TOLEDO, Ohio — After seeing WTOL’s 2019 investigation, “Guilty without Proof,” retired King County, Washington judge Michael Heavey reached out to Travis Slaughter.
Slaughter was a key figure in the investigation. In 1998, he told police in a six-hour interrogation that he killed 13-year-old Maurice Purifie on a Central Toledo street and that he was helped by Wayne Braddy and Karl Willis.
But he later came forward to WTOL 11 and admitted his entire story was a lie. Heavey talked to Slaughter for hours and had a similar conversation.
“I know some people don’t want to hear it, but Slaughter’s absolutely innocent. They messed with his mind, and he didn’t have good representation,” Heavey said. “It’s so obvious to me that they’re all 100% innocent. I don’t know what’s less, an iota or scintilla, but there’s not an iota or scintilla of evidence against Wayne Braddy or Karl Willis.”
Heavey co-founded Judges for Justice, a Seattle-based group that fights to correct wrongful convictions. That group was instrumental in helping to raise public awareness of the case. Using “Guilty without Proof” as the basis, the group helped raise awareness of the case by doing interviews with local media and running a $35,000 campaign that involved mailing out 40,000 postcards to Lucas County voters and buying Facebook and newspaper ads.
Heavey was on hand Tuesday when Braddy and Willis entered Judge Gary Cook’s courtroom to take an Alford plea in the case. He was also there when the men walked out of the Lucas County jail later that afternoon.
Alongside him in court and at the jail was his King County colleague, retired judge Deborah Fleck.
Fleck, who served 21 years on the bench, worked on the wrongful conviction issue while on the bench and also in retirement. She too got involved in the Braddy and Willis case after watching our investigation and realizing she had a familial relationship with Braddy. She exchanged multiple letters with Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates.
“It shouldn’t take raising thousands of dollars to broadcast this process through ads in papers or these postcards to thousands of members of the public in the Toledo area. It shouldn’t take this kind of effort to see that justice is done, but it has taken that in this case,” Fleck said.
After “Guilty without Proof” aired in 2019, WTOL made a push for a conviction integrity unit in Lucas County. In Michigan, Wayne County’s prosecutor’s office collaborates with the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School Innocence Project. That partnership has seen the exoneration of more than a dozen people.
“I think there should be conviction integrity units in every single county, the hundreds of counties around this country,” Fleck said. “Even better would be statewide conviction integrity commissions so that it wouldn’t be left up to local prosecuting attorneys to find the money.
Heavey and Fleck gave credit to Jennifer Bergeron and the Ohio Innocence Project from the University of Cincinnati for the release of Braddy and Willis. Bergeron has been the men's attorney since 2009. But the judges agreed that pressure generated by the public was instrumental in the men walking free. Judge Cook and prosecutors acknowledged that there was a lot of public interest in the case.
“The public is absolutely critical in cases like this. 99% of the public will listen to the truth if they know about it,” Heavey said. “The prosecutor’s office and police get shut down. They cannot see past their tunnel vision. They’re blinded by it, but the rest of us can be open when looking at a case like this.”
In the University of Michigan’s database of exoneration, there have been 3,293 names added since 1989. Braddy and Willis’ names won’t be added because they took Alford pleas to lesser charges so that they could be immediately released from prison.
Both Heavey and Fleck expressed appreciation that the men are now free, but also disappointment that so much time was wasted.
“There are two inescapable conclusions about this case,” Heavey said. “One, the lives of Wayne and Karl have been destroyed by the police, who are supposed to protect us, not to falsely convict us. And the other inescapable conclusion is that there’s a killer of Maurice Purifie who’s still out there, walking the land, free to kill again.”