How Bertha Owens was sentenced to life in prison—with virtually no evidence

Charley Schneider’s the sort of guy people compare to a mountain: big and craggy, with a voice that would rumble through a valley. He was a police officer in St. Louis County for 20 years but got tired of working for people with fewer principles and finer filters. Setting up shop as a private investigator, he dug into questionable convictions and looked for lost kids whose parents didn’t want them back.

But when the Midwest Innocence Project called to take him up on an offer of pro bono investigative work, Charley was at loose ends for the first time in his life. He’d just been given a diagnosis (misdiagnosis, he’d later learn) of a disease that would cause his strong body and sharply inquisitive mind (self-taught in history and philosophy and psychology, IQ of 160) to slowly, inexorably deteriorate.

Not the type to collapse on a couch, Charley agreed to investigate the case of Bertha Owens, locked up for life at age 38. If nothing else, it would be a distraction. From the brief police report and depositions, he sifted the basics:

Ten years earlier, on October 18, 1996, a 64-year-old man had been beaten senseless and his TV and VCR stolen. The man, Frederick Huff, used a wheelchair and, since throat cancer, a voice activator; he’d been helpless to fight back. 

The case drew little media attention: There was no power at stake, no sexy intrigue or luxe backdrop. The crime was one of wanton greed and cruelty, and people recoiled from it.

The beating took place at the California Gardens apartments in Benton Park West, then subsidized housing for people with scant income who were older or living with a disability. The apartments are set in a U around a courtyard, and the second story has exterior steps and walkways, motel-style, that make it easy for people to keep track of their neighbors’ comings and goings. 

Charley sketched a diagram, marking Huff’s first-floor apartment and, upstairs, the “party house” where Bertha, her two co-defendants, and five other people had hung out that evening, drinking or smoking crack.     

According to a professed eyewitness named Felicia Jones, four people had beaten and robbed Huff that night as she and Virgil “Shaky” Danzie, host of the party house, stood at the storm door and watched. Three were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole: Felicia’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Kenneth Dailey; his friend Willie “Smooth” Henderson; and Bertha Ann Owens. For reasons that remain unclear, the fourth person was never charged.

Felicia gave this account to homicide detectives seven weeks after the crime—when she was arrested for stealing and realized she was facing a long sentence. It was the first real break in the case, and the detectives moved fast, taking her with them to seize the clothes she said Kenny had worn that night. There was blood on the neck of the shirt.

Kenny, Willie, and Bertha were arrested immediately. Their alibis were vague to nonexistent. Willie couldn’t even muster a memory of that night. Bertha said she’d been at Shaky’s earlier but had left with her friend Paulette Bryant (the fourth person implicated) and partied elsewhere. When they returned, an ambulance was outside.

Twenty days later, Huff died, and the case became a homicide.

Notepad by his side, Charley settled down with the police reports and the 1,256-page trial transcript.

Once they’d made the arrests, detectives brought in the neighbor who’d called 911, a white woman in her forties named Ellen Wright. They showed her three sets of photos, each with someone they’d arrested and two strangers. She identified the people they’d arrested as the three people she’d seen earlier outside Huff’s apartment. That in itself didn’t prove much, because she’d seen Huff alive afterward. But she also recalled—only now, seven weeks after the crime, in her third conversation with police—that shortly before she called 911, she’d seen six people walking down the second-floor steps (possibly from Shaky’s apartment), and two of the men were carrying big bags.

Odds are, Bertha really is guilty, Charley thought glumly. Not only was there an eyewitness but there were two additional witnesses: Ellen and a guy who recalled Bertha coming to his house sometime that autumn to sell a TV. 

On the other hand, Charley had been a cop long enough to know that three was the magic number they pushed for: It eased a reluctant witness’ nerves to learn that two other people were saying the same thing, and having three witnesses carried weight with a jury. 

Also, this was a black-on-white crime (Huff was white, the defendants African-American)—on the South Side of St. Louis in the mid-’90s. There would have been a big political motivation to close that case.

He sped through the pretrial documents, then skidded to a stop: In January 1998, just two months before trial, defense attorneys had learned about 2,000 pages of medical evidence indicating that Huff was beginning to recover from the brain trauma when a bowel problem developed—not as a direct result of the beating but instead as a complication of treatment. A routine colonoscopy was done, but the physician inadvertently perforated Huff’s colon, so a colostomy had to be performed. 

