author: Bill Carico
Sometimes prosecutors get away with murder.
Who holds the most power in the criminal justice system?
Choose one:
- investigator/detective
- the defense attorney
- the prosecutor
- the judge
- the jury
After becoming familiar with dozens of offenders and their stories, I can confidently say it’s the prosecutor… by a wide margin.
On any given day, the prosecutor makes more decisions that affect peoples lives than the judge because they decide which cases reach the courtroom.
Grand juries have become a rubber stamp. In the rare instance a grand jury would recommend against an indictment, the prosecutor has the power to bypass them and directly indict a defendant.
Overzealous prosecutors have put countless innocent people to death. Consider the story of Tommy Lee Walker.
Walker was sent to the electric chair by the longest-serving prosecutor in U. S. history. That would be the late Henry Menasco Wade, who became district attorney in Dallas in 1951 when he was 37 years old. Wade remained in that job for the next 36 years. He wasn’t just aggressive, he was super-competitive, and his over-the-top antics and theatrics in front of juries soon became his trademark.
Wade was involved in many highly publicized cases and even historic cases, including the prosecution of Jack Ruby for Killing Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion. Henry Wade is the Wade in Roe v Wade.
Mary Mapes wrote about this legendary prosecutor in May of 2016 on the sixtieth anniversary of the death of an innocent man Henry Wade sent to the electric chair. The Walker case came along during Wade’s third year on the job.
In 2004, Mary Mapes was the producer of CBS News program 60 Minutes when it aired a documentary accusing then-President George W Bush of receiving preferential treatment during the years he served in the Texas Air National Guard. Afterward, the authenticity of documents used in the reporting didn’t hold up under scrutiny. The push back on CBS News from Bush’s defenders led to the firings of news anchor Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, and three others who worked on the story. The movie, simply titled “Truth,” is about the scandal and was based on a memoir written by Mapes titled, Truth and Duty, The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power. Mary Mapes currently resides in the Dallas area and in May of 2016 wrote an article revealing that prosecutor Henry Wade was a con artist and his legacy has been fooling the citizens of Dallas by convicting innocent people of crimes they didn’t commit. Mapes discovered that according to the National Registry of Exonerations that didn’t start tracking wrongful convictions until 2 years after Wade retired in 1987, at least 25 convictions that Henry Wade oversaw have been overturned. These reversals are based on DNA forensic technology that has been improved and utilized to re-investigate Dallas County criminal cases.
Here is an abbreviated version of the story, which also reveals the role corrupted police and even journalists played in supporting Wade the con artist. Mape’s article is titled, When Henry Wade Executed an Innocent Man; The subtitle states, The legendary District Attorney ran a conviction machine that got results. In 1954, he persuaded a jury to send Tommy Lee Walker to the electric chair just three months after his arrest. But a new look at the case reveals one of the greatest injustices in Dallas history.
The article begins by introducing the first victim, and then explains others were victimized by this wicked prosecutor. “It was dark when she left her job at the dime store and headed across Northwest Highway, but Venice Parker did not walk to the nearest bus stop. Instead, she turned in the opposite direction, toward the distant lights of Love Field, across an overpass and into the night, to catch a less convenient bus at a lonely place in the shadows of Lemmon Avenue. The trek saved her 5 cents. This was 1953, and, as a working mother with a 4-year-old son and a husband long hospitalized with tuberculosis, she’d learned to make every penny count.
On this September night, though, that sensible decision would cost Venice Parker her life. The murder triggered a hysteria in Dallas that led to a bad arrest, a sensational trial, and an execution. Sixty years ago… Tommy Lee Walker died in the state’s electric chair for a crime he could not have committed… The Tommy Lee Walker case came to my attention several years ago, when I began looking for an execution in Texas that could possibly be proved wrongful using DNA evidence. My search focused on Dallas County, because DNA evidence taken during criminal investigations here was often refrigerated and saved for decades, a policy of the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences; and one of the reasons Dallas County has more exonerations than almost every other county in the nation. Since I needed a case that involved DNA based evidence I looked for crimes that included rape. Until 1977, when the U S Supreme Court ruled against it, a rape conviction could draw the death penalty,—and it did in Texas, particularly when the victims were white and the suspects were black… The Tommy Lee Walker… was convicted of killing Venice Parker almost solely based on what looks to be a coerced confession… In 1953, Dallas was booming…Dallas had not yet been altered by the Kennedy assassination or the civil rights movement. Just two years earlier, in fact, there had a been a series of bombings in South Dallas, as whites terrorized black people moving into their neighborhood. A grand jury handed down nearly a dozen indictments, but no one brought to trial was ever convicted.
Cops coerced a confession from Tommy Lee Walker. The district attorney then was the legendary Henry Wade, just beginning a nearly four-decade reign as one of the country’s top prosecutors, long before the public would learn of his tendency to target and prosecute the wrong suspects with lethal efficiency.
