In the early morning of July 12, 1985, a woman’s nude body was discovered feet-first against a tree in a city park in Millington, Tenn., a town of 10,000 residents about 20 minutes north of Memphis. Her face was bruised and beaten, her hair matted with blood, strangulation marks visible around her neck. A 31-inch stick, taken from the tree above, had been shoved so far into her vagina, twice, that it punctured a lung. In all, there were more than 100 individual injuries to Suzanne Marie Collins’ body. Her murder is still regarded as one of the most senseless and gruesome homicides in Shelby County history. To this day, no clear motive can explain why it happened. Even before Collins’ body was found, police had discovered her murderer. Sedley Alley literally drove into investigators looking for her in Edmund Orgill Park, a one-square-mile recreation spot split in half by a lake, with a golf course on one side and a picnic area on the other. Police had been on the lookout for a dark green station wagon with wood paneling whose driver was last seen apprehending a female jogger at the Memphis Naval Air Station, the most significant landmass in Millington. A month shy of his 30th birthday, Alley didn’t have much going for him. His job as an air-conditioning repairman didn’t pay much. He was an alcoholic and habitual drug user, abusing hard stuff like PCP, LSD and methamphetamine. He could claim few, if any, friends. He had what today would be described as anger management issues. He threatened acquaintances and beat his first and second wives, the latter of whom had joined the Navy. He obsessed over his appearance. And he drove around in a rundown green Mercury station wagon in such disrepair that Alley had to start it with a screwdriver. After listening to Alley’s alibi and speaking with his wife, Lynne, police allowed Alley to return to base housing, where he lived and where they monitored him for several hours. The next day, when Collins’ body was found, police arrested and began interrogating him. Alley initially said he wouldn’t talk until he was provided an attorney. But after police gave him breakfast, coffee and cigarettes, he confessed to the murder, taking detectives to the spot in Orgill Park where Collins was found and showing them from which tree he tore the branch. His version of his encounter with Collins, a petite, athletic, 19-year-old Marine nearing completion of avionics training at the Memphis base, was that he accidentally struck her with his car while she jogged on a dark road. On the way to the hospital, she became belligerent and threatened to tell authorities he was driving drunk. In a panic, he diverted his station wagon to the park, where he accidentally stabbed her with a screwdriver. Then he impaled her to throw off police, he said, by making her murder look like a maniac was on the loose. During trial, Alley’s main contention was that he was insane. He alleged he wasn’t one person but at least three—Sedley Alley, a female named Billie and a menacing personality called Death. Since Alley claimed at trial he couldn’t remember where he was during Collins’ murder, his attorneys insisted one of the other personalities must have been responsible for killing her. None of Alley’s family members could testify they had witnessed the multiple personalities before Suzanne Collins’ murder and a half-dozen psychiatrists, one of whom interviewed Alley more than 30 times, determined he was faking mental illness. His symptoms, they said, appeared to coincide with his arrest and impending trial. It didn’t help that prosecutors were able to provoke Alley’s sister, Brenda Hoffman, into admitting Alley would do anything to avoid conviction. “Just like a lot of defendants,” she said, “they always look up every avenue.” It took the jury less than three hours to convict Alley, who didn’t take the stand in his own defense. Most of Alley’s appeals process returned to the question of his sanity—whether experts were qualified to testify and things of that nature. Alley’s trial judge, Fred Axley, was removed during the appeals phase because he made outlandish remarks about Alley in relation to the death penalty. (For example, Judge Axley said he would review an Alley request for a stay of execution May 3, 1990, the day after Alley was first scheduled to be executed.) In federal court, his attorneys argued Alley’s rights had been violated because Axley and prosecutors had engaged in a pattern of improper conduct—allegations the federal court ruled “frivolous.” Last month, Alley’s federal public defenders introduced evidence that Alley might, in fact, be innocent after all these years and close calls with the death chamber. His next execution date, in fact, is next week, May 17. They introduced a letter from a University of California, Irvine, criminology professor who says that Alley’s confession contains two glaring errors: Suzanne Collins was not hit by a car, as Alley alleged, and she didn’t have the