Billy Richard Glaze was convicted in 1989 of murdering three Native American women in Minneapolis. Kathleen Bullman, 19, was killed in July 1986; Angeline Whitebird Sweet, 26, and Angela Green, 21, were killed in April 1987. A Hennepin County jury found him guilty of first-degree murder during a sexual assault and of second-degree intentional murder, and he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms. The Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the verdicts in 1990, pointing to what it called the overwhelming evidence of his guilt.
Glaze denied the killings from his arrest until his death. In 2014 his lawyers from the Innocence Project of Minnesota, the national Innocence Project in New York and the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney asked for a new trial. They said DNA testing of dozens of items from the three scenes had found nothing that came from him, and that a profile from two of the scenes matched another man with a sexual-assault conviction. Hennepin County prosecutors answered that the DNA proved nothing about who killed the women and that the case against Glaze remained overwhelming. He died of lung cancer in a Delaware prison in December 2015, before a judge ruled. A district judge then dismissed the petition as moot, and in March 2018 the Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed the appeal. The convictions stand.
Kathleen Bullman, called Kathy in several news reports, was 19. MPR News, reporting in 2014 from the case record, gave the date of her death as July 27, 1986. Angeline Whitebird Sweet was 26 and the mother of three children, the Star Tribune reported. Her name appears in news coverage both as Whitebird Sweet and as Whitebird-Sweet, and a few reports spell her first name Angelina. MPR News gave April 12, 1987, as the date of her death. Angela Green was 21. She died on April 29, 1987, according to MPR News.
All three were American Indian women, and all three were killed in Minneapolis. The Minnesota Supreme Court, describing the case in 2018, wrote that each had been beaten to death and that the bodies were found at different places around the city. News reports at the time and later said that the killings were similar enough that police went looking for a single killer.
Two of Angeline Whitebird Sweet's sisters spoke to the Star Tribune after the Innocence Project's petition for a new trial was filed. Her older sister said she had believed that police "had him." Her younger sister said it was "kind of scary" to think that the person responsible might still be free.
The killings were investigated by the Minneapolis Police Department under John Laux, then the city's deputy police chief, who headed its investigations. Prosecutors later described the inquiry as one of the most extensive in the city's history, MPR News reported, with hundreds of witnesses interviewed across the country. MPR News also described the community as living in fear while the killer was at large.
Glaze emerged as the prime suspect, MPR News reported, after authorities said he had made derogatory comments about American Indian women. He was a drifter with a long criminal record, which MPR News said took in sexual assault, drunk driving, Social Security fraud, disorderly conduct and counterfeiting. The Star Tribune reported that he was born in Georgia and had moved around the country.
Accounts of the arrest differ in detail. The Star Tribune reported that police in New Mexico arrested him during a traffic stop in mid-1987, when he was wanted for violating parole on an earlier sexual-assault conviction and was already a suspect in the Minneapolis killings. MPR News reported that in 1987 KARE 11 interviewed him in a Dallas jail, where he was being held on a probation violation. "I did not murder nobody," he said in that interview. "I couldn't murder nobody. I don't have it in my heart to."
Laux, interviewed by MPR News in 2014, said police had done what they could with the tools of the time and that everything they had pointed to Glaze. "We had to follow the rules and make sure that we're not taking shortcuts just out of revenge we gotta get somebody," he said.
Glaze was tried in Hennepin County District Court in Minneapolis. His lawyer was Mike Colich, who argued that the evidence was not enough to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, MPR News reported. DNA analysis was not available for the case at the time.
The prosecution acknowledged that there was little physical evidence. According to MPR News, the only physical item linked to Glaze was a footprint that was never confirmed to be his. A 2018 Minnesota Lawyer summary of the trial record said the state presented shoe prints at one scene that were consistent with his shoes. Experts testified that some blood found at the scene of Angeline Whitebird Sweet's death could not have come from her or from Glaze, the Star Tribune reported.
The state's case rested mostly on witnesses. According to the Minnesota Lawyer summary, prosecutors presented evidence that Glaze held hostile feelings toward Native American women and had spoken of wanting to harm them, and that he had given his girlfriend a ring that belonged to one of the victims. Several jail inmates testified that they had heard him admit the killings. One inmate said Glaze had written a note that read, "I killed them. I was mad at them," the Star Tribune reported. Other witnesses placed Glaze with one of the women or near the scenes.
