WHAT'S DONE IN THE DARK | Part II: Secrets & Suspects

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a four-part investigative feature series looking back on the 1989 murder of Rev. Francis Craven in northern Tuscaloosa County. Be on the lookout for Part III next weekend on Tuscaloosa Patch.

Secrets & Suspects

"I'm the innocent bystander. Somehow I got stuck ... between a rock and a hard place ... and I'm down on my luck."

- Warren Zevon, "Lawyers, Guns & Money" (1978)

TUSCALOOSA, AL — Greenhorn Tuscaloosa County homicide investigator Joe Pearson didn't know what to think about what he and his partner, Dennis Levins, found in that rectory closet in Guntersville.

Much less did they even know if such strange evidence had any relevance in the investigation of the murder of Rev. Francis Craven, whose burned and beaten body had been found on a dirt road in Tuscaloosa County just days before.

Nevertheless, what they found became a central pillar of the case.

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Amid a frustrating search of the St. Williams Catholic Church rectory in Guntersville that Craven had once called home, the only thing that stood out to investigators was a small closet with more than one lock on the door.

A locksmith was called out to the home and once the door was opened, Pearson became unsettled and a bit confused. Sitting at his dining room table in the present day, his eyes were wide when he pantomimed with his hands the shape of a cube about a foot and a half in diameter and height.

ALSO READ: WHAT'S DONE IN THE DARK: Part I | The Murder Of Rev. Francis Craven

What investigators first discovered were two or three large boxes of adult diapers stacked up inside the closet. They then retrieved baby bottles, a pacifier on a cord, some type of clothesline or rope and at least one pair of handcuffs.

"He was a bad diabetic," Pearson explained of the little they knew about Craven at the time. "So you might could've explained away just the diapers when considering that fact. But what about all the other stuff? We really didn't know what we were looking at."

The most controversial evidence recovered, however, were several unassuming spiral notebooks.

The contents of the notebooks were later interpreted in the press and in court to be "journals," but Pearson surmised that the explicit words on the pages read like fiction and described it as "sexual fantasy literature."

As mentioned in Part I of this series, he had already written off any "Satanic Panic" or ritualistic murder theories during his initial assessment of the crime scene.

But what, if anything, could he learn about the case, especially from something as enigmatic and personal as the writing in those notebooks?

"I’m 28 years old and I guess I had lived a pretty sheltered life up to that point," Pearson told Patch. "I’ve never seen something like some of this stuff and really didn't know what to make of it or if there was anything we could go off of to piece things together."

Investigators made it a point to keep the newly discovered evidence close to the chest but word of the salacious details was leaked to the local media in the immediate aftermath and overnight became one of the only stories anyone in Alabama was talking about.

"When things started being reported about his sexual fantasies, it was shocking," longtime Tuscaloosa News reporter and columnist Robert DeWitt told Patch years later in a lengthy phone interview. "It was particularly shocking because it was a small Southern city with a fairly small Catholic community. Holy Spirit in Tuscaloosa is a pretty good-sized church but compared to Protestants somewhere like Guntersville, it's a fairly small community."

The revelations also led many, both in law enforcement and the public, to speculate out in the open that Craven was a closeted homosexual.

Keep in mind, dear reader, this true crime odyssey is set during a time when the LGBTQ+ community, especially in the Deep South, was marginalized due, in part, to the AIDS epidemic and many felt pressured in places like Tuscaloosa to exist as a kind of underground community.

Pearson vividly recalled this and, in discussing the initial phases of the investigation and throughout the entire story for this reporter, he proved to be an incredibly open-minded investigator, especially for his time.

Treating this series as a work of forensic history and as a kind of criminal justice case study, nearly every source who spoke to Patch for this story said in some way or another that Pearson refused to let something he didn't understand cloud his focus when it came to treating people with respect and digging for answers the right way while he was on the case.

Nevertheless, one of the excerpts from the alleged "journals," as they were exclusively referred to in contemporary news coverage, was read into the official record years later as prosecutors sought a conviction in the case.

The excerpt reads as a kind of letter to a man identified only as "Troy."

The details included in the excerpt are quite graphic and buttressed by a colorful spectrum of profane language, some of which is considered hate speech today.

Editor's Note: This is a kind of disclaimer, preface and shout-out to my only living grandparent, who reads everything I write and was one of the first people to ask when I would publish the second part of this series. I've told numerous sources for this story, I have to include some of what you're about to read but wanted to write it so my Maw Maw can read it and not faint.

For the sake of reference, I've highlighted keywords that stood out once the entire story came into complete focus:

"I am the queer you put in handcuffs and drove from Nashville the other day," the excerpt begins. "You really took charge of the situation when you placed the key to my handcuffs in your pocket and started to humiliate me."

Some details did catch the eye of homicide investigators, including a reference to "Troy" using a dog leash on the narrator of the journal during a sexual act.

As Patch previously reported, one newspaper account said Craven's body was found with an electrical cord around his neck that was connected to a steel dog leash with a leather handle.

This detail ultimately proved to be erroneous but that's not the point of mentioning it at this point in the story. Just put a pin in that thought for now.

"You took all my money and bought some whiskey," the alleged journal/work of fiction reads. "You put me back in the car and drove off into the woods, where you pulled a gun on me and stuck the barrel in my mouth and held it there for a long time with the hammer cocked until you felt I was certain you would kill me if I did not totally obey you. You then cuffed my hands behind my back and tied my ankles together and shoved me on my face on the ground."

The journal's narrator then says "Troy" forced him to eat dirt and belittled him with homophobic slurs not fit for publication and irrelevant in the grand scheme of this story.

The notebook entry goes on to describe sexual acts that are far too lewd, even in their basic descriptions, to detail in this story and still be appropriate for the general public, much less relevant to the investigation.

The fantasy culminates with the narrator ending up beaten, hospitalized and sedated, only to wake up to find he'd received a gender reassignment surgery that would allow the narrator to be sexually assaulted by "Troy" and his friends whenever they wanted.

"Some of them even bit my neck & gave me hickeys," the last paragraph of the journal entry reads. "In fact, you have even forced me to be a prostitute on the streets so you can keep all the money. Once I tried to run away and you caught me and beat me up so now I won't ever do that again."

