Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
An Academy Award winning Hollywood white movie actor from the
mid nineteen fifties and a black man who was only nineteen.
It was a time when who needs forensic evidence? Just
the word of a white cop is good enough, even
when eyewitnesses had the truth.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
All the witness sale the white man had committed to
murder and Nate, they're not going to send you the present, Yeah,
and he did.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Before we go any further with the man you just heard,
can I take you back way back to nineteen fifty five.
Many of you probably weren't even born sixty nine years ago,
but there was a movie hot on Hollywood screens starring
iconic white actors James Dean, Natalie Wood, and young, fresh
faced newcomer sal Mineo. The movie Rebel without a Cause.
(00:56):
The movie put Mineo on the map, got him that
oscar for supporting actor. Here is one of the scenes
the infamous shootout No Turn on the Light, Mineo, playing
the role of Plato, is shot dead by cop. Fast
(01:20):
forward to real life nineteen seventy six. Salminio, the teen actor,
was now thirty seven and in the headlines not for
some new blockbuster, but because he was murdered somebody knifed him,
stabbed him to death right in front of his Hollywood
apartment on West Holloway Drive. Police suspect a robbery gone wrong,
(01:42):
and guests who went to prison. You had all those witnesses,
And just to tell our listeners, how did you look
back in nineteen seventy six?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I was five five and a half with a big ol'
affro and mustache, go tee.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
And the main thing, you're black, You're black, then you're
black married right.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
I ain't never changed no other no other color with black.
That's all I am. That's all I ever being. That's
all I have a beat.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The story of Lionel Ray Ray Williams is a new
compelling documentary, better than anything Hollywood could make in fiction.
Is a fact here in Blackland and now as a
brown person, you just feel so invisible where we're from.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
I welcome you to this joyful day and we celebrate freedom.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
Where we are, I know someone's heard something and where
we're going.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We the people means all the people.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It made big news. Has been Hollywood actor murdered bloody violent.
Who did it? There was a description The killer looked
nothing like Lionel Ray Ray Williams Ray Ray Welcome.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
How you doing? How you doing?
Speaker 1 (03:08):
What was the description of the killer and who were
the witnesses who saw him?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The description of the killer was from five eight the
six fek tall with blue blind dan, no mustache, no
hair on his face. The witnesses was a white security guard.
(03:35):
The other witness was a little white guy walking his dog.
A nine year old girl. She was also white and
her mother was an eyewitness. She was also white.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Even with white witnesses to what happened in West Hollywood,
cops in California somehow got a brown skin black nineteen
year old with a big afro. He didn't fit the description,
but again it didn't matter. How did they even get arrested?
Back in nineteen seventy six, How did your name even
come up?
Speaker 2 (04:08):
The Los Angeles Sheriffs put out a bulletin stating that
if they'd seen a yellow car in that area, if
someone longed a small yellow car in that area, contact
the police. So O'Connor Lincoln called the police and said
that they launched me a car, a small yellow car
(04:30):
that that day and six six, eight months later, the
police contacted me in the La County jail before I
was being extradited to Michigan to Battle Creek face charges
out there on poetry case.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Okay, for background, Ray Ray didn't own a yellow car,
but he did have a seventy one deuce in a
quarter the Electra two twenty five Bwick he bought from
O'Connor Lincoln, but the brakes went bad, so he took
the car to the dealership to be repaired. They gave
him a loaner, a little yellow Dodge coult So voluntarily
(05:06):
the people at the car dealership called the police and said, hey,
we lent a black man a little yellow car that
fit that kind of description. He might be the killer.
Is that how they made the connection.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
They made the connection, and right then when they came
to the county jail, they wanted to know did I
have any white friends that would commit murder, any kind
of crimes.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I told him I had none. They didn't believe me,
and here we are today.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Even the news reports from back in the seventies said
it was a white man. The witness has said they
had seen a young white male with blonde hair fleeing
the scene. We know what happens a lot and documenting
this tragic, tragic turn of events in Ray Ray's life
is Leticia McIntosh. She is the producer of Unseen Innocence,
(05:59):
which tells the story of this real life thriller. Leticia, welcome,
Thank you very much. I appreciate you taking interest in
this story. It really means a lot to both mister
Williams and myself. How did you get involved?
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Well, I've spent most of my career working in it.
I worked for a public accounting firm for most of
my career as a trainer and onboarding specialist, and I
wanted to learn how to animate my training video, so
I wound up going to a film school program so
I could learn how to use some editing software. And
when I got into the film school program, I was like,
(06:38):
you know what, I can do this. It was actually
a certification program for one year, and I wound up
making you know, a short and long story short, what
wound up happening is my I directed a music video
for a Southern soul artist and the manager of that
Southern soul artist was in contact with mister Williams. He
(07:00):
was trying to book that artist at his motorcycle club
in Bakersfield, California. And then mister Williams told them the
story that he really needed somebody to help him tell
his story, and they called me on the phone. And
then I said, okay, well, let me do a little research.
