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In January 2000, Frontline broadcast a program called The Case for Innocence, profiling three
life prisoners who, in spite of their serious claims of innocence and DNA evidence in their
favor, could not be set free.
What most people think is if you're innocent and you prove you're innocent, you ought to
get a new trial.
Roy Kreiner had been sentenced to 99 years for rape.
Clyde Charles had been convicted of rape and sentenced to life without parole.
Earl Washington had been sentenced to death, later commuted to life.
But within a year and a half of the broadcast, all three were free.
After 20 years in prison, Clyde Charles was released in December 1999.
Having served 14 years, Roy Kreiner was pardoned in August 2000.
After 19 years in prison, Earl Washington was released in 2001.
We are sorry.
The system is broken.
Lawyers don't get innocent people out of the penitentiary, journalists do.
But as journalists, we knew there were other cases, including one we had originally investigated
but didn't have time to finish.
It haunted us, so two years later we went back to it.
That was the story of Frank Lee Smith.
Little did Chiquita Lowe realize that the drive she took one night 16 years ago in Fort
Lauderdale, when she was 19, would haunt her for the rest of her life.
It was April of 85.
I asked my grandmother can I hold a car to go to a friend's house.
I went down the street by the park, and as I was coming down, I seen this guy here, he
was flagging the car down, so I stopped.
And he asked me if I had 50 cents, I told him no.
The man she said seemed delirious, agitated, with a droopy eye and a glassy look.
Frightened, she drove off.
I came back into the neighborhood about 30 minutes to an hour, and I seen all the commotion
on the street that I came down, and I seen amulets, I seen police cars, I seen a lot
of people gathering around.
So I went over there and I asked them what happened, they said a little girl got killed.
The little girl, eight-year-old Chandra, had been brutally raped and was unconscious.
Her mother Dorothy McGriff had come home late from her work as a nurse's aide.
She told the police she had seen a stranger standing near the window.
When she approached him, he ran.
In the dark, she couldn't see his face, she said, only his shoulders.
Inside, her daughter lay dying.
Her nine-year-old son Reginald was asleep in his bed.
Chandra had been beaten and strangled.
She was on life support for nine days before she died.
Chief Richard Sheff of the Broward Sheriff's Office led the investigation.
We conducted our investigation.
We ultimately made contact with two individuals, a Chiquita Lowe and a Gerald Davis.
They indicated that they had observed a man emerge from a field across the street from
the Dorothy McGriff residence.
They had engaged in a conversation with this man.
The conversation itself was bizarre and the man appeared bizarre given the amount of traffic,
which was very light traffic that went through that area, the proximity to the crime scene
and the close time between when this man is observed and when Dorothy McGriff comes home
to find the suspect emerging from the house.
It seemed logical to consider this person as a potential suspect.
At the police request, Chiquita Lowe and Gerald Davis went to the Sheriff's Office to help
produce a sketch, which they both agreed looked like the man they saw.
Chiquita took a copy of the composite home and showed it to her family.
A day later, a man wheeling a cart with a television set on it approached Chiquita's
house, knocked on the door and offered to sell it.
Someone in the family took a look at him and panicked.
Everybody kept running in there saying, Chiquita, Chiquita, the killer, I had a man on the sketch
out here.
Get up, get up, get up.
You better call the police.
As I get up and I go to the back door, I seen this person here walking away from me and
the straggler hair is all I really can identify and say that that was the man.
And they kept saying, call the police, call the police.
So I called the police and told them and they came out and they picked the man up on the
next couple of streets and put him in jail.
The man they arrested was Frank Lee Smith.
He had a record.
He was convicted at 13 for manslaughter and at 18 for murder.
He had been on parole for the last four years.
I think they probably canvassed the area and they spoke to different people and they said,
hey, this guy looks like somebody you might be speaking of.
And then they probably pulled a sheet on him, saw that he had been arrested previously and
then it went from there.
For Andrew Washer, Frank Lee Smith's defense attorney, the case became especially significant.
To be honest with you, I have never tried a murder one case after that particular case
because I felt that the system was unjust.
And I just felt that he didn't do it.
The defendant, Frank Lee Smith, 38 years old, son of a prostitute who was murdered, never
knew his biological father.
He had spent a total of 15 years behind bars.
First after he stabbed another youth in the scuffle after a football game.
Then at 18, he and a friend shot a man during a holdup.
He pleaded not guilty to the rape and murder of little Chandra Whitehead.
There was no physical evidence presented.
