November 14, 2016 • 30 mins
Keith Allen Harward, a Navy veteran, was wrongfully convicted of a 1982 rape and murder in Newport News, VA and served 33 years in prison. The assailant had broken into a home, killed a man and brutally raped his wife. Keith was convicted primarily on the testimony of two forensic dentists who said that his teeth matched marks on the victim's body, and he was convicted of capital murder. The Innocence Project performed DNA testing on the rape kit and numerous other pieces of crime scene evidence, and the testing excluded Keith and identified Jerry Crotty as the perpetrator. After the Virginia Supreme Court granted a writ of actual innocence, Keith Allen Harward walked out of prison on April 8, 2016 after wrongly serving more than 33 years of a life sentence.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had a beautiful life.
I went to sleep because September seven was the first
day of my high school year. I was gonna be
a senior at twenty two, I was set to start college.
I woke up and my life was never the same again.
Cops came out with guns drawn, and I never saw
(00:22):
freedom ever ever since after that. It's like roach Moke town.
Once you get in, you're not getting out. This is
wrongful conviction with Jason Flom, a true rock star of
(00:55):
the innocence movement, Keith Alan Harward along with his one
of his attorneys and salesman of the great Firm of Scadding. Keith,
you were just a pretty much a regular guy from
from the Carolinas serving in the Navy and uh in
Virginia at the time. Is that right? Yes, I was
stationed in uh Newport News at the time. I was
(01:15):
on aircraft care being built at the shipyard. Is there?
And uh, that's where it all all kind of took
place fell apart. So Keith was in the Navy, had
been serving for three years on the ship. Um and
uh sort of interesting how you got to that point
in the first place. You know, at that time it
was six drugs and rock and roll, and I was
(01:35):
kind of involved with all of them. And who wasn't yeah,
and and and I got tired of that lifestyle. It
was just it just caught up women. I needed to change.
So I signed one day I'm more joined the military.
So I went to the old Post officer in Greensburg
and I signed. The first door I come into recruiting office.
(01:56):
It was gonna be the door where I was gonna
walk into and that's the first door was in. They
the door. So I walked in there and signed up,
and uh went pretty quick. You know. They wanted, you know, well,
we can delay you for sixty days. I said, no,
I want to go. So the next day I was
in Charlotte day Fees taking the test, and the next
day I was sitting in Chicago, Illinois at boot camps.
(02:17):
A matter of three days, I was in it. That's
some some radical fixing going on there. And some people
like me would have just walked into a a and
been like, hey, little change of life, but you decided
to take it to the extreme. Well, I mean to
be able to get away from everything, you've got to
get away from everything, and and you know, friends or
(02:38):
friends and come on, man, let's let's go. You know,
if I'm away from that, then I can't be influenced.
So think I got out of town and started a
new well, maybe things would work out. So there you are,
serving in the navy and and a horrible crime takes
place pretty close to the shipyard. Is that right right?
It was just only a few blocks away, uh, from
(02:59):
the gate to the shipyards. And it was it was
sort of like what we would call now a home invasion, right,
somebody broke into a home. The husband was killed, and
after he was they were bed together, and he came
in and beat the husband with a crowbar and just
you know, just tore him up. And and when he
was done doing that, then he took hold of the
(03:21):
wife and and six year assaulter for several hours. Truly
horrible situations. So she had to be so they didn't
have any information other than that she had said that
the perpetrator was wearing a sailor's uniform. Is that right? Right? Right?
So that's what clued them into the shipyards, you know,
because the Newport new Shipyards is away from Norfolk, which
(03:43):
is normally where you would find sailors, and uh, that's
what clue to men was the fact that he was
wearing a uniform, so apparently he had to be on
one of the ships or submarines that were there being
repaired or built at the shipyard. How many sailors are
on the ship, Well, the crew of the of aircraft
career we're after air winging somewhere back three to five,
but it was being built, so it's probably two to
(04:06):
three thousand guys. A lot of guys for the cops
that tried to figure this one out. It's a tough one.
So months had gone by, right, and there's a lot
of pressure, right, nobody wants people take it very personally
when someone's home is invade. I know I do. When
I read a story about that in the paper. Everyone
can relate because everyone has a home. There's pressure on
the cops. There's pressure. They gotta they gotta solve this,
they gotta get it there. And there was even some
politicians involved. And let's turn to you don for a second.
(04:27):
How did they land on Keith? Of these thousands of guys.
The rape victim had told the police that during the rape,
the rapist had bitten her on the leg a few times,
and the police took photographs of these bite marks that
appeared on her leg, which were essentially bruises from the
rapist teeth. And so, because the police suspected that one
(04:48):
of the sailors on this ship, the USS Carl Vincent,
was the rapist, they started looking at the dental records
of hundreds and maybe thousands of these sailors, and they
were trying to narrowed down this big group of people
to a smaller group. And one of the people who's uh,
you know, records they looked at was Keith's. But when
(05:10):
they looked at his records the first time they even
took an impression of his mouth, Um, the dentist excluded Keith.
They said he was among the people who didn't match.
And so they kept looking for um, you know, other suspects,
and that went on for a while. But then um,
something happened that led to Keith being uh, them taking
(05:32):
a renewed interest in looking at Keith, even though they
had had a professional, someone who was supposedly certified and
would have been been qualified to give this opinion to
say that it wasn't him. I had a girlfriend and
we had gotten into a fight, and uh, I bid
her own the shoulder, and the police took her to
the hospital to check her out. And that's apparently when
(05:55):
the light bulb went off that you know, hey, we
gotta go, we gotta buy it or here. You know,
they were looking for somebody for a long time. And
then when the police found out and word got two
detectives or whoever. Uh, that's when the light came home
for them and went on me. They pushed it so
I would show up at court for two reasons. One
(06:17):
the victim was in the audience, whatever you call it,
and also they wanted to get more impressions of my teeth.
I didn't know either one of these. After having been
brought in on the charge in the first place, you
couldn't go back home where you were living with her
because you just had this altercation and she was an
alcoholic and the whole situation was crazy. So where'd you
to tell this story about where'd you go to sleep?