By 1953, Henry Wade already had the city wired. Reporters treated his word as gospel, sometimes even buttressing Wade’s efforts in court with their own testimony. The Dallas Police Department and County Sheriff’s Office eagerly did his bidding. White citizens felt safe with Wade at the helm of his Texas-tough law-and-order empire—until a baffling crime spree that shook the city to its core. Over the summer, reports surfaced of a “Negro Prowler.” In one neighborhood after another, white women called police with tales of a naked black man peeping into their homes, exposing himself. Police always arrived after the perpetrator had fled. His crimes left no evidence, just the stories of terrified women splashed across front pages. Henry Wade urged vigilance and patience. Then, on the night of September 30, 1953, a horrific discovery on Lemon Avenue set the city’s fears on fire. Just after 9 o’clock, an airline reservations clerk was driving home from work at Love Field when his headlights illuminated a small, struggling figure in the middle of the road. It was 31-year-old Venice Parker, crawling on her hands and knees, her dress torn and drenched in blood, her throat slashed. The driver pulled over and ran to her side, asking, “Lady, what’s happened?” He would testify later that Venice was able to say only, “I was stabbed,” before falling silent. He half-walked, half-carried her to the automobile and sped back to the airport, where he knew he’d find police. He said he did not hear Venice speak again, that she issued only what he described as “gurgling sounds.” He testified that during the short drive, her feet kicked at one of the back windows when she seemed to go into convulsions. Screeching to a stop in front of the terminal, he shouted for help. Skycaps and other airport workers rushed to the car. Those witnesses also said Venice was collapsed in the car, wordless as her blood pooled on the back seat. After several minutes, a Dallas police officer arrived. His story would be different. Patrol Officer J W Gallaher said that he leaned into the car, and, just before she died, Venice raised her head, coughed, and spoke to him clearly. She said, “A Negro took me under the bridge and cut my throat.”
Those words changed everything. Overnight, the gruesome murder of the pretty, young white woman merged with the story of the Negro Prowler. Front pages shrieked of a city under siege, where gun shops sold out of weapons and the dog pound was overwhelmed with requests for large guard dogs. Women were afraid of being home alone. Armed men formed vigilante groups to patrol neighborhoods at night. Police begged citizens not to turn their guns on each other in fear. For weeks, tension built as the murder investigation, like the Negro Prowler case, went nowhere. Police had found Venice’s purse, her broken glasses, and her underwear discarded on a patch of bloodstained grass at the bottom of a wooded ravine next to Lemon Avenue. But 1950’s forensics were very limited. The evidence in the ravine offered police virtually nothing to go on. Venice’s autopsy showed only that she had been raped and beaten and that she’d died after having her jugular vein severed. So under intense public pressure, investigators relied on a tried-and-true technique. They rounded up dozens of black men who had absolutely no connection to the case. One of those men was Tommy Lee Walker.
• • •
Tommy Lee’s life was already set to change profoundly on the night Venice Parker died. That evening, the 19-year-old’s longtime girlfriend, Mary Louise Smith, was about to deliver their child, something he was thrilled about. Friends said he’d pleaded with Mary Louise for months to marry him, but she refused because she wanted to wait until their baby was born. Preparing for fatherhood, Tommy Lee had been working extra hours at a gas station on Denton Drive, not far from Love Field. One of his co-workers later testified that on the night of the murder he had driven Tommy Lee home at about 6, three hours before Venice was found, to what was then a burgeoning black neighborhood near Baylor hospital, east of downtown. Tommy Lee regularly needed a ride because he did not own a car. His home was about 5 miles from the scene of the murder. The Walkers were longtime residents of the neighborhood around Exall Park, where his sister ran a beauty shop. Tommy Lee himself was familiar to many there as one of a group of young men who cooled off in the park in the evenings after work. They sang doo-wop songs and jokingly called themselves the Street Lamp Quartet. According to witnesses, Tommy Lee was there in the park for a couple of hours after work on the night of the murder. But he ended up, as he did most nights, at his girlfriend’s house near the park, arriving around 8 pm. He visited for a few hours and then went to his own house after 11 pm, two hours after the murder. A few hours later, he got a call saying it was time. Mary Louise was in labor. He and his sister woke up their father and borrowed $5 to pay for an ambulance. Tommy Lee headed back to his girlfriend’s house, where he helped her into the vehicle. Their son, Edward Lee Smith, who goes by Ted, was born in the early morning hours, a little boy who would share his father’s middle name but very little of his father’s life… Dallas police used the word “hysteria” to describe public reaction. The night after Venice’s killing, police received a whopping 400 reports of prowlers and peeping Toms.
The cops began arresting young black men. Many were questioned for days after being picked up for “appearing suspicious” or for not being able to sufficiently explain to police where they had been on the night of the murder… Police did not get around to Tommy Lee Walker for four months, in late January 1954. The service station on Denton Drive where he worked had been robbed— months after Walker had moved on to another job. Police asked the station’s owner for a list of previous employees and their addresses, which led officers to Tommy Lee’s house near Exall Park. He was arrested and taken in for questioning on a Friday evening. While there, he later told friends and family, he feared for his life after seeing jail officers beat a black inmate.
Late the next night, Tommy Lee was brought before Captain Fritz, who questioned him for hours, not about any involvement in the robbery for which he had been arrested, but about Venice Parker’s murder. Tommy Lee said that Fritz told him he had received a phone call implicating him in the crime. Fritz had received no such call. Fritz said that there were witnesses and that police knew what he had done. Fritz had a reputation for being unusually effective at wringing admissions of guilt out of suspects, and his techniques worked in this case as well. Years later, we know much more about how often false confessions occur and what can trigger them— fear, cultural differences, sleep deprivation, and feelings of hopelessness, all of which played a role in this case.
