And the case file doesn't contain the report Goldberg says he would have sent to Mississippi authorities, or any indication of what might have been done to substantiate it. View contact information: phones, addresses, emails and networks. Me and Twanda was out of town," he said. Miller also asked the investigator to interrogate Presley and Gamble about the Tardy Furniture murders. After a multistate manhunt, Presley and Gamble were arrested in Norfolk, Virginia. When he showed up the Montgomery County Sheriffs Department two days later, he said, they immediately cuffed him and that the investigators made it clear he was a suspect. Two weeks later, a picture of Marcus Presley, the shooter in the Birmingham murders, was included in a photo array shown to Porky Collins, a witness in the Winona, Mississippi case. Share to Reddit. Search by Name. Record that.. (1909). She said that investigators have never questioned her about Hemphill's story. Her new position on exactly what happened that morning is likely to be heard by a jury if Fleming faces one for a seventh time. It was June 21 just an hour before the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn Curtis Flowers' conviction and reporters for In the Dark had intercepted Hemphill at a courthouse in Indianapolis. Flowers gave authorities conflicting statements about the times he went to these places. His mothers mutt, Patches, was barking in the crawl space, causing him to find a gunbeneath the house she was renting. View Tommy Hemphill results including current phone number, address, relatives, background check report, and property record with Whitepages. On November 16, 2015, Marcus Presley signed an affidavit claiming that Lasamuel Gamble and Steven McKenzie (the driver of the getaway car) had been in Mississippi the day of the Winona murders and had returned with several hundred dollars in their pockets after claiming to have hit a lick (committed a crime). Before he disappeared into a men's bathroom, he once again dodged the question of where he was on the day of the murders and insulted two female reporters with vulgarities. Editor's note: This endorsement editorial was updated on . Marcus Presley, then 16, points a gun at pawn shop owner John Burleson shortly before killing him on July 25, 1996, in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. This case was filed in U.S. Courts Of Appeals, U.S. Court Of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit. In the course of these crimes, one employee was shot in the leg and another in the back (both survived) and Presley was the shooter in both cases. NEWS & ADVICE. At first he was reluctant to divulge who he was with that morning, but later said it was a woman named Twanda Woods. We went to boot camp together., The officers denial dont make me mad, he said. He is aiming to get bail, which is rare in capital murder cases. Find an Obituary . According to the July 8, 1996, police report, store owner Bertha Tardy reported to police that a burglar or burglars smashed through a skylight, tried to break into the safe and stole the side door key. Also known as Willie L Hemphill, Hemphill Wilie. In October 2015, almost 20 years after the murders at Tardy Furniture, one of Curtis Flowers' lawyers was paging through his case file, when she saw a familiar face. When we finally found Hemphill, living in Indianapolis, he had some very surprising things to say about the case . And there he was. A series of Willie James Hemphill mugshots ranging from 2000 through 2016. - Law enforcement had interviewed a different suspect with a violent criminal history, Willie James Hemphill - a fact which was not disclosed to the defense. Police arrived at the factory and interviewed employee Katherine Snow. The answer was yes many, many times. The officer who was with Small when they pulled over Armstrong for speeding told APM Reports that Armstrong had indeed given them a handgun, which was turned over to the district attorneys office. Simpson's brother Emmett was an early suspect, too a fact Matthews had himself testified to in the second Flowers trial. ROCK HILL - Willie Abraham Williams, 69, of 1138 Hickory Lane, Rock Hill, S.C., was called home Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008, at Hospice & Community Care.He was born Sept. 7 . Why was he questioned? As I argue in the course of the program, Simpson seemed to be bending over backwards to let the world know that a gun had been stolen from his car in the parking lot of the garment factory where he worked. used to implicate Flowers in the Tardy case. The investigative file contained no indication of what Hemphill said or why he was eliminated as a suspect. Courtroom testimonyshows that Presley was the shooter in the pawn shop murders in Birmingham