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Mastho Davis always knew.

He knew that in January 1996 he wandered into a stranger’s apartment in Clay and pounded Christina Gristwood in the head three times with a hammer he found on the counter. He left her brain-damaged and paralyzed on one side.

Seven years later, he tried to confess to Onondaga County jail deputies while he was held on a different assault. Later, he tried to admit in open court that he beat Gristwood, but the judge kept resisting the confession.

Davis was crazed and violent, but he had a conscience. In August 2003, he tried again. He walked into the Syracuse Police Department late one night and again told officers he’d beaten a woman with a hammer in 1996.

It’d be another two years before a judge finally accepted what Davis knew all along.

But for all those years, someone else knew the truth, too.

Christina’s husband, Daniel Gristwood, seethed in prison. A judge, jury and prosecutor had sent him there for the crime, persuaded by a false confession coerced by state police investigators.

“I’ve lost everything in my life – my wife, my children, my job, my freedom, everything,” Daniel Gristwood wrote in a letter from prison. “Why am I being railroaded like this?”

A bloody discovery

It started on a snowy night, Jan. 12, 1996, when Dan Gristwood arrived home shortly after 3 a.m. to his apartment in the Gerviston Court complex off Morgan Road in Clay. He had worked until 11:45 p.m. as a machine repairman at Syracuse Label Co., then went out for beers with friends.

He found his wife Christina in bed. Her head was covered in blood. It was everywhere – on the walls, ceiling and curtains.

Gristwood called 911 and his aunt and stepmother, who helped with the Gristwoods’ five children.

He agreed to go with state troopers to their barracks in North Syracuse. The details of the interrogation are revealed in court records that include the testimony of the troopers involved.

Investigator Matthew Tynan took the first statement from Gristwood that morning. The questioning was nonconfrontational, and the four-page statement detailed Gristwood’s night. He told Tynan he had nothing to do with the attack.

The troopers quickly produced a hole in his alibi. A neighbor gave a written statement early that morning saying she’d seen Gristwood’s car parked in front of his home between 10:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. — when he claimed to be at work. The neighbor, Kimberly Lumpkin, was sure of the time because she was backing out to take her babysitter home and was worried about banging into Gristwood’s parked car, her statement said.

Tynan talked with Investigator Norman Ashbarry about what to do next. They weren’t buying Gristwood’s story. They decided to give him a lie-detector test at the state police barracks in Oneida.

The trooper who administered it, Investigator John Fallon, told his colleagues that it appeared Gristwood did not tell the entire truth. But Fallon, who was not a certified polygraph administrator, cautioned them: The results might be off because Gristwood was “somewhat physiologically unresponsive” from a lack of sleep. During the test, Gristwood started to nod off.

At one point, Gristwood felt a pain in his chest and thought he might be having a heart attack, he testified later.

‘I remember seeing ...’

After four hours in the lie detector room, Gristwood became irritated and said, “I’m telling you the truth and I’m leaving.”

He hadn’t been charged so he was free to leave. Fallon called him back into the room to sign papers. That’s when two other troopers, Frank Jerome and Tynan, took over.

The investigators turned it up.

They took turns asking questions, with Jerome yelling and getting so close that Gristwood felt spit hit his face, Gristwood later testified. Tynan offered Gristwood a friendly ear and the chance to minimize what he’d done. Then the two troopers would switch roles.

Nearly three hours into the more aggressive questioning, at 6:42 p.m., Jerome started typing Gristwood’s statement. Gristwood later testified that they told him he could see his children again if he signed.

At 7:09 p.m. — after 16 hours of questioning with no food and with no sleep for 34 hours — Gristwood read aloud the statement and signed it in three places, the troopers testified later.

The confession’s wording has an odd, out-of-body quality.

“I ... remember seeing my arm and my fist going toward her head and I remember seeing the hammer on a pillow on the floor next to her head,” the statement said.

“I am very sorry that I did this to my wife because I love her more than anything in the world,” it said.

Even now, Gristwood has a hard time explaining why he signed the confession. The investigators told him so many times and for so long that he was the attacker, he thinks he began to believe them — as if brainwashed, he said.

The troopers charged him with attempted murder. His perp walk at court made the TV news.

Seven months later, Gristwood was tried in Onondaga County state Supreme Court despite no physical evidence tying him to the attack.

