 The following story contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. What was my day like on October 1, 1984? What were you doing nine Mondays ago? Can you detail your every move that day from memory? How would you prove it? Most of us would look at our phones or email. We'd look for timestamps, sent messages, or what we posted on social media. We might even look at recordings from our doorbell cameras or ask our neighbors for their security cam footage. In the fall of 1985, none of these options were available to the 11 young people headed to trial for the murder of Catherine Fuller. For Chris Turner, an otherwise forgettable day turned out to be the most consequential day of his life. I was spending time at Kelvin Smith House on October 1, playing what you call a tarry and it consisted of a stick figure, just one stick. You could play that game and it made a little beep sound. It was a ball and a stick and it just beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. But if you were playing it just like people play today when they play Madden and they're into them and they play them for hours and so that's what I was doing for hours. I remember it was raining outside, it was real drizzly, so I didn't have no plans for that day. When we talked in November of 2022, Cliff Yarbrough told me about what he was doing the day Catherine Fuller was murdered. I was in school. We met my girlfriend, walked home from school together. We went to school together and walked home and I stayed at my house. How would you as a teenager in the 1980s account for a whole day's worth of events months after the fact? How would you prove you were at home playing video games or hanging out with your girlfriend? Add in the variable of an inexperienced defense attorney going up against a federal prosecutor's office with unlimited resources. How would you create a solid alibi? The answer is you probably couldn't. This is the alley, DC's 8th and H case. My name is Shannon Lynch, episode five, Fox guarding the hen house. In the last episode, harsh interrogation tactics grew the list of those arrested to 17. The grand jury dropped the charges for four of those arrested. Two suspects, Calvin Alston and Derek Bennett, pled guilty to lesser crimes and agreed to serve as star witnesses on behalf of the government in exchange for a lighter sentence. That left 11 of them facing down the biggest murder trial in DC history. Media. By the fall of 1985, the local TV news stations had been covering the 8th and H case incessantly for the past year. These men are members of a gang which was known as the 8th and H crew. The fact is the 8th and H crew has made a name for itself by means of graffiti as well as word of mouth. Local papers ran articles with headlines like police arrest five and gang killing of Northeast mother and fuller killers bred by mean streets. There was one common thread throughout all of the media coverage. The government story that a gang was responsible for Catherine Fuller's murder was reported as fact. It wasn't questioned or challenged. Here's Patrice Gaines again, author and former Washington Post reporter. One of the things that was happening in 1984-85 that doesn't happen as often now was that reporters simply believed what police said and they quoted them as if whatever they said was the truth. Thanks in part to the media, most of the public thought the defendants were guilty before they even walked into court. Part 2 The Trial Begins Just before the trial began in October of 1985, Mike Campbell had to sever his case from the rest of the group. His lawyer withdrew due to personal reasons, rumored to be in connection with drug or alcohol use. Without a lawyer, Mike could no longer be tried with the others. That left 10 young people preparing to defend their innocence in D.C. Superior Court. Months later, with a new lawyer, Mike Campbell would take a plea deal. Judge Robert M. Scott presided over the trial. Judge Scott was what you might call old school. The White Midwesterner was 63 at the time of the trial and had sat on the D.C. Superior Court since 1977. When it came to running a trial, he wanted all rules strictly followed and all proceedings to run as efficiently as possible. Whenever a lawyer, or anyone else, made an error, he was quick to ridicule them in front of the whole courtroom. This is what Chris Turner told me about his impression of Judge Scott. I think he was over biased in this case. I think he was over-opinionated in this case. I think he handled this case wrong. Levi Rouse had a similar read of the Judge. This is the Judge who asked me before trial even started. He says, you know you're not leaving here. He didn't believe that we was innocent. He seen black men setting up dead and we was going to jail. Period. He already had his mind made up. The trial officially began on October 31, 1985. As is the case with all criminal trials, the prosecution goes first. In his opening statement, federal prosecutor Jerry Goren painted a gruesome picture of how the crime played out. According to