Tommy Lee said later that he was intimidated when Fritz shouted at him again and again that he was lying about the murder. He said Fritz asked repeatedly if he had to “bring in the men from upstairs” when Tommy Lee balked at signing a confession. He believed that was a reference to the two officers he’d earlier seen beating a man. Many hours later—alone, confused, and frightened—Tommy Lee wearily signed a confession for the murder. It included details about the crime that only police knew, along with a number of errors and information that simply did not add up. Tommy Lee, sensitive to issues of race and sexuality, insisted to Fritz that he had not raped Venice Parker. The dubious confession claimed that the young mother had accidentally been stabbed when she “started to run and jumped into my knife.” Walker would say later that he did not see or hear the full transcript of the confession until it was read aloud in court during his trial. As soon as Captain Fritz sent Tommy Lee back to his cell, the teenager realized the extent of the trouble he was in and began telling guards, inmates, and family members that he had been tricked into signing the confession. He said that everyone at the jail told him the same thing, that the only person who could help him now was the district attorney, Henry Wade. A couple of days later, Tommy Lee met with Wade and renounced his confession in person. He told Wade where he’d been on the night of the murder, providing names of people who’d seen him from 6 pm, three hours before Venice Parker was killed, all the way till the early morning of the next day, when his son was born. Tommy Lee said that Wade told him he understood all of that and would help him if he would sign a copy of the confession “for his files.” Tommy Lee claimed that Henry Wade told him it would be valuable for anyone trying to help with Tommy Lee’s case, and he promised that he would not ask for the death penalty. There was no physical evidence linking Tommy Lee to the crime— no bloody clothing, no knife. None of Venice Parker’s belongings were found in his possession. There was no connection between Tommy Lee and Venice and no credible way to show that he had even been in the area at the time. Still, North Texas newspapers trumpeted the police success in nabbing the killer. Negro Prowler reports slowed to a trickle, and order in Dallas was restored, except in black neighborhoods, where people seethed over the framing of a naive kid who had proved no match for Henry Wade’s version of justice.
The Trial of Tommy Lee Walker. A young black attorney named Kenneth Holbert happened to be at the county jail that weekend… when he overheard Tommy Lee, distraught and protesting that he had been coerced into signing a confession for a crime he did not commit. “His story was so striking,” Holbert says. “I thought, Not him. He’s not big enough to do that. He was a small fellow, about 5-foot-3, weighed maybe 118 pounds. My first thought was, What is this kid doing in jail and what can we do to get him out?” Holbert went back to the law office where he worked for W J Durham, one of Dallas’ first wellknown black attorneys. He told him about the Tommy Lee Walker case, and, after some back and forth, eventually the team agreed to represent him at trial. 142 - Three Days in Texas Confidential Now 91 years old and living in Washington, D C, Holbert is still a practicing attorney at the U S Department of Housing and Urban Development. He moved out of Texas several years after Tommy Lee’s trial. Holbert recalls with bitterness the efficiency of Henry Wade’s operation, particularly the way it dealt with black defendants. “They had a well-developed system for winning convictions,” Holbert says. “It was like conjugating a verb, no problem. It was not a Southern system. It was a Texas system. Mississippi could only dream of being that effective. It took money and skill to do that, and Dallas had that.” Holbert, Durham, and J L Turner, another Texas legal giant, joined forces in presenting Tommy Lee’s defense, three black lawyers in a life-or-death face-off with the daunting forces of Henry Wade and his staff. “He was all about winning,” Holbert says. “He was a brilliant attorney. He got the maximum that was available. The maximum is what he always got.” The defense attorneys felt they had no chance of winning an acquittal against Wade in front of an all-white jury. They hoped to save their client’s life. “In those days, what you tried to do was get a lighter sentence in the murder of a white female. You did not expect to walk him out. Best bet was to create something akin to doubt. Back then, that would be your victory. Life in prison, not death. That would be your victory.”
The trial, in March of 1954, became a sensation, with black newspapers covering it as closely as the larger publications. Every day the courthouse was packed with scores of black onlookers, many of whom had to wait outside in the hushed hallways because there was not space in the courtroom. They strained to hear testimony through cracked doors, struggling to glimpse the overflowing benches and players in what many believed was an unfolding travesty. Henry Wade called two surprise witnesses who said they had been driving through the area on the night of the crime. A man and woman, both white, had come forward after Tommy Lee’s picture had appeared in the newspaper. Mrs. Harry Kluge told the jury she had seen a “colored man walking along on the sidewalk. “He sauntered along and walked in the direction of the bridge.” A male driver, who said he stopped at a traffic light near the murder scene, testified that he “noticed a colored man leaning against the telephone pole, in a slouched position.” He claimed that at the moment he’d seen him, he’d told his wife that the man “was a good prospect for the Negro Prowler.” Despite the darkness of the hour, despite the distance, despite the passage of time, both said that, in their opinion, Tommy Lee Walker was that man. Any understanding of the failures of eyewitness identification, particularly across racial lines, was far into the future. The defense team countered with no fewer than nine alibi witnesses. Tommy Lee’s girlfriend, Mary Louise Smith, told the jury that her boyfriend had been at her house at the time of the murder. “District Attorney Wade tore into her testimony,” according to the Dallas Morning News. He claimed that Mary Louise had told Captain Fritz in an earlier interview that Tommy Lee had not been there. Both Mary Louise’s mother and their next-door neighbor testified that they had talked to Tommy Lee when he was at the Smith house that night, close to the time of the murder. The co-worker who’d driven Tommy Lee home from his job at the service station testified on his behalf. So did the Beard brothers, who’d been with him in the park that evening. A beauty shop worker who saw him at his sister’s salon before he walked to Mary Louise’s house testified for him. The ambulance driver told the