even though, prior to being shown video of the crime, he insisted that Gamble had been the gunman. And he's shown a quick and violent temper, particularly with women who don't comply with his demands. He told APM Reports that he was arrested and questioned in the early days of the investigation. "The best of my recollection, Mississippi was able to determine that our guys weren't the ones, or there was something that didn't make them right for the Mississippi case," said Mike DeHart, the Alabama sheriff's deputy who questioned Gamble. Menu. James Graham, was a blues pianist and her mother, Virgie Lee Graham, was skilled in many instruments, though she did not . A wealthy lawyer who killed his wife and son at close range has been sentenced in one of the most troubling cases the judge said he had seen. WIILIE HEMPHILL OBITUARY. View More. Username. He said he would have sent a written report back to Mississippi, so authorities there could check out the stories. Presley was the tougher of the two, and he didn't say much. Contact Jerry Mitchell at 601-961-7064 or jmitchell@gannett.com. Although Presley was only sixteen, he seems to have been the driving force behind these crimes. Shortly after the killings, police arrested Hemphill, then 24, who was wearing a pair of the Grant Hill Fila shoes. A shoeprint in a pool of blood found in the Winona furniture store was found to be from a Grant Hill Fila shoethe footwear Gamble, McKenzie (and just about every other young man in America) was wearing while in Mississippi. Search by Name. He's shown a fearlessness about committing brazen attacks and thefts in daylight with high risks and low payoff, in places close to where he's lived and where people are more likely to recognize him. What are we supposed to think? Flowers parents have long believed in his innocence, visiting him in prison. Hemphill said investigator took his shoes for a few minutes as well as his fingerprints. By licks he meant places to rob.. Select this result to view William Thomas Hemphill's phone number, address, and more. Judge Joseph Loper asked Evans if the state had any exculpatory evidence.. Prosecutors said repeatedly at trial that the only suspect seriously investigated was Flowers. Username. Passed away February 25, 2012. The prosecutors had said repeatedly at trial that the only suspect seriously investigated was Flowers. Surveillance video from John's 280 Pawn Shop broadcast by ABC News. Share to Pinterest. Baran noted that Hemphill was known to love the song Nasty Bitch by Bust Down it was not for kids, Baran said which he would sing and dance to on Winonas streets in those days. If Flowers did what he is accused of doing, he deserves his punishment, Armstrong said. He said he began working at Tardy Furniture on June 29, 1996. "I can't recall seeing him that day," Woods said. And then Hemphill stormed off, ending the interview. One of them, LaSamuel Gamble, had more money in his possession when he returned to Alabama, Presley said. Willie James Hemphill, 38. He allegedly stabbed a woman with a screwdriver, among other violent crimes. A bloody shoe print found in the store (left), and an investigator's sketch comparing the print to the Fila Grant Hill sneakers. But maybe she didnt see anyone at all. In the midst of the probe, the Mississippi Crime Lab sent a copy of the bloody shoeprint found at Tardy to the lead Boston investigator. Sure, onceIn the Dark is over the heat will diminish slightly. Maybe theyll cover that in their next season. On April 30, 2018, American Public Medias true crime podcast In The Dark began airing its second season, an investigation of the case of Curtis Flowers, a black man in Mississippi accused of a quadruple homicide at a furniture store in 1996. Illuminating Journalism from American Public Media. He said he knew nothing about the burglary. In a sworn statement, one of those criminals, Marcus Pressley, told Flowers' lawyers thattwo of his accomplices in the Alabama crimes were in Mississippi at the time of the Tardy murders. . Montgomery County Sheriff Bill Thornburg searched Moores home and found a size 10.5 Fila Grant Hill shoebox in a dresser at her house. On July 19, the Clarion Ledger did just that, finding wires, broken concrete blocks, parts of childrens toys and a plastic dog bone. Does this theft provide a clue as to how the killers made their getaway? Winona, Mississippi lies three hours west of Birmingham on Highway 82. The second best result is William E Hemphill Sr . Why offer up another suspect? After learning that Willie James Hemphill was an initial suspect in the murders at Tardy Furniture, reporters for In the Dark wanted to find out if he'd ever broken the law before. The district's Republicans should nominate James Hemphill as their