22 July 2023 , 20:52
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A man serving a 300-year sentence after he was convicted of butchering five people has said he was coerced into confessing by police.
Lawyers for Cleveland 'Christopher' Bynum say they have a "mountain of evidence" that shows their client was wrongfully convicted after five people were found dead in Gary, Indiana in 2000.
Sheila Renee Bartee, 37, Anthony Jeffers, 36, Angela Wallace, 24, and her sister Susan Wallace, 34, were killed. All of them were Gary residents.
Jeffers and the Wallaces were found dead in a home in the Gary neighbourhood of Aetna, where Bynum lived, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Another woman, Elizabeth Dailey Ayres, 37, was from Portage, Indiana. She was found dead in a park with Bartee.
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A man, Gerald Mathews said in a video: "My understanding is that an innocent man is doing the time that I was supposed to."
'An innocent man is doing the time that I was supposed to,' Gerald Mathews said. (Bynum pictured) (Change)Mathews, who was also known as 'Chris,' was shot and killed in 2014. He had arranged for the video of him to be handed over to authorities in the event of his death
In 2009, a federal appeals court in Chicago ruled Bynum's lawyer did not give effective representation to his client by choosing not to put him on the stand.
Here, Bynum could have claimed his confession was coerced.
The court upheld the conviction, however, despite branding the evidence against Bynum "skimpy."
Forensic evidence
No forensic evidence links Bynum to the crimes. It was his confession and the statement of a 12-year-old witness that was used to convict him.
Larry Brooks, Angela Wallace’s 12-year-old son, said a man he knew to be called Chris was heard after the shootings took place. The young boy said he heard this person tell someone to "put another shell in" and "shoot her in the head."
He told police he believed the surname of the man he heard started with the letter 'B' and said Gary police told him Bynum had confessed.
Despite this claim, Bynum was not arrested until the following day.
In 2020 Brooks told Bynum's lawyers in a deposition doesn't "remember saying half this s**t."
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Bynum's confession
Bynum has always said he was told to sign a false confession after being coerced.
“I didn’t have nothing to do with it," he told officers but admitted he was at the house when three people were shot in his first statement.
Bynum claims he changed his confession to protect himself as his lawyers say he was taken from a holding cell and confronted by one of the men he had named.
DNA evidence tested in 2017 found Bynum's DNA was not recovered from the victims, but linked the son of a late Gary police officer.
The Free Chris Bynum website claims: "One profile being a Gary Police Officer’s son’s semen being in the mouth of one of the deceased victims, another profile being found in the vaginas of two victims (that second man has also been linked by DNA evidence to another woman’s murder in 2010 with both of those bodies being found partially nude at a baseball field, and a videotaped confession of a man named Gerald Mathews."
He alleged another man committed the killings and also killed the women in the park.
Later, a second confession was issued that said he was drinking at a veterans hall with one of the two men he had named.
He then returned home in a car with the same man when he spotted Jeffers outside his house.
This was Bynum's version of what happened next, according to the second confession:
- He and Jeffers got into an argument because he believed he was telling people Bynumm was a drug dealer.
- Jeffers later approached Bynum in a car with Bartee and Dailey Ayres inside, after which they drove to the park where Jeffers shot both of them.
- After this, Bynum said he and Jeffers went to the Jeffer home and got into an argument over who would take the blame for the deaths.
- Jeffers was injured in a "tussle" when Bynum thought he was trying to take his gun. The gun went off and killed him.
- The Wallace sisters approached him and then Bynum panicked and shot them both dead.
“If he went to trial today, he’d be acquitted so fast,” Nicky Ali Jackson, executive director of Purdue University Northwest’s Center for Justice and Post-Exoneration Assistance in Hammond, said to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Jackson added that Bynum's statements are likely made up because they are so hard to follow.
“This case was as sloppy as it gets,” Jackson says, pointing to a lack of DNA evidence testing, police not checking for phone records, or looking for surveillance videos.
One of the Gary detectives who interrogated Bynum was later involved in a settled lawsuit after a murder charge was dropped against a woman accused of stabbing her husband to death.