The trial was heavily covered. The jury deliberated for 35 and a half hours over four days, the Star Tribune reported, and returned verdicts of guilty on charges of first-degree and second-degree murder. Patch, reporting in 2016, gave the date of the verdict as February 10, 1989, and said he received three consecutive life sentences. Before he was sentenced, Glaze told the judge that the witnesses were liars and that he was not the man who had killed the women, the Star Tribune reported.
Glaze appealed. In 1990 the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the convictions in State v. Glaze, 452 N.W.2d 655, relying, as the court itself later summarized, on the "overwhelming evidence" of his guilt.
From 1990 he served his sentence in Delaware, at the Delaware State Penitentiary, MPR News reported. His lawyers said in 2014 that he suffered from mental illness, and they did not make him available to reporters. They said his physical health was also poor.
Glaze wrote to the Innocence Project from prison. Ed Magarian, a Dorsey & Whitney partner who was one of his lawyers and sat on the board of the Minnesota Innocence Project, wrote in 2014 that the letter had arrived about ten years earlier. Patch reported that the Minnesota group took up the case in the mid-2000s and that the Hennepin County Attorney's Office worked with it to review the evidence and allowed DNA testing of some of it.
Some testing began before the defense became involved. In 2003, the Star Tribune reported, prosecutors asked the state crime laboratory to test a jacket recovered in the investigation of Angeline Whitebird Sweet's death.
In 2007 Glaze moved under a Minnesota statute for DNA testing to show his actual innocence. The court granted the motion, and the parties then spent about seven years arguing over the scope of the testing, the Minnesota Supreme Court later recounted. Three laboratories tested dozens of items from the three scenes, and the work took years, MPR News and the Associated Press reported. The Star Tribune put the number of items at 39, including bodily fluids and clothing; Magarian, writing in Minnesota Lawyer, put it at more than 40.
According to the Star Tribune's account of the defense filing, a 2009 test of a sample from the evidence in Angela Green's case excluded Glaze. In 2012 a search of the FBI's national DNA database matched that profile to another Minnesota man. In April 2014 a cigarette butt found a few feet from where Angeline Whitebird Sweet died was tested; it also excluded Glaze, and it matched the same man, the defense said. MPR News reported that the profile from Green's sample was a full one and the profile from the cigarette butt a partial one. "There is not a single item that has come up that matches Billy," Magarian told the Star Tribune.
The man was not named in news reports. Court documents identified him only by the initials J.A.S., Minnesota Lawyer reported. MPR News said he had been convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting another American Indian woman in Minneapolis in 1989, and had served his sentence for that crime. Magarian wrote that the 1989 attack took place about a month after Glaze's conviction. Police interviewed the man in 2012 while he was in jail for failing to register as a sex offender, MPR News reported; according to a transcript, he denied knowing Angela Green. In June 2014 he told a private investigator working for the defense that he had not known any of the victims and denied any part in the killings, MPR News reported.
In early June 2014, Glaze's lawyers filed an amended petition for postconviction relief in Hennepin County District Court. They asked the court to vacate the convictions and order a new trial, or at least to hold a hearing on the new evidence, which they said placed an alternative perpetrator at two of the crime scenes. (MPR News reported the filing on June 3, 2014; Patch gave the date as June 4.)
"You would certainly expect to see some DNA from the perpetrator," Olga Akselrod, a lawyer with the national Innocence Project, told MPR News, describing a case involving a sexual assault, "and we didn't find any DNA from Billy Glaze." Julie Jonas of the Innocence Project of Minnesota said the original case was "the best they could come up with, with the tools they had available at the time." With modern tools, she said, the other man would have been arrested and tried, and "Billy Glaze would never have gone to prison for all those 27 years." Magarian told WCCO that investigators in the 1980s "didn't have the tools that we have today to be able to figure out that they actually did charge the wrong person."