Goren, on the afternoon of October 1, 1984, the defendants plus several more people were hanging out in the park near 8th and H, quote, playing and joking and singing Chuck Brown songs about money and getting paid. Goren was referencing the song We Need Some Money by Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, which was released in 1984. Over a go-go beat, Brown sang lyrics like, a dollar bill is a friend of mine. According to the prosecutor, the group was inspired by this song and decided they were going to rob someone for some cash. It was at this point that they saw Mrs. Fuller on the other side of H street. Next, according to Goren, the group crossed H street. Levi Rouse and Charles Turner grabbed Mrs. Fuller and pushed her into the alley from the 8th street side. Everyone in the group took turns hitting her. They picked her up and carried her down the alley to just outside the garage. Goren said Mrs. Fuller was yelling relentlessly for help this entire time. Lastly, she was brought into the garage where she was sodomized with a pole and left to die. Goren hypothesized there were many more attackers involved than just the defendants that were sitting in the courtroom. Arguably, an excellent trial lawyer's most important job is to be a compelling storyteller. No amount of legalese or memorization of law is going to win the hearts and minds of a jury. Goren had just told a gripping story. The people in the packed courtroom were visibly disturbed. The defendant's impression of the prosecutor varied. Levi Rouse told me, Jerry Gordon warned the Linus man never walked in two shoes. He warned just to say to us that I got power. During the trial, come to find that Jerry Gordon was sending money to one of the dudes who had testified against us. And I'm sitting there saying to myself, can he do this? And just got just dismissed as like it was nothing. Cliff Yarbrough added, He was acting nasty as well, you know, like arrogant. Like, oh, these guys going down, I'm going to take them down. Charles Turner, on the other hand, tried to give the prosecutor the benefit of the doubt. Admittedly, he looks back on his point of view as slightly naive. You know, you don't really understand it, but you realize that this is their job. They're supposed to make you look bad so they can gain the confidence of the jury, also the judge. So it was his job to make me look bad, right? So I really didn't hold it against him, even though I didn't understand why I would do it, but you still feel they're going to do the right thing. You always feel that the right thing is going to happen. The defense attorneys had their work cut out for them. All 10 of the defendants in the eighth and eighth case had their own lawyers, and each of them would need to start strong and establish reasonable doubt in their opening statements. You might assume the defense attorneys stood up and talked about how witnesses had identified convicted woman assaulter James McMillan running from the crime scene with an object concealed under his coat, or the account Amy Davis shared with police about seeing James Blue beating Mrs. Fuller up in the alley that afternoon, or the witness statement about hearing groans coming from the closed garage around the time of death, because the garage was far too small to fit a large group of people in it with the door closed. But it was impossible for the defense attorneys to propose these alternative narratives, because none of this evidence was ever shared with them. Part three, The Brady Rule. Prosecutors have immense power in criminal trials. As we discussed in an earlier episode, they pretty much have free reign over the grand jury process that determines who gets indicted. The prosecution also has the advantage of access to all the information police gather during their investigation. They're granted this access well ahead of trial, allowing them to incorporate this information into their arguments. The defense, on the other hand, only has access to police records that the prosecution decides to share with them. This brings up an obvious conflict of interest. If a prosecutor comes across evidence that might undermine their case, couldn't they just choose not to share it with the defense? In 1963, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments for a case called Brady v. Maryland, which addressed this issue directly. This is really the crux of our problem in this court, that there was an unconstitutional suppression or a withholding of evidence prior to a trial. