Critics of police work in St. Louis would have been comforted by observing the trial of Rico Paul, 19, who was charged with attempted burglary in the states streets neighborhood on May 9, 2011 and the murder of the good Samaritan neighbor who interrupted the burglary with a threat to call the police.
The prosecution’s best evidence was the defendant’s videotaped confession, made the day after the crimes were committed. The way the video recording was made and published to the jury made it all but impossible to refute or discount it as evidence. The young suspect sits alone in the interview room. The suspect does not look as if any harm has come to him. The detectives enter, sit politely, read the suspect his Miranda rights and the suspect consents to doing the interview without a lawyer present. The detectives then ask him questions about the crimes. The tone of their questioning is insistent but respectful. When the suspect asks to speak to one detective alone, the other detective leaves the room. When the suspect asks for another suspect to be included in the interview, the remaining detective leaves him alone in the room with the video still recording as he goes to check.
The video recording is always running. By the time Detective Dan Sweeney has talked the suspect out of a complete confession to attempted burglary and shooting the good Samaritan neighbor, there is about an hour of uninterrupted viewing of Rico Paul in the police interview room. He says he understands his rights, he never asks for a lawyer, he is never threatened or assaulted in any way. This is very clean police work, and it was cleanly presented in its entirety to the jury by Melissa Gilliam, arguing the state’s case from Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce’s office.
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Bad old days
The last time The American closely considered police work, it was to take a new look at the investigation of the 1991 Chain of Rocks Bridge case. From the testimony presented this year in Special Master Michael Manners’ evidentiary hearing for the Missouri Supreme Court, St. Louis detectives in that investigation beat conflicting confessions out of a series of suspects, keeping the confessions that hung together the best. Detectives even rewrote police reports to help prosecutor Nels C. Moss talk the state’s way out of having in the trial record one confession to the same crimes that pretty much invalidates the state’s case against the defendants who actually went to trial. It was also awkward that the suspect who gave the completely inconsistent confession was the state’s star witness against the defendants who confessed differently.
It was easy to see what the Chain of Rocks codefendants were up against when now retired Detective Chris Pappas took the stand at the evidentiary hearing, even more than 20 years after he interrogated Reginald Clemmons and Thomas Cummins. Pappas still looked like a man you would not want to be alone in a padded cell with, and Pappas was never alone; he always had at least one other detective doing the dirty work with him. (Pappas and the other detectives on the Chain of Rocks case denied ever beating suspects, though Pappas and Joseph Brauer pled the 5th Amendment when police Internal Affairs investigated Clemons’ allegation of police brutality.)
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Social workers from hell
The detectives who worked the Rico Paul interview, Sweeney and Detective Dan Fox, let their minds not their fists do the talking. Their approach to police work resembles social work in hell. They connected with this troubled young man only to convict him.
Indeed, it was the previous connection that Sweeney had established with the defendant that elicited the confession. Sweeney had investigated the homicide of a young girl just weeks before the May 9, 2011 murder, and Rico Paul had been useful to him as an informant. That is why the youth asked to talk to Sweeney alone. When Detective Fox agreed to leave Paul and Sweeney alone, Sweeney very skillfully leveraged this troubled young man’s sense of a connection between them. There is a strong, sad impression that Sweeney talked a confession out of Paul simply because he was an older man showing sincere interest in the youth and willing to listen to him. Paul was homeless at the time he committed the crimes. He woke on May 9, 2011 having slept in the back seat of a friend’s car.
Sweeney only once put any words in the defendant’s mouth, though this suggestion was critical in getting the confession. Sweeney told Paul that if he was acting in self-defense when he shot the good Samaritan neighbor, that could make a difference in how much he gets punished. Sweeney repeatedly said he couldn’t make any promises, but the suggestion that he could get less time was what finally moved Paul to stop blaming someone else for the shooting (in fact, the same person he had informed against in his previous interview by Sweeney) and put himself at the crime scene.
Once Paul admitted he attempted the burglary and shot the neighbor who interrupted him, the youth rattled off a series of specific crime scene details that the detectives had not mentioned and only someone who was there would know. The gun he said he used shoots the same caliber as the bullet that killed the neighbor. He said only one shot was fired, which was true. He even stood and mimicked the way he had to lean up in order to shoot down over the tall wooden fence that separates the home he was burglarizing from the home of the neighbor.
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One juror hangs jury
Unfortunately for justice in this case, a St. Louis jury was hung on the verdicts in this trial, with one holdout. As a result, Judge David Mason declared a mistrial and Paul must be tried again.
According to courtroom sources, the jury first took up the lightest charge, attempted burglary, and could not even come to an agreement on that charge, with one holdout. This suggests a juror with a limited understanding of the law and evidence, since in his police interview Paul elaborately describes the method he and his accomplice used to burglarize homes – one youth knocks on the front door, prepared to say they must be at the wrong house if someone answers the door, then sends the other burglar around the house to break in when no one answers the door. His guilt as a burglar is not in any doubt.
The state did have to work around some conflicting evidence as to the murder. The eyewitness neighbors across the alley, who lived to testify, picked Rico Paul out of a police lineup two days after the crimes were committed and testified that he had a male accomplice. These witnesses were sure that Paul was the burglar and shooter, but they estimated his height and weight as being smaller than he is in fact. The male accomplice they witnessed does not match Paul’s confession, which was that he attempted the burglary with a 15-year-old girl accomplice.
That discrepancy is accounted for in the videotape of Paul’s confession. A friend of his had been brought in as a suspect at the same time, and when left alone in the interview room Paul communicated with his friend by screaming back and forth through the wall. He seems to be telling his friend that he is confessing, but not implicating the friend.
Paul yells at one point, “They got witnesses on me. It’s too late, bruh.” But he assures his friend, “I got you, blood. You hear me?” When Sweeney returned to the room, Paul then asked for his friend to be brought into the room before he would talk. It seems clear he wanted his friend to witness him confess to his own guilt without implicating his accomplice.
Whoever was with him on May 9, 2011, it is clear from the evidence that Rico Paul attempted a burglary next to the home of Paul Reiter, and then shot Paul Reiter dead when Reiter came out on his back porch with a cell phone threatening to call the police.
Paul Reiter, the good Samaritan neighbor who was killed, was the longtime circulation manager of The St. Louis American, our lost colleague whom we continue to miss and mourn.
