A jury in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, convicted John Francis Wille in December 1986 of first-degree murder and sent him to death row. The victims were Nichole Lopatta, eight years old, of Terrytown, near Gretna, and Billy Phillips, 25, of Tickfaw. The state placed both deaths on June 2, 1985.
The case against Wille rested on words rather than physical evidence. In August 1985, while being questioned in Florida, he gave a tape-recorded confession. His girlfriend, Judith Walters, and her teenage daughter gave statements that pointed to him. All three later said their statements were false or forced. Walters was convicted in a separate trial and given two life sentences. Her daughter was never charged.
Wille spent nearly 30 years on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. In May 2014 the district attorney joined his lawyers in asking a judge to vacate the death sentence, and he was resentenced to life without parole. A new administration in the district attorney's office tried to restore the death sentence in 2015. It lost in the trial court, in the Court of Appeal and, in November 2017, in the Louisiana Supreme Court. His conviction stands, and he says he is innocent.
Wille grew up in LaPlace, in St. John the Baptist Parish. As a boy he went to St. Joan of Arc Catholic School, where he was taught catechism by the mother of a LaPlace native who later became a priest and took up his cause. When the case broke in 1985, L'Observateur, the LaPlace newspaper, wrote that many people who knew him could not believe he was capable of the crime.
His family stayed with him. In 2000 his father described him as likable and lovable, a son who would do anything to protect his relatives, and said he had never given up hope that his son would come home. Wille's parents and sisters sat together in the middle of the courtroom during the post-conviction hearings that year.
The same people who defended him also described a young man who invented things. A petition filed by his lawyers in 1995 called him a chronic liar who, as a child, had taken beatings and confessed to things to shield his younger sisters. His father, while insisting on his innocence, acknowledged the petition's point that his son told wild stories to make himself seem important. Victor Bradley Jr., a lawyer who had represented Wille in three misdemeanor cases in the early 1980s and later became chief of the Indigent Defender Board in St. Charles Parish, testified in 2000 that Wille was prone to wild, exaggerated claims. Bradley recalled Wille calling him repeatedly to ask him to move a million dollars from Mississippi to Louisiana, money that Wille said came from his girlfriend's family's ties to General Motors and would pay for his defense.
Wille met Judith Walters in early 1985, when both were living in Norco, in neighboring St. Charles Parish, according to his 1995 petition. She had a daughter and a son. Her own lawyers later described her as a woman who had suffered abuse from childhood onward, first in her family and then in her marriage, and who had long struggled with substance abuse.
In May 1985, the petition said, Wille, Walters and her daughter left Louisiana together and settled in Milton, in Santa Rosa County in the Florida Panhandle. The petition gave the daughter's age then as 13; L'Observateur put her at 14 by the time she was questioned that summer. Neighbors in Milton had trouble with Wille, the petition said, and they went to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office about things he had told them: that he had committed murders along the Gulf Coast. A newspaper in Santa Rosa County printed a remark about him that a psychiatrist later quoted in court: if you told Wille about a crime, he would tell you about it.
Nichole Lopatta was eight years old and lived with her family in Terrytown, near Gretna, in Jefferson Parish.
Billy Phillips was 25, from Tickfaw, a small town in Tangipahoa Parish.
The investigation spread across several jurisdictions: the sheriffs of Jefferson, St. John and Tangipahoa parishes, the Hammond police, the Louisiana State Police, the FBI and officers in Mississippi and Florida all had a part.
By August 1985 the trail had led to Milton. On August 7, St. John Parish detectives went to Florida to question Wille. The same day, Walters was questioned in an intensive care room at the county hospital in Santa Rosa County, where she had been taken after a suicide attempt. Wille's lawyers later said she named him while under the influence of medication given in the hospital.
According to the 1995 petition, Wille at first claimed several murders, then took the claims back. On August 27, 1985, he gave a tape-recorded confession to the killings of Nichole Lopatta and Billy Phillips.