The crime scene was covered with blood, but Gristwood had none on him or his clothing, and police found no evidence in the sink drains or anywhere else that he’d cleaned himself up.

As for the neighbor who saw Gristwood’s car across the street around 11 p.m.? That witness, Kimberly Lumpkin, gave a different story when Gristwood’s lawyer, James Hopkins, called her as a defense witness in the trial.

By this time, police had talked to five people who were with Gristwood that night to corroborate his alibi.

Lumpkin testified that her police statement was wrong about its most crucial point: the time. She told the jury that an investigator must’ve written the time of 10:30 to 11 p.m. on his own, even though her statement refers to the time in four places. Lumpkin said she actually saw the car somewhere between midnight and 8 a.m.

Lumpkin, who did not respond to requests for an interview, was married to a state trooper.

In his summation, prosecutor Nicholas DeMartino conceded the confession wasn’t perfect. But he asked jurors to consider the alternative suggested by Hopkins.

“We have the intruder theory,” DeMartino said. “We have some other mysterious strangers creeping, lurking around Gerviston Court ... Go figure that one.”

Christina Gristwood could not help to reveal the truth. She was in an assisted living facility because the attack had left her paralyzed on one side and so brain-damaged that she could not care for herself.

On Aug. 20, 1996, the jury deliberated for six hours before convicting Gristwood.

The verdict came down to this, juror Charles Marchione said in a recent interview: How could anyone confess to a crime he didn’t commit? The defense theory of a total stranger was preposterous, they concluded. There was no forced entry and nothing was stolen from the apartment.

“It was like an open-and-shut case,” Marchione said. “How could someone else possibly have walked in there and beaten her?”

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Justice John Brunetti sentenced Gristwood to the maximum, 12 ½ to 25 years in prison.

All Gristwood told the judge at the sentencing was: “I didn’t do this, and I miss my wife.”

Attempts to confess

On the morning Gristwood discovered his wife, Mastho Davis slept on a couch two blocks away in the apartment of a friend’s mother. Social service records confirm he was there.

Davis was then a 24-year-old career criminal, born on the same date as Gristwood, five years later. Davis had 12 arrests in four years for assaults, burglaries and other violent crimes. He used to walk out of his James Street apartment carrying a blue-handled, 22-ounce hammer and wearing a bandanna on his arm to show everyone he was in a gang – “the protect-myself gang,” he told police.

Audio: Mastho Davis talks to private investigators Jim Savage and Tom Wiers about his reaction to hearing on the TV news that Dan Gristwood had been arrested for attacking Gristwood's wife with a hammer.

Davis heard on the television news the next day that a man had confessed to beating his wife with a hammer.

“I don’t know why the guy went ahead and said he did it,” Davis thought, he told a private investigator years later in a recorded interview. “Something must be wrong with him to say he did something like that.”

Two months after the Gristwood beating, Davis attacked a 28-year-old woman sleeping in her apartment on Butternut Street in Syracuse. He put a sheet over her head as her two children slept nearby and he dragged her out of bed. He then beat her, choked her and threatened to kill her. He later pleaded guilty to attempted burglary and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Shortly after his release, in 2002, Davis again surprised a stranger in a James Street apartment complex and assaulted her.

While in jail on those charges, Davis told deputies at the Onondaga County Justice Center that he wanted to confess to a crime seven years earlier.

Then he appeared in Onondaga County Court and pressed the point with Judge Anthony Aloi.

“I want to admit to a murder I committed,” Davis said, unaware that Christina Gristwood had survived. Aloi, protecting Davis’ right against incriminating himself, told him to talk to his lawyer, who could talk to prosecutors.

“He said he don’t want to hear it,” Davis said. Aloi told him to tell the police or deputies at the jail.

“I already went through those channels,” Davis said. “Everybody says the hell with it.”

A detailed confession

Five months later, in August 2003, Davis gave it another try. He walked into the Syracuse Police Department headquarters in the middle of the night and said he wanted to confess.

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Although he had a long criminal history, Davis had a sense of right and wrong, according to Julia Burnett, the woman who’d let him stay in her apartment that night in January 1996.

“Whenever he does something wrong he feels overwhelming guilt about it, and he’ll try to get himself back on the right page by telling you what he did wrong,” Burnett testified.

