To Debbie. To himself. To the air. He fires up the Dodge Colt, pulls out of the driveway. After one block he begins to feel physically uncomfortable, his whole body queasily overloaded like a sleeping limb roused to feeling. Two blocks from home he slams on the brakes. Now he knows. He whips the car around. Pulls into the driveway. With one hand he throws the car door open.
With the other he undoes his collar. He scurries up the walk, throws the door open. Shucks his boots. Calvin snaps the belt off his waist. He doesn't answer. Just takes off his bor shorts, climbs into bed and says simply, "I love you. The written exam takes two hours. He schedules his road test for the following Monday, then emerges from the driving academy brimming with the calm, clean feeling that comes from taking care of business.
A small voice in his head then. Calvin crosses the street to City Hall, where the police are headquartered, and steps up to the front desk. Maxine gets home first. The sun is up. Her daughters, Latanya and Katina, play in the yard. She heads for the bedroom. Lucretia's hunched in a chair with her face buried in a pillow. The girl's face is a shell, lumpy and discolored.
Dried blood sheathes her neck. Maxine goes next door for a phone. A detective named Betty Brookins arrives. What happened? Who did this to you? But Lucretia is incoherent.
She keeps grabbing her stomach and breaking into hysterics. Maxine gets Lucretia's mom, Barbara, on the phone. She's at somebody's house watching The Price Is Right.
At the hospital, Barbara remains with her daughter for a while. But only for a while. After a few hours she goes back to Perrin Street, where she and Maxine and a few of their neighbors start to hash things out. Fueled by grief and spite and a feral hazy sense that somebody needs to pay, they make a decision.
He provides the details. How Debbie told him as he walked out the door that she wanted him home by midnight. How he laughed—what did it matter whether he was in by midnight or sunrise, since her big old pregnant self was going to be in bed the whole time anyway? How he hung out with his friends Gerald and Jerome until eight o'clock.
How Calvin and Jerome went off and visited a couple of friends, then hit the Glass Hat Lounge around ten-forty-five. How, when he stripped to his underwear, threw his pants and shirt over the dresser, and got into bed, Debbie roused, looked at the clock, saw that it was exactly five minutes to midnight, and said, You made it home, Calvin. You think I want to hide my curl? You think I want to muss it up with a hat? There's an edge of fear now. This is , not , but it's still Louisiana, and Calvin is still a black man answering to a white detective.
To help keep cool, he begins a separate and simultaneous conversation. To the detective he says aloud, evenly, "Sir, my wife is pregnant. I have a daughter. Till lately I been keeping three women on the side. I don't got to rape nobody. You know that, right? Calvin surrenders his saliva, his pubic hair, his blood. The tests show him to be a type O secretor. Like 41 percent of black people. And like the cowboy man, whose semen has been found spangled over the size 40 bor shorts and Lucretia's nightgown, and inside her.
Forty-one percent. It can't touch him, can it? When Calvin was 2 years old, his mother took him to his grandparents' house. He was so malnourished he was covered with sores—he looked gnawed —and drifted from room to room like a wraith, whispering nonsense to himself. The Newtons, they were as filled with God, exuberantly and tremulously, as people can be on this earth, and they taught their boy how to open his heart to God, how to talk to Him and praise Him with song.
The lawyer they hire, a man named Stacey Freeman, believes the state had no cause even to suspect, much less arrest, Calvin, and waives his client's right to a jury trial. This is an incendiary charge, after all; why bring human uncertainty and prejudice into the equation when the case—as a matter of law, of fact —is so feeble?
Let the judge rule from the bench. From the get-go, however, the trial is bizarre. The district attorney announces that a day after the rape, Lucretia picked Calvin's face out of a photo lineup the police having had his mug on file from a couple of misdemeanor arrests dating to ' Neither Calvin nor his lawyer has heard of this lineup.
The DA says he himself has just learned of it. He also announces that the photo lineup has been lost. And that the police have kept no record of how it was assembled. After the judge denies Freeman's motion to exclude, the lineup and the issue underlying it—did Lucretia actually name Calvin as her attacker and, if so, when —becomes the trial's central question.
Problem is, nearly all the prosecution witnesses contradict statements they made to police the day of the crime—and even statements they've already made on the stand. The testimony of Lucretia's mother, Barbara, is typical: She starts by saying she'd never heard the name Willis before talking to the detectives. Then she admits she had. Then she says a detective suggested the name to her. Finally, she says that Lucretia named "Calvin" to her just before they arrived at the police station on the morning of the tenth.
