But Zach, like many other twenty-
year-old men, is still trying to figure
out his relationship with his father, and
the two sometimes butt heads. Ed is
anxious that his son, who is so much
like him, might make some of the same
mistakes he did—or even get in some
terrible trouble that isn’t his fault. In
March Zach moved out and got a place
with a cousin. Ed worried, but Kelvin
reassured his brother. “He was raised
right,” said Kelvin. “All you can do is let
him go.” To Ed’s relief, six weeks later
Zach moved back in.
Recently Ed pulled out some of his
prison lists and read them over. He’s
been able to check off most of his goals.
Some, such as getting a driver’s license,
were easy. Others, like smiling, he’s had
to work at. The thing Ed wants the most,
though, isn’t on any of his lists. “I want
my name back,” he had said in 2018,
while still behind bars. “I want this mark
off me, this stripe off me. I want to be
able to talk to people without them say-
ing, ‘That’s the guy in prison for killing
that lady.’”
Exonerations take a long time, even
when backed by an army of Innocence
Project lawyers and well-intentioned
podcast listeners. Clayton began the
process in 2016 and eventually con-
vinced the Smith County DA’s office
to join her in filing a motion in 2017
for DNA testing of twenty crime scene
items, including scrapings from un-
derneath Griffin’s fingernails, rape kit
swabs, and the substance from Ed’s
shoe. Unfortunately for Ed, most of
the biological samples were so old and
degraded that they revealed only one
full profile: Griffin’s. The exception was
the semen stain, which unquestionably
came from Moseley.
And the shoe debris—the substance
that 26 years ago led investigators to
believe Ed had been inside the trailer
the night of the murder? DNA testing
revealed that it belonged to an uniden-
tified male. Not only was the tiny trace
never proven to have been human feces,
it had nothing to do with Elnora Griffin.
Clayton is now trying to track down
the crime scene fingerprints so they
can be analyzed using modern software
and then plugged into a current data-
base. She is also planning to challenge
Ed’s conviction under a 2013 state law
that allows a court to grant relief in
cases based on faulty forensic science.
Clayton would like to debunk the state’s
feces theory once and for all—and ex-
onerate Ed while doing so.
She’s had offers of assistance from an
unlikely source: David Dobbs. In 2016
Dobbs received an email from Ruff lay-
ing out his reasons for believing Ed is
innocent and asking for an interview.
Dobbs responded, “Is this the Bob Ruff
who called me a psychopath?”
Dobbs, who left the DA’s office in
2000 and now has his own personal
injury practice, told Ruff to give him
some time to look into the case. If Ed
was innocent, he said, he wanted to
help, possibly by assisting the current
DA in tracking down and questioning
Moseley, Walker, and Johnson.
“I’m open to the possibility that he
may be innocent,” Dobbs said in June.
“Anytime you have a circumstantial
case without any conclusive forensic
evidence, there’s that possibility. But
this is not a clear case of ‘He’s innocent.’
We have work to do to investigate that.
I feel a responsibility to do what I can.”
Ed is skeptical of Dobbs’s intentions.
He knows there are many reasons that
people get sent to prison for something
they didn’t do. In his case, as in most
wrongful convictions, it began with a
deeply flawed investigation, with dep-
uties focusing on one suspect to the
exclusion of others. (Neither Hukill
nor Waller responded to multiple inter-
view requests.) But Ed thinks that the
main reason he spent twenty years in
prison is the prosecutor who sent him
there. “Once Dobbs saw that none of
the evidence pointed to me, he should
have left it alone. Then he came over to
the jail and talked to Kenny Snow, who
was a known snitch. And they believed
what he said!”
Ed’s not the only one who thinks
Dobbs was trying to win his case at all
costs. During Ed’s second trial, Victor
Sirls, an old friend of Ed’s who had also
been in the jail cell with Snow, was sub-
poenaed by Ed’s team to testify. The day
before his scheduled testimony, Sirls
said that Dobbs summoned him to a
vacant jury room. “He said if I testified
for Ates, they’d get me,” Sirls recalled.
“Dobbs said if I fucked this case up, he’d
fuck my case up—those were his exact
words.” (Dobbs denied this.)
Many others have complained about
Tyler prosecutors over the years. In2000 the Houston Chronicle ran a front-
page story on the Smith County justice
system, in which defense attorneys
claimed that the DA’s office would do
anything to win a case. “It’s simply a
pattern of lying, cheating and violations
of the law by Smith County prosecutors
that wouldn’t be tolerated in Harris or
Dallas County or any of the other, larger
offices in the state,” said Houston attor-
ney Paul Nugent, who represented Ker-
ry Max Cook. A principal tactic, critics
charged, was making secret or implicit
deals with jailhouse informants like
Snow, which are required by law to be
revealed to the defense. Dobbs, quoted
in the story, denied all allegations.
Dobbs recently contended that you
can’t look at Ed’s case—or any other
from that era—in isolation. In a conser-
vative, pro-law-enforcement commu-
nity, he said, he was doing the job voters
expected of him. “It was the nineties,
the war on crime. We were doing cases
on the fly.” That decade saw Texas send
more people to prison than any other
state—and Smith County contribut-
ed its fair share. In the months before
Ed’s second trial, Dobbs was juggling
three other murder cases. In his twelve
years, he would try at least fifteen death
penalty cases and win all but one. “As
a DA,” he said, “you’re like Mel Gibson
in Braveheart, swinging your sword all
the time. You can’t stop and look closely
at a tree. You’re always under siege.”
It wasn’t a war to Ed, at least not at
first. To Ed, it was a bunch of men with
badges who seemed determined to
prove he was a brutal killer. “They didn’t
care about anything,” he said recently,
“as long as there was a conviction.”
He spoke on a Sunday in late May,
as he and his family were preparing to
go to a Memorial Day crawfish boil at
a cousin’s house.
“They had their minds made up as
soon as they heard I had been in prison
in Oklahoma. All they had to do was
look at it a little closer, do a little more
investigation, and it would’ve made a
big difference.”
He paused. “I’m never going to get
those years back. I’m going to live for
today, make every day count.” At the
party, he would see family members
he hadn’t seen in decades, and he was
eager to get going. “I’ll never get those
years back,” he said again, “and I’m not
going to even try.” TTEXAS MONTHLY 105