Nothing.
No.
The prosecutor, who is now a judge, would not talk to us on camera.
But what he had at the trial, he said, were witnesses.
Dorothy McGriff, the victim's mother, testified that she picked Frank out of a photo lineup.
But when questioned by the defense, she said that she identified the person by his shoulders.
Gerald Davis described the man he saw as having a wild look, straggly hair, and droopy eye.
But he wasn't confident in identifying the defendant in the photo lineup, and he was
reluctant to cooperate.
That left Chiquita Lowe as the main witness.
Chiquita Lowe, 19 at the time, was nervous but consistent.
Dorothy also described the man she saw that night as having a wild look, straggly hair,
and a droopy eye.
He was big, with big arms and a big chest.
She had first picked the defendant out in Detective Schiff's photo lineup, then confirmed
her identification at trial.
Frank Lee Smith, she said, was the man she saw.
Chiquita Lowe's testimony was the key to the trial.
She was the only one that was insistent, out of all the people, that she had a good look
at him and at this person in the courtroom, and the person that she ID'd was the person
that she had seen on the street.
Detective Schiff, who was made deputy of the month for having solved this crime, testified
that he showed the eyewitnesses two lineups, one with Frank Lee Smith and one without him.
He also testified that he trapped the defendant into an incriminating admission.
This crime was committed in the presence of an eight-year-old boy, the brother, Reginald
Whitehead, who was carried by the suspects from one bedroom into another and slept through
the entire incident.
I said to Frank Lee Smith, I said, look, I don't know whether you did this or not, but
I want you to be aware of something.
If you did this, I'm going to be able to find out, because that little boy did not sleep
through this whole incident.
He saw the person who murdered his sister, and if that's you, he's going to be able
to identify you.
His response to me was to say, no way that kid could have seen me, it was too dark.
And I said, oh, really?
He said, yes, the lights were out.
And I said, obviously, I mean, there's something to that statement, because I had no idea whether
the lights were on or off.
To me, that was a very compelling statement.
There were no tapes or transcripts of the interrogation, and during sentencing, Frank
denied he had ever made such a statement.
However, this was presented to the jury as an involuntary confession.
After five days of trial, the jury convicted Frank Lee Smith, and he was sentenced to die
in the electric chair, joining the hundreds of inmates on Florida's death row.
But there was a problem with the death penalty there.
Although Florida was the leading state in executions at that time, there were no lawyers
assigned to represent the condemned inmates in their appeals.
It came to such a point that in 1985, the Florida Supreme Court stopped all executions
until the state could provide the inmates with lawyers.
Eager to solve the problem and move the executions faster, the legislature created an agency
of special public defenders to take on the death row appeal process.
The Capitol Collateral Council got hold of Smith's case when his death warrant was signed
in 1989.
Among the lawyers who would represent Frank Lee Smith during the appellate process would
be Brett Strand, Marty McLean, and an investigator, Jeff Walsh.
First came onto the case with the execution right around the corner, less than 90 days.
While we were under unbelievable pressure, really, it's hard to imagine when you get
up one morning and you go into work and then someone says, hey, work on this case and they
want to kill him in a couple of months.
When you look at the case on the surface, it's very troubling if you're a defense investigator
like myself.
When you look at the type of victim and the nature of the crime itself and Frank's criminal
history, you know, you're like, oh, this is not good.
But as I started to dig into the case, it became very clear that there was really no
evidence or very little against Frank Lee Smith.
Jeff Walsh's immediate task was to look for clues the police investigators neglected.
He began in the streets.
And, of course, I knew in this area there had been many rapes and or homicides of young
women that, you know, were very similar in nature to the case I was working on.
And I realized by reading the police reports that there were several other individuals
other than Frank who were listed as suspects.
And Eddie Lee Moseley was one of the names that was linked to many of these crimes.
I had no idea who he was.
Obviously, I started digging deeper.
He went to the police station to examine Eddie Lee Moseley's file.
As I got into the Eddie Lee Moseley files, I saw a photograph of Mr. Moseley.
And it was stunning.
This is the photograph of Eddie Lee Moseley.
And this is the composite sketch that was put together by Chiquita and a police sketch
artist.
I mean, they're just identical.
And the minute I saw the photo, I remember I ran to the telephone and it was like Mardi
Gras or something.
It was a big event, you know.
And we actually that day came up with a slogan we had, it was Free Frank Lee, because we
felt we had uncovered who it was Chiquita had seen that evening.
