Page 3 - Weldon Murder News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Guilty of capital sexual battery and murder in the first degree. on june 30th, 1988, james duckett was sentenced to death. >> when they sentenced him, it was probably one of the best days of my life. because i took a bad cop out who killed a child. >> 14 years after duckett's conviction, a retired miami police homicide detective named marshall frank began doing an investigation for a crime novel he wanted to write. >> i retired to a little town called maggie valley and it's in the mountains. it is beautiful. i had an idea for a novel in which the protagonist ends up on death row. so being an i...

Eight of them wanted to tell me how they weren't guilty. one of the responses was from james duckett. and he seemed logical. he seemed articulate. contrary to what i promised myself i wouldn't do, i said i'm going to look more into this. i'm not a bleeding heart. i don't fall for people saying i'm not guilty. i've heard it all in my career. i put a lot of people in jail for murder. i don't think i was ever wrong. so i pull out all the files. i read every report. when i started assembling all the evidence, it is like a mosaic. you get a little piece of this tile, a little piece of that tile, a ...

>> police never charge duckett with the weldon murder, but they have said they'll pursue duckett for the crime if he is ever let off death row for the mcabee murder, a possibility beth wells is counting on. >> they're presently reviewing jim's case, and i'm 100% confident that when they evaluate this evidence, they'll say, you know what? we got it wrong. we have to give this guy a new trial. >> the hard evidence was tire tracks which can't be identified to his car. a pubic hair, nothing that he can even say the pubic hair belonged to james duckett. gwen, her truthfulness is in doubt. >> we've ...

Discovered that gwen had an alibi for the night of the murder. an alibi that the jury had never heard. >> he will me he could not have been there at the murder because he got a call from the jiffy stop, another convenience store in a different part of town. so he went over there around the time the little girl was being murdered. he jotted everything down in his little spiral log book. time, activity, traffic stop. >> the notebook has her information in it. that i wrote down that night. >> i said did that log sheet get introduced into trial? he said no. he said, i don't know what happened to i...

>> i wanted to see a copy of the notepad that duckett told me about. >> according to the defense, duckett's police notebook from the night of murder contained his alibi. >> the notebook should have been in the trial record. and it is not. the jury never sees it. and when you see it, when you look at it, you go, there's evidence right here. >> beth faxed me copies of those pages. i looked at them. and that began to give me some doubts. i could be wrong all along. hold. i go through periods where it's hard to sleep at night, and stay awake during the day. non-24 is a circadian rhythm disorder th...