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THE INNOCENT MAN:
Ron Williamson

John Grisham (1955)

John Grisham

The Innocent Man (2006) was John Grisham's first true crime book. It is a story about a small-town waitress who was raped and murdered in 1982. Six years later Ron Williamson, a washed-up small-town baseball hero, and his friend Dennis Fritz were unjustly charged and tried based on lying witnesses and tainted evidence. Williamson was sentenced to death and Fritz to life in prison. Click Here

Ron Williamson

Ronald "Ron" Keith Williamson was born February 3, 1953, and raised in Ada, Oklahoma. Williamson was the 41st pick in baseball's 1971 amateur draft, a second-round selection by the Oakland Athletics. He spent the 1972 season primarily with the Coos Bay-North Bend A's. In 1973, he had a poor year with the Key West Conchs. A shoulder injury interrupted his career for the next few years. His father, through a former major league pitcher, got him on with the New York Yankees, where he pitched in their minor league system for parts of 1976 & 1977.  At the age of twenty-four his baseball career was over. He tried to spark further interest in himself from the Yankees camp two years later but was unsuccessful. He played another small stint in the minors but this was cut short due to the nagging shoulder injury. His baseball career was over and he became addicted to drugs and alcohol and suffered from increasingly severe mental illness. He returned to his mother's home and slept twenty hours a day on the couch.

On December 8, 1982, twenty-one year old Debra Sue Carter left her waitressing job at an Ada bar and was found raped and murdered in her apartment the following day. Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson were known to frequent the establishment where Debra worked. Williamson and Fritz were arrested five years later on flimsy testimony. A jailhouse inmate that Fritz had been paired with came forward and stated that Fritz had confessed to the murder. This jailhouse snitch gave a two hour taped interview revealing what Fritz had allegedly confessed to him. This confession came one day before the prosecution would have been forced to drop the charges against Fritz. Another informant testified that she had heard Williamson threaten to harm his mother as he had the victim. According to a witness, Glen Gore, Williamson had also been seen at the bar the night of the murder. Additionally, police had statements from Williamson regarding a dream he had about the crime.

The evidence included expert testimony in hair analysis, which is now regarded as unreliable. The expert concluded that 13 of the 17 hairs found at the crime scene were "microscopically consistent" with those of Fritz and Williamson, and alleged that one of them was a "match." The defense failed to point out that although the hair samples could have implicated the pair, they equally could have cleared them both. Despite his rapidly failing mental health, no motion was made to assess Williamson's competence. Both were found guilty in 1988. Williamson received a death sentence and Fritz was sent to prison for life.

After Fritz's appeals were denied, he contacted the Innocence Project for help. It was learned that the physical evidence was going to be tested due to appeals filed by Ron Williamson's lawyers. Fritz filed an injunction to make sure that the evidence would not be totally consumed until the cases were joined with regard to DNA testing.

DNA testing revealed that neither Fritz nor Williamson deposited the spermatozoa found in the victim. Further testing proved that none of the many hairs that were labeled "matches" belonged to them. The profile obtained from the semen evidence matched Glen Gore, one of the state's witnesses at trial.

After 11 years on death row, Williamson and Fritz were cleared by DNA testing, and were finally freed on April 15, 1999. In 2003 they sued the City of Ada and won a settlement of $500,000. The State of Oklahoma also settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

Glen Gore, the Ada man who had testified against both Williamson and Fritz, was ultimately convicted of the murder of Debra Sue Carter. He was the last person seen with Carter, and also had been seen arguing with her on the night of her death. Although he had submitted hair samples after her murder, these were never processed.

Once Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz had been cleared of murder, Glen Gore eventually came to trial, based on the same DNA evidence that had cleared Fritz and Williamson. This evidence proved that it was Glen Gore's DNA that was left at the scene. On June 24, 2003, Gore was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death but his death sentence was overturned in August 2005. He was eventually convicted at his second trial on June 21, 2006, and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Five years after his exoneration, Williamson died in a nursing home of cirrhosis of the liver. John Grisham read Williamson's obituary in The New York Times and made him and Fritz the subject of his first non-fiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, published in 2006. The book became a bestseller.

On September 28, 2007, as a result of The Innocent Man, Grisham was named in a civil suit in a US District Court, claiming Grisham libeled Pontotoc County, Oklahoma; District Attorney Bill Peterson; former Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent Gary Rogers, and criminalist Melvin Hett. The suit claimed that Grisham, along with two other authors critical of Peterson and his prosecution of murder cases, conspired to commit libel, generate publicity for themselves by placing the plaintiffs in a false light and intentionally inflict emotional distress. The case was dismissed on September 18, 2008,

John Grisham's Best Selling Legal Thrillers

• A Time to Kill (1988) This is a tale of a young lawyer defending a black Vietnam war hero who kills the white druggies who raped his child in tiny Clanton, Mississippi.  The was John Grisham's first novel.

