On the afternoon of Sunday, February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was killed in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan as he was about to address a rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Talmadge Hayer, a member of the Nation of Islam from Paterson, New Jersey, was arrested in Manhattan that day and charged with homicide. He was the first of three men to be charged, and in the end he was the only one of the three who ever admitted taking part.
That admission came in the middle of his own trial, and it came with a second claim that he never abandoned. The two men in the dock beside him, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, had nothing to do with the killing, he told the jury. The jury convicted all three of murder in the first degree on March 11, 1966, and each was sentenced to life imprisonment. Hayer repeated his account in sworn affidavits in 1977 and 1978, and the courts turned it away. He served more than four decades before the New York State parole board released him in April 2010. Eleven years later, on a joint motion of the Manhattan District Attorney and the defense, a New York court vacated the convictions of the two co-defendants. Hayer's own conviction was never part of that motion. It stands.
Hayer came to the case from across the Hudson. In February 1965 he was a rank-and-file member of the Nation of Islam who belonged to its mosque in Paterson, New Jersey, while Butler and Johnson belonged to the Harlem mosque. The prosecutors who later reviewed the trial found that, apart from membership in the same movement, the People had drawn no connection among the three men: there was no proof that they knew each other, that the two Harlem men had any ties to New Jersey, or that Hayer had ties to the Harlem mosque.
Over the years he used several names. He was arrested and tried as Talmadge Hayer. He was also known as Thomas Hayer and Thomas Hagan, the name under which the State of New York held him for most of his sentence and under which he was paroled. In prison he took the Islamic name Mujahid Abdul Halim, and the 2021 court proceedings used that name.
The killing grew out of the split between the victim and the leadership of the Nation of Islam. The men who carried out the killing acted, as the Associated Press summarized the case at the time of Hayer's parole, out of anger over that break. Hayer himself later told the parole board that he had been incensed by remarks the victim made about the movement's leader. In a court filing in 2008 Hayer described what he had done as the act of a young man who "acted out of rage on impulse and loyalty" to religious leaders.
The rally that Sunday afternoon was held in Washington Heights, at the northern end of Manhattan, and the killing took place before the audience that had come to hear the speaker. Hayer was arrested in Manhattan the same afternoon and charged with homicide.
The police inquiry moved quickly. Butler was arrested on February 26, 1965, and Johnson on March 3, 1965. A New York County grand jury heard testimony, and on March 10, 1965, it returned Indictment Number 871/1965, charging all three men with murder in the first degree under the Penal Law then in force. The District Attorney of New York County supervised the prosecution, and an assistant district attorney interviewed the witnesses who had been at the rally.
The case file that the District Attorney's office built over the following year survives. It runs to nine boxes and holds handwritten notes of the prosecutor's interviews with eyewitnesses, signed carbon copies of police interviews, a transcript of the grand jury proceedings and a bound transcript of the 1966 trial. Its first folder, labeled with the complaint number and the names Hayer, Butler and Johnson, spans March 10, 1965, the day of the indictment, to April 15, 1966, the day after sentence.
The People's theory was that the three men had acted together and that all three took part in the killing. It was a theory that needed all three men at the rally.
Against Hayer the evidence was heavy. The prosecution called twelve eyewitnesses. Two of them made no identifications. The other ten identified Hayer as having been present, and many testified that they had seen him take part in the killing. Physical evidence recovered after the killing tied him to the crime.
Against Butler and Johnson the case was different in kind. Seven of the ten identifying witnesses named one or both of them, but no physical evidence connected either man to the killing, and nothing tied either of them to Hayer. Both presented alibi evidence. The People's case against the two Harlem men, the reinvestigating prosecutors wrote in 2021, rested entirely on eyewitness testimony.
Jury selection began on December 6, 1965, in Part 37 of the Criminal Term of the Supreme Court in Manhattan, before a justice of that court. On January 20, 1966, twelve jurors and four alternates were sworn, and the trial began. It was a joint trial of all three defendants on the one indictment.
Hayer first took the witness stand in his own defense on February 23, 1966. He gave the court the name Talmadge Hayer. He denied having planned or discussed the killing, denied any part in it and said he had never seen Butler or Johnson before his arrest. He admitted that he had gone to the rally that afternoon.
Five days later, on February 28, 1966, Butler's attorney called him back to the stand as a witness. This time his account was the opposite. He told the jury that he had taken part in the killing, that the testimony he had given the week before was a lie, and that he was speaking of his own free will. "I just want to tell the truth, that's all," he said.