candidate for Congress in the May 3 primary. Miller would not comment. Other facts may help explain why Hemphill initially was a suspect: The shoes he told In the Dark that he was wearing when he was questioned by investigators on July 21, 1996 Fila Grant Hill high-tops are the same type of sneaker that had left bloody footprints at the scene of the murders five days earlier. They didnt question him about other suspects or bring up Flowers name. Saums believes whoever carried out the crime had inside information. Usually if somebody starts shooting, he said, others will run.. Law enforcement clearly saw Hemphill as a prime suspect. But we found a document showing that another man, Willie James Hemphill, had also been questioned just days after the murders. That discovery will very likely win Curtis a new trial, but it doesnt necessarily finger the new guy as the killer. Why was he questioned? Evidence of false testimony by prosecution witnesses could potentially get Flowers' conviction overturned, Bennett Gershman, a former prosecutor who now teaches law at Pace University, told the APM reporting team. An APM Reports investigation of Hallmon's criminal history shows that at least seven felony charges against him fell away between 2001 and 2016. 704-***-**** View Phone. Back in 1996, there had even been speculation in the media that the crimes could be connected, and investigators had told the local paper they were looking into it. In the Dark has previously reported that Hemphill was an initial suspect in the days after the July 1996 murders in Winona, Mississippi. She had at least 2 sons and 1 daughter with James Tobias Whitehead. And why didnt DA Doug Evans even consider the Presley-Gamble connection? It wasn't that day." They fell out and broke. The justices wrote that it was as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen in the context of a Batson challenge. At the time of his first known arrest, in 1990, he was an 18-year-old high school dropout bouncing back and forth between his mother's house in Memphis, Tennessee, and Winona, where his grandmother lived. State investigator Matthews told the jury he didnt check Hemphills alibi, ruling him out by conversation alone. (Although that figure is, at best, an educated guess.). Can Marcus Presleys affidavit be trusted? Marcus Presley and Lasamuel Gamble werent raised at all. The accused has had his conviction overturned for the sixth time, the woman who put him at the scene of the murders has backflipped on her story and another man has been forced to deny it was him all along. Right now, Willie Hemphill lives in Rock Hill, SC. It happens. APM lead investigative reporter Madeleine Baran found one page among the documents Evans did give the defense attorneys, a form someone named Willie James Hemphill, then 24, of Memphis had signed at the Winona Police Department five days after the murders waiving his rights to an attorney. A Hearing. He said he wondered what happened with the gun. He spent 11 days in jail before authorities released him. Before he left on July 3, he said she gave him $30. Free this man. Gamble and Presley are serving life in prison for their Alabama crime spree. Maybe he and Doyle were co-perpetrators. The whole time Ive been telling them, I dont remember the day, Fleming said. Hallmon is now serving three life sentences in Parchmanwithout the possibility of parole. It wasn't until Flowers' sixth trial that jurors heard anything about the Alabama suspects. The podcasts decision to try to figure out who may have actually committed the murders at the Tardy Furniture store in Winona, Mississippi isnt surprising. But instead of stopping there, its reporters started snitching to the same system whose injustice they had just unmasked. AVERAGE AGE. Mississippi Smoldering: Tom Mangold reports on the Curtis Flowers case in 2009, Dwelling in a land of disbelief: My University Years . Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death in the first three trials, but each time, the verdict was overturned on appeal for prosecutorial misconduct in the first and second trials, and for racially discriminatory jury selection in the third. While that case was delayed for more than two years, Hallmon murdered three people, including his ex-girlfriend, Marquita Hill, and her mother. "After a short time, we realized that he didn't know anything about the case.". Photos. Jurors at Flowers trials had only heard of one suspect who could have worn Fila Grant Hills Flowers although investigators never found the shoes they said he wore. US States (36975K) Current Events (51K) Celebrity (272) Exonerated (117) Favorites (421) FBI Most Wanted (848) Gangsters (49) Historical (131) Interpol (1.7K) . When we finally found Hemphill, living in Indianapolis, he had