On September 3, 1985, FBI agents interviewed Walters's daughter in Laurel, Mississippi. She too gave a statement implicating Wille. His lawyers said she later took it back, and that the jury never heard about the retraction.
Before Wille's statements, the investigation had other leads. One early suspect, a man picked out in a lineup by a witness, was never arrested. The defense also said that Billy Phillips's roommate had never been fully cleared.
On September 12, 1985, a St. John the Baptist Parish grand jury indicted Wille and Judith Walters for murder. Walters's daughter was not charged.
As prosecutors put it to the jury, Wille, Walters and her daughter were in Louisiana on June 2, 1985, and both killings took place that evening. The state said the three were back in Milton afterward.
The only direct evidence was Wille's own confession, according to the petition. Around it the state placed circumstantial evidence: a restaurant worker in Kenner testified that Wille and his girlfriend had been there at about 8 p.m. that night; the statements of Walters and her daughter, which the state said matched his; and a hair that was described as "consistent" with Wille's.
Wille's trial opened on December 1, 1986, before Judge G. Walton "Ton" Caire of the 40th Judicial District Court. The lead prosecutor was Thomas Daley, who later became a judge of the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal. Madeline Jasmine, later a district judge, was co-prosecutor.
The court appointed George Oubre, a former state senator, as lead defense counsel. Oubre had himself been convicted of a felony involving false bank statements and fraud, and representing Wille was a way to meet the community service condition of his own sentence. By his own later account he had mostly handled civil work and had tried only three cases in his life, none of them a capital case. His second chair, Robert Becnel, had just graduated from law school and had no capital experience either.
The jury found Wille guilty on December 6, 1986. L'Observateur, summarizing the record in 2000, reported that the verdict covered two counts of first-degree murder. Two days later he was sentenced to death.
Judith Walters went on trial on January 19, 1987, before Judge Thomas Malik, defended by Pat Fanning, a former United States Attorney. She was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder on January 23 and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment, which she served at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel.
Wille became Louisiana prisoner number 115864 and was held on death row at Angola.
In 1995 his lawyers filed a petition for post-conviction relief. Its opening claim was blunt: John Francis Wille did not kill Nichole Lopatta and had nothing to do with her death. It argued that the physical evidence contradicted his confession; and that it was physically impossible for Wille to drive more than 60 miles and commit the crimes in about an hour.
The petition offered witnesses the jury had not heard. A Florida woman would have put Wille at her house in Milton on the afternoon of June 2, 1985. Another witness would have testified that the two deaths did not occur on the same day. Witness accounts of the afternoon and evening, together with the restaurant testimony, would have left Wille less than an hour to be in Gretna, LaPlace and Kenner and commit two killings in between.
The petition also attacked the evidence the state had used. Between five and twenty other hairs and a stained handkerchief were never matched to Wille, the petition said, and it asked for DNA testing of the evidence.
Two jurors were also challenged. According to the petition, one was the brother-in-law of the co-prosecutor, and another was a close friend of a case investigator, Ken Mitchell. Nearly every juror had small children, the petition said, and so might have been inclined to convict and sentence to death a man accused of killing a child.
Nick Trenticosta, one of Wille's lawyers, told L'Observateur it was astonishing that anyone believed Wille would join Phillips in a plot against a child. He said he had found no evidence that Wille and Phillips knew each other. His own theory was that Phillips died elsewhere, two or three days before Nichole Lopatta. "I know who killed Billy Phillips," he said outside court in 2000, "and someday I'm gonna prove it."
In September 2000 the petition finally reached a hearing. Wille, then 36, was brought from Angola to LaPlace, and on Monday, September 25, he went into the St. John the Baptist Parish courthouse at Edgard for four days of testimony before Remy Chiasson, sitting as an ad hoc judge. Judith Walters, then 46, was driven each day from St. Gabriel to press her own claims. One morning her transport arrived nearly two hours late; the drivers, guided by radio, had ended up in Thibodaux looking for Edgard.