The point of the new testimony was his co-defendants. Hayer said he had spoken with Butler and Johnson and had told them that he knew they had nothing to do with the murder, because he himself had taken part in it. He meant to clear them, he said, because they were completely innocent. He insisted that the prosecution witnesses who described him as one of the men who caused the diversion were telling lies. He testified that three or four other men had been involved in the killing and that he knew all of them. He would not name them, and he would not describe most of them.
For the defense of Butler and Johnson the testimony was a gamble. It placed in front of the jury a confessed participant who swore that they were not there. It also asked the jury to believe a man who had told them the opposite under oath five days before. Defense counsel pressed the weaknesses in the identification evidence: inconsistencies between what witnesses had told the grand jury and what they said at trial, and lineups that one witness agreed had been made up of men of different sizes and complexions.
The jury was not persuaded. On March 11, 1966, it found all three defendants guilty of murder in the first degree. On April 14, 1966, each of the three was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The convictions went up through the courts on the ordinary route. In a decision dated April 18, 1968, the Appellate Division, First Department, unanimously affirmed the judgments of conviction, in a case titled under Hayer's other name, People v. Hagan. The case then went to the New York Court of Appeals, which unanimously affirmed the judgments in an opinion dated April 16, 1969. On October 27, 1969, the Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari in Hayer v. New York. The convictions were final.
Hayer did not leave the question of the others alone. In two affidavits, dated November 30, 1977, and February 25, 1978, he went further than he had at trial. He named the men he said had been his accomplices and described their parts. He identified four men besides himself, all members of the Nation of Islam from New Jersey, two from Paterson and two from Newark. The second affidavit set out how he said he had been recruited, how the killing had been planned and what each man had done on February 21, 1965.
The affidavits were the core of a new attempt by Butler and Johnson to clear their names. On December 5 and 8, 1977, the two men moved in the Supreme Court, New York County, to vacate their convictions, chiefly on the ground of newly discovered evidence under section 440.10(1)(g) of the Criminal Procedure Law. From December 1977 through January 24, 1978, ten affidavits were filed in support. Besides Hayer's, the motion relied on the newly discovered fact that a police officer working undercover had been an eyewitness to the killing, on redacted FBI records obtained during the litigation, and on an affidavit from a minister who had addressed the audience just before the victim rose to speak.
The District Attorney's office opposed the motion. It told the court that its case file contained nothing that supported the defendants' allegations and no papers of any kind from the FBI. In a supplemental affirmation dated July 14, 1978, it stated that it had obtained unredacted copies of the FBI documents the defense had filed and that there was no mention in them of any of the men Hayer had named. It added that an FBI agent had told the prosecutor that the remaining documents were held at FBI headquarters in Washington and would take a considerable time to retrieve, and that there appeared to be nothing in them to corroborate Hayer's affidavits.
In a decision dated November 1, 1978, the justice hearing the motion denied it, holding that identifications of new participants made thirteen years after the events could not be relied on to overturn the verdicts. A petition for leave to appeal to the Appellate Division was denied.
Butler and Johnson then turned to the federal courts. On or around December 31, 1979, they filed petitions for writs of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The petitions added further detail from Hayer about the physical descriptions of the men he had named. On December 31, 1980, the district judge denied and dismissed the petitions. After that, for four decades, there were no further proceedings in the case. None of the men Hayer named was ever charged.
Hayer served his sentence in the New York state prison system under the name Thomas Hagan. While in custody he earned a master's degree in sociology. His court papers later said that he had repeatedly expressed remorse.
For much of the second half of his sentence he was on work release. Under the program he spent two days a week in custody and the other five days working outside, at placements that included a shelter for homeless people, and living in Brooklyn. In his last years in custody he was held at the Lincoln Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison in Harlem.
Parole came slowly. Butler was released on parole in 1985 and Johnson in 1987. Hayer appeared before the parole board again and again and was refused each time. After a denial in 2007 he went to court, arguing that the board's decision had been arbitrary and capricious.
His seventeenth appearance before a state parole board took place on March 3, 2010. "I've had a lot of time, a heck of a lot of time, to think about it," he told the panel. He said that he now understood better how movements work and how conflicts arise within them, and that much of what the man he killed had been saying was true. He apologized, told the panel that his motives had been wrong, and said, "I have deep regrets about my participation in that."
He also gave the parole board his own answer to the question that had shadowed the case from the start, whether anyone above the men at the rally had sent them. "I can't say that anyone in the Nation of Islam gave us the idea or instructed us to do it," he said. "We did this ourselves for the most part, yes."
The board granted him release effective April 28, 2010, and a spokeswoman for the state Division of Parole confirmed the decision later that month. His paperwork was completed early, and at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, April 27, 2010, he walked out of the Lincoln Correctional Center on parole, at the age of 69. He had been in custody since the day of the killing, a span of 45 years. He told reporters that day that he had not had time to gather his thoughts and declined to comment. He had 24 hours to report to a parole officer, who would set the conditions of his supervision. He had been volunteering at a mosque, and he said he hoped to work as a substance abuse counselor.
