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Chapter 1: Who killed Allen Ray Jenkins?

'There's something wrong - bad wrong.'Alan Gell says he didn't commit murder, and the evidence supports him





AULANDER - Allen Ray Jenkins had a talent for finding trouble.
"My brother was a party animal," Sidney Jenkins said. "He loved to drink, he loved young girls. It weren't no secret."

Sidney had tried over the years to keep his older brother in line, and the day an ashen-faced neighbor pulled up alongside his truck, he knew it was serious.

"You've got to go to Allen Ray's house. There's something wrong -- bad wrong."

Sidney Jenkins sped past his brother's white frame house to the police department in the small Bertie County town, where a member of the rescue squad agreed to come along, and then back to his brother's house.

Allen Ray Jenkins' body lay on the floor of the front bedroom -- bloated, discolored and covered with dried blood. The sight and the stench drove Sidney back out into the yard.

It was April 14, 1995.

There was no mystery about how Allen Ray Jenkins died; he had been shot twice in the chest by a shotgun.

Within a few months, police concluded that the murderer was Alan Gell, a small-time drug dealer. Two-and-a-half years later, a jury agreed and sentenced Gell to be executed. He is now on death row at Central Prison.

The verdict rested on the premise that Jenkins was killed April 3 -- the only day Gell could have committed the crime. He was out of state or jailed for car theft every other day until after the body was found.

Seven years later, forensic science has offered refuting evidence: Allen Ray Jenkins didn't die on April 3.

This raises a question: If Jenkins wasn't killed when prosecutors said, how could Gell be the murderer?

The investigation into the murder of Jenkins, 56, a truck driver recently retired from the state Department of Transportation, began right away.

The yard filled with cars and cops: Aulander's police officers, Bertie County sheriff's deputies and agents from the State Bureau of Investigation. They strung yellow tape around the yard and house, photographed and videotaped the scene, lifted fingerprints and collected shotgun pellets.

And they fanned out into Aulander to interview neighbors and friends.

Jenkins' house was in a well-kept corner of town dotted with modest wood and brick bungalows.

Aulander was built on peanuts and cotton and enjoyed a degree of prosperity in its day. But that day is past. As in many small towns in Eastern North Carolina, vacant storefronts now dot Main Street. Empty homes pepper the town, which shrank from about 1,200 people in 1990 to 900 in 2000.

As police spread out around town, they asked who might want to hurt Jenkins. And they asked everyone the same question: When did you last see Allen Ray?

Sidney Jenkins recalled seeing his brother six days earlier -- on Saturday, April 8 -- when he honked at him on Main Street.

Allen Ray's next-door neighbor, Mary Hunt, had seen him that same morning as she worked in the office of Farm and Home Gas Co. at the corner of Main and Commerce. Jenkins was in his white Camaro, she said, stopped at Aulander's only traffic light.

Edward and Margaret Adams were out for a walk on Sunday, the ninth, when they saw Jenkins driving near the Golden Peanut Co. He then turned and stopped in front of a neighbor's home.

That neighbor, Ricky Alan Odom, told police he saw Jenkins when he dropped by the house on the seventh. Jenkins had recently bought $700 worth of shingles and asked Odom to put them up.

An across-the-street neighbor, Willie Hoggard, also last saw Jenkins on the seventh. Donald Hale, a lifelong friend, told police he dropped by that same afternoon and chatted with Jenkins in his front yard for about five minutes. Eventually, police would collect statements from 17 people who said they saw Jenkins in the week before his body was found.

Details of life

In the 36 hours after the body was found, police learned more about Jenkins than just the path of his wanderings through town the week before.

At first blush, he seemed like an ordinary guy. They learned, for example, that he had retired four months earlier from his DOT job; that he paid his taxes and had no debts; that he mowed his lawn twice a week and kept his house neat. He wasn't good with numbers or words; his neighbor Mary Hunt, the gas company employee, filled out his tax returns for him every year and helped him with other paperwork.

And he lived a small-town life far removed from Mayberry.

"There wasn't no harm in my bro, he was kindhearted," Sidney Jenkins said. "He had one weakness, girls. They took advantage of him."

Sidney Jenkins shakes his head and laughs when talking about Allen Ray, his brother with the obsession for underage girls.

The brothers looked similar, big men with meaty hands. But they took different paths in life. After a brief marriage, Allen Ray lived as a bachelor, a natty dresser who kept a neat house.

Sidney has the rumpled look of a man who runs a scrap yard. His home shows the clutter of a place where eight children were reared.

Sidney Jenkins has made his living for decades tearing out and recycling old equipment from the massive Perdue chicken factory eight miles from Aulander. The plant is Bertie County's biggest employer and a tough place to work: 2,200 workers kill, cut and package 275,000 chickens a day.

Sidney Jenkins' scrap yard is at the dead end of Lombardy Street, the same street on which his brother lived. He drove past Allen Ray's house several times a day, hauling old conveyor assemblies and chicken cages.

He often stopped and chatted with his brother in the yard, but almost never went inside. Allen Ray kept the house locked tight, and was careful about who he let in.

"He didn't want me to bug him," Sidney Jenkins said.

Criminal charges

In 1990, police in Ahoskie charged Allen Ray with statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl who was a frequent visitor to his mobile home in Ahoskie, a larger town eight miles northeast of Aulander. Jenkins plied the girl with wine coolers -- his refrigerator was stocked with Seagrams Black Cherry and California Coolers when he was arrested.

"Allen Ray was guilty of messing with that girl, but he didn't rape her," Sidney Jenkins said. She was a frequent visitor to Allen Ray's mobile home, he said.

Allen Ray admitted sexual contact with the girl on two Saturdays in March that year. He pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent liberties with a minor and the rape charges were dropped. He was sentenced to six months in prison.

