprived of and a life he's been deprived
of for thirty eight years, or take a plea. I go to Larry, and I speak to Larry about this, and Larry says to me, Paul, could you guarantee me I'll be free in a year if we continue to fight, because I'm innocent, And I said, Larry, you know, I can't guarantee you what a court will do in a year. I mean, we might not even be, you know, heard in the year.
Look, I'm a big fan of Larry Krasner. I'd like to clone that guy and put him in offices all over the country. Nobody's perfect, though, this outcome was far from perfect. But nonetheless, Larry, I think you know, Look, no one can follow you from making that decision. What was it like to walk out into the air, into the arms of your loved ones? What did you do first? Did you go get something to eat? Did you hug a tree? Like?
What did you do? Well? Jason? When I first heard that, I was, you know, found out that I was truly going home after thirty eight years or something I didn't do in prison. You know, I was overwhelmed.
I was excited standing outside the prison waiting for him to come out. There was must have been what Larry, fifty people and all of his family. It was just the kind of you know, jump for joy moment dimnity emerged from behind the doors.
My family had a gathering for me at a hall. I went to go eat, and I had relatives, my sisters and brothers and cousins and so forth, and all.
His daughter Sharena arranged with the local community center to cater a little celebration lunch. It was wonderful and I.
Went out to go eat with Paul and his white was there. I had a big stake for my first mail.
It was really cool.
Larry. We're all thrilled that you're free, that you're home, that you're here with us today. I know that there'll be people that are listening that would like to support you as well. You have a go fundme that people might be able to help you because the state obviously has never given you any compensation and they're not going to. So this is the part of the show that I always look forward to. It's called closing arguments, and it
works like this. I thank each of you again for taking your time to be here today and share this remarkable story. And then I'm going to turn my microphone off, beat my headphones on, and kick back in my chair and just listen to anything else that you guys want to share.
I guess what I want to share is that, you know, Larry is an extraordinary human being, and I think he's blessed by the fact that he has a wonderful family. I don't want to be negative, but these wrongful conviction cases where people can out of jail after spending thirty eight years or twenty four years or whatever the period of time thirty years, it's not a victory. It's a sad comment on a system that consistently and persistently makes the same mistakes over and over and over and really
does little to correct them. You know. Yet, we have a federal system that is hostile to reviewing state courts convictions. And that wasn't the case, you know, pre nineteen ninety six and the passage of the Anti Terrorism Affected Death Penalty Act, and state courts have created barriers to relitigating
cases and to bringing cases of innocence forward. People have to understand that there are lots and lots of innocent people behind bars that are prevented from bringing claims based on time constraints and in access to evidence that they should be able to access. But the courts say no, you don't have a right through it, and the problems continue to this day, over and over, and Larry's case is really illustrative of exactly that. And it's just a
frightening kind of system. And you have to understand the system. It is dependent upon human beings, and human beings have to act in a certain way in order for fairness to occur, and when they don't do what they should do, you wind up with wrongful convictions.
Jason, I just would like to encourage of the family that may be going through something similar like my case, that family support is very important for people that's incarcerated for something they didn't do. I just like to encourage other families to support they loved ones. And I also like to encourage the listeners to write other organizations that take cases on like minds. If it happened to me,
I believe that it can happen to other people. I just like to thank some turn in ministry for believing in me and fighting for me over these many years and bringing me home to my family and my loved ones. Jason, once again, not to repeat myself, to thank you for taking his time out for you know, interviewing me and getting my story out. It means a lot to me and just want to say go equals.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea, and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Cleibern. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR
nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrong for Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Opening Number one