Innocence Lost

Since August 23, 1992, Anthony Graves has been behind bars for the gruesome murder of a family in Somerville. There was no clear motive, no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, and the only witness against him recanted, declaring again and again before his death, in 2000, that Graves didn’t do it. If he didn’t, the truth will come out. Won’t it?

by Pamela Colloff

October 2010

Mary Cavallo says: I watched the story of Anthony Graves on the web site and it was very upsetting to know just how unjust our justice system really is. What upset me even more is the fact that my grandson’s grandfather has been in prison for 18 years for a murder that he did not commit. No one in the state of Texas seems to want to help him because there was no DNA or weapon found. He was sentenced to life on circumstantial evidnce alone. There was blantant collusion and illegally withheld exculpatory evidence that would have proven his innocence. If the only people that have DNA are the only ones the system cares to try and help; what does that say about our country or justice system on the whole. If there is some one out there that cares, please let me know. I have sent a letter and this man’s book to TM and Pamela Colloff because I feel like she really cares. I pray some one will take the time to read it. His name is Robert Midkiff and he is incarcerated at the Hughes Unit in Gatesville Texas.His# is 738842. If anyone is listening,Please help him! I am very grateful and happy that someone took an interest in Anthony Graves when they did. If people were listening years ago, it may not have taken soo long for him to obtain his freedom. God Bless the ones that truly care! Mary Cavallo (June 21st, 2012 at 12:38pm)

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Editors’ note: On October 27, 2010, just a month after the publication of this story, the Burleson County district attorney’s office dropped all murder charges against Anthony Graves and released him from the county jail, where he was awaiting retrial.

I.

A few hours before dawn on a sticky summer night in Somerville, a one-stoplight town ninety miles northwest of Houston, police chief Jewel Fisher noticed the faint smell of burning wood. Fisher was following up on a late-night prowler call east of the main drag, in the predominantly black neighborhood that runs alongside the railroad tracks. Turning down the town’s darkened streets, he suddenly caught sight of a house on fire and realized that he was looking at the home of 45-year-old Bobbie Davis, a supervisor at the Brenham State School. Flames climbed the walls and skittered along the roof of the one-story brick structure, casting a murky orange glow. The windows had already been smashed in by several neighbors, who had screamed the names of the children they feared were trapped inside, pleading for them to wake up. Fisher quickly radioed for help, but when volunteer firefighters arrived, they discovered the bodies of Bobbie, her teenage daughter, and her four grandchildren inside. Each person had been brutally attacked and left to die in the blaze.

Word of the killings, which took place on August 18, 1992, traveled quickly through Somerville. The tragedy had no precedent; it was—and eighteen years later remains—the most infamous crime in Burleson County history. “Many in the neighborhood remarked that this was the kind of thing that you expected to happen somewhere else, not in Somerville,” read a front-page article in the Burleson County Citizen-Tribune. Bobbie had been bludgeoned and stabbed. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Nicole Davis, a popular senior and top athlete at Somerville High School, had been bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot. Bobbie’s grandchildren—nine-year-old Denitra, six-year-old Brittany, five-year-old Lea’Erin, and four-year-old Jason—had been knifed to death. (Bobbie’s daughter Lisa was mother to the oldest and youngest children; Bobbie’s son, Keith, was father to the two middle girls.) All told, the victims had been stabbed 66 times. Even the youngest member of the Davis family, who stood three and a half feet tall, had been shown no mercy. Jason, who investigators would later determine had cowered behind a pillow, was stabbed a dozen times. His body had been doused in gasoline before the house was set on fire.

After daybreak, neighbors gathered to survey the ruins of the Davis home, and TV news crews from Houston came by helicopter, circling overhead. Two Texas Rangers arrived that morning, and two more later joined them, but they had few early leads. There were no obvious suspects and hardly any clues; the fire had ravaged the crime scene, and the killer—or killers—had left behind no witnesses. A night clerk at the Somerville Stop & Shop, Mildred Bracewell, came forward to say that two black men with a gas can had purchased gasoline shortly before the time of the murders. A hypnotist employed by the Department of Public Safety elicited a more precise description from her of one of the men, and a forensic artist sketched a composite drawing of the suspect. Still, there were no arrests.

Four days after the murders, the Rangers got their first break. Five hundred mourners—nearly one third of Somerville—turned out for the funeral, which was held in the local high school gymnasium. Among them was Jason Davis’s absentee father, a 26-year-old prison guard named Robert Carter, whose bizarre appearance that day drew stares. His left hand, neck, and ears were heavily bandaged, as was most of the left side of his face. When Bobbie’s sister-in-law approached him at the cemetery to inquire about his injuries, Carter’s wife, Cookie, quickly answered for him. “His lawn mower exploded on him,” she said. Carter added without explanation, “I was burned with gasoline.” His conversation with his deceased son’s mother, Lisa Davis, was no less strange. Lisa had suffered an unimaginable loss; that day, she would bury two children, as well as her mother, sister, and two nieces. (That her own life had been spared was a quirk of fate; had she not traded shifts with a co-worker at the Brenham State School, she would have been at the Davis home on the night of the murders.) As Carter reached to embrace her, she took a step back, startled by what she saw. “What happened?” she asked, studying his face. Abruptly, Carter turned around and walked away.