Released in February 1991, Jenkins was placed on probation for five years and ordered not to have minors in his house unless their parents were present.

The state gave Jenkins his job back. Sidney Jenkins worried that his older brother would take up with young girls again. A second offense would mean years of prison, not months.

Sidney moved Allen Ray's mobile home to Aulander, into the yard behind their mother's house, so he could keep a closer eye on his brother. And when their mother died a month after he left prison, Allen Ray moved into her home.

Every Friday and Saturday night was party time at Allen Ray's. Music would blast until two or three in the morning. Jenkins had all sorts of guests: black, white, men, women and girls. After he retired from his state job, the parties were louder and went later into the night.

The next-door neighbors, Bobby and Mary Hunt, told police their suspicions: They thought Jenkins was bisexual, that he paid young ladies for sexual favors, and that many of the girls who visited were younger than 16.

Police learned more lurid details. About how Jenkins hired women on weekends to clean his house and strip for him. How every crackhead woman at First and Maple in Ahoskie could tell them about Jenkins. How he liked to sit around the house in women's underwear or a towel.

An acquaintance, Linda Lou Baggett, told police about a party held just after Jenkins retired. When she walked into the house, practically everyone had their clothes off. Several young girls, wearing only panties, engaged in sex play on the floor as Jenkins, in underwear as well, sat in a chair and watched in delight.

Invited to strip, Baggett replied that it was not her kind of party, and never returned.

Seeking evidence

As police scoured Aulander for information about Jenkins, investigators went through the house for evidence.

It was 80 degrees inside, due partly to the weather and partly to the Atlanta Superflame gas heater in the living room. The heater was still burning, meaning the thermostat was set above 80. It had been on since the day Jenkins was killed. Televisions ran in the bedroom and the living room.

The house was tidy, sprinkled with knickknacks. A row of potholders was arrayed above the stove, near three bottles of dishwashing liquid. A big red stuffed dog took up one living room chair, across from a brown couch with four round yellow cushions placed in perfect symmetry. A smiley red stuffed bear with a Shoney's shirt hung from a wall. The front door was locked, with the skeleton key in the door.

Jenkins apparently had a guest or guests over, or was expecting someone. A blue enamel baking pan stacked with fried herring sat on the stove. Jenkins often cooked fish for his friends.

Jenkins' favorite drink was Seagrams Extra Dry Gin mixed with Mountain Dew; open bottles of each sat on the kitchen counter. The autopsy would show that his blood-alcohol level was 2 1/2 times the legal driving limit when he died.

An open wine cooler was on the kitchen table. Another one was atop the TV in the bedroom, next to a pack of Marlboro Lights. Jenkins did not smoke.

A female had probably been there recently: Police found a tampon applicator and wrapper on top of the trash in the bathroom wastebasket.

The body was a disturbing sight. Jenkins lay at the foot of his water bed, clad only in a short white and blue striped towel that was safety-pinned around his waist. His face was bloated and unrecognizable. His skin had turned dark and brown. His veins had begun to blacken, giving him a marbled appearance. Parts of his outer layer of skin had begun sloughing off, like cellophane.

Perhaps most unpleasant were the maggots, the larvae of flies that had flocked to Jenkins' body as they do to all dead creatures.

Ten shotgun pellets lodged in his body. Five had gone clean through his back.

Police found several shotgun pellets in the bedroom -- on the window sill, in the ceiling near an outside wall and behind Jenkins' head. They photographed the blood that had gushed onto the door frame inside the bedroom, dripping from about five feet downward.

From the location of the pellets and the blood splatter, it appeared that the killer had stood in the hall or doorway and fired into the bedroom at Jenkins.

After the crime scene investigators wrapped up their work, Jenkins' body was taken to Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville for an autopsy the next day.

Meanwhile, police were picking up leads that took them beyond Aulander.

Shortly after midnight, Aulander Police Chief Gordon Godwin and SBI agent P.E. Brinkley went to a house outside Ahoskie.

There, Godwin met a 15-year-old high school dropout who would become the cornerstone of the case against Gell, Crystal Annette Morris.

Chapter 2: A witness, a tangled web


'The truth as they knew it'






AULANDER -- In the months after Allen Ray Jenkins was murdered, 15-year-old Crystal Morris emerged as the star witness, the one who really knew what had happened inside Jenkins' house, and when.
But her story kept changing.

A Hertford High School dropout, Crystal was a regular visitor to Jenkins' house, where she hung out, drank and called him "Uncle Allen Ray."

Jenkins had known the Morris family for decades. When Crystal's father was courting her mother, Jenkins drove him from Aulander to Scotland Neck. Crystal's uncle, Kenny Morris, was the neighbor who had found Jenkins' body on April 14, 1995, the one who said something was "bad wrong."

Police realized early on that Jenkins had been killed by someone he knew. He kept his house locked tight, even when he was home, and was picky about whom he let in. There were no signs of a break-in.

The Marlboro Lights, the open wine coolers, the tampon applicator and wrapper in the bathroom came from someone else; Jenkins didn't use them.

And given Jenkins' sexual habits and his criminal record, investigators turned to young girls who knew him. Taking the lead were SBI agent Dwight Ransome and Aulander Police Chief Gordon Godwin.

Crystal Morris came from a rough family. Her father died when she was 4, and various uncles (though not Kenny) have been in and out of jail and prison.

Crystal's best friend was Shanna Hall, a student at Ahoskie Christian School. The two were like sisters, just six days apart in age. Crystal had lived with the Hall family, almost as a foster child, because of the trouble at home.

The girls spent a lot of time with their boyfriends -- Crystal with a young man named Gary Scott, and Shanna with Alan Gell, a small-time drug dealer.

Gell's mobile home in Lewiston, eight miles south of Aulander, was party central, where the four hung out, drinking and doing drugs. Gell, 20, had a reputation among police and a record: breaking and entering and bringing a weapon to school.