jury that Tommy Lee had been at the Smith house when he arrived to take Mary Louise to the hospital. Tommy Lee’s sister testified that she had seen him early in the evening and was with him at home later, when they’d awakened their father to borrow ambulance money. None of that testimony— accounting for Tommy Lee’s whereabouts during every hour of the night, putting him 5 miles from the murder— and none of those witnesses swayed the all-white jury. “The system was not designed to receive or believe the testimony,” Holbert says. Jurors simply would not believe black witnesses over the word of Henry Wade, no matter how many there were, no matter who they were, no matter what they said. Tommy Lee’s attorneys brought in skycaps and other witnesses to testify that they had not heard Venice Parker speak when she was in the automobile at the airport. The attorneys repeatedly challenged the patrol officer who claimed that she had told him, after convulsing in the car, after spilling her blood in the back seat, “A Negro took me under the bridge and cut my throat.” They introduced expert medical testimony that it would have been impossible for her to speak because of the severity of her injury. And they tried to keep Tommy Lee’s confession out of court, claiming that it was coerced and signed without appropriate warnings. They argued that his arrest had been illegal. On all counts, the court ruled against them. 146 - Three Days in Texas Confidential Tommy Lee Walker took the stand. He told the court that after fighting Captain Fritz’s demands for hours, he finally gave in and told him what he wanted to hear because he was scared. To counter that claim, Henry Wade brought two reporters from the Dallas Morning News and WBAP radio to the stand to testify that they had watched Walker sign the confession and that no one appeared to threaten him in their presence. Then Henry Wade made his signature fiery closing argument. He stalked the courtroom, slamming his hands on the defense table and thundering directly into Tommy Lee’s face, “I’d be glad to walk the last mile with you, Walker. And I’d be glad to pull the switch on you.” The jury went to deliberate. “We left to go to a restaurant to get a sandwich,” says Holbert the defense attorney. “Before the order was brought to our table, the bailiffs showed up to say we had a verdict.” It had taken just over an hour for the jury to reach a decision. When Holbert and the defense team returned to the courthouse, it was surrounded by close to 1000 black citizens, who were in turn surrounded by dozens of Dallas police riot officers. Holbert says, “That moment was the most powerful example of state power I have ever seen.” Inside, just three months after he’d been arrested, Tommy Lee Walker was pronounced guilty and sentenced to death. Tommy Lee Walker’s prison records show that in his first interview at the Walls Unit, in Huntsville Texas, he again insisted on his innocence. “I signed a confession … because I was frightened and tricked into it. I was over 2 miles from where this murder was supposed to have occurred on Lemon Avenue. Never at any time was I in this area on the night of September 30, 1953.” In his assessment of Tommy Lee’s attitude, the examining officer wrote, “Subject is of the opinion that he did not get a fair trial … He has an excellent memory for events past and present, however, the interviewer found him to be very evasive and impudent … This subject denies guilt … DISPLAYED A POOR ATTITUDE.” In Tommy Lee’s last psychiatric examination before he was executed, a doctor wrote that he “revealed no depression, irritability and no anxiety… He did state the law knew he was innocent and that they were framing him.” “Henry Wade would not intentionally try to convict someone he knew to be innocent,” says former Dallas assistant district attorney Edward Gray, “but even in cases where evidence was weak, he would go all out, go for broke, be supercompetitive.” Gray, who wrote the 2010 book Henry Wade’s Tough Justice, which begins with his years working in the Wade office, says that the Tommy Lee Walker case “was not at all out of character.”
In the years since DNA forensic technology has been improved and utilized to re-investigate Dallas County criminal cases, at least 25 convictions that Henry Wade oversaw have been overturned, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, with one caveat. They did not start tracking wrongful convictions until 1989. It is possible that there were some convictions overturned before that. Some of the men who were wrongly convicted had been on death row. But there has yet to be a DNA based exoneration of someone who has been executed. At the Walls Unit, there was no hope for Tommy Lee. Records detail requests to witness his execution from Dallas law enforcement officials and from one morbidly interested local real estate agent with no apparent connection to the crime. There are pages devoted to the exact measurements for Tommy Lee’s burial suit, ordered while he was still alive. There is a letter from the warden alerting the family to the issuing of a death warrant. “It becomes my sad duty to inform you that unless the Board of Pardons and Paroles … intervenes the death penalty assessed your son Tommy Lee Walker will be carried out during the early morning hours of May 12, 1956.” In an oddly upbeat final note, the warden added, “Everything is being done to make your son’s last hours as happy as possible under the circumstances.” Shortly after midnight on the appointed day, Tommy Lee Walker was led to the electric chair and strapped in. He declared one final time that he was innocent. Four minutes later, he was dead.
His body was displayed in a small South Dallas funeral home for two days. More than 5000 people walked past his cardboard casket in protest. The Dallas Express, a black paper run by Marion Butts, listed the name of every person who came to the viewing. On the day of the funeral, Butts wrote a searing column condemning the handling of the case. “Walker is dead,” he wrote, “but he will forever live in the minds and conscience of those who have the ability to reason.” At the Dallas funeral service for Tommy Lee Walker, the minister told a packed church that just hours before his death, Tommy Lee had told his father that he “was not worried about what he was facing, because God was with him.” In the front row, Tommy Lee’s sister held his 2-year-old son, the child he’d had with Mary Louise Smith. Mary Mapes’ story about Henry Wade reveals the dark side of a celebrated prosecutor, and his egregious conduct that went unchecked and unbridled for decades. This prosecutor was not what he seemed to be, innocent people went to jail, some were executed, and, in reality, the citizens of Dallas were never as safe as they thought they were. Imagine how many others working with Henry Wade chose to look the other way, knowing full well that the lives of innocent people were being either ruined or terminated by this evil man.