Then there is Lucretia. She is, simply, a terrified child, saying "yes" both literally and effectively to whatever is being asked, no matter who's asking, and casting a veil of confusion. Even her swearing-in raises questions. Detective Brookins corroborates Lucretia's account, testifying that she told the girl, "I need you to pick out the one that raped you. Lucretia's testimony gets stranger still.
When Calvin takes the stand, his sense that the trial has become a joke mis with his fear to produce a taut, edgy witness, ready to fight. After the DA launches a series of oddball questions about daylight savings time, Calvin snaps. Calvin's account—everything from where he was, and when, to the beige shoes he was wearing—squares perfectly with the testimony of his friends, Jerome and Gerald, with whom he spent the night of June 8, and with that of his wife.
But in the end, Calvin's testimony does not matter. It does not even matter that the rapist's waistline, as evidenced by his bor shorts, is eleven inches larger than Calvin's. None of this matters because the trustworthiest witness of all—science—has calmly pointed its finger at Calvin: "Shorts were found at the scene," Lynch rules, "and…semen stains matched that of the defendant. The nightgown that was worn by the victim had semen stains that matched that of the defendant.
On May 17, , Lynch sentences him to a term no shorter than "natural life" without the possibility of parole. Narlvil Newton feels her face tightening into a mask, openmouthed and silent, as her boy is taken away. In all of Shreveport, young Lucretia notwithstanding, is there a human being as cursed as Calvin Willis?
Her name is Janet Gregory. She's a white woman a few years older than Calvin who walks with a limp and talks with a drawl. By her own admission she was raised among racists, though she herself has never bought into that. Prissy, as she is known, has an unusual disposition. She has an uncanny ability to sniff out liars and phonies and a corresponding inability, just as uncanny, to refrain from telling those liars and phonies exactly what she thinks of them.
In other respects Prissy is strangely guarded. She doesn't like being looked at or touched by men, because men have brought almost incomprehensible pain to her life. Three months after marrying her high school sweetheart, Ralph, Prissy accidentally shot herself through the knee with his.
Doctors told her she would never walk again. Four months later, before it became clear that Janet was tougher than anyone knew and would indeed walk again, Ralph was killed in a car wreck. When a proper period of time had passed, Prissy agreed, at the prodding of friends, to date a man named Daryl.
He picked her up in his truck and took her not to the concert he'd told her they'd be attending but to his rented trailer home. He asked her to take a seat, walked into another room, returned with a shotgun, and announced that she would be performing oral sex on him. On some level, Prissy suspected that Daryl might somehow be the price she needed to pay for living and breathing when her husband had died, so for many years she told no one about what had happened in the trailer.
She did find love again, though. His name was Ferris. They married. Ferris and his dog were hit by a seventy-five-car freight train. He'd been fiddling with the radio in his truck. Prissy is now married to her third husband. She refers to this man not as "my husband" but as "my son's father. In years to come, after she secures a protective order and a divorce, people will ask about her ex, and Janet will say, "The one constant anger in my life is my son's father.
I can handle no child support. But for my boy's whole life he hasn't had a father. And for that, I could literally rip his head off and shit down his neck. Given all that has befallen Janet Gregory, such statements carry a certain weight.
Because Janet's third husband—whom she characterizes drily, ominously, as "the one who lives"—makes no financial contribution, she works as a paralegal. In this capacity, she strikes up some remarkable relationships. One is with a death-row inmate named Wayne Felde, whom her boss represents on appeal. Janet knows Felde killed a policeman in a drunken rage, and he doesn't pretend that he didn't. But throughout his unsuccessful appeals—even after she stops working for his lawyer—she talks to Wayne Felde, writes him, visits him, lays her hands upon him during court proceedings, functions as a vessel for him, assuring him when he feels his humanity departing him that it is safe and intact with her.
This is the thing about Janet. For some reason, her sufferings, rather than withering her soul, have greatly expanded it. They have given her sight into the inner lives of others and, yes, an abiding and forceful anger.
Janet takes out a loan to pay for his burial. After working for Felde's lawyer, Janet finds employment with an attorney named Graves Thomas—whom Momma and Poppa Newton have hired to appeal Calvin's conviction. In May , while weighing Calvin's options, Graves—one of Janet's dearest friends—goes waterskiing. After cleaning moss from the engine's propeller, he steps up to the deck, says, "Let's go!