String of versions

In the weeks and months after Jenkins' murder, Crystal Morris gave a string of versions of how it had happened.

APRIL 15 -- VERSION ONE: Crystal gave her first account when she talked with police at 12:48 a.m. on April 15. Jenkins' body had been found 10 hours earlier.

Police Chief Godwin and SBI Agent P.E. Brinkley talked to her at Shanna Hall's house outside Ahoskie.

She told the officers she thought she had last seen Jenkins on April 3, a Monday. Crystal said she and Shanna were walking down Lombardy Street and Jenkins came to his door and said hello. The two girls stood inside the front door for 10 or 15 minutes and chatted before leaving, she said.

MAY 5 -- VERSION TWO: Three weeks later, on May 5, Crystal went with her mother to the Aulander Police Department to meet with the chief and SBI agent Ransome -- and there she provided a revised account.

Once again, Crystal told the officers that she and Shanna stopped by Jenkins' house for a few minutes on the afternoon of April 3.

Then, for the first time, police heard Alan Gell's name in connection with the murder.

Crystal told the officers that Gell was Shanna's boyfriend. Then she described a confessional phone call. Gell, she said, had called her collect from the Bertie-Martin Regional Jail several days before Jenkins' body was found. He was going to move to Florida when he got out of jail because he had done some bad things and might go to prison for a long time.

Gell then told her something that she could not tell anyone else. According to Crystal, the conversation went like this:

"I killed somebody," Gell said.

Who?

"Allen Ray Jenkins."

Why?

Gell wouldn't say.

How?

"I shot him twice, I shot him in the chest. ... I took some money, that's all I took, just the money. I threw the gun in the woods. ... If you ever tell anybody what I did, I'll do the same to you, or if I can't, don't think I won't have somebody else do it."

When?

"I did it the night that Shanna and I left to go to Maryland," the night of April 3. "It was a shotgun."

And, Crystal added, Gell smoked Marlboro Lights.

MAY 17 -- VERSION THREE: Twelve days later, police taped a phone conversation in which it became clear that Version Two was a lie.

In this May 17 call, Crystal admitted that she was at the murder scene. She spoke in a rambling, profanity-laced phone conversation with her boyfriend, Gary Scott, with Shanna heard in the background. Scott had just returned from being questioned by Ransome and Godwin about the murder. He gave Ransome permission to tape the conversation without the girls' knowledge.

Crystal, after being told by Scott that police suspected she had been in Jenkins' house when the murder occurred, began rehearsing her story:

Crystal: "They think one of us were there."

Shanna: "They don't think we were both there?"

Crystal: "I don't know.

In an apparent reference to Gell's supposed confessional phone call in Version Two, she continued:

Crystal: "All right. I told them what Alan told me, right?"

Scott: "Yeah."

Crystal: "Alan told me that he shot him twice in the chest, right?"

Scott: "Yeah."

Crystal: "Mr. Kenny told me that my uncle told him that [Jenkins] was only shot in the chest one time and that half of his face was blown off. So there. How do you explain that?"

Scott: "How do you explain that, Chris?"

Crystal: "I don't know how to explain any goddamn thing. I'm going f--ing crazy."

At another point, Crystal yelled at Shanna to stop talking to Gell, who was in jail.

"Shut the f-- up. ... You have said something to Alan about it. Yes, you did, Shanna, because one day I told you to shut up when you were talking to Alan."

Meanwhile, Scott repeatedly implored his girlfriend to tell police that he had nothing to do with the murder. Only she could clear his name, he begged.

Crystal said she needed time. "I can't just call and say, 'Hey, look. Check this out. Me and Alan Gell killed a motherf--. Don't take Gary to jail. Take me for 10 goddamn years.' "

JULY 3 -- VERSION FOUR: Six weeks later, on July 3, Crystal confessed to a role in the murder, when she and her mother met at the Aulander Police Department with Ransome and Godwin. The chief and the SBI agent knew she had been lying and wanted her to take a polygraph. Crystal refused but eventually began talking.

On Monday, April 3, Crystal said, she was in Jenkins' bedroom, helping him fix a videocassette recorder. Jenkins was wearing only a towel. She went to the kitchen to get a drink. She said she was in the hallway when she saw Gell shoot Jenkins twice in the chest with a double-barreled shotgun. Jenkins was standing in his bedroom in front of his waterbed. Gell had told them he planned to rob someone to get money to leave North Carolina. And, Crystal added, Shanna Hall was there, too.

JULY 5 -- VERSION FIVE: Two days later, Shanna's parents hired a lawyer in Ahoskie to represent their daughter and Crystal, whom they regarded as part of the family. Crystal provided another account to the lawyer, Perry Martin, in a long conversation in which she said they had no idea that Gell was going to kill Jenkins -- that it had been a total surprise.

JULY 26 -- VERSION SIX: The element of surprise disappeared when Crystal gave Version Six to the chief and the SBI agent at the SBI office in Greenville on July 26. In its place was a conspiracy to rob Jenkins, hatched in conversations on the afternoon of April 3 and carried out that night.

"I think I'm going to have to hurt your friend," Gell said, according to Crystal.

According to Crystal's nine-page statement, the three talked and settled on a plan: The girls would distract Jenkins so he wouldn't see Gell sneak into the house. Gell planned to use a long knife to stab Jenkins. There's a loaded shotgun in the bedroom, Crystal said. Told that the house next door was only a few feet away, Gell said he would use a pillow to muffle the sound. Gell asked how long would it take somebody to find Jenkins' body. A few days, Crystal said.

In this account, Crystal rearranged the murder scene as well. Jenkins was killed as he stood in the bedroom doorway, not at the foot of the bed as she had said in Version Four.