SIDE NOTE: The main reason I decided to tell this story in a longwinded, multi-part format is to give you, dear reader, something close to my experience as I peeled back the layers of this story from its start to conclusion.

Not trying to over-explain things here, but many of the lurid and complex details mentioned in this story are far too important to not expound upon as background for when the case later goes from the investigator's desk to the courtroom.

Francis Craven's memory deserves dignity and every detail mentioned in this story about his private life before his death is written with the sole intention of telling the most accurate and transparent story possible.

At any rate, investigators were certain the writing in the notebooks was by Craven, namely due to connecting the dots with numerous references to diapers and the narrator being treated "like a baby," which tracked with the evidence recovered from the little locked closet at the St. Williams rectory.

The notebooks also mentioned "Troy" had one friend in particular and other associates who also participated in the sexual and physical abuse of the narrator.

In that moment, "Troy" was the first name resembling anything close to a suspect who would have had a motive to physically harm Craven.

As previously reported in the first installment of this series, the only people investigators could find at this point who'd ever had cause to be angry with Craven were the parishioners at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Tuscaloosa.

Indeed, members of the parish eventually had enough and approached the leadership of the diocese in Birmingham to say they had grown to resent Craven because of his excessive spending on electronics for the Tuscaloosa rectory while the church tottered on the verge of bankruptcy.

This ultimately spurred his reassignment to St. Williams.

Even with this bit of background, Pearson and others were at a complete loss trying to interpret what they found in the Guntersville rectory and wisely began to consult experts around law enforcement.

The investigation initially turned up contacts in the LGBTQ+ community and provided promising leads, while also proving a formative experience for Pearson as he grew as a crimefighter.

"We started asking the other police, 'do you know anybody who might could help us figure this out?' and an officer I knew on nightshift was very knowledgeable and gave us a contact," Pearson told Patch. "The guy we ended up talking to had gotten himself ordained as a kind of priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church or something like it."

It was a strange encounter at first as Pearson walked up to a mobile home deep in the woods of southern Tuscaloosa County. Pearson's a member of the Church of Christ to this day and, once inside the trailer, his eyes were drawn to the candles, crucifixes and other religious iconography he didn't fully understand.

Pearson described it years later as "like a kind of confessional in a church."

"That guy was patient, though, answered every question and was as professional as he could be," Pearson said. "At first, we were thinking the case was some kind of S&M thing. But this guy said 'no, we call it bondage and discipline,' so he said Craven probably liked being tied up and humiliated, but not for the pain. This meant we could just about rule out he died being tortured during some kind of consensual sexual act. Back then during that investigation, I found out there was a very tight network of homosexual men and lesbian women in Tuscaloosa. A lot of them knew who each other were and supported each other and I had several more come to me later on and tell me stuff."

Pearson borrowed a quote from Charles Dickens when he reflected that the case was "the best of times and worst of times in some ways," with the good coming in the way of trustworthy contacts that helped in later cases and the bad being his reassignment out of the homicide unit.

"But all that did was muddy the waters, really," he said years later. "We had guys contact us and say 'I met this priest one time and he took me in and fed me and helped me out.' We interviewed them and they were all men and all homosexuals. They said he never tried anything sexual with them and it was never anything like that.

"We only had one guy who was from Tuscaloosa and said the priest asked him to change his diaper, maybe give him a bottle and hug him," Pearson added. "He was a drifter and went to Holy Spirit looking for a handout. I always felt he had been coached to know what to say. ... We managed to downplay a lot of that as much as possible when it got to the courtroom."

The Trail Warms Up

Joe Pearson's partner in the homicide unit, Dennis Howard Levins, was a polarizing figure in local law enforcement. A decorated Marine who served in Vietnam, Levins was from the Baby Boom generation of cops who came before Pearson.

Pearson was a rookie homicide detective who initially wanted to learn from the older investigator and declined at every opportunity in the present to speak ill of his former partner, who passed away in 2021.

Still, numerous qualified sources in this story independently offered up that Pearson's career as a homicide investigator was stunted after he was taken off the case due to the overt actions of his partner.

As one former officer speaking on background told Patch, "[Levins] was a good investigator, and for every person who criticizes him, you'll probably find someone who thought he was a genius."

However, if someone was looking for the source of leaks to the local media following Craven's murder, one of the best starting points could be Tuscaloosa News reporter Harry Satterwhite's working relationship with Levins.

Satterwhite is a practicing attorney in Mobile and did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story. It should also be said here that he was a young reporter and numerous sources insisted to Patch that he "printed the information he was given."

Additionally, defense attorneys would later praise Satterwhite's work and even said information from the public defender's office was leaked to the newspaper reporter in the hopes of shifting the public narrative around the case.

This is a fairly common occurrence in a business where information is currency and, to be crystal clear, this reporter doesn't hold it against Satterwhite for how he did his job.

On Nov. 12, 1989, Satterwhite penned a glowing article on Levins after a big break in the case, where Levins badmouthed the homicide unit he had recently been reassigned from. While Levins insisted that no one person could be credited with the latest break in the case, he didn't seem to mind his photo appearing alone on the top fold of the Tuscaloosa News, accompanied by the headline "Priest Probe Overcame Controversy."

Had you asked folks reading their newspaper that day, you'd likely be given the impression that the case had been solved.

But if you asked the few former investigators and officers still around today who remember it, they will be just as likely to twist their faces up at the thought of the photo, before immediately lamenting the damage it did to the unit's public reputation in the wake of the story.

Levins felt he had a mountain of evidence but didn't have a clue how poorly his theory and the laudatory story would age in the coming months.

By every single account gathered from numerous sources on this story, Levins gave Tuscaloosa County Homicide Unit Commander Warren Miller fits with how he conducted himself, both behind closed doors and out in the public.

Inside the homicide unit office, Levins was known for grabbing cigarettes from other investigators' packs without asking and had cleared out a kind of supply closet to use as his office.

