Sydney Boles, Viola Du, Ashley Graham, Sam Krevlin, Jessie Liu and Dori Sotirovska

Special to the Detroit Free Press

Late in the night of May 19, 2005, a glass bottle flew through the second-floor bedroom window of a Detroit home and shattered. The accelerant in the bottle ignited and burst into flames. An infant and a 10-year old who lived in the house died.

Investigators identified a suspect almost immediately: Kenneth Nixon. He had a clear motive. Nixon’s girlfriend had an affair with his childhood friend who lived in the house causing the friendship to turn violent.

And police had an alleged eyewitness, a 13-year-old survivor of the fire who said Nixon was the culprit.

Less than five hours after the arson, police burst into a house nearby where the 19-year-old Nixon and his girlfriend were sleeping and arrested him. Police later found gasoline on his clothes and in his girlfriend’s car.

Just four months later, a jury found Nixon guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole and the case was closed.

But previously undisclosed internal memos, obtained by the Medill Justice Project, reveal that the lead investigator and the prosecution had doubts about their own case that Nixon’s lawyers say were never disclosed to the defense, raising questions about Nixon's conviction as he continues to proclaim his innocence from behind bars.

On May 23, 2005, just days after the fire, the lead homicide investigator wrote to his lieutenant to say that a statement from the 13-year-old star witness, Brandon Vaughn, was “obviously coached.” And on Aug. 3, more than a month before the trial, the prosecutor wrote to the same lieutenant to say the case had “serious problems” and there was a “desperate need” for more evidence.

Shortly thereafter, more evidence emerged in the form of a jailhouse informant. But even that informant, Stanley January Jr., said in a recent interview with MJP that he harbors doubt about Nixon’s guilt, though he stands by his trial testimony.

The memos are among several questions raised about Nixon’s prosecution:

Three witnesses interviewed by MJP said they saw Nixon the night of the fire and he could not have committed the crime.

Vaughn gave authorities widely divergent accounts of the events of the night, including where he was in the house and whether he actually saw Nixon throw a Molotov cocktail into the house.

At trial, prosecutors cited the gasoline on Nixon’s clothes as evidence of his guilt. But Nixon, a tow-truck driver, said he often had gasoline on his clothes, and a witness corroborates his account that he fixed a car with a fuel leak either the day of or the day before the fire.

Veteran defense attorney Sheldon Halpern, who handled the appeal of the case, said Nixon is “one of the few absolutely innocent people” he’s represented.

In a series of interviews from the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia, Nixon professed his innocence. He said the combination of multiple alibi witnesses and newly uncovered internal documents that reveal police doubts prove he didn’t commit the firebombing.

“As of today, I’m a 32-year-old man that has spent all of my 20s incarcerated for a crime that I didn’t commit,” Nixon said. “I was robbed of my youth at an age where I was really learning to discover what being a man was, being a father was, being an adult was.”

Maria Miller, spokeswoman for the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, said in an email that her office’s position on the Nixon case has not changed.

“This case has been reviewed on appeal and on Motion for Relief of Judgment, as well as the habeas petition heard and denied in the Sixth Circuit (Court of Appeals),” Miller said. “We have placed our position on the record in court and the Attorney General’s Office also did so in handling the habeas petition. We have no comment on this case at the time.”

Brandon, investigation, inconsistencies

Within days of the fire, the lead investigator raised questions about the testimony of their prime witness, Vaughn.

In his first interview with arson investigator Frank Maiorana shortly after midnight following the May 19 fire, Vaughn said he was in an upstairs bedroom when he heard a “loud boom,” ran downstairs and saw Nixon fleeing, according to police records.

In a second interview at 3:30 a.m. May 20, Vaughn said he was on the front porch when he saw Nixon get out of a green Dodge Neon and hurl a glass bottle at the top window of the home at 19428 Charleston St., records show.

In a third interview with Sgt. Charles Clark at 6 p.m. the next day, Vaughn said for the first time that he saw Nixon’s girlfriend, LaToya Caulford, driving the Neon and that Nixon was in the passenger seat. Vaughn told Clark the car was parked outside his house for about five minutes, according to the records.

Even Vaughn acknowledged he was confused about the sequence of events.

“Did you understand all the questions you were asked that morning of May 20th at 3:30 a.m.?” Clark asked.

Vaughn responded: “No, he asked me some questions and I had just woke up.”

Vaughn gave yet another account of the circumstances surrounding the fire at trial. He said for the first time he chased the Neon down the street as Nixon fled.