After the funeral, the Rangers paid Carter a visit at his home in Brenham, fifteen miles south of Somerville. “I figured y’all would be over here to talk to me because of the bandages,” he told them. The Rangers had learned from Lisa that she had recently filed a paternity suit against Carter, a first step in obtaining child support. Carter had been served with papers just four days before the killings. Ranger Ray Coffman, the case’s lead investigator, read Carter his Miranda rights and asked him to come in for questioning.

That afternoon, at the DPS station in Brenham, Carter sat down with the four veteran Rangers assigned to the case: Coffman, Jim Miller, George Turner, and their supervisor, Earl Pearson. The Rangers were skeptical that one person could have brandished the three weapons used in the murders—a gun, a knife, and a hammer—and had surmised early on that the Davis family had been killed by as many as three assailants. Carter was grilled by the Rangers, but he remained steadfast in his insistence that he knew nothing about the killings. He had burned himself, he told them, while setting fire to some weeds in his yard. By evening, he and the Rangers had reached an impasse, and he agreed to take a polygraph exam. Three of the investigators—Coffman, Miller, and Turner—drove him to Houston, where the test could be administered by a licensed polygraph examiner. He failed it sometime after 11 p.m.

The Rangers continued to interrogate him until well past midnight. After several hours, they wore down Carter’s resistance, and he finally agreed to make a statement about the crime. At 2:53 a.m., Ranger Coffman turned on the tape recorder, and Carter began to talk. He had been present at the Davis home on the night of the murders, he allowed, but it was another man—his wife’s first cousin, Anthony Graves—who was to blame. As he began, he stumbled over the killer’s name, once calling him Kenneth. Later he corrected himself: “I said Kenneth. It wasn’t Kenneth. I’m sorry. Anthony.”

Carter told the Rangers that he had driven Graves to the Davis home after one o’clock in the morning. Graves, he said, had asked him if he knew any women, and the only prospect who had come to Carter’s mind was sixteen-year-old Nicole. He had dropped Graves—who was, by Carter’s own admission, a stranger to the Davis family—off at the front door while he stayed in the car. He did not say exactly how Graves had gotten inside. As he waited for Graves to return, Carter said, he heard someone shouting, and then screams. Alarmed, he let himself in to look around. To his horror, he said, he had walked in on a killing spree. “There was blood everywhere,” Carter said. “He was going from room to room.” Carter maintained that he helplessly looked on while Graves single-handedly murdered the Davis family. “I had no part in it,” he insisted, though he had already accurately described the precise locations where many of the victims had been killed.

Afterward, he said, Graves had retrieved a gas can from the storage room, poured gasoline throughout the house, and set it ablaze, scorching him in the process. Remarkably, he expressed no anger toward the man who, by his own telling, had just murdered his son. After the rampage, he said, he drove Graves back to Brenham and dropped him off at Graves’s sister’s apartment.

During the tape-recorded conversation, the Rangers never stopped to ask Carter fundamental questions that could have determined whether Graves was actually present at the scene of the crime. They never pushed Carter to explain why he would have taken a man who was looking for sex to a house full of sleeping children. Or why Graves would have brutally murdered six people he did not know. They never questioned him about the improbable logistics of the crime he had just described. (How had Graves managed to find a gas can inside the storage room of a house he had never visited?) Nor did they press Carter to admit his own role in the killings. (Wouldn’t Bobbie Davis, whose body was found nearest the front door—where investigators had determined there was no sign of forced entry—have been more likely to let in Carter, the father of her grandchild, than a stranger who had turned up at her house in the middle of the night?) Even after Carter divulged that he had burned his own clothes upon returning home, Ranger Coffman continued to focus on his accomplice, twice prompting Carter to say that he wanted to help investigators find his son’s killer.

Although Carter’s statement was badly flawed, the Rangers had gotten what they wanted: an admission from Carter that he was at the scene of the crime and the name of an accomplice. The possibility that he had falsely named Graves to shift the attention away from himself was never fully explored and would haunt the case during its long and meandering path through the court system over the next eighteen years. “I hope that you don’t use this to lock me up,” Carter said when he was done, his face still partially obscured by bandages.

What evidence the Rangers were able to find later that day pointed exclusively to Carter himself. A cartridge box in his closet held the same type of copper-coated bullets that had been used to kill Nicole. The .22-caliber pistol that he usually kept above his bed was missing. The Pontiac Sunbird that he had admitted driving to the Davis home was gone; he had traded it in at a Houston car dealership two days after the killings. And yet even as his story fell apart, the Rangers continued to pursue their case against Graves. Two warrants were issued hours after Carter made his statement: one for Carter, who was immediately arrested, the other for Graves. There was no physical evidence that tied Graves to the crime and no discernible motive—only the word of the crime’s prime suspect.

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