In January 2020 the Conviction Integrity Program of the New York County District Attorney's office opened a reinvestigation of the case at the request of lawyers for Butler, who by then was known as Muhammad A. Aziz, and later for the estate of Johnson, known as Khalil Islam, who had died in 2009. Prosecutors and defense lawyers worked on it together for almost two years. They reviewed thousands of pages of transcripts and records, obtained FBI and New York City Police Department files that had never been shared with the District Attorney's office or the defense, and read the original prosecutors' file.
Hayer, the one living man who had admitted taking part, would not help. The reinvestigating teams made contact with him several times, and he refused to be interviewed. The parties had no legal means to compel him, and the reinvestigation proceeded without him.
What it found went to the case against Butler and Johnson, not the case against Hayer. The FBI and the police had held material that was never given to the defense, among it the identities of eyewitnesses who were FBI informants and had been told to withhold that status, records of witnesses who could not identify Johnson or who named other suspects, and an FBI file on a man Hayer had named as an accomplice after the trial. The FBI's 1978 representations to the prosecutors and the court did not, in the reinvestigators' assessment, appear to be accurate, and the District Attorney's own file had contained police documents that supported Hayer's version of events. The reinvestigation also found no evidence to support the claim, raised in the 1970s litigation, that the FBI or the police had orchestrated the killing.
On November 18, 2021, the District Attorney's office and the defense filed a joint motion in the Supreme Court, New York County, to vacate the judgments of conviction of Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, on the grounds of newly discovered evidence and the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence at trial, and to dismiss the indictment against them. The same day, the court's administrative judge granted the motion and vacated the two men's convictions. Hayer declined to comment. His conviction was not before the court, and no one else has been held to account for the killing.
Hayer's account of who else took part has never been tested in a courtroom. The four men he named in his affidavits were never charged, and all of them had died by 2021. His accusations against them remain allegations by a convicted man.
His two accounts at trial cannot both be true, and the jury rejected the one that cleared his co-defendants. His earlier denial, given under oath on February 23, 1966, was his own admitted lie. The vacatur of 2021 did not rest on his testimony; it rested on evidence withheld from the defense, and the District Attorney's office stopped short of declaring the two men innocent.
The record of his sentence and parole is not consistent from one account to the next. The court record gives the sentence as life imprisonment; reports at the time of his parole gave it as 20 years to life. The Associated Press counted the 2010 hearing as his seventeenth before a parole board, while another wire report said he had gone before the board 15 times since 1984. His work release was reported to have begun in 1989 by one outlet and in March 1992 by another. And while his affidavits named four other men, a 2010 account of his parole interview said he repeated there that his accomplices were two men who were never charged.
The claim that law enforcement agencies orchestrated the killing, raised in the 1970s litigation, was examined in the reinvestigation, which found no evidence to support it.
February 21, 1965: Killing in Washington Heights, Manhattan; Hayer arrested in Manhattan and charged with homicide.
February 26, 1965: Norman 3X Butler arrested.
March 3, 1965: Thomas 15X Johnson arrested.
March 10, 1965: New York County grand jury returns Indictment No. 871/1965, charging all three with murder in the first degree.
December 6, 1965: Jury selection begins in the Supreme Court, New York County.
January 20, 1966: Jury sworn; trial begins.
February 23, 1966: Hayer testifies and denies taking part.
February 28, 1966: Recalled as a witness, Hayer admits taking part and testifies that his co-defendants were not involved.
March 11, 1966: All three found guilty of murder in the first degree.
April 14, 1966: Each sentenced to life imprisonment.
April 18, 1968: Appellate Division, First Department, affirms (People v. Hagan).
April 16, 1969: New York Court of Appeals affirms.
October 27, 1969: Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari (Hayer v. New York).
November 30, 1977: Hayer's first affidavit naming four other men.
December 5 and 8, 1977: Butler and Johnson move to vacate their convictions.
February 25, 1978: Hayer's second affidavit.
November 1, 1978: Motion to vacate denied.
December 31, 1980: Federal habeas petitions of Butler and Johnson denied and dismissed.
2007: Parole denied; Hayer challenges the denial in court.
March 3, 2010: Seventeenth parole board appearance.
April 27, 2010: Released on parole from the Lincoln Correctional Center in Harlem, aged 69.
January 2020: District Attorney's reinvestigation opens; Hayer declines to be interviewed.
November 18, 2021: Convictions of Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam vacated on joint motion; Hayer's conviction not affected.