Taylor gets his shot at release

RALEIGH -- Greg Taylor took a wrong turn.

It was misty and dark, and Taylor didn't know these streets. He was high again.

That night in September 1991 was full of wrong turns, ones that eventually led Taylor, 47, to prison. His truck got stuck in the mud at the end of a dead-end street off South Blount Street. About 100 yards away, police found the battered body of Jacquetta Thomas and assumed the driver of that truck had something to do with her death.

Taylor swore from the start he didn't. Tuesday, he'll launch his final attempt to clear his name. In September, the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission voted to send Taylor's case to a panel of judges for further review. Those judges will convene Tuesday and could vote to send Taylor home after 17 years in prison.

"It never occurs to you that an innocent man can get dragged into something like this," Taylor said in an interview at Johnston County Correctional Institute.

Taylor says his misadventure began at 9 p.m. on Sept. 25, 1991, when he popped the top of his first Budweiser and watched the Cincinnati Reds square off against the Atlanta Braves. One beer became six, and by game's end Taylor wanted to chase another high.

He rang Johnny Beck, a recent acquaintance. Their relationship was more a partnership than a friendship. Beck, a man who knew those streets, was Taylor's cover so dealers wouldn't mistake him for an undercover cop. Beck made the buys; Taylor brought the cash.

Taylor and Beck bought some crack and went for a ride.

Taylor made a wrong turn and ended up on a dead-end street.

He steered his Pathfinder off the street, tearing through the mud until his tires sank.

Taylor decided to ditch the truck until daylight, and the pair hitchhiked to Beck's place.

As they walked away, Beck spotted something in the cul-de-sac. Taylor suspected it was a roll of carpet but figured that if it was a person, he'd call police in daylight, when he sobered up.

At that moment, all Taylor could think was how he'd screwed up again. His wife, Becky, would be angry; he'd blown more money.

Sober, then slipping

It wasn't always like this for Taylor, roaming strange neighborhoods looking for a drug fix. When he first met pot and booze at Sanderson High School in Raleigh in the late 1970s, it came to him.

"I was inundated," he said. "Anything I wanted, I could get."

Still, Taylor kept up his grades and fell in love with Becky, the smart, quiet girl who sat behind him in homeroom. They married after high school and had a baby girl.

Becky went to college; Taylor went to the bars. There, he was the lovable drunk, the guy who hugged strangers and remembered the names of the bartenders' children, friends and family said.

"In the back of my mind, I thought I'd straighten out when I turned 30," Taylor said.

Becky says she tried to walk away from their marriage a half-dozen times. In the spring of 1991, she told Taylor to clean up or get out.

Taylor checked into rehab and sobered up.

The summer that followed was bliss. The Taylors bought a boat and spent weekends camping as a family at the lake.

By August's end, Taylor started to slide.

When the phone rang just before sunrise Sept. 26, Becky Taylor wasn't surprised.

Greg hadn't come home that night. He sheepishly asked her for a lift to his truck.

Charged by nightfall

By the time Taylor came to fetch is truck, Raleigh police were running the tags on his license plate.

Taylor introduced himself and agreed to go to police headquarters to answer questions. He figured he'd tell police what little he knew, finish within an hour and head to work at a telecommunications company.

Instead, Raleigh Police Detective Johnny Howard told Taylor a witness saw him and Beck "right in the middle of something" the night before, according to transcripts of the interview.

Howard told him that Beck had blamed him for the murder and invited Taylor to turn on Beck. Howard suggested Taylor could face the death penalty; police told Taylor the victim's blood was in his truck. Taylor asked for an attorney four times, but police didn't bring one.

Taylor stood firm: "I did not do it. I'm telling you the truth," according to a transcript of the interview.

Howard replied: "Well, then there will be an innocent man convicted of murder."

Taylor let detectives search his car and home.

He gave them his clothes, strands of his hair, saliva and blood.

He offered to take a lie detector test and undergo hypnosis.

"It's so frustrating to go up against all these people. They have all this power. You have the truth, but they refuse to look at it," Taylor said.

They charged Taylor and Beck with first-degree murder about 8 p.m., less than 12 hours after police found Thomas' body.

Bad timing

Taylor pulled on a jail-issued jumpsuit that night and found a spot to lie in a crowded holding cell.

He told himself police would quickly realize they had the wrong guy. He assumed they would test his hair and blood and set him free.

Taylor phoned Becky and told her he needed a lawyer. She brought two Raleigh lawyers to court the next day: Michael Dodd and Jim Blackburn.

Taylor picked Blackburn, a former federal prosecutor. Taylor's mother and stepfather took out a second mortgage on their home to cover the first $50,000 lawyer payment.

Again, Taylor's timing was bad.

Blackburn was coming undone. He would later chronicle his mental illness and decline during those years in an autobiography called "Flame Out." He forged court documents and stole clients' money, including Taylor's. Blackburn later surrendered his law license and spent time in prison.

By the time Wake County Assistant District Attorney Tom Ford scheduled Taylor's trial for early 1993, Blackburn's misdeeds had come to light.

Blackburn withdrew from the case, and his firm offered to pay for another lawyer to represent Taylor.

Taylor had to pick one quickly. A new trial date was just weeks away.

No defense, no freedom

Taylor's replacement lawyer, Michael Dodd, employed a simple strategy at trial: no defense.

Taylor said Dodd assured him the state had no evidence of his guilt. They would let the state present its case and then tell jurors during closing arguments that prosecutors had failed.

Taylor tried to sit back and trust him.

At trial, Ford first argued that Taylor was not the killer, but instead had accompanied Beck on this murderous adventure and should be found guilty just the same. In closing arguments, the prosecutor suggested that Taylor did help batter Thomas.

A prostitute named Eva Kelly testified that she recalled seeing a woman named "Jackie" with Taylor the night she died. When shown a picture of Thomas during an earlier police interview, Kelly had said that wasn't the woman she knew. To testify, Ford promised to cut her sentence on pending charges in half, according to a letter from Ford and Kelly's testimony at trial.

Ernest Andrews, a man who was in jail at the same time as Taylor, took the stand and told police that Taylor admitted in jail that Beck had cut Thomas' throat while he watched. In fact, Thomas' throat had not been cut.

Two other damning bits of information were presented to jurors: an SBI agent told jurors they found blood on Taylor's truck. A police dog jumped on Taylor's truck, indicating Thomas had been in it.

Taylor would later learn that the SBI agent was wrong about the blood on his truck; there was none, and the agent had run the tests to know that, according to SBI records since turned over to Taylor's lawyers.

And the dog used by police hadn't been trained to track scents of the dead, according to police records.

Jaw-dropping verdict

The morning that Taylor's lawyer planned to deliver final arguments, Taylor said Ford offered a deal.

Taylor could plead guilty to accessory after the fact of murder if he testified against Beck.

Again, Taylor refused.

It took the jury nearly two hours to convict Taylor of first-degree murder.

As the jury read the verdict, Taylor fell apart. His father, Ed Taylor, threw back his head, muttering to the sky. His mother, Martine Strickland, wept, choking the screams she wanted to let loose.

Taylor just stared at Ford.

The image still burns in Taylor's mind: The prosecutor's jaw had dropped in surprise.