Sometimes prosecutors get away with murder.
Who holds the most power in the criminal justice system?
Choose one:
- investigator/detective
- the defense attorney
- the prosecutor
- the judge
- the jury
After becoming familiar with dozens of offenders and their stories, I can confidently say it’s the prosecutor… by a wide margin.
On any given day, the prosecutor makes more decisions that affect peoples lives than the judge because they decide which cases reach the courtroom.
Grand juries have become a rubber stamp. In the rare instance a grand jury would recommend against an indictment, the prosecutor has the power to bypass them and directly indict a defendant.
Overzealous prosecutors have put countless innocent people to death. Consider the story of Tommy Lee Walker.
Walker was sent to the electric chair by the longest-serving prosecutor in U. S. history. That would be the late Henry Menasco Wade, who became district attorney in Dallas in 1951 when he was 37 years old. Wade remained in that job for the next 36 years. He wasn’t just aggressive, he was super-competitive, and his over-the-top antics and theatrics in front of juries soon became his trademark.
Wade was involved in many highly publicized cases and even historic cases, including the prosecution of Jack Ruby for Killing Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion. Henry Wade is the Wade in Roe v Wade.
Mary Mapes wrote about this legendary prosecutor in May of 2016 on the sixtieth anniversary of the death of an innocent man Henry Wade sent to the electric chair. The Walker case came along during Wade’s third year on the job.
In 2004, Mary Mapes was the producer of CBS News program 60 Minutes when it aired a documentary accusing then-President George W Bush of receiving preferential treatment during the years he served in the Texas Air National Guard. Afterward, the authenticity of documents used in the reporting didn’t hold up under scrutiny. The push back on CBS News from Bush’s defenders led to the firings of news anchor Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, and three others who worked on the story. The movie, simply titled “Truth,” is about the scandal and was based on a memoir written by Mapes titled, Truth and Duty, The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power. Mary Mapes currently resides in the Dallas area and in May of 2016 wrote an article revealing that prosecutor Henry Wade was a con artist and his legacy has been fooling the citizens of Dallas by convicting innocent people of crimes they didn’t commit. Mapes discovered that according to the National Registry of Exonerations that didn’t start tracking wrongful convictions until 2 years after Wade retired in 1987, at least 25 convictions that Henry Wade oversaw have been overturned. These reversals are based on DNA forensic technology that has been improved and utilized to re-investigate Dallas County criminal cases.
Here is an abbreviated version of the story, which also reveals the role corrupted police and even journalists played in supporting Wade the con artist. Mape’s article is titled, When Henry Wade Executed an Innocent Man; The subtitle states, The legendary District Attorney ran a conviction machine that got results. In 1954, he persuaded a jury to send Tommy Lee Walker to the electric chair just three months after his arrest. But a new look at the case reveals one of the greatest injustices in Dallas history.
The article begins by introducing the first victim, and then explains others were victimized by this wicked prosecutor. “It was dark when she left her job at the dime store and headed across Northwest Highway, but Venice Parker did not walk to the nearest bus stop. Instead, she turned in the opposite direction, toward the distant lights of Love Field, across an overpass and into the night, to catch a less convenient bus at a lonely place in the shadows of Lemmon Avenue. The trek saved her 5 cents. This was 1953, and, as a working mother with a 4-year-old son and a husband long hospitalized with tuberculosis, she’d learned to make every penny count.
On this September night, though, that sensible decision would cost Venice Parker her life. The murder triggered a hysteria in Dallas that led to a bad arrest, a sensational trial, and an execution. Sixty years ago… Tommy Lee Walker died in the state’s electric chair for a crime he could not have committed… The Tommy Lee Walker case came to my attention several years ago, when I began looking for an execution in Texas that could possibly be proved wrongful using DNA evidence. My search focused on Dallas County, because DNA evidence taken during criminal investigations here was often refrigerated and saved for decades, a policy of the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences; and one of the reasons Dallas County has more exonerations than almost every other county in the nation. Since I needed a case that involved DNA based evidence I looked for crimes that included rape. Until 1977, when the U S Supreme Court ruled against it, a rape conviction could draw the death penalty,—and it did in Texas, particularly when the victims were white and the suspects were black… The Tommy Lee Walker… was convicted of killing Venice Parker almost solely based on what looks to be a coerced confession… In 1953, Dallas was booming…Dallas had not yet been altered by the Kennedy assassination or the civil rights movement. Just two years earlier, in fact, there had a been a series of bombings in South Dallas, as whites terrorized black people moving into their neighborhood. A grand jury handed down nearly a dozen indictments, but no one brought to trial was ever convicted.
Cops coerced a confession from Tommy Lee Walker. The district attorney then was the legendary Henry Wade, just beginning a nearly four-decade reign as one of the country’s top prosecutors, long before the public would learn of his tendency to target and prosecute the wrong suspects with lethal efficiency.
