Issue of innocence: Is Adam Braseel serving life for another man's crime?

TRACY CITY, Tenn. – Adam Clyde Braseel clocked out of work, borrowed his mother’s car and headed to the mountain for a weekend of four-wheeling with friends. He took about a 45-minute break in between to lure an old man from home in the dark, beat him to death by the roadside, steal his wallet and try to silence an eyewitness.

He made it to his next stop in time for a late supper.

That’s the argument that convinced a Grundy County jury to send Braseel, then 24, to prison for life a decade ago for the death of 60-year-old Malcolm Burrows. A judge set him free a year-and-a-half ago and ordered a new trial, calling the evidence of Braseel’s guilt insufficient. The state Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the decision and took that freedom back.

He’s 34 now. He’ll be 76 if he lives long enough to appear at his first parole hearing.

The case has divided this small Southeast Tennessee community on the Cumberland Plateau and raised questions about the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and just what issues qualify as fair game under Tennessee’s appeals process.

► Related:Rally claims Grundy man wrongly convicted of murder

Braseel maintained his innocence from the moment investigators confronted him. He maintains it today.

“It’s been a rollercoaster ride nobody should ever have to take,” Braseel said in a phone call from prison. “I never thought it would happen to me. I try to stay positive, but I’m realistic. I know I could be an innocent man in prison the rest of my life.”

A clean-cut case

The officer who signed the arrest warrant says he has no regrets.

“I don’t lose any sleep at night over the case,” said Lonnie Cleek, former Grundy County chief deputy. “All they’re trying to do is muddy up the waters to get a retrial. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Do I think Adam was by himself in the crime? No, I do not. Do I think Adam was totally innocent? Hell, no.”

No other suspect was ever charged in the case. Not a single piece of physical evidence linked Braseel to the crime scene – no fingerprints, no DNA, no blood, hair or clothing fibers.

Prosecutors say they didn’t need it.

“Two eyewitnesses clearly identified him,” said Steve Strain, the assistant 12th Judicial District attorney general who handled the trial. “He was tried like anybody else. He was represented by two established, very experienced attorneys, and the jury found him guilty.”

Two more eyewitnesses swore they saw Braseel in a church parking lot at almost the exact moment of the crime. A friend testified he saw Braseel walk through his door minutes after the killing – calm, clean and composed as far as he could tell.

The years between have served only to cloud the case further. The main witness against Braseel, Burrows’ sister who testified he tried to beat her death, has died. So has the friend who greeted Braseel at his home that night. Memories have faded, and contemporary police and court records leave a spotty paper trail littered with contradictions, omissions and unanswered questions.

The Tennessee Supreme Court chose earlier this year not to hear Braseel’s case. That leaves only one further avenue of appeal – a petition in U.S. District Court to have the conviction declared unlawful and thrown out. Such petitions are rarely granted – if ever.

The red-headed man

The knock at the front door came about 9 p.m.

Becky Hill wasn’t looking at the clock when her brother, Malcolm Burrows, went to answer the door of his house on Melissa Rock Road outside Tracy City the night of Jan. 7, 2006. Hill, 54, and her son, Kirk Braden, had been staying with Burrows since the fall. They’d finished supper, and Braden, a diabetic, had gone to bed early, complaining he felt sick.

Hill said later she couldn’t be sure of the time – maybe it was 9, maybe 9:15. Her brother apparently recognized the man. She never heard Burrows call the visitor’s name, but she noticed his hair, red and close-cropped. He was short and skinny, with a medium build, wearing a jacket and a ballcap. She remembered he’d been up there earlier that day.

The man’s car had died just up the road. Burrows had a gas can outside and offered to help. He grabbed a jacket and the keys to Hill’s car, a Chrysler parked at the end of the driveway, and headed out the door.

‘He’s killing me’

Within 10 minutes – maybe 20, maybe 30 – the man walked through the door again uninvited. The car still wouldn’t start. Burrows had sent him back for starter fluid – right there under the kitchen sink, he said.