(06:38):
I had no place to go, so I slept in
the dumpster. But it was in particular dumpster. Yeah it
was dump yeah. Yeah. They there was a hat manufacturer
made baseball caps and they had a dumpster was filling
nothing but material. Was no food or anything in it.
It was all star foam and foam, rubber and cloth
and that kind of stuff. So it was, you know,
right outside the shipyard gate. And I would walk by
(07:01):
and I would notice all this material laying on the ground.
And I stopped one time because cheap hats that got
the little plastic things that you popped the size with.
And I saw him on the ground and mine and
broke on my hat. So I went over and picked
one up. I just opened a dump struck. Look, I said, man,
this place is nice. I wonder why there's nobody else
living here, you know kind of thing. So so that
(07:23):
night I thought, well, you know, that was a close
place to go. It was close to the shipyard. It
was between the house where I was living at apartment
in the shipyards. So that's where I stayed. Even though
um Keith now became a suspect because of this, you know,
this fight with his girlfriend. During a fight, he really
didn't match the um the scription description of the that
(07:47):
the victim gave because she said that the rapist was
nineteen years old, nineteen twenty years old, clean shaven, baby faced,
Keith was twenty six years old. Um a mustache, and
he had a he had a not a beard like
but he had a heavy you know, uh five o'clock
shadow type you know. Uh. The hair she said his
(08:10):
head hair was ready. Mom was brown. So Keith didn't
he didn't match the description. But in a lot of
these cases, once the police and and and law enforcement,
you know, focus on somebody, they they don't pay attention
to the things that that suggests that they got the
wrong person. And Keith, he did not meet the description
(08:32):
of the rapist in this case. They've decided they want
Keith locked up. They're going to solve this case. We
had this bad science, right, We had bite mark evidence,
which we now know has been completely discredited. There was
a recent study of dentists, forensic dentists, and note ontologists
in which they found that the error rate was junk science. Really,
(08:57):
we had also another element, which was which involved hypnosis,
which sounds I'm sure to the audience are going, no,
we can't that that's ridiculous. You can't have hypnosis in
a capital murder case, because yours was a capital murder case.
Is that right? So let's talk a little bit about
that and the element that this hypnotism played. This crime
got a lot of publicity and actually, you know, the
(09:19):
news media published, you know, it was on TV and
radio and this this shipyard security guard heard the story
about a murder and a rape that had happened just
um a couple of blocks away from the shipyard. And
he actually was eating dinner at his home that night
and heard it on the radio and he said to
his wife, I think I saw someone suspicious. So he
went down to the police and they interviewed him, and
(09:41):
he told the police that he saw a guy who
looked like he was drunk, came to the gate to
pass through, you know, had to show a badge, but
the guy didn't. The guard didn't remember, you know, the name,
or didn't look at the name, but that the guy.
He remembered the guy because he had blood splat would
look like blood splattered all over his uniform. Later on
six months, during the next couple of months, they hypnotized
(10:05):
this guy to try to get more information. And it
was not uncommon back in the day for the police
to hypnotize witnesses to see if they could remember more. Um.
The problem is that that can really ruin someone's memory.
It can change someone's memory the hypnotism. It can have
them fill in gaps say things that they didn't actually remember. Um.
(10:26):
And so it's really unreliable and it can corrupt the
whole process. So the shipyard security guard had given a
description that was, you know, vague, but he was shown
a composite drawing that the victim, the rape victim, had
done with the police, you know, artist, and she had
said that that person looked ninety sure that that's what
(10:47):
the rapists look like, or some very high percentage. And
they showed it to the shipyard security guard and he said, yeah,
that looks like like, um, the uh guy I saw
walking into the shipyard. That composit drying had no mustache,
because the victim has said that the rapist was baby face.
(11:07):
But after this guy was hypnotized, he changed his story.
He changed the time that he said that he saw
the guy. Now it was closer to five o'clock, which matched,
you know, with the time that the rapists might have
been coming back on the ship. That's convenient. And then
he later was shown a photograph or maybe a series
of photos, including Keith's photo. After the police focused on
(11:27):
Keith and he picked Keith's photograph out and said, that
was the guy that I saw. They didn't have anything
to go with. There was really no evidence in this trial.
You know, there was no finger branch there were you know,
there was there was hardly nothing to go other than
this bike mark stuff. That's what they you know, that's
what they were reliable, and you know, like you said,
(11:48):
it was unreliable. Keith actually had sort of an alibi
because the victim had told the police that earlier in
the day. You know, she was attacked at two o'clock
in the morning, but the day before she had had
taken her kids to the swimming pool because this was
in September um and there was a guy that she
(12:11):
saw when she was getting in the car with her
kids who was hitchhiking, and he was a sailor, and um,
he was angry that that she didn't pick him up hitchhiking,
so he swore at her and flipped her off. And
she then said when she got home from swimming with
her kids later, she saw what she thought was the
(12:31):
same guy looking over her fence in her backyard. And
when she told the police the next day, when they
you know, when they were interviewing her after the rape.
She said she was pretty sure that the sailor she
had seen the day before was her rapist, and at
the time that she saw the guy the second time
looking over her back fence was at six pm. That's
(12:55):
what she told the police. And at six pm Keith
had an alibi. He was at an alcohol education course
he had signed in. The person who ran the course
remembered Keith and verified that he was there in Norfolk,
not in Newport News in Norfolk at the time that
she saw the guy who looked like her rapist. Researchers
(13:16):
who look at wrongful conviction cases they identify the same
problems that happened in these cases over and over and
over again, and there's about six of them that commonly occur,
and one of them is, you know, poor representation by
defense lawyers. In Keith's case, he actually hit the trifecta
(13:37):
in a bad way because he had three of the
common problems that arise in these wrongful conviction cases happened
in his case junk science, misidentification, and the third one
is prosecutorial and police misconduct that happens in a lot
of cases, and in Keith's case. We haven't talked about
that yet except for the hypnosis. But there was misconduct
(13:58):
by law enforcement in his case, right, so he he
did certainly hit the wrong kind of trifect that you
can't hit it any worse and ended up serving thirty
three years in president. And let's let's talk about that.