He also developed a reputation for having little interest in following up on assault cases and other violent crimes that didn't involve a dead body. But even with his seeming devotion to murder cases, he had never broken a big case to receive the bold headlines and public praise.

Miller told Satterwhite that Levins was finally stripped of his status as an investigator in May 1989 because of his independent nature, for not being a team player and for his public criticism of the homicide unit. His partner, Tuscaloosa Police officer Joe Pearson, became collateral damage and was given the boot along with Levins.

Guntersville Police Captain Carl Fulmer gave a direct quote for the story about Levins being "a team player," before the newspaper then paraphrased Miller saying the opposite just a few paragraphs later.

Levins was candid in the local paper as he aimed his criticism at the reputation of the underfunded six-investigator homicide unit, saying murders weren't being solved because the unit was overburdened with cases.

Still, before the story praising Levins and after he was put back on patrol, he grew even more convinced he could crack the case and went so far as to approach Tuscaloosa County Sheriff Beasor Walker to ask if he could take on Craven's murder investigation by himself and on his own time while not on patrol. The sheriff is the most powerful law enforcement official in the county, after all, and in Tuscaloosa County has the final say on how the Tuscaloosa (Metro) Violent Crimes Unit operates and handles its cases.

Sheriff Walker was first elected in 1970 and is a legendary figure who looms large over this and many other stories. A one-time Army captain who earned a Distinguish Service Cross for his decisive and effective actions near Wullsoneid, Germany in 1945, he was honored after the war for his documented killing of multiple Nazi combatants and for leading a successful assault on a key German position.

It's said that Levins, also a Marine combat veteran from the Vietnam era, told Sheriff Walker that he could have it solved in two weeks if put back on the case and outside of the purview of the homicide unit. Levins felt he knew the case front to back and could crack it without the red tape or ideological and personal politics dividing the homicide unit.

Months removed from the murder, the leads were nil and the trail was cold, so Sheriff Walker figured it wouldn't hurt to put some renewed focus on the open investigation and since it was in the sheriff's office's jurisdiction, he gave the case to Levins on Thursday, Oct. 12, 1989.

"After me and Dennis got moved out of the unit, we really hadn't heard anything about the case for months," Pearson remembered of the investigation years later. "I’d still get calls but we really didn't have anything."

Levins and Pearson were also taken off the case at a time when Homicide Commander Warren Miller was facing unrelenting pressure to produce results during one of the most difficult periods in the evolutionary history of criminal investigations.

Indeed, in less than two years and at a time when serial killers dominated headlines, investigators had been pretty much stumped on three different high-profile murders that had yet to be solved by the time Levins and Pearson were both back on patrol.

This violent stretch began in the summer of 1987 when University of Alabama graduate student Chanda Fehler was believed to have been abducted from the Riverside swimming pool on campus.

Her killer attempted to sink her body with cinder blocks before it later surfaced and was recovered from the Black Warrior River northeast of Tuscaloosa. The case remains open to this day.

November 1987 then saw 29-year-old James Tilley, known on the streets as "Short Round," shot in an execution-style killing before his body was dumped at an old ballpark in Elrod that is now the site of a volunteer fire department.

The case was cold for over two decades before Terry Ray “Tico” Snow entered a guilty plea to manslaughter in Tilley's death 26 years later and received a suspended 15-year sentence from Circuit Court Judge Brad Almond.

In an unrelated case just a few years before that conviction, Snow was indicted twice in the killing of his girlfriend in 1997 but was never convicted after serious questions were raised in the courtroom over bribery and extortion. He was released in January 2023 after serving a sentence for an unrelated assault.

At this point, it's worth noting that the late Doug Turner, a longtime Northport Police officer, was the lead investigator on the first two unsolved cases prior to Craven's murder.

To paraphrase what a couple of local law enforcement officials told me about the man, Turner was a highly respected investigator and a meticulous note-taker — one of the best, the sources said — and had a keen knack for observation. Turner died on April 1 at the age of 79.

His partner on the two unsolved cases, though, was Dennis Levins.

More than two decades before any breaks in the Tilley case, Craven's murder and the two aforementioned killings had yet to be solved and the public outcry for answers was beginning to boil over.

In the wake of the newspaper story where Levins was praised for his break in the Craven case, Miller and District Attorney Charley Freeman were reportedly fuming behind closed doors as they read the most intimate opinions on, and details of, the case being offered up by a cavalier patrol deputy who had been given the case to work on in his spare time — like Sheriff Walker throwing a bone to a begging dog.

These factors worked in concert to create a regrettable dynamic as it related to justice for Francis Craven and, 34 years later, is pretty much accepted as gospel among those closest to the case as a reason progress in the investigation was delayed for as long as it was.

Enter Jerry Wayne Taylor.

Suspect Suspects

Nearly 500 miles from Tuscaloosa, confessed serial killer Theodore Robert Bundy died in the electric chair at a Florida prison on Jan. 24, 1989 — exactly two weeks to the day since Francis Craven's charred corpse had been discovered on a heavily wooded dirt road in northern Tuscaloosa County.

The lead-up to the execution was a staple of network news and press coverage following his widely televised apology tour, where Bundy told a national audience that pornography was to blame for his acts of murderous depravity.

Approaching death, Bundy even managed to cause a little more mass hysteria by telling all of America that he became such a monster because of the accessibility to pornography.

Just another panic.

Indeed, there was much hand-wringing over the thought of psychotic, lone-wolf killers roaming the country, especially in a state like Alabama — a state found to have been both a busy thoroughfare and hunting ground for some of the most notorious murderers in American history.

More than a decade before his execution, Bundy appeared emboldened after he escaped custody in Colorado and embarked on a heinous, multi-state killing spree targeting young female college students that culminated in a brutal spree assault on a sorority house at Florida State University that became the act of violence he is most remembered for.

There are still local cops who insist they could, at the very least, prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Bundy passed through Tuscaloosa during his final period of activity. However, nothing conclusive has ever connected him with any unsolved cases in the area.

Bundy's execution was also a top-fold story in the Tuscaloosa News the morning he met his end.