some very surprising things to say about the case. He testified in multiple trials that the other images in the photo lineup were just "filler pictures," chosen "at random" based on some resemblance to Flowers. listing of 6209011-20040428-Willie-James-Hemphill-Criminal-Civil_jp2.zip; file as jpg timestamp size; 6209011-20040428-Willie-James-Hemphill-Criminal-Civil_jp2/ Look, Ive got something yall need to get, he said he told them. Whoever killed four innocent people in the Tardy Furniture store on that fateful day in 1996 was familiar with armed violence and kind of liked it. The two men had family in both Boston and Norfolk. Case Details Parties Documents Dockets . The FBI checked it out. | BillionGraves We are testing a new layout for the record page. But there was a three-week gap in the Alabama crime spree right at the time of the Tardy murders. "We have never had any evidence that showed anything other than this defendant's guilt," Evans said. Support investigative journalism with a donation to In the Dark. He allegedly stabbed a woman with a screwdriver, among other violent crimes. And why did Doyles brother, Emmett, run from law enforcement when they came to question him on the morning of the crime? 0.68 2.43 /5. Willie James Hemphill is confronted by reporters at an Indianapolis courthouse in June 2019. Detective Goldberg got Presley and Gamble to confess their roles in a pair of murders at a Birmingham pawn shop less than two weeks after the Tardy Furniture murders. He didnt bother anybody.. Their size was a.380. On 03/12/2020 Willie Hemphill filed a Prisoner - Other Prisoner lawsuit against Warden. Share to Twitter. The second season of the In the Dark podcast is about the case of Curtis Flowers, who was tried six times for the same crime. Reporter: Mr Hemphill. Prior to his death, Doyle came across as a passive man working hard to stay out of trouble. Afraid that he would be shot on sight if he didnt surrender, Hemphill turned himself in at the local police station (wearing Grant Hill Filas, the shoes investigators had linked to a bloody footprint at the crime scene) and was immediately handcuffed and booked into the local lock-up. APM Reports, the investigative and documentary reporting team based in St. Paul, Minnesota, spent a year digging into the Flowers case for its In the Dark podcast. You can send your sympathy in the guestbook provided and share it with the family. WrongManleans tentatively fingers Doyle Simpson as the prime suspect. The similarities between the crimes were striking. In the 1980s and '90s, Hemphill spent time in Memphis. That might not be so if the whole world wasnt watching, but it is. Records show he was questioned Hemphill said he was interrogated for hours and held for 11 days before being released. Mississippi Highway Patrol Lt. Wayne Miller, the investigator who created the lineup, testified that the only suspect pictured in the lineup was Flowers. I knew Curtis had started to get involved in crack. Each victim had been murdered execution styleone or two bullets to the back of the head. Injustice flourishes in the darkness, and the sun is now blazing in the heavens (at least for Curtis Flowers). Menu. The presence of Presley in the lineup raised some questions about the testimony of law enforcement witnesses who'd said under oath that Presley was never a suspect in the Tardy case. That was a lie, Hallmon told APM Reports in an interview on a contraband cellphone from his prison cell. We encourage you to research and . Yet despite a number of theft and drug charges, probation violations, at least four domestic violence convictions and a girlfriend who alleges he stabbed her 13 times Hemphill has managed to avoid a long stint in prison. Investigators said the Simpson brothers were eliminated quickly because they were both at work at the time of the murders. Mr. Willie James Hemphill, of 1119-101 Kevin Lane, died Thursday, November 9, 2017. Willie James Hemphill Addresses Click Here For Willie James Hemphill's Last Known Address 1241 Hatfield Dr, Evansville, IN 47714 1001 Mississippi Ave, Greenwood, MS 38930. "Best I remember is somebody brought it to the attention of the investigators that they wanted us to talk to him, and he came in and we talked to him," Matthews said on the stand in the sixth trial. Baran found Hemphills booking card showing he had been arrested and jailed a few days after the killing. ", "I was nowhere near the scene," he said. Shooting a handgun with accuracy is more difficult than people think, said private investigator Charlie Saums of Ridgeland. District Attorney Doug Evans insisted he'd given the defense access to all records of the investigation. The obituary was featured in The Bryan-College Station Eagle on August 16, 2009. They also