Largely based on Vaughn’s statements, authorities charged Caulford with aiding and abetting Nixon. She was acquitted of those charges in a trial that ran concurrently with Nixon’s but with separate juries.

According to Caulford’s attorney, Daniel Blank, the inconsistencies of Vaughn’s statements ultimately became one of the most crucial pieces of evidence in Caulford being found not guilty.

“I was able to impeach him with his prior testimony,” Blank said in an interview.

Nixon’s jury, however, found him guilty of all charges despite hearing Vaughn’s conflicting statements.

Vaughn’s mother, Naomi Vaughn, and her boyfriend who had the affair with Nixon’s girlfriend, Ronrico Simmons, testified at trial Vaughn told them that he’d seen Nixon. However, neither mentioned that claim in their first interviews with police right after the fire.

Rather, both cited an altercation that happened the day of the fire involving one of Naomi Vaughn’s daughters. According to police statements, her children got into a fight with another child the afternoon of the fire.

That child’s father came to Naomi Vaughn’s home following the fight and said, “This is how people’s houses get shot up,” according to her statement to the police.

The memos

Four days after the fire, lead police investigator Kurtiss Staples wrote a memo to his commanding officer, Lt. James Tolbert, saying he believed Vaughn’s most recent statement to Sgt. Clark “was obviously coached by family members.”

Staples had interviewed Vaughn just hours after the fire, when Vaughn told him he hadn’t seen who was driving the car as it left the scene. Speaking to a different officer the next day, Vaughn changed his statement, saying he had seen Caulford in the driver’s seat.

“Our star witness is 13 years old,” Staples wrote. “By introducing two different statements [it] will only make his testimony in court difficult at best.

“ … This new statement will only make the case against Kenneth Nixon come into a question of fact and puts our case in jeopardy.’’

As the trial approached, prosecutor Patrick Muscat also expressed his concerns about the case’s vulnerabilities.

“To be blunt, this case has serious problems,” he wrote to Tolbert a month before the trial. “The cast [sic] rests on Brandon Vaughn and he is, at best, unpredictable.”

Muscat asked for some follow-up work from the police, including DNA testing and background information about the conflict between Nixon and Simmons. He also asked the police to interview Nixon’s cellmates to see if Nixon had revealed any information.

Toward the end of his three-page memo, Muscat wrote: “I know this is a lot of work, but I feel it has to be done to give us a chance.”

In an interview with MJP, Robert Kinney, Nixon’s trial attorney, said he did not “have any clear memory of the memos” before trial. Two of Nixon’s appellate lawyers, Sheldon Halpern and Daniel Blank, said they had never seen the two memos.

That possible lack of disclosure raises the possibility that the prosecution violated the Brady rule, a federal standard which requires prosecutors to disclose to defense attorneys any information that could be favorable to the defendant.

Legal experts disagree on whether the failure to disclose the two memos would be a Brady violation. Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said a police memo raising concerns about the integrity of a star witness is “powerful exculpatory evidence,” but it might not have been enough to change the outcome of the trial and therefore may not have been a Brady violation if it were not disclosed.

But Eve Brensike Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said withholding the memo from lead investigator Staples to Tolbert “strikes me as a blatant Brady violation by the state. I would even say it was sanctionable. … This is not a case where this is inadvertent. This is a case where the prosecutor is saying, this is a high-profile case with problems. If he’s not disclosing that to the defense, it’s intentional, and it’s misconduct by the prosecutor.”

The Detroit Police responded to a Medill Justice Project public records request by producing a copy of the Staples memo. But the words “obviously coached by family members” were redacted.

Also redacted were the final two sentences of the memo in which Staples concluded that Vaughn’s latest statement “puts our case in jeopardy.”

“The fact that they’re still trying to hide this exculpatory evidence is problematic because it demonstrates some evidence of a bad-faith attempt to cover up exculpatory evidence that they should have disclosed,” Primus said.

Muscat declined to be interviewed.

The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office said in an emailed statement: “Prosecutors will often ask the police for additional work, and will continue to evaluate the case during the pre-trial process. This memo is not uncommon.” The prosecutor’s office did not answer a question about whether the memos had been turned over to the defense before the trial.

Attempts to reach Staples and Tolbert for comment were unsuccessful.

The witnesses

Three alibi witnesses interviewed by MJP place Nixon inside Caulford’s home on Havana Street, a few blocks away from the scene, around the time of the fire. But only one of them could account for Nixon’s whereabouts for the entirety of the night – Caulford. She did not testify because she was Nixon’s co-defendant. The other two alibi witnesses testified at trial.

