named Frances Johnson (an acquain-
tance of Ed’s who had dated Griffin),
confess to attacking her. Snow said Ed
had even written out a script for Snow.
“He gave it to me to memorize it,” Snow
testified. Instead, Snow sent the script
to the DA, and a handwriting expert
verified that it was written by Ed. On the
witness stand, Snow denied that he’d
been promised anything by prosecutors
for his testimony.
Although the state couldn’t put Ed at
the crime scene forensically, Dobbs and
a fellow assistant DA presented Ed’s
lie about his alibi and investigators’
observations regarding the handprint
on the towel, the position of the car
seat, and the candy wrappers. The pros-
ecutors hit Ed hardest when it came
to the alleged feces. Despite the FBI
agent’s conclusion that the smudge
on Ed’s shoe was merely “protein of
human origin,” Dobbs used the term
“human feces” six times in closing ar-
guments alone. “Liar sitting over there
with human feces on his shoe and no
explanation for it,” he declared.
Ed’s lawyers tried to show that Snow
was an untrustworthy jailhouse snitch,
making him read a letter he had written
Dobbs from jail. “I think I could be the
best informant that ever come out of Ty-
ler, Texas,” he’d proclaimed. They em-
phasized that none of the hundred-plus
hairs, blood, semen, fingerprints, or
cigarette butts tied Ed to the crime
scene—they also pointed out that he had
no scratches or blood on him or any mo-
tive to kill Griffin. Moseley was a much
better suspect, they said. Again, the jury
took a long time and was deadlocked
10 to 2 after two days, in favor of guilt.
Again, Ed was offered a plea bargain,
and again he turned it down. But on
the morning of the third day, August 13,
1998, the two holdouts changed their
minds, and the jury found Ed guilty.
According to a local paper, when the
verdict was read, “A cry went up” from
Ed. He was sentenced to 99 years. Kim,
weeping, watched as her husband was
handcuffed and taken away.At the H.H. Coffield Unit, near the
town of Tennessee Colony, Ed spent
much of his free time doing what he
did best: playing basketball. One day
a friend confronted him. “All you do
is play basketball,” he said. “Get your
ass up—we’re going to the law library.”His friend showed Ed how to search for
his case, and in mid-2000, Ed saw that
his appeal had been denied earlier that
year. He began spending every day in
the library, researching, and after Texas
passed a law giving inmates the right to
petition for DNA testing of evidence,
Ed did so, asking that everything at the
crime scene be tested, not just the hairs.
He fell into a routine, getting up at
5 a.m., working on a road crew. Later
he served as a cook and a groundskeep-
er. He learned to keep his emotions in
check, to not show any weakness. He
avoided trouble and developed a rep-
utation for toughness on the prison
basketball courts, living up to his new
nickname: Big E.
Back in Dallas, Kim was struggling to
raise Kyra and the new baby, Zach, by
herself. She sold their home and moved
in with her parents and would bring
Kyra and Zach to visit their dad everytwo weeks. On the long drive to Ten-
nessee Colony, she would tell them how
their dad was in prison for something
he didn’t do. When they arrived at the
prison, the kids toddled to Ed, who got
to hold them for an hour or two. But it
crushed him when he had to return to
his cell. The kids didn’t understand why
their father couldn’t come home with
them, and as the years crept by, the vis-
its became harder for all of them. Zach,
especially, started getting resentful.
Like his father, Zach was passionate
about basketball, playing every day.
But unlike his friends’ dads, Ed never
came to his games or his birthday par-
ties. “When are you coming home?” he
would ask over and over. Kim finally
stopped talking about Daddy—it wastoo sensitive a topic—which made her
even more depressed.
Kelvin visited Ed for a while too but
couldn’t bear to hear his brother called
“convict.” He hated seeing the grimace
on Ed’s face when he would head back to
his cell after a visit. So Kelvin stopped
making the trip.
Ed never heard from the attorney
assigned to him for his DNA claim,
and in 2006 his grandmother hired
two Houston lawyers, father and son
Randy and Josh Schaffer. Randy had
a long history of freeing the wrongly
convicted, and to him, Ed’s case had
all the earmarks of a bad conviction: an
entirely circumstantial case, no DNA,
no eyewitnesses, no confession. What
had sent Ed to prison, it seemed to the
Schaffers, was Snow’s testimony.
And now the lawyers had a secret
weapon of their own. Snow had been
released from jail three months after
Ed’s trial, but he eventually fled the state
and was arrested for violating his pro-
bation and brought back; in 2004 he
was sentenced to forty years. While in
prison, Snow got a message to Ed’s new
lawyers: he had lied on the stand.
Snow’s betrayal of Ed, as he swore in
an affidavit, was especially treacherous.
Snow said that, while in jail, he had over-
heard a conversation between Ed and
Frances Johnson, the man who’d dated
Griffin, in which Johnson admitted to
being in her trailer the night of her mur-
der. Johnson said he grabbed a knife
and “wore her ass out.” Ed asked Snow
to help him out, and Snow agreed to re-
count the conversation to Ed’s lawyers,
who then informed the trial judge about
the new witness at a pretrial hearing.
But two weeks later, Snow claimed in
the affidavit, prosecutor Dobbs visited
him in jail. “Dobbs told me that if I testi-
fied for Ates, the state would not help me
with my cases,” Snow said. “They told
me that I would never box again unless
I helped them convict Ates.”
After Ed was convicted, Snow plead-
ed guilty and was given ten years’ pro-
bation—even though with his record
he would have likely received 25 years
to life in law-and-order Smith County.
(Indeed, the judge told him she had nev-
er granted probation in a case like his,
“where there is violence and kind of an
anger that is of some concern to me.”)
This, Josh Schaffer thought, was a
classic case of a favorable deal with a96 TEXAS MONTHLY
THE KIDS DIDN’T
UNDERSTAND
WHY THEIR
FATHER COULDN’T
COME HOME WITH
THEM, AND AS
THE YEARS CREPT
BY, THE VISITS
BECAME HARDER
FOR ALL OF THEM.