Wayne Henderson has written for Steamshovel Press practically since its inception. His analysis of the California prison system as seen from the perspective of an innocent man on the inside,"Hotel Kalifornia," originally appeared in Steamshovel Press #4 and has been widely anthologized. Here for the first time he discusses in-depth the circumstances of his own incarceration. Henderson's tribute to his good friend Jim Keith will appear in the next issue of Steamshovel.
GOT A MINUTE?
CONSIDER THIS...
You've been traveling cross-country, just a leisurely 'working vacation' by car: you stop in San Francisco, and agree to split rent, temporarily, with what seems like a nice young couple.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the 'nice young couple' have criminal records, are selling 'crank' (methamphetamine) out of the apartment, and worse yet, owe a major chunk of change to local biker gangs. In the meantime, your car has been towed for a parking violation, you're strapped for cash to get it out of hock, and death-threats from the biker stepuglies are flying as thick as divorce lawyers in Tijuana.
You finally acquire transportation - the nice young couple agree to trade their broken-down panel truck to you in lieu of repaying you for covering half of the rent, let alone the pizza delivery bills - so you gladly leave Frisco behind and head back East, to civilization. Sometime in the next few days after you leave, your roomies end up very dead.
There are numerous witnesses to the death-threats; one of them is a known police informant (who lived with the 'nice young couple' before you did, and got out when the death-threats began). The money disputes between your ex-roomies and the biker stepuglies is common knowledge, and one of the killers was gracious (and stupid) enough to leave his fingerprint, in engine grease, on one of the bodies. While you could reasonably expect to be called as a material witness (you're one of several witnesses to an altercation in which one of your roomies got the crap beat out of him by a creditor, and another in which the same creditor smacked the same roomie over the head with a wooden cane), and you're obviously broken up about your roomies' deaths (you spent Xmas partying with them, and now they're in the morgue), you're expecting that the strongest impacts of this incident on your own life will be 1) to keep you from ever even considering getting involved in retail crank sales, and 2) to make you very happy that you got the hell out of Frisco when you did.
Except for a possible appearance as a witness, your involvement in all this is over, right? 'Fraid not...not by a long shot.
My name is Wayne Henderson, and I'm a writer - you might've read some of my work in any number of 'zines, DHARMA COMBAT, STEAMSHOVEL PRESS, Donna Kossy's KOOKS among them - in addition to that, I'm also currently a 'guest' of the Hotel Kalifornia, and have been incarcerated here for sixteen years now. Why? Read on, and you tell ME...
I've lived the situation I've just described...my girlfriend and I were the ones who got the hell out of Frisco - on 12 January 1982 - and the 'nice young couple', Ray and Angie, were alive and well (if somewhat stressed by their biker creditors) when we left. Angie talked to the landlord on the phone, on the afternoon of 13 January - more than 24 hours after we'd left California; and our neighbors in the front apartment - Ron and Carol - had seen Ray and Angie in and around the place as late as the weekend, 16-17 January...Ron and Carol had also witnessed one of the death-threats from the biker stepuglies, made against everyone in the house.
The Frisco police themselves proved our whereabouts...we were in Reno, Nevada at 1:30PM, on 12 January 1982, 24 hours before one of our alleged victims spoke to the landlord on the phone; we didn't return to California until the cops dragged us there, months later.
And why were we arrested? Again, you tell me...all the witnesses told the cops about the death-threats, the drug debts, and how we'd been included in those threats - just because we shared an apartment and partied with Ray and Angie. It's beyond obvious that we weren't even in California when the murders occurred, and wouldn't have any reason to kill people who, for whatever faults they might've had, certainly knew how to party. But it gets weirder, much weirder...
After repeated visits from the cops, witnesses either changed their stories (disagreeing wildly with their recorded initial statements, even to the point of stating impossibilities) or suffered odd and inexplicable memory loss...