The man seemed different this time – nervous, agitated, with a “wild” look in his eyes. Hill knelt down to open the cabinet and rooted around in vain.

“I said, ‘There’s nothing down here but a fire extinguisher,’ ” she testified later. “And just as I raised up, he pulled a steel rod maybe this long out and that’s when he hit me the first lick in the head. … I tried to get back up and he repeatedly hit me. … It knocked me down, and I hollered for my son, you know, ‘He’s killing me.’”

Braden, awakened by the noise, charged into the kitchen from the bedroom. The man looked up from hitting Hill, grabbed the fire extinguisher and slung it at Braden, then ran out the door.

“I deadbolted the door and heard him start and leave in his car,” Braden told police.

The house had no phone, so Braden went to a neighbor’s to call E-911. Dispatchers logged the time – 9:52 p.m., the only precise time anyone could swear to later.

The dead man in the dark

The first officer on the scene arrived within 15 minutes. The second – Andy West, a new deputy barely three months into the job – passed a blue Chrysler on his way to the house. He didn’t know it, but Burrows’ body lay about 10 feet away in the dark.

The body lay there for another hour. Officers didn’t begin searching for Burrows until West realized the missing Chrysler was the one he’d driven past on the roadside. By that time, a semi-conscious Becky Hill had left in an ambulance after giving only a brief description of her attacker. Braden repeated her story and described seeing the attacker drive away in a gold or tan car, maybe a Nissan or Honda.

Grundy County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Mike Brown, the night shift supervisor and investigator on duty, worked the scene as an assault case. He gathered the fire extinguisher and the broken halves of a baseball bat, the attacker’s presumed weapon, loaded the evidence in his cruiser and pulled out of the driveway. As he left the house, Brown flicked on his auxiliary lights and spotted a body lying face-down on a bed of blood-soaked leaves, about 600 feet from the house and a few feet from the driver’s side door of the Chrysler. It was 11:25 p.m.

A bloody scene

Burrows had no shortage of friends and enemies. He’d dabbled in local politics through the years, serving on the Tracy City Council and running unsuccessfully for mayor. He also had a reputation for bootlegging, drug dealing and trafficking in stolen property, including a 2003 arrest for selling pills that earned him a felony record and three years on probation.

An autopsy found Burrows had been struck as many as a dozen times, maybe more, with enough force to split his skull in two. Bruises to his hands, forearms and shoulders indicated he’d tried in vain to defend himself.

“The best I could tell, he had confronted somebody and been killed there,” recalled Brown, now retired. “Whoever did it should have had blood all over them.”

Agent Larry Davis of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation arrived just before 1:30 a.m. to take over the case and inspect and photograph the crime scene. The dead man’s wallet was gone, never found in later searches. Burrows, known to carry wads of cash, probably had about $800-$1,000 in his pocket when he left the house, authorities estimated.

The nature of the location – damp, loose leaves, scattered brush and asphalt – meant fingerprints, clothing fibers and other trace evidence would be scarce to nonexistent. Even so, Davis gathered everything in sight to be processed, from the charger by the car to the leaves surrounding the body to a trio of bottles found along the roadside. Tests for DNA detected only Burrows’ blood from samples collected at the scene. Just one item – a Sundrop bottle that could have been lying in the ditch for a few hours or a few months – yielded a single identifiable fingerprint, unmatched to any human to this day.

Within 12 hours, police had their first and only suspect.

‘The description fits’

Authorities still won’t explain exactly what led investigators to Adam Braseel. But by 1 p.m. on the day after the killing, his name came up.

“Information has come in that the description fits Adam Braseel,” Davis wrote in a report.

Braseel had grown up in Grundy County’s Pelham community, where he graduated high school before moving with his mother to Estill Springs in neighboring Franklin County. He had no criminal history beyond a misdemeanor arrest for marijuana possession as a teenager.

“I guess I’m the one who pointed the finger at him,” said Brown, the former sergeant. “I just figured we didn’t have many people on the mountain with red hair. One of my snitches said there used to be a guy who lived in the valley (near Pelham) with red hair that she went to church with as a kid. Looking back on it, I think he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Officers went to his mother’s home in the next county. Braseel wasn’t there.

