Rebirth

REBIRTH

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Matthew Thomas Houston. I spent twenty-two years in prison for the murder of two college coeds, murders which I did not commit and for which I was wrongly convicted. This is the story of my rebirth following the losses that resulted from that miscarriage of justice and its aftermath.

I was a mechanical engineer, specializing in the design and installation of industrial production lines, married to Lisa, a nurse, whom I loved with all my heart, and father of a set of twins, a boy (Jon) and a girl (Mary), whom I loved, I think, more than life itself. Lisa and I had met as college freshmen and had married straight out of college. Although we had not planned for this to happen, she had gotten pregnant on our honeymoon. I was making enough money that she could be a stay-at-home mom for at least a few years, although her being a full-time mommy meant deferring the purchase of a house. We decided the children were more important and had rented a townhouse in a newer development in the Philadelphia suburbs not far from my office.

My job required me to travel to oversee the installation of the production lines which our firm designed. The twins were a few months shy of their third birthday when I left to oversee installation of a production line in the Midwest. It was the last time I ever saw them as my children.

On the day when my life went to Hell, I got up at my usual 5:00 A.M. and took my regular morning one-hour run. I went out the side door of the hotel, up to the river and ran along a walking path/bike trail, returning through the front door of the hotel just after 6:00 A.M. The choice of doors to exit and enter proved critical. The camera on the side door, which should have captured my exit, was malfunctioning. The front door camera was not. As a result, there was no record of my departure, just one of my return.

After finishing my run, I showered, had breakfast, and went into the parking garage to retrieve my rented car and head over to the plant to continue the installation. To my surprise, the car was missing. I initially thought that I'd misremembered which floor of the garage I'd parked it on, but a search of all the floors failed to turn it up. I went back into the hotel and called the rental car company to get the registration information on the car and confirm that they had not taken it back for some reason, then called the police to report it stolen. They asked me to come in to make a report at my convenience. I told them I'd be there after getting the crew settled on the day's work at the fabrication installation.

I had no idea when I called the police that the car was a burned-out shell containing the bodies of two young women in the trunk, parked between two abandoned warehouses in the industrial district of the city, about five miles from my hotel. Knowing that probably wouldn't have changed the ultimate outcome of my trial, but it would have put me on my guard when I was speaking with the police.

When I got to the police station, I filled out a stolen car report using the information I'd obtained from the rental car company. The rental car company met me there and provided another vehicle, telling me they would contact my employer to address the insurance issues relating to the stolen car. I went back to my hotel, had dinner, and went to bed. The next morning, I got up and went for the daily run, then back to the plant. Late that afternoon, I received a call from a detective, who told me that the car had been found and asking me to stop to speak to him about a few details. I left the plant a few minutes later and drove back to the police station.

Two detectives met me at the front desk and accompanied me into a conference room They offered me, coffee, engaged in a bit of back-and-forth banter, including asking why I was in town and how long I planned to stay. Tbegan asking questions about the car. Initially, they wanted to know when I'd last seen the car (about 8:00 P.M., when I'd returned from dinner), where I'd had dinner (a local diner near the hotel), whether I still had the car key (I did, taking it from my pocket and handing it to them). From there, the questions got a bit weirder. They wanted to know what I'd done after returning to my room (called my wife, read a bit of a novel I was working through) and when I'd gone to sleep (about 9:30 P.M.). Had I left the room after that (not until 5:00 A.M. the following morning). Why had I left so early (the daily morning run). What had I worn (my sweats). What color (grey). Where had I gone on my run (to the river and up the hiking/bike path). Had I seen anyone (no one I knew - just a couple of other early morning runners and bicyclists). Could they see my Blackberry (sure, here it is).

I was beginning to wonder what all of this had to do with a stolen rental car and so I asked. They looked at me for a minute and then opened a file and handed me photos of two young women. (I found out later that the women had been reported missing, but that the coroner had not yet positively identified the two of them.) They asked me if I knew either of them (no) or had seen them (no, again). When I asked what that had to do with my missing rental car, they dropped the bomb. Two bodies, thought to be those of the young women, had been found in the trunk of the car, which had been dropped in an abandoned warehouse complex and torched. A person in a set of sweats with the hood pulled up had been seen on a camera not far from the warehouse complex.

At this point, I did what I should have done when the questioning started to get weird - asked for a lawyer. The detectives told me I was being held as a "person of interest" in the murders and arson and that I would be held for up to 48 hours while the investigation continued. Since I did not have an attorney, the local public defenders' office would be providing me with counsel. They then walked me to a cell, requiring me to empty my pockets, removing my belt and shoelaces and locking the door behind me.

Things quickly went downhill from there. The two young women were identified from their dental records, as the bodies were so badly burned as to render other identification impossible. They were children of two very wealthy and politically connected families who put an enormous amount of pressure on the city police and district attorney to get "justice" for their children. The police never looked at any possible suspects other than me. And why should they? They had the car, the car keys, the sweats, the entry back into the hotel at the end of the run and a complete lack of an alibi for a period that included the time the women were last seen and ran until long after the car had been torched.