pointed end of a screwdriver driven into the side of her head, as Alley also stated. Attorneys point out that at 9:30 a.m. July 12, Shelby County Medical Examiner James Bell said Collins had died, at most, eight hours “before the 9:30 time of pronouncement.” That would place her death at 1:30 a.m., when Alley was under surveillance by Naval police officers. In other words, Alley couldn’t have been in Orgill Park murdering Suzanne Collins because he was at home, his whereabouts documented by police logs. Defense attorneys also say Alley doesn’t match the description provided by the only eyewitness who saw a man with Collins the night of July 11, 1985. The description of the kidnapper: a short, dark-complexioned, dark-haired man wearing black shorts. Alley was 6-foot-4, slender, with light reddish-brown long hair. He wore blue jean shorts, not black shorts and had facial hair. Attorneys have taken Alley’s defense one step further. Not only have they said Alley doesn’t match the physical characteristics, they found someone who did. At trial, one of Collins’ colleagues said Collins devoted little time to men. In fact, she had not one, but two, boyfriends, neither of whom apparently knew about the other. An investigator hired by Alley’s defense team located both men last year. Greg Gonsowski told the investigator, April Higuera, he was engaged to marry Collins and that his romance with Collins was exclusive. Gonsowski left Memphis about three weeks before Collins, expecting her to relocate near him within six weeks. Higuera located Collins’ second boyfriend, John Borup, a former University of Memphis student who worked for NAPA Auto Parts, in Florida. Borup met Collins in a bar called Flanagan’s and “hit it off right away.” He also considered their relationship exclusive. As Higuera wrote in an affidavit filed in federal court, Borup is short, with dark-brown hair brown and a medium build. In 1985, he drove a brown Aspen station wagon and had “just dropped off [Collins] before [the murder] happened.” Defense attorneys are asking the state to stay Alley’s execution for several months pending DNA testing of the 31-inch stick, a pair of male underwear found at the scene and skin located underneath Collins fingernails. They’ve signed on defense attorney Barry Scheck, of O.J. Simpson fame, who is a DNA specialist and founder of the Innocence Project, to help with the final phase of Alley’s defense. “The tree branch was sharpened into a weapon,” says Vanessa Potkin, an Innocence Project staff attorney. “There was significant contact between the perpetrator and the weapon. We can test that for probative value and have an answer within a few weeks at no cost to the state.” Make no mistake: Sedley Alley is a man whose guilt, on paper at least, seems beyond reproach. He was wearing bloody shorts and drove a bloody car, and samples from each matched the victim’s blood type. He escorted police to the crime scene, even identifying the exact tree under which the victim was found. Finally, he offered a detailed 16-page confession. But as improbable as Alley’s innocence may be, his defense team’s request seems reasonable enough: simply test the DNA. As Potkin points out, DNA testing has exonerated 175 inmates across the country, 14 of whom were sitting, like Sedley Alley, on death row. Only one person claimed he could describe the lone male jogging in the vicinity of Suzanne Collins the night she was abducted. That person was Scott Lancaster, a Naval enlistee who oversaw the recreational activities at Navy Lake on the base. Lancaster gave a statement the night Collins was kidnapped describing the male jogger he saw as 5-foot-8, medium built, dark-brown hair, dark tan and wearing black shorts. But at trial, nearly two years later, Lancaster could not remember those details. “Did you get a good look at him?” Henry Williams, one of the prosecutors, asked him. “I got a quick glance at him,” Lancaster responded. “I saw his midsection and his hair.” Edward Thompson, one of two assistant Shelby County public defenders working the Alley case, made a half-hearted attempt to impeach Lancaster’s testimony, pointing out that the testimony he gave during trial failed to match the statement he gave police. Prosecutors were able to clarify Lancaster’s comments on the stand by asking him if Alley looked similar to the male jogger he saw that night. “They looked close,” Lancaster said. “They looked identical almost.” The problem is, even if Lancaster’s testimony could be considered unreliable, Alley admitted in his confession that he parked his car where Lancaster said he did, and was jogging when he first encountered Collins. Two other Marines, Mark Shotwell and Mike Howard, jogging past Collins moments after Lancaster saw her, provided testimony more relevant to the murder than Lancaster did. They saw a dark-colored station wagon with wood-grain siding, high beams on, swerve past them as it rounded a curve in the road, almost hitting them. They