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United Kingdom An innocent man spent 46 years in prison. And made a plan to kill the man who framed him.
Richard Phillips is a tall man with broad shoulders and a habit of singing to himself, usually without words, a deep and joyful sound that seems to rise from his soul. He began singing when he was a boy, and kept singing in prison, and now sings in the car, and at the dinner table, sustaining that one long note, as if nothing in the world could stop the music.
Two days after he was sentenced to life in prison in 1972, Phillips wrote a poem. It may have been the first poem he ever wrote. He was 26 years old, and had left high school in tenth grade, and now, with plenty of time to wonder, he took a pencil and set his wondering down on the page. He wondered about the color of raindrops, the color of the sky, the color of his heart, the color of his words when he sang aloud, and the color of his need for someone to hold. He missed holding his children, missed lacing their shoes and wiping away their tears, and he knew the only way he’d ever return to them was to somehow prove his innocence.
One appeal failed in 1974, another in 1975. Phillips thought he might win with a better lawyer, so he took a job at the prison’s license-plate factory, in the inking department, catching freshly inked plates as they came out of the chute and sending them by conveyor belt to the drying oven. The wages were bad by civilian standards but good by prison standards, maybe $100 a month plus bonuses, and Phillips opened a bank account and watched the money accumulate.
About four years later he had enough to pay one of the best appellate lawyers in Michigan, so he sent in the money and waited for freedom. All the while he thought of his children, and remembered the taste of homemade ice cream, and wrote love poems to women, both real and imaginary, featuring beds made of violets and warm baths made of tears.
He waited, and waited. On January 1, 1979, a date confirmed by his journal, Phillips was in his room when another inmate walked in with some news. He’d just seen Fred Mitchell in the chow hall. It was a cold gray Monday at the Jackson prison, and Phillips had not seen his children in 2,677 days. Fred Mitchell? Phillips knew what to do.
On his way he stopped to tell a friend.
I’m coming with you, the friend said.
The prison was home to several factories. This meant easy access to raw materials, including scrap metal, which also meant an abundance of homemade knives. Phillips and his friend each held one under a sleeve as they stood outside the chow hall, waiting for Mitchell to emerge. Here he was, walking across the yard, unaware of the two men walking behind him.
Phillips could see it all in his mind. He would wait until Mitchell reached the Blind Spot, a well-known location the guards couldn’t see. He would plunge the shank into Mitchell’s neck. And he just might get away with it.
This would feel like justice.
Phillips was about 12 years old when his stepfather’s watch disappeared. It was a Friday night in Detroit around 1958. The stepfather had a thick leather belt. He took a drink of Johnnie Walker and asked Phillips if he’d taken the watch. Phillips said no. The stepfather beat him with the belt for a long time. Then he asked again: Did you steal my watch? Phillips said no. The beating continued. Did you steal my watch? No. The belt tore into the boy’s skin. His mother watched, too afraid to intervene. The stepfather asked once more for a confession. Phillips stood firm. The belt struck again, and again, and again, and finally it shattered some internal barrier. Did you steal my watch? Yes, the boy said, just to make it stop, and the young man who emerged from that beating told himself that was the last false confession he would ever make.
Some lies require more lies. Phillips had to account for the watch somehow, so he said he’d given it to another boy at school. The stepfather told him to go to school Monday and get it back. Phillips went up to sleep in the roach-infested attic, as he did every night, and wondered how to conjure a watch out of thin air. The next morning he ran away. He gathered a can of pork and beans and a can opener and a few slices of bread and an empty syrup bottle full of Kool-Aid and he crammed them into his lunchbox and walked outside into his new life. That night he slept on the hard floor of a vacant house, aware that he had no one in the world but himself.
The police caught him the next day. His stepfather beat him again. And alone in the attic or on the streets of Detroit, Phillips taught himself how to survive. How to steal cherries from other people’s trees. How to have a vicarious Christmas morning by talking his way into a neighbor’s house and watching other children open their presents. How to escape into his own mind by drawing pictures: an airplane, or Superman, or even the Mona Lisa, with a pencil on a piece of cardboard.
On those streets, he made the friend who would betray him.
Little is known about the life of Fred Mitchell beyond a few memories of old acquaintances and the occasional mention in official records. When this reporter approached his sister in late 2019 to ask about Mitchell, she said, “Get the f--- off my porch.” Anyway, he was a good baseball player in the old days, when a lot of boys looked up to the great centerfielder Willie Mays. Fred Mitchell could chase down a deep fly and catch it over his shoulder, just like the Say Hey Kid.
