The lawyer appointed to defend John Francis Wille in a capital trial was a convicted federal felon working off his community service.
He had been given a three-year suspended sentence, one condition of which was four hundred and sixteen hours of unpaid work. Representing a man facing the electric chair counted toward it. The federal prosecution that convicted him had been brought in the same parish where he lived and where his new client would be tried.
Nichole Lopatta was eight years old. On June 2, 1985 she was lured away from the swimming pool at the Tres Vidas apartment complex in Terrytown, near Gretna, on the west bank across from New Orleans. Four days later a passerby found her body in woods off Frenier Road, about eight miles north of LaPlace, naked, beaten, and so badly decomposed that she had to be identified by her fingerprints.
A second body lay nearby. Billy Phillips was twenty-five, from Tickfaw, and he had been stabbed to death. He was found at seven that morning in the marsh under Interstate 55. The prosecution's case was that he was a hitchhiker Wille had picked up earlier that day, that he enticed the child from the pool, with Sheila Walters alongside him, and took her back to the Chevrolet Impala where Wille and Judith Walters were waiting, and that he was killed afterward.
Wille was twenty or twenty-one, raised in LaPlace and living in Milton, Florida with his girlfriend Judith Walters, who was in her mid-thirties, and her fourteen-year-old daughter Sheila. The state's account had the three of them driving from Milton into Louisiana, collecting Phillips on the way, and going on into New Orleans with Wille drinking throughout.
He was arrested that summer in Florida on unrelated charges, and on August 27, 1985, in custody there, he gave a tape-recorded confession. It described the abduction, the rape and the killing in extended detail, including sexual acts performed on the child's body after she was dead and a threat to kill Judith Walters if she ever spoke about it. He said Phillips had taken part.
Judith Walters gave a statement naming him. So did Sheila, at fourteen. Walters was indicted alongside him in September; her daughter was never charged.
Florida got to him first, convicting him of the murder of Frank Powe, killed near an interstate rest area, and sentencing him to life on December 13, 1985.
The Louisiana trial opened at Edgard a year later, prosecuted by District Attorney John Crum, with George Oubre and Robert Becnel for the defense, and it rested on the tape. The jury convicted on Saturday, December 6, 1986 and the penalty phase ran through the weekend. A priest, Father Peter Bergeron, asked them to let Wille live so he could get back to his god. His mother Pat spoke about the two younger sisters he loved. Nichole's mother, Jodee Lopatta, told the court that the day would have been her daughter's tenth birthday, and that her daughter had a right to graduate from high school one day.
On the Monday the jury took about two hours and chose electrocution. Crum said afterward that the confession had been so powerful the defense would have struggled to overcome it.
Judith Walters was tried separately in January 1987 and got two life sentences. The Louisiana Supreme Court later explained the difference between the two sentences by noting that Walters had not injured the child, had not raped or sodomized her, and had not killed her.
Besides the lawyer, one other problem was visible on the face of the record almost immediately: two witnesses the jury never heard.
Mid-trial the defense asked for a recess to secure them. One was Sandy Becker, living in Virginia, who they said would place Wille in Florida on the afternoon of June 2. The other was Dr. William Rodriguez, a time-of-death specialist who had examined the crime scene photographs and concluded that Lopatta and Phillips had not died within the same twenty-four-hour period, which, if true, contradicted the confession. He had seen the photographs late because the state did not hand all of them over until the day before it rested. The recess was refused. Neither witness testified.
In March 1990 the Louisiana Supreme Court found that the trial court had wrongly let an FBI agent tell the jury what Judith and Sheila Walters had said about Wille. Neither woman testified, so the statements were hearsay, and the court said plainly that the real purpose of the agent's evidence had been to put before the jury the fact that they had named him as the killer.
It held the error harmless. The reasoning turned on a single phrase: the agent's account was merely cumulative of Wille's own confession, "the voluntariness and reliability of which have not been substantially challenged." The court listed the corroboration: the fingerprint identification, the timing of the group's arrival at the apartment complex, an identification of Wille asking for a bag at a Popeye's on the night of the murder, and the fact that the bodies were where he said he had left them.