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas authored the opinion on behalf of the majority. Here's my colleague, Lee Drutman, reading a quote from that opinion. We now hold that the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution. That upon request part was voided in a subsequent Supreme Court case. So therefore, in other words, the Brady Rule says that a prosecutor must share evidence with the defense if that evidence could possibly change the outcome of the trial. Failure to do so is a violation of a defendant's constitutional rights. Nancy Gertner is a retired federal judge and professor at Harvard Law. I had the chance to have a discussion with her about the Brady Rule. The Brady Rule is a rule that requires the government, a prosecutor, to turn over evidence that is on the one hand exculpatory, that exonerates a defendant, but also that could tend to exonerate a defendant. Not that it is categorically exonerating, but they could tend in that direction and even mitigate the punishment. The rationale for the rule is that the government has access to the incriminating evidence in a case or all the evidence in a case. They have access to the crime scene. They have access to documents that they've mustered to prosecute. Essentially, unless they are obliged to turn over exonerating or even documents that mitigate the punishment, the defense would have no way to defend. You think about it this way. If there's a crime scene, a murder, if there are aspects of the murder scene that could exonerate the suspect, the only way that the defendant can find out about that is through the government. So the obligation to turn over evidence is a terribly important obligation. Author and former D.C. public defender Thomas Dibdall added, the idea was to make trials fair that justice is not winning a guilty verdict in court for a prosecutor, but it's finding justice and information that points to innocence for a defendant is crucial to justice. That rule has been in effect now for what, 60 years almost, but it's often honored more in the breach than in reality. You can understand that prosecutors in the middle of a criminal case, particularly if they believe that the person they've arrested and charged is guilty and they believe justices to have this person convicted. It's very difficult for them to share evidence that could hurt their case that would help the defense. And so, as you might imagine, they often do not do that. And because it may well be evidence that only the prosecution has, it often goes unnoticed or unfound. While the Brady rule sounds pretty straightforward in theory, as Thomas Dibdall mentioned, it often doesn't pan out that way in real life because of the way it's enforced. Here's Judge Gertner again. The rules with respect to enforcing Brady are somewhat complicated. Clearly, if one is convicted and you later find out that the government didn't turn over what they should have turned over, that could be the basis for overturning a conviction. It's also a way of making sure that the prosecutor does what they're supposed to do because it is incentivizing the prosecutor if he wants to have convictions. However, even when prosecutors are caught breaking the Brady rule, they very rarely face consequences. Sean Armbrust is the executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project. She summed up the conundrum inherent in Brady. I mean, it's the definition of the fox guarding the henhouse. It's asking them to do something that's psychologically very difficult for anyone to do. And then when they get it wrong and when they don't turn over information that is exculpatory or would be helpful to the defense, it only matters. The conviction is only reversed if judges, most of whom were former prosecutors, ultimately decide that the evidence was material. And of course, for the most part, these challenges aren't going to be successful, and the materiality standard is really vague. All of this talk of how evidence should be handled by prosecutors is further complicated by the fact that DC is not a state. If you were to commit murder in a state, a prosecutor from the nearest district attorney's office would be assigned to your case. The vast majority of district attorneys in the U.S. are elected, which means they are beholden to voters. They are also almost always from the area in which they are prosecuting cases. On the other hand, in DC, the federal government holds jurisdiction, which means the U.S. Attorney's Office handles homicide cases. In 1984 through 1985, the U.S. Attorney's Office was headed by Joseph DiGenova, a Republican from Delaware who was appointed by Ronald Reagan. Jerry Gorin, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to prosecute the 8th and H case, worked under DiGenova. Like DiGenova, Gorin also was not from the DC area. I spoke to retired assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Lynch about this. Lynch worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tacoma and Seattle, Washington for more than two decades. He explained how Brady rule issues are handled in a U.S. Attorney's Office today. In the 80s, the process was more lax than it is now, and simply involved prosecutors asking their higher-ups what they thought about disclosing the evidence in question. Sometimes, the prosecutor on the case just made that decision on their own, which, from what we know, is exactly what Jerry Gorin did. There's no record of him asking his higher-ups about these Brady issues. Typically, the attorney assigned to the case knows his or her case file better than anyone else, so he makes