Every day has got to be helped. But but I mean,
I don't want to put words in your mouth because
you share no no, and and people always say that,
you know, they can't imagine, and it's it's with a
(14:20):
good heart they say that, but truly they can't. You know,
unless you've been there, you just don't. You just don't know.
But what got me through was the fact that I
knew I was innocent from day one, and I had
hoped that they would discover it because, like I told
you before, this is the United States of America. People
don't get convicted for crimes they did not do. But
(14:43):
they do not one of them. So all through the
process of a trial, and even until I was in
prison for a while, I was thinking, well, they're gonna
figure this out. You know, they made a mistake. They're
gonna figure this out. It didn't happen. But what got
me through was the was the fact that Okay, they're
(15:05):
already convicted me, they put me in prison, but I
wasn't going to allow those criminals. And when I speak
of criminals, I'm talking about the the police officers and
the prosecutors, the actual criminals of this case, besides the
fellow that did it. I wasn't gonna let them exact
another second from me. They had me, but then we're
(15:25):
gonna get my mind. And if I allowed them to
make me punish myself even farther or do anything disruptive
in my life, even though I was in prison, I
was given them more and I wasn't go give no more.
I wasn't gonna do it. It's like a very spiritual approach. Well,
(15:47):
it's a lot of staring at walls and wondering, Wow,
what what just happened? I mean again, you can't you
can't fathom what it's like. It's like, what's this happened?
It's like a car wreck. You what's all? The movement
is stopped and you're sitting there behind the wheel with
the air bag under your team. You're thinking wow, So
(16:19):
Keith wrote to The Innocence Project, I think it might
have been sometime in like two thousand and eight or
something like that. I didn't know they existed. I was
in prison. I didn't know these outfits existed. In Another
inmate said, hey, man, your story is so crazy. Why
don't you give the Incience Project to try and write
him a letter? So I I wrote him with a
letter and said, hey, you know, there was no evidence
(16:40):
they convicted me on bite mark evidence alone. I didn't
do it, you know, And basically what the letter was,
you know, you know what you think, right, So his
letter got to the Innocence Project in New York. Um,
but they get letters from inmates all over the country,
thousands of letters at least twohund months. Yeah, they have
a back blog of several thousand inmates, you know, who
(17:04):
have written to them, who they haven't yet had a
chance or at that point hadn't had a chance to
look at. The Innocence Project was looking at bite mark
cases because it is junk science, and and there have
been twenty four now with Keith, twenty five people who
had been indicted based on bite mark evidence and were
later exonerated. So they were looking for cases that involved
(17:27):
bite marks. So Keith's file got plucked from the middle
or somewhere in the stack and put up to the
top for someone to look at. And um, one of
the law students I think or interns discovered that the
evidence from Keith's case was still in existence, you know,
the physical evidence like that. Now you've gotten engaged. The
(17:51):
Innocence Project has gone to scatting. They reached out to
me because which is like bringing in the big guns.
And we put together this team and we started working
with the Innocence Project because they found the evidence. It
was this little box called a rape kit that has
you know, swabs from the victim, you know, and and
other evidence that the crime scene folks had taken and
(18:15):
had been taken from the autopsy and the rape exam.
Um and uh. They were in the process of arranging
to have that tested and and to their credit, the prosecutor,
the current prosecutor um down in Newport News, agreed to
have the evidence tested. That's good to hear. When you
were first made aware of Keith's case by the Innocence Project,
(18:37):
how long did it take before you realize that you
had an innocent man on your hands? You know, I've
done a lot of this kind of work, um. And
when we started looking into his case and we read
the transcripts, and we realized how weak a case of uh.
You know, the evidence was the only evidence, um that
the prosecutors used against Keith was this bite mark uh
(19:00):
expert testimony, which at the time was thought to be
an actual science that had validity, that was reliable, and
you know, a bunch of experts. There were two experts
who testified in court and said that there are four others.
And I think about that, right if you're in a
jury and you're sitting there and you go, wow, this
guy's a forensic this and he's got to that. But
(19:22):
we know now that it's it's really an unregulated uh
sort of practice. It's not certified by any particular but
you can be a forensicologist basically you get certified by
your friends pretty much shared and old Friday, you know,
Sunday to give you a diploma. Yeah, it's it's really well,
here's the thing, you know, it's terrible. This science was
(19:44):
actually developed not for use in court, like in a
case for Keith, but when there's like a mass disaster
and they find the remains of victims and included in
the remains or you know, the teeth and the jaw,
and then they to try to identify that person. So
they they think they know who the victims are, but
they're not sure who's who. Then they can look at
(20:06):
dental records, but that's looking at, you know, someone's full
set of teeth, like thirty two in in in a john.
Comparing that to X rays or other dental records. It's
very different doing that, which is noble work. You know
people who do that. But it's very different when you
try to say, based on a blurry photograph of a
(20:27):
woman's shin um, to look at that where you know,
if someone bites another person, maybe only four teeth make
the bite mark six or two or whatever. Then to
say with almost certainty that the person who bit that
victim's leg was Keith Harwood is a very different matter. No,
(20:49):
I've seen a case where they the bite bark evidence
was the primary cause of the conviction and it turned
out later on that it wasn't even a human it
was animal bite. The victim had thrown a scar, and
a scar one of the guys testified that it was
a bite Martin that turned out to be a scar.
For that's what swayed that jury so is when that
(21:11):
character Levine is his name, when he started getting up
and giving all his props he helped go. He went
to uh Argentina for the mingal aid, you know, the
Nazi criminal guy when they found the skull and try
to identify that he was involved with that. There was
an airplane crash in Hawaii, I think in Sydney nine.