When the mother left home that night, deputies followed her across the county line to a house on Company Farm Road in the Coalmont community, about a quarter-hour’s drive from Burrows’ home. As Cleek and the Grundy County sheriff, Brent Myers, pulled up, their high beams fell on a short, red-haired man standing beside the mother’s car – Adam Braseel. A gold four-door 1995 Acura Legend, the car Braseel had borrowed from his mother two days before, sat in the yard.

A night on the mountain

Braseel complied with every request from police. He agreed to a search of the Acura and signed it over to deputies. A tow truck hauled off the car, which wouldn’t start due to a dead battery. He turned over his ballcap and the clothes he said he’d worn the night before.

“I gave them everything they wanted,” Braseel said. “I had nothing to hide.”

Tests found none of Burrows’ blood or brain matter in the car, on the cap or on the clothes. Braseel had no visible injuries except for a bruise and small cut on his cheek – where a box had fallen on him at work, he said.

He followed officers that night to the county jail in Altamont, where he let himself be fingerprinted and photographed and gave a brief statement.

He’d left work at the UPS warehouse in nearby Tullahoma that Friday, come home to borrow the Acura, driven to Grundy County and spent the night at the home of a friend, Charles Partin, in Coalmont. He stayed at Partin’s until sometime between 9:15 and 9:30 p.m. He drove around for the next half-hour or so before heading to the house on Company Farm Road, where another friend, Josh Seagroves, and others waited to go four-wheeling.

Seagroves testified he remembered looking up at the clock just as Braseel walked through the door at 10 p.m. – eight minutes after Braden’s E-911 call. They ate a late supper of macaroni and cheese, spent that night riding four-wheelers on the mountain, and slept in Sunday before heading out on the mountain again.

He came back to a phone call from his mother that Burrows was dead, the sheriff was looking for him and to stay put until she got there.

“My buddy told me not to worry about it,” Braseel said. “I thought this was all going to be worked out.”

‘That’s him’

The trial lasted three days in November 2007. With a judge and jury watching, Becky Hill took the witness stand and pointed out Braseel as her attacker.

“He is right there,” she said.

Cleek, the chief deputy, testified Hill picked Braseel out of a photo lineup days after the killing with the words, “That’s him.”

Her son did the same. Braseel’s ballcap, he told the jury, matched the ballcap worn by the man who attacked his mother. He said he recognized the car impounded by deputies as the one that sped away from the house. The cut on Braseel’s cheek, he testified, matched the spot where he landed a punch at the attacker.

Strain, the prosecutor, hailed their testimony at the time as “better than CSI.” He didn’t deny then or now that the case had its holes and loose ends. Even the investigating officers doubted Braseel, who stood 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighed about 130 pounds, could have beaten Burrows, who outweighed him by about 100 pounds, to death by himself.

“Our belief has always been that there was a third party involved,” Strain said. “We’ve never been able to prove that. We always like to have more evidence.”

Braseel’s family had moved from Grundy County years earlier after a fire that destroyed their home. Local gossip held Burrows had been behind the fire. No witness ever testified to any of that story, but everyone in the courtroom had heard the rumors.

“Our theory was that Malcolm Burrows had threatened the mother,” Strain said. “Adam lured him to the scene, and because Becky Hill had seen him, he had to go back for her.”

Braseel’s lawyers say they recognized the case as lost from the moment Hill pointed to the defense table.

“Juries believe eyewitnesses,” said attorney Bob Peters, who assisted with the defense. “She was not hesitant. I was studying the jurors’ faces, and there was not a single juror that didn’t believe her.”

More than meets the eye

Courts have treated eyewitness testimony as the bedrock of convictions since the days of Moses and Hammurabi. But psychological studies and wrongful-conviction appeals over the past half-century have increasingly called that principle into question.

