"I Killed 30 or 40 People Last Year"

By Peter Weston
Detective Dragnet
February 1980 (Volume 24, Number 1)

When the middle aged, dog-faced man walked into the West 100th Street Station in New York City, the desk sergeant yawned and demanded, "Well, what do you want, buddy?"

"I want to make a confession," the man replied. "I killed my wife yesterday. Stabbed her a dozen times and left her body on the bedroom floor. Up in Dutchess County."

The sergeant was jolted to full wakefulness. Maybe the man was one of those oddballs who confessed to anything just for attention. And maybe he wasn't. There is no alternative for police in those situations. The man has to be checked out.

"What's your name?"

"Joe Fischer - Joseph Fischer. I'm 50. I might as well tell you something else. I'm an ex-con. Got out of Rahway State Prison over in Jersey last year. Did a stretch for murder."

"Where did you kill your wife?"

"It was up in Dutchess County. A little town called Wassaic, outside of Poughkeepsie. I got a trailer in a trailer colony up there. My wife's name was Claudine. She used to be Claudine Eggers, and she was a lot older than me. She wrote me a lot of letters when I was in stir, and I wrote back to her. When I got out I married her. She was 78, and I was 50. That was the trouble. She was too old for me..."

This dramatic episode on June 27, 1979, was the beginning of a saga of coast-to-coast murder which, as it gradually unfolded, shocked and intrigued law enforcement officers all the way from Maine to California - one which promised to crack as many as 20 homicides which had been written off as "unsolved".

After extensive questioning in the 100th Street Precinct, the New York authorities notified police in Poughkeepsie, a pleasant river town some 70 Miles up the Hudson. The Poughkeepsie detectives came to New York City the following day and took Fischer in handcuffs to Poughkeepsie, the seat of Dutchess County, and lodged him in jail there.

Mrs. Claudine Eggers Fischer was slain by repeated stab wounds on the day before Fischer walked into the 100th Street Precinct and the body was found on the floor of the trailer the couple had occupied in Wassaic.

Fischer told Poughkeepsie detectives that he had slain his wife after they returned to Wassaic following a two-day trip to Cooperstown, N. Y.

Checking up on his record, the investigators found that the prisoner had set a pattern of murder for himself over the past 30 years.

His first crime was the mugging of soldier for $5 in his home town of Belleville, N. J. About this time he recommited himself to the Essex County Hospital Center in Cedar Grove, N. J., where he had already undergone half a year's treatment for an "emotional disorder". For the mugging, Fischer served a term of five years in New Jersey's Bordentown Reformatory.

Just two weeks after doing this stretch he killed a 16-year-old youth, Harry Powell 3rd, with a rock and took $2 off his body in Branch Brook Park in Belleville. He showed the police where he had concealed the body in a small gully. For this crime he was given a life sentence, but was paroled after spending 24 yeard behind bars.

It was 13 months following his parole that his elderly wife was stabbed to death.

"But that isn't the half of it," Fischer was quoted as saying. "Besides my wife, I killed more than 20 people from coast to coast."

Manuel Sanchez, a detective with Troop K of the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation, was skeptical. "Suppose you tell us all about it."

"Well," said the tattooed Fischer, "I told my wife I wanted to tour every state in the union, and she gave me the money to finance my trip. I went alone, and I was gone the last of 1978 and the first half of 1979..."

Sanchez could tell that Fischer was overwrought - he seemed to feel a great compulsion to relate his bloody history to the officers. He admitted that he had a drinking problem, and he said that most or all of his crimes were committed while he was under the influence of alcohol.

In the continued quizzing, Detective John Crodelle took a part. Fischer told him he had murdered a 26-year-old woman named Pamela Nolen of Ruidoso, N. M., on October 30, 1978. He pickup truck was found abandoned in a wooded area three miles from her home, but her body could not be discovered.

Fischer gae the troopers and the Poughkeepsie detectives a photograph of Miss Nolen, and he supplied travel records that showed he had without doubt been in New Mexico. Later, the authorities of that state informed the New York police that the photo was, indeed, a likeness of Miss Nolen. The New Mexico police said they were anxious to question Fischer about this slaying.

"About the same time," Fischer declared in his rambling confession, "I killed another woman in New Mexico; I stabbed her several times until the stopped moving."

Then, in Moore, Okla., a suburb of Oklahoma City, Fischer declared, he was alone in a house with a 38-year-old woman whom he murdered. He stuffed her body into a closet and nailed the door shut. For this crime, the Oklahoma authorities promptly issued a warrant for the prisoner.