(21:32):
He went to identify remains there. So he's up there
and his arms are waving around and the smoke starts
to coub and the lights and stuff, and you think, wow,
we're not in Kansas anymore. I e. The Wizard of Oz.
The jury is like, you know, they're sopping up the drools.
And he says, so the state brought him in. If
(21:55):
he says so, he's gotta be. And he said it
with almost near certain and he said that there was
a very very very very high probability that Keith was
the person who caused those bite marks. And another expert
came in and said, um, there's nobody else in the world.
There's maybe you didn't say the world, but there's nobody
(22:15):
else who could have um caused these bite marks rather
than other than Keith's dental impressions, which means it was Keith.
I said before that there was UM, you know, misconduct
(22:38):
by law enforcement UM on the rape kit. UM. At
the time of this trial and at the time of
the crime, they had a prologist, someone who specializes in
analyzing blood and other body fluids, examined the samples from
the rape victim, including you know, vaginal samples and UM.
They found UM semen on the victim's thought I and
(23:00):
on the vaginal swabs and other swabs that were taken,
and they tested it for blood blood type because at
the time there was no DNA testing. This was three
his first trial and then his second trial. There was
no DNA. So the scerologist UM examined the evidence and
(23:21):
issued a report, and the report said that on the
swabs from the rape kit that UM it was inconclusive
that they couldn't identify on the critical swabs the blood
type and therefore UM it could have been Keith or
it might not have been Keith. That and that's what
he testified to at trial. Well, when the Innocence Project
(23:43):
and Scadden got involved in the case, we asked for
records and among the records that we asked for, and
again to the credit of the prosecutor, he was agreed
to turn over information that had never been turned over before.
We got the lab notes from the analysts. So he
had issued like a three page official report that essentially
(24:04):
said no blood typing could be done on those critical swabs.
But in his notes and his lab notes, it showed
that he did get a blood type that was not Keith's.
It was type OH blood and Keith is type A blood.
So he if that would have been brought up at
court where it wouldn't been a court, wouldn't been a trial.
So now you've got your you've got your evidence, you've
(24:26):
done you've done the digging, right, you and your team,
the Innocence Project and their team. Um, you've met with
Keith play now right, and anybody that would meet him
knows that he might be capable of telling a bad joke,
but that's probably the worst crime that he's going to commit,
you know. Um. So, so now take us to that
moment of justice finally being served. So we had DNA
(24:53):
testing done on the evidence that the Innocence Project had found,
and the DNA results came back. First, they showed that
the rape sample evidence didn't match Keith um that there
was an unknown male profile um that didn't match Keith.
Then we needed to do more testing because the victim
was married and her husband was murdered, and we needed
(25:16):
needed to make sure that the semen samples that were
DNA tested didn't belong to him. And there was more
DNA testing done so we we knew we had an
innocent guy all along. Now we had DNA evidence which
I think you know, pretty much conclusively proved that, but
we needed to make sure it wasn't matching the husband.
And we got the test results back right as we
(25:38):
had just filed the petition saying we had, you know,
preliminary results, and the new testing not only showed that
it wasn't Keith's DNA, it wasn't the victim's husband's DNA UM,
but it showed whose DNA it was. The police originally
suspected that a sailor on the U s S. Carl
Vincent committed this crime. That they were right about that
(26:00):
because the DNA matched a guy who was a sailor
on the USS Carl Vincent. His name is Jerry Krate
and after he left the Navy, he went on with
his life. Keith was in prison and he ended up
Jerry Krate committing other crimes, and he was in prison
in Ohio for an abduction, which is another word for
(26:23):
a kidnapping. He also had convictions for UH breaking into houses,
UM and UH and he died in prison in two
thousand six, ten years before. His DNA was matched UM
in multiple places on the victim from the rape kit,
on her clothing she put on a T shirt after
the rape. His UM DNA was found on the T shirt.
(26:46):
His DNA was found on a towel that she wrapped
around her after the rape. When the police came, she
was wearing a towel and the rapist had put karate.
Now we know his name is Karate. He had put
a diaper, one of his, her children's diapers over her
face when he was raping her, and his DNA was
found on that paper. So there's absolutely no doubt that
(27:08):
he was the rapist. I consider her situation now, she
thinks the rapist is in prison me, so she can
relax a little bit because he's not going to come back.
Years later, thirty four years later, she finds out no,
(27:30):
he was still out there running around and could have
come back at any time. And she's got to relive
this because those criminals in Newport News one the conviction,
not the truth. So now all these years later, it
comes back up, it's brought. It's like scrabbing a scab.
She's got to relive that whole rape thing because it's
(27:52):
on the news, it's everywhere that I'm being exonerated that
I didn't do it right. And the guy who did
this horrible thing to her and her family, Rock could
have still been out there and done done more, and
he did, but he could have come back. And for
that woman, I feel for her. She was re victimized
by those criminals in Newport News, by them short cutting
(28:12):
and taking the easy way out, by not trying to
find the right person. The guy crowdy that did it
was a wall when all this testing was going on
about the bike marks and stuff. So what they do, Well,
he's gone. We ain't got time to look for him.
We got the guy here he is, Yeah, So and
that's that's what happens. They're dead, all of them, but
(28:32):
the urologists are gone now, the prosecutor, you know, and
it's all about ego with them, you know. They get
ahold of something. The detective in my case, Spinner. After
that I was convicted, he took one of the moles
and went to the foundry and had brass a brass
mold of my teeth made and make a paperweight for
(28:55):
his desk. And now how is that? Knowing what he did,
he that I didn't do it. He had to know, Keith. Uh.
You know, I'm a big fan of yours and I
just uh. I listened to you talk and I'm I'm
frankly in awe. Is there anything else, any closing thoughts
you want to share with the audience. These organizations exist
(29:18):
and the Innocent Projects, and people don't know about them.
I mean, you can turn the TV O and they
want uh Sally Scruthers want you to give doll money
for dogs and stuff like that. But these organizations aren't.
I was in prison and didn't know about the Innocent Project.
