Eye On Innocence Project

Daniel J Alden
Eye On Innocence
(904) 207-3462

Seems like it was 30 years ago I first heard it on the news. Sometimes things stand out when you hear about them, or see them, and for my dad, like millions of others, it was the Kennedy assassination. For me, the biggest was the day the twin towers fell in New York.

I also remember the smaller events. The death of Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley, Mahatma Gandhi; I remember the day all of them happened, but not where I was when I heard the news.

I remember the day, time, and where I was when the space shuttle Challenger blew up. I was in Jacksonville Florida’s Ed White Sr High school, in Dr. Heathington’s classroom. It was January 28, 1968. It was my birthday, with the year inverted; I was born in 1968, the Challenger explosion, 1986.

Some things you’re expected to remember, and I do, like where I met my ex-wife and the births of my two sons.

Sometimes, there are things seemingly insignificant to our personal lives but when we are coerced or triggered by something into remembering those events, we can recall small details.

I was driving to Fernandina Beach from work that morning after a 12-hour shift on the Southside of Jacksonville Florida. I was on Highway 9A which connected the north and south side by way of the Dames Point Bridge over the St John’s River.

I don’t remember the exact time, but I’d turned onto Highway 17, somewhere near the bar I worked at as a bartender and bouncer right after I left the Marine Corps, Ye Old Plantation it was called.

It was there, traveling that stretch of two-lane highway that I remember hearing of the deaths of eight people about an hour and a half north of me in the small coastal Georgia town of Brunswick.

Nine people had been bludgeoned and seven died at the scene, one more person died the following evening at the hospital. One of the victims, a 3-year-old toddler named Byron had survived the assault.

It was late August 2009.

That was it. I don’t remember hearing, reading, or watching any news about it afterwards, which is actually kind of odd, as I’ve been an avid reader of true crime stories since I was a child.

I was reading about Ted Bundy before anyone knew he was a serial killer. Which is to say, at the time I was learning about the crimes he’d committed, between the pages of Readers Digest that my father had a subscription to, Ted Bundy hadn’t become a suspect yet; at least to the public’s knowledge.

The suspect in the Brunswick murders would be identified by Chief Doering of the Glynn County Police Department as one Guy Heinze, Jr., the son of one of the victims, and the other eight were members of his extended family.

I was a Marine at this time, a staunch believer in our justice system and the constitution of the United States of America. Little did I know that in eleven years I would become a factor in the New Hope murders as a case analyst for the loved ones of the defendant, Guy Heinze, Junior.

Even further from my mind was the idea that I would absolutely come to believe in the defendant’s innocence.

I began questioning “the system” after a personal experience and this case (as well as the many others out there) which drove me into creating my Eye on Innocence project after six years of involvement in Guy Heinze’s wrongful conviction.

The State’s prosecutor, John Johnson, under the direction of DA Jackie Johnson, would begin the trial with the words: “This case is circumstantial. Meaning we don’t have any evidence putting Guy Heinze, Jr. at the scene of the crime as it was being committed.”

That was a huge understatement.

In reality, even his circumstantial evidence was far less than adequate.

It boiled down to one, Guy Heinze, Jr. knew the victims, two, Guy Heinze. Jr. used drugs, and three, Guy Heinze, Jr. lived there and claimed to have found the victims.

I’d like to at least be able to say that confirmation bias swayed the investigators of the Glynn County Police Department. That sheer and utter incompetence could explain the ensuing catastrophe of that investigation.

Ultimately though, I cannot.

This wasn’t a case of investigators, perhaps, subconsciously forcing the evidence to conform to their belief that Guy Heinze, Jr. was the killer. It wasn’t so simple.

This became a case of hanging their proverbial hat literally on the lack of evidence.

Destroying or disposing of any evidence that may have proven exculpatory.

From the beginning, they focused on one suspect, Guy Heinze, Junior.

In a matter of a few days, in a case where they already knew they had no solid evidence of the young man’s involvement, Police Chief Mathew Doering publicly announced Guy Heinze, Jr. as the lone suspect in a mass murder like no other has seen before or since.

What made this crime unique was that eight people had been killed by bludgeoning with a blunt object, a ninth victim would barely survive., a toddler of 3 years of age who would suffer severe brain trauma and undergo years of therapy, but who was, of course, unable to aid in naming the killers.

Michael Toler, a 19-year-old, had also survived the attack, sadly, he passed away in the following few days.