Denise LeBoeuf led the defense, with Trenticosta. "If these confessions are false, these convictions cannot stand," she told the court. She argued that the case against both defendants consisted mostly of their own sworn statements and that of Walters's daughter, and that no physical evidence conclusively tied them to the killings. "No one can look at this evidence and believe they got a fair trial," she said. The state was represented by Julie Cullen, director of the criminal division of the Louisiana attorney general's office.
Much of the first day went to the handling of evidence. The clerk of court for the 40th Judicial District, Eliana DeFrancesch, testified that records and evidence storage had been badly disorganized. Her predecessor, Harold Montegut Jr., who had held the office for 16 years after his father's 32, said space had been short but his records were adequate. He was questioned about a box labeled "No. 3" in the Wille and Walters case, which held little; boxes one and two were missing. That afternoon Maj. Robert Hay of the St. John sheriff's office brought in four large banker's boxes of physical evidence. Officers from Jefferson and Tangipahoa parishes and the City of Hammond described what they held, and Capt. Tommy Waguespack of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office brought a stack of photographs six inches high.
Walters's daughter, by then 29, was expected to testify that week that investigators had forced her statement on her, telling her, she said, that if she lied, her mother would not be executed. She told L'Observateur that she remembered the events clearly, and she called Wille "a sweetheart" whom she still loved.
Bradley, Wille's former lawyer, testified about Wille's habit of tall tales. He also said that he had advised Oubre, his first cousin, not to become emotionally attached to his client, and that Oubre had seemed insecure and frightened about the case.
The defense called three specialists. Mary Ann Dutton, a clinical psychologist who had examined Walters several times in 1993 and 1994, diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociation, aggravated by years of substance abuse and abuse by others. Walters had told her she was mistreated during questioning; L'Observateur noted that no medical or other evidence of that was presented. Under cross-examination Dutton agreed she relied on what Walters told her. Cullen asked whether the defense meant that Walters had been manipulated by Wille or coerced by the police, and told them, "You can't have your cake and eat it, too."
James MacKeith, a forensic psychiatrist recognized as an expert on forced confessions, said he judged the reliability of confessions rather than their truth. He had reviewed the transcripts and tapes of the statements, the histories of all three people who gave them, the autopsy reports and contemporary news coverage. He found "gross inconsistencies" between Wille's statements and the known facts of the case. MacKeith said Walters's fragile mental state made her susceptible to coercion, and that her daughter's statement read as though the answers had been rehearsed. He found it telling that the girl was never prosecuted although her own statement gave her a part in the crime. He suggested Wille's statements might have been an odd attempt to protect Walters. "It defies common sense, but it happens," he said.
Gisli Gudjonsson, a forensic psychologist and former police officer who also studies false confessions, testified that he had enough evidence to doubt the reliability of the statements.
Judge Chiasson questioned the relevance of the expert testimony, observing that the court was not there to decide guilt or innocence, which had already been decided. Outside court, Major Hay said that for the confessions to have been coerced, there would have had to be a "massive conspiracy" involving four Louisiana parishes, officials in Mississippi and Florida, the state police and the FBI.
The hearing recessed that Thursday. A further session was set for October 20, when the forensic anthropologist William Bass of the University of Tennessee was to review the time-of-death evidence, with more testimony planned for November and December. Walters's mother, who attended with her son and granddaughter, told reporters that her daughter had not been a good daughter, mother or neighbor, but that this did not make her a murderer. In 2014 the new-trial claims were still pending in the 40th Judicial District Court.
In 2007 the New York law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy took on Wille's case without charge, working with LeBoeuf, the ACLU Capital Punishment Project and Trenticosta. The team, led by Tawfiq Rangwala, filed a petition for a new trial raising 21 claims, among them ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, failure to disclose evidence favorable to the defense, and actual innocence.
