Justice A.A. Birch Building
In 2011, Det. Mike Roland and Sgt. Pat Postiglione, veteran homicide detectives who were then working in the Metro Nashville Police Department’s Cold Case Unit, sat with some of the most powerful people in Nashville’s criminal justice system to inform them of a problem. Then-Metro Police Chief Steve Anderson was there, as was then District Attorney Torry Johnson and two deputies from his office. The agencies’ public relations officials — Don Aaron from the MNPD and Susan Niland from the DA’s office — were also in the room.
Earlier in the year, while looking into the unsolved murders of several Nashville sex workers in 1999 and 2000, Roland and Postiglione came upon the case of Velma Tharpe. She was a sex worker who’d been killed in the summer of 2000, and by this time — more than a decade later — a man named Paul Garrett was nearing the end of his prison sentence for the crime. After noticing some deficiencies with the case file, Roland and Postiglione started digging further and eventually undertook a thorough re-investigation of the case. By the summer of 2011, they were ready to inform the leadership of the MNPD and the DA’s office of their conclusions: They believed Garrett was innocent. Not only that, they also believed they knew who had really killed Velma Tharpe.
Upon hearing the detectives’ presentation, Johnson tasked then Assistant District Attorney Kathy Morante — who went on to become the director of the MNPD's Office of Professional Accountability in 2013 — with checking their work. She conducted her own investigation of the case and came to the same conclusion.
“I do not believe that we can permit Garrett’s conviction to stand,” she wrote in an Aug. 20, 2011, memo to Johnson and Deputy District Attorney Tom Thurman. “At best, we can have no confidence in it. At worst, the investigation conducted by Pat and Mike, along with a review of the original file, leads to the conclusion that he is innocent.”
But Morante’s remarkable report — which also included a recommendation that “all homicide cases with convictions” that were handled by the lead detective on the Garrett case be reexamined “as soon as possible” — did not prompt much action by her superiors. In fact, a year later, after Garrett’s release, Johnson’s office defended the conviction in court.
But now, nearly 20 years after Garrett was sent to prison for Tharpe’s killing and almost a decade after his December 2011 release from prison, Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk’s office has told a court that Garrett’s conviction should be vacated.
In a notice of intent filed with the Criminal Court of Davidson County on Tuesday, Funk writes that “this office knows of clear and convincing evidence establishing Mr. Garrett was convicted of a crime he did not commit” and cites the office’s ethical responsibility to act on that knowledge. As a result, he writes, his office will be requesting that Garrett’s conviction be vacated and the case dismissed.
The filing followed an investigation by the office’s Conviction Review Unit into the case and includes a report from CRU director Sunny Eaton that thoroughly details her investigation of the case. It shows a miscarriage of justice resulting from what would appear to be a disastrous mix of negligence, misconduct, apathy and obstinance. Eaton’s report makes clear that there were in fact several points, both before and after Garrett’s conviction, that prosecutors had good reason to doubt his guilt and, damningly, shows that they acknowledged as much more than once over the years.
Police first interviewed Garrett in August 2001, more than a year after Tharpe’s body was found in an alley in North Nashville. A medical examiner had ruled her death a homicide, listed blunt force trauma to her head and neck as the cause of her death and also said she’d been strangled.
Garrett participated in initial interviews with police voluntarily and offered a DNA sample. In their arrest report after Garrett was charged, then Metro Police Dets. Roy Dunaway and E.J. Bernard wrote that Garrett had “made various admissions about killing victim Velma Tharpe.” At a preliminary hearing on Aug. 30, Dunaway testified that Garrett had told him in interviews that he liked to “choke girls” and that he had choked Tharpe until she “twitched violently” while they were having sex.
But soon after the hearing, the first major reasons for doubt emerged, according to Eaton’s report. DNA results issued by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation less than a week later excluded Garrett as the source of the DNA found on Tharpe’s body. After that, ADA Pam Anderson, who was handling the case for the state, made a disturbing discovery. According to Morante’s 2011 report — which is included in the new CRU report — the prosecutor went back to watch the recordings of police interviews with Garrett and realized that Dunaway had lied to the court. Morante’s report also states directly that much of Dunaway’s testimony at the preliminary hearing — including a claim that Garrett had confessed to his wife that he choked Tharpe and was present when she died — was false. In fact, although Garrett acknowledged having sex with sex workers, he had repeatedly denied killing Tharpe, to officers and to his wife.
Morante’s report says then DA Johnson was made aware of these apparent red flags and even cites a note from ADA Jon Seaborg saying “I don’t think we can make a case.” The case was in limbo, and Morante’s report says prosecutors had been given a deadline to indict Garrett or dismiss the case. It was around this time, though, that two jailhouse informants told prosecutors that Garrett had made inculpatory statements to them while they were locked up together. The case moved forward, with ADA Dan Hamm as lead prosecutor heading to trial.
Because the public defender’s office had previously represented one of the informants, Garrett’s initial attorney, Laura Dykes, was replaced by an appointed attorney, Kimberly Haas. Eaton’s report suggests that Haas’ representation left something to be desired. (Haas died in 2016.)