thought the driver was a sailor trying to give Marines a hard time. Moments later, they heard a scream. A woman’s voice yelled, “Don’t touch me” and “Leave me alone.” The two ran in the direction of the scream, several hundred yards and around the bend. By the time they arrived at the car, it took off in the direction of the main gate. Shotwell and Howard followed, running. They told the security guard at the gate what they’d seen and base security was alerted. The three Marines—Shotwell, Howard and the security guard, David Davenport—had several key pieces of information damaging to Sedley Alley. Shotwell and Howard not only knew what the car looked like, they knew what it sounded like. It had a distinctive sound, as if the car had a “loud, faulty muffler.” When Alley was apprehended and brought in for questioning an hour after the station wagon passed through the gate, Shotwell and Howard couldn’t identify the driver because it had been too dark to see who was behind the wheel. And they couldn’t verify whether the headlights were the same as those on the car that passed them. But as the two left police headquarters, Alley, who was also free to leave at that point, started his station wagon. The sound stopped Shotwell and Howard in their tracks. Alley’s station wagon sounded exactly like the car that swerved passed the Marines the night of Collins’ abduction. “I went back into security,” Howard testified during Alley’s March 1987 trial, “and I told them that that was, in fact, the car that I had seen out there, that there was no doubt in my mind whatsoever.” Davenport, the security guard, remembered that a station wagon with a defective exhaust system had passed him, but he couldn’t see the driver or the female passenger. He did notice, though, that the car had Kentucky license plates. Sedley Alley, who was born and raised in Ashland, Ky., owned a station wagon with Kentucky plates. It’s difficult at this point to determine whether the station wagon driven by John Borup, the man identified in court papers as one of Collins’ boyfriends, had Kentucky plates. A spokesman for the Kentucky Department of Motor Vehicles says the agency’s records are purged after five years, making them unavailable through routine public records requests. Alley’s defense team, meanwhile, is prohibited from subpoenaing the information because that would require a federal judge to reopen the evidentiary part of the case, which was closed according to appellate guidelines several years ago. Another contentious issue is the time frame of Suzanne Collins’ murder. Shelby County medical examiner James Bell determined at 9:30 a.m. July 12, 1985, that she had been dead approximately six to eight hours. If Collins had died, in fact, eight hours beforehand, that would place her death at 1:30 a.m., a time of the morning when Alley was under police surveillance following his initial capture and release. Bell died more than a decade ago and did not present a time of death at Alley’s trial. But two visitors to Orgill Park the night of Collins’ death, Virginia Taylor and Sheri Barganier, said they saw a dark-colored station wagon near where Collins was eventually found. They heard a terrifying death scream somewhere between 10:30 and 11:15 p.m. Thinking it was some kind of childish prank, one of the people in their group yelled at the car, at which point somebody turned up the radio. A few minutes later, the station wagon peeled out. Defense attorneys say Collins, based on her injuries and the amount of blood she lost, could not have stayed alive for two hours—assuming Alley murdered her at 11:30 and she died at 1:30. At most, she survived 15 minutes from the time the stick penetrated her, defense attorneys say. Sedley Alley, meanwhile, left the guard shack at approximately 11 p.m. Police, responding to a fight in Orgill Park unrelated to the Collins murder, stopped him as he drove by the fight scene at 12:10 a.m., according to police logs. The park was less than five minutes from the base. Alley had enough time to kill Suzanne Collins, but it might have been difficult for him to clean up after such a heinous, blood-spattering crime. During closing arguments, prosecutors said he wiped off blood on Collins’ sock and a pair of men’s underwear found at the scene. Alley himself was tidy, police noticed, except for perspiration around the top of his T-shirt. His jean shorts, they reported, were sopping wet. Despite his physical appearance, investigators found enough evidence to persuade a jury to convict him. Forensic specialists testified at trial that they found 31 spots on Alley’s jean shorts that tested positive for blood. They found what appeared to be a smear caused by a bloody head wiped against the driver’s side door, near the handle. The blood type, O, matched Suzanne Collins—as well as Sedley Alley. Type O blood was located on the headlights and on the station wagon’s Mercury emblem. A Danver’s Restaurant napkin obtained from the