the initial determination to release Brady material to the defense counsel. If he has a question about whether something should be released as Brady material, he will go to his immediate supervisor. They can also call the criminal division at the main justice department and seek advice on whether something needs to be released. Starting in the early 90s, U.S. Attorney's offices designated what are called professional responsibility officers. This formalized the process and put more stringent policies in place to document any questions about turning over Brady material. But in the 80s, no such system existed. In my office, in the 90s through 2016, I was the professional responsibility officer. So if the assistant U.S. Attorney wasn't sure what to do, they would come to me and then the chief of the criminal division would get involved in the U.S. Attorney, and then we would go back to the main justice department. So you go through the hierarchy. In the 80s, there wasn't a professional responsibility officer. Prosecutor Jerry Gorin didn't have a professional responsibility officer to look over his shoulder in 1985. Regardless, it was Gorin's clear constitutional duty to share exculpatory evidence with the defense, and he failed to do so on multiple counts. Some states have made moves to prevent Brady violations from happening by passing laws that require prosecutors to share evidence with the defense. This is referred to as open file discovery. In 2004, Governor Mike Easley of North Carolina signed a bill that requires prosecutors to share files in all felony cases. The statute requires district attorneys to share files, including investigator notes, defendant and witness statements, test results, and a list of probable witnesses before the trial. Since then, states including Ohio, Louisiana, and Texas have passed similar laws requiring open discovery or at least making it more commonplace. However, in most states, it is still the case that prosecutors have the power to decide what evidence is shared with the defense. Part four, prosecution. The government's case against the so-called 8th and H crew was heavily dependent on Calvin Alston and Derek Bennett's testimonies. The two young men agreed to testify on behalf of the government in exchange for shorter sentences. On November 5th, 1985, the prosecution called Derek Bennett to the stand. As he timidly recounted his version of events, the judge had to repeatedly tell Derek to, quote, keep your voice up. Reporters in the courtroom described how physically uncomfortable he looked. He implicated all of the defendants except for Cliff, who he said he didn't see in the alley at any point during the attack. There were several factual issues with Derek's testimony as it relates to physical evidence. In his version of events, Mrs. Fuller was pushed into the alley while walking back from the store, carrying her purchase and a shopping bag. This doesn't make sense, though, when you consider how high her blood alcohol content was. Unless Mrs. Fuller chugged most of her pineavodka in the half-dlock walk from the liquor store. That seems unlikely, as Mrs. Fuller was very private about her drinking. She wouldn't even visit bars. She only drank at her home, at someone else's house, or out of sight in the alley. Plus, the bottle of vodka found in her umbrella at the crime scene was empty. Also, Derek claimed the attack started on the 8th street side of the alley. Most of Mrs. Fuller's belongings, including her raincoat, umbrella, and hair rollers, had been found near the 9th street side of the alley, though. Derek said Mrs. Fuller was carried most of the way down the alley, while the injuries on her body showed she'd been dragged a long distance. He also claimed that all of Mrs. Fuller's clothes had been torn off, but she still had some clothes on when her body was found. None of the defense attorneys questioned Derek's version of events. Only his motives. Several of them attempted to pin the murder on Derek and Calvin exclusively to take focus off of their client. During cross-examination, Timothy Catlett's lawyer, Fred Sullivan, stated, quote, she was just a little lady, and she was hollering for help, and you just punched and punched. Bennett replied, yes, sir. Sullivan asked, what was your object? What did you hope to accomplish? Derek answered, I don't know. Next up was Calvin Alston. Calvin had a particularly traumatic experience in jail leading up to the trial. In March of 1985, he'd been sexually assaulted by three men in his jail cell. Now more than ever, he was determined to make his time behind bars as short as possible. According to his father, though, Calvin continued to privately claim he had no knowledge of the murder. But he told me up to the last minute, I talked to him, you know, say even. He said he didn't know anything about it. His eagerness showed in his trial testimony. A reporter in the courtroom explained Calvin's style of describing the crime as aggressive and clearly stated. Like Derek, Calvin could not explain the motivation behind the