Before the 48-hour period was up, I was charged with two counts of murder and a count of arson and remanded without bail to the city jail. Shortly thereafter, the grand jury indicted me. The case was put on a fast track for trial.

My wife took every nickel we had and could borrow and got me an attorney. He wasn't one of the elite criminal attorneys in the city (we didn't have anywhere near that much money), but he had a decent reputation. My parents helped some, but they were both retired, living on fixed incomes and in their seventies (I'd been a surprise when they were in their forties), which pretty much precluded their raising any significant funds. We had nowhere near the resources the district attorney's office devoted to this case - no real investigative capacity; no lab testing, except what the DA's office conducted; and no alternate theory of what happened except a general "someone else stole the car, kidnapped the women and murdered them, then torched the car and walked away." In a case like this, that's a mighty slim reed on which to lean and it turned out not to hold my weight.

The pre-trial publicity was extensive and brutal. The judge (a crony of the patriarchs of the families of the victims) refused a change of venue motion. He also refused to require the government to provide adequate funds to allow my attorney to conduct an independent investigation. The trial was nasty, short, and brutal. Although there was no physical evidence to tie me to the women, the combination of the rental car, my retention of the keys, the sweats, and my lack of a viable alibi, combined with the early morning return to the hotel, turned out to be sufficient for the jury to decide I was guilty. My parents and my wife had sat through the entire trial, trying to provide moral support. When the verdict was announced, all three of them began to cry, as did I. The bailiffs were kind enough to allow me to hug them one last time before handcuffing me and removing me from the courtroom. Shortly thereafter, I was sentenced to the mandatory life without possibility of parole (the state had no death penalty), plus twenty years for the arson, the sentences to run consecutively, and shipped to the state penitentiary. Having the sentences run consecutively was a bit of overkill, but political influence and inflamed emotions do sometimes warp justice.

My lawyer took an appeal, citing the excessive pre-trial publicity and refusal to change venues, plus arguing that there was insufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Not surprisingly, given the prominence of the victims' families and the nature of the crime, the appeal was denied in short order by the appellate court. The state and federal supreme courts both refused to hear the case.

CHAPTER TWO

The blows just kept on falling. Three months after my conviction, my wife filed for divorce, asking for sole custody, denial of any visitation opportunities for me with my children (after all, I was 1000 miles away from their home and visitation wasn't practical according to her petition), a change of hers and the children's last names to her maiden name and an award of all marital property. Despite the efforts of a legal aid attorney assigned to represent me, the family court promptly granted her petition.

A year and a half later, my father died, followed a few months later by my mother. I didn't know either had died until the attorney probating my mother's estate contacted me by mail to obtain my signature on a receipt for the $1.00 I had been left in her will to avoid any issues regarding an inadvertent disinheritance. My brother and sister, who were 14 and 12 years older than I was, had not bothered to inform me of either death. When I reached out to them, told me they blamed me for my parents' dying so quickly. They also told me never to contact them again in any manner. My former friends did the same. I was a pariah one Nwho had meant anything to me remained except my children.

Notwithstanding the divorce and the loss of any custody rights, I had been writing my children a letter every two weeks, emphasizing my continued love for them and telling them (in very general and perhaps overly optimistic terms) about what I was experiencing and asking them not to give up hope that we might once again be a family. I was a bit more than two and a half years into my sentence when the next blow fell. I was served a petition in which my ex-wife was seeking to terminate my parental rights along with a restraining order that would permanently prohibit me from contacting my ex-wife or my children. Again, despite the best efforts of an overworked legal aid attorney, the petition was granted in its entirety. The attorney told me that my ex-wife had gone to work as a nurse in a local hospital and had met a doctor whom she was about to marry. He wanted to adopt my children and the petition would clear the way for that adoption. My children, the sole remaining good thing in my life, were now gone as well. I seriously considered suicide.

There was only one thing in my prison experience those first years that provided even a tiny positive note. My cellmate, Sam, was a long-term prisoner, 35 years into a 40-year sentence for a double homicide. Sam had come home early one day to find his wife and her lover in the act. Enraged, he'd pulled a shotgun off the wall and killed both, then called the police to turn himself in. Unfortunately for Sam, what would ordinarily have been handled as a crime of passion and generated a sentence of around 15 years, had run into its own political hornets' nest. The lover was the youngest son of the county sheriff and the brother of the county district attorney. They went for the maximum possible sentence, although the sentencing judge, at considerable risk to his own potential career advancement, had exercised a modicum of mercy by setting a sentence of a definitive period rather than life without parole. The brother had continued to rise in the political hierarchy of the state and was now a powerful state senator who chaired the committee that handled issues relating to prisons, probation and parole matters. His political influence ensured that Sam would serve every single day of the 40 years.