A few months after this, Samuel Newton, Calvin's de facto father and the man whose meager salary has been keeping Calvin's legal strategies—his hope —alive, dies of cancer. Calvin is given leave from prison to attend the funeral. In a way, it feels like his own.
In the two years preceding Graves Thomas's death, Calvin has heard the name Janet Gregory once or twice, though he's never met her. He actually thinks she's a secretary. He does not know that Janet Gregory, a white woman raised to be racist and violated by two men, has been going through her dead boss's files, reading the trial transcript of a black man convicted of rape and alternately exclaiming "This is bullshit!
All Calvin knows is that there are two people out of place at his grandfather's wake, and that Calvin is one of them. There are the scores of mourners in their Sunday best, silent and elegant, all black. There is Calvin, hands and ankles tautly chained to a black steel box affid to his beltline, shuffling, clanking, eyes lowered—no longer Big Hands, no longer the man who once used his gaze to seize ownership of whatever came before him.
And there is that woman, the sole white face, kneeling before his children and speaking softly. From to the state of Louisiana houses Calvin at the Caddo Correctional Institute thirty miles outside Shreveport.
Debbie brings the family every Saturday—Momma and Poppa Newton, while he's still alive; Calvin's little girl, Kesha, 3 years old at the time of his conviction; and Calvin Jr.
The visits are never enough, of course. Not even close. His need for Debbie is complex. At first he tethers his longing to his memories: of dancing with her for an hour straight the night they met; of their holiday celebrations; of Kesha's birth; of instances when the might of their physical love verged on the preposterous. So he finds himself pining for what he cannot quite remember, the nonevents, the sweet quiet nothings of being with her. There's a thing she used to do as she nuzzled his chest in bed, a peaceful rolling coo.
Did she know she did it? Did she know he could feel the low little hum in his sternum? What did she mean by it? Something plain and good, he thinks now. I'm here with you.
His longing for his babies, on the other hand, is not complex. Where missing Debbie is an act, something he engages in, his need for his babies seizes and terrorizes him. There is no controlling it. He will try to numb himself, dip his mind in a gray vagueness for days at a time, but then something sharp—the ammoniac sting of industrial solvent in the mess, the cold shock of his cell's stainless-steel shitter against his haunches—will jerk him to a state of full awareness and he will freeze, clasp his son's first bib, which he keeps with him, over his eyes and say aloud, "My babies.
One day he goes so far as to sneak into a room he's not supposed to be in. When, inevitably, a guard approaches saying, "Hey, you," Calvin calmly wraps a hand around the man's forearm, lowers himself into the man's chest, and flips him on his back. The storm comes within seconds, half a dozen guards with billy clubs, calling him nigger and bludgeoning his kidneys and shins until he no longer feels the agony of his lost children. In , shortly before being transferred miles across the state to Angola prison, Calvin addresses the unspoken question hanging over the Saturday reunions.
He asks the Newtons and his children for some time with Debbie. Once they're alone, he tells his wife that he aches for her, aches the way he did in his last hours as a free man, when a spirit came upon him and sent him home to make love to her for the last time.
Debbie begins to cry. But he must, and she knows it. He tells her that he knows it's been hard for her. That he knows she's been working six days a week at Dillard's with double shifts on Saturdays. That he knows Kesha and Calvin Jr.
That this is no way to live. And he tells her that even though the thought of her with another man feels to him like a form of death, he knows that it must happen. The most despised and marked man in the world is the man imprisoned for raping a child, so Calvin tells no one on the inside why he is there.
To avoid anyone asking, he seeks no company and strives to keep others from seeking it in him. To hide himself in plain sight, he kills everything within him that is engaging—his ability to tell a story, to offer counsel, to make everyone around him laugh and forget.
He even strips the confidence and sex from his stride, tightening it up and keeping his eyes downcast when he moves from here to there so that his body in motion suggests nothing except Nothing to see here.
Calvin's way of being, showing his heart to God through constant conversation while showing the world the face of a zombie, takes enormous effort. Postconviction DNA testing excluded Willis as the perpetrator of a rape for which he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The evangelist in you will be empowered and equipped!! Trying to find Dustin Willis?
The primary contributor to the non-sperm portion of that sample was a male. Investigators attempted to interview the victim at the hospital but were not able to do so. The police officers that responded to the call testified that the victim was incoherent and did not provide an intelligible description of the assailant. On September 18, , Calvin Willis was released from prison after serving more than 21 years for a crime he did not commit.