As Crystal related Version Six to Ransome and Godwin, another SBI agent interviewed Shanna in a different room. The stories matched.

The matching accounts convinced the two investigators that they had cracked the case: As Godwin would later say, "In their final statements, they told the truth as they knew it."

The next day, July 27, Ransome and Godwin confronted Gell at the Bertie-Martin jail. He had been released April 20 and put under house arrest, but now was back for violating the house-arrest conditions.

The investigators had previously interviewed Gell on July 1. Now, he repeated what he had said the first time -- he did not know Jenkins, he didn't know where he lived, he had nothing to do with the murder. As Ransome asked questions, Gell wrote answers on a note pad, seven pages worth, and ended with this: "Please do not believe two people who have been together forever and also had 3 or four months to talk out a story to blame me."

Ransome reacted angrily. He went into bad-cop mode, putting his face inches from Gell and yelling at him.

Gell could feel the agent's hot breath, feel the spittle as Ransome questioned his manhood.

"You were too scared to stab him, you coward! You were too scared, you had to go get a gun, didn't you?"

Insulted, Gell yelled back.

"If I had been there, if I had a knife, I could have done it."

Godwin thought that Gell was on the verge of confession, but holding back.

Re-interviews

Still, Ransome and Godwin had a problem. In each of Crystal's versions, the murder occurred April 3. But the SBI and the district attorney files had statements from 17 people saying they had seen Jenkins alive after April 3.

The next day, July 28, Godwin and Ransome set out to clear up the discrepancies. They went to Ahoskie and re-interviewed four witnesses who had seen Jenkins buying gas, fish and a meal on April 10.

Ransome and Godwin informed each witness that Jenkins had died April 3. Each one then gave a new statement to the effect that they were not sure of the actual date, just that it was in early April.

Armed with the revised statements, Godwin and Ransome returned to Aulander to look for two key witnesses -- Jenkins' next-door neighbors, Bobby and Mary Hunt.

The two officers found Mary Hunt at her job at Farm and Home Gas Co. at the corner of Main and Commerce.

Ransome later dictated a report from this interview: "Hunt was re-interviewed because it was learned that Allen Ray Jenkins had been shot and killed on Monday, April 3, 1995. Hunt stated that she last saw Jenkins on Saturday morning, April 1, 1995."

Mary Hunt did not learn the contents of this report until a reporter showed her a copy in October 2002. The Hunts are clear on their story: She last saw Jenkins on Saturday, April 8, six days before his body was found. She was sitting in her office, waiting for the clock hands to hit noon so she could go to lunch, when she saw him stop at the traffic light outside her window.

"Oh, no," she thought. "He's getting ready for another party tonight."

The next day, April 9, Bobby Hunt saw Jenkins cooking fish in the back yard with some friends. Bobby Hunt went to bed early, as he did every Sunday. He needed to be at work at the Food Lion in Williamston at 5 a.m.

A grandson and his friend were playing when he went to bed. About 10 p.m., Bobby Hunt was awakened by a loud rumbling sound. He went out and told Mary to quiet the children down.

She told her husband she was the only one there. The children had left an hour ago.

All that week, the Hunts noticed that Jenkins' kitchen light was on constantly, shining into their bedroom.

The Hunts, who still live in the brick ranch house at 301 Lombardy St., are just as certain that the kitchen light was not on for two weeks, and that there were no quiet weekend evenings before Jenkins' body was found.

And the grass: Jenkins mowed his lawn twice a week, and the grass had not gone unmowed for two weeks. It would have been much higher.

Shown the SBI file stating she last saw Jenkins on April 1, Mary Hunt shook her head at Ransome's report.

"This is not right," she said. "That's wrong there. I didn't say April first. He must have put that down wrong."

Mary Hunt's comments came seven years too late for Alan Gell.

On Aug. 1, 1995, Ransome and Godwin arrested Alan Gell in the first-degree murder of Allen Ray Jenkins.

Chapter 3: Gell defense left in dark

Gell Defense Left in Dark







WINDSOR -- Until the moment police pressed his fingertips on an ink pad for his prints, Alan Gell didn't think that he would actually be charged with killing Allen Ray Jenkins.
He didn't even think he was a suspect. He never requested a lawyer.

Figuring he had nothing to hide, he spoke freely with State Bureau of Investigation Agent Dwight Ransome and Aulander Police Chief Gordon Godwin. Told that Crystal Morris and Shanna Hall had named him as the murderer, he offered to help. Let me call the girls and you can listen to the conversation, he said. Listen to their answers.

No way, Ransome said. They believed the girls, not Gell.

Gell never changed his story: He didn't know Jenkins, never went to his house and had nothing to do with the murder. Jenkins' decomposing body was found in his home in the Bertie County town of Aulander on April 14, 1995. He had been shot to death.

In jail, charged with the crime, Gell felt confused, misunderstood, angry.

These feelings would not go away.

Respectful boy

James Alan Gell was 20 at the time of Jenkins' murder and is 28 now. Born in Columbus County, he moved around a lot as a child. Friends and family remember him as a respectful boy who did chores for neighbors -- cutting grass, fixing a mower -- but never wanted to be paid. He had a knack for drawing and art.

He dropped out of high school at age 16 and got his GED soon afterward at a community college. He worked at his mother's used car lot, or for his stepfather, a contractor who often worked at the sprawling Perdue chicken plant.

After he got his driver's license, Gell started dipping into drugs, first using, then selling. He became more secretive with his family and began hanging around with a different crowd. He had several arrests for minor drug possession that were dismissed.

While Gell has consistently denied any involvement in the slaying of Jenkins, his timing was terrible, because in the days surrounding Jenkins' murder, he was a one-man crime wave.

