(This is the first of a two-part series. Read part two here.)

T

he gunshots weren't enough to rouse the neighbors from their beds. It took the screams to bring them out into the dark and the cold.

"They're dead!"

Two bodies lay on the ground outside a public housing development in the Centerville section of Camden. These were the city's 13th and 14th murders of 1995, and it was only January.

A protest erupted. Police were put on high alert. The arrests came swiftly, amid public outcry.

Kevin Baker and Sean Washington, then both 25, were convicted after a two-day trial in 1996. A single eyewitness, a woman who testified she was a habitual crack cocaine user out looking for another fix, placed them at the scene.

Each was given two consecutive sentences of 30 years to life, meaning they'll be in their mid 80s before they get out of prison.

But an examination by NJ Advance Media of hundreds of records, trial evidence and interviews with key players raises serious questions about whether the two are guilty.

Lawyers from the Last Resort Exoneration Project -- an initiative at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark that offers free legal and investigative services to those it believes to be innocent -- say neither man pulled the trigger.

"They were victims of a total breakdown of the criminal justice system at every point," said Michael Risinger, who runs the project with his wife and co-counsel, Lesley Risinger.

The Risingers say the evidence they have gathered proves the two men innocent and points to something investigators missed all those years ago.

The actual killer.

In stacks of filings submitted in Superior Court over the past three years, the attorneys allege:

Investigators, feeling the heat of a spiraling murder rate, pegged Washington with the killings based on street rumors.

Under pressure from detectives to identify suspects, a local woman claimed she witnessed the murders when she was actually blocks away, and selected Baker as a second shooter from a stack of mugshots "at random."

None of the physical evidence put either man at the scene, and newly developed forensic and ballistics techniques can prove there was only one shooter.

They allege police transcripts of key witness statements were riddled with errors and omissions, and the original audio tapes didn't surface until years later. The team also claims Baker and Washington received ineffective assistance from overburdened public defenders, and were poorly represented in their post-conviction challenges.

The Camden County Prosecutor's Office, which has fended off state and federal appeals from the two men over the years, says the exoneration project's assertions are "baseless."

"The courts have consistently held that justice was served in this case," said Andy McNeil, a spokesman for Prosecutor Mary Eva Colalillo.

The Risingers accepted Baker as their first client in 2011, and in the course of vetting his claims, came to believe not only was Baker wrongly convicted, but so was Washington.

After getting Washington his own attorney, they're now seeking to merge the cases and get both men a new trial.

"They're serving 60-year-to-life sentences for crimes they didn't commit," Michael Risinger said. "If that doesn't strike you as unjust, then I don't know what to say to you."

THE CENTERVILLE MURDERS

Camden was among the deadliest places in the country in 1995, the tail end of the crack epidemic that ravaged urban neighborhoods like Centerville. There had been 45 homicides in 1994, in the worn down city once known for Campbell's Soup, RCA Victor, and the famous shipyards that built many of the nation's luxury liners and warships.

The first killing of 1995 happened just 10 minutes into the New Year, when an East Camden couple were killed in their home during an attempted robbery. Before the year was out, 58 lives would be snuffed out in bloodshed, according to federal crime data.

In the morning hours of Jan. 28, the crack of gunfire again erupted, piercing the silence around the Roosevelt Manor apartments. Nobody seemed to pay the gunshots any mind.

"I did not bother to get up because it was normal around the area -- high crime area," one witness who lived in the apartment complex later told police.

His girlfriend just turned over after the shots rang out. "When I heard them, I just went back to sleep," she said.

Then came the screaming.

"A few minutes later, I heard somebody say, 'Damn, damn, damn they dead,' " she said.

She woke her boyfriend and looked out the window to see one man running away from the bodies as another man approached.

The commotion brought neighbors to their windows and doors, and several told police in addition to the screaming man, they saw another neighbor, Tyrone Moore, approach the bodies and identify them to stunned onlookers by their nicknames: "Rock" and "Murph."

Just before 6 a.m. on Jan. 28, the city police's 911 system recorded a call from a frantic-sounding man who told the dispatcher he'd found two dead people "just laying in a (expletive) pool of blood."

"Send somebody, please," the man pleaded. He never gave the dispatcher his name.

Emergency responders arrived at Roosevelt Manor at 6:01 a.m. to find Rodney "Rock" Turner, 35, in a camouflage jacket, slumped on his left side. Margaret "Murph" Wilson, 40, wearing a rose-colored jacket, was face down nearby, her head resting in the crook of her left arm. Each had been shot in the head at close range.

The blood was puddled all around them, coagulating in the winter chill.

The crime scene investigator was summoned at 6:11 a.m. and arrived just after 7, according to his report. Police recovered three spent cartridges, all of them marked "SB 9mm Luger" and a pack of cigarettes from the scene.

