DOUBLE MURDER CASE UNRAVELS

In a stunning development in a controversial Death Row case, a
Milwaukee laborer made a videotaped statement Wednesday implicating
himself in the 1982 murders of a South Side couple and appearing to
clear condemned prisoner Anthony Porter.

The statement by Alstory Simon to a private investigator came five
days after his estranged wife implicated him in the murders of Jerry
Hillard and Marilyn Green and accused Chicago police of pressuring her
to identify Porter as the killer.

Simon, speaking on the videotape, said he felt threatened during a
confrontation over drug money and was protecting himself and his wife.
He fired his gun, he said, because he thought Hillard was going for a
gun in his coat.

"Before I knew anything, I just pulled it up and started shooting,"
Simon said during the 10-minute statement, videotaped in his Milwaukee
apartment. "I must have close to busted off about six rounds."

The private investigator made the tape while working with a team of
Northwestern University journalism students and their professor, David
Protess, who have been reinvestigating the double murder.

Cook County prosecutors received the tape Wednesday night and were
reviewing it, said Bob Benjamin, a spokesman. "We do have to conduct
our own investigation," Benjamin said. "We can't act on a videotape."

Simon's lawyer, Jack Rimland, said he had been in "constant contact"
with prosecutors and said they wanted to talk with Simon. The private
investigator recommended Rimland to Simon.

"I will look out for his best interests, whether that's advising him
to remain silent or advising him to talk," Rimland said late
Wednesday. "Obviously, if he's charged, he's looking at the death penalty."

Porter, sitting in a cinderblock visiting room in a maximum-security
unit at Cook County Jail, where he was transferred for court hearings
on his mental competency, slumped in a stainless steel stool and
banged his handcuffed fists against his forehead when he was told of
Simon's statement Wednesday.

"Oh my God. Thank you, God," he said as he began to weep. "I'm just
overwhelmed. I've been trying to fight for my life for so long."

In September, Porter, 43, came within two days of being executed by
lethal injection but received a stay from the Illinois Supreme Court
because his lawyers argued he had a low IQ and was not mentally fit to
be put to death.

Simon's statement caps a week of twists--including a statement by
Simon's estranged wife, Inez Jackson, and recantations by other
witnesses in the case--that increasingly have thrown Porter's 1982
conviction into doubt.

Porter's attorney, Daniel Sanders, said after watching the video
Wednesday that he would file court papers next week with Cook County
Judge Thomas Fitzgerald seeking to vacate Porter's conviction and free
him.

"It doesn't seem that there's anybody left saying Anthony did it,"
Sanders said. "To get these people making statements is really something."

If Porter eventually is exonerated, he will be the 10th Death Row
prisoner in Illinois released since the state reinstated capital
punishment in 1977. Only Florida has released more condemned prisoners.

Rimland also played a role in one of those previous Illinois cases,
involving four men known as the Ford Heights Four. Rimland represented
Ira Johnson after he confessed to the Ford Heights killings when the
initial case unraveled, and he arranged for Johnson to plead guilty in
exchange for a life sentence without parole.

Hillard, 18, and Green, 19, were shot and killed in Washington Park on
the city's South Side on Aug. 15, 1982, following the Bud Billiken
Parade. Porter, then 27 and a gang member with an armed-robbery
conviction, was charged two days later.

Although Sanders had been challenging Porter's death sentence on
competency grounds, saying his IQ of 51 made him unable to understand
his sentence or assist in his defense, the question of Porter's
innocence now has become the focus of the re-examination of the case.

Interviewed by Protess' students in mid-December, the state's lead
witness, William Taylor, recanted his eyewitness testimony, saying in
an affidavit that Chicago police "threatened, harassed and
intimidated" him into identifying Porter as the gunman in Hillard's
and Green's murders.

"Taylor (also) said he saw the shooter fire with his left hand, and
Anthony Porter is right-handed," said Shawn Armbrust, 21, a senior
majoring in journalism.

When another journalism student, Tom McCann, 21, and private
investigator Paul Ciolino interviewed Taylor, he eventually recanted
his trial testimony.

"He said he was putting on his clothes and that he saw a figure run
really fast right by him," and that police had coerced his testimony
fingering Porter, McCann said. During questioning by police, Taylor
recalled how one officer kept asking him, "Who are you more afraid of,
Porter or us?" McCann said.