“Then the stitches leaked, so they went in and fixed that,” explains Dr. Michael Graham, the medical examiner, “but there was an abscess in the area. He went downhill from there.” 

Graham told the defense attorneys that he thought Huff would have died of his original injuries anyway—but maybe as long as a year later.

The trial was uncomplicated by forensic evidence. The DNA in the blood on Kenny’s shirt hadn’t matched Huff’s after all. There were no fingerprints. The most likely weapon was a brick usually kept outside to weigh down newspapers: Ellen had told police it was in front of Huff’s door that night but got kicked into the grass by a paramedic. Fragments of brick had been found inside the apartment, and a presumptive test for the presence of blood was positive. 

But Felicia, the eyewitness, testified that Bertha used a knife and a statue—neither of which was ever found. 

After the crime, Felicia said she’d washed the knife and put it in Shaky’s drawer. Why? “I don’t know. I don’t need anything like that laying around.” She also reported throwing away a bloody pair of gloves she said Willie (by all accounts seriously drunk that night) had somehow had the presence of mind to slip on ahead of time.

Charley went back to Felicia’s earlier versions. When she first talked to police, there was a warrant out for her in St. Louis County, where she had pending felony charges for three counts of stealing in Clayton, plus she hadn’t completed an earlier probation for either stealing or third-degree assault. She was looking at prison time. Also, she was scared she’d be suspected in the Huff case because she and Kenny had been living upstairs at Shaky’s apartment. 

She told the officer who booked her that she had some information about a homicide. Detectives were summoned. First, Felicia told them that she knew who committed the crime, but she was at the grocery store when it occurred. By 9:15 the next evening, when they taped her statement, she was saying—her soft voice barely audible—that she’d been there and she’d seen it all. She and Shaky had gone downstairs with the other four, “just to be nosy,” and they’d kept watch, standing shoulder to shoulder outside Huff’s door for 20 or 30 minutes. “Bertha Ann was saying she was going to hit him in the face with a brick,” she said. “I think she got it out of Shaky house.” And what did she do with the brick? “She left it outside.” 

Felicia said all the fighting took place back in the bedroom, which she could see from the storm door (a lousy vantage point for the level of detail she offered). When a detective asked whether the fight had at some point moved to the living room, she said, “Yeah.” It started when Willie tried to take the TV, she said: He struggled with Huff, then struck him in the head with a knife, and all four people started punching him.

Charley picked up Felicia’s deposition, taken months later.

Now it was Bertha who’d tried to steal the TV, Bertha who’d hit Huff with the end of the knife: “She got it out of Fred house, I guess.” Felicia added that when it was all over, she went to her mother’s house. A moment later, she mentioned going back to Shaky’s apartment. Then she said she went with Kenny and Bertha to try to sell the TV and VCR and afterward went to her mother’s.

By the time Felicia took the stand in court, Bertha was clearly the mastermind, vowing ahead of time not only to steal from Huff but also to hit him with a brick. She’d also brought a knife—she got it from Shaky’s apartment, Felicia was now sure, not Fred’s. Bertha left the brick outside and hit Huff with the side of the knife’s blade (a gesture that struck Charley as awkward at best), then kept hold of the knife while picking up a statue and hitting him with that. She then dropped the bloodied statue on the floor—where police somehow never noticed it. Kenny, Felicia now insisted, hadn’t even thrown a punch, only pushed Huff.

Charley grinned when he read how Brad Kessler, a hotshot attorney on Willie’s defense team, had grilled Felicia: 

Her earlier statement that Willie stabbed Huff “was a lie, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” 

“Willie never had a knife in his hands at any time, did he?”

“No.”

When she said, “A lot of stuff I said was to make them leave me alone,” Kessler made her repeat it. 

“What you’re telling this jury is under oath today, you lied before when you were under oath?” 

“Yes.” 

“Did Mr. Moss [assistant circuit attorney] tell you how many counts of perjury you’re going to be charged with?”

“No.” 

“Probably none, I venture to say, even though by your admission you’ve lied under oath.”

Kessler was rebuked for the crack, but later, in one of the attorneys’ many trips to the bench, the judge himself remarked, “She’s said so many things, it’s possible to impeach almost everything. I don’t think she’s said the same story about anything.” 

Yet the jurors believed her—or, rather, believed the prosecutor, Nels Moss Jr. 

Charley knew the name: Famously aggressive, Moss had been singled out by the Center for Public Integrity in D.C. six years later as “a recidivist breaker of the rules by which prosecutors are supposed to operate.” He was accused of prosecutorial misconduct in 25 cases, and eight of his convictions were reversed.

