Trust and truth
Concealed evidence, a coerced confession and a biased detective sent an innocent 17-year-old to prison for murder, prosecutors say
Keith Bush, who maintained his innocence in a 1975 murder, was finally vindicated after 33 years in prison last week, when he was exonerated by a judge who agreed with prosecutors that he was wrongfully convicted in a case rife with problems.
For Bush of Long Island, New York, the emotional court hearing May 22 in Suffolk County marked an official reprieve in the case that has consumed his life. Bush, a black man, was 17 when he was arrested in the murder of a teenage girl. At 62, he has been on lifetime parole as a registered sex offender since his release from prison in 2007.
“I placed my principles and my ethics on trust and the truth,” Bush said at a news conference after the hearing, “and I tried to live by that, hoping that this day would arrive.”
The judge’s decision followed a motion to exonerate him by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, the same agency that secured his conviction and for decades fought his efforts to reexamine the case. The office’s Conviction Integrity Bureau, a recently formed unit responsible for examining potentially unjust convictions, found that the case’s prosecutor and others had hidden the existence of a second credible suspect.
Prosecutors said that man, since deceased, was more likely the killer.
As the case against Bush unraveled under closer scrutiny, CIB investigators interviewed August Stahl, one of the detectives who arrested Bush.
Stahl, 90, told investigators last month that he remembered the Bush case, according to court documents filed by prosecutors, and said, “That
“The police seem to have just decided based on some sort of sixth sense. They didn’t investigate. They just decided.”
Adele Bernhard
Keith Bush’s attorney
(expletive) n----- did it, there is no doubt about it; he should have been executed for it.”
According to the court filings, Stahl referred to murders in mostly black neighborhoods as “misdemeanor homicides” and boasted that he did his detective work in a way that would’ve gotten him indicted today. He lamented to investigators that in his old age, “I can’t pound people the way I used to be able to,” according to the records.
In an interview May 22 with USA TODAY, Stahl denied making any of those statements. “Not true at all whatsoever,” he said. Stahl denied he is a racist, pointing out that he partnered with a black police officer and served with black soldiers during World War II and the Korean War.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that I got the right person for the murder,” Stahl said.
‘More than reasonable doubt’
The stark change in the handling of Bush’s case is an example of the power the Conviction Integrity Bureau has to address injustices long after a defendant’s appeals have been exhausted. Similar units operate in law enforcement jurisdictions around the country.
In Suffolk County, District Attorney Tim Sini was elected to the office after the resignation of Thomas Spota, who was indicted in 2017 on federal conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges in an unrelated matter.
Sini said he was “astonished” by the breadth of mistakes and misconduct in the Bush case, the first that his Conviction Integrity Bureau sought to reverse.
“The worst thing a prosecutor or any member of law enforcement can do is go forward with a case when they have reasonable doubt about that person’s guilt,” Sini said. “Here they had more than reasonable doubt.”
The motion to reverse the conviction followed an in-depth Newsday story last week in which members of the District Attorney’s Office discussed some of the flaws in the case.
The DA’s motion states that Bush, in an interview with Sini and other prosecutors, explained that he repeatedly refused to confess to the murder during parole hearings – then was denied parole, resulting in a dozen extra years in prison – because he had learned a lesson after detectives beat a confession out of him when he was 17.
“I refused to let them do to me as a man what they did to me as a boy,” Bush said, according to the filing.
Bush’s attorney, Adele Bernhard, said that even as the previous administration stonewalled their attempts to reexamine the case, they never gave up.
“In this case, I thought I would ultimately get somebody to listen,” she said. “It was just too heartbreaking.”
On Jan. 11, 1975, the body of Sherese Watson, 14, was found in a vacant lot in Bellport, New York. Her jeans were partly unzipped, and she had small puncture wounds on her right lower back. A medical examiner determined that Watson died of strangulation.
Homicide detectives quickly honed in on Bush, who had no criminal record but was at a house party where Watson was last seen. Detectives Stahl and Dennis Rafferty had him taken out of school and brought to a homicide interrogation room where, Bush said, police beat him over the head with a “big book” and kicked him in the genitals.
He signed a confession that he stabbed Watson with his hair pick, then strangled her to death after she refused his advances.