crime scene contained blood, though investigators couldn’t determine whether it was human. Three Danver napkins were found on the floorboard of Alley’s car. There was blood on the end of a screwdriver handle found at the scene but, again, not enough blood to determine whether it was human. A medical examiner also found a bloody head hair similar to Suzanne Collins’ inside the Mercury wagon. Overall, though, Alley’s car was cleaner than one might expect from a vehicle involved in a bloody murder. One of the Naval investigators, Jeff Key, testified that no finger- or handprints could be lifted from inside the station wagon because it appeared to have been wiped down. Defense attorneys, meanwhile, have continued to document discrepancies in Alley’s case. They hired an Ohio tire specialist, Peter McDonald, who studied photographs of front tire tracks at the murder scene and determined they did not belong to Alley’s Mercury station wagon. They seemed to belong to a mid-sized car. A shoe print didn’t appear to match Alley’s sneakers, though no analysis has been conducted to determine whose it is. Evidence of semen was present not only in Collins’ vagina but also on her right inner thigh, though Sedley Alley has claimed repeatedly that he did not rape Collins. A DNA analysis of swabs from Collins’ body, underwear and the 31-inch stick could unequivocally determine Alley’s guilt. In court filings, defense attorneys are practically begging federal judges to allow access to any evidence that might contain a DNA sample—access Shelby County prosecutors and the state Attorney General’s office have repeatedly blocked. The defense team calls the Alley case, at this point, an “authentic ‘who-done-it.’ ” It would be much easier to believe Sedley Alley’s case was a true whodunit if not for the avalanche of evidence against him punctuated by the confession he gave police 20 years ago. It wasn’t just any confession. Typed out by Naval secretaries, it was 16 pages long, each page signed and corrected by Sedley Alley. Not only did he provide a confession, he signed a release giving detectives permission to search his house and another form, the Navy’s Civilian Suspect’s Acknowledgement and Waiver of Rights form, saying he was willingly confessing. But Alley’s defense team points out that in 25 percent of cases exonerated through DNA testing, the defendant gave a false confession. In Alley’s case, defense attorneys say he was threatened with the arrest of his then-wife, Lynne, if he didn’t cooperate. They say, correctly, that the facts don’t match the confession Alley provided—for example, he didn’t stab Collins in the head with the pointed end of a screwdriver, and he didn’t hit her with his station wagon. And they say the confession he gave to Naval Special Agent Anthony Belovich, who later became an FBI agent, must have been coerced because the length of time of the confession, two hours, didn’t match the confession length on the tape, which clocked at just under an hour. The discrepancy “clearly indicates that authorities tampered with or manipulated” the confession, Alley’s attorneys claim. In fact, the issue of the tape length vs. confession length was discussed at trial. Agent Belovich explained that he used an office Dictaphone, not a tape recorder, to record Alley’s confession. The Dictaphone was equipped with 90-minute tapes even though it was a 60-minute machine, perhaps explaining the gap between actual interview and recorded interview times since the tape had to be flipped over. According to trial testimony, Alley even pointed out to agents that they’d left part of his confession out of the initial transcription. Not only did Alley give the confession and corrections, he then took Agent Belovich and another investigator on the route he drove the night Collins was kidnapped. His directions to the agents were tape-recorded. He first went to the abduction scene, then traveled to Orgill Park, near the basketball courts and dam, where Collins body was discovered earlier that morning. “We took a walk down there and he looked around and he looked up and said, ‘This is the tree.’ I said, ‘Well, how do you know this is the tree? You told me you didn’t remember what kind of tree it was.’ He said, ‘I remember this tree. That’s where I broke the branch’ and he pointed up.” Before the confession, Belovich and another agent, Carl Puricelli, were in a room when Alley told his wife he killed Collins. Alley’s wife, Lynne, yelled at the two agents to leave the room, they said, but they remained. She did not take the witness stand in her husband’s defense. As for the discrepancies in Alley’s confession, several psychiatrists testified it isn’t uncommon for defendants to embellish confessions to make themselves look better. Accused individuals weave fiction with fact to try to secure a more lenient punishment for themselves. Medical examiners, for example, didn’t find puncture marks consistent with a screwdriver shoved in Collins’ head. But they did find injuries behind the left ear and high on the head where she was beaten with the rounded end of a screwdriver. Alley admitted as much when he was sent to a state mental hospital for evaluation in November 1986. “Mr. Alley told us that he did lie in the police confession specifically so that he could show that there were inconsistencies in the police report,” Deborah Richardson, a social worker who researched Alley’s psychosocial history, testified. “Therefore, he thought that would get him off the charge.” To believe Sedley Alley is innocent after all these years is also to overlook the way he acted during the time between his arrest and trial. Alley was sent to a psychiatric hospital to determine whether he was competent to be tried and to judge his sanity about the time of the murder. It didn’t take long for Alley’s psychiatric team to rule out insanity. He was caught faking the voice of Death over the telephone to his sister, Brenda Hoffman. How did doctors know Alley was faking it? He told his sister he was trying to kill himself by putting a plastic bag over his head and tying it with a sock. Hoffman alerted security guards, who rushed to the telephone room to find Alley doing no such thing. There was no plastic bag and no sock. Psychiatrists were so certain Alley was faking it they began giving him false information to see whether he’d react. After Alley related a dream sequence to them, they asked if he had to urinate once he woke up. Alley said no, but when he related his next dream sequence, he added that he went to the bathroom once he awoke. He complained of sleep disturbances, animals coming to kill him and the like. So, without telling him, doctors decided to conduct a bed check every 15 minutes. They found him sleeping peacefully. Doctors were able to determine that the span of Alley’s amnesia, the things he couldn’t remember in his life, related only to the time of Suzanne Collins’ murder. “The only time that he could really specifically tell us he couldn’t remember anything was during the time that this woman was killed,” Richardson testified. Alley complained about hallucinations, paralysis, ringing in his ears, depression, headaches and visions of Billie and Death. Doctors linked most of these symptoms to Alley’s long history of drug abuse. In fact, Alley was doing drugs—speed and Coke laced with rubbing alcohol—even as he was being evaluated. Prosecutors allege he went so far as to sell cocaine and LSD from his jail cell. Far from being delusional and psychotic, Alley’s thoughts were well organized, even cunning. He wrote to his wife asking her to watch television and newspapers to see whether the media might bias the jury. He asked her whether police followed proper procedure when conducting a search of their house. He suggested to his wife, after reading the National Enquirer, that they place an ad in the paper, seeking to borrow several hundred thousand dollars for his defense. “There’s a catch to it, I know,” Alley wrote, “but maybe we could buy me out of this and then declare bankruptcy.” Doctors observed Alley hanging out with the truly psychotic patients, mimicking their behavior. He took notes on at least one patient. When psychiatrists asked questions, trying to draw him out, he would be evasive and ask questions back, like “What do you mean” and “What do you really want to know?” In other words, he was unsure what symptoms to display, so he tried to make doctors lead him to the correct answers. State psychiatrists did eventually diagnose Alley with a mental condition, though not the multiple personality disorder he was hoping for. They found him to be a borderline personality, a behavior style defined as someone who is highly suspicious, irresponsible, angry, unstable, fearful of being alone and emotionally dependent, usually upon a lover. Doctors noticed Alley had a perverse, hostile way of relating to his wife when she was in basic training a year before Collins’ murder. He included so much pornographic language in his letters that Lynne Alley told him he had to stop. At one point, he told her he wanted to urinate on her. In another letter, he said he wanted to rape her. Doctors noted the rape comment was “extremely significant” because rape isn’t about sex or love. It wasn’t something a husband should write to his wife. Despite all that, Alley’s two children from his first marriage believe he’s innocent. “I asked him a couple of years ago if he did it,” says April McIntire, Alley’s daughter. “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘No. I didn’t.’ He said the detectives who interviewed him held a gun to his face and told him they’d shoot him if he didn’t confess. His family would have been forced to attend his funeral with a closed casket.” McIntire believes her father, she says, because she married a former law enforcement agent. “He told me cops do those kinds of things.” But with the massive evidence against Alley, that’s a tough sell.