“Mistaken eyewitness identification is the primary cause of wrongful convictions in the U.S. – about 70 percent by most estimates,” said Gary Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University who has made a career of studying human memory. “There’s no other single factor that quite comes close to that. We think of eyewitness certainty as a pretty good indicator of accuracy, and if you do everything right in the initial lineup, you can count on the confidence of the witness as a pretty good predictor of what’s right or wrong. But unfortunately, things can really break down early on.”

For all her ability to point out Braseel in the courtroom, Hill couldn’t give a consistent account of how she picked him out as her attacker.

She testified at a preliminary hearing about six weeks after the killing that the sheriff and the chief deputy came to her sister’s home a day or two after she returned from the hospital. They sat at the kitchen table, showed her a photo lineup, and “once I seen the picture I knowed him. … None of (the others) look like him.”

At the trial, 22 months after the killing, Hill swore she’d gone to the jail for the lineup.

“I’m not sure if I looked at (the photos) at my sister’s or not,” she testified. “I did go to the jail and look at them. … I had been heavily medicated. I wasn’t at myself at that time real good. … I knowed exactly what I was telling them. I knowed what I was doing.”

Cleek, the chief deputy, insists officers went to visit Hill immediately after she left the hospital but didn’t try to show her a lineup because she was still in too much of a daze.

“I did not present the photo lineup to her then because I did not feel she was up to it,” he said. “I was the one who sat two inches away from Becky Hill (later) when she poked her finger on that photo of Adam Braseel. To me, she was certain.”

A fitting image

That lineup, introduced as an exhibit at trial, consists of eight color mug shots – four on top, four on the bottom – with Braseel’s on the bottom near the center. Five of the men in the photos have bangs or bushy hair. Four appear to be at least middle-aged or older. Three have beards.

Only Braseel’s and another photo show close-cropped hair. Not everyone pictured has red hair.

Grundy County authorities didn’t record Hill’s identification, on audio or video. The only record of the process to make its way into the court file consists of an undated report prepared under the name of Myers, the sheriff.

“She told me that she could not positively identify the car but that she would never forget the person’s face that assaulted her,” the sheriff wrote. “When she saw his picture she began to cry. She told me that she knew that this would not bring Malcolm back but that she would never forget Adam Brazeel’s (sic) face when he assaulted her.”

Myers didn’t respond to repeated efforts to reach him for this story.

Defense lawyers made no objection to the lineup.

“Frankly, I’m appalled at what I’m hearing,” said Wells, the eyewitness expert, who has no ties to Braseel’s defense. “I hesitate to criticize law enforcement in a case like this, because they often have small staffs and because it’s easy to hindsight people. But there needs to be some kind of clear, documented identification process. There should be filler (photos) of people who look like the suspect. The person conducting the lineup should be someone other than the case detective, someone who doesn’t even know which photo is the suspect’s so that they can’t unconsciously influence the witness. You shouldn’t be able to look at the lineup and tell which person is the suspect. When that doesn’t happen, it’s up to defense attorneys to hold law enforcement to account.”

A relative question

The official photo lineup with Hill didn’t take place until Jan. 16 – nine days after the killing and a week after her son, who was still living with her, had already identified Braseel’s photo in a process that raised further questions.

That identification rated only a pair of sentences in the sheriff’s report. But at trial, Myers admitted things hadn’t gone as planned.

The sheriff testified he’d been clipping out mug shots on a desk in an unsecured trailer outside the jail to paste into a lineup when Braden burst in unannounced.

“All of those photos was on the desk … and when he sat down he pointed at the picture and told me that that picture was the one that had did it,” Myers testified. “When he did that, I picked all those photos up in my hand, and I handed ‘em to him and I told him that I wanted him to make sure that he had picked out the right photo.”

The sheriff said he couldn’t remember how the photos were arranged on the desk, how many lay face-up or how many face-down. Braden swore he saw Braseel’s photo first, then the others.

“He showed me the first photo and I identified him,” the son testified. “He come up and asked me, yes, ‘Is this the man who done it?’ … He showed me three or four. … I couldn’t tell you how many (photos). There was a stack.”