The reason I decided to bring up Bundy is because of one cold case in particular, which prompted the formation of the Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit and saw cold case investigators in Tuscaloosa County briefly consider Bundy as a suspect in the 1973 murder of University of Alabama student Paula Ellis.

ALSO READ: How An Unsolved Murder Led To The Creation Of The Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit

This is the year before Bundy's first confirmed murder in 1974 and is nearly impossible considering he moved from Seattle to Utah to enroll in law school during the same year and was never suspected of murders in the Deep South until his highly publicized escape several years later.

Ellis was last seen alive on Good Friday 1973 after leaving with her bike to go to a midnight concert by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on Woods Quad.

It was a sunny, pastoral Easter morning when her partially nude body was found in an overgrown ditch near a busy intersection in Northport and within walking distance of Hicks Barbecue.

The case has never been solved.

As Patch previously reported in a deep-dive story on the open murder investigation, it remains Tuscaloosa County's oldest unsolved cold case.

This brief case study and accompanying local anecdote are offered here as a kind of primer when looking through the lens of a forensic historian in 2024 as we work to make sense of the perspectives, competing realities and biases that united and divided local law enforcement, the judiciary and the public across the state as the Francis Craven murder case trudged forward.

'Tunnel Vision'

Former homicide investigator Joe Pearson, a Tuscaloosa Police officer at the time, recalled in the present day that a little more than a month after Craven's body was discovered that Oakman Police Chief Mike Cain contacted the homicide unit with information on a heavily tattooed and scraggly ne'er-do-well who'd been arrested as part of a group accused of a robbery-turned-homicide in nearby Walker County that left a Domino's Pizza delivery driver dead.

Pearson let out a heavy and frustrated sigh sitting at his kitchen table in a house that overlooks the original scene where Francis Craven was killed when he thought back on first learning that a real case was being made against a solitary drifter from Walker County.

"When I heard that about Jerry Taylor, I just knew they had gotten the wrong guy," Pearson told Patch three decades later.

Everything he had deduced up to that point said the murder was far too personal and appeared too premeditated to have been the work of an alcoholic drifter picked up by a priest who was already on a fairly tight travel schedule as he tried to get back to his parish for evening mass.

Just as important, the drifter suspect also had connections to Atlanta, which this reporter theorizes made Taylor an even easier target to pin a brutal murder on.

This is probably the best time to pause and offer a bit of insight from legendary FBI criminal profiler and behavioral science pioneer John Douglas. You may not know his name but if you've made it this far in the series, there's no doubt you know his work.

While lauded today for his hit nonfiction memoir "Mindhunter," which was turned into a short-lived but popular Netflix series, he was a polarizing figure for his innovative theories about anticipating criminal psychology before having a known suspect in high-profile cases like the Centennial Park bombing at the 1996 Olympics and the Atlanta child murders in the early 1980s.

In the Atlanta child murders case, it was Douglas who made the difference in convincing a jury that Wayne Bertram Williams was responsible for at least the majority of the unsolved killings.

It's a concept that he stresses in several different ways throughout his numerous books and lectures:

"To understand the artist you must first understand their art."

Williams, a Black man, was suspected in up to 30 murders of Black children in the Atlanta area and panic initially gripped the "City Too Busy To Hate" amid rumors of White supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan snatching up Black children from the sidewalks within walking distance of their homes.

It was an easy conclusion to reach at that time given the social turbulence of the era.

Nevertheless, Douglas received substantial pushback at first from the local Black community in Atlanta when he was asked to advise local and state investigators and prosecutors on the case.

For a time, he was a pariah in the Peach State and law enforcement community after applying his misunderstood scientific approach to profiling killers and went public with his theory that only a young Black man would be able to operate unnoticed for so long and in broad daylight as he abducted and killed numerous children and young people in their own predominantly Black communities.

It was the single-most logical theory offered in the investigation up to that point, in an age where the hysteria over, and misunderstanding of, serial killers was building toward a fever pitch.

Williams was convicted in the murder of a 27-year-old man and, despite the frequent killings ceasing altogether once he was behind bars, he was never tried for any of the other young victims.

Just a few short and violent years removed from Wayne Williams becoming a household name in the Southeast for the Atlanta child murders, a smalltown police chief from Walker County figured he was onto something.

He'd surmised that the drifter and murder suspect with the bushy salt-and-pepper beard they had locked up in the local jail over a month after the murder seemed to fit the psychotic hitchhiker profile posed by Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Deputy Dennis Levins.

It was a theory many in the present day speculate Oakman Police Chief Mike Cain surely read about in the papers as Levins trotted out the drifter theory to his contact at the Tuscaloosa News.

Jerry Wayne Taylor was 40 years old at the time and had already earned a reputation as a kind of regional vagrant, small-time criminal and county jail frequent-flyer.

In a thorough examination of court records, newspaper archives and hours of independent interviews with more than a dozen sources, it can be objectively said that the guy did seem to pop up all over the place like the titular character in the classic song "Sympathy for the Devil" by The Rolling Stones.

Indeed, everywhere he went, Taylor appeared to be the first one on the shortlist to be picked up when authorities had a murder with details that didn't make sense or if they needed a quick arrest to placate a worried public.

While one person who knew Taylor told a newspaper reporter that he was "a free spirit" and a gentle soul, the fact he was developed as a suspect in so many open murder investigations makes sense, too, considering his lifestyle and the moral panic over the occult and widespread fear of serial killers roaming the highways and suburbs in the late 1980s.

Nevertheless, Taylor fit the profile formulated by Levins after that fateful call from the Oakman Police Department. By this time, Levins had already posited his unshakeable belief that Craven had picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be his killer and was reinvigorated by a new lead in the case.

Picking up a hitchhiker was an act that seemed out of character for Francis Craven, though.

Fort Myers, Florida, native Jeanne Murphy — one of the last people to see Craven alive — later told an Associated Press reporter that Craven respectfully admonished her and asked that she teach her children the dangers of giving rides to strangers after her son once suggested Craven pick up a hitchhiker as they drove past a man standing on the side of the road holding out his thumb.

The initial case against Taylor also failed to mention that another set of footprints was found at the crime scene by Pearson, who said the tracks clearly showed one person dragging the body to the burn pile, while a different set of footprints appeared to show someone standing around near the van a few feet away, as if they were watching everything unfold.

