A convicted murderer in N.C. has spent decades trying to prove his innocence

Police didn’t need McKoy’s help. As part of a federal task force investigating Fayetteville’s “Court Boys” gang, the officer had already heard four cooperators name Talley as the shooter. And months before McKoy sent his letter, a federal prosecutor had stood up in court and told a jury in Talley’s drug trial that, even though he wasn’t charged with Hailey’s killing, Talley “shot him dead.”

But despite the prosecutor’s declaration and new evidence McKoy and his attorneys presented — including that the sole eyewitness who testified at trial was unreliable and that a detective on his case was later convicted of taking bribes from drug dealers — he cannot clear his name.

Standing in McKoy’s way is the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a 1996 law that imposed steep legal barriers on those seeking to overturn what they believe were wrongful convictions. The law, supported by Republicans and Democrats wanting to appear tough on crime, says a person can only appeal to federal courts once, has only a year to do it, and those courts must defer to state court findings. After the law’s passage, successful petitions declined dramatically.

There is a way around the limits — new evidence of “actual innocence.” But McKoy’s case shows how even when new evidence emerges, federal courts are extremely reluctant to overturn state convictions.

“The statute is kind of designed to put prisoners in crazy Catch-22s, and the Supreme Court has read it very expansively,” said Noam Biale, a criminal defense lawyer who specializes in such appeals.

While fighting his conviction and meeting repeated rejection, McKoy was released on parole after 27 years in prison. But he is still hobbled by being labeled a convicted murderer and still fighting to prove he is not one.

McKoy’s attorneys have now filed a long-shot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, trying to keep alive a fight he started decades ago in his note to the officer.

“Please don’t cover this up,” McKoy’s 1995 letter said. “You know Rat kill that man I’m in prison for. So please hear me out.”

Hailey had the day off on Jan. 25, 1990. The 30-year-old had a new job — and a two-year-old addiction to crack cocaine. His wife was trying to keep him from spending his whole paycheck on drugs. After they argued at his mother’s house, Hailey took off in his wife’s car.

The next morning, her blue Honda Accord was found crashed off the side of the road in Fayetteville, 25 miles from the small town where the Haileys lived. Myron was slumped behind the wheel, with a bullet hole straight through the driver’s seat and his chest. Two .357 caliber bullets were inside the car.

He was last seen at 8:55 p.m. the night before, returning clothes to a store 45 minutes from Fayetteville. Based on tire tracks where the car went off the road, police assumed Hailey was traveling east when he hit a tree and the car tumbled down an embankment.

Police began scouring the Haymount Hill neighborhood, where a gang shooting earlier on Jan. 25 had knocked out the power.

But as they canvassed the city, identifications of Hailey’s killer were vague and contradictory — until February, when Bobby Lee Williams, also known as “Strawberry,” told police McKoy had killed Hailey in a drug dispute.

According to the police file, Williams relayed that McKoy tried to sell Hailey powdered aspirin as crack cocaine, then Williams intervened and forced the dealer to hand over the real drugs. Williams said he then saw McKoy chase as Hailey drove away, firing a gun twice.

Before Williams, McKoy had only been named as one of many potential witnesses to Hailey’s killing. McKoy was in the “streets,” he later acknowledged. After his father died working at the commissary at Fort Bragg, McKoy started noticing other kids in the neighborhood with rolls of cash and new clothes. He turned from dreams of following his father into the military to dealing drugs.

Williams had also told investigators McKoy’s friends were involved in the shooting, prompting police to round them up. One, 16-year-old Charmaine Evans, implicated McKoy.

But those accounts quickly became problematic. Evans was handcuffed to a chair for hours before naming McKoy, according to the police record. Days later, before he was supposed to testify in court, Evans told his lawyer he had lied.

“I didn’t know nothing about it,” he said in a recorded conversation with his attorney included in the court record. “They said they were gonna keep me down there in jail if I wouldn’t tell them nothing.”

Evans did stick to one part of his story: that McKoy carried a .22 caliber gun, not a .357 like the rounds shot at Hailey. That information did not make it in to the police record of the interview.

Court records show Williams, who at the time was on parole for armed robbery and manslaughter, appeared to make inconsistent statements in his account — about the weather, Hailey’s clothing and whether there was a passenger in the car.

The physics of Williams’s story were also improbable, said Graham Gurnee, McKoy’s first appellate lawyer. Williams’s account required both him and McKoy to catch up with a moving car by running through trees, and Hailey to make a series of turns while fleeing gun shots.