• The Firm (1991) There was a time when the word "lawyer" wasn't synonymous with "criminal," but this legal thriller describes the inner workings of a law firm set up by the Mafia to launder money and concoct tax evasions.

• The Pelican Brief (1992) The heroine of this legal thriller is Darby Shaw, a brilliant Tulane law student who comes up with an ingenious theory to explain the baffling assassinations of two Supreme Court justices in one day. They were shot and strangled by ace international terrorist Khamel, who loves the film Three Days of the Condor, but government gumshoes don't get what connects the deaths. They died so the conservative president, who just wants to be left alone to play golf, will appoint new, conservative justices who will help out a case involving an industrialist who is the enemy of pelicans and other living things. It's all spelled out for them in Darby's brief.

• The Client (1993) Eleven-year-old Mark Sway, taking his kid brother for a smoke behind their Memphis trailer park, witnesses the suicide of a lawyer "driven crazy" by a lethal secret. Before he dies, the man confides to Mark where the body of a recently murdered U.S. senator lies buried, Trailed by the police, the FBI and assorted Mafia types.  The deceased politician was the victim of "a successful New Orleans street thug". Mark retains--for one dollar--the services of Reggie Love, a 50ish female lawyer, to help solve the case.

• The Chamber (1994) Adam Hall is a 26-year-old attorney, fresh out of law school and working at the best firm in Chicago. He might have been humming "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades," if it wasn't for his psychotic Southern grandfather, Sam Cayhall. Cayhall, a card-carrying member of the KKK, is on death row for killing two men. Knowing his uncle will surely die without his legal expertise, Hall comes to the rescue and puts his dazzling career at stake, while digging up a barnyard of skeletons from his family's past.

• The Rainmaker (1995) Rudy Baylor, a new law school graduate, once dreamed of the good life as a corporate attorney. Now he faces joblessness and bankruptcy, unless he can win an insurance case against a heavyweight team of lawyers, a case that starts small but mushrooms into a frightening war of nerve and legal skill that could cost Rudy not only his future, but also his life.

• The Runaway Jury (1996) Millions of dollars are at stake in a huge tobacco company case in Biloxi, and the jury's packed with people who have dirty little secrets. A mysterious young man takes subtle control of the jury as the defense watches helplessly, but they soon realize that he in turn is controlled by an even more mysterious young woman.

• The Partner (1997) This is a story about a lawyer in trouble. Patrick Lanigan had been a young partner in a prominent Southern law firm. He had a beautiful wife, a new baby girl, and a bright future. Then one winter night Patrick was trapped in a burning car; the casket they buried held nothing but ashes. A short distance away, Patrick watched his own burial then fled. A fortune was stolen from his ex-firm's offshore account. And Patrick ran, covering his tracks the whole way. But, now, they've found him.

• The Street Lawyer (1998) This is a novel against anyone, big or little, who treats the homeless as less than human. It begins with an armed, homeless man who calls himself Mister taking hostage of nine attorneys of a huge law firm headquartered in D.C. Among the nine is Michael Brock, an antitrust lawyer who receives a faceful of blood when a police sniper blows away Mister's head. This greedy hotshot is ripe for a moral awakening. The next day, Michael visits the shabby offices of Mister's attorney, Mordecai Green, who explains that Mister and others had been illegally evicted from makeshift housing on orders from a real-estate development company represented by Michael's firm. Inspired by Green and shaken by his firm's complicity, Michael volunteers at a homeless shelter. When a family he meets there dies on the street, and turns out to have been among the evictees, Michael quits his job, goes to work for Green and, using as evidence a file he steals from the firm, aims to sue his former employer on behalf of the evictees.

• The Testament (1999) Troy Phelan, a 78-year-old eccentric and the 10th-richest man in America, is about to read his last will and testament for his estate worth $11 billion. Phelan's three ex-wives, a legion of lawyers, several psychiatrists, and a group of sound technicians wait breathlessly, all eyes glued to digital monitors as they watch the old man read his verdict. But Phelan shocks everyone when he left his entire estate to a mysterious heir in Brazil. Nate O'Riley, a washed-up, alcoholic litigator with two ruined marriages and the IRS on his tail, is dispatched to the Brazilian wetlands in search of a mysterious heir named in the will. After a harrowing trip upriver to a remote settlement in the Pantanal, he finds Rachel Lane, a pure-hearted missionary living with an indigenous tribe and carrying out "God's work." Rachel's dedication and kindness impress the jaded lawyer, so much that a nasty bout of dengue fever leads him to a vision that could change his life.

