The Missing Evidence

The evidence that could have changed everything kept disappearing. It was misplaced, withheld, degraded, or not presented in a way that gave the jury the tools to use it.

Michelle’s early police interviews were recorded. In those recordings, she told investigators again and again that Clarance was not involved. She asked, by name, why they kept bringing him up when he had nothing to do with it. Those statements exist. They were made under conditions where she had no particular reason to protect Clarance. They were made before anyone had applied the kind of pressure that changes what people say. Then a detective got involved. Then, as Clarance tells it, she was told her children might be taken from her if she didn’t cooperate. Then her story changed.

One of the videotaped interviews was produced without audio. The footage is there. The conversation it depicts is there. The sound is not. Clarance has long believed that the missing audio captured detectives feeding her information about the crime, filling in details she didn’t have, coaching her on what to say so that her testimony would be consistent with the evidence rather than invented. His current attorneys are still attempting to obtain a usable copy.

The timeline was another piece of evidence that should have protected him and didn’t. The prosecution’s theory required the murders to have taken place at a time consistent with the Walmart surveillance footage. But the physical evidence did not support that timeline. Witnesses in the Thompson neighborhood who had been outside that evening told investigators they had not seen any suspicious vehicles. The neighborhood was the kind of place where people knew what was happening on their street. They would have noticed.

Legal documentation placed the murders hours later, around one or two in the morning, when Clarance was at Michael Scott’s house. Michael signed an affidavit. Phone records showed Kenneth calling Clarance from a payphone near Michelle’s house later that night, confirming that the two men were not together at the time the murders occurred. These records were introduced at trial. But they were introduced by Eric Cullen, who was new, inexperienced, and they were never explained in a way that gave the jury the tools to understand what they meant. The prosecution’s timeline was never challenged head-on. The impossibility of the state’s version of events was never made visible to the people who were deciding Clarance’s fate.

“Clarance, I’m just ready to get it over with.”