"Then there was a guy I met in the Salvation Army Center in San Francisco," Fischer went on. "We traveled together to Flagstaff, Ariz., and in a house there I beat him to death with my fists."

After a July 4th celebration last year, Fischer related, he picked up two prostitutes - he intended to get into bed with both of them - and it turned out that they wanted to rob him. So he murdered them.

The police chief of Norwalk, Conn., informed the New York investigators that such a double murder had, indeed, occurred, and he said he was anxious to question Fischer.

"Then there were three Bowery bums in New York," Fischer said. "I knocked them off one at a time in Arpil, May, and June of this year."

At the time he was on the trip upstate with his wife. Later on, the prisoner boasted, he was alone with a man in a rowboat on Otsego Lake. He beat the man unconscious and tossed him overboard. (Divers searched the bottom of the lake, but failed to find the body.)

Fischer told Detective Sanchez that he had a suitcase filled with newspaper clippings about his multiple crimes and with the possessions of some of his victims. He declared he left the suitcase in a beach bungalow he rented in Keansburg, N. J., In July, 1979, and in corroboration he showed a rent receipt. The bungalow was searched, but the suitcase was not found.

"Let's get back to the killing of your wife for a minute," said one of the Poughkeepsie detectives. "Didn't you feel terrible after you stabbed her and letf her on the floor of your trailer in Wassaic? After all, she had been very good to you. She wrote to you in prison - maybe she even visited you - and she gave you a large sum of money for your crosscountry trip."

Fischer shrugged and spread out his hands. "I felt O. K.," he said. "Nothing to feel bad about."

"Were you intimate with her?"

"A few times. But I used to go out and pick up a young whore, or maybe a couple of them. I used to like two girls."

"Didn't your wife suspect that you might kill her someday?"

"Oh, no. I didn't tell her anything about anything."

For three or four days in July of 1979, Fischer was in Portland, Me., and he intimated that he committed at least one murder there.

A further check on the mass-murder suspect's background disclosed that he had undergone some psychiatric observation and treatment during the years he was confined to prisons in New Jersey. The New York State Police sought to obtain the psychiatric findings and evaluation, but the New Jersey Correction Department refused to disclose it because "it is confidential medical information."

Before Fischer finally won release from prison in New Jersey in the summer of 1978 - he was released in the custody of the Salvation Army center in Paterson, N. J. - his applications for parole were turned down 13 times. A condition of his release was that he participate in Alcoholics Anonymous programs and receive "intensive supervision".

The quizzing of the prisoner, conducted by alternating teams of detectives headed by State Troopers Crodelle and Sanchez, went on day after day. And as it proceeded, it appeared that the death toll might be considerably higher that anticipated. Joseph Fischer claimed that he had stabbed, choked, shot, or beaten more than 30 people to death in his mad coast-to-coast rampage!

He added Oregon and Washington to the list of states in which the alleged murders occured. He recalled shooting a man in Oregon and slaying a woman in Seattle, Wash. Also, he claimed he murdered a total of six people in Oklahoma - four more that he previously had confessed to.

Furthermore, numerous documents in Fischer's possession - including airline tickets and other travel receipts - placed him in the vicinity of several of the killings at the time the homicides occurred, according to the investigators.

"Now how about that murder up in Oregon?" queried detective Sanchez.

"Oh, that one. It was somewhere near Bend. Out in the woods. I was drunk, and I stumbled on this man sleeping in one of those sleeping bags. There was a gun lying on the ground near him, so I just picked it up and sent a bullet through his head."

He was asked why he would shoot and kill a total stranger as he slept.

"I guess I just said, 'The hell with it, '" he replied. "I had knocked over so many already, what difference did one more make?"

"What time of the year were you around Bend?"

"It must have been in the spring or summer, because I remember it wasn't cold. All I was wearing at the time was a heavy jacket."

Three New York City detectives, led by Deputy Inspector Gene Martinez, arrived in Poughkeepsie to question the suspect. For once, Fischer cited a logical motive for murder. "I killed those bums," he said, "right after they got their welfare checks. I forged the names on the checks and was able to cash them without any difficulty."

After the quizzing Deputy Inspector Martinez said he believed the suspect's story. "He gave us mor than the average person would have known about the murders," the investigator declared.

"Some of those cases got into the newspapers, but others did not. Only the killer could have known the details. The guy's accounts are a bit hazy at times because he admitted he had been drinking heavily at the time he committed the crimes."