In her witness statement and in a recent interview, Caulford said she and Nixon went into her bedroom with their son around 10 p.m. to watch television. The pair watched “The King of Queens,” “The Simpsons” and two episodes of “Cheaters.” According to a television guide published in the Free Press for the night in question, the shows aired between 10 p.m. and midnight that night. The fire started shortly before midnight.

After she was acquitted, Caulford signed an affidavit stating Nixon was with her when the firebombing occurred. Thirteen years after the crime, she staunchly maintains his innocence.

“I don’t believe with any inch of my heart that he had the capacity to do it,” she said in an interview.

Caulford’s cousin and roommate, Mario Mahdi, also was home that night with his girlfriend. Mahdi’s mother, Lisa Medina, was there, too. In a previously unreported diary entry, Medina said that her then-partner Majed Yousif came over around 11:30 p.m. to fix glass in the front door.

While Medina watched Yousif work, she said in an interview, she heard a “bunch of fire trucks” and sirens. Yousif could not be reached for comment.

Mahdi said in a separate interview that he also heard these sirens while Medina and Yousif were in the home. Medina said she did not see Nixon leave through the front door at any point before this time. Medina, Mahdi and Caulford all said the only other exit, the back door, was boarded shut.

Medina said Nixon would have had to pass her and Yousif if he had left the house. She said that didn’t happen.

In her journal, Medina wrote that she and Yousif left the house at 12:10 a.m. In an interview, Caulford recounted that Medina came back immediately to get her cigarettes and knocked on the window, waking Nixon and her up. Medina confirmed the sequence of events, saying Caulford brought the cigarettes to the door.

Medina said in an interview that police and fire vehicles were already blocking roads around Charleston Street by the time she left, meaning the fire was underway while Nixon was home.

“After we were done we left there around 12:10 a.m.,” Medina wrote in her journal. “When we got to Charleston house saw a lot of fire + police cars down the street. I guess there was a house on fire.”

Another witness who testified at trial, Basim Alyais, said he was sitting on the porch of his house, next door to Caulford’s. According to his testimony, he sat there from 7 p.m. until midnight or 12:30 a.m. During this time, Alyais said he saw Nixon briefly leave the home in the Neon and return around 10 p.m. He testified that he did not see Nixon leave the house again. The fire began shortly before midnight.

Alyais could not be reached for comment.

At trial, the prosecution worked to discredit the witnesses by suggesting that Nixon had paid them for their testimony. The prosecution attempted to attack Alyais’s credibility, saying he was drinking that night.

The informant

For Muscat, according to his memo, getting a jailhouse informant to testify was a “long shot.”

Stanley January Jr., a short time later, became that informant. A couple of weeks before trial, January told police that Nixon confessed he committed the firebombing and he was sorry “about the kids.”

In August, January told police that on May 23 the man – whose name he had forgotten – confessed that he firebombed a home and killed two children but didn’t know that the children would be there. January said the man was sorry because he had a son.

Less than three weeks after January’s interview with police, on the final day of Nixon’s trial, Muscat called him to the stand.

January pointed to Nixon as the man who had confessed to him in jail.

Asked by Nixon’s attorney whether January had seen coverage of the fire on television before talking to Nixon, he said he had not. He told the court that his testimony was not given in exchange for any kind of leniency, even though he acknowledged that he had done that in the past.

Thirteen years later, in multiple interviews with MJP, January said he remembers being perplexed by Nixon’s demeanor in jail and said Nixon didn’t seem like the type who would commit such a crime. “I have doubts,” he said.

But January stood by his testimony, remembering Nixon talking about his case.

He does now say – contradicting what he said at trial – that before even encountering Nixon, he knew the story of the firebombing on Charleston Street. Not only were inmates talking about the case, but those with access to a TV, including January, viewed the coverage firsthand, he said.

“I saw the firebomb story,” he said. “A lot of people saw the firebomb story … We were looking at the news and it popped up.”

The prosecutor, Muscat, built his case around the violent dispute between Simmons and Nixon over Caulford. “Jealousy can lead to anger and anger can lead to rage, and rage can lead to stupidity and that stupidity can lead to violence,” he told jurors.

Muscat also told the jurors that Nixon told Simmons: “This ain’t over until one of us is dead.”

During his opening statement, Muscat implored the jurors to consider Vaughn’s age as they listened to his testimony. “[L]adies and gentlemen, when you listen to his testimony, you will be able to tell that he’s doing his best to try to answer the questions.”