Keep in mind: The late Harold O'Quinn Sr., who first discovered Craven's body while out on a walk, had already been ruled out thanks to his footprints being quickly identified after he had walked a circle around the burn pile trying to get a better look at what was on fire.

Still, that phone call from Oakman was the lead Levins had been itching for after initially posing the theory. The 1980s were the halcyon days for highway-prowling serial killers and, culturally speaking, it was likely an easy conclusion to reach in such a brutal murder case like Craven's.

Let's pause here and define the concept of "confirmation bias" — a term first coined by English psychologist Peter Wason as "the tendency of people to favor information that confirms or strengthens their beliefs or values and is difficult to dislodge once affirmed."

Levins later testified in court that Taylor became a suspect "sometime in February [1989]," after Oakman Police Chief Mike Cain contacted investigators in Tuscaloosa County to tell them that a hitchhiker in Oakman told someone who had given him a ride that he had killed someone.

Career investigator Brian Barnett, who was a University of Alabama undergraduate intern working as the very first investigator in the Tuscaloosa County Public Defender's Office at the time of Taylor's arrest, said sitting at his office desk in the present day that Levins had the bug put in his ear about Taylor by the Oakman police chief and never formulated on his own that the drifter should be considered as a suspect.

"We discussed confirmation bias as one of the factors with Levins and about his theory and it turned out to be a very textbook example of that," Barnett told Patch. "I don't know if there was any malice on his part associated with that or not. It's just one of the perils of getting tunnel vision on a case like this."

Taylor was charged with murder three days before the Tuscaloosa News story ran that November heaping praise on Levins for cracking the case.

It was around this time that a public defender named Jim Standridge was appointed by District Court Judge Gay Lake to defend the accused murderer. Brian Barnett was then enlisted as his investigator on the case.

"Jerry Taylor was a street person and didn't do himself any favors in how he behaved for the cameras," Standridge told Patch years later when asked about his first impression of his indigent client. "He had been on the street for a long time and had some substance-use issues. He was a rough sort of person in how he lived, but honestly, he was friendly. We didn't know if he was guilty or not because we were just getting into the case."

As far as quality suspects go and based on the evidence already offered for public consumption, Taylor seemed pretty guilty going into his preliminary hearing that December, just a couple of weeks before the one-year anniversary of the murder.

Taylor has volumes of county jail records for petty offenses across the Southeast in the 1980s, particularly in Atlanta. Despite listing a Berry home address in court and referred to as a resident of Oakman in the press, his defense team said Taylor's main base of operation at the time of the murder was Atlanta, where he would sleep in abandoned houses and collect aluminum cans to sell to a nearby recycling center.

Taylor ran into plenty of trouble in Georgia, sure, but the murder investigation in Tuscaloosa County was far from the only one interested in the drifter as a suspect.

Less than a year and a half before Craven was murdered, the partially nude body of Wilson Monroe Matthews was found on July 7, 1987, in a cane break in Hendersonville, North Carolina — a small city with a present population of a little more than 15,000.

Matthews was discovered with a tie-dyed T-shirt "wrapped around his neck, under his shoulder, around his back and in his mouth," according to one report picked up by national wire services.

An autopsy and evidence at the scene also suggested Matthews had been sexually assaulted and his body was near a homeless encampment that was bulldozed shortly after the killing.

Taylor later received a suspended sentence, thanks in part to the work of Standridge and Barnett, and was given time served after pleading no contest to manslaughter in 1992.

To reiterate: this was the era of the serial killer — many of whom took advantage of the interstate system running through Alabama. Names like Ted Bundy, Richard Starrett, Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas, just to menion a few of the relevant ones.

In fact, Levins at one point during Taylor's preliminary hearing said he had initially suspected David Allen Brimmer — a convicted "drifter" serial killer operating in the Deep South who was found guilty of two murders. Brimmer's most infamous murder was that of a special education teacher in Tennessee who was strangled to death in October 1989, roughly nine months after Craven's body was discovered.

An Associated Press wire story even mentioned to a national audience on March 16, 1990, that Brimmer was considered a suspect in the Craven case. The story appeared on the front page of the Gadsden Times, complete with a headshot photo of Brimmer, which is published at the beginning of this section.

Following a dateline from Clinton, Tennessee, the lede said:

"Brimmer was bound over to a grand jury in the slaying of a Tennessee teacher as the investigation into at least three others murders continued, including that of a priest in Alabama."

During Jerry Taylor's preliminary hearing, Levins pointed to the fact that Brimmer made money by donating blood and did so at one point in Birmingham — a stopping point on the straight-shot interstate system connecting Atlanta to Tuscaloosa and beyond.

The accusations against Taylor were at the forefront, though, and the suspicions certainly seemed to suggest the possibility that he had been walking along the interstate with a thumb out as Francis Craven drove north toward Guntersville and decided to be a Good Samaritan by giving a ride to a bum.

Folks living in Tuscaloosa at this time will also remember the brutal May 1988 murder of Judy Moody, a vivacious and civic-minded 41-year-old woman who had been in her late 20s when she lost in a runoff for the Tuscaloosa mayor's office in 1976.

Moody, a resident of Etowah County in 1988, was reported missing after leaving a private club in Atlanta, where she had attended a wedding and was planning a stay with her brother. The Gadsden Times reported that her decomposed and dismembered body was found three weeks later near an abandoned well in the Munford area of Talladega County.

Moody's murder has never been solved and area investigators admitted in the months that followed that the trail went cold because they were too understaffed and busy with fresh cases to keep a heavy focus on solving her murder.

News coverage from 1988 said investigators briefly considered convicted serial rapist and murderer Richard Starrett as a potential suspect but leads ran out after a few busy months for homicide detectives in Talladega County as they publicly feared that the area had developed a reputation as a "dumping ground" for serial killers using the interstate system.

Tuscaloosa Mayor Al DuPont, a member of the local Catholic parish, even compared Moody's murder to Craven's when asked for comment on the day of Craven's funeral.