The resemblance was indeed striking, down to the droopy eye that both Gerald Davis and
Chiquita Lowe described.
The next step was to show the picture to Chiquita Lowe.
It had been almost four years since the trial.
Jeff Walsh wasn't sure Chiquita would even agree to see him.
Well, I had a hard time locating Chiquita.
We just were working around the clock trying to find her.
And actually a mail carrier is the one that told me where she'd lived, ultimately.
And we spoke through the door, the closed door, she was concerned about who was there.
And when I told her why I was there, she immediately opened the door and let me in and basically
asked me, what took you so long?
Where have you been?
And I didn't really quite know what to take of that at first, and just explained to her
what I was doing on the case, and showed her the picture of Eddie Lee Moseley.
And it was very much of a physical reaction.
That picture, I seen the man like I seen him yesterday, I seen the droopy eye, I seen the
look on his face, and it just really just shook me up.
It shook me up.
I was so afraid.
When Jeff left that night, I closed down everyone in the house and just locked all the doors.
I was so afraid.
Well, it was a very strange combination.
It was relief, like I finally get to tell somebody, but very tense and nervous and afraid.
What does this mean?
How's Frank going to react?
That was really one of her biggest concerns.
Frank Lee Smith must hate me.
This is an innocent person that been in jail for 16 years.
This man did not do this, and I feel so bad, so guilty and ashamed.
Looking back now, she says, she can't stop thinking how, as a teenager, she came to identify
the wrong man.
I was pressured by my family, the people that's in the neighborhood, and the police officer,
because they kept telling me, I'm the only one who can put this man away, because I'm
the one that seen that man that night.
And that's the way I was raised and brought up, is to obey older people.
She had identified Frank Lee Smith's picture before in Detective Chef's lineup, but when
she saw him in the flesh, she said, she began to have doubts.
When I went in that courtroom and seen that man, he was too skinny, too tall, and he did
not have the droopy eye that I seen the night of the man when he murdered this little girl.
She told no one of her doubts.
I know that I lied on the stand that day, but I was pressured because of what the police
officer was telling me, what the people in the neighborhood was going through, and that
little girl's mother.
So what did you do?
I went home and told my grandmother, and cried on her, and she told me that you have to pray
about it, and that's what I did, kept praying over the years, something came good about
it.
In 89, Jeff Walsh came to me.
That was when Jeff came with the picture of Eddie Lee Mosley.
Who was this Mosley, and what did the police know about him?
The answer was staggering.
Mosley's home, marked by a yellow dot on the police map, was in the middle of a neighborhood
rife with rapes and murders of young black women.
The green dots stand for sexual assaults, the red for rape murders.
Eddie Lee Mosley was hardly an unknown.
His name has been connected to these crimes for years.
Detective Kevin Allen has been working for 15 years for the Fort Lauderdale police, whose
jurisdiction borders that of the Broward Sheriff's Office.
The crimes were committed in both jurisdictions.
I was a rookie homicide detective in 1987.
One of our patrolmen had found a dead body in northwest Fort Lauderdale and asked for
any homicide detective.
So I got on the radio and volunteered for the case, and within half an hour I was at
the crime scene.
And?
When I got to the crime scene, it was a black female who was nude from the waist down,
the top portion of her clothing was pulled over her breast, looks like she'd been dead
four or five days.
What did you do?
I worked it like any other homicide, you know, basically get to know the victim, get to know
the victim's family, friends, acquaintances.
Came to basically a dead end after about a week or two, reported that to my supervisor
at the police station, and that's when I ran into Doug Evans.
Doug Evans was a Fort Lauderdale police detective who retired in 1987.
Doug asked me how I was doing on the black female that had been found raped and murdered,
and I basically told him I'd come to a dead end, and he said this, he goes, I haven't
been to that crime scene, and I haven't read anything about it, but let me tell you about
it.
It was a black female, nude from the waist down, top portion of her clothing pulled over
her breast, and she was dead for several days when you found her.
And I said, yes, how did you know that?
He says, because it's been happening here for the last 15 years.
Doug Evans has been following Eddie Lee Moseley's activities for almost 30 years.
In 1973, I was assigned to be in charge of Fort Lauderdale Police Department Rape Squad.
We had an excess of close to 300 cases.
We went through the files and discovered that we had at least possibly three different suspects
involved in the rapes.
We arrested all three subjects.
The last one was Eddie Lee Moseley, and that was our first introduction to him.
We held live lineups.