By 1953, Henry Wade already had the city wired. Reporters treated his word as gospel, sometimes even buttressing Wade’s efforts in court with their own testimony. The Dallas Police Department and County Sheriff’s Office eagerly did his bidding. White citizens felt safe with Wade at the helm of his Texas-tough law-and-order empire—until a baffling crime spree that shook the city to its core. Over the summer, reports surfaced of a “Negro Prowler.” In one neighborhood after another, white women called police with tales of a naked black man peeping into their homes, exposing himself. Police always arrived after the perpetrator had fled. His crimes left no evidence, just the stories of terrified women splashed across front pages. Henry Wade urged vigilance and patience. Then, on the night of September 30, 1953, a horrific discovery on Lemon Avenue set the city’s fears on fire. Just after 9 o’clock, an airline reservations clerk was driving home from work at Love Field when his headlights illuminated a small, struggling figure in the middle of the road. It was 31-year-old Venice Parker, crawling on her hands and knees, her dress torn and drenched in blood, her throat slashed. The driver pulled over and ran to her side, asking, “Lady, what’s happened?” He would testify later that Venice was able to say only, “I was stabbed,” before falling silent. He half-walked, half-carried her to the automobile and sped back to the airport, where he knew he’d find police. He said he did not hear Venice speak again, that she issued only what he described as “gurgling sounds.” He testified that during the short drive, her feet kicked at one of the back windows when she seemed to go into convulsions. Screeching to a stop in front of the terminal, he shouted for help. Skycaps and other airport workers rushed to the car. Those witnesses also said Venice was collapsed in the car, wordless as her blood pooled on the back seat. After several minutes, a Dallas police officer arrived. His story would be different. Patrol Officer J W Gallaher said that he leaned into the car, and, just before she died, Venice raised her head, coughed, and spoke to him clearly. She said, “A Negro took me under the bridge and cut my throat.”
Those words changed everything. Overnight, the gruesome murder of the pretty, young white woman merged with the story of the Negro Prowler. Front pages shrieked of a city under siege, where gun shops sold out of weapons and the dog pound was overwhelmed with requests for large guard dogs. Women were afraid of being home alone. Armed men formed vigilante groups to patrol neighborhoods at night. Police begged citizens not to turn their guns on each other in fear. For weeks, tension built as the murder investigation, like the Negro Prowler case, went nowhere. Police had found Venice’s purse, her broken glasses, and her underwear discarded on a patch of bloodstained grass at the bottom of a wooded ravine next to Lemon Avenue. But 1950’s forensics were very limited. The evidence in the ravine offered police virtually nothing to go on. Venice’s autopsy showed only that she had been raped and beaten and that she’d died after having her jugular vein severed. So under intense public pressure, investigators relied on a tried-and-true technique. They rounded up dozens of black men who had absolutely no connection to the case. One of those men was Tommy Lee Walker.
• • •
Tommy Lee’s life was already set to change profoundly on the night Venice Parker died. That evening, the 19-year-old’s longtime girlfriend, Mary Louise Smith, was about to deliver their child, something he was thrilled about. Friends said he’d pleaded with Mary Louise for months to marry him, but she refused because she wanted to wait until their baby was born. Preparing for fatherhood, Tommy Lee had been working extra hours at a gas station on Denton Drive, not far from Love Field. One of his co-workers later testified that on the night of the murder he had driven Tommy Lee home at about 6, three hours before Venice was found, to what was then a burgeoning black neighborhood near Baylor hospital, east of downtown. Tommy Lee regularly needed a ride because he did not own a car. His home was about 5 miles from the scene of the murder. The Walkers were longtime residents of the neighborhood around Exall Park, where his sister ran a beauty shop. Tommy Lee himself was familiar to many there as one of a group of young men who cooled off in the park in the evenings after work. They sang doo-wop songs and jokingly called themselves the Street Lamp Quartet. According to witnesses, Tommy Lee was there in the park for a couple of hours after work on the night of the murder. But he ended up, as he did most nights, at his girlfriend’s house near the park, arriving around 8 pm. He visited for a few hours and then went to his own house after 11 pm, two hours after the murder. A few hours later, he got a call saying it was time. Mary Louise was in labor. He and his sister woke up their father and borrowed $5 to pay for an ambulance. Tommy Lee headed back to his girlfriend’s house, where he helped her into the vehicle. Their son, Edward Lee Smith, who goes by Ted, was born in the early morning hours, a little boy who would share his father’s middle name but very little of his father’s life… Dallas police used the word “hysteria” to describe public reaction. The night after Venice’s killing, police received a whopping 400 reports of prowlers and peeping Toms.
The cops began arresting young black men. Many were questioned for days after being picked up for “appearing suspicious” or for not being able to sufficiently explain to police where they had been on the night of the murder… Police did not get around to Tommy Lee Walker for four months, in late January 1954. The service station on Denton Drive where he worked had been robbed— months after Walker had moved on to another job. Police asked the station’s owner for a list of previous employees and their addresses, which led officers to Tommy Lee’s house near Exall Park. He was arrested and taken in for questioning on a Friday evening. While there, he later told friends and family, he feared for his life after seeing jail officers beat a black inmate.
Late the next night, Tommy Lee was brought before Captain Fritz, who questioned him for hours, not about any involvement in the robbery for which he had been arrested, but about Venice Parker’s murder. Tommy Lee said that Fritz told him he had received a phone call implicating him in the crime. Fritz had received no such call. Fritz said that there were witnesses and that police knew what he had done. Fritz had a reputation for being unusually effective at wringing admissions of guilt out of suspects, and his techniques worked in this case as well. Years later, we know much more about how often false confessions occur and what can trigger them— fear, cultural differences, sleep deprivation, and feelings of hopelessness, all of which played a role in this case.