This wasn’t one of them. 

Charley flipped to Moss’s closing argument. “Do you think for a minute that I was going to try to prove to you that everything that any witness said in this case, including Felicia Jones, was true beyond a reasonable doubt?” he asked the jury. “Can’t do that.” But, he continued, “if you really look at what was said here, you’ll see that what she was telling about the basics here was more than true. And uncontradicted.” Felicia, he said, had “absolutely no reason to lie about these people.”

Charley reread that line twice. Then he read Moss’s description of the neighbor, Ellen: “Again, not another rocket scientist, okay. This is a place for the disabled there.” But, Moss continued, “She’s got no motive to lie.” 

According to Moss, there was “no question the evidence shows that Bertha Owens here was the one, she was the prime movant.” He spoke of protecting helpless citizens who were “prey to these people.” Then he said that Felicia “held up through two days of testimony… So if you feel so confident that she’s lying about these people being there and these people doing it, then walk them out... Let them go back to their dens, let them go back to doing what they did before.”

That, the defense attorneys objected, was a “future dangerousness” argument, personalizing the case for the jurors and using “dens” to suggest that the defendants were predators. 

“I don’t think anybody could draw that inference,” said the judge. 

Moss glided to his conclusion: “You know in your heart of hearts that they did it. You know that from the evidence.”

Charley shook his head. He’d never seen anybody convicted on less evidence.

The verdict rang hard and clear: guilty, on all counts, for all three defendants. When the judge asked Bertha whether she had anything to say, she flashed back, “Yes, I do. I don’t feel I had a fair trial. I’m not guilty of this. I wasn’t there; I know nothing about this… There’s no justice in this system at all.”

And were there any questions, the judge continued, that her attorney failed to answer?

“This whole thing’s a question!” 

She received the heaviest sentence: life plus 45 years. “The woman seemed to be kind of the mastermind,” one of the jurors, William Connaghan, an editor of legal newspapers, says now. “Nels Moss was impressive. He wanted to emphasize that this was planned, premeditated. He had us pretty convinced that they had come down there with the intent of killing this man, not just robbing him.”

And the eyewitness, was she credible? Another juror, Isabell Dixon, doesn’t even remember her. “I really don’t, either,” says Connaghan. “I’m sure that had to be a big part of what we were basing our judgment on, but…it’s funny, she doesn’t really jump out at me. Although I guess she should. I think she might have been kind of quiet—a bit more timid—and she must have been believable, because we all pretty much went along with it.” 

He does remember Moss’ having “a pocket full of those big peppermints. We talked about it in the jury room. He would slowly unwrap one, and the wrapper made quite a bit of noise. We all became kind of fascinated to see when the next mint was coming out.”

After he’d digested all of the court documents, Charley drove to the women’s correctional center in Vandalia to meet Bertha. In the first five minutes of talking to somebody, he can usually hear the contradictions, the stray facts made up and oozed into the gaps like caulk. But Bertha’s story was consistent, and when she didn’t know something, she just said so.

What did catch Charley off guard were her prophecies: God spoke to her, Bertha said, in dreams and coincidences, and she knew she would be released. Loath to crush her hope, Charley just kept nodding and saying, “Hopefully.”

Her record showed penalties for violating a stop sign and driving without a license; no felonies, no violent crimes, no prison time. She didn’t pretend to be law-abiding; she’d grown up in the Clinton-Peabody housing project and been wild since age 15, “tryin’ to act grown.” She’d dealt weed; she’d smoked crack since her early thirties. But she had no record of violence; nor did Willie. Only Kenny had a prior felony conviction.

By October 9, 2007, Charley was ready to visit Felicia, who was in prison again for stealing. “Look,” he said, “Moss is gone; he’s out of the prosecutor’s office. We’re not going to throw you to the wolves.” There was an intelligence about Felicia that he hadn’t expected, and none of the street’s profanity. By the end of their conversation, she’d agreed to admit that she’d lied, he says. They had the statement notarized, and he sent it to the Midwest Innocence Project.

This was coming together more easily than he’d expected. Maybe Bertha’s prophecies weren’t so far off after all…

On December 3, Charley located Ellen and her husband in an out-of-the-way pocket of Lemay. He says Ellen reiterated that she’d seen Bertha and the others near Huff’s apartment when she and her husband walked to the QuikTrip. But Gilbert Wright said he hadn’t seen anyone. Then Ellen blurted that she hadn’t wanted to get involved in this at all until homicide detective Cliff Harper told her that her own uncle was under suspicion because he’d fought with Huff a few days before the crime.