Other investigators who came to Poughkeepsie to question Fischer included detectives from the Maine State Police, and from San Francisco and Oklahoma City.

A good picture of the alledged mass-murderer was given by a reprter for the Poughkeepsie Journal, who interviewed him with the consent of the court:

"Mass murder suspect Joseph Fischer was dog-tired. Sitting in the stuffy chapel of the Dutchess County jail, a bleary-eyed Fischer rubbed his temples as he explained how he had at through six hours of interviews, telling his story over and over agian until, he said, he sounded like a broken record."

(These interviews were conducted by tow television stations, the U. P. I., The New York Daily News, the Newark Ledger, and the Poughkeepsie Journal.)

"Traffic in the jail was heavy as reporters and camera crews stalked the halls waiting for their chance to interview the man who claims to have murdered more that 25 people in a cross-country killing spree."

"I feel much better," he said after unburdening himself to the media. "When I die and got to Claudine, I'll go to her clean. She will accept me when the truth is out."

"Later, Fischer broke into tears briefly as he said he sometimes feels his wife is watching over him. On more than one occasion Fischer has referred ominously to his own death and to meeting Claudine once again..."

The police declared that Joseph Fischer matched a "psychological profile" made of the killer of the two prostitutes in Norwalk, Conn., who were stabbed 100 times in the face and the breasts and then dumped in a wooded area. That profile also fit the description of the slayer of the Bowery bums in New York.

According to the profile, the killer of the prostitutes had probably committed murder before and probably would again and had never been caught.

Fischer was arraigned on a charge of murder before Judge Raymond Aldrich in Poughkeepsie and held for trial without bail.

"I've been living with this for a long time," he told the judge, "and I am anxious to get it off my chest."

An indication of how the suspect hoped to die so that he could join his slain wife was given in an interview to a reporter for the New York Daily News.

"I believe firmly in the death penalty," he said, "and I want to be prosecuted in a state where I will face the death penalty... All of this (his alleged multiple murders) would never have happened if I had just been executed after I killed that boy in Newark in 1953. If more kids knew that they had the death penalty it would stop a whole lot of what is going on today."

The prisoner revealed, in the interview, a possible motivation for his slaying spree.

"A lot of my female victims looked like my mother who was a whore - that's why I had to kill them - and a lot of my male victims looked like the guys who used to pay my mother. Also, the girls I killed looked just like my mother when they asked me to give them money."

Fischer said sometimes his mother copulated with "Johns" while he was a witness. Sometimes he even was in the same bed with them.

Present during many of Fischer's jailhouse interviews were his lawyer, James R. Brown Jr., and William L. Paroli, chief investigator for the Dutchess County public defender's office, which was representing the suspect.

Fischer related that he grew up in Belleville, N. J., the son of a laborer. His father, he said, left his mother after the boy told him he had seen the mother in bed with other men. (One of the detectives suggested that Fischer's bloody crime spree would have been a fit subject for Freud, the famous psychoanalyst who tied human emotional ills to childhood traumas.)

Fischer said that his father forged some papers to get him into the Marines when he was only 15, and that he saw combat on Guadalcanal, Guam, and other Pacific battlefields during World War II.

Fischer, who is about 5-feet-9 and weighs 170 pounds, wore a maroon T-shirt, khaki pants, and moccasins. Jail doctors said he was constantly under medication.

"After I was sprung from prison in '78," Fischer said, "I was scared to death. I couldn't cope with nothing... Now it's bugging me that a lot of people don't seem to believe what I tell them. I'm not a liar. Telling the truth is about the only thing I've got left... I don't want to be free again - I want to be with my wife."

At a hearing in Dutchess County court to determine Fischer's fitness to stand trial, two pychiatrists told Judge Aldrich that the suspect "does not lack the capacity to understand the proceedings against him or to assist in his defence."

Fischer was subdued in court. He seemed to understand his serious predicament. At a previous court hearing he had stood up and angrily demanded that he be given permission to grant jailhouse interviews. After hearing the psychiatrists' statements, the judge granted him this permission.

The prisoner told the authorities and reporters that he had begun drinking heavily about the age of 12 or 13, spent "most of my life drunk," and drank heavily behind bars in New Jersey on smuggled and homemade booze. He accused state police of having plied him with beer and never warning him of his rights during his interrogation.

On one of his murder rampages, he said, he had a companion. This was the slaying of the two prostitutes in Norwalk, Conn. He said he and his friend picked up the ladies-for-hire in a bar. He simply meant to copulate with them, but when one of them reached into his pocket for money he grabbed his knife and killed them both.