This time, state police started an investigation.

They checked whether Davis had been persuaded by Gristwood to confess. They learned the two had been in the same county jail in March and May 1996. They were both also at Elmira state prison for four days in December 1996. There was no evidence they’d talked to each other, but investigators focused on a possible conspiracy.

The troopers had a problem. If Davis turned out to be the guilty man, he could not be charged in the attack on Christina Gristwood. The statute of limitations had run out.

The confession Davis gave was highly detailed.

Audio: Mastho Davis tells the private investigators how he wandered into the Gristwoods' apartment in Clay on Jan. 12, 1996, picked up a hammer and beat Christina Gristwood.

He had wandered accidentally into the Gristwoods’ apartment, thinking it was Burnett’s. He described more than a dozen items: a framed picture of a man, a bowl full of pennies, a white bottle with a gold top and blue lettering, and a tiger cat that hissed at him. He described where each of the five Gristwood children slept. He said he saw a hammer next to the bowl of pennies and thought of one thing: payback.

“I was venting at the things that had gone wrong in my life up to that point,” he told state police. “I picked up the hammer and held onto it, looking at it. I remember having a scowl on my face. I turned around and walked up the stairs.”

He saw a woman sleeping in bed with a toddler next to her. He struck the woman twice in the side of the head and once in her right eye, he told police. The description matched her injuries.

For two years, Gristwood’s defense lawyer, Hopkins, gathered evidence and Gristwood came back for hearings in an attempt to overturn the conviction, while prosecutors resisted.

In 2005, Hopkins tried to reassure an increasingly angry Gristwood that the justice system would work.

“This guy walks in off the street and confesses of his own free will and they let him go run around for two or three years and assault and rob other women,” Gristwood wrote from prison. “But they want to keep me locked in jail and you tell me to believe in the system.”

Free to attack again

In August 2005, Judge Brunetti issued a decision based on the new evidence. Brunetti later testified that he found “unassailable corroboration” of Davis’ confession. Brunetti vacated the conviction and prosecutors eventually decided not to pursue the case.

Gristwood was freed in August 2005, two years after Davis came forward for the last time and more than nine years after the attack.

Davis remained free, too. Then in 2006, Davis broke into the home of a 75-year-old woman in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and beat and raped her. He was sentenced last year to spend the rest of his life in prison.

That made it three women Davis had attacked since Christina Gristwood. Had state police done their jobs in 1996, Dan Gristwood says, those three women could have been spared.

Meanwhile, Gristwood sued the state. In a trial in the state Court of Claims, Brunetti testified that he’s become better educated on confessions over the years, including the role that fatigue plays in a lengthy interrogation.

The record of that case and Gristwood’s court proceedings before Brunetti provided much of the information for this story.

In the civil trial, the four troopers testified, as did Gristwood, Brunetti and prosecutor DeMartino.

One of Gristwood’s lawyers, Thomas Shannon, asked trooper Ashbarry what his reaction was in 2003 when Davis came forward.

“Did you say to yourself, ‘My God, we have the wrong man in jail?’” Shannon asked.

“That was certainly one consideration,” Ashbarry testified.

For the state to be held liable, it wouldn’t have been enough for the civil trial’s Judge Nicholas Midey to find that Gristwood was innocent. Similar lawsuits were dismissed because the wrongly accused person had contributed to his own conviction by confessing.

Gristwood’s lawyers in the civil case, Shannon and Patricia Lynn-Ford, asked Midey to hold off until the state’s highest court ruled on a similar case. The strategy worked: The state Court of Appeals ruled in March of this year that in cases where police coerce a false confession, it should not be held against a defendant who later sues.

Midey ruled in June not only that the evidence clearly showed Davis was the attacker, but that state police coerced the statement from Gristwood.

“It was the product of several hours of aggressive, intense interrogation, and certainly was not freely given,” Midey wrote.

“We don’t coerce”

Ashbarry, who retired in 2009 and is running for Lysander Town Board, disputes the judge’s decision. Even if Gristwood confessed to someone else’s crime, it wasn’t because of the police, Ashbarry said in an interview.

“I’ve been involved in homicides where people confessed to crimes that we know they didn’t commit,” Ashbarry said. “Why people say things is a matter for someone smarter than me. But not freely given? I don’t agree with that. That’s a deduction I would not make.”

