too eager or too surprised—too anything—he might retreat.
“It was all a lie. What I’m going to tell you is going to blow your mind, Mr. Stevenson.”
He held his stare on me dramatically before turning to Michael. “You, too, Jimmy
Connors.” It didn’t take many conversations with Ralph before it became clear that he had
difficulty remembering names.
“Mr. Myers, you know I’m going to want you to not only tell me the truth but also tell the
court the truth. Are you willing to do that?”
I was nervous to push so quickly, but I needed to be clear. I didn’t want a private
performance.
“That’s why I called you.” He sounded surprised that there could be any question about his
intentions. “I’ve been in a group therapy class here. You’re supposed to be real honest. We
been talking about honesty for nearly three months. Last week people were talking about all
the bad shit that happened to them when they were kids and all the bad things they done.”
Myers was picking up steam as he spoke.
“I finally told the group, ‘Well, I can top all you sons ’a bitches, I done put a damn man on
death row by lying in damn court.’ ”
He paused dramatically.
“After I told all of ’em what I’d done, everybody said I needed to make it right. That’s what
I’m tryin’ to do.” He paused again to let me take it all in. “Hey, y’all gonna buy me a damn
soda, or am I just gonna sit here all day looking at them damn vending machines and pouring
my heart out?” He smiled for the first time since we’d been together. Michael jumped up and
walked over to buy him a drink.
“Hey, Jimmy, Sunkist Orange, if they got it.”
For more than two hours, I asked questions and Ralph gave answers. By the end, he did, in
fact, blow my mind. He told us about being pressured by the sheriff and the ABI and
threatened with the death penalty if he didn’t testify against McMillian. He made accusations
of official corruption, talked about his involvement in the Pittman murder, and revealed his
earlier attempts to recant. He ultimately admitted that he had never known anything about
the Morrison murder, had no clue what had happened to her or anything else at all about the
crime. He said that he had told lots of people—from the D.A. on down—that he had been
coerced to testify falsely against Walter. If even half of what he said was true, there were a lot
of people involved in this case who knew, from the mouth of his sole accuser, that Walter
McMillian had had nothing to do with the murder of Ronda Morrison.
Ralph was on his third Sunkist Orange when he stopped his stream of confessions, leaned
forward, and beckoned us closer. He spoke in a whisper to Michael and me.
“You know they’ll try to kill you if you actually get to the bottom of everything.”
We would learn that Ralph could never let a meeting end without dropping some final
dramatic insight, observation, or prediction. I reassured him that we would be careful.
On the drive back to Montgomery, Michael and I debated how much we could trust Myers.
What he told us about the McMillian case all made sense. His story at trial was so implausible
that it was easy to believe that he had been pressured to testify falsely. The corruption
narrative that he seemed intent to expose was harder to assess. Myers claimed to have
committed the Vickie Pittman murder under the direction of another local sheriff; he laid out