Fischer refused to disclose his companion's name. "What do you think I am?" he said. "I'm no stoolie."

On his cross-country murder jaunt Fischer often took odd jobs in towns he visited. He was a maintenance man in a motel, a landscaper, and a painter. Meanwhile, he was drinking heavily - as much as two quarts of Canadian Club whisky a day - and frequently suffered blackouts.

"In Oklahoma City," he recalled, "I worked as a pizza cook for two weeks without even knowing I was working there. Finally I talked to a waitress at the restaurant when I sobered up a little. I asked her how long I had worked there, and she said two weeks."

Fischer told reporters that he was treated well in the Dutchess County jail. But he was afraid of the other prisoners because he thought they wanted to kill him in reprisal for all the murders he had committed.

Police in Cooperstown, N. Y., the home of the baseball hall of fame, checked motel records and found that he had stayed there on the dates he specified. And in Portland, me., the local authorities similarly discovered that he had stayed in a motel there from July 18 to 20, 1979. During that period he allegedly committed at least one murder.

In the Moore, Okla. murder, where Fischer killed a woman and then stuffed her body into a closet and nailed the door shut, police identified the victim as Betty JoGibson, her body was not found until a month after the crime had taken place. The body had been horribly bludgeoned.

In Hartford, Conn., the two prostitutes slain were identified as Ronnie Tassiello, 18, and Alaine Hapeman, 19. Their bodies had been carried into a wooded area.

In Newark, N. J., police said that the woman bludgeoned to death was JoAnne E. Franklin, 18, of East Orange. She was killed near the Branch Brook Park.

The Dutchess County jail physician, Dr. George Brown, who is also a psychiatrist, examined Fischer and found that he was suffering from alcoholism and auditory hallucinations. He prescribed sedation for him.

In practically all the cities and towns where Fischer's alleged murders occurred during his long rampage, indictments were voted against him on charges of murder. There were enough charges filed, in fact, so that it appeared he would never agian enjoy freedom.

The court machinery of Dutchess County, meanwhile, clanked into action for a trial of Fischer on the charge that he killed his 78-year-old wife, Claudine Eggers Fischer. As yet, no date for the trial has been set.

At this writing, Joseph Fischer sits in his jail cell in Poughkeepsie and awaits his fate. It will of course, be up to a judge and jury to determine the truth or falsity of his mass-murder claims.

He keeps a scrapbook of all the newspaper stories about his case and often reads and re-reads them.

Money for Nothing

Women's "gifting circles" are the fastest-growing -- and cruelest -- scam around.

A Tantalizing Fantasy

Gina DeJoy used to take people at their word. At her Maine antiques store, customers could ask for things to be put aside, on hold, no deposit necessary. These days, DeJoy would like to be paid in full first, thank you very much. After what she's been through, it's hard to blame her.

Three years ago, DeJoy, 43, told an acquaintance that she was in a tough spot financially. Every six weeks she was flying to Virginia -- missing work each time -- to get her mother through chemotherapy. Her credit cards were maxed out, but she couldn't bear to let her mother suffer alone. DeJoy's friend said she had a solution.

There was a local group set up to help women just like Gina. Called A Woman's Project, it was a "gifting circle" that worked like this: Give $5,000 to another woman in need, and in a short time your gift would come back to you eightfold -- $40,000.

How could money multiply so magically? Simple: by more women being inducted into the group. The groups, usually made up of 15 women, are known as "circles" but are best understood as pyramids: eight women on the bottom layer, four above that, two above them, and one at the top. The woman with the most seniority (the one at the peak of the pyramid) collects $40,000 when the bottom level is filled -- that is, when each of the eight newest initiates give her a $5,000 "gift." After the top woman collects, she leaves the group, which splits in two. At this point, all remaining members move up a level, and both groups start trolling for eight new bottom-level members.

A Woman's Project seemed heaven-sent to DeJoy. At her first meeting -- a potluck lunch held at a local hairdresser's house -- she felt as if she'd been invited to join a secret sorority. Among the 40 or so attendees, there were familiar faces, including her bank tellers and grocery-store cashier, but no one used last names, making the group feel both intimate and mysterious. The idea was that everyone had gathered for a charitable purpose -- to raise money for a good cause. Many of the women had brought donations for a local food bank, and the pile of canned goods sat in the middle of the crowded living room, a symbol of A Woman's Project's good intentions.