I made up a photo lineup with Moseley, and the victims identified him.
So I went to the chief.
I personally told him that this was the biggest problem that the City of Fort Lauderdale Police
Department, all the police department had, was Eddie Lee Moseley.
I say, he was identified in 41 sexual battery cases.
See, he never confessed to anything.
He never confessed, not one time, to any case.
All these people identified him.
When in 1973, Eddie Lee Moseley was brought to trial on two counts of rape, he was declared
incompetent by reason of insanity and was shipped to a mental institution for the criminally
insane in Chattahoochee, Florida.
Then, five years later, a new string of rapes and murders occurred around the same neighborhood.
Doug and I were having coffee one day, and I said, Doug, do you know that they found
some more bodies?
And he says, yeah.
And he said, you're thinking what I'm thinking?
I said, yep.
I wonder if Eddie Lee Moseley's out again.
And Doug said, well, I'm going to make some calls, and I'll get back with you.
And Doug got back with me and said, Mac, he's out.
But they soon learned that another suspect had already been arrested.
He had confessed to almost everything.
His name was Jerry Frank Townsend, and he had an IQ of 50, the mental capacity of a
child.
Based on his confession, he was convicted of two rape murders and pleaded guilty to
others.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
Doug Evans didn't buy it.
They never conferred with me, during the investigation, the sergeant or the sheriff's department
after they arrested Townsend.
They never talked with me, even before, even when we went to trial, because the detective
from the sheriff's department said in the trial that I had a fetish for Eddie Lee Moseley.
You had it?
And I had a fetish for Eddie Lee Moseley.
Well, I did.
Whatever you want to call it.
Anytime a man has committed that many criminal offenses, well, then somebody should be concerned
about it.
Beginning in 1973 and continuing through 1987, when he's incarcerated, there are no unsolved
rape murders of black females in Northwest Fort Lauderdale.
Immediately upon his release, within 30 days, we find a black female at the rate of one
a month until he's incarcerated again.
And that history has repeated itself consistently over 15 years.
Out of the mental institution and back in the neighborhood, between 1980 and 1987, Moseley
was in and out of prison for rape.
In April 1985, when Chandra Whitehead was killed, he was out.
Chandra's mother, Dorothy McGriff, was his cousin.
Without knowing any of this history, when Chiquita Lowe saw the picture of Moseley that
Jeff Wall showed her, she was certain that he was the man she had seen on the night of
the crime.
She gave a sworn affidavit to that effect.
The Florida Supreme Court was impressed enough with a key witness changing her mind to order
the trial judge to hold an evidentiary hearing to consider Chiquita's new testimony.
Waiting for that hearing, Chiquita went over and over in her mind what she would say to
the court.
Please, the Lord gave me a second chance to prove myself that I know that I made a mistake
and now I'm here trying to get Frank out.
So I'm begging you, please let Frank out.
He needs to be out.
He did not do that crime.
He needs to be out.
Frank did not do that.
Ed Lee Moseley did it.
And please let him free.
Let him free.
I just can't stand up here and just think that this man is going to die of just something
that I said when I was young, very young.
Marty McClain handled the evidentiary hearing.
I found her extremely convincing.
I was always convinced by her.
I was convinced by her demeanor, by her behavior, by what she said in and out of the courtroom
and so my goal in March of 91 was to present her testimony in order to convince the judge
they had the wrong guy.
Joel Silvershine, now assistant state attorney, explained the state's position in 1991.
They were determined to prove Chiquita's new testimony was not credible.
In other words, when she changed her story, she was lying.
I think she was telling the truth in 1985 and 1986 when she consistently under oath
identified Frank Lee Smith as the person who perpetrated this crime.
She gave statement after statement after statement under oath saying that Frank Lee Smith was
the one who she saw that night and after they show a five-year-old picture of Eddie Lee
Moseley to her, all of a sudden she changes her mind.
They just kept on badgering me and badgering me on the witness stand and just kept on frustrating
me and I kept telling them what I said back then, I was pressuring to it, but the man
who did this was Moseley.
That's the man who I seen the night that stopped and asked me for that 50 cents.
That's the man who did it.
No doubt about it.
That's the man that I seen.
One detective chef who had always been consistent in his depositions and trial testimony that
he showed the witnesses two lineups, one with Frank Lee Smith and one without him, now remembered
that he actually showed them a third lineup with Eddie Lee Moseley in it.
In 1991 when it became convenient to try and say Chiquita Lowe is now lying, suddenly there
was a third lineup.