The murder bullet, a .22 slug showing no rifling (and therefore likely fired by Ray's own .22 pistol, which has never been found) is altered - and the alteration is documented - in the hope that it can be made to fit the "class of characteristics" of a .22 rifle I'd subsequently sold to a friend in Florida. The alteration, it should be noted, was not altogether successful, and the prosecution was forced to admit in a rare moment of candor that the bullet couldn't really be matched to the rifle in question.
Remember the fingerprint? The cops took our fingerprints more than 20 times after the arrest, from every conceivable angle and with every possible pattern of smudging - and in the end, it was painfully obvious, even to the cops, that the fingerprint belonged to somebody else. So what do they do - check the print against their extensive files? Not hardly...they ignored it. The prosecutor even told the jury, at one point, that fingerprints aren't good evidence. Remember that, if your fingerprint ever shows up where it oughtn't be...
Even after the cops were done trampling every stick of evidence in their path, we were still able to amass enough evidence to prove our innocence, or at the very least to expose the gaping holes in the cops' story - and all our evidence was invariably excluded by a 'prosecution friendly' judge, no matter how relevant it was. On the other hand, the cops and prosecution were allowed to present rank speculation as though it were evidence, perjure themselves, and violate Federal law and rules of evidence, without restriction. No, I'm NOT just making this up - you can see the proof for yourself.
The jury never got to hear anything but what the cops and prosecution wanted them to hear - and it's taken sixteen years of life and death struggle with the California legal system to finally file a petition for writ of habeas corpus with the state supreme court...and even with the proof in front of them, they continue to drag their feet...
If I sound like some bitter prisoner shouting "I didn't do it", I've got to admit that that's a fair assessment. Unlike the popular image, however, I have proof; evidence not only of my own innocence, but also of the illegalities committed by a small clique of politically-ambitious cops and prosecutors.
Sixteen years; Ray and Angie have been dead for sixteen years, I've been locked up, the actual killers have walked free - for sixteen years. While one of the prosecutors - William Fazio - proved to be too dirty even for his buddies, and was forced out of the DA's office during an unsuccessful bid to become DA himself, another prosecutor - James McBride - is now a municipal court judge; interesting occupation for a man who forged a subpeona duces tecum form, then crossed several state boundaries in order to illegally access my medical records (a Federal crime). The cops, Prentice Sanders and Napolean Hendrix (yes, Napolean really is his name) are still cops; both of them perjured themselves, continue to make arrests - Sanders has even been promoted to Deputy Chief of Police.
Why should you care? There are others who've been in similar situations, people you've heard of: Clarence Chance and Benny Powell, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Geronimo Pratt, and others - who have the backing of an enviable media machine to get their stories out. Geronimo Pratt - whom I've met, in prison - owes his freedom to FM 94 KPFA radio in Berkeley, California, a station I listen to almost every day; Clarence Chance and Benny Powell had the help of Rev. James McClosky of Centurion Ministries, in my home state (New Jersey) - I have no such backing; I've got to hope that I can pique the interest of someone out there who will be both willing and able to actually look at the evidence I've amassed - proof of police perjury, subornation of perjury; witness, evidence, and jury tampering; and judicial misconduct - and lend a hand.
I've got to hope that you will be concerned enough about your own safety - if they can do it to me, they can do it to you - to get involved.
John E. Dupont, O.J. Simpson, John and Patsy Ramsey, and those like them have automatic access to the best lawyering money can buy; even in those rare occasions when their behavior is too obvious and too reprehensible to avoid scrutiny, they never pay the price...but when poor folks - like you and I - are accused, our innocence buys us nothing - we don't have Johnny Cochran for the defense, we have only each other.
If you can help in any way - publicity, legal assistance, moral support - contact C.G. Hodges at lynxmist@webtv.net - if you're seriously able to help, we can lend you a copy of the proof on disc...no need to take my word for it, when you can see the evidence and judge for yourself.
Consider: if only 5% of all prisoners in this country are wrongly incarcerated, we have 85,000 innocent people behind bars...I'm one of them, and if cops like Sanders and Hendrix, and prosecutors like Fazio and McBride aren't stopped, YOU could be next!!!
FIGHT BACK -
WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!
Wayne Henderson