"We're women who help women," gushed one of the promoters, an inspirational speaker who said she had participated in a successful group in Texas. "That's what it's all about." Then came the pitch: The woman you help could be you. Eight of the attendees told stories about receiving $40,000. They encouraged newcomers to mortgage their homes to finance the initial gift. They mentioned money-back guarantees.

Of course, the two parts of the hook -- giving to charity and making a quick buck for yourself -- have nothing to do with each other. But for DeJoy, as for many other women, those two parts merged into a persuasive and tantalizing fantasy.

DeJoy talked it over with her husband and borrowed $5,000 from a bank. Then she wrapped the cash up like a present. At an afternoon tea attended by 18 Woman's Project participants and potentials, she handed the package to her host, a woman she'd never met. Though DeJoy was "scared to death," the others burst into applause. The next day she headed to Virginia to take care of her mother. Soon, she thought, the gifting-circle money would allow her to hire a private nurse.

Pyramid Scheme

Instead, within a week, things began to fall apart. DeJoy's husband called to tell her there had been a story in the local paper -- the gifting circle was in fact an illegal pyramid scheme. Frantic, DeJoy phoned the woman she had "gifted" to try to get her money back. The woman told her she didn't have it, and the others in the group were "just as mean and cold and heartless as could be," DeJoy recalls.

As her mother grew worse, DeJoy fell deeper into debt. A nurse was now out of the question. She had to borrow money from relatives. Her mother died, and DeJoy returned to Maine, where her husband tried to hang on to the antiques business while she took a job in a bakery -- on top of teaching art, weeding gardens and cleaning houses, almost anything to catch up on her bills.

And the money DeJoy had given, supposedly to help someone in a jam? The $5,000 really was gone. The head of the circle had spent the money -- received from DeJoy and seven others -- on "necessities" like a new car and a Caribbean cruise.

Pyramid schemes have been around nearly forever -- almost as long as there have been gullible people with money in their pockets. In the 1920s, Italian-born con man Charles Ponzi promised an eye-popping 400 percent interest on the cash that eager Boston residents "invested" with him. Before his arrest, Ponzi separated as many as 40,000 people from a total of $15 million.

Unfortunately for DeJoy and thousands of others like her, Ponzi's spirit lives on in today's gifting circles. First detected in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1990s, gifting circles are classic pyramid schemes, according to experts, but with a twist. They target women almost exclusively, and often draw in those who can't afford to lose any money at all. "There are a lot of people out there who are desperate," says Jim McKenna, an assistant attorney general in Maine. "It's not because they're greedy, but because they've fallen on hard times."

But it's not just the poor -- or even the financially naive -- who get taken. Gina DeJoy had experience running a business. Holly DeIaco, 32, a consultant who lost $2,500 to a similar scheme, has a master's degree. "I'm successful at what I do," she says. "How could I not see this?" The woman DeIaco gave her money to said she was writing a book -- a seemingly worthy cause to support. Only later did DeIaco find that the woman lived off credit cards and the money she made from gifting circles.

Far from being isolated cases, what happened to DeJoy and DeIaco is increasingly common. Hundreds of thousands of women have been swindled, losing what may add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. In Wisconsin in 2000 and 2001, sheriffs and district attorneys reported illegal gifting circles in 61 of the state's 72 counties. New Mexico's attorney general called it the No. 1 scam in her state in 2002. Last fall, the Sacramento sheriff's department broke up a network of gifting circles that involved 20,000 women and $15 million in losses.

If those numbers seem big, here's why: By its very nature, a pyramid scheme must grow exponentially if people at the top are going to get paid. But sooner or later the bubble will burst. "There's a finite number of people in your circle of friends and acquaintances," says Susan Grant, director of the National Fraud Information Center/Internet Fraud Watch. "There's no way you're going to keep bringing in new people to fuel the circle." Nine out of ten women are sure to lose their entire investment.

Fighting Back

To deflect potential victims from that grim mathematical reality, the perpetrators of these schemes cloak their scams in touchy-feely New Age language or appeals to sisterhood. Authorities say people who originate gifting circles are almost always career con artists. But if a circle sustains itself after an initial cycle or two, subsequent "winners" might genuinely not realize they are committing a crime.

Once a woman has joined a circle by putting up cash, there's a powerful incentive to stay -- even if things begin to look odd. Gifting circle victim Heather Wolfsmith, a 31-year-old financial advisor in New York City, quickly learned to keep her questions about the legality of the circle to herself. "The prevailing feeling was 'Don't ask,' " she says. "It was like you were afraid to live your dream, and that's why you're having these doubts."