The petition also attacked the trial witnesses. According to the Star Tribune, one witness who had testified that he saw Glaze with Kathleen Bullman later recanted, and had testified after discussing the case with his probation officer. A transient who said he had seen one of the killings also claimed to have seen more than 60 killings in prison. The inmate who produced the note later admitted that he had been looking for a deal. The defense also argued that it had not been told of relationships between four trial witnesses and one of the victims.
In his September 2014 commentary in Minnesota Lawyer, Magarian argued that the conviction rested on jailhouse informants seeking better treatment and on witnesses who came forward after Glaze's photograph appeared in the newspaper. He wrote that apart from a shoe print found more than 40 feet from one of the bodies there was no real physical evidence, and he quoted the state's closing argument at trial: "Make no bones about it, with the exception of the shoe print there is no physical evidence pointing to this man." He also cited a 2014 KARE 11 interview in which Tony Bouza, the Minneapolis police chief at the time of the killings, called the case "shaky" and recalled pressing for a prosecution that the county attorney of the day had considered "potentially a losable case."
The day after the filing, the Minneapolis Police Department and the Hennepin County Attorney's Office said they would take a new look at the case, MPR News reported, and the county attorney assigned two senior prosecutors to it. Laux told MPR News that if another person's DNA had been found at a scene, that would be strong evidence. "I'm still not convinced frankly that we don't have the right guy," he said, but he added that there was enough new information to justify an in-depth second look. Colich, the trial lawyer, said that with the information now available, "I think the outcome would be different."
From the start, Hennepin County prosecutors said they still believed Glaze was guilty. David Brown, chief criminal deputy in the county attorney's office, told MPR News that "nothing we've seen tells us Billy Glaze is not the killer." He cited eyewitness identifications, Glaze's statements about his hatred of Native women, and confessions, the Associated Press reported. In June 2014 the office asked for several months to respond, saying the evidence pointing to another man was "insubstantial and the evidence against Glaze is overwhelming."
The office filed its formal response on October 31, 2014. It said Glaze had admitted the killings at least twice and had made several statements about killing and harming American Indian women, MPR News reported. It called the case "not a DNA exoneration case," arguing that DNA could show that a person had been somewhere but not when or how the material got there. On the sample from Angela Green, prosecutors said the DNA identified a man who had been with her some hours before her death, not her killer, and that another man's DNA had also been found. On the cigarette butt, they said the profile was only partial and could have been left at any time; it could not rule out the man's father or brother, who had worked at and visited the center where the killing took place, according to WCCO. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman called the new evidence "inconclusive and unpersuasive," said it did not meet the clear and convincing standard required for a new trial, and argued that Glaze had waited until 2014 to bring a claim he could have raised by 2007.
The Star Tribune also reported that, years after his trial, Glaze had confessed to killings in California. He was not prosecuted for them because the details did not match, and his lawyers said those confessions were false.
Magarian said the county's response repeated discredited facts and added speculation in an effort to keep an innocent man in prison. Freeman was blunt in a later interview with KARE 11: "We didn't make a mistake with Billy Glaze. He's guilty."
Further material for testing was later found in the evidence from Angela Green's case, KARE 11 reported, and the two sides argued over which laboratory should test it: the defense wanted the lab that had found the other man's profile, and the county wanted the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. In August 2015 the district court ordered additional DNA testing and reserved its decision on whether to hold an evidentiary hearing, the Minnesota Supreme Court later recounted.
Glaze died on December 22, 2015, at 72, in the infirmary of the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Delaware, the Associated Press reported. Delaware officials said an elderly inmate serving a Minnesota life sentence had died of natural causes after a terminal illness. Magarian said Glaze had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer the week before. "Billy spent almost 30 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit," Magarian said in a statement. "That tragedy has been compounded by his death." He told MPR News that the legal team had expected Glaze to be exonerated and released in 2016, and that his dying wish was for them to clear his name.
Four days before he died, Glaze wrote a will leaving his estate to the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Minnesota Lawyer reported in 2016. Court filings put the value of his assets at about $25.
On January 4, 2016, the county attorney's office moved to dismiss the petition as moot, Patch reported. Glaze's lawyers argued that a live controversy remained because a ruling could still clear his name, and that the case raised questions of statewide public importance. A former Innocence Project attorney who had been appointed personal representative of his estate asked to be substituted as the petitioner.