He couldn't produce it.
He had no documentation to support it.
He just suddenly started saying there was a third lineup and he showed Chiquita Lowe
a photograph of Eddie Lee Moseley and she did not identify him.
I know I did not draw any reference to the Eddie Lee Moseley lineup in my notes.
I think that saying that I said there were only two lineups might be a mischaracterization
of what I said in trial.
I don't think, I may be wrong, but I don't recall testifying that there were only two
lineups per se.
I think I was asked a question which contained, a segment of the question contained an issue
about any potential other suspects or lineups of photos to which I answered no.
That was obviously not the correct answer.
The answer was yes.
What does that mean?
It means that according to Deputy Chef, we showed her Eddie Lee Moseley at the time that
this happened and she said that's not the man.
And so therefore you can't believe her when she says now in 1991 that's the man.
It was an effort to discredit her and to say that she's lying.
Chef insists that he had a lineup in which he put a picture of Eddie Lee Moseley.
And who did he allegedly show it to?
To the witnesses.
Okay.
If he did something like that, it's his obligation under the law to give a copy of that lineup
to the prosecutor and it's the prosecutor's obligation to give the defense, and I was
his defense attorney at the time, a copy of that lineup.
I never received a copy of that lineup.
I knew nothing about an Eddie Lee Moseley and I don't believe that Mr. Demetrioulaouis
knew about it either.
The prosecutor.
Correct.
No one seems to remember it.
This is the lineup that everybody says they didn't see.
Okay.
Well, now not everybody says they didn't see it.
Chiquita didn't see it.
Chiquita says she doesn't recall seeing it.
The prosecutor.
The prosecutor I know I probably did not show it to.
Dorothy McGriff remembers seeing it.
The lawyer.
Okay.
The lawyer.
You mean Andy Washer?
No.
He would not have seen it either.
The only person that I know of for a fact that remembers seeing it and has testified
to that is Dorothy McGriff.
Dorothy McGriff, the victim's mother, has now become the state's chief eyewitness.
But Mrs. McGriff's memory of the events has changed through the years, from identifying
the man's shoulders in the dark, to seeing a flash of his face, to picking him out from
a lineup, then from a photo album, where she also identified Moseley as her cousin.
Reginald Whitehead, now 26, is Dorothy McGriff's son and Chandra's brother.
Mrs. McGriff refused to talk to us, but Reginald and his wife Tracy agreed.
This was the first time they had seen the composite and Moseley's picture.
This is a big resemblance.
A big resemblance.
And this is what the witnesses saw at that point.
Boy, I don't see how they ever could have mistaken that composite with that person.
I have a feeling that Reggie doesn't see it that way.
Maybe he just doesn't want to see it.
It's too emotional for him to look at the resemblance, but it's very obvious.
I see a resemblance, yeah, I see a big resemblance.
I don't know if your mother saw the composite, but if I were to show her this side by side
like that, do you think she would change her mind that it could have been Moseley?
I'll say, I'll give it a 50-50 chance that it's possible, you know, but it's, one is
something you believe that happened, and you know, not believing, but you knowing who you
saw can't change it, just can't.
Reginald and Tracy, who have four children, are very close, and yet she knew almost nothing
about the family's tragedy.
Moseley told me that he had a sister before her, and she died, and he didn't too much
go into detail.
It wasn't really something discussed.
It was just a hush-hush thing.
It was as if she wasn't there, as if she never existed, that it was like she was never
born.
That's the way I saw it.
She wasn't discussed.
Even though never discussed, Reginald says, she has never been forgotten.
How much did you think about it in all these years?
A lot, a whole lot.
Sometimes day to day, hard to go to sleep.
Sometimes when I'm at work, it'll just cross my mind.
When I do go to sleep, I'll have to watch the TV, so I can have other things to think
about besides the bad thing that happened to my sister, and that's how I go to sleep
at night.
Till today?
Still today.
A month after the 1991 evidentiary hearing, the judge rendered his decision.
The motion was denied.
He found Chiquita hesitant, slow, evasive, and not credible.
He concluded that the fact that she did not remember seeing Mosley's picture in Detective
Chef's so-called third lineup showed that she was confused.
Copies of the decision were sent to the two parties.
But then it turned out that State Attorney Paul Zaks participated in the drafting of
the judge's decision without the defense's knowledge.
This is called ex parte communication, and it is considered improper.
The defense objected.
The fight over the ex parte communication would take seven long years until the Florida
Supreme Court vacated the order.
