For Grisham, a new turn into non-fiction

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- John Grisham's downtown office in this quaint college town is packed with 12-inch-high stacks of court documents, box after box of medical records and hundreds of photographs.

They are part of the paper trail that tells the story of Ron Williamson, a once-promising ballplayer who spent 11 years on Oklahoma's death row for a rape and murder he did not commit. It might have been the whole story of Williamson's life -- until Grisham read his obituary in December 2004.

Grisham found Williamson's real life just as compelling as the stories he has told in his hugely successful legal thrillers. "It just had everything," Grisham says. "A wrongful conviction, the near execution, the exoneration, the mental illness, the insanity, the baseball."

Grisham, 51, was so taken by the Ada, Okla., native's story that it has changed the course of his career. The author of 18 best-selling novels has now written his first non-fiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (Doubleday, $28.95), on sale Tuesday.

"Every time there's an exoneration and people walk out of prison after 10 or 15 years, people say, 'How could this happen?' Well, I want this book to show people how it can happen," Grisham says. "It was sloppy police work, or worse, cops who didn't want to find the real killer, vindictive police work and a prosecutor who became convinced he knew who the real killer was."

And because Williamson was often in trouble, Grisham says, the Ada police didn't like him.

"The cops knew him well. They just became convinced he was the killer," he says.

In 1971, fresh from a stellar high school baseball career in Asher,Okla., Williamson was selected as a potential catcher by the Oakland A's in the second round of the draft. He was, Grisham writes, the 41st player chosen out of 800. Like his baseball hero, fellow Oklahoman Mickey Mantle, Williamson, then 18, had dreams of playing in the big leagues. But recurring arm injuries and a life-long battle with alcohol that began in his teens brought his career in the minor leagues to a close in 1976.

It was a personal defeat from which he would never recover.

Williamson moved back home to Ada, lugging with him all his bad habits -- drinking, barhopping and womanizing. But something else was going on as well: His family noted dire changes in his personality, the first signals of the bipolar disease he would struggle with the rest of his life.

The drinking and mental illness made it difficult for him to hold down a job. He racked up numerous arrests, including two rape charges. In both cases, he said the sex was consensual. The juries for both trials found him innocent. He did spend time in jail for public drunkenness, DUI and check forgery. He didn't have a reputation for violence.

The cocky and notorious one-time hometown hero was certainly no angel. But in 1982, he began his transformation into Ada's most reviled citizen when Debra Sue Carter, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress, was raped and murdered.

The beginnings of injustice

Carter's badly bruised body was found on the floor in her apartment. An autopsy would show that she died of asphyxiation caused by strangulation with a cord or belt and choking on a washcloth stuffed in her mouth.

With no solid evidence, the police and the district attorney decided Williamson and an acquaintance, Dennis Fritz, were the murderers, Grisham writes.

There was no proof the two men knew Carter, their fingerprints were not found at the scene, and there were no eyewitnesses. Grisham writes in the book that the case against Williamson consisted of "two 'inconclusive' polygraph exams, a bad reputation, a residence not far from that of the victim's, and the delayed, half-baked eyewitness identification" from the man who would turn out to be the real murderer.

In 1988, Williamson and Fritz were convicted of first-degree murder. Fritz received a life sentence. Williamson was sent to death row. It's where he would stay for 11 years until DNA evidence exonerated him -- just five days before he was to be executed.

DNA testing proved that hairs and semen found at the Carter murder scene did not match either man. They were later shown to match those of Glen Gore, the last man to see Carter alive and someone to whom the police had paid little attention. Gore actually testified against Williamson at his trial. He was eventually convicted of murdering Carter and is in prison.

Despite his exoneration, Williamson's story had no happy ending. The mental illness and drinking problems he had struggled with all his life continued to haunt him. He died of cirrhosis of the liver five years after he left prison in 1999. He was 51.

So how could two men be tried and convicted on non-existent evidence, the false testimony of jailhouse snitches, faulty forensics work and suppressed evidence?

"I don't know how it got that far," Grisham says. "Bad police work is not unusual, bad defense work and incompetent defense lawyers are not unusual, and rough, mean prosecutors are not unusual, but that's why you have a judge. The judge has got to guarantee that when you come into the courtroom, there's got to be a fair trial, and that was the great tragedy here. The judge was asleep at the switch."

A hard look at the system

In 2002, a federal judge ruled that the circumstantial evidence used against the men "indicates a concerted pattern" that deprived them of their constitutional rights. The judge cited "repeated omission of exculpatory evidence ... inclusion of debatably fabricated evidence, failure to follow obvious and apparent leads which implicated other individuals, and the use of questionable forensic conclusions."

For Grisham, the Williamson story was a wake-up call.