“She told me that…Mr. Huff started bragging to [her uncle] about the great oral sex he had just received. He said this in front of Ellen and her mother, and [her uncle] was so angry, he later kicked in Mr. Huff’s front door,” Charley wrote in his report to the Innocence Project. He added that Ellen initially thought the detective was the Harper she’d dated in high school; only later did she realize that was his brother Johnny.

So she cooperated because she trusted him, Charley thought, and she was trying to protect her uncle. “She said, and Gilbert confirmed, that she’d been conveyed to the district attorney’s office to go over her testimony many different days and that Mr. Moss tried to get her to say she saw the three defendants exit Mr. Huff’s apartment, carrying stolen items.” She said she’d refused—which gave a new slant to her vehemence before the grand jury when asked whether the six people went into Huff’s apartment: “I didn’t see that. I didn’t see them go in; I didn’t see them come out.”

Charley left with a signed statement: “I was told by Prosecutor Moss that if I didn’t testify against the three suspects that he would charge my uncle Doug with committing the crime. The prosecutor Moss wanted me to change my story and lie in my testimony so that it would be like Felicia’s statement.” 

Still, Ellen insisted she’d seen Bertha outside Huff’s door earlier, just hadn’t known her name. An older neighbor had later said it must have been “Big Butt Bertha.” So Charley drove to California Gardens to talk to older ladies who saw things. “We’re trying to get Bertha released because we think she was falsely convicted,” he told one of them.

“Well, Bertha’s not in jail!” she retorted. “I just saw her a few days ago, walking through here!”

Charley had already wondered about Ellen’s description of the woman she saw: “a heavy-set lady; her rear end stuck way out, and she—I call her dirty looking, scroungy… She looked in my door like she could have killed me.” The woman’s hair was uncombed and sticking out, Ellen said, and “her lips are big.” 

There was another woman in this loose circle of partiers who, in Charley’s words, “had a big shelf butt. Bertha’s butt wouldn’t qualify whatsoever—and Bertha was always into looking good, and Ellen Wright talks about this individual as a mess, totally disheveled…” He chatted with a second woman in the complex, casually asking for a description of Big Butt Bertha. “She was tall and weighed about 250 pounds,” he heard.

Bertha weighed at least 100 pounds less than that, and according to her arrest record, she was 4-11.

Increasingly curious, Charley went looking for Paulette, whose absence from the trial puzzled him. Felicia had fingered four people. Only three had been charged. And the fourth, Paulette, was the friend Bertha said she was with at the time of the crime. The police report simply noted that Bryant did not want to comment. Bertha finally instructed her attorney “to go ahead and let the prosecutor know where Paulette live, because I very tired of being here for something that I know nothing about and had nothing to do with.” But an investigator for the public defender found Paulette a hostile witness and said she denied any involvement at all and “told me to never come back to her home again.” 

Charley found her. “I had to reassure her that Nels Moss was gone,” she says. “She said, ‘Yeah, me and Bertha went here and there, and then we came back, and there were ambulances there, and we went up to Shaky’s and said, “What’s going on?” and he said somebody killed the old man.’” Paulette refused to make a statement, he says, unless Felicia officially recanted. 

The testimony of the alleged fence who said Bertha tried to sell him a TV sometime that fall didn’t bother Charley: It proved nothing, and the man had been under investigation himself, for unrelated fraud. He’d only agreed to testify after immunity was granted; who knew what deal he’d been offered?

No, the guy Charley wanted to talk to was Shaky. Moss had managed to bring bits of his version into the trial, even though he had not been deposed and supposedly was unavailable to testify. According to the police report, Shaky said that late on October 18, Kenny, Willie, and Felicia left his apartment. “A short time later Bertha and Paulette left.” Later, the two women returned, and Paulette seemed nervous. Then Felicia, Kenny, and Willie came back. Shaky denied ever leaving the apartment, and his sequence didn’t match Felicia’s testimony—but the players were the same. The report also indicated that he’d introduced Bertha to Huff the week before and left the two of them alone; soon after, she came up to his apartment furious and exclaimed, “I’m gonna kill that dude! He asked me to suck his dick!”