Guy found Michael alive in his be but badly beaten and Guy frantically screamed for police and emergency services to hurry in getting to the scene to save the Michael’s life. I personally can’t recall a case in which a person who allegedly murdered a large number of people then pleaded for help in saving the one survivor that could identify him or her as the murderer.

The investigation began immediately. Guy Heinze, Jr. was cooperative from the very beginning.

Although he admitted using illegal drugs prior to coming home and discovering that his family had been massacred, he was entirely forthcoming with information during a time when he was visibly distraught and shaken. The investigating officers had already begun to believe the killer was none other than Guy Jr., and that against all logic, he had been able to, for all intents and purposes, bludgeon eight people to death without suffering any injury to himself, without anyone escaping, and without being covered in massive amounts of blood, in fact, without any blood noticeable on him at all. Although after making numerous trips back into the home, he did accumulate small amounts of transfer blood on his shorts, both of the neighbors who had reacted to his pleas for help testified that upon his arrival home that morning, he was barefoot, and without any blood visible on his person at that time.

 Below I’ve outlined the errors of the Glynn County police department investigators.

Among the strongest of their evidence against Guy Heinze, Jr was the blood stains on the inner and outer shorts Mr. Heinze, Jr. had been wearing on the day of the murders.

Guy Heinze, Jr. was observed by his neighbors, Ms. Orlinski and Mr. Nixon, after his arrival home at roughly 8 a.m., and right after frantically entering the home and screaming that his whole family was dead. Both of the neighbors testified that there was no blood on the clothes Guy was wearing, which supports Mr. Heinze’s claim that his clothing had become stained with the blood of the victims on his three trips into the home in which he searched for a phone to dial 911, as well as to check and to see if anyone in the home might still be alive, of which there were two, Michael Toler and Byron Jimerson.

On one of those trips, Guy even sat or laid on a bed next to Michael Toler to comfort him and screamed for his neighbor, Ms. Orlinski, to tell the police and paramedics to hurry, because Michael was still alive.

Had Guy committed these murders, certainly he would not have wanted the only person who could identify him to survive. As it was, Michael Toler was taken to the hospital alive, but succumbed to his injuries two days later.

Knowing this, we can surmise that the blood being transferred from the bodies of the victims while Guy was checking them for signs of life, while he sat and/or laid next to Michael Toler, or by simply brushing up against bloody items (chairs, walls, door frames, etc.) inside the home, which the police themselves testified would be impossible to enter and walk through without stepping in, or walking through, blood as it was “ everywhere”.

These are each, and all reasonable hypothesis contrary to the prosecution’s theory.

Not only are they reasonable, but with the two eyewitnesses who saw and spoke with Guy that morning, they are even more reasonable than the state’s theory.

It will be found in testimony that the Glynn County Police Department (GCPD) worked vigorously to implicate Guy Heinze, Jr. as the culprit responsible for the murders.

It is proven in testimony that officers collecting evidence agreed that there was, in the south bathroom of the home, blood evidence that gave them reason to believe there was a possibility that the suspect(s) had been injured during the course of the crime and their blood had been left on items of clothing in that bathroom.

They subsequently photographed that evidence, but failed to preserve it for testing.

They believed Guy Heinze, Jr. had committed these murders and washed an enormous amount of blood from his body, hair, ears, and nostrils, and so the sink and bathtub drain taps were removed from all drains in the home.

They too, like the aforementioned bloody clothing, were not preserved for testing.

As if that wasn’t egregious enough, admitted to in transcripts, the police then began storing over 600 items of bloody evidence in the bathtubs, located at the crime scene, according to officer Strohl (over 1000 pieces according to DA Jackie Johnson in a press interview) and said evidence was removed from the tubs just prior to releasing the home from police custody.

However, BEFORE it was released, but AFTER they removed the blood evidence from those bathtubs and bathrooms, they decided to test the tub for blood (transcript pages 5139, line 11 through page 5144, lines 21).

This is too obvious an indiscretion to have been simple error.

This would be the equivalent of someone putting laundry in their washing machine, then feigning the shock of a great discovery when they go back and find their laundry in the washing machine. All in all, there was between 600 and 1000 pieces of evidence collected, but only 200 items tested and/or analyzed, and that was done with extreme bias favoring the state as you will see.

Numerous issues with the mis-handling of evidence occurred when Guy Heinze, Jr. surrendered the clothing he had worn the day he discovered his family murdered.

Officer Mike Owens of the GCPD collected those clothes and kept that evidence with him overnight. Not logging it into the evidence room until 18-24 hours later.