On May 5, 2014, a state judge granted a joint motion by the district attorney and the defense, vacated the death sentence and resentenced Wille to life imprisonment without parole. He had spent almost 30 years on death row. The evidentiary hearing on the remaining claims went ahead the next day and lasted two days.
Oubre testified. He called the 1986 trial an ordeal in the strongest terms, said his investigator "knew more than I did," and admitted that he had not interviewed a single prosecution witness, and had passed over defense witnesses. He had broken down during the trial, collapsing in tears on the floor of the judge's chambers, according to the American Bar Association's account of the hearing. "To say he was in over his head does an injustice to the phrase," Trenticosta said.
William Rodriguez, a forensic anthropologist, testified on the time-of-death issue that the timeline in Wille's confession was "scientifically highly improbable." The defense also put forward recent DNA testing of evidence; Milbank said the results proved his innocence. "We are pleased that Mr. Wille is no longer on death row," Rangwala said.
A new district attorney took office in St. John the Baptist Parish, and in July 2015 the state filed a motion to reinstate Wille's death sentence. Milbank called the move unprecedented and said it threatened more than a dozen other Louisiana prisoners whose death sentences had been set aside by joint motion or agreement.
In March 2016 the trial court denied the motion. The state appealed, and the Louisiana Court of Appeal ruled that the motion was time-barred and that the 2014 vacatur had been proper. The state then applied to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which took about 16 months to act. On November 13, 2017, it denied the application. Milbank said the ruling ended any possibility of his execution, and that Wille, no longer on death row and living in the general population, would keep pressing to clear his name.
Wille's guilt has been contested since the 1995 petition. His lawyers' position is that the convictions rest on three statements, his own, Walters's and her daughter's, all later withdrawn; that no physical evidence ties him to the killings; that witnesses who would have placed him in Florida and challenged the time of death were never heard; and that his trial lawyers were not equipped for a capital case. The state's position at the 2000 hearing was that the experts could not show the statements had been coerced, and the sheriff's office said coercion would have required a conspiracy across several states and agencies. The rulings of 2014 and 2017 concerned the sentence; Wille's conviction was left in place.
The time of Billy Phillips's death is disputed. The state said he was killed the same evening as Nichole Lopatta; Wille's lawyers say he died elsewhere two or three days earlier.
Accounts differ on the age of Walters's daughter in 1985, 13 in the 1995 petition and 14 in L'Observateur's coverage.
Early 1985: Wille and Judith Walters meet in Norco, St. Charles Parish (1995 petition).
May 1985: Wille, Walters and her daughter move to Milton, Florida.
June 2, 1985: The date the state gave for the deaths of Nichole Lopatta, 8, of Terrytown, and Billy Phillips, 25, of Tickfaw.
August 7, 1985: St. John Parish detectives question Wille in Florida; Walters is questioned in hospital.
August 27, 1985: Wille gives a tape-recorded confession.
September 3, 1985: The FBI interviews Walters's daughter in Laurel, Mississippi.
September 12, 1985: Wille and Walters are indicted in St. John the Baptist Parish.
December 1, 1986: Wille's trial opens before Judge G. Walton Caire.
December 6, 1986: Wille is convicted of first-degree murder; he is sentenced to death two days later.
January 23, 1987: Judith Walters is convicted of two counts of first-degree murder; she receives two life sentences.
1995: Wille's lawyers file a petition for post-conviction relief.
September 25, 2000: Four days of post-conviction hearings open in Edgard before ad hoc Judge Remy Chiasson.
2007: Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy takes the case without charge.
May 5, 2014: Death sentence vacated by joint motion; Wille resentenced to life without parole.
May 6, 2014: Evidentiary hearing on the new-trial petition opens.
July 2015: The state moves to reinstate the death sentence.
March 2016: The trial court denies the state's motion; the Court of Appeal later rules it time-barred.
November 13, 2017: The Louisiana Supreme Court denies the state's writ application.