"It sure is a tragedy, just like what happened to Judy Moody," DuPont told the Tuscaloosa News. "This is really a tragic thing that's happened."

Was it possible that the drifter from Walker County or some infamous serial killer was responsible for both murders?

Joe Pearson didn't think so and neither did public defender Jim Standridge.

Standridge could only speak for the murder charges against Taylor that he was able to dispel and said years later that he and investigator Brian Barnett, who is now the director of Special Services at the Tuscaloosa County District Attorney's Office, began to chase any leads to prove their client's innocence.

This would be a tall order, though, considering that Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Deputy Dennis Levins insisted on the merits of the evidence he had gathered and claimed could prove that Taylor was the killer.

At this point, the smallest details really began to matter.

For example, earlier in this story, we intentionally cited a court document that said Craven's body was found with an electrical cord around his neck that was connected to a steel dog leash attached to a leather handle.

But in throwing in some misdirection in the story, we left out the fact Pearson insisted years later that this was not the case. Instead, he explained that he noticed the cord and dog leash were tangled together and appeared to have been thrown on the body in a rush, along with other garbage believed to have come from Craven's van.

Craven was known as a messy individual and one who would often wad up a wrapper or crush an empty can before tossing it over his shoulder into the back of his van, so Pearson theorized the electrical cord and dog leash were likely thrown on the fire as an accelerant as opposed to being used to torture Craven in the moments before his death.

Another inconsistency in the prosecution's case was presented in the testimony of Taylor's sister-in-law, who Levins spoke with on multiple occasions.

Levins testified in a sworn affidavit obtained by Patch that he first spoke with Townley resident Sharon Taylor on Oct. 20, 1989 — less than a month before Jerry Taylor was taken into custody.

During that introductory interview, Sharon Taylor told Levins that Jerry Taylor came to her house between 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. the day of the murder. She claimed he was dressed in faded pants that were wet to the knee, Levins testified, with one pants leg appearing to be torn and the other showing red flecks of what seemed to be blood.

The damp pants are an interesting detail, especially considering that Craven's burned-out GMC van was found in about two feet of water after it had become stuck in the mud on a logging road off of Highway 69 — roughly half an hour's drive from Route 1 in Townley.

To this end, Pearson remembered that rain clouds began to gather to the west as they wrapped up their work at the initial crime scene on Old Bull Slough Road and investigators found the van almost a week later after a winter rain storm deluged Tuscaloosa County for several days.

When the heavy rain finally subsided, and nearly a week after the van was believed to have been set on fire, a break in the weather resulted in the discarded vehicle being spotted by a police helicopter and retrieved by investigators.

"Taylor had cuts on his upper left arm and had a burn on his wrist," Levins said of Sharon Taylor's story ahead of the preliminary hearing. "He was carrying a piece of plastic which he had wrapped around a pair of black canvas slip-on shoes, a belt, and other items. He also smelled of gasoline."

Levins went on to say that Sharon Taylor informed him her brother-in-law then bathed, cut his hair and shaved off his facial hair.

"When he left her home, he wore the black canvas slip-on shoes which she had earlier seen him carrying," he testified. The shoes fit the exact description of those Craven was believed to have been wearing the day of his murder.

Sharon Taylor also told Levins the shoes appeared to have been worn in an unusual manner when looking at the area over the top of the toes. This is another critical detail that would've been impossible for Sharon Taylor to have known unless she was telling the truth or had been primed with information about the case — information that had not been released to the public.

As Patch previously reported, Craven was a diabetic and Guntersville resident Florence Stamm had given him a pair of black canvas slip-on shoes she had purchased at K-Mart in Albertville after buying a pair for her husband that he liked.

Craven suffered from diabetic neuropathy in his feet — a condition commonly referred to as "diabetic foot."

According to Joan Bacon, Craven's sister, a side-effect of this nagging affliction saw the priest's toenails grow in a way that caused his toes to "hump up."

Another key piece of eyewitness testimony used by the prosecution to establish probable cause during Taylor's preliminary hearing was presented after Levins spoke with Jeff Norris and Brent Keith on Nov. 7, 1989.

The two men first told Levins they were in front of Norris' grandmother's home near Lake Tuscaloosa— approximately three miles from where Craven's still-smoldering body was found.

"They told me that when they were in front of the grandmother's home, a blue and silver minivan drove down to the driveway of the home, stopped, backed into the driveway, turned around and went back toward Tierce Patton Road," Levins said. "They said they saw that the van had a short antenna on its roof and an antenna on the front. They both said the side windows to the van were tinted."

They allegedly told Levins they were roughly 30-40 feet away from the GMC van when they spotted it, noting that the driver was a White man, approximately 35-40 years old, with a beard, full mustache and "pulled back hair."

"They told me they saw the van and its driver two more times within the next several minutes," Levins testified. "The next time they saw the van and driver, they were walking up the road toward Norris' home when the van drove past them from the direction of Tierce Patton Road headed back toward the grandmother's home. The van went out of their sight.

"A short time later they heard tires squeal and shortly thereafter the van passed them again headed toward Tierce Patton Road again," Levins added. "The van passed them again and went out of their sight. After that, they went down the road toward the lake and found tire skid or scratch-off type tracks in the area from which the sound of the squealing tires had come."

Levins said Norris and Keith agreed to look at a photo lineup and one in person that both included Taylor and the men identified him as being the driver of the van that they saw. This was enough for Levins to secure an arrest warrant and charge Taylor with murder the next day.

With Taylor locked up in the Tuscaloosa County Jail awaiting a preliminary hearing date in December, Standridge and Barnett set out to peel back the layers on their client's story and were stunned by what they found.

"Dennis Levins claimed to find these pieces of evidence and they simply did not exist," Standridge told Patch over three decades later. "When put to the test, we proved that."

The Center Cannot Hold

Opposite Standridge in Judge Lake's courtroom were District Attorney Charley Freeman and Assistant DA Tommy Smith.

In the present day, Standridge and Smith are both well-known figures when discussing the history of the local legal community and both men eventually served as Tuscaloosa County's district attorney.