This is obviously an egregious and highly suspicious chain of custody error.

Officer Owens was a seasoned police officer who’d handled evidence many times and knew the procedures well. His performance in doing so, had caught the radar of internal affairs as will be pointed out soon.

One would be remiss if his removal and possession of that evidence did not cause them to ask, why? Where did he take it? And what else might he have done with it?

The officers of GCPD failed to test Mr. Heinze, Jr for blood at any point after his discovery of his family in the home at New Hope Trailer Park.

Why? If they believed he might possibly be the culprit, even if they didn’t believe that, it would be a standard procedure used to rule someone out of being a suspect.

It would, and does seem at this point that they took every measure they could to PREVENT Guy Heinze, Jr. from being ruled out!

It didn’t stop there either.

There was a question of evidence regarding a document which had supposedly had a bloody palm print of Guy Heinze, Jr. on it along with a small number of blood droplets, that was supposedly placed in a drawer by Mr. Heinze, Jr. during, or immediately after the murders.

The ADA, Mr. John Johnson, in opening statements, made a very powerful statement regarding that document and where it was found along with the palm print of Guy.

Unfortunately, despite a court order not to do anything to evidence which might consume said piece of evidence (meaning do not test anything in a way that would destroy the item), that is apparently what happened.

The evidence was destroyed during testing.

This left the defense without the ability to scientifically test that evidence themselves and build their counter defense.

For that fact alone, that piece of evidence should have been disallowed by Judge Stephen Scarlett but it was not.

Entered into evidence by the State was a photograph of the document in which none of the claims by the state could be seen by the naked eye; however, it was published to the jury anyways.

Furthermore, during proffer with Officer Strohl, without the jury present, it was discovered that despite ADA Johnson’s claim in opening arguments that the paper was found in a drawer, the location of where it was found was actually unknown; also unknown was the DNA profile of one of the droplets of blood according to the biological fluids expert from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI).

The statement in testimony of it being found in a drawer was disallowed when the jury returned, however, they could not un-hear what they had heard in opening statements from Mr. Johnson.

To further aggravate the situation, the assistant district attorney made the claim that it had been retrieved from the drawer once again during closing arguments anyway.

Police chief at the time, Matt Doering, had conducted fingerprint comparisons of prints found on evidence from the home, yet the results of those comparisons were not turned in during discovery.

No one knows where those results are to this day.

In addition, there were bloody prints found on a bedframe as well as a headboard that did not belong to Mr. Heinze, Jr., or anyone else in the household.

One of those prints was sent to the GBI with explicit instructions for it NOT to be compared to anyone else’s hand print EXCEPT that of Guy Heinze, Junior. Why?

It was determined that it was not in fact the hand print of Guy Heinze, Junior.

It was also not entered into that National Automated Fingerprint Identification System because Lt. Daras stated “it wasn’t of good enough quality”.

I submit to you that if it was good enough quality to determine who’s it wasn’t to the naked eye it would have been good enough quality to determine who it DID belong to through the use of the FBI’s automatic inspection computers. If it was even questionable in 2009-2013, I’ll guarantee because I work with automated inspection cameras, that it would be identifiable today.

The Glynn County PD testified that they had 70 pages of lead sheets on this case with between 20 and 30 leads per sheet that had been called in to the tip hotline managed by GCPD.

They claimed they followed up on every lead, yet they had no records of those follow ups. According to Lt. Daras, lead investigator in the Guy Heinze, Jr. case, they simply don’t annotate or record any follow ups, visits, or interviews or even save notes from those visits if they don’t feel as though the follow up was useful.

One has to ask, after a shift change at the GCPD, how would a different officer picking up the lead sheets from his shift commander ever know which leads had already been followed up on, and where to pick up on the next unchecked leads if there was absolutely no records of the previous leads having been followed up on already?

This defies logic! A police department couldn’t possibly even function in that manner! It’s likely that they simply didn’t follow up on any of those leads.

As you’ll see, when Calvin Hudson called in with his two alternate suspects that had said in his presence “we’re going to kill the whole fucking family”, it took the GCPD four years to go visit Mr. Hudson, let alone to seek out the two alternate suspects. Not until jury selection was under way in 2013, did they send anyone to interview Mr. Hudson.