On April 2, 1995, he was arrested for stealing a tractor and released that night. On April 4, he took a truck belonging to the father of his friend, Dewayne Conner. Gell drove the truck to Virginia and Maryland with his girlfriend, Shanna Hall, to buy drugs. On his return, he was jailed for two weeks for the truck theft.

Soon after being released on house arrest, he stole some blank checks from his mother, cashed them and went to Florida with Conner. In Bradenton, Fla., on May 7, Gell and Conner ran out of a Pizza Hut without paying for their food or beer. Police arrested them and soon learned there was a warrant for Gell. They shipped him back to the Bertie-Martin Regional Jail in Windsor on June 25. He has been locked up ever since.

The charge against Gell rested on the premise that Jenkins was killed April 3 -- the only day Gell could have committed the crime. He was out of state April 4 and 5 and jailed from April 6 until April 20, six days after the body was found.

The two years Gell spent in jail waiting for trial had positive points. He sobered up, read a lot and drew, though the jailers would arbitrarily confiscate his artwork and pencils. His druggie friends didn't visit or write. His family rallied around him, though they didn't know what to do to help.

Still, Gell felt as if he had been rotting for two years. Nothing visible had happened in his case except a game of musical chairs among his lawyers.

His first lawyer, and then his second, had quit the case to work as prosecutors. His third was studying for a divinity degree at Duke University while practicing law in Windsor. In September 1997, several months before the start of the trial, she asked out, saying she couldn't take classes while facing the intense demands of a capital case.

That same month, Maynard Harrell became the fourth lawyer given the job of keeping Alan Gell off death row.

Gell's was the 20th capital case for Harrell, a veteran defense attorney from Plymouth. A Bertie County native, he has the ruddy, weather-beaten face of an avid hunter and fisherman.

Harrell opened Gell's court file and was appalled: Almost nothing had been done in two years.

No independent investigation had been conducted for the defense: no interviewing of witnesses, no spadework to challenge or rebut the state's case for Gell's guilt. Nor did Gell have a mitigation specialist, an investigator whose job is to prepare the case for why a jury, in the event of a guilty verdict, should reject the death penalty.

And, perhaps most telling, few motions had been filed.

Aptly named, motions move a court case along, driving the schedule, evidence, witnesses and legal issues. Of those that had been filed for the defense when Harrell took over, most were filed the day that Gell's third attorney asked out of the case.

With just a few months to investigate and prepare the case, Harrell was rowing upstream, with one arm tied behind his back.

Few files shared

Gell was thrilled with the appointment of the veteran defense lawyer. He thought Harrell was going to fix everything.

But Gell soon became disappointed, as Harrell made little progress.

Despite a 1997 order to do so, prosecutors had not turned over any material that could help exonerate Gell. And Gell's defense team turned up none of its own.

The pace had picked up in August 1997, when prosecutors dismissed first-degree murder and robbery charges against Crystal Morris and Shanna Hall and accepted guilty pleas to second-degree murder. The girls would face up to 10 years in prison, not life.

After the guilty pleas, the local prosecutors who had been handling the case handed it off to lawyers from then-Attorney General Mike Easley's office, because one of Gell's former lawyers now worked for the district attorney, creating a conflict of interest.

Alarmed that the case was finally moving ahead, Gell's mother paid $2,500 to Clifton Hardison, a private investigator. Despite repeated prodding, he produced no new evidence. Eight days into the trial, he faxed a report based entirely on a 4-month-old interview with Gell. Rather than gathering the information Harrell requested, he reported old or irrelevant facts about such things as Gell's sex life and his first meeting with Crystal and Shanna when buying marijuana.

Shortly before the trial began on Feb. 2, 1998, Harrell read a newspaper story saying that three people had seen Jenkins in Ahoskie on April 10 -- a full week after Gell had supposedly killed him.

This was important: Gell had an ironclad alibi from April 4 until after Jenkins' body was found April 14. He was out of state with Shanna on April 4 and 5, and in jail on the car-theft charge thereafter.

Harrell asked Superior Court Judge Louis Meyer to order prosecutors to hand over any exculpatory evidence -- material that could prove Gell's innocence.

The prosecutors replied that there was none. Some witnesses had said they saw Jenkins after April 3, prosecutor Debra Graves said, but they were mistaken.

"Ransome talked to those witnesses a number of times, and the dates change from time to time," Graves said. "There was nothing exculpatory about that information, and consequently we did not provide it."

At Judge Meyer's insistence, however, prosecutors handed over statements by 10 people.

All had been re-interviewed after April 3 had been established as the date of death, Meyer said, and all said they were unsure when they last saw Jenkins.

But "out of an abundance of caution," Meyer let the defense lawyers read the statements.

So on the first day of trial, the state finally gave Gell's lawyers reports of people who said they saw Jenkins alive after April 3.

But only some. All but one of the statements were from people whom Police Chief Godwin and SBI agent Ransome had re-interviewed after telling them Jenkins was killed April 3.

Like all defendants, Gell had the constitutional right to evidence in law enforcement files that could prove his innocence or cast doubt on the truthfulness of witnesses such as Crystal and Shanna.

Whether intentionally or inadvertently, the prosecution team did not turn over the statements of Donald Hale, Jenkins' lifelong friend who said he chatted with him April 7. They also did not provide the account of Willie Hoggard, his across-the-street neighbor who said he saw him that same day; and that of Ricky Alan Odom, who told police he talked with Jenkins about roofing his home on April 7; and that of Jenkins' brother Sidney, who said he had honked at him in town on April 8; and Edward and Margaret Adams, who saw him April 9.

The state did not hand over the tape recording of a phone call involving Crystal Morris, the state's key witness -- a conversation with evidence that Crystal was fabricating her account of the murder. And the state didn't turn over its numerous reports of Jenkins' interest in young girls and payments for sex.

The late production of the witness reports put Harrell at a disadvantage. The trial had begun, and the lawyers were in court all day, with little time to chase down people who might help their case.