Charley finally found Shaky sitting on a relative’s porch in Walnut Park. “Shaky! You’re the man I’ve been looking for,” he called. “Man, you’re hard to find!”  

Shaky’s eyes narrowed, and even Charley, whose childhood on the rough edge of Kinloch left him easy in such situations, had to talk fast to keep him from going back inside the house. He was the most hostile individual in this case—yet he’d cooperated with police?

“Bullshit,” Shaky said. “I didn’t tell them nothin’.” He also snorted at the notion that he’d been “in treatment,” as one of the defense lawyers was told during the trial: “That’s a f—king lie. They knew where I was, and I wasn’t in no rehab. They just didn’t want me.”

Back home, Charley sank into a big, soft chair and reached for the letters Felicia wrote to Kenny while he waited for trial. She’d told the detectives she was scared of Kenny hurting her, which would explain why she’d kept her mouth shut for so long. But she signs the letters love and kisses, “your wife” or “Pooh,” and she hotly denies that she is the “secret witness” he’s heard about. Then she says she was coerced and terrified of being taken away from her kids. 

Careful not to blame her too hard, Kenny writes, “I’m sorry the police came at you like that.” Encouraged, she replies, “The more I try to say you wasn’t involved the more Mr. Harper would make things harder for me. He even threaten to give me an asseserie to murder and he said that he would make sure that I’d never see the streets again.” Rather than say she’d sought out the homicide detectives, she writes that they were looking for her already. Then she writes, “The ones that was really involved was Bertha, Smooth, Paulette and Bernard and you wouldn’t believe where that came from. T-Terrance so you know there’s some truth to that story.” 

Still wary, he writes back, “You are correct in saying that I was kind of scared to show my true feelings…I know that I love you want you and need you. Before I forget, Felicia, what did they offer you seven years for? I don’t understand that.” 

That was for stealing, she says. She tells him she told a psychiatrist she’d been forced to lie so she could exonerate Kenny but not to expect her to exonerate anybody else: “F—k Bertha.” 

By midsummer, though, Felicia is furious with Kenny: “I have no more love for you Player! … I’m not going to change what I said to the grand jury therefore I can’t help you.”

With a slight shake of his head—his standard response to an irrational world—Charley set the letters aside and sent yet another report to the Midwest Innocence Project, wondering when they were going to do something. A caseworker from Vandalia called, worried that Bertha was suicidal because she was giving away cherished possessions. 

But far from feeling suicidal, Bertha was just trusting the prophecies. She was sure she’d be leaving any day. 

Sister Eugenio Pastorik, who worked in criminal justice ministry and had gradually come to believe Bertha’s story, found her a new lawyer, Charlie Teschner. 

“We need a copy of that notarized statement,” Teschner said, seeing only the unsigned copy in his file. So Charley called the Midwest Innocence Project, then camped out in a corner of a silk-stocking law firm—with a frayed shoestring of a budget. The office was in the process of digitizing hundreds of files. The interim director, a corporate lawyer who’d volunteered for the job as he eased toward retirement, had quit.

“They are the safety net that’s supposed to catch these people,” Charlie fumed, “and they have holes in them wider than a football field and just seem to be able to walk away any time they want!”

(Pat Doak, then the director’s secretary, says they “searched and searched and searched for that affidavit, but we never found it. We spent a lot of time trying to track it down. We really thought Bertha was innocent.”)

Later in 2010, Bertha’s new attorney was killed in a car crash. 

Devastated, she prayed and wrote everyone she could think of, including Oprah and the New York Innocence Project. She got her miracle: An attorney at Bryan Cave, Stephen Snodgrass, took up her case pro bono. He spoke by phone with Felicia, who’d landed back in prison. She agreed to meet with him—then changed her mind. Once released, she dropped out of sight.

Meanwhile, Bertha was begging Charley to talk to a prison chaplain, the Reverend Madeline Coburn, who’d been working on a death row case prosecuted by Moss. It took three years for Charley to trust Coburn’s heart-on-the-sleeve approach enough to share information, but eventually the two realized that they had, in her words, a “kind of a Cagney & Lacey thing” going for them: her access as a female African-American chaplain, his harder-edged credibility as a white male investigator.

“You know what, Charley?” Coburn said, leaning across the laminated tabletop at Steak ’n Shake. “We need to find Felicia again.”