The prosecution used the testimony of Mr. Thomas Williams (transcript pages 5190-5210) to dispute the claims of Mr. Guy Heinze, Jr. in which Guy claimed that he had been at the campground known as Barrington Park around 1 a.m. on the morning of the murders, and that Mr. Williams testimony that Guy was never seen at the park around 1 a.m. as proof that Guy wasn’t being truthful about his whereabouts that morning. The charge of lying to law enforcement about his whereabouts on that morning was used to arrest Mr. Heinze, Junior in connection with the murders.

The problem with this is that on transcript page 5201, line 22, Mr. Hamilton asks Mr. Thomas: “Now if I understand correctly, Mr. Williams, is you went to bed at 10 o’clock that night?

Mr. Williams responds: “Yeah.”

Mr. Hamilton then goes on to state what is obvious. If Mr. Williams went to bed at 10 p.m. the night before the murders, why would he be expected to know if Guy had entered the campground at around 1 a.m., and left later that morning?

Mr. Williams testified that he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. That he was asleep.

Guy Heinze, Jr. should never have been arrested on that charge to begin with, let alone had that testimony used by the prosecution against him.

Two pieces of evidence turned over to authorities after GCPD had completed their processing of the scene and relinquished the mobile home back to New Hope Trailer Park.

The GCPD had been called by Ms. Gail Montgomery (now Gail Priest) to collect first, a pair of what she described as bloodied nunchaku, and later an equally apparently bloodied Estwing Hammer.

Initially, the police claimed to the judge during a motion for a continuance, that there were no such calls to their department and Ms. Montgomery was merely a frequent caller to the PD, and intimated that she was lying and looking for attention.

Their claims of the non-existent phone calls were quashed, when the recordings of those phone calls to GC PD were found, and the officer on those two calls stated that the GC PD definitely wanted that evidence.

Ms. Montgomery says the items had been retrieved possibly by officer Mike Owens, the same officer who had held on to Guy’s clothing overnight instead of turning them into evidence the morning he collected them.

Not only has officer Mike Owens become someone of questionable reliability during the entire case, it turns out, he was questionable BEFORE this case as well and had been the subject of an internal affairs investigation regarding his handling and preservation of evidence collected in criminal cases.

As I just mentioned, officer Owens had, prior to the murders at New Hope Trailer Park, been investigated by the Department of Internal Affairs, and he admitted during that investigation that he was guilty of collecting evidence in a criminal investigation in which he mishandled and improperly preserved the collected evidence!

The prosecution suppressed that from the defense, which would have allowed the defense attorneys to impeach all of Officer Owens testimony as well as his reports.

Since the prosecution knew about his credibility problem, their suppression of this information from the defense is a clear Brady Violation in which when testimony or evidence against a defendant is impeachable, it most often becomes exculpatory, in that it becomes unusable against that defendant by the state because we cannot verify reliably that it has been entered into evidence in the same condition as it was when collected from the scene of a crime.

In the onset of the investigation into the murders, a caller by the name of Calvin Hudson placed two phone calls to the GCPD stating that two men with affiliations to a local gang known as the Insane Gangster Disciples had said, in his presence, that they were going to “the entire fucking family”.

They failed to question the two men involved because they determined one, Andy Anderson was being held in jail at the time, though there was no record of that produced at trial. The second man’s name was given only as Dwayne. They chose not to try and search for Dwayne as they had no last name. This is ludicrous.

That lead had been presented to the police in 2009, yet they never went to see Mr. Hudson until jury selection was under way in 2013, nearly four years later, and only after they caught wind that the defense team had spoken to him.

Furthermore, there was another Anderson known as Joseph Bryant “Big Joe” Anderson. Big Joe gave an interview with GCPD in which he named alternate suspects that were exculpatory to Mr. Heinze, Junior.

Was “Big Joe” a relative of Andy Anderson?

Did he ALSO point the finger towards Andy and Dwayne?

We may never know, because true to GCPD and the DA’s form, the recording of that interview with Big Joe was lost or destroyed, never to be found again.

The trial itself didn’t end the injustices.

After the defense rested its case, the prosecution motioned to enter one more witness. They referred to Officer Tillman as a “rebuttal witness”. This was extremely odd because the defense had yet to make its closing arguments. The prosecution at this time had nothing to rebut!

Nevertheless, Judge Scarlett allowed the witness to testify.

What he testified to was extremely suspicious.

Suddenly out of the blue, the DA’s office had discovered an officer that no one had heard of up to that point, who claimed to have conducted the search of the area outside of the home of the Heinze/Toler residence after the murders and would testify that he found no such items as the nunchaku, or the hammer, that it had now been proven did in fact exist. As had become the norm during this investigation, he could produce no report on his search to the defense.

