When convicted killer Timothy W. Krajcir added to his string of confessions the stabbing of an older woman in Mount Vernon, Ill., and the details matched up with a 1981 case for which a Mississippi man was already found guilty, Mount Vernon police chief Chris Mendenall told news media Krajcir was admitting to something he had not done.

For Stephen Swofford, the attorney who defended Grover Thompson for the attempted murder of Ida White in 1981, the confession dredged up old memories and validated something he said he had known in his gut for 26 years: The wrong man was convicted for the crime.

"I'm not the kind of person that takes on causes lightly, but after going through this case I was convinced for years that this man was innocent," Swofford said.

The Illinois department of corrections confirmed that both Krajcir and Thompson were housed at Menard Psychiatric Center in Illinois for several years, until Thompson's death in 1996.

Mendenall told the Morris Daily Herald the two men might have talked about the case behind bars, and that Krajcir was attempting to pass off the story as his own.

Swofford said he did not believe Thompson would have been capable intellectually of conveying distinct details, nor does he think Thompson, a poor black man from the South, would have had enough of a rapport with someone of a different cultural and ethnic background to open up about anything.

In a Dec. 3 confession, after admitting to murdering women in Cape Girardeau, Pennsylvania, Marion, Ill., and Paducah, Ky., Krajcir told Lt. Paul Echols of the Carbondale, Ill., Police Department and Detective Jim Smith of the Cape Girardeau Police Department that he crawled in through an open basement window and accosted the victim in her bathroom.

He said he kept on telling her to be quiet and she persisted in screaming, so he stabbed her several times with a knife.

The attack took place during the summer, Krajcir said, because he remembered he was wearing a T-shirt.

When White was attacked in September 1981, her neighbor, Barney Bates, ran into her apartment and grabbed at her assailant as he escaped through the window, tearing his shirt, according to trial testimony.

Krajcir never mentioned any such confrontation.

Both White and Bates described the assailant as a black man. Krajcir is white.

The whole case boiled down to the eyewitness identification Bates provided, which the defense tried to suppress because Swofford said it had been illegally and unconstitutionally obtained.

Bates, an ambulance driver, accompanied White to the hospital while police searched for the suspect, based on the description Bates gave at the scene, that of a "tall, thin, black man, with facial hair, wearing a T-shirt and jeans."

Less than 30 minutes later, police found Thompson stretched out in the lobby of the post office, across the street from White's apartment.

He was wearing a black pullover shirt and had a red-and-orange strip of cloth tied around his waist. Under his head was a ball of clothing he was carrying with him, including a red-and-orange shirt that had the sleeve ripped off.

Also in his possession was a small knife that an officer described as having what appeared to be dried blood on the blade.

Police escorted Thompson to the station, where he was placed in an interrogation room with a one-way mirror so Bates could observe him.

Swofford argued that the identification was prejudicial because a detective told Bates beforehand they had a suspect in custody that they needed him to identify.

At the preliminary hearing, an officer testified it took Bates only one to two minutes to make the positive identification, but at trial, Bates said it was about 10 to 15 minutes.

"In that time, they could have assembled a physical line-up, or taken his picture and assembled an eight-race photo line-up," Swofford said.

Also troubling was the fact that Thompson was not informed he had the right to have legal representation present for any identification, Swofford said.

White's attacker left behind a fabric imprint of a sock on the toilet seat in her bathroom. The state's forensic expert testified that the print was not a match to the socks Thompson wore.

Human blood was found on the blade of the knife Thompson had, though a forensic expert testified the amount was too small to tell whether the type was a match to White.

Though Bates originally told police the attacker had on a T-shirt, at trial he said the attacker wore a red-and-orange print shirt.

Swofford also said he was troubled by the fact that he never thought Thompson was physically capable of climbing though White's window because of his poor physical state and arthritic condition.

Thompson was convicted and served 14 years of his 40-year sentence in prison.

"I think he was really kind of befuddled by the whole thing," said Swofford of his client's demeanor.

Thompson was a homeless transient who traveled by bus, and the night he was arrested, he had just arrived in Illinois from Milwaukee, Swofford said.

Tired of traveling and wanting to get out of the light drizzle that was falling in Mount Vernon, Thompson sought refuge for the night in the post office before taking a Greyhound bus back to Mississippi, Swofford said.

Thompson said he had gone to the post office because it was a dry place to sleep and the police came and "hauled him away," Swofford said.

Swofford said though 30 years of practicing law and trying hundreds of cases have made him somewhat jaded, he still has faith in the justice system and the people in it.

"I believe if you want that system to have integrity in the future, you speak up when the system fails," he said.

Mendenall did not return calls seeking comment.

bdicosmo@semissourian.com

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