• The Brethren (2000) The Brethren are three judges who meet in Trumble Prison after being sent there for their various crimes. They spend hours together in the prison library setting up a scam to blackmail rich gay men who are married and who have a lot to lose if their homosexuality is revealed. With the help of their unambitious and dishonest lawyer, they begin to make a lot of money. The Brethren advertise for pen-pals in gay magazines (using the name Ricky). Their lawyer takes care of collecting and delivering the pen-pal letters to the prison and hiding the money in bank accounts in the Bahamas. When the Brethren receive a few letters with incriminating evidence, they demand money and threaten to reveal their victims’ secret. Meanwhile, the CIA director, Teddy Maynard, is trying to save the United States from Russian attacks, and possibly from a third world war. He creates the perfect candidate, who will increase defense spending and build up the US military, in time for the next presidential election. Congressman Aaron Lake is “a solid candidate.” What Maynard doesn’t know is that Lake has written two letters to “Ricky.” When he discovers Lake’s secret, he and his men at the CIA work to uncover the scam in order to cleanse their candidate’s private life.

• The Summons (2002) Law professor Ray Atlee and his brother, Forrest, are summoned home to Clanton, Mississippi, by their ailing father to discuss his will. But when Ray arrives the father is already dead, and the one-page document dividing his meager estate between the two sons seems crystal clear. What the will doesn't mention, however, is the small fortune, $3 million in cash, Ray discovers hidden in the old man's house and doesn't mention it to brother Forrest.

• The King of Torts (2003) This is a legal thriller set in Washington DC. An aspiring young lawyer in the Public Defender's office is assigned a case that appears to be nothing more than one of many crack cocaine murders in the capital. However, he digs deeper and begins to uncover a conspiracy that is bigger than him and perhaps bigger than the justice system itself.

• The Last Juror (2004) In 1970, small town newspaper The Clanton Times went belly up. With financial assistance from a rich relative, it's purchased by 23-year-old Willie Traynor, formerly the paper's cub reporter. Soon afterward, his new business receives the readership boost it needs thanks to his editorial efforts and coverage of a particularly brutal rape and murder committed by Danny Padgitt, a member of the town's reclusive bootlegger family. Even though those who oppose the Padgitt family tend to turn up dead in the swampland, rather than shy from reporting on the subsequent open-and-shut trial, Traynor launches a crusade to ensure the unrepentant murderer is brought to justice. When a guilty verdict is returned, the town is relieved to find the Padgitt family's grip on the town did not sway the jury, though Danny Padgitt is sentenced to life in prison rather than death. But, when Padgitt is released after serving less than a decade in jail and members of the jury are murdered, Clanton once again finds itself at the mercy of its renegade family.

• The Broker (2005) Before he was sent to federal prison for treason (among other things), Joel Backman was an extremely powerful man. Known as "the broker," Backman was a high rolling lawyer making $10 million a year who could "open any door in Washington." That is, until he tried to broker a deal selling access to the world's most powerful satellite surveillance system to the highest bidder. When caught, Backman accepted prison as the one option that would keep him safe and alive, since the interested parties (the Israelis, the Saudis, the Russians, and the Chinese) were all itching to get their hands on his secrets at any cost. Little does he know that his own government has designs on accessing that information or at least letting it die with him. Now, six years after his incarceration, the director of the CIA convinces a lame duck president to pardon Backman, and the broker becomes a free man and an open target.

• The Appeal (2008) A Mississippi jury returns a $41-million verdict against a chemical company accused of dumping carcinogenic waste into a small town's water supply. The company's ruthless billionaire CEO is defeated and the good guys (a courageous young woman who lost her husband and child and her two lawyers who've gone half a million dollars in debt preparing her case) receives its just reward.

• The Associate (2009) Kyle McAvoy, a Yale Law School student, dreams of a public service job upon graduation, until shadowy figures blackmail him with a videotape that could revive a five-year-old rape accusation. Instead of helping those in need, McAvoy accepts a position at a huge Wall Street firm, Scully & Pershing, whose clients include a military contractor enmeshed in a $800 billion lawsuit concerning a newly-designed aircraft. McAvoy can avoid exposure of his past if he feeds his new masters inside information on the case.

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