When they were not playing baseball, Phillips and Mitchell and their friends skipped school and played with BB guns and drank beer in alleys and fought in backyards and played hide-and-seek with the cops. They were juvenile delinquents on the verge of becoming hardened criminals in a city where violent crime was all around.
A single issue of the Detroit Daily Dispatch newspaper gives a sense of the chaos and desperation. A man told police, “I have shot four men today.” Two women fought with knives; one was stabbed to death. Kidnappers robbed and raped a doctor’s wife. It was December 13, 1967. At the bottom of Page 2 was a brief item about a 19-year-old man pleading guilty to manslaughter. This was Fred Mitchell, who quarreled with another young man and then shot him to death.
By this time, Phillips had taken a better path. After a joyriding conviction led to a brief prison sentence, he took a typing class and learned to type 72 words per minute. Out on parole, he turned this new skill into a good job at the Chrysler plant in Hamtramck, typing out time sheets and bills of lading for $4.10 an hour—more than $33 an hour in today’s dollars. He put on a suit in the morning and rode the bus to work, spending less time with the old crew.
Phillips had a strong jaw and an easy manner. He charmed the young ladies. One day a girlfriend named Theresa told him she was pregnant, and the baby was his. Phillips stayed with Theresa, and their daughter was born, and they got married and had a son. Theresa worked in a bank. They rented a modest apartment on Gladstone, and Phillips bought a Buick Electra 225. He gave his children the things he never had: abundant love, fancy new clothes, armloads of presents under the Christmas tree.
In 1971, the year Phillips turned 25, things began to unravel. He played around with some pranksters at work, and one prank went too far. Someone dropped a lit cigarette into a guy’s back pocket, and the guy said Phillips did it. Phillips denied it, but he lost his job anyway.
Around this time, Fred Mitchell got out of prison. Jobless and shiftless, with his marriage floundering, Phillips returned to his old friend. These days Mitchell ran with a big white guy he’d met in prison. They called him Dago. The three men went to shows at night and snorted heroin in motel rooms.
Phillips lived a double life, dangerous and unsustainable, a drug addict by night and a father by day. One day in September, he took the children to the Michigan State Fair. His daughter, Rita, was 4. His son, Richard Jr., was 2. They rode the Ferris wheel, crashed around in the bumper cars, and posed together for an instant photograph that was printed on a round metal button. That night Phillips went out and never came home.
Forty-six years later, legal observers would say Richard Phillips had served the longest known wrongful prison sentence in American history. The National Registry of Exonerations lists more than 2,500 people who were convicted of crimes and later found innocent, and Phillips served more time than anyone else on that list. Undoubtedly, the justice system failed him. The police failed. The prosecution failed. His defense attorney failed. The jury failed. The trial judge failed. The appellate judges failed. But on that cold day in the prison yard, as he walked toward the Blind Spot with the homemade knife under his sleeve, Richard Phillips was not thinking about a nameless, faceless system. He was thinking about the man who put him there: his old friend Fred Mitchell.
Here’s how it began: On September 6, 1971, two men walked into a convenience store outside Detroit. The black man stood watch near the door. The white man pulled a gun and demanded money. They drove off with less than $10 in stolen cash. An alert citizen noticed the car driving erratically and called the police. The registration came back to Richard Palombo, also known as Dago, who had stayed the previous night with Mitchell and Phillips at the Twenty Grand Motel in Detroit.
Palombo knew he was caught; he would plead guilty to armed robbery. But who was his accomplice? Phillips and Mitchell were both detained shortly after Palombo was. The two men looked similar. In a lineup at the station, two witnesses looked them over. They agreed that the second robber was Richard Phillips.
At Phillips’ trial in November, Palombo took the witness stand and told the jury how he committed the robbery. The prosecutor asked who else was there.
“I don’t want to mention the name,” Palombo said.
The judge ordered a recess. After the jury left, he asked Palombo, “Are you afraid of somebody?”
“No,” Palombo said, “I am not afraid of anybody.”
“Is your silence because you did not wish to incriminate someone else?” Phillips’ lawyer asked.
“Yes,” Palombo said.