I had no clue. And I was in prison of
all places. We should know about these things. So the
word needs to get out and people need to help.
(29:40):
Because my heroes they get up every day. They washed
their face and brushed the thief and then put the
capes on and they go out and save people, and
that's the kind of people that we all should be
about them. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review
wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm
(30:02):
a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence
Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved.
I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Kevin Wardis. The music in the show is by three
time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
(30:24):
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Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number one
I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had a beautiful life.
I went to sleep because September seven was the first
day of my high school year. I was gonna be
a senior at twenty two, I was set to start college.
I woke up and my life was never the same again.
Cops came out with guns drawn, and I never saw
(00:22):
freedom ever ever since after that. It's like roach Moke town.
Once you get in, you're not getting out. This is
wrongful conviction with Jason Flom, a true rock star of
(00:55):
the innocence movement, Keith Alan Harward along with his one
of his attorneys and salesman of the great Firm of Scadding. Keith,
you were just a pretty much a regular guy from
from the Carolinas serving in the Navy and uh in
Virginia at the time. Is that right? Yes, I was
stationed in uh Newport News at the time. I was
(01:15):
on aircraft care being built at the shipyard. Is there?
And uh, that's where it all all kind of took
place fell apart. So Keith was in the Navy, had
been serving for three years on the ship. Um and
uh sort of interesting how you got to that point
in the first place. You know, at that time it
was six drugs and rock and roll, and I was
(01:35):
kind of involved with all of them. And who wasn't yeah,
and and and I got tired of that lifestyle. It
was just it just caught up women. I needed to change.
So I signed one day I'm more joined the military.
So I went to the old Post officer in Greensburg
and I signed. The first door I come into recruiting office.
(01:56):
It was gonna be the door where I was gonna
walk into and that's the first door was in. They
the door. So I walked in there and signed up,
and uh went pretty quick. You know. They wanted, you know, well,
we can delay you for sixty days. I said, no,
I want to go. So the next day I was
in Charlotte day Fees taking the test, and the next
day I was sitting in Chicago, Illinois at boot camps.
(02:17):
A matter of three days, I was in it. That's
some some radical fixing going on there. And some people
like me would have just walked into a a and
been like, hey, little change of life, but you decided
to take it to the extreme. Well, I mean to
be able to get away from everything, you've got to
get away from everything, and and you know, friends or
(02:38):
friends and come on, man, let's let's go. You know,
if I'm away from that, then I can't be influenced.
So think I got out of town and started a
new well, maybe things would work out. So there you are,
serving in the navy and and a horrible crime takes
place pretty close to the shipyard. Is that right right?
It was just only a few blocks away, uh, from
(02:59):
the gate to the shipyards. And it was it was
sort of like what we would call now a home invasion, right,
somebody broke into a home. The husband was killed, and
after he was they were bed together, and he came
in and beat the husband with a crowbar and just
you know, just tore him up. And and when he
was done doing that, then he took hold of the
(03:21):
wife and and six year assaulter for several hours. Truly
horrible situations. So she had to be so they didn't
have any information other than that she had said that
the perpetrator was wearing a sailor's uniform. Is that right? Right? Right?
So that's what clued them into the shipyards, you know,
because the Newport new Shipyards is away from Norfolk, which
(03:43):
is normally where you would find sailors, and uh, that's
what clue to men was the fact that he was
wearing a uniform, so apparently he had to be on
one of the ships or submarines that were there being
repaired or built at the shipyard. How many sailors are
on the ship, Well, the crew of the of aircraft
career we're after air winging somewhere back three to five,
but it was being built, so it's probably two to
(04:06):
three thousand guys. A lot of guys for the cops
that tried to figure this one out. It's a tough one.
So months had gone by, right, and there's a lot
of pressure, right, nobody wants people take it very personally
when someone's home is invade. I know I do. When
I read a story about that in the paper. Everyone
can relate because everyone has a home. There's pressure on
the cops. There's pressure. They gotta they gotta solve this,
they gotta get it there. And there was even some
politicians involved. And let's turn to you don for a second.
(04:27):
How did they land on Keith? Of these thousands of guys.
The rape victim had told the police that during the rape,
the rapist had bitten her on the leg a few times,
and the police took photographs of these bite marks that
appeared on her leg, which were essentially bruises from the
rapist teeth. And so, because the police suspected that one
(04:48):
of the sailors on this ship, the USS Carl Vincent,
was the rapist, they started looking at the dental records
of hundreds and maybe thousands of these sailors, and they
were trying to narrowed down this big group of people
to a smaller group. And one of the people who's uh,
you know, records they looked at was Keith's. But when
(05:10):
they looked at his records the first time they even
took an impression of his mouth, Um, the dentist excluded Keith.
They said he was among the people who didn't match.
And so they kept looking for um, you know, other suspects,
and that went on for a while. But then um,
something happened that led to Keith being uh, them taking
(05:32):
a renewed interest in looking at Keith, even though they
had had a professional, someone who was supposedly certified and
would have been been qualified to give this opinion to
say that it wasn't him. I had a girlfriend and
we had gotten into a fight, and uh, I bid
her own the shoulder, and the police took her to
the hospital to check her out. And that's apparently when
(05:55):
the light bulb went off that you know, hey, we
gotta go, we gotta buy it or here. You know,
they were looking for somebody for a long time. And
then when the police found out and word got two
detectives or whoever. Uh, that's when the light came home
for them and went on me. They pushed it so
I would show up at court for two reasons. One
(06:17):
the victim was in the audience, whatever you call it,
and also they wanted to get more impressions of my teeth.
I didn't know either one of these. After having been
brought in on the charge in the first place, you
couldn't go back home where you were living with her
because you just had this altercation and she was an
alcoholic and the whole situation was crazy. So where'd you
to tell this story about where'd you go to sleep?
(06:38):
I had no place to go, so I slept in
the dumpster. But it was in particular dumpster. Yeah it
was dump yeah. Yeah. They there was a hat manufacturer
made baseball caps and they had a dumpster was filling
nothing but material. Was no food or anything in it.