Crystal on stand

The prosecution began its case by putting Crystal Morris on the stand. She was demure and soft-spoken, a far cry from the profane character heard on the taped phone call. The judge repeatedly urged her to speak up so jurors could hear her.

Crystal was the most important witness for the state. She testified that she saw Gell kill Jenkins. The state had no physical evidence tying Gell to the murder: no fingerprints, no footprints, no fibers, no DNA evidence. No one had seen Gell at Jenkins' home other than Crystal and Shanna.

In the weeks after the murder, Crystal had given six different versions of her role in the crime -- starting with not knowing anything about it and ending with an account that named Gell as the trigger man and acknowledged her own role as an accessory. She gave a seventh in August 1997 in the course of pleading guilty to second-degree murder.

Now, she provided Version Eight -- a rearrangement of the crime scene. Previously, she had said Jenkins was shot as he stood at the foot of his water bed. She later changed it, saying Jenkins was shot while standing in the doorway.

At trial, she moved the victim into the hallway and placed Gell in the bedroom, partly concealed behind the door. She and Jenkins were walking back to the bedroom, she said, when Gell fired the first shot. Jenkins stumbled into the bedroom and Gell shot him a second time. Jenkins fell on his back. Gell stole $400 in cash from a closet.

Harrell pressed Crystal during cross-examination, but not too much. He feared the jury would react badly if he seemed to be bullying a young woman.

Gell's mother, Jeanette Johnson, was a nervous wreck through the trial. She was desperate to help. After the SBI reports were handed over, she spent several days tracking down people so the recently hired mitigation specialist could interview them. At night, she went home and conducted her own amateur forensic experiments.

After Crystal testified that Gell had shot Jenkins after emerging from behind a door, Johnson and her husband Joel -- Gell's stepfather -- spent hours trying to re-create the scene. Joel Johnson, right-handed like Gell, took an unloaded shotgun and turned to his right around a door. It was awkward.

Later in the trial, an SBI crime scene investigator testified about a bloody pillow found next to Jenkins' body. The pillow had been ripped in places, apparently by pellets, but was still largely intact. The investigator speculated that Gell had held a pillow over the shotgun muzzle to muffle the blast.

That night, Jeanette Johnson made her husband act the scene out several times: left hand holding pillow over muzzle, right hand holding the loaded shotgun. Her husband refused to pull the trigger, fearing the recoil would smash his arm.

Jeanette Johnson hung the pillow on a swing set. She wanted to know what a shotgun would do to it. Joel shot a hole in it. White stuffing fluttered all over the yard.

The only medical evidence regarding the date of death was presented by Dr. M.G.F. Gilliland, a forensic pathologist at the medical school at East Carolina University. A tiny, intense woman with two decades of experience as a pathologist, Gilliland has testified in about 500 cases, most of them involving homicide. She is widely regarded as a precise, prepared and confident witness.

Gilliland explained that the rate of decomposition depends on temperature. The warmer it is, the faster the body rots. She also looked at the size of the maggots on the body. The age of the larvae would also help pinpoint time of death. She gave her opinion: Jenkins had been dead at least seven days when the autopsy took place April 15, and perhaps as many as 10 or 12 days. The murder could have occurred between April 3 and April 8.

No temperature data had been provided that would help her be more precise. "If the room was very nice and warm, then it would tend to be on the shorter" end of the range, she said. "If it took the flies awhile to get in ... the longer side would be as accurate."

Chuck Moore, a lawyer assisting Harrell with the defense, treated Gilliland cautiously during his cross examination, fearful that she would attack him if he pressed too hard.

He was also thrown off-guard. He had spoken with her in January and learned that she pegged the time since death at seven to 10 days, a range that would exonerate Gell given his rock-solid alibi from April 4 forward. When she offered a range of seven to 12 days on the stand, he was surprised and didn't regain his footing.

Moore did not ask the likelihood of death occurring on April 3, or whether Gilliland had seen the statements handed over at the start of the trial from witnesses who had once said they saw Jenkins alive after April 3.

The first page of the report by the Bertie County Medical Examiner said "LAST KNOWN TO BE ALIVE: April 8, 1995 mid-morning." Yet Moore did not ask her a single question about this.

But Moore's biggest problem was not lack of nerve. In hindsight, Harrell and Moore acknowledge, the trial was a litany of things not done, of evidence not provided, of questions not asked.

The jury did not hear from the Hunts, the next-door neighbors who said they saw Jenkins on the eighth. Ransome and Godwin had re-interviewed Mary Hunt and written a report saying she had been mistaken and had last seen Jenkins on the first.

The re-interview spoiled their usefulness. Harrell feared that putting these witnesses on the stand would undermine his case.

This was a murder case where time since death was paramount, yet the defense did not ask for money to hire an independent medical examiner to review the autopsy. Harrell and Moore didn't think the judge would allow it.

The defense lawyers knew that Crystal had given differing versions of the killing, and that her testimony was essential. Yet they did not hire a crime scene specialist to examine the shotgun pellets and trace their likely trajectory, or use the blood spatter and position of the body to map out where the shooter and the victim were standing.

Gell had no experts to rebut the state's version of the crime.

On Feb. 25, the jury took just over an hour to convict him of murder.

During the sentencing phase, Harrell put Gell's family and friends on the stand. Pleas for mercy, however, are best accompanied by remorse, and Gell continued to maintain his innocence.

Prosecutor David Hoke called for death in a powerful closing argument that was more sermon than summation. He hammered at Gell for ambushing Jenkins in the sanctity of his own home.

Hoke reminded jurors of the words of Gell's pastor, who testified that Gell had never acknowledged wrongdoing or shown remorse.

Gell interrupted Hoke. "I still deny the charges," he blurted out.