His silence about the crimes of 1971 would stretch out for 39 years, with disastrous consequences. Even though one prosecution witness wavered between identifying the second robber as Fred Mitchell or Richard Phillips, the jury found Phillips guilty of armed robbery. He was sentenced to at least seven years in prison. And he was still in prison the next winter, when the body of Gregory Harris turned up.
Harris was a 21-year-old man who disappeared in June 1971 after going out to buy cigarettes. His wife found his green convertible the following night. There were bloodstains on the seats. Later that year, according to Detroit police documents, his mother told an officer about a strange phone call. She said an unknown woman told her, “I can’t hold it any longer, a Fred Mitchell and a guy named ‘Dago’ took your son out of a car at LaSalle Street. They shot him in the head and killed him. They then took him out near 10 Mile Road and tossed him from (the) car.”
It is not clear what the police did with that information.
On March 3, 1972, when a street repairman in Troy, Michigan, walked into a thicket to relieve himself, he saw daylight glaring off a shiny object. It was Harris’ skeleton, frozen into the ground. An autopsy showed the cause of death: multiple gunshot wounds to the head.
On March 15, Mitchell was arrested yet again — this time on more unrelated charges of armed robbery and carrying a concealed weapon. The next day, he told police he had information on the death of Gregory Harris. He said the killers were Richard Palombo and Richard Phillips.
The authorities had no physical evidence connecting their suspects to the crime. They had no circumstantial evidence, either. But with the sworn testimony of one man, the police could say they had solved a murder.
When Mitchell took the witness stand on October 2, 1972, to testify against Palombo and Phillips, Palombo’s attorney asked the judge to inform the witness of his right against self-incrimination.
“It’s my opinion that his testimony involves him in a serious crime,” the attorney told the judge.
By Mitchell’s own testimony, he knew about the murder plot before it was carried out. He played a role in the murder by calling Gregory Harris and luring him into a trap. He was arrested in possession of what may have been the murder weapon. And under cross-examination, he admitted to a possible motive: While Mitchell was in prison, Gregory Harris may have stolen a $500 check from Mitchell’s mother’s purse.
But for reasons that have never been revealed, and probably never will be, the state of Michigan put forth another theory of the case. Building on Mitchell’s testimony and little else, the prosecutor tried to persuade the jury that Mitchell had heard Palombo and Phillips conspiring to kill Harris, apparently because one of the Harris brothers had robbed a drug dealer, a purported cousin of Palombo.
Neither Mitchell nor the prosecutor ever tried to explain why Richard Phillips would have taken part in a revenge killing on behalf of the cousin of a man he barely knew. Later, Palombo’s father took the stand and said the cousin did not exist.
If investigators ever dusted Harris’ car for prints, they did not present that evidence at trial. Nor is there any record they analyzed the blood found in Harris’ car. Despite all this, Phillips’ court-appointed lawyer, Theodore Sallen, was curiously silent.
He did not give an opening statement. He let Palombo’s attorney do almost all the cross-examination. He never challenged Mitchell. He did not call one witness or introduce any evidence. He kept Phillips off the witness stand because he didn’t want Phillips to be questioned about his robbery conviction. When it came time to give a closing argument, Sallen said, “You know, they talk about Gregory Harris being dead. I don’t know if Gregory Harris is dead.”
The jurors deliberated for four hours before finding Palombo and Phillips guilty of conspiracy to murder and first-degree murder. Before handing down a sentence of life in prison, the judge asked Phillips if he had anything to say.
“Not necessarily, your honor,” Phillips said, “except for the fact that I was not guilty, you know, even though I was found guilty. And it’s not too much can be done about it right now to correct the injustice already, so all I can do is just, you know, wait until something develops in my favor.”
And so he waited, trying not to kill anyone and trying not to be killed. He knew one man so afraid of the rapists that he drank a jar of shoe glue and escaped them forever. He knew another so haunted by his own crimes that he jumped over a railing and plummeted to his death. Richard Phillips waited in his cell, subsisting on coffee and watered-down orange juice, reading Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
He saw children visiting other inmates, saw guards searching diapers for contraband, and he resolved to spare his children from that experience. He wrote his wife a letter, told her not to visit, not to bring the children, told her to move on and find someone else. Eventually she did.
On January 17, 1977, in a poem called “Without a Doubt,” he wrote these verses:
Ain’t it a crime
When you don’t have a dime
To buy back the freedom you’ve lost?
