 James "Jim" Kelly (Photo: Pennsylvania Innocence Project)
Officers with the Philadelphia Police Department quickly responded to 911 calls about the shooting and began interviewing potential witnesses. Hughston was pronounced dead at an area hospital at around 8:30 p.m.
Colie Baxter told the police that he had been stopped at a red light a few blocks away when he heard gunshots. He then saw two men run toward him from the direction of the shooting and get into a small, two-door white car with a sun guard in the back window.
Baxter described the driver of the car as “brown skin, in his 20’s, about 5’8”, 180 lbs ... carrying something in his right hand by the way he was holding his arm to his side, he was wearing a dark hat … and a long black trench coat.” Baxter described the passenger as “a black male, in his 20’s too ... shorter about 5’5”, thin, dark brown complexion ... [and] wearing a light to medium blue sweat suit with some red in it.”
Baxter said the car drove past him, which allowed him to make eye contact with both men.
Hughston had been visiting his girlfriend, Tameka Ledbetter, who lived with her uncle, George Patterson. Patterson said Ledbetter and Hughston had just left his house when Patterson heard shots. Patterson said he saw a man in a long black trench coat run north, toward Diamond Street.
Tameka Ledbetter said that she heard the shots and saw Hughston on the ground, about two houses away. She said she saw a Black man put a gun into his waistband. She said he was wearing a black trench coat and a black skull cap. She said he got into a white car and drove north.
Ledbetter told the police that Hughston sold drugs in the area. She said he was not a street-level dealer; others worked for him. Ledbetter told police about other shootings in the neighborhood and rumors of Hughston’s involvement in those incidents.
The police interviewed Ernestine Williams, who lived across the street from Patterson. In her first statement, taken on the night of the shooting, Williams said she was upstairs in her bedroom when she heard gunshots. She looked out and saw Hughston on the ground and a woman screaming. She said she didn’t see the shooting or anyone running away.
Williams gave a second statement on March 31, 1993. Now, she said that she had seen the shooting and actually talked to the assailants prior to the murder. (She said she had asked them for help jumping her car.). She said that a teenager from the neighborhood named Devon was with the men at the time.
Williams said one of the men was 5’ 7”, 180 pounds, wearing a long black leather coat and a black turtleneck. She said the other man was around 6’ tall, with big lips and a medium build. He wore a beige, full-length coat and dress shoes.
Police interviewed Williams again on September 14. In this statement, she said that she had bought drugs from Hughston’s shooter several times in the past few months and had frequently seen him at a Chinese takeout place. She said she hadn’t come forward with this information earlier because she was scared.
The next day, the police showed Williams several photo arrays. In one array, she picked out Larry Mullins, whom she said she recognized from the takeout place, as the shooter. In another array, she selected 37-year-old James “Jim” Kelly, as Mullins’s accomplice. Kelly’s photo was from 1978, related to a robbery case where he received probation, but Williams said she recognized him from a wedding they had both attended a month earlier.
Kelly’s name had surfaced early in the investigation, for reasons that aren’t clear from available records. The police interviewed him in March 1993, and Kelly, a city sanitation worker, said he was at a family member’s house for a New Year’s blessing at the time of the shooting. He said a pastor and his family were in attendance and could vouch for his whereabouts.
On July 2, 1995, Williams gave another statement to police and said that she had seen Kelly pass Mullins a weapon before the shooting. Separately, Baxter had identified Mullins as one of the participants but had not made an identification of the second person. The police drew up an arrest warrant and arrested Kelly on July 6, 1995. Mullins was arrested on July 31, 1995. Both men were charged with murder, felony weapon possession and conspiracy.
After Kelly’s arrest, his attorney, Geoffrey Seay, hired an investigator, who interviewed Williams. She said that the police had harassed her, believing she was “taking money from these other guys, drug dealers, to put the blame on somebody else.” She said that the police had shown her a photo of Kelly and told her his name. She also said that a detective had mentioned another potential suspect, a man named “Tommy” who lived around the corner.
Mullins and Kelly appeared at a preliminary hearing in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas on October 31, 1995. Initially, Williams looked at Kelly and said, “He don’t look like the picture I saw.”
The judge declared her a hostile witness, and Williams then testified that Kelly was the person she saw pass a gun to Mullins just before Hughston was shot.
Kelly and Mullins were tried jointly, beginning on August 14, 1996. No physical or forensic evidence connected either man to the shooting. Kelly was 15 years older than Mullins, and there was no evidence that the men knew each other. An officer would testify that bullets and casings recovered at the crime scene and from Hughston’s body most likely came from the same weapon.
Detective Walter Hoffner testified about the investigation and the photo arrays shown to Williams. During cross-examination, he acknowledged that Kelly’s photo was taken 15 years earlier. Hoffner said he used this photo to make a fairer photo display that was more in line with the witness descriptions of a younger man.
Hoffner testified that the names of other known drug dealers had come up in the investigation, but he did not know the reasons they were excluded as suspects.
Williams testified about the events before the shooting. She said she first encountered Mullins and Kelly when her car died outside her house and she asked them for help. She identified Mullins and Kelly as the two men she saw shoot Hughston.