"I was a lawyer for 10 years and I represented a lot of criminal defendants. I had two murder cases with tough trials, rough trials, but I can't remember spending any time thinking or worrying about wrongful convictions. I knew that cops cut corners. I knew the prosecutors cut corners. I knew that there were a lot of bad defense lawyers. I knew all that but just never slowed down long enough to think about wrongful convictions."

Asked whether his book is a kind of social activism, he says: "When I researched and wrote the book, it was impossible not to become indignant and infuriated. And that becomes an activism in itself."

One of Grisham's greatest amazements is that a man diagnosed with severe mental problems, who had been prescribed lithium, thorazine and other psychotropic drugs, could have been found competent to stand trial.

"How about a mental competency examination? Any lawyer would go nuts with that issue. When you have a client facing capital murder -- my gosh, you do anything you can." Williamson's lawyer never asked for a competency hearing, and neither did the judge.

Fueled by his anger and fascination with the case, Grisham threw himself into researching Williamson's story. He interviewed more than 100 people, including Williamson's sisters, Annette and Renee, plus Fritz and several other local men who had been wrongfully convicted of terrible crimes. He spoke with judges, lawyers and baseball coaches. He made numerous trips to Ada and visited Williamson's home for 11 years: death row at the Oklahoma state prison at McAlester. Of visiting prisons, he says, "afterward you just want to go somewhere and take a shower and have a drink. It just sticks with you."

Learning about Williamson's life, Grisham was struck by the similarities between his own formative years and Williamson's.

"I grew up in a small town like Ada. I was born in Arkansas three hours from where Ron grew up. I lived in small towns in Arkansas and Mississippi where life revolved around Little League. We played ball all summer long. Nights, weekends, that's what we did. We both grew up in really strict homes, memorized Scripture, and you never missed church for anything." And it was in church that the young Grisham heard sermons about "eye for an eye" justice.

But while he was writing his 1994 novel, The Chamber, about a young lawyer who rescues an innocent man from death row, he began to see things -- the death penalty in particular -- differently.

"I really flipped with The Chamber," Grisham says. "That's when it happened." Grisham visited death row in Mississippi while researching that book and spoke with the death row chaplain. "He asked me if I was a Christian and I said yes. I asked him, 'Do you think Jesus would approve of what they do here?' He smiled and said 'No, there's no way.'

"I've come to believe that," Grisham says. "As heinous and horrible as some of the crimes are, if killing is so wrong, then we shouldn't be allowed to kill."

'How could this happen?'

He shakes his head when he talks about how close Williamson came to being put to death for a crime he didn't commit and recalls his final visit to Ada and Williamson's grave.

"It's on a hill outside town, a couple of miles from downtown, and I sat there for a long time thinking about Ron and his tragic life, and I kept thinking, 'How could a friendly little town like Ada -- small-town America -- how could this happen? How could they screw up so badly? How could they devour one of their own? One of their own heroes.' It seemed so impossible that it could happen, but there it was."

The Innocent Man lays out what happened in Ada. Grisham says he's proud of the book.

"I have never been this excited about publication except for maybe the first two books. A Time to Kill was the thrill of a first novel. The Firm was the first big book, and I was very excited about that and very anxious to see if it was going to sell. But I'm pretty psyched up about the publication of this one."

Grisham's agent, David Gernert, says Grisham had a greater sense of pride with this book because, as non-fiction, it was a more difficult story to tell.

"The novels come to him not easily but naturally, and so he had a greater sense of accomplishment with this one," Gernert says.

A call to action

The effect of Williamson's story on Grisham has been significant. He describes himself as "not much of a joiner," but he recently joined the board of The Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, a non-profit legal clinic that helped exonerate Williamson. Founded in 1992, the project handles cases in which post-conviction DNA testing of evidence can yield proof of innocence. So far, the project has helped clear 183 people who had been wrongfully convicted.

"They're doing God's work, getting these people out of prison," Grisham says. "But they are also trying to lobby legislatures around the country to provide for ways to stop some of these bad convictions and get compensation for people when they are released. After 15 years in prison, they don't even get a pat on the back. They don't get counseling. They don't get a dime. They don't get anything.

"They are all disasters and they are not prepared to deal with life. That's the cruel part."

Grisham is not sure how the die-hard fans of his legal thrillers will respond to The Innocent Man.

"I'm very nervous about it. I'm nervous because there are X number of people who love the legal thrillers and can't wait till the next one comes out, and I love those people. The issue is: Are they going to be happy with a non-fiction book, although it reads like a legal thriller? And then the other question is: Will it appeal to people who like to read non-fiction books? That's the big question mark."

The first printing is 2.8 million, the same as for his legal thrillers.

Fans of Grisham may be disappointed to know he won't publish a thriller -- or any book -- in 2007, the first year in 16 he won't have a book. His next legal thriller is scheduled for February 2008.

Would he ever tackle another non-fiction book?

"It's going to have to be something good," Grisham says. "But I have learned over the years you never know where a story's going to come from, and it could easily happen again, real soon or 20 years from now."

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