A new hearing was scheduled in 1998.
All that time, Frankley Smith was on death row waiting.
By then, he had been there for 13 years.
His life was passing in aging mugshots.
Frank has kept at Florida State Penitentiary right near where the electric chair is.
So for the last 13, 14-plus years, he's been there very close to where they've executed
every minute.
He knows.
Over the time that I knew Frank definitely, he was deteriorating mentally, and it became
harder and harder to communicate with Frank because he was losing touch with reality and
because his anger intensified over the years, and he fell apart.
It was very, very sad to watch him just lose his mind.
Frank's closest relative was his Aunt Bertha.
I think about him all the time.
All the time I think about him, all the time.
I read the letters sometimes, and I get upset.
I had a whole lot of letters.
I took all of them, and I put them somewhere where I don't even know where I put them,
just to get them away from me for a while.
Dear Bertha, my heart has grown to become a stone now.
My only fault's fate and the lack of understanding for not having allowed me to live a life as
everyone else in this world.
That is, deserving the opportunity to express their talent.
And now I see what my life have been wasted.
Finally in 1998, the new evidentiary hearing began.
The first part of the hearing dealt once again with the credibility of Chiquita Lowe.
The famous mystery line-up that Detective Chef talked about and couldn't produce seven
years before finally and inexplicably made its appearance, looking unlike any other line-up
shown previously.
As for Eddie Lee Moseley, shown in the line-up, in a picture which the police said was taken
a year before the crime, he too looked different, thinner, with close-cropped hair.
This became the state's argument.
The Moseley photo which Chiquita identified had been taken five years before the crime.
According to the state, Chiquita identified Moseley when he no longer looked like this
photograph.
The Eddie Lee Moseley picture was taken in 1980, about five years or less than five years
prior to the homicide.
People's appearances changed.
And the question you must ask is, when was that picture taken?
Eddie Lee Moseley, at the time of the homicide, did not look like the picture that was presented
into evidence by Mr. Smith's lawyers.
Detective Kevin Allen has written a yet unpublished book about Eddie Lee Moseley.
Okay, who does that look like?
Eddie Lee Moseley.
Any question about that?
Well, it's a composite.
It's not a photo, so it can't be an exact match, but I spent a lot of time with Eddie
Lee Moseley.
It looks a lot like Eddie Lee Moseley.
If I had shown you this sketch in the late 80s or even early 90s, do you think that's
what you would have told me?
Yes.
Eddie Lee Moseley.
Yes.
Did anybody show you the composite?
No.
Another reason the state insisted that Eddie Lee Moseley couldn't have done the crime was
because according to his M.O., they said, he never harmed children.
Eddie Lee Moseley was kind of a creature of habit.
He had a modus operandi.
He had a way of operating about him.
He did not like, he was not into kids.
He didn't do his homicides inside.
All his homicides were committed outside.
They were all with adults.
They were all with people who either picked up or with prostitutes.
Doug Evans does not agree.
Didn't he kill a little girl in 1979?
I don't remember her name.
Sonia Maria.
She was quite young, wasn't she?
Yes, 14.
Teresa Cummings, 15, children, also a young man, also a young boy, also molested by Moseley.
He wasn't killed, but he was molested by Moseley.
And the police knew it?
Reports were there.
Why, when there were two men, one with an overwhelming number of rapes and murders,
the other also with a record of manslaughter and murder, but never rape, why would the
police and the prosecution fight so fiercely to keep the one on death row and not even
investigate the other?
That's the $64,000 question here.
I have theories and ideas.
I don't know what's true.
Maybe it's incompetence on the police part.
Maybe it's because it's black on black crime and nobody cares.
Let's just get anybody, somebody.
It's beyond comprehension why they never looked at Eddie Lee Moseley, never went to his house,
never talked to him.
According to the state, there was no reason to investigate Moseley.
Why not?
Smith was identified as the person who committed this crime.
You can blame a lot of things on Eddie Lee Moseley, but this homicide is not one of them.
Yes, sure.
Yes.
Donald Jones is a professor of law at the University of Miami.
One of the things that strikes me about this case is they decided not to spend much time,
much money, much resources, anything.
It's as though this person's life wasn't worth time.
It wasn't worth checking.
It wasn't worth this extra step.
And why isn't it worth it?
Is it because it's the life of a black man?
Professor Jonathan Simon of the University of Miami School of Law followed the case closely.