This gave more fuel to Hoke, who asked jurors to think about how important it was for them to feel safe in their own homes.

"Look at that feeling of peace, joy, comfort in your own home," he said. Contrast it to the act done "at the hands of this man who has not yet acknowledged any sorrow."

He addressed the jury, calling each member by name, and then:

"From the Old Testament and the Book of Numbers, anyone who kills a person is to be put to death as a murderer upon the testimony of witnesses. You've heard the testimony of witnesses. ... Now, they might argue to you the New Testament changes all that. No, it doesn't. Jesus didn't come to destroy the law or the prophecies of the Old Testament. He came to fulfill them.

"Listen to this in Deuteronomy. 'Cursed is the man who kills his neighbor secretly and all the people shall say amen. Cursed is the man who kills an innocent person for money, and all the people shall say amen.' It's time to sentence this man, a murderer, to die, and let the people of Bertie County say amen."

Chapter 4: Evidence points to innocence








Getting sentenced to death was a lucky break for Alan Gell.

Like any other indigent inmate found guilty of a serious crime, he was entitled to an appeal of his conviction for the 1995 shotgun murder of Allen Ray Jenkins in Jenkins' Bertie County home. That appeal focused narrowly on Gell's 1998 trial.

But Gell's death sentence guaranteed him something more: two post-conviction lawyers to examine the case more broadly. Paid by the state, their job was to look at the entire case, not just the trial, to see whether Gell was treated fairly, both inside and outside the courtroom.

Equally important, Gell's lawyers had the right to all his law enforcement files, a right that state law gives only to death row inmates.

The lawyers -- Mary Pollard of Raleigh and James P. Cooney III of Charlotte -- began working on the case in 2000, after Gell's direct appeals to the N.C. Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court were rejected.

Pollard started first, reading the trial transcript and examining the exhibits. As she waited for the Attorney General's Office and the State Bureau of Investigation to deliver their files to her office at the law firm of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, she identified a vital question about the case: When did this murder happen?

Pollard called Dr. M.G.F. Gilliland, the pathologist who had testified at the trial that Jenkins was probably killed between April 3 and April 8. Gilliland explained that her lack of data on the temperatures in Jenkins' house made it impossible to determine the time of death more precisely.

As Pollard researched time-of-death issues, she learned that there existed a field of study called forensic anthropology, and she started a file on it.

Days later, as Pollard waited in her dentist's office leafing through an old copy of Newsweek, she stopped at a page with pictures of a decomposing human hand.

The article was about Murray Marks, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee who worked closely with law enforcement agencies around the country to determine time of death, most often in homicide cases.

Pollard contacted Marks, who agreed to look at the case. She sent him a copy of the autopsy, Gilliland's trial testimony and crime scene photos.

Meanwhile, the attorney general and the SBI delivered their files to Pollard.

In the files, Pollard and Cooney found undisclosed evidence of Gell's innocence: a secretly taped phone conversation in which 15-year-old Crystal Morris, who became the state's key witness at trial, contradicted early accounts she had given police and rehearsed the story she would tell law enforcement.

They also found previously undisclosed statements by friends, family and neighbors who had seen Jenkins after April 3, 1995 -- the only day Gell could have committed the murder. Gell was in Maryland and Virginia on April 4 and 5, and he was jailed for car theft upon his return until after Jenkins' body was found on the 14th.

In all, Pollard and Cooney tallied up statements from 17 people who said they saw Jenkins alive after Gell had been jailed. (Some of those witnesses wavered about the dates in re-interviews with police months after the murder.)

The statements convinced the lawyers that Allen Ray Jenkins was not killed April 3.

Their client, they believed, was telling the truth when he said he had nothing to do with the crime.

Down on the farm

In March 2001, the lawyers visited Marks at his workplace in Knoxville, Tenn. It is officially named the Anthropological Research Facility. Most people in law enforcement call it the Body Farm.

Marks performs much of his research on a wooded, hilly, two-acre piece of land next to the University of Tennessee Medical Center.

Behind a pair of tall fences -- chain link topped with razor wire on the outside, and solid wood inside to block the view -- dozens of bodies rot and decompose, just as Jenkins did in his home in April 1995.

But at the Body Farm, Marks and his colleagues study the process and chart the course of human decomposition. The goal is to help answer the question posed by police everywhere when they find a cold body: When did this person die?

Soft-spoken, bearded and with intense brown eyes, Marks speaks with the passion of someone who knows his research into human decomposition is extremely valuable to police, medical examiners and families of victims.

Marks finds the process of human decomposition amazing, "nature at its best."

He and his staff study bodies clothed and unclothed. They put them in cars, lean them against trees, place them in water, bury them, and hide them under concrete slabs. They wrap them in plastic, put them in the sun and in the shade.

And each step of the way, they measure, weigh, photograph, take tissue samples, count bugs, take notes and enter it all in a database.

The research has yielded a rough formula for determining the time of death that takes environmental variables into account.

They have found that one variable dominates all others -- temperature.

Roughly speaking, bodies decompose from two forces, bacteria from the inside out, and insects from the outside in. The process speeds up as temperatures rise, and slows as temperatures fall.

Marks and his colleagues have devised a unit of measurement they call a "degree day." Twenty-four hours at 80 degrees equals one degree day. The outer layer of skin peels off at two degree days. Internal organs are liquefied at seven degree days or more. Limbs turn black at 14 degree days.

Almost all of Marks' work is for police and prosecutors. For him, the Gell-Jenkins case was a rare foray on behalf of a defendant.

He examined Jenkins' autopsy report and photos and video of the crime scene. Given the degree of bloating, the state of Jenkins' internal organs, the marbled appearance of his arms and legs, Marks concluded that he had died approximately seven degree days before the April 15 autopsy.

