Journalist changed mind about inmate on death row

Jana Bommersbach believed for 25 years that Debra Milke was a baby killer.

Milke had reportedly confessed to having her 4-year-old son Christopher shot and killed in 1989. A jury believed it. So did the judge who sentenced Milke to death in 1991, the only woman on Arizona’s death row.

“I always thought she was guilty,” said Bommersbach, a longtime journalist whose book, “A Stolen Life: The Debra Milke Story,” is out now.

Then in 2013, a federal appeals court threw out Milke’s conviction because her rights had been violated.

The case against Milke had hinged on an unsigned, unwitnessed, unrecorded confession that Milke insisted she never gave. Prosecutors alleged she conspired to kill Christopher for a $5,000 life insurance policy.

Bommersbach worked with Milke’s attorneys, reviewed documents and interviewed people. She talked to Milke, in prison and after she was released.

I interviewed Milke for a story in 1998. I saw her in her cell on death row and talked to her by phone.

Milke told me she hadn’t known what would happen when her roommate, James Styers, and his friend, Roger Scott, took her son to Metrocenter Mall.

Christopher was found a day later in a desert wash.

“I just wish the state would confess error and put an end to this. They have their killers,” Milke said. Styers and Scott were both on death row for Christopher’s death. ”It would be a lot easier to wash the egg off their faces than to wash my blood off their hands after they execute me. They should let me go.”

The more Bommersbach learned, the more she thought Milke was innocent. The detective who claimed Milke confessed had a history of misconduct. The insurance policy was a perk of a new job.

“After a quarter century of believing Debra Milke was a baby killer, I can say this,” Bommersbach said. “I have never been so wrong.”