As if that wasn’t enough, prosecutor John Johnson must have realized his case was not as strong as he had wanted; he requested that he be allowed to change the wording of the charges. No longer would the charge be strictly against Guy Heinze, Jr. as the lone killer. he requested that the charges now include Guy, Jr. as an active participant, or being involved with a non-active participant who knew of and conspired with others to commit the murders.

This had undoubtedly caused confusion and stress among the jurors. For eight days they had heard testimony, seen evidence, and geared their minds towards determining if Guy Heinze, Jr. was the sole suspect. Now, in the eleventh hour, they would be asked to recall all of that testimony and evidence, and quickly restructure their thought process to include a second possibility.

This in and of itself shows that even the prosecutors believed there was reasonable doubt in their case; so abundant, that they asked that a couple other options be added for the jury to suddenly and without notice ponder. They literally doubted their own case to such a degree that they scrambled for other ways in which they might get a conviction and be able to say the most brutal murders in Georgia history had been solved. Case closed.

The removal of juror #152 was a spur-of-the-moment decision in which Guy Heinze, Jr. was put on the spot and under great duress, as you might imagine he would be, when being asked to make a decision that affects the rest of his life. He was, in his own words “given 10 minutes to make his decision”.

There’s no way Guy Heinze, Jr. could have possibly absorbed the gravity of that decision in just a few minutes. He was being asked to agree to the removal of juror #152 and with that removal the death sentence would be removed from his sentencing. This juror was refusing to vote guilty and was keeping the other jurors at deliberation. If the state could remove #152 and replace them with an alternate, the death sentence would be removed, and the other jurors could be released from deliberation.

The alternate votes guilty, thus ending the trial with a guilty verdict unanimously.

This is not a decision a defendant should be rushed into making by the defense counsel nor by the judge.

Removal and replacement of a juror during deliberation is allowed only under extreme circumstances.

In this instance, juror #152’s “extreme circumstance” seems to be that he mentioned the trial to a bailiff, and the bailiff claimed the juror said the word “cockroach” to his wife during a family visit during sequestration. Though it’s true that it had been mentioned during the trial what appeared to be cockroach bites on some of the victims, the bailiff heard no context of the conversation between juror #152 and his wife. It’s just as plausible the juror was mentioning cockroaches in reference to the motel he was being sequestered.

It was also declared that he was annoying to the other jurors.

None of these are extreme circumstances that should have ended with his removal from the jury to be replaced by an alternate.

One juror was recorded by the BBC for their documentary “Life and Death Row” stating that the first thing he thought to himself when he first looked at Guy was that Guy “showed no remorse”.

One who is supposed to be presuming innocence up until all the evidence and facts have been submitted, should not even be LOOKING for remorse, why would an innocent individual being tried for a murder he did not commit, be remorseful?

This same juror, again in the BBC documentary, also stated that he felt that when the death penalty option in sentencing was taken away, that he felt the jurors had been robbed, that something had been “taken away from them”.

Additionally, two more jurors in the documentary stated before the camera that they had been confused during the entire trial.

This is not just a misstep. In fact, it’s a violation of Judge Scarlett’s jury instructions in which he told the jury: “if you’re wavering, or if you are unsure, you MUST vote not guilty”.

I do not believe the sufficiency of the evidence to proceed to trial was ever there. I believe the DA also knew it wasn’t there because prior to trial, they contracted the help of an Assistant DA in Atlanta, Georgia to conduct research into the odds of the state winning in a strictly circumstantial evidence death penalty trial.

If sufficiency is in fact found to be there in the eyes of the law, and the honorable justices of Georgia’s Supreme Court, then the weight of evidence must be scrutinized further.

This was a terrible tragedy that took place at New Hope Trailer Park. There is no denying it.

The case was mishandled at every turn. The evidence left behind, lost, or destroyed seems to have each and every time occurred to the benefit of the state and to the detriment of Guy Heinze, Junior.

The scales of justice were weighed heavily against Guy Heinze, Jr. from day one until the verdict was read, and every single error lies with the state. Every single one.

A fair and impartial trial cannot happen when the defendant has to pay for the errors, intentional or otherwise of those who seek to imprison him.

In the words of Schaefer Cox “if the government wants you guilty, they’ll make you guilty”.

It is as clear as day that the Glynn County DA and police department wanted Guy Heinze, Jr. to be guilty, and they lost, destroyed, mishandled, or disposed of every piece of evidence along the way that might have proven him otherwise.