Tommy Lee said later that he was intimidated when Fritz shouted at him again and again that he was lying about the murder. He said Fritz asked repeatedly if he had to “bring in the men from upstairs” when Tommy Lee balked at signing a confession. He believed that was a reference to the two officers he’d earlier seen beating a man. Many hours later—alone, confused, and frightened—Tommy Lee wearily signed a confession for the murder. It included details about the crime that only police knew, along with a number of errors and information that simply did not add up. Tommy Lee, sensitive to issues of race and sexuality, insisted to Fritz that he had not raped Venice Parker. The dubious confession claimed that the young mother had accidentally been stabbed when she “started to run and jumped into my knife.” Walker would say later that he did not see or hear the full transcript of the confession until it was read aloud in court during his trial. As soon as Captain Fritz sent Tommy Lee back to his cell, the teenager realized the extent of the trouble he was in and began telling guards, inmates, and family members that he had been tricked into signing the confession. He said that everyone at the jail told him the same thing, that the only person who could help him now was the district attorney, Henry Wade. A couple of days later, Tommy Lee met with Wade and renounced his confession in person. He told Wade where he’d been on the night of the murder, providing names of people who’d seen him from 6 pm, three hours before Venice Parker was killed, all the way till the early morning of the next day, when his son was born. Tommy Lee said that Wade told him he understood all of that and would help him if he would sign a copy of the confession “for his files.” Tommy Lee claimed that Henry Wade told him it would be valuable for anyone trying to help with Tommy Lee’s case, and he promised that he would not ask for the death penalty. There was no physical evidence linking Tommy Lee to the crime— no bloody clothing, no knife. None of Venice Parker’s belongings were found in his possession. There was no connection between Tommy Lee and Venice and no credible way to show that he had even been in the area at the time. Still, North Texas newspapers trumpeted the police success in nabbing the killer. Negro Prowler reports slowed to a trickle, and order in Dallas was restored, except in black neighborhoods, where people seethed over the framing of a naive kid who had proved no match for Henry Wade’s version of justice.
The Trial of Tommy Lee Walker. A young black attorney named Kenneth Holbert happened to be at the county jail that weekend… when he overheard Tommy Lee, distraught and protesting that he had been coerced into signing a confession for a crime he did not commit. “His story was so striking,” Holbert says. “I thought, Not him. He’s not big enough to do that. He was a small fellow, about 5-foot-3, weighed maybe 118 pounds. My first thought was, What is this kid doing in jail and what can we do to get him out?” Holbert went back to the law office where he worked for W J Durham, one of Dallas’ first wellknown black attorneys. He told him about the Tommy Lee Walker case, and, after some back and forth, eventually the team agreed to represent him at trial. 142 - Three Days in Texas Confidential Now 91 years old and living in Washington, D C, Holbert is still a practicing attorney at the U S Department of Housing and Urban Development. He moved out of Texas several years after Tommy Lee’s trial. Holbert recalls with bitterness the efficiency of Henry Wade’s operation, particularly the way it dealt with black defendants. “They had a well-developed system for winning convictions,” Holbert says. “It was like conjugating a verb, no problem. It was not a Southern system. It was a Texas system. Mississippi could only dream of being that effective. It took money and skill to do that, and Dallas had that.” Holbert, Durham, and J L Turner, another Texas legal giant, joined forces in presenting Tommy Lee’s defense, three black lawyers in a life-or-death face-off with the daunting forces of Henry Wade and his staff. “He was all about winning,” Holbert says. “He was a brilliant attorney. He got the maximum that was available. The maximum is what he always got.” The defense attorneys felt they had no chance of winning an acquittal against Wade in front of an all-white jury. They hoped to save their client’s life. “In those days, what you tried to do was get a lighter sentence in the murder of a white female. You did not expect to walk him out. Best bet was to create something akin to doubt. Back then, that would be your victory. Life in prison, not death. That would be your victory.”
The trial, in March of 1954, became a sensation, with black newspapers covering it as closely as the larger publications. Every day the courthouse was packed with scores of black onlookers, many of whom had to wait outside in the hushed hallways because there was not space in the courtroom. They strained to hear testimony through cracked doors, struggling to glimpse the overflowing benches and players in what many believed was an unfolding travesty. Henry Wade called two surprise witnesses who said they had been driving through the area on the night of the crime. A man and woman, both white, had come forward after Tommy Lee’s picture had appeared in the newspaper. Mrs. Harry Kluge told the jury she had seen a “colored man walking along on the sidewalk. “He sauntered along and walked in the direction of the bridge.” A male driver, who said he stopped at a traffic light near the murder scene, testified that he “noticed a colored man leaning against the telephone pole, in a slouched position.” He claimed that at the moment he’d seen him, he’d told his wife that the man “was a good prospect for the Negro Prowler.” Despite the darkness of the hour, despite the distance, despite the passage of time, both said that, in their opinion, Tommy Lee Walker was that man. Any understanding of the failures of eyewitness identification, particularly across racial lines, was far into the future. The defense team countered with no fewer than nine alibi witnesses. Tommy Lee’s girlfriend, Mary Louise Smith, told the jury that her boyfriend had been at her house at the time of the murder. “District Attorney Wade tore into her testimony,” according to the Dallas Morning News. He claimed that Mary Louise had told Captain Fritz in an earlier interview that Tommy Lee had not been there. Both Mary Louise’s mother and their next-door neighbor testified that they had talked to Tommy Lee when he was at the Smith house that night, close to the time of the murder. The co-worker who’d driven Tommy Lee home from his job at the service station testified on his behalf. So did the Beard brothers, who’d been with him in the park that evening. A beauty shop worker who saw him at his sister’s salon before he walked to Mary Louise’s house testified for him. The ambulance driver told the