“It just did not ever make sense to me,” Gurnee said. “But I was never able to get anything to back that up.”

Two other witnesses said they saw McKoy shooting at a car that night, but their timing did not line up with Williams’s account, and they were not called to testify at trial, according to the court record.

Years later, Evans — the teen who implicated McKoy — would twice reach out to Gurnee asking if he could help free McKoy. “It had always been on my mind and in my heart,” Evans wrote.

The state had one other piece of evidence. Police officer Mike Ballard testified that in a brief conversation on the street about a month after the shooting, McKoy replied, “I know it,” when the officer accused him of murder. McKoy maintains he was being sarcastic.

Ballard did not arrest McKoy, instead suggesting he agree to be photographed and polygraphed. McKoy refused and was allowed to leave; in subsequent notes, Ballard said McKoy made no “incriminating remarks.”

The judge told jurors at McKoy’s trial they could take the statement as “evidence which tends to show that the defendant has admitted the facts relating to the crime charged in this case.”

After four days of testimony and five hours of deliberation, on May 2, 1991 the jury came back unanimous — guilty of first-degree murder.

‘William Talley shot him dead’

Four years later, members of a local Fayetteville gang known as “the Court Boys” went to trial in federal court.

Facing rising violence, Fayetteville police had teamed up with federal agents to take down the gang, which operated out of a housing complex called Grove View Terrace. Ten men pleaded guilty in federal court. Three went to trial in 1995 — including Talley, the one known as “Rat Rat.”

Talley was accused only of selling crack for the gang while armed. But prosecutors told jurors he was not just a drug dealer but a killer.

Two cooperating gang members testified they saw Talley shoot at a driver who tried to rob them of drugs in the Grove View Terrace housing complex the night Hailey was killed, and that they saw the crashed car on an embankment the next day.

In closing arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Bennett held up the gun Talley was carrying when arrested and told the jury to “use your common sense.” It was a .357 caliber revolver, according to the court record.

“Ladies and gentlemen, what do you think happened to the driver of that car?” Bennett asked. “What happened is that William Talley shot him dead.”

Talley did not respond to requests for comment through his last attorney or calls to his listed phone number. A man at his last known address who identified himself as “William” declined to speak to a reporter and did not respond to a letter left at his door.

“Where is the evidence about this murder?”

— Alexis Pearce, attorney at appeal hearing

Talley was ultimately granted a new trial because of the murder accusation and was convicted on drug charges a second time. Talley’s defense attorney, Alexis Pearce, was shocked; he had no warning that his drug trafficking client was going to be implicated in a homicide.

“I was blown out of the water,” Pearce later testified at McKoy’s first appeal hearing.

After the closing argument, Pearce pressed the police officers involved in the case for more information about the killing his client was accused of committing.

He learned that another man had been convicted in state court in the killing the prosecutor accused Talley of committing — information useful for his client.

“I kept saying, ‘Where is the evidence about this murder?’” Pearce testified. One officer “gave me the name Lamont McKoy.”

Pearce decided he also had an ethical responsibility to tell McKoy about Talley: “If there is an innocent man in jail, I wanted him to be released.”

He called McKoy’s trial attorney, who relayed the information to McKoy in prison. Unable to pay the lawyer a second time, McKoy filed a handwritten appeal from behind bars.

Gurnee was appointed to argue the case in state court for McKoy. He subpoenaed the leader of the Court Boys, who didn’t show up to court. Gurnee said he was working on getting Williams (a.k.a. “Strawberry”) to recant his identification of McKoy when the witness died. Gurnee also struggled to get records from state or federal prosecutors. But the night before the hearing, he was handed an internal FBI memorandum reporting that “evidence has been developed which indicates that Talley was involved in the murder of … Myron Craig Hailey.”

He presented that in court, along with testimony from Pearce and records of the testimony from Talley’s trial.

The appeal was still dismissed. The Talley witnesses could have confused two “similar” killings, the judge said in his ruling, noting that they described the attack as occurring east of the crash site while the tire tracks from the scene led west.

Bennett, the federal prosecutor who had implicated Talley in the killing, also reversed course. He had written to the state prosecutor, “I do not believe that this information provides enough evidence to charge Tally [sic] with the murder, nor does it provide enough evidence to exonerate Lamont McKoy.”

