Does DaRoyce Mosley Deserve to Die?
Raised in Kilgore’s poorest black neighborhood, he was an honors graduate with a bright future—until he was convicted of killing four whites. But the case is still hotly disputed, and the question remains…Does DaRoyce Mosley Deserve to Die?
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After sunrise, about seven in the morning, ATF agent Larry Smith asked DaRoyce to show him where he threw the ski mask that he had worn in the robbery. When they got to the scene, Smith saw a glove, which DaRoyce admitted was his. Smith recalled that he said to DaRoyce, “You know, we can run gunpowder tests of your glove to find out if you were the shooter at Katie’s.” At that point, said Smith, DaRoyce said he was ready to change his statement and admit that he had shot all four people at Katie’s. (DaRoyce heatedly told me that he never made a confession to Smith at the scene.) Instead of taking the new statement from DaRoyce immediately, Smith suggested that everyone get some sleep. Six hours later, DaRoyce said he killed the Katie’s customers because Ray Don had pointed a gun to his head. According to witnesses in the room, after the eight-page, single-spaced confession was printed out, DaRoyce read it carefully for at least thirty minutes before signing it. It was 3:50 on a Saturday afternoon, more than sixteen hours after the police had started questioning him.
ALTHOUGH THE CASE LOOKED AIRTIGHT, there were significant problems. The glove and clothes that DaRoyce wore that night showed no trace of blood from the four victims and no trace elements of gunpowder residue. Ballistics and autopsy tests showed that the gun DaRoyce got from the man who lived behind Caboo had been the one used to murder the four customers at Katie’s. But a blood spot inside the small box where the gun was kept when the police recovered it matched Ray Don’s. Blood matching that of Buddy Waller, one of the victims, was also found all over the side of one of Ray Don’s tennis shoes. “Blood spatter” tests showed that Waller’s blood had hit Ray Don’s shoe at a high velocity, undoubtedly as a result of the force of a bullet entering Waller’s flesh. In other words, Ray Don had to be standing very close to Waller when he was shot. To further complicate matters, Marcus Smith said that when he saw Ray Don and DaRoyce after the shootings, Ray Don was covered with blood, but DaRoyce had no blood on him at all.
Ronald Dodson and Richard Stengel, two longtime firearms and toolmark examiners for the Bexar County Forensic Science Center in San Antonio, were asked by the defense attorneys to study the crime scene. They studied the shell casings that had been ejected from the two pistols. By noting the location of each casing on the floor, it was possible to determine where the killer or killers were standing when the shots were fired. Dodson and Stengel found that a shell casing lodged under the pool table next to Luva Congleton’s body had come not from the gun DaRoyce supposedly used but from Ray Don’s gun. If Ray Don had shot his gun only when he first came into the bar, as he said he did, his gun’s casings would have flown toward the right corner. Although police investigators suggested that the casing had been kicked by officers and ambulance attendants when they got to the bar, Dodson said it was impossible for someone to have kicked that casing on a carpeted floor all the way across the room and around the other side of Luva Congleton’s body.
Trying to understand how Ray Don’s blood got inside the gun box, Dodson and Stengel wondered whether Ray Don had used both guns that night. Dodson had been a homicide detective in St. Louis for ten years before coming to San Antonio. He was a hard-boiled cop who had investigated more than five hundred homicides and written a major paper in college on the importance of the death penalty. He almost never testified for defense attorneys. “But the more I kept looking at the evidence from the crime scene,” he told me, “the more I was convinced that DaRoyce froze at the door and didn’t shoot anybody, and Ray Don took the gun from DaRoyce.” I asked Dodson about the police department’s theory that Ray Don didn’t shoot Buddy Waller because the blood spatter was only on the side of Ray Don’s shoe, meaning that Ray Don had to be standing on the side of or away from Waller when he was shot. “Oh, that’s easy,” said Dodson. “I think after Buddy Waller had been shot in the leg and the head, Ray Don stood right over him, his foot at a sideways angle to his face, and he shot him through the eye. You have to ask yourself if DaRoyce Mosley could be capable of doing something that vicious.”