In January 2012, Coburn did just that. Felicia was back at the city workhouse, and Coburn offered a chaplain visit. “She looked at me kind of weird, like she was cold-hearted,” recalls Coburn, who said if Felicia was willing to talk, she’d like to ask her about Bertha: “I said, ‘I know how they used you,’ and tears welled up in her eyes. She said, ‘Ma’am, you just don’t know. This is God. My mom told me on her deathbed I needed to make this right. I would be there for hours and they would have me practicing to prepare for court. They told me they would take my kids from me, and I couldn’t let that happen.’ She couldn’t do anything about it now, she said, because she didn’t know whom to trust, and she was scared she’d go to jail for perjury. I said, ‘Listen to me, sweetheart. Given the situation, there are remedies. We’ve got to make this right, Felicia. There’s a pro bono attorney, and he would like to talk to you.’ She said, ‘Will you be with me? Is he white?’ I said, ‘We don’t have time for racism.’”

Snodgrass visited Felicia on February 16. According to his summary of their conversation, she said, “I lied about Bertha because I was afraid of what would happen to me. I heard about the beating of Fred after it happened. I also knew that the police were looking for me to ask me about it. Shaky’s apartment was hot because of the drugs, and I was one of the people who used to hang out there… After awhile, I gave in and started making up stories about what happened. I said I was the lookout because that is what Det. Harper wanted me to say.”

(A public information officer for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department says Harper is not available for an interview: “However, then-Detective Harper did not coerce any witnesses into making any statements related to this case. The facts of the case were presented to the circuit attorney’s office and warrants were issued, ultimately resulting in a jury trial, which led to convictions.”)

 “There were a lot of rumors about who beat Fred, mostly naming people who hung out at Shaky’s, like Bertha,” the account continues. “I also used some of the details from the rumors in my story… When I was getting ready to testify, they gave me a statement about what happened that I was supposed to memorize.” 

When Snodgrass returned with the affidavit typed up, Felicia refused to sign. She’d decided that it might jeopardize the status of her stealing case. 

A year later, he tried filing a petition that she be deposed: “Over the last five years, Ms. Jones has told at least five people…that she lied about observing the attack on Mr. Huff under pressure from a police detective and a prosecutor in order to avoid being charged herself and losing custody of her children.”

The petition was denied.

In the margin of one of Charley’s many notes is a scribbled rhetorical question: Did you ever just want to quit?

Sure, bertha could be guilty. She’d been high on crack cocaine that October night, and Willie was so drunk, he doesn’t even remember where he was. But deadly assault wasn’t typical behavior for either of them. Sure, Felicia could have just woven them into a story she told, like Scheherazade, to save herself. But would she sell out her own boyfriend?

That one may be answered in a letter Kenny wrote to Bertha in prison, after she accused him of knowing more about that evening than he let on. All he knew, he insisted, was what Shaky had told him and Felicia. Seven weeks later, he’d been with her when she was arrested for shoplifting, and she was furious with him for giving the guard her real name. “I had no idea she had cases pending under the name Felicia Jones [and used an alias]… Next thing I know…I’m under arrest for what happen to the dude downstairs. Come to find out she made a deal with the prosecutor to come from under whatever cases she had. All she knew about the man downstairs is what Shakey had told us. So she add some things to what Shakey said and sold it to the prosecutor… to make the lie more convincing she added you and Smooth…I had no idea she was the one who came up with this bullshit until I read my transcript and filled in the blank spots that was blocking out her name.” 

Why implicate Willie (who no longer answers to “Smooth,” because that life’s over)? Granted, he was Kenny’s friend, and Felicia wasn’t wild about having to hang out with him every day, judging from comments in her letters. But she swiftly shifted the blame to Bertha.

“I thought we were friends, but we weren’t,” Felicia said in deposition. Bertha used to lie, she said, telling Kenny that Felicia had cash or dope she wasn’t sharing. “Sometimes I would have it, I just didn’t want to give—” The result, she said, was that Kenny would beat her, “bust my head with a brick.”

At Vandalia, Bertha and I talk beneath signs warning offenders to keep apart from their loved ones, even during photographs. She’s softly upholstered, not heavy; her bottom does not protrude. She’s done her hair the best she can under the circumstances. One of the correctional officers tells me she’s a little bossy sometimes but no trouble.

I ask about Felicia’s claim that Bertha betrayed her, which would be the perfect motive to frame Bertha—except that Bertha says that’s a lie, too. “I knew nothing about their relationship!”

The most frustrating part of the trial, she says, was her public defender’s urging her not to take the stand. “She said, ‘You don’t have anything to testify.’ I said, ‘I do! The truth is the truth!”