After that, additional pieces fell into place for Protess' team. Last
month, Inez Jackson's nephew, Walter Jackson, signed an affidavit
saying that in 1982 Simon had told him he had "taken care of" Hillard
over a drug debt.

Then on Friday, Inez Jackson signed an affidavit saying that she was
at Washington Park with Simon when he got into a quarrel with Hillard
over a long-standing debt and opened fire, killing him and Green.

"My students and I have believed for months that Anthony Porter is
innocent," said Protess, who with another group of students was
instrumental in freeing the Ford Heights Four.

Getting a statement from Simon proved more difficult. The students
approached him recently, and he denied having anything to do with the
double murder.

But early Wednesday, Ciolino went to Milwaukee to bring Inez Jackson
to a meeting with prosecutors. He stopped at Simon's brick and stucco
duplex to make another try.

Simon rebuffed Ciolino initially. But as they sat in his living room,
with a morning news program on the television, Simon saw a videotaped
statement by his estranged wife accusing him of Hillard's and Green's
murders.

"He was claiming he knew about the shooting, but he didn't do
nothing," Ciolino said. "Then all of a sudden he sees it on the news,
and the air just kind of went out of him."

Ciolino said that after Simon apparently realized how much attention
the case was receiving, he challenged Simon to tell the truth and
perhaps save a man from execution. Ciolino also suggested that
authorities were close to arresting him and he should offer his account.

"I said, `Al, it's time to stand up and be counted,' " Ciolino said.
"You got a guy that's going to be executed because of your actions."

Simon, according to Ciolino, implicated himself but said the murders
were self-defense. At that point, the private investigator asked if he
could videotape the rest of the interview, telling Simon, "I'll make
sure everybody knows why you did it."

At that point, he said, Simon agreed to go on tape.

On tape, Simon, who was paroled in January 1981 from Stateville
Correctional Center in Illinois after serving 4 years of a 5- to
15-year term for armed robbery, first described his life in Milwaukee,
where he said he works in home improvement.

Then he began to talk about the murders. He explained he had been
selling heroin, cocaine and PCP on the South Side when Hillard got
into debt with him over some drug deals. But Hillard refused to pay
him back.

At the park, things got tense. "When I started asking him about my
finances, he began to get a little loud and a little bodacious," Simon
said on the video.

Simon said Hillard reached into his coat, a move he acted out on the
video, leading him to fear Hillard had a gun. He said he did not
intend to kill Green.

"That was an accident," he said. "She had nothing to do with
nothing."

Simon and Inez Jackson offered identical accounts of their dealings
with police. They said detectives came to their home the morning after
the murders to talk to them and show them photographs of suspects.

But, they said, the police were not interested in what they knew, and
they did not suspect them. Instead, they said, the police simply were
after Porter. She knew that Porter was innocent but said nothing, however.

"When they came to my house with those pictures, they told me who did
it. They told me," Inez Jackson said in an interview with the Tribune.
"I didn't have a chance to say nothing because they didn't ask me nothing."

Inez Jackson arrived in Chicago shortly after lunchtime Wednesday and
viewed Simon's statement as she held her 9-month-old granddaughter and
sipped a soft drink.

"Everything I said, he said. He told the truth, finally," she
said.

Inez Jackson said she regretted not speaking up earlier but said she
feared for herself and her children if she did. Now, she said, a
burden has been lifted.

"Now maybe I can sleep at night," she said.

One of the officers who worked the case, Detective Guy Habiak,
declined to comment, saying he had not seen the video. The others
could not be reached. A police spokesman, Pat Camden, said officials
had not begun any investigation.

"The case in the media is a little less than clear," he said. "If
there are allegations of wrongdoing, that is something that will be
investigated."

But for the mother of murder victim Green, the videotape made things
very clear. Offie Green said she had suspicions about Simon all along
and even provided Protess and his students with an affidavit saying
she had told police of her suspicions.

She said Simon and Inez Jackson left town early the morning after the
murder, heightening her belief that Porter was not the gunman.

"I never did feel (Porter) was the one that did it," she
said.

As for Porter, he said he had finally begun to let himself think that
his prayers had been answered and he might soon walk free.

He said he had found it difficult to be separated from his family,
including his six children and six grandchildren, as well as his friends.

"The first thing I want to do is hug my mother and hug my children,"
he said, cupping his hands around a circular air vent as if to make
his words heard more clearly, "and to let them know I'm back and I
love them very much."

MORE ON THE INTERNET:

Watch or listen to Alstory Simon's statement at

chicagotribune.com/go/porter