When I asked DaRoyce to tell me what really took place that night, he did admit that he had followed Ray Don into the bar. “Ray Don told me to shoot the lady in front of me. I said, ‘I’m not going to shoot anybody.’ He said, ‘Shoot her, goddammit.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to shoot anybody.’ He snatched the gun out of my hand and I turned to run.”
“But why didn’t you ever go back to the police and tell them that Ray Don had killed those people?”
DaRoyce’s body seemed to sag, and it appeared for a moment that he was about to break into tears. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know I could just go back [to the police]. I felt [that since] I had already given several different statements, they would think that this one was also a lie.”
AFTER DAROYCE’S ARREST, SOME SUPPORTIVE Kilgore citizens anonymously placed an ad in the Kilgore newspaper announcing the DaRoyce Mosley Benefit Fund. “Friends of DaRoyce Mosley plead for your help to SAVE HIS LIFE,” read the ad, which also showed a picture of DaRoyce from his high school yearbook. There were, however, plenty of townspeople convinced that DaRoyce was a cold-blooded killer. Relatives of the Katie’s victims began showing up at pretrial hearings wearing black arm bands with the word “justice” emblazoned on them in gold letters.
The tension escalated when DaRoyce’s great-uncle Joe Rogers Johnson used his entire life savings, $15,000, to hire Austin attorney Gary Bledsoe, the head of the Texas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to defend DaRoyce. The 43-year-old Bledsoe—a tall, surprisingly gentle-voiced man who prefers cowboy hats, boots, and bolo ties—asked Cynthia Orr, a San Antonio defense attorney who specializes in capital punishment cases, to be his partner. (She worked pro bono.) They immediately caused an uproar when they alleged that the police were desperate to convict DaRoyce because they needed to prove they could successfully solve a case. (The Kilgore Police Department had been embarrassed by the infamous 1983 Kentucky Fried Chicken murder case, in which five Kilgore citizens had been abducted and were later found dead in an adjoining county. Although the police quickly identified four suspects, they were never brought to trial because of a lack of evidence.) “There has been a feeling in the community that maybe its police department isn’t up to snuff,” Bledsoe told me.
The two attorneys further inflamed the community when they said that the police and prosecutors didn’t care about the facts in the case because DaRoyce is black. In one motion to the court asking for a change of venue, Bledsoe and Orr wrote, “The local criminal justice system is still infected with racism, and many members of the community still hold racist beliefs that have not changed since the Civil War.” Bledsoe said that during one of his visits to the county jail to see DaRoyce, a jailer unleashed a large German shepherd just to scare him. It was no different, Bledsoe said, than police using German shepherds to attack civil-rights demonstrators in the sixties. Gregg County sheriff Bobby Weaver said the dog was never unleashed. “I am not calling him a liar,” Weaver snapped about Bledsoe, “but he is coming close.”
In their most damaging attack, Bledsoe and Orr charged that Ray Don had worked out a deal with prosecutors to keep himself off death row. At a pretrial hearing, Ray Don was brought to the witness stand. Although Ray Don invoked the Fifth Amendment to keep from answering most questions, the judge did order him to answer one question Bledsoe posed about his making an agreement with the district attorney to testify against his nephew in exchange for DaRoyce’s being tried first. Ray Don said yes. Bledsoe then asked if “high-ranking public officials” had assured him that he would not get the death penalty if he took the stand against DaRoyce. Again, Ray Don invoked the Fifth Amendment, and this time the judge ruled that Ray Don didn’t have to answer to avoid self-incrimination. “Something stinks,” Ronald Dodson told me. “I’ve been around too long not to smell a deal.”
As the capital murder trial began this past October, the case could be seen either as a small-town version of the O.J. Simpson trial, with defense attorneys blatantly playing the race card, or as a reenactment of To Kill a Mockingbird, with callous white officials unfairly prosecuting a black man. Rumors had swept through Kilgore that the Ku Klux Klan was planning to bomb DaRoyce’s grandmother’s house if DaRoyce was acquitted. There were also rumors that a group of black men had vowed to burn down Katie’s if DaRoyce was convicted. Because of the publicity, it had been difficult to find jurors. When 500 county residents were summoned to the courthouse for jury selection, only 207 showed up.
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