Kathy Guardipee, 55, of Browning, Mont., kept quiet about her concerns for a different reason -- one that had a unique female appeal. "There are a lot of women going through abusive relationships, and this is their way out," she remembers being warned. Gina DeJoy was told the same thing.

While they may be poorer, Guardipee, Wolfsmith, DeIaco and DeJoy decided not to keep quiet. All three asked for their money back, and were refused. So they took action.

Wolfsmith has had the most success. In September 2001, she and five others in her circle, including DeIaco, filed suit in small-claims court against the women they "gifted." Victory was sweet. Ruling that the defendants -- who were involved in multiple circles -- showed "malicious intent," the judge awarded triple damages. The decision was upheld last year.

Not everyone will be so fortunate. State laws governing scams vary, and some courts may rule that merely participating in -- not just profiting from -- a pyramid scheme is a criminal act. Helping a gifting-circle victim get her money back would then be like helping a person recoup losses from an illegal poker game. And defendants, even if found guilty, can claim bankruptcy to avoid their debt.

There are some bright notes, though. In New York, the attorney general recently "unwound" a gifting circle, returning more than $170,000 to the proper pockets. In Wisconsin, an amnesty program got $1.2 million back to its rightful owners. Maine authorities are trying to do the same for DeJoy and her fellow victims, and have managed to settle a number of cases in their favor. But DeJoy turned down a settlement offer for one-fifth of her original investment -- $1,000 -- in hopes of getting all her money back.

Whatever happens, she can already claim at least a modicum of revenge. Despite the embarrassment of getting taken, she's been heartened by the response from other women in her area. "It was nice to have people come out and say, 'Yeah, we almost did it. You weren't a complete nitwit.' "

In fact, she might be wiser than the crooks who hatched the scheme. For all the talk about building a community, A Woman's Project fell apart the minute the chance to make money evaporated. By contrast, DeJoy and two other Maine women duped by gifting circles have begun getting together each week for lunch, and may, indeed, become friends for life.

By Shea Dean (From Reader's Digest)

They Took My Life

His wrongful arrest led to 12 years in jail. David Shephard can't make up for the lost time -- but he's determined to try.

Fear of Freedom
The euphoria washed over David Shephard the instant he walked out of prison, and didn't let up for hours, not until he finally collapsed from exhaustion, safe back in his mother's house. But after spending so much time in jail, Shephard had changed -- and so had his world. Within days the exhilaration of freedom vanished, replaced by a crippling paranoia that dogged him all day, every day.

For weeks he couldn't leave the house. When he finally did venture out, he made sure to save his bus ticket in case he had to prove where he had been. "I wanted to get back to my life," Shephard says, "but I was afraid it could all happen again."

If you stop and think about it, Shephard's paranoia is understandable. Wrongly convicted of raping a 19-year-old New Jersey woman, he spent 12 years behind bars, until an advanced DNA analysis proved his innocence. After all he'd been through -- arrested at work, ripped from his future wife and baby son, jailed for a third of his life -- starting over wasn't as easy as walking out of a cell. Nine years after his release, Shephard, now 41, is still trying to shake the notion that if it happened once, it could happen again.

To date, 143 U.S. prison inmates have had convictions overturned using DNA evidence, including 13 on death row. While these exonerations have exposed deficiencies in the judicial system, they also make an old truism painfully clear: Nothing can make up for lost time. There's simply no amount of money or job support or training or counseling that can guarantee a smooth re-entry for an innocent man who's been jailed for years.

"Prison can make healthy people literally insane. Most prisoners assume that when they get out, they'll be able to just step back into their old lives," says Dr. Laurie Vollen, a forensic scientist who is developing the first national support network for the wrongly convicted. "But they come out to nothing. If they're lucky, they'll get bus fare and a newspaper headline."

David Shephard hardly had a fair shot in the first place. His father took off before he was born. To support her three children, his mother worked a double shift as a cellular telephone operator. When Shephard was a high school junior, he dropped out to take care of his baby sister, Nataly. He'd been a good student, taking advanced classes, but he took the adjustment in stride. "I tried to make the most of my free time," he says. "I was never one to sit around." He volunteered for a local community policing program, where he met his wife, Erica Calloway, a fellow volunteer. She fell for him instantly. "David was different from the others," she says. "He was a real charmer. He was charismatic."

Shortly after the two began dating, Shephard landed a job on a ramp crew servicing planes at Newark International Airport. By the fall of 1983, when he was 20, he'd moved up to head the graveyard shift, and Erica had just given birth to their son, LeMarr. The couple were making plans to buy a house. "We were building a future," Erica says.