Prosecutors apparently believed they had a fairly weak case. There was no physical evidence connecting Garrett to the killing, and no witnesses. In her report, Eaton writes that Hamm told her “he did not find the statements offered by jailhouse informants to be either reliable or compelling and would not have called them as witnesses if this case had proceeded to trial.”
But Garrett, whose cooperation and claims of innocence had done him little good, feared what could happen at trial. Eaton writes that detectives had mentioned the death penalty while interviewing him, and in 2011, when Roland and Postiglione interviewed him in prison, he explained his state of mind.
According to the report, Garrett said “his attorney told him he had a 70% chance of losing the case and since he had already served two years, he would make parole with just a few more years.” He was “at his breaking point” and did not have faith that a jury would believe him. He feared he was about to spend his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. That’s why, he told the detectives, he agreed to have his attorney approach the prosecution with an offer to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter for a sentence of 15 years at 30 percent. The DA’s office agreed.
But the following year, in 2004, yet another reason to doubt Garrett’s guilt arrived in the form of a letter from the TBI stating that the agency had found a match in the national Combined DNA Index System for the DNA taken from Tharpe’s body. They identified the man, and it wasn’t Garrett. But again, this revelation was largely ignored in Johnson’s office. Eaton’s report says, in the original DA file, “There is a yellow sticky note on this letter saying ‘someone should look into this’ but nothing indicating anyone did so.’”
Garrett did not quickly make parole as his attorney had assured him he would. Seven years went by until Roland and Postiglione stumbled upon his case. In her 2011 report, Morante listed several legal options the office could pursue. They could support his immediate release through the Board of Probation and Parole; they could request that then-Gov. Bill Haslam grant Garrett a pardon; or they could recommend that the governor grant Garrett an exoneration. Morante favored seeking an exoneration.
“I believe that Garrett is not guilty of this murder,” she writes. “Garrett deserves to be released immediately with no conditions and to have his record clear.”
But Johnson went another way. In an Oct. 2011 letter to then-Chairman Charles Traughber of the Board of Probation and Parole, Johnson wrote that “there are serious questions about Mr. Garrett’s guilt” and cited the TBI’s CODIS hit and the fact that police viewed that man as a “viable suspect” in Tharpe’s killing.
“However,” Johnson wrote, “I do not believe that the present state of the evidence is such that it exonerates Mr. Garrett from any responsibility in this crime. While I can not assert to the parole board that Mr. Garrett is utterly blameless in this crime, I do believe that sufficient questions surround his guilty plea that, in light of the more than ten (10) years he has been in custody, he should be immediately released.”
Nearly a year later, Roland — the cold case detective who had re-investigated the Garrett case with Postiglione — was still troubled by the response to what they had presented to the MNPD and the DA’s office. He went to Laura Dykes, Garrett’s original attorney, to share his findings with her. As a result, Dykes filed a petition for writ of error coram nobis, citing the TBI report matching the DNA found on Tharpe’s body to another man. But despite the conclusions of Morante’s 2011 report and Johnson’s statements acknowledging questions about Garrett’s guilt in his letter to the parole board, Deputy DA Tom Thurman directed Hamm to oppose the petition. The court sided with the DA’s office, denying the petition and citing the false testimony that Garrett had confessed to the murder.
It was eight years later, in October 2020, when Roland came to an ADA in Funk’s office to ask that the CRU review Garrett’s case. Eaton writes that before filing the report with the court, Funk and Deputy DA Roger Moore met with Johnson about the case and the CRU’s findings. The report includes a letter Johnson sent to Funk on April 26 stating his view on the case.
After summarizing the events up to this point, Johnson writes: “Given the history of this case, it is fair to say that I do not have confidence in Mr. Garrett’s conviction and that there are genuine concerns about his guilt, but I remain unaware of compelling evidence that he should be exonerated. Of course, that could change if your office were to charge and convict another suspect for the death of Ms. Tharpe.”
Of course, since 2004, authorities have had another suspect — the same one that Roland, Postiglione and Morante thought should be pursued in 2011. Eaton’s report says that the detectives interviewed their alternate suspect in 2011 and that, while he denied killing Tharpe, he did provide a DNA sample. Once again, the report says, it matched the DNA found on her body.
As for the officers who initially investigated Tharpe’s death and zeroed in on Garrett, both men would be caught in falsehoods again years later. In 2005, Bernard resigned after 24 years on the force in the wake of allegations that he lied during a homicide investigation. The following year, Dunaway was demoted from detective to patrol officer after giving false testimony in a murder trial, again falsely claiming that a defendant had confessed to him. He later admitted as much but said he’d made a mistake because he was working late and taking cold medicine. He has since left the MNPD, although his record of misconduct has followed him.
Eaton declined to comment on the Garrett case beyond what is in her report, but did answer a question about following through on Morante’s 2011 recommendation to reexamine cases Dunaway worked on.
“The integrity of investigations will never be taken lightly by this office, and based upon what we’ve learned about the two detectives involved in the Garrett case, we will be aggressively investigating past convictions that relied primarily on their veracity,” she tells the Scene, adding that the office would “prioritize” cases brought to them by the defense attorneys.