“I just wanted my mom,” Bush explained as to why he signed the confession, which he said he did not read.
Bush made the allegation of abuse within two days of the interrogation, according to a medical record. Suffolk County detectives, including Rafferty, later became notorious for such tactics.
A Newsday investigation titled “The Confession Takers” in 1986 included allegations by multiple homicide suspects that detectives beat them with telephone books to secure false confessions. Three years later, members of a New York state investigative commission called a homicide confession secured by Rafferty “highly suspect” and noted that he failed to test a bullet in a murder case because, as he explained, “every black guy in Amityville has a .22.” The commission members reported that they were disturbed by his “convenient talent” for producing the exact testimony and evidence that he needed to close a case.
Rafferty, through his attorney, and Stahl denied to USA TODAY that they beat Bush or any other suspect.
“My cases are done with physical evidence connected with the defendant, nothing else,” Stahl said.
Besides the Bush confession, which prosecutors said was coerced, his conviction in a jury trial relied on other evidence that the DA’s office considers problematic, according to the filing.
A witness who testified in court that she watched Bush leave the party with the murder victim recanted four years later, saying she made up the story because she was “scared and afraid” of police. Investigators checked her account with statements of others at the party and concluded that her initial testimony was indeed false.
Sini said physical evidence presented in the trial – such as fibers that were said to link Bush’s jacket to the victim’s fingernails or the finding that her stab wounds were made by Bush’s hair pick – relied on “junk science.”
The second suspect
During the four-plus decades Bush spent in prison or on parole as a sex offender, Suffolk County prosecutors resisted his attempts to readjudicate his case, even after a DNA test in 2006 found that another man’s tissue, and not his, was under the victim’s fingernails. Prosecutors fought Bush’s public records requests for materials in his own case file.
In 2018 – after Spota left office following his indictment for allegedly helping to cover up the county police chief ’s beating of a prisoner – Bush received his full case records, including materials he and his attorneys said they had never seen before. The new documents referred to another suspect, John Jones, who came to the attention of the detectives roughly three months after they secured the purported confession from Bush.
Jones told the detectives that after leaving the same house party attended by Watson, he tripped over a body, dropped his own hair pick and left it at the scene, where it was later taken into evidence. The detectives had Jones take a polygraph and, satisfied that his story was truthful, discarded him as a suspect.
A year after the murder, Jones, then 22, was charged with third-degree rape after impregnating a 15-year-old girl. According to a Newsday report, he was arrested several more times, including for stabbing a man, before dying in 2006.
Sini called Jones’ story “ridiculous” and said he found him to be a far more credible suspect than Bush.
“Instead of investigating Jones, what do they do?” Sini said of the detectives. “They try to wash it and cover it up.”
Rafferty’s lawyer, James O’Rourke, said the retired detective “maintains to this day that the second suspect was found not to be credible under the circumstances” and didn’t fit the killer’s profile.
“The police seem to have just decided based on some sort of sixth sense,” said Bernhard, Bush’s attorney. “They didn’t investigate. They just decided.”
Undisclosed evidence
Bernhard and the prosecutors reexamining Bush’s conviction said one of the most disturbing aspects of the ignored second suspect was that his existence was apparently hidden from Bush and his attorneys for four decades. They consider it a violation of Brady v. Maryland, a Supreme Court decision mandating that prosecutors disclose all evidence that might be helpful to the defense.
“Who knew what, and when, is an important part of this investigation,” Sini said. The CIB concluded that Gerald Sullivan, the prosecutor in Bush’s case, was “fully aware” of Jones’ existence as a second potential suspect and didn’t disclose that to the defense. Sullivan has since died.
Sini said the CIB received petitions about 100 other cases, and the unit is investigating about a dozen. Of Rafferty and Stahl, Sini said, “Any petition that involves one of these detectives will be carefully reviewed.”
CIB investigators found Stahl at his home in a small private enclave in Yaphank, New York, which is owned by the German American Settlement League. Stahl served as a board member of the league, which barred residents who weren’t of “Germanic extraction” until two years ago, when it ended the policy to settle an anti-discrimination lawsuit.
Court filings indicate that Stahl confided in the investigators that tragedy he’s experienced, such as sickness in his family, may be “payback for some of the bad things I’ve done in my life.”