Ain’t it a sin
When your closest friend
Won’t lend you a helping hand?
Ain’t it a rule
That’s taught in school
That says “Be kind to your fellow man?”
Ain’t it odd
That when you pray to God
Your prayers don’t seem to be heard?
Ain’t it sad
When you’ve never had
The freedom of a soaring bird?
We all have a thousand possible lives, or a million, and our surroundings change us, for better and worse. Phillips always hated smoking, despised his stepfather’s Camels, trashed his own wife’s cigarettes whenever he could, and then he got to prison and reconsidered. Prison made him hyper-vigilant, always watching and listening, finely attuned to the danger all around. Sometimes he needed a cigarette just to calm his nerves. In prison, you didn’t throw away a half-smoked cigarette. You savored it, right down to the filter.
One December, a stranger handed Phillips two packs of cigarettes and said, “Merry Christmas.” After that, Phillips gave presents to other inmates: a book for one guy, a package of cookies for another. It felt good. Through a program called Angel Tree, he picked out toys and had them sent to his children. He didn’t know whether they’d been received. In 1989 at the Hiawatha prison on the Upper Peninsula, administrators held a contest for best Christmas song. Phillips won a $10 prize for a song with this chorus:
So just give me your love for Christmas
For love is all that I need
And if you give me your love at Christmas
My Christmas will be merry indeed.
There was another contest that year, for the cell block with the best snow and ice sculptures. In the prison yard, Phillips and his neighbors built a nativity scene and other decorations, including a seal balancing a ball on its nose. Then a guy from another block kicked the head off the lamb and smashed the ball off the seal’s nose. Phillips was furious. He stepped up to the guy, who weighed about 300 pounds, and said, “You’re disrespecting Jesus Christ.” Neither man backed down. A crowd gathered. Chaos ensued.
In this chaos, according to a guard, Phillips grabbed the guard’s shoulder and spun him around. Phillips denied it, and the report said he produced the names of 56 defense witnesses, but the prison investigator contacted only four of them. There is no surviving record of what they said. Nor is there any indication in the report that anyone corroborated the guard’s story. Nevertheless, authorities believed the guard. Phillips was found guilty of assault and battery on staff. He spent Christmas in solitary confinement, on a bed with no sheet, with food pushed through a slot in the door.
The next year he turned 44, and had a creative awakening. Phillips wrote at least 31 poems in 1990. He wrote about the vibration of crickets, about skylarks racing through the night. He recalled a sycamore tree in Alabama, from the early days when he lived with a kind aunt and uncle and an older cousin who carried him on her hip. He imagined himself dying, leaving on a train in the dark, serenaded by an orchestra and a blues band all at once, receiving a standing ovation. He burned with desire, imagining one woman in a rose-colored dress, and another so luminous that she singed his hair with her flickering light. He saw tulips opening in the garden, flocks of birds coming in from the south. He saw his own hair turning white.
“What I wouldn’t give — to be a young me — once again,” he wrote. “The clock hand spins like the water wheel on the side of an old shack. Everything has been for a reason. Nothing can be turned back; especially not time.”
This was his most prolific year as a poet. It was also the year he stopped writing poetry, because he found something he liked even more.
He’d been drawing with pencil occasionally since the mid-80s, after he finished his GED and associate’s degree in business, and in 1990 he decided to add some color. He sent away for an acrylic paint set, or at least thought he did. What came back was an Academy Watercolor Artists’ Sketchbox Set, an accident that changed the course of his life.
He opened the set. He took out the paints. And he began to experiment. Phillips had taught himself to draw, and to live, and now he taught himself to paint. He got it wrong at first, and then began to get it right: mixing the water and paint, keeping the brushes clean, letting the colors spread across the page.
He read art books from the prison library for technique and inspiration. He admired the work of Picasso, Da Vinci, and especially Vincent Van Gogh, another man who suffered, locked away in an institution, struggling to keep his sanity. Van Gogh and Phillips kept on painting.
