spent almost four years in Oklahoma,
most of them incarcerated. Now he had
four felonies on his record.After interviewing Ed, Detective
Hukill returned to the crime scene,
where homicide detective Jason Waller
and other deputies had been collecting
hair, blood, and cigarette butts. It was
past 1 a.m., and Hukill briefed Waller on
his conversation with Ed. They began
piecing together what they believed
to be possible clues. There was a Jol-
ly Rancher candy wrapper in Griffin’s
bathroom garbage can. A pink bath tow-
el was covering her front door window,
and they discovered a large handprint
on it, as if a big man had hung it there.
Griffin’s white Mercury hatchback
was parked closer to the trailer than a
neighbor said she usually parked it, as if
someone else had left it there. Inside the
car, deputies found, the seat had been
pushed all the way back, as if it had been
driven by a tall man. The radio station
was tuned to KZEY, which played rap
music; Griffin, a religious woman, lis-
tened to gospel.
Later that Saturday, Hukill and
Waller were joined at the crime scene
by a man named David Dobbs, the first
assistant in the Smith County district
attorney’s office and a rising star there.
A boyish 31-year-old with curly, dirty-
blond hair and piercing, pale green eyes,
he would actively work with the depu-
ties in the investigation, meeting Hukill
at Bush’s apartment complex, where
they found two men who said they rec-
ognized Griffin’s car from a photo and
said it had been parked there the night
she was killed. Ed, Hukill wrote later,
must have driven it there.
At least initially, Hukill had another
suspect too, a man named Leonard Mo-
seley, who’d been romantically involved
with Griffin but lived with a woman, An-
gela Walker, with whom he’d had a baby.
Moseley still saw Griffin for a regular
late-night Thursday date, but he told
Hukill he’d been at work on the night
of the murder, then gone home. Walker
backed up his alibi. During an interview
with Moseley four days after the body
was found, Hukill said he believed him.
“I’ve got one particular person who told
me where he was, what he was doing,
and his story ain’t checking out,” the
deputy told Moseley. “I don’t think you
did it. I really don’t. Not at this point,especially because this other boy, this
other thing is just, like, slapping us in
the face right now.”
That particular person was Ed, who
was arrested on August 26 and charged
with murder. A Tyler newspaper noted
that Smith County had had seven mur-
ders so far in 1993, and arrests had now
been made in each of them. Sitting in
jail, Ed was confident that he wouldn’t
actually be tried for the crime and felt
all the more sure when investigators
concluded their blood-typing, finger-
printing, and hair analyses. No physi-
cal evidence tied him to the scene. By
contrast, though the medical examiner
found that Griffin had in fact not been
sexually assaulted, the second suspect,
Moseley, couldn’t be ruled out by blood
type as a “possible donor” of a semen
stain found on a comforter. One ofEd’s court-appointed lawyers, Clifton
Roberson, told him that the state didn’t
have a case. Ed rejected a plea bargain
of forty years.
It took Ed’s family another eight
months to get him out on bond, but
once free, he felt like his life might ac-
tually be turning around. He enrolled in
trucking school—he liked the freedom
of the road—and upon graduation got
a job with a Tyler waste-management
company. He bought himself a new
pickup. And in October 1994 he went
to a Halloween party and met a pret-
ty young woman from Dallas named
Kim Miller. Ed liked her immediate-
ly: she was smart and independent, a
sociology student at the University of
Texas at Tyler. In turn, Kim thought the
soft-spoken basketball player looked alot like Michael Jordan. The day after
the party, he called her seven times.
She thought he was joking when he
said he had been indicted for murder.
Ed would forget about it sometimes
himself, especially since his trial date
kept getting pushed back ( both the
prosecutors and the defense lawyers,
busy with other murder cases, asked for
postponements). The couple dated for a
few months, and Kim got pregnant. She
graduated in May 1995, and in October
their daughter, Kyra, was born. Ed loved
holding her before heading out to drive
his truck. Kim eventually convinced
him to move to Dallas, where her par-
ents lived and where there were more
opportunities for a college graduate.
Ed landed a job driving a garbage
truck. Meanwhile he was getting more
and more notices to appear in court. He
talked to his boss about taking some
time off, and in July 1996 Ed went on
trial for murder.For years, Smith County had been one
of the most stringently law-and-order
communities in Texas. Judges and DAs
in conservative Tyler were elected on
promises to wage war on crime, which
meant punishing those they thought
were guilty, protecting victims, and
keeping the streets safe. Prosecutors
plowed through cases, and they were
particularly relentless with murders.
In one notable example, beginning in
1978, they tried Tyler-area resident
Kerry Max Cook three times for the
same murder over the course of sixteen
years; one attempt ended in a mistri-
al, the other two in guilty verdicts that
were thrown out by the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals.
Even without any physical evidence
tying Ed to the scene, prosecutors felt
they had a good case, especially with the
charismatic Dobbs at the helm. One of
Ed’s lawyers, Tom McClain, had worked
in the DA’s office with Dobbs and knew
what he was up against. “Dobbs tried a
case as hard as anyone I’ve ever seen,”
said McClain. “And he’s really smart.”
At trial, Dobbs theorized that Ed
killed Griffin, stepped in her feces, drove
her car to his girlfriend’s, and returned
home after midnight. The state offered
no motive and indeed no proof that the
debris on the bottom of Ed’s shoe or
the clumps in her trailer were human
feces. An FBI expert could determineJUDGES AND DAS
IN CONSERVATIVE
TYLER WERE ELECTED
ON PROMISES TO
WAGE WAR ON CRIME.
PROSECUTORS
PLOWED THROUGH
CASES, AND THEY
WERE PARTICULARLY
RELENTLESS WITH
MURDERS.94 TEXAS MONTHLY