But Bertha’s truth would have looked pretty blurry, examined in the hard light of a murder trial. Here’s her account of the evening: “We went to Shaky’s house, but what I didn’t know was that when Paulette got high, she just froze and didn’t move. She was with her boyfriend, Lamont—whom Felicia named Bernard in her story. She doesn’t know these people, so she just made up a name for him! Finally, Paulette came to herself, and we went downstairs.” They bought beer, then went to a house on Nebraska to buy crack cocaine, and eventually walked back to Shaky’s. By then, Bertha says, “it was dark and they were putting Fred in an ambulance. Shaky was very nervous. He said, ‘Somebody tried to kill that man downstairs.’”

The day the trial ended, Bertha received an unsigned apology letter: “I don’t expect you to believe me nor forgive me but I do want you to know that it wasn’t all my fault nor my idea...I was trying to keep myself from being put away.” There’s a postscript: “I’m sorry for the days I took out of your life.”

Why would Felicia have made all this up? Bertha surprises me by saying, “I always believed that her story was true. She just put different players in place. Protecting somebody, maybe.”

In Felicia’s accounts of the evening, only Bertha is quoted, announcing that she’s going to go downstairs to steal Huff’s VCR. “Nobody said anything,” Felicia said. “They just followed behind her.” According to her, nobody spoke during the attack, either—everything took place in silence. So why insert such a specific quote about Bertha’s wanting to steal the VCR?

“Because I did steal his VCR!” Bertha exclaims. “I met that man one time, once, way before anything ever happened, and Felicia took that one time and tried to put it with that story she told. Shaky took me downstairs and introduced us. But I was not a person that would turn no tricks! I went back later on that day and took a VCR box from his house. I assumed that he bought hot stuff, because it was in the box. Felicia knew I did it, ’cause she and Kenny were with me when I sold it. I felt bad after that. To avoid seeing him, I would go to Shaky’s house [by way of] a different route.”

That’s robbery, but it’s not murder. Why frame Bertha for Huff’s death? “I have no idea.” The friendships in this case didn’t go deep, she reminds me. “I know you probably wasn’t a person who hung out on the streets, but it’s just people knowing different people. I used to see her walking the streets late at night. I would pick her up, feed her, give her a place to lay her head.” Bertha shrugs. “She was always kind of quiet.”

In hours of phone interviews, Bertha hasn’t been maudlin once, and she sheds no tears now—until I ask about the moment the verdict was read, and she says she collapsed on the floor of the holding cell, and they broke the rules and let Sister Eugenio come inside to hold her while she wept. She was so scared of going to prison, she says. Then, when she arrived at Vandalia, there was Felicia, right there in the same facility, serving a reduced sentence for stealing. “Can you imagine, both of us here?” Bertha asks with a low chuckle, swiping away the tears. “Then they sent her to Chillicothe, which is good, because if I had saw her during that time, I was going to handle her.”

Later, for her own peace of mind, Bertha managed forgiveness. Now her daughter, 12 years old when Bertha was incarcerated, is forgiving her. “When Kina turned 18, she came to visit me. She didn’t know why I was locked up. My sister said everybody in prison committed a crime.” Since then, Kina’s watched enough TV documentaries to realize that “there are people here who shouldn’t be.” 

God’s still dropping clues, Bertha says, that she will get out someday. “Even the times I wanted to give up, God would always come through and say, ‘Get up. Dust yourself off.’ He would always give me another route to take.”

Bertha cherishes every glimpse of hope—a fellow inmate who said she’d overheard Felicia’s mother talking about people hurting that old man “and they got that girl locked up for it”; a cellmate of Felicia’s brother’s writing to say he knew Bertha was innocent. But none of this will stand up in court.

Her appeal failed in 2001. So did Willie’s—though the case against him was the weakest of all. When Ellen ID’ed his mugshot, she was choosing from three people: Willie, who visited her apartment complex every day, and two complete strangers. The only characteristic she recalled was his height, which she estimated as close to her husband’s, about 5-foot-5.

She missed by 9 inches: He’s nearly 6-foot-2.  

“Even when I went to court, couldn’t nobody point me out,” Willie says. “Nels Moss was, like, ‘Smooth right there…’ Felicia Jones lied on me because she didn’t want to get other people in trouble. I think at the most part they just wanted to find somebody guilty. The whole trial was based off of lies.”