Reached by phone recently, Bennett said he did not remember the details of either case. “Your guess is good as mine at this point” as to why he was equivocal about Talley’s guilt with state prosecutors, he said. But, he added, “Any decisions about that case were theirs to make and not mine.”

In 2001, McKoy tried again, connecting from prison to Duke Law’s Innocence Project.

First, the volunteers set about proving that the Court Boys could not have described a different killing.

Over the next decade, Duke law students confirmed that Hailey was the only man found shot inside a crashed automobile in Fayetteville between 1986 and 1995.

The Duke students uncovered additional evidence suggesting McKoy was innocent. Two more Court Boys gave statements saying Talley committed the killing, with one naming Hailey as the victim. Williams’s ex-fiancee signed a declaration that before dying, her partner had planned to admit he falsely implicated McKoy for a $1,000 reward. (She could not be reached for comment.) The students learned one of the two investigators on McKoy’s case, who had been undercover in Grove View Terrace, had since been convicted of taking bribes to drop drug cases. And they found an incident report showing several police officers responding to the earlier gang shooting were present at the exact time and place that Williams claimed McKoy shot Hailey, which McKoy’s lawyers argued would have made it impossible for the killing to go undetected by law enforcement.

But North Carolina state courts again dismissed his appeal, saying that it came too late and that McKoy should have found the new evidence before his trial. The Duke team went to federal court. They hired a mechanical engineer who testified that the tire tracks from the crash site were misinterpreted and Hailey could easily have been coming west from Grove View Terrace. And then, buried in the thousands of documents turned over by the state, they found two pieces of paper: typed records of the first tips to police that came in after Hailey’s death. One was from a woman who said “Rat-Rat did the shooting” and identified a witness. The second said an “intoxicated” caller “named the person he said was responsible.” Scrawled on the report was “Rat-Rat’ from Groveview Terr.”

In late 2019, a federal judge in North Carolina heard McKoy’s case.

In the courtroom was Myron Hailey Jr., who was 3 years old when his father was killed. Next to him was his fiancee, who gasped when photos of the crime scene were shown. The dead man in the car looked just like her future husband.

In Hailey Jr.’s one clear memory of his father, Hailey Sr. is leaving through the back door, saying “I’ll be back.” Even that could be imagined, he knows. And he could be wrong about who killed his father. But he has always understood McKoy to be the killer, and the hearing did not change his mind.

In the elevator outside the courtroom, the two men found themselves alone together. Hailey Jr. recalled it as the strangest silence of his life.

“Look man, I didn’t kill your dad,” McKoy eventually said.

“Okay,” Hailey Jr. responded.

He didn’t believe it. Neither did the court.

As U.S. Appeals Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III put it at oral arguments in McKoy’s case, “There are very few cases that there’s not some after-discovered evidence. It’s always brought up. And I thought that [the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act] was passed to shut off these kinds of claims because they just go on and on.”

“It’s no way to operate a system that’s concerned with the truth.”

— Jaime Lau, professor, Duke Law

In December, the 4th Circuit issued an unpublished opinion that the evidence was “not conclusive” enough to meet the “very demanding burden” of “actual innocence.”

Jamie Lau, a professor at Duke Law who argued McKoy’s case, said the appellate court is supposed to look at the evidence with fresh eyes but instead relied heavily on the state court rulings that were based on incomplete evidence.

“It’s no way to operate a system that’s concerned with the truth,” he said.

In prison, McKoy missed the death of an aunt who had championed his case for years. McKoy’s wife was pregnant with their son when he was arrested; he asked for a divorce so she could move on without him. For 27 years he slept on hard cots in long halls, avoided knife fights and saw his family once a month at most.

In 2017, with help from Duke, his parole was granted. He went first to Golden Corral, for the first meal where he was able to have seconds in nearly three decades. Then to the graveyard to visit the relatives who died while he was behind bars. And then to see his mother, who survived.

He wants to become a commercial truck driver; see the country, make good money. But several employers rejected him because of his record; he is back at the same scrap yard that employed him as a prisoner on work release.

Talley was released from prison two years after McKoy, in 2019. They passed each other on the street in Fayetteville once, according to McKoy.

Neither man said anything.

Story editing by Lynh Bui. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Copy editing by Mina Haq. Design by J.C. Reed. Alice Crites, Razzan Nakhlawi, and Leigh Tauss contributed to this report.