Free Manifest Injustice by Barry Siegel

September, Macumber learned from his brother that they appeared close to raising the $55,000 bail. Someone in the community had stepped forward, offering to provide a major portion. Bill’s neighbors, including Paul and Shirley Bridgewater, had done the rest, agreeing to put up their homes as collateral. On Tuesday, October 1, in anticipation, Macumber packed up his belongings. Waiting, he listened for the elevator, the sound of someone coming for him. No one appeared that day, though, or the next. Bill worried that he’d be out of writing paper by the end of the week—he hadn’t ordered more tablets because he’d assumed he’d be released by then.
    But on Friday, October 4, Bill’s father came to see him, bearing bad news: They had failed to raise the full bail. One of those involved had backed out. Bill could not hide his dismay. Harold promised that he would keep trying. Again he urged his son to hang in there.
    That same day, later in the afternoon, Macumber received another visitor: John Thomas, the civil attorney representing him in his divorce proceedings. Thomas, too, had disturbing news for Bill, of an entirely different sort: He’d just heard that years before, someone else had confessed to the Scottsdale murders. But neither the county attorney nor the sheriff’s department, Thomas told Macumber, will allow the use of this information in your case. In fact, they will fight to keep it out of the courtroom.
    This was how Macumber first learned of Ernest Valenzuela. In his journal, he vented: “If I knew I was going to die tomorrow I doubt I could or would feel any worse. I’ve been charged with the crime of murder. A crime I did not commit. I have sat here for the last 39 days and been questioned, lied to and who knows what else.… Men from this department have taken the stand and outright lied in an effort to make a better case. The media has done their very best to put me in the worst possible light.… I’ve lost my children, my home, my possessions, my income and my freedom.… I’ve been subjected to every possible indignity and have faced letdown after letdown. After all of this I find that someone else confessed to the crime and that the powers that be choose to ignore that confession. If there is anything more that can possibly happen it lies beyond my imagination.”

 
    CHAPTER 5
    Valenzuela’s Confession
    SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 1974
    Word of Ernest Valenzuela’s confession had not emerged just then by accident. In September, Thomas O’Toole—still a federal public defender, not yet a judge—had followed the news about Bill Macumber’s arrest with mounting unease. O’Toole felt certain that he’d represented the true killer. But what could he do? The question haunted him. He couldn’t shake the memory of Ernest Valenzuela, couldn’t shake the image of that man’s eyes. Valenzuela, he knew, had not remained free for long in 1964, following his confessions to the cops and Dr. Tuchler. Soon after being released that August, he’d been arrested again on a second-degree burglary charge, drawing a four-to-five-year prison sentence. Released once more in the summer of 1967—despite a “very poor conduct record” in the state prison at Florence—he’d waited just ten days before kidnapping a couple, killing the husband and raping the wife. Because the murder and rape occurred on the Gila River Indian Reservation, Valenzuela needed a federal public defender.
    That’s how O’Toole came to represent him, appointed by a magistrate. Valenzuela wrote O’Toole a note the very next day: “Dear Sir, I want to know how the case looks. I also would like to talk to you.… Please let me know how the case looks.” The case, in truth, looked awful to O’Toole. Late on the evening of August 9 and on into the early morning of August 10, Valenzuela had been drinking at a bar in Phoenix with Lamson and Salina Nelson, both Apache Indians. At his request, the couple started to drive Valenzuela to the