It was all star foam and foam, rubber and cloth
and that kind of stuff. So it was, you know,
right outside the shipyard gate. And I would walk by
(07:01):
and I would notice all this material laying on the ground.
And I stopped one time because cheap hats that got
the little plastic things that you popped the size with.
And I saw him on the ground and mine and
broke on my hat. So I went over and picked
one up. I just opened a dump struck. Look, I said, man,
this place is nice. I wonder why there's nobody else
living here, you know kind of thing. So so that
(07:23):
night I thought, well, you know, that was a close
place to go. It was close to the shipyard. It
was between the house where I was living at apartment
in the shipyards. So that's where I stayed. Even though
um Keith now became a suspect because of this, you know,
this fight with his girlfriend. During a fight, he really
didn't match the um the scription description of the that
(07:47):
the victim gave because she said that the rapist was
nineteen years old, nineteen twenty years old, clean shaven, baby faced,
Keith was twenty six years old. Um a mustache, and
he had a he had a not a beard like
but he had a heavy you know, uh five o'clock
shadow type you know. Uh. The hair she said his
(08:10):
head hair was ready. Mom was brown. So Keith didn't
he didn't match the description. But in a lot of
these cases, once the police and and and law enforcement,
you know, focus on somebody, they they don't pay attention
to the things that that suggests that they got the
wrong person. And Keith, he did not meet the description
(08:32):
of the rapist in this case. They've decided they want
Keith locked up. They're going to solve this case. We
had this bad science, right, We had bite mark evidence,
which we now know has been completely discredited. There was
a recent study of dentists, forensic dentists, and note ontologists
in which they found that the error rate was junk science. Really,
(08:57):
we had also another element, which was which involved hypnosis,
which sounds I'm sure to the audience are going, no,
we can't that that's ridiculous. You can't have hypnosis in
a capital murder case, because yours was a capital murder case.
Is that right? So let's talk a little bit about
that and the element that this hypnotism played. This crime
got a lot of publicity and actually, you know, the
(09:19):
news media published, you know, it was on TV and
radio and this this shipyard security guard heard the story
about a murder and a rape that had happened just
um a couple of blocks away from the shipyard. And
he actually was eating dinner at his home that night
and heard it on the radio and he said to
his wife, I think I saw someone suspicious. So he
went down to the police and they interviewed him, and
(09:41):
he told the police that he saw a guy who
looked like he was drunk, came to the gate to
pass through, you know, had to show a badge, but
the guy didn't. The guard didn't remember, you know, the name,
or didn't look at the name, but that the guy.
He remembered the guy because he had blood splat would
look like blood splattered all over his uniform. Later on
six months, during the next couple of months, they hypnotized
(10:05):
this guy to try to get more information. And it
was not uncommon back in the day for the police
to hypnotize witnesses to see if they could remember more. Um.
The problem is that that can really ruin someone's memory.
It can change someone's memory the hypnotism. It can have
them fill in gaps say things that they didn't actually remember. Um.
(10:26):
And so it's really unreliable and it can corrupt the
whole process. So the shipyard security guard had given a
description that was, you know, vague, but he was shown
a composite drawing that the victim, the rape victim, had
done with the police, you know, artist, and she had
said that that person looked ninety sure that that's what
(10:47):
the rapists look like, or some very high percentage. And
they showed it to the shipyard security guard and he said, yeah,
that looks like like, um, the uh guy I saw
walking into the shipyard. That composit drying had no mustache,
because the victim has said that the rapist was baby face.
(11:07):
But after this guy was hypnotized, he changed his story.
He changed the time that he said that he saw
the guy. Now it was closer to five o'clock, which matched,
you know, with the time that the rapists might have
been coming back on the ship. That's convenient. And then
he later was shown a photograph or maybe a series
of photos, including Keith's photo. After the police focused on
(11:27):
Keith and he picked Keith's photograph out and said, that
was the guy that I saw. They didn't have anything
to go with. There was really no evidence in this trial.
You know, there was no finger branch there were you know,
there was there was hardly nothing to go other than
this bike mark stuff. That's what they you know, that's
what they were reliable, and you know, like you said,
(11:48):
it was unreliable. Keith actually had sort of an alibi
because the victim had told the police that earlier in
the day. You know, she was attacked at two o'clock
in the morning, but the day before she had had
taken her kids to the swimming pool because this was
in September um and there was a guy that she
(12:11):
saw when she was getting in the car with her
kids who was hitchhiking, and he was a sailor, and um,
he was angry that that she didn't pick him up hitchhiking,
so he swore at her and flipped her off. And
she then said when she got home from swimming with
her kids later, she saw what she thought was the
(12:31):
same guy looking over her fence in her backyard. And
when she told the police the next day, when they
you know, when they were interviewing her after the rape.
She said she was pretty sure that the sailor she
had seen the day before was her rapist, and at
the time that she saw the guy the second time
looking over her back fence was at six pm. That's
(12:55):
what she told the police. And at six pm Keith
had an alibi. He was at an alcohol education course
he had signed in. The person who ran the course
remembered Keith and verified that he was there in Norfolk,
not in Newport News in Norfolk at the time that
she saw the guy who looked like her rapist. Researchers
(13:16):
who look at wrongful conviction cases they identify the same
problems that happened in these cases over and over and
over again, and there's about six of them that commonly occur,
and one of them is, you know, poor representation by
defense lawyers. In Keith's case, he actually hit the trifecta
(13:37):
in a bad way because he had three of the
common problems that arise in these wrongful conviction cases happened
in his case junk science, misidentification, and the third one
is prosecutorial and police misconduct that happens in a lot
of cases, and in Keith's case. We haven't talked about
that yet except for the hypnosis. But there was misconduct
(13:58):
by law enforcement in his case, right, so he he
did certainly hit the wrong kind of trifect that you
can't hit it any worse and ended up serving thirty
three years in president. And let's let's talk about that.