Muscat acknowledged that January was not without his own faults. “You might not like Mr. January either, but ladies and gentlemen, this case isn’t going to be about how many nuns I can produce to this court,” Muscat said.

Detroit Police Officer Roger McGee testified that he brought a canine accelerant detector to Naomi Vaughn’s house shortly after the fire was extinguished. The dog indicated that he smelled an accelerant on the second floor in the south bedroom. McGee later went back to headquarters to evaluate some of Nixon’s clothing using the same dog.

According to police records, Brandon Vaughn described the perpetrator as wearing a multicolored shirt, and in a warrant to search the Havana Street house where Nixon was sleeping, the suspect was described as wearing a multicolored shirt. But the shirt police collected from the Neon was white. At trial, the prosecutor read a report from Michigan State Police saying that Nixon’s clothes tested positive for gasoline. However, the prosecutor did not explain if the “defendant’s clothes” consisted of the white shirt collected from the Neon.

Officer William Niarhos, an evidence tech in the Detroit Police Department, collected evidence from the trunk, rear passenger area and front passenger seat and floor of the green Neon.

Nixon co-owned a tow truck company, and he said he remembers working the day of the fire and he usually wore the same clothes two or three days in a row. Nixon said he frequently had gasoline on his clothes.

“It wouldn’t be unusual because you have to get on the ground [to work on the car],” Nixon said in an interview.

The Medill Justice Project tracked down a friend of Nixon’s, Rico Buyck, who confirms his account and who was never called to testify at trial. Buyck said either the day of or the day before the fire he asked Nixon to work on his cousin’s burgundy Chevy Caprice. Buyck said it took Nixon a day or two to fix a gas leak on the car. Trevor Hill, Nixon’s business partner, said Nixon was working on the car the day of the fire.

One of the jurors in Nixon’s case, Lanny Reece, said in an interview the strongest evidence against Nixon was Vaughn’s testimony. But he said he wasn’t fully convinced at first of Nixon’s guilt because he couldn’t imagine someone holding a grudge for as long as the prosecution alleged.

Reece changed his mind, he said, after a “lady of color” on the jury said it was normal for people from lower-income neighborhoods to get back at each other for petty reasons.

The aftermath

Nixon has fought unsuccessfully to overturn the jury’s verdict since his conviction. His attorneys have filed multiple appeals.

Caulford signed an affidavit during the direct appeal process saying where Nixon was and what he did on the night of the fire. Nixon’s mother and other alibi witnesses from the trial also signed affidavits.

In his latest appeal, Halpern cited the ineffective assistance of counsel, newly discovered evidence, prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective appellate counsel. Halpern argued that the prosecution mischaracterized Nixon’s statement to January in jail.

Nixon’s attorneys can continue to file appeals if they have new evidence, such as an additional witness or DNA on the remains of the Molotov cocktail. It would be Nixon’s responsibility to go to court to have the remains of the bottle and wick tested. Sterling Heights Laboratory, the forensic science division of the Michigan State Police, could not immediately confirm whether the bottle still exists.

Caulford raises her and Nixon’s son in the Detroit area on her own and rarely interacts with Nixon’s family. She works seven days a week to make ends meet and to pay for their son to play in sports leagues and receive private tutoring. To date, she has visited Nixon only twice in prison and said she feels guilty for him being there. She believes that if she had never had an affair with Simmons, Nixon wouldn’t be incarcerated today.

Nixon fights from prison to overturn his conviction with help from his family and his girlfriend, Wendy Woods, whom he met while in prison. But his years being incarcerated have already put a strain on his relationships with his children.

“It’s torture to wake up in the morning and it’s torture to go to bed at night,” Nixon wrote in an essay for the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing. “It’s torture to talk to my kids over the phone, and it’s even worse to watch them leave me in the visiting room.”

Nixon said his biggest goal in life was to be an involved father, and he never imagined that he would be absent from his children’s lives. Now he only sees his children two to three times each year.

“I was stripped of the opportunity to enjoy those special moments of my kids’ lives,” Nixon said in a phone interview. “I was stripped of the opportunity to actually enjoy life.”

This investigation was conducted by six undergraduate and graduate students at Northwestern University as part of an investigative journalism course taught by Timothy Franklin, Desiree Hanford and George Papajohn. The Medill Justice Project supported the class work. Allisha Azlan and Rachel Fobar, MJP associates, also contributed to this report.