In 2006, he says, he received a statement, purportedly signed by Felicia, addressed “to whom it may concern”: “The testimony I gave against him was false and untrue. I have no knowledge at all to what happen in the case of Frederick Huff. I agreed to testify out of fear of it being put on me due to the fact that I was being threatened by the homicide detectives and the prosecutor.”

The handwriting is lovely, almost old-fashioned, the curves as evenly spaced as the scallops on a petticoat hem. But at an amateur’s glance, it doesn’t match her writing on letters to Kenny or her anonymous apology to Bertha. On the other hand, those don’t match each other, either—except for a distinctive way of making a backward loop. The love letters to Kenny are graceful and straight; the apology’s baseline wanders all over, and the script’s nowhere near as well formed. 

“She said she didn’t want to get her other friends in trouble,” Willie says now. “I have no idea who she was talking about. I figure she should be here for perjury. I didn’t even know Fred Huff.”

Bertha describes Willie as “a happy guy. He drank his little drink.” His sister-in-law says he was a gentle man who was out of work at the time, hanging with the wrong people. One of his stepsons, Deeike Williams, says that after his arrest, “he wrote to my mom apologizing to us, because it was a direct reflection on us. What my mom told us was that he stayed behind in a situation where he shouldn’t have been there in the first place and took the blame.” 

Shaky is dead now, though there’s a guy in prison who used his name as an alias.

Moss died in 2015—“of heart disease,” Bertha murmurs. 

Harper retired from homicide in 2002, then returned to the police department as a dispatcher. He’s now the custodian of communication tapes.

Felicia is out of prison. At age 28, when asked how she supported herself, she said “stealing.” Now, she has photos on her Facebook page of herself getting ready for work, nametag proudly visible. “I’m a good girl compared to what I use to be,” she writes. “I’ll still go ham on a mf just not as quick. Lol! I’m too old for that shit! U know I beating breaks off bitches…I’m not person nomore im good.” A few pages earlier, stressed by a breakup, she announces, “Everybody that know me know I take care of my damn self. I don’t need shit from u! Hustle is my middle name.” The quote on her profile photo is: “Don’t judge me. You can’t handle half of what I’ve dealt with…”

She doesn’t sound like the quiet eyewitness the jurors barely remember.

She responds when I message her saying I’m writing about Bertha and Willie and asks what happened to Kenny. When I break the news that he died in prison, she writes, “Oh my god really. Do u know for sure…That explains y I couldn’t find him on the inmate website…”

After extracting a few more details, Felicia stops answering. I make one last try, writing that I understand her reluctance to talk, but people are saying she was coerced into her testimony and I need to know whether that’s true. She replies: “No I don’t want to relive that madness or talk about it but yeah their telling the truth.” She says she “agreed to be a witness so they would stop harassing me and my family. I was tired of that.” She adds that she never signed anything: “It was all done verbally.”

Charley gives a low, rueful laugh when he hears that quote. He’s still not sure what to make of Felicia: “When I first met her, her clothes were all baggy and sloppy, and her demeanor was like a street lady you see pushing a cart, just kind of blank. I was surprised I was able to communicate with her on the level I was: She rose up to that level as we started talking... She’s intelligent, and there’s a part of her that still has a conscience.

“I’m not just looking to prove Bertha innocent,” he adds. “I’m looking for the truth. I can’t say 100 percent that Bertha did not participate in this crime, but my gut feeling is, there’s more than a 99 percent chance she didn’t—and there is not a shred of credible evidence that she did.”

So how did this happen? 

Bertha, Willie, and Kenny were easy to dismiss as “scum,” Charley says, convinced that’s why the case unfolded in the way it did.

Willie’s attorney, David Bruns, says, “I don’t think it was a time when there was a lot of oversight of the homicide division of the circuit attorney’s office, and at times of homicide in the police department.” He pauses. “I don’t think Willie did it. I don’t think Bertha did it, either. I think they got too many people.”

Trying all three co-defendants in the same trial was a mess, Kessler adds: “It’s virtually impossible for jurors to distinguish the actions and intent of one party from another when they have been joined in the same trial.”

The only real evidence was the “eyewitness,” he adds, “and you can get anyone to say anything just by saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna charge you.’ But if someone gets caught in that many lies and the jury doesn’t care? I think it’s more a testament to the presumption of guilt.”

Last month, the New York Innocence Project contacted Bertha Owens, years after she’d written them, and asked to see the court documents. The St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office’s conviction integrity unit is now reviewing the case.