An autopsy later determined Wilson also sustained gunshot wounds to her left arm, and two bullets were removed from her clothing. The bullet that passed through Turner's skull was never found. Police collected blood and hair samples and tested the cigarettes for prints. They didn't find any.

Whoever killed "Rock" and "Murph" left little behind.

A sketch of the scene of the crime submitted as evidence by the defense. Click to enlarge in another window »

THE KILLINGS ROCKED A NEIGHBORHOOD

January had been a bloody month, and residents of Roosevelt Manor had seen enough of the violence that had overtaken their neighborhood.

The following afternoon, outraged residents from the development and nearby Branch Village apartments formed "a human blockade" on South Eighth Street to demand more police protection, according to a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

During a community forum covered on local television, residents told the city's police chief they felt unsafe in their own homes. They wanted more cops present in the neighborhood.

A Reuters report the week after the killings, citing local police and the prosecutor's office, said the city's "360-strong police force is overwhelmed by a young population which doesn't respect life."

The deaths of Turner and Wilson left their families reeling.

"My husband did nothing wrong," said Virginia Turner, Rodney Turner's wife, who has lived with the grief ever since that morning. "He was a good man. He gave anything he could for anybody."

Turner had been a member of the Army National Guard since the 1970s, federal records show. His wife said he'd just gotten a job as a custodian for the local board of education, after years working nights as a chef at a nearby restaurant to support his family.

"My kids had it rough because their father wasn't around, because somebody took their lives," she told NJ Advance Media. "He was a good father."

Wilson would make money babysitting and cleaning neighbors' homes, investigatory records show. She had her struggles with drug addiction but was headed to rehab the day she was murdered. A friend told police she "had her bags all packed" for a detox center in Salem County, according to an investigator's report.

Soon after, the city's mayor convened a summit of local and state law enforcement to address Camden's mounting death toll. It was there authorities said they were making great strides stemming the violence: They had identified suspects in several murders, including the killings of Turner and Wilson.

Police video taken after the killings shows the scene at Roosevelt Manor.

THE SOLE EYEWITNESS

With little physical evidence at the crime scene, police had to hope somebody, anybody, had seen something.

Harry Glemser Jr., then a homicide detective with 10 years under his belt at the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, was assigned to the case.

Now retired and working as a private investigator in Florida, Glemser was a seasoned detective who boasted a 98 percent solve rate and "never lost a court case," according to online profiles. He declined multiple interview requests for this story.

Police canvassed the neighborhood in search of witnesses the morning of the killings, according to his report, dated Feb. 7, 1995. Several repeated what the initial witnesses, the girlfriend and boyfriend, told investigators: They heard shots and ignored them, but came out to find the bodies after they heard screaming.

They found no eyewitnesses that day, but Glemser had a few leads. One man said he'd heard Turner and Wilson were killed "because they had stolen a package that belonged to a local drug dealer," the investigator wrote in his report.

Camden is a city of little neighborhoods, and it didn't take long for other rumors to find their way to police. Investigators got word a local woman, Denise Rand, may have been "out there" that night, and interviewed her on Feb. 2, records show.

Rand told police she was out with a cousin, Tyrone Moore -- the man neighbors claimed had identified the bodies -- the night of the murders. She said she saw two men run up to Turner and Wilson, who were standing in the Roosevelt Manor courtyard, and fire at them at close range. The victims collapsed as the suspects fled past her, down Phillip Street, she said.

The interview was recorded, but the tape never surfaced until years later, when one of Baker's former attorneys requested it from the prosecutor's office.

In the police transcript, Rand said "Stuff" and "what was his name...K.B." were the shooters, using their nicknames.

But the Risingers commissioned a blind, third-party transcription they claim shows how muddled and confused Rand's story was -- so much so, she didn't refer to Baker by his nickname, "K.B."

They say she called him "J.D."

"Um, we cross the street, right, they in the middle of the block, right, let me think ... first it was Murph, then Rock, then Stuff, then what's his name, uhmm ... you'll have to excuse me, I'm so nervous..." Rand said, according to the tape.

"Just relax," another detective said, and Rand pauses on the tape.

"J.D. comes around the corner, and then they just shoot 'em, right, and then they just run past me," Rand said, according to the third-party transcript.

The quality of the tape, now 20 years old, is poor. But prosecutors said in a June 2015 court filing that if Rand did identify Baker as "J.D.," she correctly identified him elsewhere on the tape.

Moore, Rand's cousin, was also brought to the station that day, records show, but police never recorded a statement from him. He later told an investigator for the public defender's office he didn't like how the detectives treated him, and a record of a polygraph exam performed by police indicates they questioned him about his possible involvement in the murder.