And I you know, got online and started googling it
and looking for information. And I said, you know, I'm
(07:21):
from the school that if it doesn't sound right, there's
a lie in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Boy, were there lies? And as luck, what happened this
rookie in the industry, Remember she was an IT and
took a course on editing, became a deep dive investigative
journalist who came upon a story of a man's life
that would beat anything produced in Hollywood.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
And you know, everything that I saw was that, you know,
witnesses saw a white man, a Caucasian man, you know,
hair bouncing in the wind. And I just kind of
felt like this, there's something not right here, so I
just started exploring it further.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah. Wow, First of all, it it's almost it was
almost meant to be that you look at the chain
of events. Most people would go to journalism school and
kind of look for stories like that, and this just
basically came to you. It was almost like you were
trained to cold and tell this story. That's amazing, you
know what.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
The cold thing about it is a brother name is sal.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
My Remen's name was sal also. Yeah, so that was
another interesting thing because I had never heard of Sal Minio.
I'm gonna be very honest. And when I started researching,
I said, well, I knew about Rebel without a Cause,
and then I learned about the curse, and then I
learned a lot of different things. And then because of
my background being in it, and I, you know, having
some background with programming and you know, I used to
(08:42):
have to find the missing syntax and the code when
when it wouldn't run properly. So I'm used to calmbing
through information and deciphering information. So when I came across this,
that's just kind of what I did. I just started
gathering all kinds of information.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
The curse of the movie Rebel without a Cause. Besides
sal Mineo's murder, the top stars of the movie. James Dean,
the popular handsome white actor of the fifties, died at
age twenty four in a car crash in his German
built Porsche. The movie also starred Natalie Wood. She played
the role of Judy, she died in a mysterious voting accident,
(09:20):
and of course Salmineo, who later in life made news
as one of the earliest actors in Hollywood to come
out as part of the LGBTQ community, unheard of in
Hollywood at the time. Mineo was murdered and the unjustice
system successfully fingered then nineteen year old Lionel Ray Ray
Williams as his killer.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
My goal is to help mister Williams not only get exonerated,
but then also to clear the record so that his
name isn't tarnished like this, you know. I mean, he
has always said I was no angel, you know, And
I can respect that, you know what I mean. I
can respect the fact that he's very honest about, you know,
(10:04):
the path and the road that he was on when
he was in his young age. But he has a child,
he has children, but he has a young child, and
he has grandchildren, and I just kind of feel like
his legacy should not be tied to the death of
Salmnio the way it is.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
But it is just Google Salmonio or Ray Ray Williams
they're tied together Ray Ray's life, Sal's death.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
But the stories that are out there that are so
grossly inaccurate, that needs to be, that needs to change.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
It's been forty eight years since the crime. Ray Ray
has been home twenty five years. Still being railroaded is
something you never get over. Serving twelve years and infamous
sin Quentin while innocent, especially since there were several eyewitnesses.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
He's a white people. Ooh no, who they people look like,
you know.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
And the jury went and believed everybody who gained something,
some money, some freedom, some money, and some more freedom,
you know, because because I was to get out of
jail free card for everybody who knew me. If you
had a case of your boyfriend was in jail, come
(11:25):
and say Ray Ray told him, told me that he
did it, and I'll let him get out. I'll let
her get out. I'll give them some money, you know,
you know, you know, I'll let them out of prison.
You know, so many people that they tried to get at,
they got it. Everybody everybody that I knew, you know.
(11:45):
And it again to a point where when I'm calling
my friends, they telling me, look, I mean accept this call,
but don't call me no more, you know, because the
police is on them, you know, and the police is
trying to get something on them so they can get
on me. So that's how a lot I lost a
(12:05):
lot of friendships behind this case because they was just
trying to turn everybody against them.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
So that's how they do it in this setup.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
There's actually a format that is traditionally used in these
kind of cases. It starts with inaccurate eyewitnesses, you know,
people giving inaccurate descriptions from an eyewitness. It also goes
to prosecutorial misconduct. It goes to misconduct on behalf of
(12:37):
the police and then also incentivizing witnesses or people to
turn on them, either people who might be jail house
informants which they recently changed or they changed that, but
other people having the incentive being given something like mister
Williams is saying to be able to say whatever it is,
(13:01):
you know, as they call it a script that they
will follow. And unfortunately that happened in his case. But
that happens even to this very day. I mean, it's
happening right now. And you know a lot of times
they you know, they they will put things in together
to make the case to be able to win the case.