In April 2016, Hennepin County released the results of a federally funded review of more than 14,000 old convictions, carried out with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the Innocence Project of Minnesota and the state public defender's office, to see whether DNA could clear anyone. Freeman said it had produced no exonerations. Two cases remained open, and one of them was Glaze's, WCCO reported.
On November 2, 2016, Hennepin County District Judge Toddrick Barnette granted the motion to dismiss. In a nine-page order he held that the petition was technically moot and that the public-interest exception did not apply. He wrote that "nothing in the record supports a finding that Petitioner (Glaze) was actually innocent or that his conviction was wrongful," Patch reported. He also rejected the claim that prosecutors had failed to disclose the witnesses' ties to a victim, finding that the defense had known of them, Minnesota Lawyer reported. "Justice was done in the murders of Kathleen Bullman, Angeline Whitebird-Sweet and Angela Green," Freeman said, adding that the evidence "was overwhelming that Glaze was the killer." Jonas called the ruling "extremely disappointing." "The real perpetrator is still out there and no one is doing anything about it," she said.
The lawyers appealed in Glaze's name. On March 21, 2018, the Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed the appeal in Glaze v. State. Writing for the court, Justice Anne McKeig held that the lawyers' authority to act for Glaze ended when he died, that they were not themselves aggrieved parties, and that the court therefore lacked jurisdiction. "In sum, no 'Appellant' with standing has appeared before us in this appeal," she wrote. The court did not reach the DNA evidence. Magarian told Minnesota Lawyer that the decision rested on "technicalities," and said the team would consider whether to go on, seek a posthumous pardon, or end the matter.
The convictions of 1989 are final, and the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed them in 1990. No court ruled on the merits of the DNA evidence. The district court in 2016 found nothing in the record supporting actual innocence, but it dismissed the petition as moot rather than after a hearing on the new results.
The DNA results are reported from the defense filings. The Innocence Project and Glaze's lawyers said the profile at two scenes showed that another man was the killer. Prosecutors said the results showed only that the man had been in contact with one victim and might have left a cigarette at another scene, at an unknown time, and that a relative could not be ruled out. That man denied involvement.
Glaze's own statements also conflict. He denied the killings in 1987, at sentencing and to the end of his life; prosecutors said he admitted them at least twice, and the Star Tribune reported later confessions to California killings that his lawyers called false.
Reports also differ on some dates and figures: the verdict date (February 10, 1989, per Patch), the petition filing date (June 3 or June 4, 2014), and the number of items tested (39, or more than 40).
July 27, 1986: Kathleen Bullman, 19, is killed in Minneapolis.
April 12, 1987: Angeline Whitebird Sweet, 26, is killed in Minneapolis.
April 29, 1987: Angela Green, 21, is killed in Minneapolis.
Mid-1987: Glaze is arrested in New Mexico on a parole violation, according to the Star Tribune; in a 1987 Dallas jail interview he denies the killings.
February 1989: A Hennepin County jury convicts him of first-degree murder during a sexual assault and second-degree intentional murder; three consecutive life sentences.
1990: The Minnesota Supreme Court affirms the convictions; he begins serving his sentence in Delaware.
2003: Prosecutors ask the state lab to test a jacket from one of the investigations.
Mid-2000s: The Innocence Project of Minnesota takes up the case.
2007: The court grants his motion for DNA testing.
2009 and 2012: A sample from Angela Green excludes Glaze and is matched through the FBI database to another man, according to the defense.
April 2014: A cigarette butt from the Whitebird Sweet scene excludes Glaze and matches the same man, according to the defense.
June 2014: Petition for a new trial filed (June 3 per MPR News, June 4 per Patch).
October 31, 2014: Hennepin County prosecutors oppose the petition.
August 2015: The court orders more DNA testing.
December 22, 2015: Glaze dies of lung cancer in a Delaware prison, aged 72.
January 4, 2016: Prosecutors move to dismiss the petition as moot.
April 2016: A statewide review of 14,000 cases reports no exonerations; Glaze's case is one of two left open.
November 2, 2016: Judge Toddrick Barnette dismisses the petition.
March 21, 2018: The Minnesota Supreme Court dismisses the appeal for lack of standing.