One morning in late December, Shephard clocked out after his shift and then headed to his car. A couple of Hillside, New Jersey detectives stopped him. They wanted to talk about a stolen vehicle. He rode with them to the police station -- the first one he had ever been in -- where the officers began pressuring him to confess not only to the car theft but to a sexual assault. They told him that a young white woman had been abducted on Christmas Eve by two black men outside the Woodbridge Mall, south of the airport. They forced her into her car and drove to a quiet area, where they beat and raped her before leaving her by the side of the road.

Injustice
Shephard recalls that he was strangely unfazed by the allegations. "I told them, 'I don't know what you're talking about.' I'm thinking about what I'm going to do when I get home. We were going to look at a house; we were going to buy a car. Those were the things that were on my mind."

When the detectives started questioning him about his whereabouts on Christmas Eve, Shephard faltered, just for a moment. First he said he'd been out with Erica. Then he remembered he had been baby-sitting Nataly. "They must have repeated everything three times," Shephard says. "They interrogated me for almost six hours. Nothing made sense in the end." Still, he wasn't worried. "I never for a moment thought I would end up being charged or doing time for this."

But the police had put together enough evidence to link Shephard to the crime. The victim remembered one of the men who assaulted her calling the other Dave. And, unbeknownst to Shephard, police had brought her to his workplace, and she had identified him as one of her attackers.

After producing an arrest warrant charging him with aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping and robbery, the officers let Shephard phone his mother and Erica to tell them what had happened. Then they led him to a holding cell and closed the door.

Several weeks later, a standard test of semen found in the victim's car matched Shephard's common blood type. During a one-week jury trial in the fall of 1984, both Shephard and his mother testified, offering an alibi and pleading injustice. But after the victim identified Shephard once again as her assailant, both his public defender and the judge urged him to accept a plea bargain in exchange for a reduced sentence. Shephard refused. "I always thought I would go home," he says. "I had tremendous faith in the system." When the verdict was read and the judge handed down a 30-year sentence, Shephard's world collapsed.

In the aggressive, testosterone-driven environment of prison, Shephard's spirit was quickly crushed. Because rapists occupy a low level in the institutional hierarchy -- somewhere just above child abusers -- he was a target from day one. A gang wielding weight bars attacked him in the gym. An inmate sliced him with a razor blade. Another routinely stole his food and cigarettes.

Finally, a veteran inmate pulled Shephard aside and advised him that if he didn't start sticking up for himself, he would die. A fuse was lit. The next time the thief approached, Shephard grabbed a metal dinner tray and hit him over the head. "Make no mistake," says Shephard, who has the bulky form of a nightclub bouncer, "prison changes you. You can't turn the other cheek. They'll take everything from you."

He struggled to make sense of his conviction and filed regular appeals, but gave up hoping for sympathy. "You can't go around prison saying you're innocent, because then you're really going to get hurt." Instead, Shephard began to carve out an existence inside the penitentiary. He finished his high school degree, ran a football pool, took a job in the laundry room.

Meanwhile, his connections to the outside world grew weaker. For months, he forbade his mother and sister to come see him. He told Erica to get on with her life, and she reluctantly began to date other men. He watched LeMarr grow up over the course of a hundred sterile Saturday visits to the prison. "We never got to know each other," LeMarr, 20, says.

Back in the Game

While working in the penitentiary library one day, Shephard came across the case of Gary Dotson, an Illinois man serving time for rape. In 1989 Dotson became the first U.S. inmate to use DNA evidence to clear his name. Shephard spent hours trying to make sense of the technical and legal data in the Dotson case, and in 1992, when New Jersey courts allowed DNA evidence in appeals, he filed a petition for DNA testing of the biological evidence from the crime scene in his case, still locked away in a police vault.

Three years later, his petition was granted and the testing carried out. The results were indisputable. The semen samples disclosed two separate DNA patterns, confirming there had been two assailants. But with nearly 100 percent certainty, they also showed no match to Shephard's DNA. On April 28, 1995, Union County prosecutors moved to drop all charges against him. Shephard was free.

Shephard moved back home with his mother but quickly reunited with Erica, who says she never doubted his innocence. He took a job as a janitor at Newark's City Hall, even though it paid half what he'd been making at the airport. With money in his pocket, he tried too hard, too fast, to catch up on all he had missed while in prison. The cravings were innocent at first: Cherry Cokes, cheesecake. But they became more desperate and destructive as he squandered his money on booze and clothes. He started coming home late and missing work. "I felt like I was 19 again," he says. "I wish somebody would have grabbed me and told me to relax."