Pastor Richard Fair will be the eulogist. She identified the nightgown and panties collected as the clothing the victim was wearing after the attack. Calvin Willis, 52, who has been on the force for nearly 30 years, was arrested in May. Get full address, contact info, background report and more! We found entries for Calvin Willis in the United States.
Willis, who is 56 and lives with his wife and grandson, said he has struggled to find work. You are now the manager of this memorial. In the past, Calvin has also been known as Calvin M Willis. Another mixture was detected on the fly section of the boxers. Get current address, cell phone number, email address, relatives, friends and a lot more. Her testimony includes a statement that Calvin was standing above her when she awoke, but the victim never made an in-court identification of Willis.
Listen to music by Calvin Willis on Apple Music. Calvin Willis is a leader and entrepreneur. Calvin Willis was excluded from being a contributor to any of the samples. After trial, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. View the profiles of professionals named "Calvin Willis" on LinkedIn. Try it free. Explore where Calvin Willis may currently live along with possible previous addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and more.
In the shop where he's … Blood was found on the boxer shorts that could not exclude the victim. He is licensed to practice by the state board in Virginia Willis was excluded from being the contributor of various hairs recovered from the bedspread. We found 14 public records in all 50 states. Alternative Health Nutritionist What's now widely termed complementary and alternative medicine CAM might … school for training health coaches called the Institute for Integrative Nutrition , … Her initial testimony did not include the victim saying anything about a cowboy hat.
Upon results being confirmed, Calvin Willis was excluded from any possible involvement in the crime. Join Facebook to connect with Calvin Willis and others you may know. Genealogy for Calvin Willis Register - family tree on Geni, with over million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. Tell His description of the clothes he was wearing that night did not match those described by any of the three girls. Calvin has 4 jobs listed on their profile. Calvin Willis Perry passed away Dec. He was released in — before Louisiana offered compensation to the wrongfully convicted — and received no compensation until View Dustin's age, phone number, home address, email, and background check information now.
Testing of the blood found on the boxer shorts revealed a mixture of DNA profiles. Genealogy profile for John Calvin Willis John Calvin Willis - - Genealogy Genealogy for John Calvin Willis - family tree on Geni, with over million profiles of … If you want to know where Jordan Willis gets his expressionless and endless work ethic, look no further than Calvin Willis.
Skip Ribbon Commands. Skip to main content. Turn off Animations. Turn on Animations. Make a Gift. On September 18, , Calvin Willis was released from prison after serving more than 21 years for a crime he did not commit.
Postconviction DNA testing excluded Willis as the perpetrator of a rape for which he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
The Crime In June , an intruder entered a home in Shreveport, Louisiana, where three girls - aged 10, 9, and 7 - had fallen asleep after playing dress-up. Two of the girls had fallen asleep on the couch, the third in bed. The intruder carried the nine-year-old from the couch to the bed, where her seven-year-old sister was sleeping.
The ten-year-old victim awoke and saw a man standing above her, naked except for a cowboy hat. The attacker choked her and banged her head against the wall. The victim was able to escape and ran from the intruder, but was caught in the front yard, where a struggle ensued.
She was kicked in the stomach and lost consciousness. The girls in the bedroom heard noises but remained in the bedroom.
Their mother, the owner of the house, returned in the morning. The police officers that responded to the call testified that the victim was incoherent and did not provide an intelligible description of the assailant.
Her mother claimed that she told police that her daughter said an ugly man with a beard under his face did this to her. The victim was taken to the hospital, where a rape kit, including fingernail scrapings, was collected. Investigators attempted to interview the victim at the hospital but were not able to do so. The Identification Police interviews with the nine-year-old girl differed. In one report, she recollected that she was asleep on the couch with the victim and awoke as she was being carried by black man.
She could not see his face but described his shoes, which were shaped like cowboy boots. In another report, the girl said that Calvin Willis stopped by the house looking for a woman who lived there previously. Later, another man stopped by looking for the same woman. The second man wore a cowboy hat, cowboy shoes, and had a big blue and white car. This second report was not disclosed at the time of trial. With regard to the crime, she described the assailant as a big man with a cowboy hat, beard, and moustache put her in the bed and attacked the victim.
She heard him throw the victim against a wall and threaten to kill her if she called the police. At trial, the girl identified Willis by his boots, though her testimony of what the boots looked like differed from the boots Willis was arrested in two days after the crime. She also identified the nightgown collected as the one worn by the victim after the attack.
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