(13:22):
So sometimes it's about winning as opposed to who actually
might have actually committed this crime or what actually may
have happened. And that's the unfortunate thing. And like what
I was saying earlier was that, you know, I saw
in the inmate records that he had, there was a
lot of information that when I googled it and when
(13:45):
I was finding online, it wasn't lining up. It wasn't
making sense. And remember I told you when there's when
it doesn't make sense, there's a lion there somewhere. And
that's what we discovered is that, you know, there's not
there's some inaccuracies him. Through the course of me working
on this, I was able to actually find the witness,
(14:06):
the eyewitness that saw Salmnio get murdered. He actually saw
it happen. He was seventeen years old at the time.
I found him online. I talked to him, I interviewed him,
and he's included in the documentary. And although he says
now he can't tell you for sure if this person
(14:26):
was white, light skinned, you know, Asian, you know, or whatever,
but he did say the man had blond hair bouncing
in the wind when he ran away. And one thing
about mister Wims is he always had an afro. He
had long hair here and there, but he always had
an afro.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Leticia.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Did they ever find the white, flowing, blonde haired killer.
That person who killed Salmonio was still out there.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
They never looked for him after that. They pinned the
whole case on mister Williams. They made it sound like
it was robbery gone bad because he had had a history.
You know, he said he was no angel. So they
just tied every like he'll tell you better than I can,
every robbery that happened in that area around that time
that was not solved. They tried to tag it to him.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
They didn't try.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
They gave me every unsolved robbery in the neighborhood of
the murder.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Everyone.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
They gave me a robbery ten minutes after the murder. Now,
I'm a short black man, bald headed, and I'm in
a big white car, four door, and I have a
crime partner who is tall and skinny and black. Three
blocks over. Now after the murder, I'm three blocks over
(15:47):
committing a robbery with a gun.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
This time, mister Ray Ray, how did you get out
of prison? You were supposed to serve. You were sentenced
to fifty one years. I need to ask you what
that felt like when you heard that sentence, and then
how did you get out serving a.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Dozen I really thought that I was I was a
dead man walking.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I really thought that I was a dead man walking.
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
I thought that I would never see the streets ever again,
you know. And then all of a sudden, my cousin,
Fernando Jackson, showed up in San Quentin, and he was
pretty much unledgeable about the law, and he got my
sentence overturned.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
An inmate he was. He was not a lawyer, No
hes an inmate lawyer.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
What is life like for you today?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Life for me today is uh, wondering do I have cancer?
Wondering how long I might have to live?
Speaker 3 (16:53):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (16:55):
You know, So you know I lived my life like
I'm finished that in thirty minutes, go out of town
a lot. You know, I'm a motorcyclist. You know, I
belong to a motorcycle club. So you know I'm on
my I'm on my bike doing what I want to
do when I want to do it, you know. And
(17:15):
you know I got married but that that didn't I've
been married full times, so I guess marriage is not
in the works for me, you know.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
But it's been hard.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
But you know, you know, when I got out here,
you know, I found me a job, you know, in construction.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
I started building houses, churches, you know, and.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Doing that kind of thing, driving still across the country,
you know.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
So you know, it's been hard, but you know, I've
been living now.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Many people try at least to get compensation for wrongful convictions.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, we we're in the process of suing the State
of California for the sentence. Fifty one million dollars. That's
what I want. That's the only thing that I'm gonna accept,
fifty one million dollars for what they did to me.
You know, they tortured me. You know, they made me
(18:15):
miss out on my family. You know, they did a lot.
You know, they turned my friends against me, you know,
with lies. You know, they get people saying that I implicated
them in in this case. How am I gonna implicate
somebody in a case that I ain't got nothing to
do with, you know, I mean, who who you really
(18:35):
gonna believe the eyewitnesses or you're gonna believe the line.
Ask people that they got up there to get the
lie on me, to get something.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
There's some freedom, some money, you know.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
In the meantime, he's getting his story out there with
Letitia Macintosh's documentary Unseen Innocence.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
We are in the process trying to work through distribution
right now, but you can go to Unseen Innocence dot
com and purchase the book. He's got a book called
fifty one Years to Life and that's gonna tell you
the whole entire story of what happened, how things happened
in court and everything. So if you go to Unseen
Innocence dot com, you'll be able to purchase the book
(19:21):
and then all of the information I in my prayer.
We had a meeting and my prayer is that we
can get it on HBO Documentaries. We had a meeting
with them. We're waiting to see what's gonna happen next.
We would also like to do a movie about his
life that we go into detail about, like the whole
thing with his first wife. You know, the stories that
(19:43):
are out there saying that she committed suicide. She's not dead.
She's still alive to this very day. The whole trajectory
of all the things that happened in the case and
in his life and how he you know, how he
was then and then what he became later.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Line old Rape. Ray Williams and Letitia McIntosh thank you
both for your story.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Vanessa Tyler, we appreciate your time and your interest in
this story. It means a very lie to.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Us, unseen innocence. How a five foot five inch black
man with an afro paid with a dozen years of
his life for the white, five foot nine inch killer
with the flowing blonde hair. I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me
next Friday where we will have a news story impacting
us here on black Land.