discovered an unfired .380 bullet, which might suggest the gun jammed. "He would have just told me everything and anything at that point," Goldberg said. Green is a reporter in Toronto. Willie James Hemphill Willie Hemphill (1919 - 2000) Jump to: Bio graphy Family Photos Comments Obit uary. His misdeeds, while abhorrent, are also likely inseparable from his decades-long history of poverty and addiction. James appears the first time in the 1870 Federal Census as a six year-old, living with two brothers and a sister on his parents farm in Lampasas County, Texas. That said, I dont see a compelling motive, and none of these people is any more capable of pulling off an outrage on this scale than poor Curtis Flowers. An early suspect in the murders, Willie James Hemphill, who has a long criminal history, lived less than a mile from where Armstrong found this gun in 2011. Its a pretty cold-hearted human being that can kill four people.. Hemphill, Willie Mae Willie Mae Hemphill, Born March 8, 1926. It might mean letting someone get away with an abominable crime. OBITUARIES. His website is. Both involved store employees who were shot execution-style, a .380 handgun that might have jammed, and a suspect wearing Fila shoes. Selected filmography. Share to Facebook. Who was he? "I was here in Winona," Woods said. 5 Visits. But In The Dark was apparently unsatisfied with exonerating the innocent: It needed the narrative closure of guilt, and found its key to that in Hemphill. He will be held in a county jail while its decided if he should face trial for a stunning seventh time. It was his legal obligation, but its easy to see why he didnt. James Mather is a British sound editor. The Dallas Morning News Homepage. Name. The show has won rightful fame for its work helping to save Flowers life. Follow him onFacebookandTwitter. Hallmon has since admitted he lied. What an Alabama crime spree might reveal about the Curtis Flowers investigation. <p>Prosecutors have always said that Curtis Flowers was the only serious suspect in the Tardy Furniture investigation. During nearly 30 years of crimes, Willie James Hemphill has shown a quick temper, and a penchant for daytime robberies and violence against women. The answer was yes many, many times. January 5, 1960 - August 13, 2009. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008); The Social Network (2010) Hemphill certainly sounds like a career criminal who is fully capable of committing violence; but he doesnt come off as a psychopathic killerand whoever did the deed at the Tardy furniture store was either a hired killer (or killers) or enjoyed killing people for kicks. Asked if he'd committed the murders at Tardy Furniture, he simply said, "Hell, no.". I was scared I was going to go to jail.. In the Dark,episode 10, makes it clear that the prosecution committed what is called a Brady violation by failing to inform defense counsel that Hemphill had been a suspect early in the investigation. The fourth and fifth trials ended with hung juries. Following a masterful turn as Flowers defense lawyer, the podcast also wanted to play the part of the prosecution. He has been behind bars ever since. Past Addresses: Shelby NC, Shelby NC +7 more. Presley murdered four people and wounded three others in a spree of robberies and murders that year. She said the shoes had belonged to her son, who no longer lived there. The podcast has never cared about the fundamental horrors of the justice system; it just wants to ensure that those horrors only happen to the correct people. Sarah Warnock and Jerry Mitchell/Clarion Ledger, Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. How do we create a person's profile? "They were investigating that intently back then. Convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh has been sentenced to life in prison for killing his wife and son. Submit an Obituary. Search by Name. Both men bounced from one traumatic living arrangement to another with no respite. Reporters from In the Dark tried to contact Hemphill online to present him with these findings. Contacts (5) Locations (10) Family (3) Social (2) Between June 19th, 1996 and June 30thof that year, Presley was involved in five robberies at gunpoint. He said that side door leads to a ditch that would have provided a better escape route than simply walking back through town as authorities claimed Flowers had. 1.58 3.33 /5. Willie Dixon - The Big Three Trio 1947-1952 (Roots N' Blues C 46216) FLAC . More importantly, Woods said she was certain that she didn't make the trip with Hemphill that day. The Tardy Furniture murders were committed at a store on Front Street in Winona, Mississippi, at about 10 a.m., and around the time that one of the store's employees, Carmen Rigby, was returning with a bank bag.