What did this mean in terms of the actual time of death? It depended on the temperatures in Jenkins' house. An average of 80 degrees in the house would put date of death on April 8, while an average temperature of 40 would place it at April 1.

Cooney and Pollard turned to Allen Eberhardt, a mechanical engineer and former professor at N.C. State University.

Using a U.S. Department of Energy computer program that simulates the energy requirements of a house, Eberhardt plugged in the data. The 1,140-square-foot dwelling was fully insulated and built on a brick foundation. He examined the venting, windows, curtains and floor plan.

He added daily weather information from nearby Lewiston, and hourly data from Rocky Mount. And he factored in the presence of an Atlanta Thermoflame heater, which was running in the house when police examined the crime scene.

In the week before Jenkins was found, Eberhardt concluded, the house temperature was seldom below 80 degrees, and exceeded 90 degrees on five occasions.

It was a hothouse.

Shown Eberhardt's results, Marks concluded that Jenkins had died "on or about April 9."

Marks also called the lawyers' attention to something else about the photos and autopsy report: the maggots. There was no evidence that any had matured to the next stage of the insect life cycle, the pupa. An insect expert, he told Cooney and Pollard, could provide additional insight into Jenkins' time of death.

"The insects will tell you everything," Marks said recently. "People lie, but insects don't lie."

The life cycles of insects are unvarying. Each species progresses from egg to larva to pupa to adult at a consistent and predictable rate.

So Pollard and Cooney turned to James Arends, a former professor of entomology at N.C. State University who now runs a biotechnology company. Arends had taught forensic entomology at the N.C. Justice Academy and consulted in criminal cases with police. He had cooperated on earlier cases with Dennis Honeycutt, the SBI agent who examined the crime scene at Jenkins' house.

Arends faced an initial obstacle. The police did not collect maggot samples, nor did the medical examiner. Ideally, an investigator would gather insects and let them grow to adulthood to date their age and identify their exact species.

Still, Arends had plenty to work with. He scrutinized the crime scene videos, photos and autopsy. Based on the size and appearance of the maggots on Jenkins' body, Arends decided they were most likely Calliphora vicina, the common blowfly, the metallic green or blue fly that buzzes noisily in flight.

Blowflies have an extraordinary sense of smell. They locate dead animals within minutes and exploit their biological niche: helping reduce a carcass to a skeleton.

Blowflies wriggle through ripped screens, chinks in houses or doors that don't close snugly in their search for food.

Once they locate a body, blowflies land and immediately lay eggs. The larvae, commonly known as maggots, hatch within a day. After six days, the maggots crawl away to a dry place and turn into pupae. Their outer skin hardens to form a protective casing -- just as a caterpillar creates a cocoon before emerging as a butterfly or moth. The full cycle from egg to adult takes 11 to 14 days -- quicker in high temperatures, slower when it's cooler.

The maggots found at Jenkins' house were in the larval stage. Police found no casings at the scene.

Based on this, Arends concluded that Jenkins had died four to six days before his body was found -- on April 8, 9 or 10.

For Jenkins to have been killed on April 3, he added, it would have meant the blowflies somehow didn't reach the body for five or six days.

"This assumption," Arends said, "would be so unreasonable as to be nearly impossible."

A new focus

Pollard and Cooney returned to Gilliland, the medical examiner, with the results of their research: the blowflies, the Body Farm and the witness statements.

For two decades, Gilliland, like Marks and Arends, has worked with the state, helping police and prosecutors. She still has the intensity and focus that cowed Gell's lawyers during trial. But now, in the case of N.C. v. Gell, she is no longer focused on the defense lawyers.

Sitting in her office recently at Pitt Memorial Hospital, surrounded by books, papers, microscopes and files, Gilliland recalled a pretrial conference in January 1998. The prosecution team was there: SBI agent Dwight Ransome, Aulander Police Chief Gordon Godwin, and David Hoke and Debra Graves from the Attorney General's Office.

Gilliland asked about the initial medical examiner's report, which noted that Jenkins was last seen alive on midmorning April 8 by a neighbor.

That person was mistaken, one of the team members said.

"That information had been withdrawn," recalled Gilliland.

Gilliland said she assumed this meant that the neighbor -- one neighbor -- had retracted the statement.

That assumption was demolished when Gilliland met with Gell's lawyers.

She learned that law enforcement had statements from 17 people who saw Jenkins alive after April 3 but had not shared that information with her.

"Seventeen people, that's a clue, that's valuable information," she said. "I would rely on that kind of information."

Gilliland has reviewed the work of Arends, the entomologist, and Marks, of the Body Farm. She is in full agreement with them about Jenkins' time of death.

She riffled briskly through her file folder, extracting some of the withheld statements.

She held up the one from Willie Hoggard, the across-the-street neighbor.

"He lived there 25 years, and he saw [Jenkins] in his truck, and he knows the man very well; he last saw him on the Friday, which is the seventh," she said, rattling the paper. "He's alive on the seventh; he's not decomposing in his house."

She moved on to the statement of Ricky Alan Odom, who told police he talked with Jenkins that same day about putting a roof on his house.

"A job, the man says, he looks at the roof on the seventh," Gilliland said. "That is not having maggots working on your remains."

Gilliland did not attend the trial and did not hear Crystal Morris testify that Gell stood in the bedroom and shot Jenkins in the hallway.

"No, no, no!" Clearly, she said, the killer shot from the hallway into the bedroom.

Crystal Morris "may have intimate knowledge of who was shooting," Gilliland said. "It may have been herself. It could have been somebody else, I don't know -- that's not something that I have information about. But with all of this together, I have better information to when it happened and when it did not happen.

"It did not happen April 3, 1995."

Gilliland is rock certain: The murder occurred while Gell was in jail, probably on April 8 or 9.

"That doesn't mean that poor Mr. Jenkins wasn't killed. It just means that this man didn't do it."