Experts say that’s one of the worst possible ways to conduct a photo lineup.

“People want to believe the human memory is like a camera, but it’s more like an Etch-A-Sketch,” said Wells, the psychology professor. “Memory is malleable. Every time you remember an event, you reshape it in your mind. Once a witness identifies a suspect, then he becomes their memory. When they think back to the crime, they see his face. Their recollection is tainted, and there’s no way to get that back.”

No one at the trial ever asked Hill or Braden whether they’d talked about his making the identification first.

“It’s ridiculous,” said William J. Bevil, a retired Brevard County, Fla., homicide detective who worked on the Braseel case as a private investigator during the initial appeals process. “That kind of lineup would never fly anywhere else in the country. Her son goes back home and lives with her. Don’t you think he’s going to say, ‘Hey, Mom, guess what? I picked the guy out.’ Right away, they have messed this case up. It’s garbage in, garbage out.”

Hill died in 2011, and Braden couldn’t be reached for this story. A knock at his door in Tracy City drew no answer.

Alibi arithmetic

Defense lawyers had the right to challenge Hill’s and Braden’s identifications as tainted and try to keep the jury from hearing that testimony. They didn’t.

Braseel recounted his alibi to the jury in detail. After leaving Charles Partin’s house on Freemont Road, he stopped at the L&L Market on state Highway 108 to buy a cigar. He saw a friend, Jake Baum, in a church parking lot and pulled over to talk. He and Baum moved to an empty bank parking lot across the road and talked for about five or 10 minutes; both wanted to smoke a joint, but neither had rolling papers. He headed from there to the Seagroves house.

The defense called three witnesses who supported Braseel’s story – Charles Partin, who testified he watched Braseel pull out of his driveway on Freemont Road as he locked the house door just before 9:15 p.m.; Josh Seagroves, who testified Braseel arrived at his home at exactly 10 p.m.; and Kristen King, who testified she was with Baum, her boyfriend, when they met Braseel in the church parking lot around 9:30 p.m.

The distance from Partin’s house to the murder scene on Melissa Rock Road covered about 10 miles with a drive time of roughly 15-20 minutes, assuming Braseel traveled along the main highway as he testified. The distance from Burrows’ home to Seagroves’ house covered about eight miles, with a similar drive time.

That left about a 15-minute window for Braseel to park on the roadside, walk to Burrows’ house, ride back to the car and kill Burrows, then drive to the Burrows house, attack Becky Hill, struggle with Kirk Braden and flee. Braden’s run to use the neighbor’s phone would have taken about two minutes, with the call coming into E-911 at 9:52 p.m.

If Braseel walked through his friend’s door at 10 p.m., that would have required him to cover the distance in half the necessary time. Prosecutors argued he could have taken a shortcut along back roads. Even that would have left little to no time to dispose of clothes spattered with the dead man’s blood, to stop at the L&L Market or to talk in the church parking lot – if the defense witnesses told the truth.

But all the alibi testimony and arithmetic in the world couldn’t have overcome two eyewitness IDs, Peters said.

“Alibi witnesses are always full of (expletive),” he said. “If you have 100 cases with an alibi witness up against an eyewitness for the state, the eyewitness will win every time. To compound our problem, there were two eyewitnesses who said he came in and beat the hell out of this old lady.”

Trails not taken

Neither prosecution nor defense called the night clerk at the L&L Market to testify. Neither side sought the store’s receipts or security video from the night of the killing.

Cellphone records could have helped pinpoint Braseel’s whereabouts that night. Neither side obtained those records.

Bevil, the private investigator, tried to pick up the trail seven years later when hired to assist with the appeal. He hit one dead end after another.

Seagroves died in 2013 in a four-wheeling crash. Verizon, the cell provider, hadn’t kept long-term records of the pings that would have shown the nearest cell towers to Braseel’s phone that weekend. The store and the bank had long ago erased all security video from that night. The clerk who would have been on duty didn’t remember.

“It had been too many years,” Bevil said. “He probably would have known the next day or even a few days later. But it was too late.”