It seems to me, again, we don't know, we weren't in the room, but what we can reconstruct
in retrospect is a decision made pretty early on in the investigation that this is the right
person, and then really a kind of a juggernaut toward a conviction and a death sentence that
starts at a very early stage.
And that is deeply troubling because of the finality of what we're talking about.
By 1998, dozens of people across the nation were proved innocent and released from prison
based on DNA evidence.
An advanced form of DNA testing was now permitted in the Florida courts.
Some DNA materials still existed in the case of Chandra Whitehead.
One month before the 1998 evidentiary hearing, the defense lawyers filed a motion asking
to test Frank's DNA, but it only started a new round of angry legal battles.
First, the prosecution suggested that the DNA test be done in their own lab.
The defense refused, asking for the FBI lab and for the results to be known only to themselves.
The state refused.
The defense then gave up their conditions, except for the testing by the FBI, at which
point the prosecution changed their mind and opposed the testing altogether, on the ground
that it was procedurally barred.
We are at this point standing on our procedural bar, at this point in time, which means this.
They had two years from when DNA was admissible, or from the point in time that they could
have brought this evidence forward, to file or amend their motion to include DNA.
They didn't do that.
They have objected and said it's procedurally barred, which means that Mr. Smith should
have asked for it nine years ago, and since he didn't, he can never have it tested and
must just be executed.
Why did the state first agree to the DNA test and then oppose it?
Carolyn McCann, assistant state attorney, explained, it all had to do with how strong
Chiquita Lowe's testimony would be in the new hearing.
Before the evidentiary hearing was scheduled to commence in September, our office sent
a letter to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, exploring the possibility of
doing DNA testing on particular pieces of evidence.
And the reason that we did that was that this case was coming back for an evidentiary hearing
because a key witness, at least the Florida Supreme Court's mind, had recanted her testimony.
We knew that this witness who we counted on at trial was no longer going to be a witness
for the state, it was going to be a witness for the defense.
Therefore, losing a key witness, we needed to bolster our case as best we could.
So we explored looking for other evidence via DNA that would put Frank Lee Smith at
the scene of this homicide because in our mind and in the mind of law enforcement, he
did it.
We had no doubts.
They found Chiquita's testimony at the hearing unimpressive.
As it turned out, in our minds, she was not credible, she was not believable, and so the
reasons that we wanted the DNA testing no longer existed.
Professor Donald Jones says he was outraged.
How could they be so unconcerned about whether they sentence this person to death?
How could they be so careless as if they're simply dealing with ordering light bulbs
or something?
We don't need these extra light bulbs.
You don't need to, you know, put a molding on the house.
I mean, it's so impersonal.
This is a person's life, and you don't need to check the DNA.
This is a person who could be sentenced to death, and you don't need to check this evidence.
What makes them so sure?
What produces this almost imperial arrogance?
The judge denied the motion for a new trial, as well as the testing of the DNA.
For the next year, there would be motions filed by the defense, objections from the
state, more filings by the defense, with no ruling from the judge.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, at the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, Detective
John Curcio was cleaning and organizing his station's files.
He was going to throw out all the old cases and reassign the ones which were still open.
At one point, he came across a file that piqued his interest.
It was Jerry Frank Townsend, the man who had been jailed 20 years before.
It contained the cases of two women, Kathy Moore, 24, and Sonia Marion, 13, both raped
and killed in 1979, both confessed to by Townsend.
Curcio remembered Doug Evans' theory about the Townsend cases.
And Doug Evans always believed that Jerry Frank Townsend had not committed either Sonia
Marion's case, her murder, or Kathy Moore's case.
So again, that was one of the things when I was looking at the crime scene photos that
made me pull up the cases to see exactly what they had as far as evidence in 1979 against
Jerry Frank Townsend.
Kathy Moore's body was so badly decomposed that no further investigation could be undertaken.
But as for Sonia Marion, there was some DNA left on her clothing.
Curcio then sent Townsend's DNA to be tested against semen left on Sonia Marion's clothing.
He also added Frank Lee Smith's DNA just in case.
Neither matched.
He then tried another batch of DNA of various suspects, Eddie Lee Mosley among them.
It was the first time that Mosley's DNA had ever been tested.
By October 2000, the result was clear.
It was Mosley.
Biologically, I think we're proving pretty much what Doug Evans has said for years is
factual.
Doug always felt that Eddie Lee Mosley was the only serial killer working or killing
people around Dillard High School committing these murders.
