The woman who had identified Mixon viewed a lineup and said she recognized Daniel from the neighborhood, but that he was not one of the four men she saw the night of the murders.

After the lineup, when detectives told Daniel he was being charged with murder, Daniel realized he was not being released. So he told the detectives the truth: He had been in jail on the night of the murders. A check showed that, in fact, Daniel had been arrested for fighting in a park that night at about 6:45 p.m., and jail records showed he was released about 10 p.m. and the murders occurred at 8:43 p.m.

But Daniel was not released.

Instead, detectives went about constructing a case to support his confession. They found Adrian Grimes, a drug dealer who frequented the same park where Daniel was arrested that night. Grimes said he had seen Daniel in the park at 7:30 p.m. that night. They found two police officers who, weeks after the murders, filed a report saying they’d seen Daniel in an alley near the shooting around 9:30 p.m.

And three months later, detectives arrested Mixon. Detectives said Mixon confessed and said that he’d seen Daniel in the park just prior to the murders—bolstering the case against Daniel.

There was a lot at stake for the detectives, who said all eight defendants had confessed. Because all of them had implicated Daniel in the murders, if Daniel’s confession were to fall apart, the rest of the case would be in jeopardy.

By the time Daniel went on trial in 1995, the cases against Brown and Akia Phillips had been dismissed. A judge had ruled that Brown had been arrested illegally and that detectives had made an improper promise to Phillips to induce him to confess. Another defendant, Rodney Mathews, had been acquitted.

But the prosecution was still relying on Daniel’s confession, as well as the testimonies of Grimes, the officers who said they’d seen Daniel in the alley, and two other police officers who claimed that the records showing Daniel’s 10 p.m. release were unreliable. That was enough for the jury—Daniel was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Six years later, we believed our investigation had demolished the prosecution’s case. Grimes told us that when he said he’d seen Daniel in the park, he was lying in return for leniency on a pending drug case. The woman who’d identified Mixon the night of the murders said she’d resisted efforts by police and prosecutors to identify Daniel, even after she was shown Daniel’s confession. “They said it’s not lying because it’s in the confessions,” she told us. “They just wanted the boys. If those boys had been there, I sure would have said so, no problem.”

We found state records, which showed that the officers who’d turned in the belated report had made false statements in their report.

And we found police reports that had been turned over by prosecutors in one of Daniel’s codefendant’s cases but never been furnished to Daniel’s defense lawyer. One report said police were looking for James Anderson, who had been in the jail with Daniel on the night of the murders. There was no indication that Anderson had ever been found.