"What would you expect from a guy who lost a decade of his life?" asks Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a New York law clinic that represents prisoners with claims of wrongful convictions. "His peers had started their careers and families. David was left behind. It's impossible to just step back into the game."

Through a mutual friend, Shephard met New Jersey attorney Louis H. Miron, who had an interest in exoneration cases. The two began speaking at local high schools about the criminal justice system and Shephard's experience. Then they went on radio programs. Occasionally, skeptics would challenge Shephard's innocence; the former inmate refused to be drawn in, saying there was nothing to prove. "I've never seen him angry," Miron says. "He just rolls with it."

But in 1996 the system turned on him again. The state tried to recover $16,000 in child support paid by the welfare department to Erica during Shephard's incarceration for the care of LeMarr, on the grounds that once prisoners return to the workplace, they are responsible for child support they didn't pay while incarcerated.

"They weren't happy to take 12 years of my life," Shephard says. "They wanted more." Again, Shephard found himself in court as Miron argued against penalizing his client, given that he'd been wrongfully incarcerated.

From there, the logical question was: Who should pay, and how, for the errors that cost David Shephard so much lost time? Shephard and his attorney explored the possibility of filing a civil suit, but because no one had acted maliciously (the police had placed faith in the mistaken testimony of the victim), and since DNA testing was not available at the time of Shephard's trial, there was no cause of negligence. "Nothing could have been done differently," says David Hancock, prosecutor of Shephard's 1984 case. "The science that exonerated him was not available back then."

Compensation

At the time, New Jersey had no law in place offering compensation to the wrongfully convicted, so Shephard went to work to create one. For two years, he lobbied state legislators to allow people jailed for crimes they didn't commit to collect an award of at least double their annual pre-conviction salary for each year of incarceration. On August 25, 1997, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman signed the compensation bill, and Shephard subsequently settled for $240,000.

"In the end, what David got is still not enough," says Pace University law professor Adele Bernhard, who has studied compensation issues. "He'll probably forever relive the nightmare of his time in prison. A million dollars wouldn't change that."

Shephard's settlement disappeared quickly. Some of the money went to legal fees, and to pay the debts of his mother and sister, both of whom passed away within a few years of his release. What was left went toward renovating the basement of Erica's parents' home, where the couple now live with their daughter Ciara, eight, LeMarr, and Nataly's daughter, Miechai, ten, whom they adopted after her mother's death.

In 1997, Shephard lost his job as a janitor. By then, he'd stopped his boozing and big spending, and felt hopeful he would find more meaningful work. But the 12-year gap on his résumé raised questions from potential employers. Eventually, he landed a position in the Newark public defender's office, and then worked as a counselor at a halfway house. When the local economy soured a few years ago, he was laid off.

For two years afterward, Shephard had little to do except collect his daughter and niece from school each day or watch LeMarr play on his football team. Plagued with painful rheumatoid arthritis he attributes to the long days he spent working in the prison laundry, he passed much of the time sitting alone in the apartment. "I'm not blind to the fact that I am back in a cell again," he said then. Looking back, he realizes he was profoundly depressed and wishes he'd sought treatment.

But lately, Shephard has begun to chip away at the invisible walls that confine him. Last spring, he and Erica attended a conference in New York for people exonerated by DNA testing. At the gathering, Shephard, one of the longest out of prison, found himself in the role of counselor. "The only way to get through this is by taking it one day at a time," he told former inmates as he passed out his phone number.

Some two weeks later, Shephard suffered a heart attack. But he recuperated, and now takes medication to lower his blood pressure. He also gets injections in his knees for arthritis; for the first time in years he is without throbbing pain. He has finally landed a good job working at a local county welfare agency, where he helps evaluate families applying for government assistance. "He's got purpose now, so he feels better," Erica says. "He's been in chains, but he's still very proud."

"I know it can all disappear in an instant," says Shephard, "but it's nice to have a reason to get out of bed. And I feel like I'm making a difference."

David Shephard now has dreams that aren't simply fantasies to get him through the bad times. One of these days, after he retires, he would like to move his family to Florida or California -- somewhere that's near the water, and where it's warmer. He'd also like to be a counselor again, or maybe a school football coach. But there is no rush, even if he is a few steps behind where he should be. "I'll get there," he says. "It may take longer than other people, but I'll get there. I've got the rest of my life to live."

By Graham Buck (From Reader's Digest)