Curtis Flowers: On death row, tried 6 times for same crime, but is he guilty?

Dave Mann | APM Reports

Show Caption Hide Caption They spent more than 30 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer of Noxubee County had the prime of their lives taken from them.

This story is the first in a five-part series, produced in collaboration with APM Reports, examining the case of Curtis Flowers. This series is adapted from “In the Dark,” an investigative podcast produced by APM Reports.

It was perhaps the worst crime the town had ever seen. On the morning of July 16, 1996, four employees were murdered at the Tardy Furniture store on Front Street in Winona, a town of about 5,000 in central Mississippi. Each victim had been shot in the head.

After months of investigation, prosecutors charged Curtis Flowers, 26, with the murders. Flowers had worked at the furniture store for a few days that summer and prosecutors contended that he committed the murders out of revenge for being fired. In October 1997, Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death.

That was the beginning of a two-decade legal odyssey. Flowers’ conviction has been overturned on appeal three times for prosecutorial misconduct, and two retrials have resulted in hung juries. Each time a conviction was thrown out or a jury hung, the prosecution decided to retry Flowers.

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In all, he’s been tried six times for the same crime, which legal experts say is highly unusual. Flowers’ sixth conviction, in 2010, has so far been upheld. Flowers remains on death row at the State Penitentiary in Parchman, having been incarcerated for nearly 22 years.

But a yearlong reinvestigation of the Flowers case by APM Reports has found serious flaws in the evidence. Among the findings are that Flowers’ conviction was based on inconsistent or unsupported eyewitness identifications, ballistics evidence that experts described as subjective and unscientific and questionable testimony from jailhouse informants. The investigation found that Flowers’ death sentence is based on little direct evidence.

“It’s hard to trust this investigation,” said Ray Charles Carter, a Jackson lawyer who represented Flowers in four trials. “It’s hard to trust the people who ran it, and it’s hard to trust the prosecution trying this case. Where are the facts? Where’s the proof?”

District Attorney Doug Evans, who prosecuted Flowers in all six trials, stands by the conviction. Though he won’t answer specific questions about the evidence — saying the case is still on appeal — he says he’s sure Flowers committed the murders. “Definitely,” he said, “no question at all.”

Evans’ certainty isn’t shared by everyone. Opinions of Flowers’ guilt largely breaks along racial lines. Many black people believe he is innocent, and most white people interviewed believe he’s guilty.

The courts have been divided, as well. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed Flowers’ conviction from his sixth trial, in November 2014. His lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the state high court with instructions to reevaluate its ruling. In November 2017, in a 5-4 decision, the state Supreme Court once again upheld the conviction. More appeals are expected in the case.

An early suspect

In July 1996, the crime scene provided investigators with few leads.

DNA and fingerprints didn’t implicate any suspects. The murder weapon was never recovered. And it wasn’t clear why someone would murder four people in the middle of town in daylight.

The victims — Bertha Tardy, 59, Robert Golden, 42, Carmen Rigby, 45, and Derrick “Bobo” Stewart, 16 — had little in common except that they all worked at Tardy Furniture.

Flowers was one of the suspects early in the investigation because he’d worked at the store earlier that summer. But at first, there was no evidence tying him to the crime. No witness saw him enter or exit the store. And Flowers said he was on the other side of town — at his house, his sister’s house and a store — that morning and was never near Tardy Furniture.

Flowers’ conviction is based on three main threads of evidence: The route that prosecutors say he walked from his house to Tardy Furniture the morning of the murders; the gun they say he stole on his way to the crime scene; and the confessions Flowers allegedly made to fellow inmates.

APM Reports interviewed nearly a dozen witnesses who had told law enforcement they saw Flowers walking through Winona that July morning. Though no one saw Flowers enter the furniture store, the prosecution used all these witnesses to construct the route they say Flowers walked from his house to the crime scene and back.

Prosecutors contend Flowers left his house early that day, about 7 a.m., and walked across town to the Angelica sewing factory, where he allegedly stole a .380-caliber gun from the glove box of an unlocked car. Prosecutors allege that, after stealing the gun, Flowers returned to his house before walking back across town to Tardy Furniture.

Ed McChristian testified he saw Flowers walking past his house going away from the Angelica factory.

In an interview, McChristian told APM Reports that he doesn’t know which day he saw Flowers walking past his house in the summer of 1996. However, he said John Johnson, an investigator with the district attorney’s office, told him that someone else had said that McChristian had seen Flowers on July 16.

“They had it down pat for me,” he said. “They already knew I seen him. Somebody had told them I seen him, so I couldn't say I didn't see him.” He said that he didn’t want to testify but did so because he feared what would happen to him if he backed out. “They subpoenaed me every time,” he said. “I never did say (I’m not testifying), but I sure wanted to.”

Johnson didn’t respond to interview requests from APM Reports, and Evans would not answer detailed questions about the investigation.

A key witness recants

Two of the most important witnesses for the prosecution were Clemmie Fleming and Roy Harris. At Flowers’ first trial, they testified that they were riding in a car together downtown on the morning of the murders when they saw Flowers running away from Tardy Furniture, about a block from the crime scene.

But after the first trial, Harris recanted. In subsequent testimony and in an interview with APM Reports, Harris said Fleming wasn’t in the car with him when he saw a man run past his car. And, he said the man he saw wasn’t Flowers.

“The only time I seen somebody running is when I was by myself,” Harris said. “She wasn’t with me when I saw the fellow running.”

Fleming has stuck by her testimony that she saw Flowers running down the street while in the car with Harris.

It took a while before Fleming got involved — she didn’t speak with investigators until nine months after the murders. That became a theme in numerous interviews. Many witnesses, like Fleming, didn’t talk to investigators until weeks or months after the crime.

The second story in this series will appear May 27. You can download episodes of “In the Dark” on iTunes. You can also read more about the Flowers case at inthedarkpodcast.org. APM Reports is the investigative and documentary reporting team at American Public Media, which is based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Also of interest: Levon Brooks: 'An extraordinary man' who wrongfully spent one-third of his life in prison