Every day has got to be helped. But but I mean,
I don't want to put words in your mouth because
you share no no, and and people always say that,
you know, they can't imagine, and it's it's with a
(14:20):
good heart they say that, but truly they can't. You know,
unless you've been there, you just don't. You just don't know.
But what got me through was the fact that I
knew I was innocent from day one, and I had
hoped that they would discover it because, like I told
you before, this is the United States of America. People
don't get convicted for crimes they did not do. But
(14:43):
they do not one of them. So all through the
process of a trial, and even until I was in
prison for a while, I was thinking, well, they're gonna
figure this out. You know, they made a mistake. They're
gonna figure this out. It didn't happen. But what got
me through was the was the fact that Okay, they're
(15:05):
already convicted me, they put me in prison, but I
wasn't going to allow those criminals. And when I speak
of criminals, I'm talking about the the police officers and
the prosecutors, the actual criminals of this case, besides the
fellow that did it. I wasn't gonna let them exact
another second from me. They had me, but then we're
(15:25):
gonna get my mind. And if I allowed them to
make me punish myself even farther or do anything disruptive
in my life, even though I was in prison, I
was given them more and I wasn't go give no more.
I wasn't gonna do it. It's like a very spiritual approach. Well,
(15:47):
it's a lot of staring at walls and wondering, Wow,
what what just happened? I mean again, you can't you
can't fathom what it's like. It's like, what's this happened?
It's like a car wreck. You what's all? The movement
is stopped and you're sitting there behind the wheel with
the air bag under your team. You're thinking wow, So
(16:19):
Keith wrote to The Innocence Project, I think it might
have been sometime in like two thousand and eight or
something like that. I didn't know they existed. I was
in prison. I didn't know these outfits existed. In Another
inmate said, hey, man, your story is so crazy. Why
don't you give the Incience Project to try and write
him a letter? So I I wrote him with a
letter and said, hey, you know, there was no evidence
(16:40):
they convicted me on bite mark evidence alone. I didn't
do it, you know, And basically what the letter was,
you know, you know what you think, right, So his
letter got to the Innocence Project in New York. Um,
but they get letters from inmates all over the country,
thousands of letters at least twohund months. Yeah, they have
a back blog of several thousand inmates, you know, who
(17:04):
have written to them, who they haven't yet had a
chance or at that point hadn't had a chance to
look at. The Innocence Project was looking at bite mark
cases because it is junk science, and and there have
been twenty four now with Keith, twenty five people who
had been indicted based on bite mark evidence and were
later exonerated. So they were looking for cases that involved
(17:27):
bite marks. So Keith's file got plucked from the middle
or somewhere in the stack and put up to the
top for someone to look at. And um, one of
the law students I think or interns discovered that the
evidence from Keith's case was still in existence, you know,
the physical evidence like that. Now you've gotten engaged. The
(17:51):
Innocence Project has gone to scatting. They reached out to
me because which is like bringing in the big guns.
And we put together this team and we started working
with the Innocence Project because they found the evidence. It
was this little box called a rape kit that has
you know, swabs from the victim, you know, and and
other evidence that the crime scene folks had taken and
(18:15):
had been taken from the autopsy and the rape exam.
Um and uh. They were in the process of arranging
to have that tested and and to their credit, the prosecutor,
the current prosecutor um down in Newport News, agreed to
have the evidence tested. That's good to hear. When you
were first made aware of Keith's case by the Innocence Project,
(18:37):
how long did it take before you realize that you
had an innocent man on your hands? You know, I've
done a lot of this kind of work, um. And
when we started looking into his case and we read
the transcripts, and we realized how weak a case of uh.
You know, the evidence was the only evidence, um that
the prosecutors used against Keith was this bite mark uh
(19:00):
expert testimony, which at the time was thought to be
an actual science that had validity, that was reliable, and
you know, a bunch of experts. There were two experts
who testified in court and said that there are four others.
And I think about that, right if you're in a
jury and you're sitting there and you go, wow, this
guy's a forensic this and he's got to that. But
(19:22):
we know now that it's it's really an unregulated uh
sort of practice. It's not certified by any particular but
you can be a forensicologist basically you get certified by
your friends pretty much shared and old Friday, you know,
Sunday to give you a diploma. Yeah, it's it's really well,
here's the thing, you know, it's terrible. This science was
(19:44):
actually developed not for use in court, like in a
case for Keith, but when there's like a mass disaster
and they find the remains of victims and included in
the remains or you know, the teeth and the jaw,
and then they to try to identify that person. So
they they think they know who the victims are, but
they're not sure who's who. Then they can look at
(20:06):
dental records, but that's looking at, you know, someone's full
set of teeth, like thirty two in in in a john.
Comparing that to X rays or other dental records. It's
very different doing that, which is noble work. You know
people who do that. But it's very different when you
try to say, based on a blurry photograph of a
(20:27):
woman's shin um, to look at that where you know,
if someone bites another person, maybe only four teeth make
the bite mark six or two or whatever. Then to
say with almost certainty that the person who bit that
victim's leg was Keith Harwood is a very different matter. No,
(20:49):
I've seen a case where they the bite bark evidence
was the primary cause of the conviction and it turned
out later on that it wasn't even a human it
was animal bite. The victim had thrown a scar, and
a scar one of the guys testified that it was
a bite Martin that turned out to be a scar.
For that's what swayed that jury so is when that
(21:11):
character Levine is his name, when he started getting up
and giving all his props he helped go. He went
to uh Argentina for the mingal aid, you know, the
Nazi criminal guy when they found the skull and try
to identify that he was involved with that. There was
an airplane crash in Hawaii, I think in Sydney nine.
(21:32):
He went to identify remains there. So he's up there
and his arms are waving around and the smoke starts
to coub and the lights and stuff, and you think, wow,
we're not in Kansas anymore. I e. The Wizard of Oz.
The jury is like, you know, they're sopping up the drools.
And he says, so the state brought him in. If
(21:55):
he says so, he's gotta be. And he said it
with almost near certain and he said that there was
a very very very very high probability that Keith was
the person who caused those bite marks. And another expert
came in and said, um, there's nobody else in the world.
