When Truth Is All You Have by Jim McCloskey & Philip Lerman

Author:Jim McCloskey & Philip Lerman [McCloskey, Jim & Lerman, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

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In late 1987, I was still living in Mrs. Yeatman’s beautiful if somewhat neglected house on Library Place, but the burden of having all this going on under her roof, and having tons of mail coming to her home from so many prisoners throughout the nation, was too much for poor Mrs. Yeatman. She never said anything to me, but apparently she talked to my new partner in crime Kate about it—“When is he leaving, Kate?” she would ask, unbeknownst to me—and Kate kept hinting to me that maybe we should look for an office. “No, no, Mrs. Yeatman loves having me here,” I told her. Years later, Kate told me, “I didn’t have the heart to tell you she wanted you out.”

So on her own, Kate found us a little office on Nassau Street in downtown Princeton and convinced me to move the operation there. I still lived in Mrs. Yeatman’s home for a while, but she passed away shortly after we got the new office. When I left, to rent a room in a house on the outskirts of Princeton, it was a little bit like leaving your childhood home. This is where Centurion was born, where it took its first steps. I remember looking around the place wistfully, one last time, and thinking of how much Mrs. Yeatman had given me, just by her strong presence, her easy wit, her civil manner. She had given me a place to watch my creation grow up, and now it was time to see where it would take me next.

It had been a roller coaster of a year for me. And not without incredible heartache. Because while I was working on Clarence Brandley’s case, I had taken on another death row case as well, that of Jimmy Wingo. Jimmy—along with another man, Jimmy Glass—was convicted of breaking into the home of a couple on Christmas Eve 1982 and murdering them. It was a horrendous crime.

The night of the murder, both men were on the lam, having walked out of a small northwestern Louisiana parish jail. At their separate trials, Glass admitted that he was the shooter, but he testified, “Wingo made me do it.” From the get-go Wingo insisted he had split from Glass after the jailbreak and tried to hitchhike home in the rain; that he was never in that house; and that about an hour after they separated, he reluctantly accepted a ride from Glass when he pulled up in a stolen car.

I was bouncing back and forth between the Brandley case and Wingo’s, and so I wasn’t able to start on the Wingo investigation until June 2, 1987—just two weeks before his scheduled execution date. It was extremely stressful, dealing with these death row cases simultaneously.

The star witness for the prosecution was Wingo’s girlfriend, who had testified that Wingo said he’d been in the victims’ house while the murder took place. It was a story that was becoming all too familiar to me: She later admitted, in a video affidavit she gave me, that the story was a lie.

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