Albany

Jeffrey Conrad curled his hand into the shape of a pistol and pressed a finger against his left temple to demonstrate how he fatally shot an Albany college student 19 years ago.

He recalled that the student, Erik Mitchell, who had cash in his pocket and was known to sell weed, collapsed in a sitting position against a wall inside the door of his basement apartment on Clinton Avenue. Conrad, wearing a mask and alone, abandoned his robbery plan and fled.

"He opened the door, he reached for the gun, I shot him," Conrad said, forcefully slapping his hands together. "It was just that quick and simple."

Mitchell, 23, never regained consciousness after being shot on Feb. 18, 1997. He died later that morning at a city hospital.

Conrad, 45, who claims he's killed at least a dozen people during his crime-filled life, also recounted a key detail not made public after Mitchell's murder: Police never found the .25-caliber silver handgun used in the killing.

"I chopped it up and threw it away. Hacksawed it. You'll never get that," he said.

Albany Detective Christopher Cornell sat at a table inside an Ohio jail two years ago as Conrad, seated across from him, confessed to killing Mitchell in a videotaped interview obtained recently by the Times Union. Conrad, who has mental health problems, said he wasn't clearing his conscience. He wanted to know why two other men, Carl H. Dukes and Lavelle R. Jones, were convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a murder he committed.

"You've always known that they didn't do it," Conrad said. "They couldn't tell you what kind of gun it was cause they didn't know. They couldn't tell you how he fell cause they didn't know. They couldn't tell you a (expletive) thing. Nothing. Nothing. ... You guys knew from the beginning, when you sensed it, that they didn't (expletive) do it ... and you went and told his family all that (expletive): 'Yeah, we got the guys.' "

Cornell, 34, an Albany detective-of-the-year in 2014, was in high school when the murder took place. He told Conrad that policing has "evolved" since that time.

"Listen, I wasn't there in the interviews," the detective said, remaining calm as Conrad grew more agitated. "You've got to understand, they confessed. They confessed to a murder."

Conrad's unexpected confession has stirred the ashes of an era when the Albany police regularly built homicide cases in which their key evidence were the signed confessions obtained from suspects after lengthy interrogations. In 1999, the same year Dukes was convicted, a decorated city detective, Kenneth Wilcox, came under scrutiny after he obtained a similar detailed murder confession from a 19-year-old Albany man accused of killing a drug dealer. The suspect, Kevin Cherry, stood trial for murder but a jury deadlocked on his innocence. On the eve of his second trial, Cherry was set free when two other men were identified as the real suspects after an eyewitness came forward.

Wilcox, who died in 2006 in an on-duty car crash, was not the only city detective who gleaned signed confessions from murder suspects, but his knack for getting them was widely known. He also helped the lead detective in the Mitchell homicide, Ronald Matos, obtain the murder confession from Dukes.

Dukes, in jail on an unrelated charge, was brought to the Albany County courthouse on Sept. 8, 1997, seven months after Mitchell's shooting death. He was left alone with Matos and Wilcox while his public defender, Bertrand Gould, left the room, but returned periodically to check on his client and make sure he didn't need legal representation. Court records indicate Gould was unaware the detectives were accusing Dukes of killing Mitchell.

The six-hour interrogation ended with Dukes signing a detailed statement saying he was only a lookout when Jones killed Mitchell. He was charged with first-degree murder and, at the time, faced a potential death penalty.

Jones underwent a similarly grueling interrogation, and signed a similar confession after being in police custody for two days.

For years, Wilcox was regarded as the city's top homicide detective. But at the time of his death, his off-duty business dealings in the city's subprime mortgage industry were under investigation by the FBI. His former business partner, Aaron R. Dare, was later convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to more than 13 years in prison.

Dukes and Jones were convicted of robbery and murder during separate trials in Albany County Court in 1998 and 1999. They are both serving sentences of more than 30 years to life in prison and claim that city detectives coerced them into giving written statements that included details they didn't know, such as the caliber of the murder weapon. The statements also contained their alleged motive to silence Mitchell, who they admitted targeting in a robbery several months before he was killed.

Jones is from Brooklyn and had alibi witnesses who placed him in New York City on the night of the murder. But his statement admitting to the crime, and implicating Dukes as the triggerman, came after he hadn't slept for 48 hours, according to court records from his trial. Matos, 47, who has since retired as a detective and is an assistant security director for Siena College, declined comment for this story, citing the re-opened investigation of Mitchell's homicide.