Ashbarry, the lead investigator in the Gristwood attack, said he still doesn’t know who committed the assault. He acknowledges the proof against Davis is “certainly compelling.”

Ashbarry wasn’t in the interrogation room when trooper Jerome took the alleged confession.

“But I know Frank Jerome, and I know how we do business,” he said. “We do do aggressive interviews. We sometimes get loud. We sometimes yell. We sometimes last long into the wee hours of the night with interviews. But we don’t coerce statements.”

Tynan and Jerome did not return phone messages for comment. Fallon declined to comment.

Allison Redlich, a SUNY Albany criminal justice professor and co-author of a study of false confessions who testified for Gristwood in the civil trial, said this interrogation stood out because the police seemed to get tunnel vision so quickly.

Of the 273 defendants cleared of criminal convictions over the past 20 years by DNA evidence, one-quarter involved false confessions, according to the Innocence Project.

They’re often obtained by investigators who see an interrogation as a “guilt-presumptive process,” Redlich testified.

They take away the suspect’s support system for hours, depriving him of sleep, food, cigarettes and drink to induce stress, she said. In Gristwood’s case, he had a cold and the investigators wouldn’t give him tissues, Redlich said. She called it a “highly coercive interrogation.”

Suspects interrogated for hours “come to realize that the only way that they can get out of the room is to confess,” Redlich testified.

But it’s not surprising the jury accepted Gristwood’s statement, she said in an interview. “It’s really counterintuitive to think someone would confess, especially to such a heinous crime, if it’s something they didn’t commit,” she said.

Other countries, including England, have changed the way police approach interrogations, she said. Instead of trying to press someone into a confession, they focus on simply asking questions to gather facts.

The next step in Gristwood’s case will be a Jan. 9 trial to determine how much the state must pay him. The cases of two other wrongly accused men could be a gauge. Roy Brown was awarded $2.6 million in 2008 for his wrongful murder conviction in Cayuga County. Steve Barnes got $3.5 million last year for his wrongful murder conviction in Oneida County.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Christina Gristwood’s family still thinks Dan’s guilty and shouldn’t get a nickel from the state. With her family’s help, Christina divorced him while he was in prison.

“He doesn’t deserve anything but to go back to prison,” said her sister, Colleen Taylor.

Gristwood, 44, remains bitter. He can’t land a job because even though the criminal conviction has been expunged — the case lives on in the Internet.

“It’s pretty much ruined my whole life,” he said recently. Meanwhile, the four troopers have gone on with their lives. Ashbarry and Tynan retired two years ago. Fallon’s a state police investigator working out of Oneida. Jerome’s an investigator in the agency’s internal affairs division in Syracuse.

Only Ashbarry will speak for law enforcement. State police, lawyers for the state and prosecutors would not comment. Gristwood’s lawyers know of no investigation by the state police into how they ended up with a false confession.

“The four that were involved should have been punished,” Gristwood said. “Instead they get to retire and live a happy life. That really makes me angry.”

Lost childhoods

Gristwood grew up in the Central Square area, the sixth of seven children.

He lives in a converted garage that’s been in his family for years on Gristwood Road in Pennellville. The road was named after his grandfather.

He’d started dating Christina Dove when she was a freshman and he was a junior at Paul V. Moore High School in the mid-1980s. They married after he graduated and she was still in school. To pay the expenses of raising five kids, Dan worked full-time at the label company and part-time for a tow truck company at nights and on weekends.

After his release from prison, Gristwood started his own business fixing small engines out of his home and salvaging metal.

He has reacquainted himself with his five kids, one of whom lives with him.

Until Gristwood was cleared, his brother Jerry sometimes packed up the children for the trip to Attica or Elmira. During the long drive, the brother would tell the kids that their father was innocent.

Once inside the walls, they would buy food out of vending machines and talk for the entire six hours allowed.

In a prison reception area, from month to month, Gristwood watched his children become young adults.

He usually didn’t talk about the case with his children, but on their first visit, he made them a promise, his brother recalled.

“You know, I love you guys,” Gristwood told his children. “I didn’t do this, and one day you’ll know.”

Contact John O'Brien at jobrien@syracuse.com or 470-2187.

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