The artist needs raw material for his work: the sunset, the garden, the lilies on the pond. Phillips did not have these, so he used pictures from books, newspapers, and magazines, combining them with his vivid imagination. And so, from inside the Ryan Road prison in Detroit, he painted a scene of three horses kicking up dirt on a racetrack. The better he got, the more he enjoyed it. Painting became an addiction. He woke up and couldn’t wait to get breakfast, drink his watery orange juice, and come back to his art. By then his roommate would be gone for the day, in the yard or at work, and Phillips could turn on his music. Outside inmates yelled, guards barked, dominoes fell, ping-pong balls smashed, showers hissed, toilets flushed, televisions blared, but Phillips put in his headphones and drowned it all out. All he could hear was John Coltrane or Miles Davis, focusing his energy, guiding his next brushstroke.
He painted a jazz trumpeter, a glass of wine with a cherry in it, a vase of yellow flowers on a table next to a picture of a tall ship on the high seas. He lost himself in the work so thoroughly that once in a while he forgot about his case, his endless appeals, his 20-year search for a judge who might believe him.
She knew men lied when they were caught. Even in her days as a defense attorney, Judge Helen E. Brown didn’t believe half her own clients. A guy would tell some cockamamie story, and she’d review the evidence, and then she’d go back and ask him what really happened. Now, in Wayne County Recorder’s Court, where she dispensed justice to killers and rapists and child abusers, she sensed that most of the defendants looking up at her were guilty of something, whether or not it was precisely the crime set forth in the indictment.
And then, in 1991 and 1992, she reviewed the appeals of two more men in a long parade of men who claimed to be innocent. When she read the trial transcript, Judge Brown was astonished. It seemed to her that Richard Palombo and Richard Phillips had been convicted of murder on the uncorroborated testimony of a single witness. If all cases were this flimsy, she thought, anyone could accuse anyone of anything and get them sent to prison.
Furthermore, she would say later, “All the evidence looked like it was against the witness.”
The judge was curious. She read the court file on Fred Mitchell’s robbery case from 1972, which was pending at the time of the murder trial, and found this quote from a trial judge: “Mr. Mitchell, when I read your record, I was going to give you life. Then as I read on, I realized what case this was, and I realized that you have been instrumental in helping on a first-degree murder case and that you deserve some consideration.”
It seemed that the more Mitchell cooperated, the lighter his sentence got. The judge reduced a potential life sentence to 10 to 20 years. Later, after Mitchell testified in the murder trial, his attorney re-worked the deal so he got only 4 to 10 years.
“In addition to all of the other obvious considerations,” Judge Helen Brown wrote after reviewing the file years later, “there must also have been a deal that Mitchell would never be charged with the murder, despite his having admitted under oath, on the stand, in open court that he was the person who set up the decedent to be killed.”
Brown concluded that the prosecution had made a deal with Mitchell and kept it secret from the defendants and the jury. In her view, “this constituted prosecutorial misconduct,” which meant neither Palombo nor Phillips received a fair trial. In 1991 and 1992, she ordered new trials for both men.
The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office denied the allegation of misconduct and appealed her decision to the Michigan Court of Appeals, putting the men’s cases in the hands of three appellate judges. It is not clear whether these judges read the trial transcript. Two of them, Myron Wahls and Elizabeth Weaver, have since died. The third, Maura Corrigan, is now in private practice in Detroit. She declined to answer CNN’s questions. Regardless, the judges concluded there was not enough evidence to prove misconduct by the prosecutors. They reversed Brown’s order and reinstated Phillips’ conviction.
Phillips kept painting. He painted so much that the artwork piled up in his cell. This made it “excess property,” at risk of confiscation. Phillips made boxes from scraps of cardboard and mailed the paintings to a pen pal in upstate New York. Her name was Doreen Cromartie. She kept his paintings safe in the cellar, hoping he would pick them up someday.
In 1994, he painted a field of sunflowers against a lavender sky. He painted an old tree in the middle of the field. He painted low branches jutting off the trunk, just below the green leaves. And for a while he was not in prison. He was perched in the tree, breathing fresh air, looking out past the sunflowers toward the open horizon.
The boy was too young to understand why. He only knew that Daddy was gone, and now they were poor, living above a barbershop, paint chipping off the walls. Years passed, and his mother got a better job, a new husband, but Richard Phillips Jr. did not get a new dad. He kept that old metal button, with the picture of himself and his dad on that day at the State Fair in 1972, and sometimes, when he opened his drawer to get his wallet, he looked at the picture again. Who was that man looking up at him? A good dad, he thought, trying to remember, but no, he kept hearing otherwise. Your dad is a crook. Your dad’s a piece of trash. Your dad is a murderer.
After a while, he believed it.