Court records indicate that during Jones' interrogation, Matos ripped up two statements Jones began writing in a police interrogation room asserting his innocence. Eventually, after being threatened with the death penalty, Jones signed a statement admitting to the murder that Albany County prosecutors now believe he and Dukes may not have committed.

Attorneys for the Exoneration Initiative in New York City have taken up Jones' case and are seeking to overturn his conviction. They argued in court papers filed recently that there was no physical evidence tying Jones — or Dukes — to the murder, and no eyewitnesses who placed him Albany at the time of the killing. The attorneys cited data from the National Registry of Exonerations indicating 22 percent of the cases in which homicide convictions are overturned, based on new evidence, involve defendants who falsely confessed to the crime.

"The only evidence connecting Jones to the murder was a vague written confession, obtained after more than 30 hours of custody and interrogation throughout which he maintained his innocence," wrote Glenn A. Garber, an attorney for Jones, who is at the maximum-security Elmira Correctional Facility in Chemung County.

Attorneys for Jones said that he is "hopeful" that his conviction will be overturned in the coming months.

"We're optimistic that they're looking at this very closely and we're hopeful that they will concede our motion to the extent that we should be granted at least a new trial, and hopefully they'll ultimately decide to dismiss the case."

Dukes is at the maximum-security Wende Correctional Facility in Erie County. He is in the process of securing a new attorney who is expected to file a motion also seeking to have his conviction vacated, according to Albany County prosecutors.

Conrad, in the jailhouse interview two years ago in Ohio, said that he left New York after Mitchell's murder. He noted that he spent much of his life on the run as a parole absconder, including at the time of the killing, and that he was arrested a year after the homicide when he returned briefly to Albany. He said a "SWAT" team stormed an Arbor Hill residence where he was hiding and recovered a 9 mm handgun, ammunition and drugs. But it wasn't the gun that he used to kill Mitchell, he said, and he was sent back to prison for five years but never questioned about the homicide, even though his name was mentioned in the investigative file.

Looking back, Conrad said he remembered wondering when he was arrested in 1998 if police identified him as a suspect in the murder because the search warrant stated detectives were looking for a "silver-colored automatic handgun," which was the color of the gun he said he used to shoot Mitchell.

As Conrad returned to prison to serve time for parole violations and weapons possession, Dukes and Jones were prosecuted for Mitchell's murder. A third suspect, Pierre Jones, who was charged with Mitchell's killing and admitted taking part in the October 1996 robbery at the apartment, was acquitted of murder but convicted of witness tampering.

"Ultimately everybody wants the truth," Albany police Chief Brendan Cox said. "From what I've seen about this case I think the detectives at that time did their job, but that doesn't mean we're always right. We know historically that you have issues with false confessions."

At the time Dukes and Jones were interrogated, the Albany police did not videotape interviews with suspects. In 2010, under new leadership, the department began videotaping its interviews and now has a policy requiring videotaped interviews in all felony cases.

"I think the videotapes now at least help show the process and show that nobody did anything inappropriately," Cox said. "Unfortunately, even though we have the best justice system in the entire world, it still has flaws in it and nobody wants to see an innocent person get convicted."

At his January 1999 sentencing in Albany County Court, Dukes, then 21, maintained his innocence.

"I'm not the killer and neither is Lavell Jones, and what the police did to me as far as interrogating me, it was wrong," Dukes told Judge Larry Rosen. "I just wanted to go home. I was scared for my life. I didn't know better. ... I put my name on something that I had no business doing and it led to this."

Albany County District Attorney David Soares said his office took immediate action two years ago to help Jones and Dukes obtain new attorneys after Ohio detectives alerted Albany police that Conrad was confessing to Mitchell's murder.

"The moment that this was brought to our attention we brought them into court and it was at our insistence they were appointed lawyers," Soares said. The case is pending before state Supreme Court Justice Thomas A. Breslin, who is reviewing a motion to reopen the case.

If the convictions of Jones and Dukes are overturned, it's unclear whether Conrad will be prosecuted for Mitchell's homicide. He is serving life in prison in Ohio for fatally stabbing an ex-girlfriend. It was following his arrest for that homicide that he confessed to killing Mitchell.

blyons@timesunion.com • 518-454-5547 • @brendan_lyonstu