The Risingers claim he was never a legitimate suspect, and that the lie detector test was intended to intimidate the two into giving favorable witness statements. They say based on statements Moore and other neighbors made in the years since the murders, it's clear Rand was several blocks away, and couldn't have witnessed the killings.

Rand and Moore could not be located for this story.

Rand's interview with police was the first time Baker was mentioned in the investigatory record, but it fit with the rumors about Washington that were circulating in Centerville.

A Camden city detective said he told Glemser word on the street was Washington, known to police as a member of the Eight Ball Posse, a local street crew, had beaten up Wilson a few weeks earlier over drugs.

The detective, since deceased, said years later in a sworn statement he was merely passing along a rumor, but Glemser wrote in his report the cop told him "Washington was our shooter."

Another witness, since deceased, told detectives a man had roughed up Wilson at the witness's apartment weeks before the killings. The witness didn't identify the assailant, but according to Glemser's report, he showed him an array of eight mug shots from the Camden County Correctional Facility.

The witness pointed to number six: Sean Washington.

Records also show a former boyfriend of Wilson, serving time in the Camden County Jail, told investigators he had information about her murder. The man, who also told police he'd heard Baker was innocent, came forward because he was trying to get transferred out of the jail, claiming Washington's friends had threatened him.

He told police he overheard Washington in a common area months after the killings, bragging he was going to get away with murder.

PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1

On paper, Sean Washington was not an unusual suspect.

Over 6 feet tall and 250 pounds, he had a criminal record and a reputation as a neighborhood tough guy, known for gambling and slinging drugs. Washington concedes it was an image he cultivated in those days, but says he was no killer.

"I was a pseudo big bad wolf," he said. "I would huff and puff, but I wasn't blowing no houses down."

During a phone interview from New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, Washington recalled as a small boy his teenaged uncle being shot and killed by a friend playing with a gun.

After his uncle's death, Washington remembers walking into his grandmother's bedroom to find her weeping, alone, in the dark.

"To see her upset like that when her son died, it devastated me," he said. "Ever since then, I said to myself, 'I would never do to nobody's mother or grandmother what I saw somebody do to my grandmother.' "

The memory did not steer him completely away from criminal enterprise, though. Washington was in and out of the criminal justice system starting at age 15, court documents show, with offenses including drug possession, assault and making terroristic threats.

He was just shy of 24 when he was charged with the killing of Turner and Wilson. At 44, he's spent so much time behind bars that his version of events the night before the murders starts with a beeping pager.

Washington said he was out late and was fixing a meal at his sister's place when he got a page from a Paulsboro number he didn't recognize. He had been seeing a Paulsboro woman and thought she might be calling, he said, but his sister's phone could only make local calls, so he headed out to a nearby pay phone.

The first call didn't go through, he said, so he walked around the corner to the Roosevelt Manor courtyard in search of somebody to lend him change.

"That's when I noticed the two bodies laying there, dead," he said. One of them looked like his nephew, he said, and he bounded toward the bodies to see what had happened.

"I thought it was him at first, and I got highly upset and a little hysterical," he said.

Washington says he ran, screaming, to the pay phone and dialed 911 -- that he was the frantic-sounding man pleading with the dispatcher to "send somebody, please" -- and he was the man witnesses heard crying out at the grisly discovery.

Afterward, he said he ran home to check on his nephew. He never spoke to police about what he saw.

In court papers, Washington's attorney, Joseph Fortunato, argues his client-- who was later charged with two other murders -- was "neatly presented to the public as a monster who had gone on a 'killing spree' in January, thus conveniently explaining a large part of the January spike in homicides, in an attempt to convince the public that Camden was not in danger of becoming the nation's small-city murder capital."

Homicide clearance data for Camden obtained from the FBI through a records request shows 1995, the year of the arrest of Baker and Washington, saw the highest number of murder arrests over a 20-year period.

In their January court brief, Camden County prosecutors disputed that claim, arguing the defense "fails to show" political pressure led to the arrests of Baker and Washington.

Edward Borden, who served as Camden County prosecutor at the time of the arrests, declined to comment for this story.

A SECOND GUNMAN?

Kevin Baker says he didn't know he was a suspect in the murders until the police came pounding on his door.

"They came to my house and got me," he told NJ Advance Media. "It wasn't like I was like running or nothing like that. I had nothing at all -- no involvement -- so I was shocked."

Born in Georgia in 1971, Baker says he had "an irregular home life" after his parents split up, moving in and out of homeless shelters with his mother. He dropped out of Camden High School in ninth grade and made a half-hearted attempt at entering the drug trade, buying small quantities and selling them to other kids in the neighborhood.