Years after the prosecution of Jerry Taylor, Smith defeated Standridge, the appointed incumbent, in one of the ugliest local political races seen in recent memory — one that culminated in Smith's 2000 conviction for using the National Crime Information Center's database to mine information that could be used to harm the reputation of his political opponent.

Smith did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

More than a decade before that widely publicized political spat, Tuscaloosa News reporter Doris Flora provided in-depth coverage of Taylor's preliminary hearing that was broadcast to a national audience via the New York Times wire service.

Seven witnesses were called to testify on the first day of the hearing and more than 30 witnesses had been issued subpoenas. Former Tuscaloosa County Public Defender's Office investigator Brian Barnett said it had to have been the longest preliminary hearing in the county's history up to that point as prosecutors sought a grand jury indictment on Taylor.

First to take the stand in succession were the two men who spotted Craven's GMC van on Tierce Patton Road and had allegedly identified Taylor from a police lineup.

Norris testified that the man he saw didn't have a full beard, but had a mustache and a scruffy, unshaven look about him. It should be mentioned here that Taylor had a full beard at the hearing.

Levins was the next witness sworn in and said for the first time publicly that the results of an autopsy concluded Craven's head was likely crushed by the van.

As previously mentioned, Pearson had recovered hair and flecks of blood several inches down in the sand, suggesting the priest was struck with a blunt object more than once as opposed to being crushed by the wheel of a two-ton minivan.

"When Taylor’s defense asked me to testify for him, I was technically going against the DA and I really didn't know his defense attorney at all," Pearson told Patch. "But at that point, it was clear Jerry Wayne Taylor was in jail the day before the murder happened and the day after and there was no way possible he did it."

Nevertheless, Levins mentioned the blood and hair samples were recovered from soil in a tire track at the scene on Old Bull Slough Road and noted the drag marks to where the body was set on fire.

He also said one of Craven's feet appeared to have been run over by the van.

Tuscaloosa County Medical Examiner Kenneth Warner testified during the hearing that the cause of death for Craven was multiple force trauma to the head which could have been caused by being run over by a vehicle or struck multiple times with a blunt object.

Warner then said Craven's body was found with a metal dog leash wrapped around the neck, before concluding that Craven was dead before he was dowsed in gasoline and set on fire.

Norris was on the stand when Standridge questioned him about selecting a different man from the lineup, to which he responded that he first picked one who was "similar" to the person he saw.

"I was trying to give them an idea of what to look for," Norris admitted, before testifying that he made the identification of Taylor from a photo lineup first shown to him by Levins, before he later pointed to Taylor in physical lineup.

Barnett, working as an intern investigator in the public defender's office, said years later that this revelation showed to just about everyone on both sides of the case that Levins had likely guided the two men into identifying the suspect Levins believed to have been the one who had committed the murder.

"They had been given the photo lineup and they said 'it kinda looks like him,' then they turned around when they saw the lineup and identified him as who they saw," Barnett said with a laugh in the present day. "Knowing that, you have to throw out everything they said as evidence because it's clear you’ve already planted that thought in their heads."

The preliminary hearing's first day closed after Jeanne Murphy and Florence Stamm took the stand and testified about the clothes and shoes they had gifted the priest. They also said there were at least two jumpsuits that Craven was known to wear.

This was relevant to the prosecution after Levins said under oath that he had recovered a tan jumpsuit, some papers bearing Taylor's name and a suitcase from an abandoned barn in Walker County where Taylor was known to sleep.

Judge Lake ruled at the conclusion of the lengthy preliminary hearing in December that there was indeed enough probable cause to charge Taylor with murder and his case was bound over for consideration by the grand jury to determine if there was enough evidence to hand down an indictment.

Standridge and Barnett were not convinced the evidence collected by Levins would ever hold up under serious scrutiny by the grand jury and quickly found their first big break in trying to prove Taylor's innocence.

As three different grand juries eventually learned, Taylor's defense team was able to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused drifter couldn't have been in Alabama to commit the murder of Francis Craven sometime during the day on Jan. 7, 1989.

The dogged legwork from this case also later played a key role in the defense that helped Taylor avoid a prison sentence and murder conviction when he was later extradited back to North Carolina on the murder charge in Hendersonville.

"Jerry Wayne Taylor is an interesting case," Standridge told Patch. "He's the only person I've ever seen to be charged with three murders in three different places and never convicted of any of them."

District Attorney Charley Freeman began to seriously doubt the evidence at this point and even told the Tuscaloosa News in March 1990 that he was considering recommending the grand jury return a "no bill" and not move forward with prosecuting Taylor.

Even if the grand jury opted to take his proposed recommendation, he explained to the local press, the case could still be returned to the grand jury for consideration if new evidence surfaced connecting Taylor to the murder.

"I disagree with Charles," Levins told the Tuscaloosa News amid speculation over the charges being dropped once the case was bound over to the grand jury. "I think we do have a case and I believe there is a chance the case can be won — that a jury can be convinced that Jerry Taylor committed the murder."

For Levins at this point, his focus seemed to be locked in on Taylor's guilt and his reputation was on the line as he publicly stuck by his theory in a way that reflected it.

Nevertheless, the first hole poked in the theory posited by Levins came when Taylor's defense team discovered he had been in jail on a shoplifting charge in Atlanta the day before Francis Craven was murdered.

"We went to Atlanta and [Taylor] had told us the people he was associated with," Standridge told Patch. "We found they had a receipt on file where Jerry had sold some cans the day before the murder. Brian Barnett did the investigative work that allowed us to show Jerry didn't do it and he was the real hero on that."

Indeed, Barnett retrieved a receipt from A&A Recycling dated Jan. 8, 1989, for 24 pounds of aluminum cans that Taylor was paid $11.28 for, before the defense offered up receipts from seven different other transactions by their client to show that he tended to stay around Atlanta — again, collecting cans and sleeping in abandoned houses.

Barnett was quick to shake his head when told that Standridge, a close friend to this day, referred to him as the "hero" of the Jerry Wayne Taylor chapter of this story, whose research worked toward the ultimate goal of blind justice.