Everything that has happened in this case since has been an attempt to challenge that confession.
The same 1990 opinion did not fully affirm. The court conditionally upheld the conviction and sentence and sent the case back for a hearing on whether appointing a felon on probation had created a conflict of interest amounting to ineffective assistance. The district court found no merit in it, and in March 1992 the supreme court agreed and affirmed unconditionally. The United States Supreme Court denied certiorari later that year.
That 1992 opinion carries an odd pair of footnotes. One justice, concurring in the denial of rehearing, complained that the evidentiary hearing had been futile and that the case illustrated "the most notable absurdity in our criminal justice system, unnecessary permissive delays sanctioned by courts." Another wrote separately to say he did not accept that a judge testifying as a witness was harmless error. The trial judge in this capital case had given evidence in it.
In September 2000 Wille was brought back from Angola for four days of post-conviction hearings at the Edgard courthouse, before an ad hoc judge, Remy Chiasson. He was thirty-six. Judith Walters, forty-six, commuted daily from the women's prison at St. Gabriel, where she was serving her two life terms, to press her own claims. A boyhood acquaintance from LaPlace, the Rev. John Lasseigne, whose mother had taught Wille catechism at St. Joan of Arc school, had taken up his cause and was raising money for the defense in America and Europe.
The petition his lawyer Nick Trenticosta filed opened flatly: "John Francis Wille did not kill Nichole Lopatta, nor did he have anything to do with her abduction and death." It argued the confession had been coerced after days without sleep and with the use of drugs and hypnotism; that witnesses placing him in Florida were never put before the jury; that his trial lawyers were not competent to try a capital case; that the jury was tainted; and that physical evidence which would have cleared him had been withheld.
Sheila Walters Prior was among those scheduled to testify. By then she was saying the statement she gave at fourteen had been false. A defense expert, MacKeith, told the court that Judith Walters's fragile mental state had made her open to coercion, that her daughter's statement read as rehearsed, and that Wille's own statements may have been a strange attempt to protect Judith. Trenticosta said outside court that Phillips had been drowned somewhere else and dumped in the marsh, and that he knew who had killed him.
Whatever was decided on those four days, Wille stayed under sentence of death for another fourteen years.
What finally took him off death row was not a court. In May 2014 prosecutors in St. John the Baptist Parish agreed the sentence should be converted to life, and agreed that he could go on litigating his claim of innocence. The district attorney's stated reason was that the point of the prosecution had been to ensure Wille never got out, and life achieved that.
Then a new district attorney, Bridget A. Dinvaut, went to court to put the death sentence back, arguing the conversion had been illegal. The district court refused. The court of appeal refused. On November 13, 2017 the Louisiana Supreme Court declined without comment to hear it.
His lawyer, Kate Rhodes Janofsky, said afterward that they would keep pushing for post-conviction relief and exoneration, and repeated the point the defense has made since 1990: no physical evidence links Wille to Nichole Lopatta. The state's case was three confessions: his own, Judith Walters's, and the one her fourteen-year-old daughter gave, and all three have since been said to be false.
Six deaths across Louisiana, Florida, Texas and Alabama between 1980 and 1985 have been attributed to Wille and Walters over the years. Two produced convictions. The other four have never been charged against anyone.
Neither conviction has been overturned. The Louisiana death sentence was given up by the prosecution rather than reversed on appeal, and the attempt to restore it failed.
A jury convicted a man on a confession he says was extracted from him, which no physical evidence corroborates, and which a court described as not substantially challenged at a moment when his lawyers had just been prevented from calling the two witnesses who would have challenged it. Against that: the confession contained details the state said only the killer could have known, and the appellate courts have gone through this case repeatedly and left the conviction standing every time.
A child was raped and killed, and a man was stabbed, and nobody disputes either of those things. What has been disputed for forty years is whether the man serving life for it did it.