There's maybe you didn't say the world, but there's nobody
(22:15):
else who could have um caused these bite marks rather
than other than Keith's dental impressions, which means it was Keith.
I said before that there was UM, you know, misconduct
(22:38):
by law enforcement UM on the rape kit. UM. At
the time of this trial and at the time of
the crime, they had a prologist, someone who specializes in
analyzing blood and other body fluids, examined the samples from
the rape victim, including you know, vaginal samples and UM.
They found UM semen on the victim's thought I and
(23:00):
on the vaginal swabs and other swabs that were taken,
and they tested it for blood blood type because at
the time there was no DNA testing. This was three
his first trial and then his second trial. There was
no DNA. So the scerologist UM examined the evidence and
(23:21):
issued a report, and the report said that on the
swabs from the rape kit that UM it was inconclusive
that they couldn't identify on the critical swabs the blood
type and therefore UM it could have been Keith or
it might not have been Keith. That and that's what
he testified to at trial. Well, when the Innocence Project
(23:43):
and Scadden got involved in the case, we asked for
records and among the records that we asked for, and
again to the credit of the prosecutor, he was agreed
to turn over information that had never been turned over before.
We got the lab notes from the analysts. So he
had issued like a three page official report that essentially
(24:04):
said no blood typing could be done on those critical swabs.
But in his notes and his lab notes, it showed
that he did get a blood type that was not Keith's.
It was type OH blood and Keith is type A blood.
So he if that would have been brought up at
court where it wouldn't been a court, wouldn't been a trial.
So now you've got your you've got your evidence, you've
(24:26):
done you've done the digging, right, you and your team,
the Innocence Project and their team. Um, you've met with
Keith play now right, and anybody that would meet him
knows that he might be capable of telling a bad joke,
but that's probably the worst crime that he's going to commit,
you know. Um. So, so now take us to that
moment of justice finally being served. So we had DNA
(24:53):
testing done on the evidence that the Innocence Project had found,
and the DNA results came back. First, they showed that
the rape sample evidence didn't match Keith um that there
was an unknown male profile um that didn't match Keith.
Then we needed to do more testing because the victim
was married and her husband was murdered, and we needed
(25:16):
needed to make sure that the semen samples that were
DNA tested didn't belong to him. And there was more
DNA testing done so we we knew we had an
innocent guy all along. Now we had DNA evidence which
I think you know, pretty much conclusively proved that, but
we needed to make sure it wasn't matching the husband.
And we got the test results back right as we
(25:38):
had just filed the petition saying we had, you know,
preliminary results, and the new testing not only showed that
it wasn't Keith's DNA, it wasn't the victim's husband's DNA UM,
but it showed whose DNA it was. The police originally
suspected that a sailor on the U s S. Carl
Vincent committed this crime. That they were right about that
(26:00):
because the DNA matched a guy who was a sailor
on the USS Carl Vincent. His name is Jerry Krate
and after he left the Navy, he went on with
his life. Keith was in prison and he ended up
Jerry Krate committing other crimes, and he was in prison
in Ohio for an abduction, which is another word for
(26:23):
a kidnapping. He also had convictions for UH breaking into houses,
UM and UH and he died in prison in two
thousand six, ten years before. His DNA was matched UM
in multiple places on the victim from the rape kit,
on her clothing she put on a T shirt after
the rape. His UM DNA was found on the T shirt.
(26:46):
His DNA was found on a towel that she wrapped
around her after the rape. When the police came, she
was wearing a towel and the rapist had put karate.
Now we know his name is Karate. He had put
a diaper, one of his, her children's diapers over her
face when he was raping her, and his DNA was
found on that paper. So there's absolutely no doubt that
(27:08):
he was the rapist. I consider her situation now, she
thinks the rapist is in prison me, so she can
relax a little bit because he's not going to come back.
Years later, thirty four years later, she finds out no,
(27:30):
he was still out there running around and could have
come back at any time. And she's got to relive
this because those criminals in Newport News one the conviction,
not the truth. So now all these years later, it
comes back up, it's brought. It's like scrabbing a scab.
She's got to relive that whole rape thing because it's
(27:52):
on the news, it's everywhere that I'm being exonerated that
I didn't do it right. And the guy who did
this horrible thing to her and her family, Rock could
have still been out there and done done more, and
he did, but he could have come back. And for
that woman, I feel for her. She was re victimized
by those criminals in Newport News, by them short cutting
(28:12):
and taking the easy way out, by not trying to
find the right person. The guy crowdy that did it
was a wall when all this testing was going on
about the bike marks and stuff. So what they do, Well,
he's gone. We ain't got time to look for him.
We got the guy here he is, Yeah, So and
that's that's what happens. They're dead, all of them, but
(28:32):
the urologists are gone now, the prosecutor, you know, and
it's all about ego with them, you know. They get
ahold of something. The detective in my case, Spinner. After
that I was convicted, he took one of the moles
and went to the foundry and had brass a brass
mold of my teeth made and make a paperweight for
(28:55):
his desk. And now how is that? Knowing what he did,
he that I didn't do it. He had to know, Keith. Uh.
You know, I'm a big fan of yours and I
just uh. I listened to you talk and I'm I'm
frankly in awe. Is there anything else, any closing thoughts
you want to share with the audience. These organizations exist
(29:18):
and the Innocent Projects, and people don't know about them.
I mean, you can turn the TV O and they
want uh Sally Scruthers want you to give doll money
for dogs and stuff like that. But these organizations aren't.
I was in prison and didn't know about the Innocent Project.
I had no clue. And I was in prison of
all places. We should know about these things. So the
word needs to get out and people need to help.
(29:40):
Because my heroes they get up every day. They washed
their face and brushed the thief and then put the
capes on and they go out and save people, and
that's the kind of people that we all should be
about them. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review
wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm
(30:02):
a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence
Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved.
I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Kevin Wardis. The music in the show is by three
time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
(30:24):
us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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