"We were interviewing Jerry just about every day and we wanted to try to nip this thing as quick as we could because he wasn't getting out of jail anytime soon," Barnett told Patch. "We asked him, hypothetically, about what he would do if he got arrested."

Taylor explained that it usually went something like this: He would get arrested and booked into the local jail for a night or so. He'd sober up and, once released, would set about collecting aluminum scrap to sell at a nearby recycling center and garbage dump for drinking money.

"This was before the internet and everything else, so we had to go to the recycling center in Atlanta," Barnett said years later. "The guy running it told us he knew Taylor and had been buying from him for years. He had these big boxes of receipts and said it was going to take him a while.

"He called me back probably two weeks later and said he had the receipts," Barnett added in the present day as he raised his fists in celebration remembering the revelation.

While this proved a substantive victory that yielded real progress for the defense, District Attorney Charley Freeman seems to have lost all confidence in the suspect's guilt after he ignored the urging from Levins to throw the book at Jerry Taylor. Instead, it was Freeman who requested Sharon Taylor — Jerry Taylor's sister-in-law — to take two lie-detector tests to possibly add insight into the credibility of her testimony during the preliminary hearing that was propped up as a key piece of evidence by the prosecution.

At a continuation of the preliminary hearing in December 1989, Sharon Taylor testified she saw her brother-in-law wearing ill-fitting clothes exactly like those that had been given to Craven during the previous Christmas season.

However, the pressure mounted on the credibility of the story she offered to Levins after the two polygraph tests, the first being administered by a Tuscaloosa Police officer a little more than a month after Taylor was charged and booked into the Tuscaloosa County Jail and before her testimony during the preliminary hearing.

The results of the first lie-detector test were inconclusive but a second polygraph examination conducted the following week by the same investigator found that she was using "some deception" in her responses to relevant questions about her testimony that she had already been asked about the week before.

Sharon Taylor also came clean when she admitted to telling another investigator sometime after the second polygraph test that she had been untruthful in parts of her testimony.

These suspicions then began to cloud around the possibility that Sharon Taylor had perjured herself and compromised the prosecution's strongest piece of evidence.

Under oath, Sharon Taylor also offered up new details regarding the clothes she allegedly saw her brother-in-law wearing, insisting that he was wearing a red, white and blue striped shirt that was far too big for him, while the new pants he also had on were too large for Taylor and had an Alabama insignia on the back pocket.

She later said that weekend she'd seen Taylor wearing a belt with a University of Alabama belt buckle. These details immediately came under harsh scrutiny from the DA's office after Jerry Taylor's defense team offered up evidence suggesting he had been collecting thrown-out cans for pocket change in Atlanta at the time of the murder.

It's worth noting that two other men from Oakman, a father and son, testified Jerry Wayne Taylor had been at their residence at some point on Jan. 8 — another set of testimonies that were refuted by Barnett's dogged investigative work.

Another crucial inconsistency in Sharon's testimony came after she said on the stand that Taylor was first brought to her residence in Townley by Jerry Taylor's sister and her husband in their van.

In a complete departure from the established narrative, Jerry Taylor's brother-in-law then took the stand and said he and his wife had not seen Taylor at all that January. He also pointed out that the van they owned was broken down and not being used during the time of the murder.

At this point, Standridge told Judge Lake that there was no evidence in existence that would implicate his client to Craven's murder.

"Jerry Taylor became a convenient suspect," he said, saying Taylor had "been charged with three or four other murders - of which he was cleared."

He then made the argument that Sharon Taylor's testimony came after the $10,000 reward had been offered by Alabama Gov. Guy Hunt. However, assistant district attorney and Standridge's future political rival Tommy Smith countered by saying there was no evidence of a reward being offered to Sharon Taylor.

Freeman, in standard practice for many district attorneys who take the approach of not "trying the case in the media," declined to comment when asked about the new revelations as prosecutors and investigators began to accept that they had the wrong guy.

"The evidence against Jerry was just completely fabricated and we could reasonably prove [Levins] had participated in the falsifying of information," Standridge told Patch. "[Sharon Taylor] had said there were several pieces of evidence — Craven's clothes — she had seen him with that simply didn't exist."

Freeman even told Tuscaloosa News Executive Editor Don Brown, who was one of my journalism instructors in graduate school, that Standridge's "expert questioning of Sharon Taylor," began to make him question the credibility of her testimony.

After three successive Tuscaloosa County Grand Juries declined to return an indictment on Taylor, Freeman decided to not pursue another attempt but did say his office would not rule out Taylor as a suspect in the future.

He was released that March and would later fail in his attempt to file a civil lawsuit against those responsible for his unjust incarceration.

The Unusual Suspects

Around the time Jerry Taylor was likely first suspected of killing a man near a homeless camp in Hendersonville, North Carolina, Gregory Little was a 16-year-old prostitute learning the ropes on the streets and in the gay nightclubs of Atlanta.

The Gallows was the aptly named watering hole where the wiry grammar school dropout with a weak frame and patchy facial hair regularly worked.

One night he met a boisterous and affable mountain of a man who seemed to have plenty of money to spend and told Little he was a retired Army colonel.

The big and affectionate man took an immediate shine to Little and, by all accounts, the feeling was mutual. Love at first sight, so the cliché goes.

Standing roughly 6'5," the high-energy man already had a reputation for cruising the streets of Atlanta where male prostitutes were known to ply their trade. The city was growing far too fast for its police to stay on top of its caseload and places like The Gallows, where drugs and prostitution were part of doing business, garnered little interest from vice and homicide investigators.

When the two men met in the bar, Little was apparently enamored and the much older man allegedly offered the soft-spoken teenager $200 to leave Atlanta and come live with him not far across the state line in Alabama.

The man promised that if the teenager didn't like the accommodations, Little later testified, he was free to go back to Atlanta and not pay back a dime.

If this saga ended here, it might've proven a love story for the ages.

But Little had no real home to speak of and the cash was in his pocket by the time he got into a truck with a man named David Leitner.

Have a news tip or suggestion on how I can improve Tuscaloosa Patch? Maybe you're interested in having your business become one of the latest sponsors for Tuscaloosa Patch? Email all inquiries to me at ryan.phillips@patch.com.