attack. Besides the elements of both Derek and Calvin's stories, the directly contradicted physical evidence, their two testimonies also differed from one another in some key ways. Derek implicated all of the defendants except for Cliff Yarbrough. Calvin said, Cliff was part of the crime, but Lisa Ruffin wasn't. Derek said there were several girls present, while Calvin said there were no girls at all. Derek placed Calvin as a central attacker during the sodomy, but Calvin said he never touched Mrs. Fuller during the sexual assault. Most puzzling, Calvin said he never saw Derek at the scene of the crime at all. It's hard to believe that if both Calvin and Cliff had been in the alley attacking Fuller, Derek wouldn't have noticed Cliff or seen Calvin's involvement. And how could Calvin have completely missed Derek, along with the group of girls Derek said was there? Those differences can't really be explained, unless of course neither Derek nor Calvin were really in the alley that day. Another witness for the government, 14-year-old Maurice Thomas, was brought to the stand. He claimed he saw the attack happen while standing in the alley in the next block between 9th and 10th streets. There were several problems with his testimony. First, it would be impossible to see where the alleged attack took place from where Maurice claimed he was situated in the next block over, because the alleys don't line up. Second, Maurice had an incentive to get these young men in trouble. He had been bullied by a few of them relentlessly. This was payback. Moreover, as was commonplace, witnesses were given $20 to $25 each time they went to share information with the detectives. $20 times multiple trips to the homicide office added up to a lot of money for a 14-year-old in a lower-income neighborhood in 1985. In addition to Maurice, a handful of other young people from the neighborhood were pressured by police to testify. One of them was seen sucking her thumb while on the stand. None of these other quote-unquote witnesses were consequential in swaying the jury, as one juror anonymously recounted to the Washington Post after the trial. The final piece of evidence the prosecution presented was the video recording of the statement Cliff gave police the day he was arrested in December. Because Cliff refused to cooperate with the government after the taping, all of the names besides his had to be bleeped out in the video. When you say something to police during an interrogation, whatever you say can be used against you in court, but it can't be used against others. The video was devastating for the defendants. It only convoluted the suspect pool further in the eyes of the jury. Despite the redacted names, Cliff still broadly portrayed the government's gang theory. What the jurors didn't see, of course, was the hours of coercive and violent interrogation tactics Cliff endured just prior to the video being filmed. The prosecution didn't present a single piece of physical evidence that tied any of the defendants to the crime scene or to support a gang attack scenario. Another critical thing to note is that the defendants were not tried for any form of sexual assault, even though there was clear sadistic sexual elements in this crime. I believe this was very deliberate on the prosecution's part. None of the defendants had any kind of history with rape or violence against women, but a few of them did have small robbery charges. Even though splitting up a very small amount of money among 20-plus people makes very little sense, it was a better strategic move for the prosecutor to pursue robbery and skip sexual assault charges all together. On November 20th, it was finally time for the defense to present their case. Part 5, The Defense Our criminal justice system treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. Brian Stevenson The question on the minds of all of the lawyers in the courtroom was never if a gang attack had taken place, but only a matter of who was involved. This created an every man for himself mentality. It was like a circular firing squad. The best the defense attorneys would do was point the finger at other defendants or try and pin it on Calvin and Derek exclusively. All 10 of the defendants in the 8th and 8th case had their own lawyers. The first one that was arrested, Alfonso Moncaris, had the good fortune of being assigned a DC public defender. Some people might hear the term public defender and picture mediocre lawyers, which may be a fair assumption in some places. But the nation's capital has one of the best public defender's offices in the country. Monk got assigned public defender Michelle Roberts, who we'll hear from in just a moment. Defendants in criminal trials have to be assigned lawyers from different firms in order to avoid any conflict of interest issues. If several of the defendants can't afford to pay for an attorney, one will be given a public defender and the rest will be assigned an attorney from a private firm. Almost all of the defendants in the 8th and 8th case were given court appointed