A legal seesaw

Jurors deliberated for a total of about three hours before finding Braseel guilty of first-degree murder in Burrows’ death, attempted first-degree murder in the beating of Hill and especially aggravated robbery. Circuit Judge Buddy Perry pronounced the sentence – life in prison.

At least one member of the jury says she’s had second thoughts from the moment the foreman read the verdict.

“It was wrong,” said Cindy Henley, who insists she argued against conviction but gave into pressure from her fellow jurors. “I don’t remember anybody else in the jury room questioning anything. I think most of them just wanted to go home. But I will never forget the look on that man’s face. I still feel guilty about that.”

A review by the state Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the overall conviction and rejected the idea the photo lineups had violated Braseel’s rights.

Next came the post-conviction process, when inmates get the chance to argue at the local court level for new trials based on due process violations or newly discovered evidence. A hearing on Braseel’s petition, argued by Knoxville attorney Doug Trant, reached the court docket on Nov. 17, 2015, eight years after Braseel’s conviction.

A new judge, Justin Angel, five years out of law school and elected to the bench just a year before, presided this time. Trant’s argument rested primarily on the problematic nature of Hill’s and Braden’s identifications, on additional witnesses supporting Braseel’s alibi – including Jake Baum, who’d been on active duty with the Army during the trial – and on testimony pointing to other potential suspects in Burrows’ death. Trant argued Braseel’s lawyers failed him by not objecting and by not driving those points home with jurors.

“Those are such important issues that certainly the defense counsel should have run with it,” Trant said. “I think they just didn’t see it.”

The judge issued his decision on Christmas Day.

“Identification alone is all that ties the petitioner to the crimes,” Angel wrote. Based on “clear and convincing evidence … The petitioner is entitled to a new jury trial.”

Back behind bars

Braseel came home from prison, released on bond as he waited for a new trial that never came. He worked a construction job while living with his mother and sister, who’d moved back to Pelham since the trial.

“I was a free man – justly free – for 10 months,” he said. “I thought it was all over with. It’s a beautiful thing to have your physical freedom, especially after it’s been taken away from you once. I take a lot less things for granted now.”

That freedom didn’t last. Prosecutors appealed the judge’s decision as unfounded. The state Court of Criminal Appeals agreed.

Neither of Braseel’s original lawyers testified at the post-conviction hearing. Without hearing from the attorneys, any ruling on their effectiveness amounted to guesswork, the court ruled.

“A defendant in a criminal case is not entitled to perfect representation, only constitutionally adequate representation,” Judge Timothy Easter wrote. “These witnesses had a substantial and prolonged opportunity to observe the offender amid adequate lighting and from close distances. The witnesses expressed certainty . … No probability exists that the result of the trial would have been different (had the defense objected to the identifications).”

That decision sent Braseel back to the prison cell where he sits today at the Bledsoe County Correctional Complex in Pikeville, Tenn. His appeals at the state level ran out in March when the Tennessee Supreme Court declined to hear his case.

“I had just got up and had my Bible in my hand when they came to take me back,” he said. “It took my breath away. To be honest, I feel like my life’s been stolen from me.”

Braseel’s latest attorney, Alex Little, hopes to file a petition in federal court by the end of the month. Just persuading a judge to hear that plea won’t be easy, as such hearings typically deal only with death-penalty cases or clear questions of constitutional rights.

He works in the prison garden, takes part in a ministry to inmates and calls home every night. His sister, Christina, organized a small rally in Nashville last month to draw attention to the case. Some local pastors mention his name from the pulpit.

Pages on Facebook and Twitter advertise the cause. Friends and strangers in Grundy County wait to see whether Netflix, HBO, network TV or some other national media outlet picks up the story.

“I try to stay patient, because I can’t just sit here and dwell on it,” Braseel said. “But where do you draw the line between enough’s enough and you reopen the case? Everybody in Grundy County knows I’m innocent. Why doesn’t the justice system?”

And Adam Braseel waits to hear the gavel tap once more.