New Jersey

26 Cases

Main Menu

County:   Atlantic   Burlington   Essex   Hudson   Hunterdon   Mercer   Middlesex   Monmouth   Passaic   Union   Unknown

Location

Defendant(s)

Date of Alleged Crime

Michael Dirago was convicted of the murder of his girlfriend in Burlington County.  However, the body was not found there and there is little reason to believe that the murder occurred in Burlington County.  (See Pennsylvania - Bucks County - Michael Dirago)  [3/08]

William Allison MacFarland, also known as “Bill,” took cyanide home from the plant where he worked.  He used it to make a solution of the poison for his wife, who had used it to clean her jewelry and silverware. Bill explained he had taken an almost empty bromide bottle and poured the contents into another bromide bottle, which was almost full. He then funneled the poison solution into the now empty bromide bottle. To avoid any possible confusion, he affixed a poison label on the bromide bottle containing the cyanide. Bill then placed both bottles on a bathroom shelf.

Ten days later he took an overnight trip to New York with his 6-year-old son.  When he returned, his wife was dead from cyanide poisoning.  The couple’s two-year-old daughter was with her, playing with toys on the floor.  It was Bill's contention that despite his precautions, his wife must have had a headache and, from force of habit, grabbed the familiar bromide bottle without looking at the label. In this way, she took the deadly poison. Bill dismissed suicide as a theory.  It was clear that Bill had no hand in his wife’s death as he was in New York.

In the course of their investigation, police discovered that Bill was having an affair with a former secretary, Flo Bromley, who lived in Philadelphia.  Armed with a motive, police came up with a new theory of how the murder could have taken place.  If, after showing the poison bottle to his wife, Bill had switched the poison label, his wife would have consumed the contents of the now deadly unmarked bottle. When he discovered the body the next morning, Bill could have removed the poison label and returned it to the correct bottle.

Bill was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife.  It was revealed that Flo had threatened to expose Bill to his employers if he did not divorce his wife and marry her by October.  It was further disclosed that Bill's home life was not as harmonious as he had led investigators to believe. His wife knew of his affair with Flo and did not like it one bit.  However, it was impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Bill had intentionally switched labels in order to poison his wife.

Bill's lawyers expanded on this flaw in the prosecution's case.  They explained, Bill’s wife had been duly warned of the danger by her husband, and if she died as a result of ingesting poison, in no way has murder been committed.  Despite this argument, the jury, after deliberating all night, found Bill guilty of murder in the first degree. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

During the trial, prosecutors had given the jury love letters between Bill and Flo to read during the trial.  Bill was granted a new trial because his defense was not given the opportunity to explain and interpret these letters.  The retrial jury felt there was reasonable doubt and acquitted Bill.  (Toronto Sun)

Earl Berryman and Michael Bunch were convicted of a 1983 rape.  Bunch later died of illness in prison.  U.S. District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise expressed "very serious doubt" that Berryman was involved in the crime.  A Centurion Ministries investigation showed that the lead police investigator in the case also had grave doubts about the victim's identification of Berryman.

The victim initially identified Berryman and Bunch from a mug book labeled “B,” which contained photographs of all individuals with names beginning with that letter.  The victim had earlier reviewed the “A” book and was told by police that, unless she could identify the suspects quickly, she would have to look through mug books for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, each containing more than 150 pictures.  The record also shows that she gave vastly different physical descriptions of her attackers on three separate occasions, all of which varied substantially from Berryman's and Bunch’s actual physical features.  (NACDL) (CM)  [7/05]

Vincent James Landano was convicted of the murder of Police Officer John Snow.  On Aug. 13, 1976, two gunmen robbed the Hi-Way Check Cashing Service in Kearny.  One went inside, while the other waited in a getaway car.  As the robbery was in progress, John Snow, a Newark police officer, arrived in his patrol car with an attaché case containing $46,000 to be delivered to the business.  Before Snow could get out of his car, the outside gunman walked up to the patrol car and shot Snow at point-blank range.  The gunman then took the attaché case and got into his car, while the the other gunman left the check-cashing service with a cash drawer containing about $6,000.  This gunman put the drawer on the roof of the car and jumped into the back seat.  The car sped away leaving $6,000 fluttering in the air behind it.

A man arrested for the crime, Allen Rollo, admitted being the inside gunman, and identified Landano as his partner, the one who shot Snow.  Centurion Ministries discovered a hidden police report in which the only eyewitness to the murder identified another man as the shooter.  When the case was retried, the jury deliberated for less than an hour and acquitted Landano in 1989.  Jurors later celebrated with him at a victory party.  (NYT) (CM)  [4/08]

Ralph Cooper, 24, Collis English, 23, McKinlay Forrest, 35, John McKenzie, 24, James Thorpe, 34, and Horace Wilson, 37, all blacks, were convicted by an all white jury of the murder of William Horner, an elderly white shopkeeper.  All were sentenced to death.  Horner died after being hit on the head with a soda bottle.  Horner's wife, could not agree on how many men were actually involved with the attack, only that it was two to four light-skinned blacks in their teens.

Five of the six arrested signed inconsistent confessions, which were obtained by police coercion.  All six had solid alibis and repudiated the confessions.  The police refused to say whose fingerprints they found on the bottle.  Some of the defendants were represented by NAACP attorneys, one of who was Thurgood Marshall, who later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice.  During appeals of the convictions, trumped-up evidence was revealed and the Trenton medical examiner was found guilty of perjury.  During a third trial in 1951, after an intervening mistrial, all defendants except English and Cooper were acquitted.  The convictions of the latter two were overturned in 1952, and they were never retried.  The Communist Daily Worker called the Trenton Six proceedings, “a northern Scottsboro case.”

Carter, a contender for middleweight boxing title of the world, was convicted of a triple homicide.  His acquaintance, John Artis, was also convicted.  In 1974, while in jail, Carter published a book entitled The Sixteenth Round, From No. 1 Contender to #45472.  The book was discovered by Bob Dylan, who made Carter a folk hero with the release of the song "Hurricane" and led to a public outcry that was largely responsible for his retrial in 1976.  Carter was also supported by Coretta Scott King, Muhammad Ali, Joan Baez, and Bobby Seale as well as by some journalists and lawyers.

In a climate of racial tension, Carter was alleged to have killed white people to avenge the death of a black man who had been killed by a white man that same night in Paterson, NJ.  The triple homicide occurred at Bob's Lafayette Grill at 18th and Lafayette Sts.  Against evidence, Carter was reconvicted in 1976, in part because a first trial witness, who recanted his testimony, recanted his recantation and testified again.  Later Carter's conviction was overturned because Judge H. Lee Sarokin declared that both of Carter's two previous convictions had been based on "racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure."  Carter was freed in 1985, but it took another three years for charges to be completely dismissed.  His co-defendant, John Artis, was paroled in 1981.  Today Carter heads a Toronto-based lobbying group, AIDWYC, the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted.  (JD01)  [6/05]