"I wasn't no big-time drug dealer," Baker said. "Just trying to survive the situation I was in."

He was arrested five times between his 17th and 18th birthdays, all on petty drug charges and bench warrants, records show. The more serious offenses came after he turned 18.

That summer, he and a bunch of guys from the neighborhood were rounded up by police after a brawl. One of them had a gun, but all six were pinned with weapons possession and other charges, according to a police report.

"The indictment said I pointed a firearm," Baker wrote in a sworn statement. "I didn't. I never had the gun."

Out on parole at 22, he said, he moved in with friends in Centerville and started working toward his GED diploma. He found summer work as a security guard at a community pool. After a rocky childhood and adolescence, Baker said it was his girlfriend, Michelle Redden, who set him back on the right path.

"She didn't really want me out there (on the street)," Baker said. "She was really pushing me toward doing something else."

Baker said he was out with Redden until about 2:30 the morning of the murders. They returned to her home at Crestbury Apartments and went to bed a few hours later, according to statements the two made after Baker was charged.

They found out about the crime later that day from Redden's brother and watched a news report about it on television, she told investigators.

After his arrest, Baker says he was pressured to rat out Washington, who remained at large. Washington was the real target, and Baker was told he'd get a good deal if he turned on his co-defendant, he says.

"I told them I couldn't because I hadn't been there," Baker said. "I couldn't just make up a story."

Washington was a wanted man, but he took his time turning himself in to police. He told NJ Advance Media he laid low in northern New Jersey and later in Trenton, but eventually returned to Camden to surrender. But before he could meet with his attorney, 15 police officers swarmed the house where he was staying, where he was arrested on March 21, according to media reports at the time.

By then one of the city's most sought-after criminals, Washington was held on $1 million bail.

Click to enlarge in another window »

THE TRIAL

The papers called the trial something of a spectacle. In his 30 years as a defense attorney, Michael Kahn says it still stands out.

"I'll never forget this case," said Kahn, who was Washington's state-appointed public defender. "Strangest conviction I've ever seen."

Baker's public defender, Frederick Gumminger, did not respond to requests for comment.

There sat Rand on the witness stand, telling jurors she was out with her cousin, looking to buy crack cocaine when she saw the killings. She was the state's only eyewitness.

John Wynne, then an assistant Camden County prosecutor, said Rand had no reason to lie, and she testified she had known Washington and Baker for a long time.

"She kept saying she knew them, and that they had done it," Wynne, now retired, told NJ Advance Media in a telephone interview. "It's not like identification in a robbery case, where the victim is seeing the defendant for the first time. She knew these people. She was an eyewitness."

Jurors never heard anything about the claims Turner and Wilson were killed over drugs. Wynne told them in his opening statement they'd hear no motive for the crime, and it wasn't necessary for the prosecution to establish one.

He called three expert witnesses: two State Police officers -- one from the ballistics unit and another from the trace evidence unit -- and a Camden County medical examiner. The three provided details about the circumstances of the grisly murders, but none gave testimony about who had done it.

Rand, 4-foot-11, took the stand looking "small" and "dazed," according to a newspaper report of the trial, and recounted the story she gave investigators. But it had been about 18 months since the incident, and she struggled with the details.

Eventually, Wynne gave her a transcript of her statement to police to read from on the stand.

On cross examination, Gumminger got her to admit she was out looking to buy crack at the time of the murder and had smoked some earlier, but she insisted it hadn't impaired her.

"I was in the right state of mind because the high doesn't last that long," Rand said, according to a trial transcript.

The defense called no witnesses, and Baker and Washington never testified on their own behalf, though they both now say they always wanted to take the stand. It's fairly common in murder trials for defendants to stay off the witness stand, and Kahn said the defense didn't see much benefit in subjecting the two to cross-examination when the state's case was so weak.

"It's kind of like, who's going to find (Rand's testimony) proof beyond a reasonable doubt?" he said.

The jury did. After meeting for less than three hours, they came back with the verdict.

Guilty.

"I just shook my head. Like, damn. It was disbelief," Baker recalled. "It didn't hit me until I got back and I thought about it and, man, they took my life."

The years since have seen a parade of appeals and petitions struck down by the courts. Baker went through three attorneys between the opening of the trial and when the exoneration project got involved. Washington had six.

Their challenges have all failed, but the two men say they've always lost on technicalities, never getting a full airing in court.

"All the evidence hasn't been put out front," Baker said. "Everything has been thrown in pieces here, or a piece there."

Nearly 20 years later, Lesley and Michael Risinger started picking up the pieces.

Part two: The husband and wife legal team re-investigates the 20-year-old murder case. Did they solve it?

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

This post has been corrected to include information from a June 2015 prosecution brief.