On Eddie Lee Mosley, you're going to have Vetta Turner, 73, Emma Cook, 1983, Teresa
Giles, 1984, Sonia Marion, 1979.
When the news came out, the various law enforcement agencies seemed shaken up.
It certainly opened the eyes to the fact that Eddie Lee Mosley certainly was involved in
killing a 13-year-old.
How about an 8-year-old?
Pressured by the defense, the prosecution finally and somewhat reluctantly sent Frank
Lee Smith's DNA to the FBI lab to be tested against what was left in Chandra's rape kit.
They also sent Mosley's DNA.
Frank Lee Smith was excluded.
Mosley's DNA matched.
The news was released at the height of the Florida national election crisis.
It would be Jerry Frank Townsend who would get the headlines.
Frank Lee Smith's sentence was also vacated.
We've had lots of people around the country now vindicated by DNA evidence, and we are
all familiar with that moment when we see them walk out of jail.
And while there's just no way that that can put back what's been taken from them, it is
a fundamentally important part of the beginning of a happy ending.
You see the psychological look of relief and vindication on the face of them and their
families, their lawyers.
Frank Lee Smith didn't get that.
Ten months before he was exonerated, on January 30, 2000, at age 52, Frank Lee Smith died
of cancer on death row.
His grave marked by a small flag.
Jeff Walsh was the last visitor to have seen Frank Lee Smith alive.
How did you find him?
It was terrible.
It was just awful.
He had lost a tremendous amount of weight.
He was clearly in a lot of pain.
He was strapped to a hospital gurney.
Essentially, he was naked, and he was just, I mean, just in excruciating pain, just moaning.
I sat there and gave him water while I was with him.
He was just dehydrating, starving.
And again, it just goes back to the truth of the matter is that they just didn't care
about him as a human being at all.
We've had many of our political officials in some of our newspaper editorials almost
congratulate themselves that while we didn't execute him, instead cancer executed him for
us.
But, you know, for those millions of us in this country that have seen what cancer is
like up close when we've seen a loved one die of cancer, to understand what happened
to Frank Lee Smith, the fact that he died of a very painful cancer surrounded by people
who absolutely hated him, with nobody around to even tend to his need for water, to make
sure you get enough medicines, to pain reliever.
This is something that should hang over every citizen of Florida.
Apparently, not everybody dwells on that.
A few weeks after we left Florida, Frontline received an unexpected letter from the Broward
Sheriff's Office telling us that even if Frank were innocent of Chandra's murder, they would
have never allowed him to leave prison alive.
Their explanation was that when Frank Lee Smith had been arrested, they found a knife
on him, which violated his parole.
Therefore, the letter said, if DNA testing had been conducted while Mr. Smith was still
alive, it is possible he would have been moved off death row.
However, he would have remained in prison.
Chiquita Lowe said she learned about Frank's death from the newspapers.
I didn't get a chance to say my goodbyes to him.
I didn't even get a chance to even ask him, is he upset with me?
And that's something that's really just inside of me, just tearing me apart, just tearing
me apart.
It's just I couldn't have a closure with him.
I wanted a closure with him when he was alive.
And I really thought I was waiting for that chance and that day for him to get out so
I can get close to him, is to tell him I tried everything I had to do to get you out of here
and now you out of here.
If there's anything I can do, allow me to do it for you.
I really wanted to do what I did, had my hopes and my dreams up on that, that day.
He's part of my daily routine, and I surely do.
Every day?
Every single day I do.
Hello Frank.
If it wasn't for me, he wouldn't be where he is, he wouldn't have to go through all
that torture and that torment.
And you're in my prayers each and every day.
You didn't have a chance to have a wife, kids, no one to love him, and I feel that it's my
fault.
Be good and I'll see you soon, okay?
Chiquita is now saving money, she says, to buy Frank a headstone.
As for lead detective Richard Sheff, he was accused by the defense of knowingly giving
false testimony in the Frank Lee Smith case.
After a lengthy investigation, it was announced that there wasn't sufficient evidence to charge
him with a crime of perjury.
Eddie Lee Moseley is still in a mental institution for the criminally insane, by now connected
to 17 murders and 60 rapes.
Moseley is now considered one of the nation's most prolific serial killers.
For more on this story, explore our website, which includes an interview with producer
Bacal about the background to her investigation, reports on Florida's shameful ranking and
death penalty case errors, a look at the U.S.'s changing attitudes on capital punishment,
and more on our website, including whether your local station is rebroadcasting this
program.
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