Under the Gun

sidebar

Untrue Confessions

To many people, the confessions of Mike Scott and Robert Springsteen, replete with details only someone present at the crime would know, are their tickets to the death chamber. Why would an innocent person say something like that, and how could he if he wasn't at the scene? In truth, detailed, false confessions are not as rare as one might think, and the Austin police have been involved in several of them. Perhaps the most shocking example of this was the case of Achim Josef Marino, a born-again Christian serving three life sentences in a Texas prison for aggravated robbery. In 1998 he wrote a letter to Governor George W. Bush confessing to raping and shooting a woman named Nancy DePriest at an Austin Pizza Hut in 1988. ". . . I did this awfull [sic] crime and I was alone," he wrote. "I do not know these men nor why they plead [sic] guilty to a crime they never committed." The men he referred to were Christopher Ochoa, who had confessed to the crime, and Richard Danziger, who had not. The detective to whom Ochoa had confessed was Hector Polanco, the lead investigator in the troubled early days of the yogurt shop case. In November 2000, DNA tests, along with the corroboration of other physical evidence Marino had mentioned in his letter to Bush, proved that Marino was telling the truth and that Ochoa and Danziger are innocent. (The two men await the results of final tests by the Travis County district attorney and, they hope, a judge's decision to free them.)

The story of how the two men came to be convicted of DePriest's savage murder is chilling. Two weeks after her death, Ochoa, then 22, and his friend, Danziger, then 18, pulled into the parking lot of the Pizza Hut and sat for five minutes, drinking beer. Suspicious employees called the police, who picked them up for questioning two days later. Over two days, under interrogation by Detectives Polanco, Bruce Boardman, and Ed Balagia, Ochoa confessed and also fingered Danziger. Though his official story changed several times, in his written confession Ochoa offered plenty of salient details: how DePriest had been hit, how her hands had been tied behind her with her bra, how she had been shot in the back of the head. Ochoa eventually made a deal with the DA, pleading guilty to murder and getting a life sentence and implicating Danziger.

Ochoa's fictional confession was not the only thing Danziger had to deal with. In Danziger's trial for aggravated sexual assault, Detective Boardman (who would later grab a murder suspect and throw him against an interrogation room wall) told how Danziger had known details only someone at the crime scene could have known, such as the kind of gun used (a .22 pistol) and what had been stuffed into the sink to flood the restaurant to destroy evidence (a blue Pizza Hut apron). Danziger himself took the stand and said he didn't know why his friend and the police were lying. Still, it took the jury a little more than three hours to find him guilty; they sentenced him to life in prison. A year later Danziger was beaten severely at the Clements Unit in Amarillo, suffering permanent brain damage, and today he sits, heavily medicated, in a medical ward at Skyview Psychiatric Facility in Rusk.

Even Danziger's trial lawyer, Berkley Bettis, had no reason to doubt Ochoa's confession. "I left that trial feeling the state had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that my client was guilty," he says now. "How could Ochoa have stood on the witness stand and related detail after detail after detail? People just don't do that if they're innocent, or at least I didn't think so." Unless, perhaps, they're guilty of something else, such as being afraid. In a November interview he gave to his attorneys, Ochoa, a former high school honors student who had no criminal record, said he confessed because over the course of two long interrogations, Polanco and the other detectives hollered at him, threatened him with rape by other inmates, and told him he would get "the needle" if he didn't confess to DePriest's murder. When Ochoa was sufficiently terrified, the detective began asking him leading questions, feeding him details. "He was all the time telling me what to say," said Ochoa. For example, he said, "Polanco would say, 'Did he [Danziger] say how good-looking she was?' or something. And I would say, 'Yeah.'" All the while Boardman typed his answers, which eventually sent two innocent men to the pen, and one to oblivion.

"That was a big mistake," admits Mike Sheffield, the president of the Austin Police Association. "We tried and convicted the wrong two men." But, he adds, "Once we knew it was a problem, we set about fixing it. If there is an injustice, you need to correct it." He says the department has been cooperating with the DA in the investigation of the case, though he also says, "Nobody has shown [Polanco] did something wrong."

No, but controversy and accusations of false confessions have shadowed Polanco for years. The Austin detective was accused by Allen Andre Causey of choking him, promising to have inmates rape him, and threatening him with the death penalty during an interrogation following an August 1991 murder. (Causey was convicted and the verdict was later upheld on appeal.) Bruce Bowser confessed to a 1991 murder after a lengthy interrogation during which, he said, Polanco threatened to have his mother and grandmother killed by a man Bowser had robbed. He later recanted the confession. (According to the police, these allegations were never proved.) In October 1991 Richard I. Osaze-Ediae, a Nigerian student, confessed to Polanco that he had committed a murder. Osaze-Ediae later recanted, saying Polanco had told him that he was doomed to be convicted and executed but if he confessed he'd only get ten years. A statement from a witness tying Osaze-Ediae to the murder was also later recanted; the woman said the police had told her she would lose her child if she didn't testify. (The prosecution of Osaze-Ediae's case was dropped by the DA after the 1992-93 investigation of the homicide department.) Following a February 1991 murder, Polanco and Brent McDonald were accused of perjury by their own police department for lying about taking a statement from a witness who would later claim he had been fed information by Polanco and others and coerced into signing the statement. (Polanco was suspended from the force and then fired in September 1992 for perjury, but an arbitrator later ruled that he had merely forgotten about the statement and ordered Polanco reinstated; Polanco would eventually win a federal civil rights suit against the city and be awarded $318,537.)

The APD would like to put as much distance as possible between 1991 and 1999; defense attorneys say that can't be done. "Hector Polanco is the father figure of all the detectives who have come in his stead," says Bettis, who now represents Springsteen. "They have the same convict-at-any-cost mentality." Polanco, now in his late forties, hovers over the yogurt shop case like a bad spirit. He made an appearance at a pretrial hearing in August to answer questions about his 1991 interrogation of Maurice Pierce. The much-decorated lieutenant (who until recently was on extended medical leave and would not be interviewed) shambled slowly into the room, looking like Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, his huge frame supported by crutches, while everyone—the families of the girls, the families of the suspects, and even the police—stared with a mix of awe and fear.

Why would an innocent person confess to a crime he didn't commit? Sometimes it depends on who is asking him the questions.