Sam actually believed me when I told him I had nothing to do with crimes for which I'd been convicted. In a society like a prison, where everyone claims to be innocent but almost no one is, the truly innocent are a rare thing indeed. It is for good reason that most prisoners are cynical and skeptical when one of their fellows claims to have been railroaded. Nonetheless, Sam's considerable experience at listening to such tales had given him a fine sense of who was being truthful and who was blowing smoke and he accepted that I fell into the former category rather than the latter.

Because of his long incarceration, Sam had considerable influence among the inmates. He took me under his wing, teaching me how to survive, avoid conflict with other prisoners and the corrections officers, and maintain my sanity in a truly insane environment. He had never had children and told me shortly before he finally left prison after completion of his sentence that I was the closest thing to the son he'd never had. Sam taught me how to exercise, made me watch what I ate (prison diets are notoriously poor and starchy), showed me how to interact with the guards, kept me out of the clutches of the various gangs who actively recruited among the new inmates and generally did as much as anyone could do to make the incarceration experience bearable, if not pleasant. When he finally completed his sentence, he promised to keep in touch, which he did for the three years he lived before dying of cancer. When I heard about his passing, I cried for the loss of my one friend. I was now truly alone.

CHAPTER THREE

My next cellmate set me on a path that gave at least a sliver of meaning to my time as an inmate.              Marcus was a 19-year-old kid from the ghetto serving a ten-year sentence for aggravated assault and weapons offenses. He had tried to shoot a rival gang's member who was dealing off a street corner that Marcus' gang believed was part of their territory. I'd continued to write to my children every two weeks, even though I could no longer send them the letters. After I completed each letter, I placed it in the small personal storage area we had in our cell. By the time he joined me, there were hundreds of pages of letters in storage. After watching me do this for several months, he asked me what I was doing. I explained that I wanted my children to know that I continued to love them and think of them even though we could no longer be together. When my time on earth ended and my very limited possessions were sent to my family, they would at least know their father had not forgotten them.

Marcus asked me if I could write a letter to his grandmother, who had raised him after his mother had overdosed. I asked him why he didn't write her himself. He hemmed and hawed for some time before admitting that he couldn't read or write. He'd had ten years of public schooling in the urban district in which he'd grown up, been promoted every year, but had never learned basic literacy skills.

I asked Marcus if he'd like to learn. He said he was too old. I told him a story (lied to him, in truth) about my grandfather, who I said had dropped out of school after second grade to help his mother on their farm when his father was killed in the war. He'd finally learned to read and write when he was in his 40s, with the help of his children. I told Marcus if Grandpop could do it then, Marcus could certainly do it now. And so it began.

There is a huge difference between being uneducated and being stupid. Marcus might have been the former, but he definitely was not the latter. Within less than a year he was reading and writing at a sixth-grade level. He wrote his first letter to his grandmother, who responded with joy and astonishment at receiving such a thing from her grandson. She asked him to pass along to me her thanks for the time and effort I'd invested in him. Marcus also told his friends in the inmate population. At first, only one or two approached me to ask if I'd help them like I'd helped Marcus. So, I began conducting small group sessions, which began to grow as more young men sought me out. After a while, I attracted the attention of a corrections officer, who wanted to know what a college educated white guy was doing with a bunch of black gangbangers. I explained what I was doing. He told his sergeant, who told his lieutenant, who told his captain, who told the deputy warden. He called me in to interrogate me and find out what I was getting in return for hanging out with a group in which I clearly did not belong. I told him that I was finding a way to pass the time I had left doing something worthwhile. I don't think he believed me at first, but when I asked that the prison acquire some books oriented toward helping adults become literate, he agreed to consider making the acquisition.

I also attracted the attention of the leaders of the gangs representing all three major ethnic groups in the prison. This was not quite as good a thing. The leader of the African American population wanted to know what I was doing. After a thorough and somewhat physically taxing interrogation, he accepted that I was nothing more than a white do-gooder, a type he'd had regular experience with growing up. There was a substantial Aryan Nation-type population in the prison. Their leadership wanted to know why I was doing this for the blacks (not the term they used) and not for "my own people." I explained that none of "my own people" had approached me about teaching them, but I was more than willing to create another class for those purposes, recognizing that the racial tensions in the prison made an integrated class a very bad idea. The leader of the Hispanic population wanted to know when I would do the same for his people. He wanted Spanish language literacy, something I couldn't offer because I spoke no Spanish. I did offer to try to teach English language literacy as part of an English as a second language approach and so ended up with a third class.

This went on for almost 15 years. The deputy warden got behind the program, providing space and seating for the classes, helping me formalize the program and making it my "job" in the prison, allowing me to earn the magnificent sum of $0.25 per hour for nine hours work each week. Class sizes ebbed and flowed, but on average I was teaching 15 to 20 members of each group at any given time. Not all of them stayed with it and not all of them succeeded in getting to Marcus' level, although many did. A couple tested out as high as a tenth-grade level. Although I was aging, the vast majority of my students were 19-25 years old. Most started at or below a second-grade level of literacy. The prison got some positive press for the program and the legislature even funded an expansion into other prisons in the state prison system. Although I still had no future, I now at least had a purpose, and that alone made my life a bit more bearable, if not happy.