lawyers. The quality of a court appointed lawyer is simply the luck of the draw, literally. It is a random process in which the court assigns private lawyers from all different specialties to a defendant who does not have the means to pay for one. Some of the defense attorneys had never even worked on a homicide case before. Furthermore, it's a common view that many court appointed lawyers enter their name into this pool simply because they aren't skilled enough to have a sufficient number of paying clients. Some of the court appointed lawyers in this case have since made names for themselves. Greta Van Sustern of Fox News fame acted as Kelvin Smith's lawyer. Lilian McEwen, who was Levi Rouse's lawyer, famously went on to recount her affair with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the book titled DC Unmasked and Undressed. Most of the accused were not impressed with the quality of their attorneys. Russell Overton described the disappointment he had with his lawyer. Levi Rouse told me how he felt about his court appointed lawyer, the one that later wrote the tell-all book. I had a lawyer. She came over to jail and said she was going to represent me and something wasn't right with her. It was like she would come over to jail and ask me questions and just leave. Would she say they offered me a 14 to something? And I'm looking at her like, no, that ain't going to happen. And the funniest thing was she never said a word. But if a lover lawyer got up and said something, she would say the exact same thing, but in a different way. And I'd be looking at her like, I don't know. I don't even ever think she had a murder trial. So they just gave me a lawyer that they knew was going to fail. Timothy Catlett felt like his lawyer never believed he was innocent. Almost all of the defendants in this case told me they had a similar experience. Once they got me over to DC jail, my lawyer brought me a plea agreement talking about cop out for seven years. I say cop out for seven years. I'm not copping out to nothing I didn't do. You know, and man, you take them papers, you take them and you get out of here. Public defender Michelle Roberts was clearly the most proficient among the defense lawyers. After serving as a public defender, Roberts went on to work for the high powered law firm Scadden and then served as the executive director of the NBA Players Association. But in 1985, her job was to defend Alfonso Monc Harris. In an interview in February of 2023, she told me how she got involved in the case. I was not initially assigned to represent the client. Another attorney in our office at the time was appointed by the court to represent the client. And that lawyer ultimately left the public defender service to go into private practice. So rather than burden another member of my staff with having to catch up, I didn't have a full case load because I was trial cheap. And so I was able to step in with less prior commitments in terms of litigation calendar. Monc was arrested only three days after the murder happened, which meant he had a fresh memory of what he was doing on October 1st, 1984. It made the most sense for Roberts to choose an alibi defense, although she admits that an alibi defense is never her first choice. I think on one hand, maybe two fingers, I can count on the number of times I've used an alibi defense because no one believes it. Generally, you're with your girlfriend. And everyone's a double girlfriend's lie. The rest of the defense attorneys essentially followed Michelle Roberts' lead and went with an alibi defense strategy. Because prosecutor Jerry Gorin withheld so much key evidence, that might have been the best option available to them anyways. But proving an alibi was nearly impossible for those that were arrested months after the crime took place, which was the case for most of them. The small amount they did remember was corroborated mostly by friends and family, which juries tend to be wary of. Furthermore, the defense attorneys had limited resources. It would have been a huge financial undertaking to pry at the government's gang theory. One after another, the defense attorneys explained to the jury why they should believe other defendants were guilty, but their client was innocent. The division among the co-defendants only bolstered the government's case, making it appear much stronger in comparison. It also created chaos as the jury headed into deliberation. When the verdict was read, I do remember being kind of dumbstruck. I was like, not believing it. Like, no, this can't be true. No. Are you serious? That's next time on The Alley, DC's 8th and H case. Martin and Joe Wilkes. Audio editing and mixing by Shannon Lynch. Social media directed by me, Maika Houlit. Script editing and fact checking by Thomas Dibdahl and Sharla Freeland. A very special thank you to Patrice Gaines for keeping the story alive for decades and for supporting this project throughout production. Please subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen, and be sure to follow New America on all platforms.