jury that Tommy Lee had been at the Smith house when he arrived to take Mary Louise to the hospital. Tommy Lee’s sister testified that she had seen him early in the evening and was with him at home later, when they’d awakened their father to borrow ambulance money. None of that testimony— accounting for Tommy Lee’s whereabouts during every hour of the night, putting him 5 miles from the murder— and none of those witnesses swayed the all-white jury. “The system was not designed to receive or believe the testimony,” Holbert says. Jurors simply would not believe black witnesses over the word of Henry Wade, no matter how many there were, no matter who they were, no matter what they said. Tommy Lee’s attorneys brought in skycaps and other witnesses to testify that they had not heard Venice Parker speak when she was in the automobile at the airport. The attorneys repeatedly challenged the patrol officer who claimed that she had told him, after convulsing in the car, after spilling her blood in the back seat, “A Negro took me under the bridge and cut my throat.” They introduced expert medical testimony that it would have been impossible for her to speak because of the severity of her injury. And they tried to keep Tommy Lee’s confession out of court, claiming that it was coerced and signed without appropriate warnings. They argued that his arrest had been illegal. On all counts, the court ruled against them. 146 - Three Days in Texas Confidential Tommy Lee Walker took the stand. He told the court that after fighting Captain Fritz’s demands for hours, he finally gave in and told him what he wanted to hear because he was scared. To counter that claim, Henry Wade brought two reporters from the Dallas Morning News and WBAP radio to the stand to testify that they had watched Walker sign the confession and that no one appeared to threaten him in their presence. Then Henry Wade made his signature fiery closing argument. He stalked the courtroom, slamming his hands on the defense table and thundering directly into Tommy Lee’s face, “I’d be glad to walk the last mile with you, Walker. And I’d be glad to pull the switch on you.” The jury went to deliberate. “We left to go to a restaurant to get a sandwich,” says Holbert the defense attorney. “Before the order was brought to our table, the bailiffs showed up to say we had a verdict.” It had taken just over an hour for the jury to reach a decision. When Holbert and the defense team returned to the courthouse, it was surrounded by close to 1000 black citizens, who were in turn surrounded by dozens of Dallas police riot officers. Holbert says, “That moment was the most powerful example of state power I have ever seen.” Inside, just three months after he’d been arrested, Tommy Lee Walker was pronounced guilty and sentenced to death. Tommy Lee Walker’s prison records show that in his first interview at the Walls Unit, in Huntsville Texas, he again insisted on his innocence. “I signed a confession … because I was frightened and tricked into it. I was over 2 miles from where this murder was supposed to have occurred on Lemon Avenue. Never at any time was I in this area on the night of September 30, 1953.” In his assessment of Tommy Lee’s attitude, the examining officer wrote, “Subject is of the opinion that he did not get a fair trial … He has an excellent memory for events past and present, however, the interviewer found him to be very evasive and impudent … This subject denies guilt … DISPLAYED A POOR ATTITUDE.” In Tommy Lee’s last psychiatric examination before he was executed, a doctor wrote that he “revealed no depression, irritability and no anxiety… He did state the law knew he was innocent and that they were framing him.” “Henry Wade would not intentionally try to convict someone he knew to be innocent,” says former Dallas assistant district attorney Edward Gray, “but even in cases where evidence was weak, he would go all out, go for broke, be supercompetitive.” Gray, who wrote the 2010 book Henry Wade’s Tough Justice, which begins with his years working in the Wade office, says that the Tommy Lee Walker case “was not at all out of character.”
In the years since DNA forensic technology has been improved and utilized to re-investigate Dallas County criminal cases, at least 25 convictions that Henry Wade oversaw have been overturned, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, with one caveat. They did not start tracking wrongful convictions until 1989. It is possible that there were some convictions overturned before that. Some of the men who were wrongly convicted had been on death row. But there has yet to be a DNA based exoneration of someone who has been executed. At the Walls Unit, there was no hope for Tommy Lee. Records detail requests to witness his execution from Dallas law enforcement officials and from one morbidly interested local real estate agent with no apparent connection to the crime. There are pages devoted to the exact measurements for Tommy Lee’s burial suit, ordered while he was still alive. There is a letter from the warden alerting the family to the issuing of a death warrant. “It becomes my sad duty to inform you that unless the Board of Pardons and Paroles … intervenes the death penalty assessed your son Tommy Lee Walker will be carried out during the early morning hours of May 12, 1956.” In an oddly upbeat final note, the warden added, “Everything is being done to make your son’s last hours as happy as possible under the circumstances.” Shortly after midnight on the appointed day, Tommy Lee Walker was led to the electric chair and strapped in. He declared one final time that he was innocent. Four minutes later, he was dead.
His body was displayed in a small South Dallas funeral home for two days. More than 5000 people walked past his cardboard casket in protest. The Dallas Express, a black paper run by Marion Butts, listed the name of every person who came to the viewing. On the day of the funeral, Butts wrote a searing column condemning the handling of the case. “Walker is dead,” he wrote, “but he will forever live in the minds and conscience of those who have the ability to reason.” At the Dallas funeral service for Tommy Lee Walker, the minister told a packed church that just hours before his death, Tommy Lee had told his father that he “was not worried about what he was facing, because God was with him.” In the front row, Tommy Lee’s sister held his 2-year-old son, the child he’d had with Mary Louise Smith. Mary Mapes’ story about Henry Wade reveals the dark side of a celebrated prosecutor, and his egregious conduct that went unchecked and unbridled for decades. This prosecutor was not what he seemed to be, innocent people went to jail, some were executed, and, in reality, the citizens of Dallas were never as safe as they thought they were. Imagine how many others working with Henry Wade chose to look the other way, knowing full well that the lives of innocent people were being either ruined or terminated by this evil man.