“I remember seeing [Kelly and Mullins] at the corner of my block making a transaction, and I remember seeing [Mullins] shoot [the victim], I seen him shoot him in his head behind his ear and he fell in his arms and he laid him on the ground and he stood back and he shot him again,” Williams said. “I remember that very well. And I’ll never forget it.”
Williams testified that she had been clean for a year but had been drinking alcohol and smoking crack cocaine on the day of the shooting.
During his opening statement, a prosecutor told jurors that Baxter would testify that he saw Mullins and another man run to a car after shots were fired. The prosecutor told the trial judge, James Lineberger, the same thing in a meeting in chambers prior to Baxter’s testimony.
Baxter testified that he was stopped at 25th and Diamond streets when he heard gunfire. He pulled over and saw two men run toward him and get into a car. One, the driver, wore a black trench coat and held something by his side. The second man wore a sweat suit. He identified Mullins as the passenger, as expected, but for the first time identified Kelly as the driver.
During cross-examination, Baxter said the police had shown him a lot of photographs and he had been unable to identify Kelly. He also said Kelly looked older than the men he saw on the night of the shooting.
Kelly did not testify. Neither did his alibi witnesses: his common-law wife, Joan Arrington, and the pastor, Reverend James Beacoat, who both attended the trial. (Both would later state in affidavits that Seay had asked them to testify but then decided at trial that they weren’t needed.)
Kenyatta Hughston, Travis’s brother, testified as a defense witness. He said that in the days after the murder, Williams told him that three men—Tommy, Kendall, and Boochie—were responsible for the murder. These were the same men that Hoffner testified had briefly been on the police department’s radar.
Although the state’s theory was that Hughston’s murder was related to an ongoing battle over drug-dealing territory, the state introduced no evidence to connect Kelly with illegal drugs.
After nearly two full days of deliberation, the jury convicted Kelly and Mullins of first-degree murder and criminal conspiracy on August 20, 1996. Kelly was acquitted on the weapons charge. Both men later received sentences of life without parole.
Kelly’s initial appeals were rejected by the Pennsylvania courts. He raised some of the same claims in a pro se petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed in 2008 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The habeas petition said that Seay had provided ineffective representation by failing to call the potential alibi witnesses, and that the state had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence about other potential suspects.
A magistrate judge recommended denying the writ, mostly on procedural grounds, on February 18, 2009.
The report, adopted as an order on October 6, 2009, also said that Seay had acted strategically in his decision not to call Beacoat to the witness stand, in part because of earlier testimony that Kelly lived in a public-housing community next to Bambrey Street. It also noted that Judge Lineberger had asked Kelly a series of questions at the end of the trial about Seay’s performance.
The judge asked: “Are there any additional witnesses that you wanted to be called at this trial that Mr. Seay did not call?
Kelly said, “Well, no. There is a witness, but my defense feels as though it was no need for him, you know.”
Later, the judge asked, “Are you satisfied with Mr. Seay’s representation of you so far?”
Kelly said, “Yes, I am.”
Also in 2009, Kelly contacted the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, which had just opened. The organization told him it was unable to help because it couldn’t find new evidence of innocence.
Kelly’s case was the subject of a front-page article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016. The article said that Kelly’s fellow inmates at a prison in western Pennsylvania were so convinced of his innocence that they had pooled their limited resources to hire a private investigator to run down new leads and assist Lawrence Wood, a retired judge who had agreed to represent Kelly. The motion Wood filed in 2012 said that Ledbetter had told police she had seen a man named Sharif Curry walking away from Hughston’s body and holding a gun. (Curry had died in 1995.)
Kelly told a reporter for the paper, “I was no angel,” he said, “but not a murderer.”
The new trial motion was denied in 2013. The court ruled Ledbetter’s evidence wouldn’t have made a difference at trial, as the state’s theory was that Kelly had handed Mullins a weapon but wasn’t the shooter.
In 2018, the Pennsylvania Innocence Project began representing Kelly. It asked the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) of the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office to review the case.
As part of the review, the prosecutors gave Kelly’s attorneys access to the police department’s investigative files, known as “H files,” for the Hughston murder and for the murder of Stacy Williams, which occurred on September 21, 1993. Much of the Hughston file was missing, but the Williams file appeared complete.
In a motion for a new trial filed on September 23, 2022, Nilam Sangvhi and Elizabeth DeLosa, attorneys with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, wrote: “After a careful review of both H Files, a theme emerged—Thomas [L.], a 19-year old young man at the time of the crime, who had a reputation in the community as a mid-level drug dealer with a strong propensity for violence, was an obvious alternative suspect deserving of police attention. Unfortunately, [Thomas L.] went completely uninvestigated for his potential role in the Hughston homicide. Instead, based solely on Ernestine Williams’s ever-changing story, the Commonwealth proceeded to trial against Kelly.”
Hughston’s H file contained an undisclosed and undated police report from March 1993 that said Baxter had identified Thomas L. as the man he saw enter the driver’s side of the vehicle after the Hughston shooting.
The Stacy Williams file said that Thomas L. owned several light-colored vehicles, consistent with the witness descriptions of the car seen at the Hughston shooting.
The file also said that Thomas L. owned the home where Ernestine Williams lived at the time she witnessed the Hughston shooting. (She was relocated to another neighborhood in exchange for her testimony against Kelly and Mullins.)
Thomas L. was convicted of murder in Stacy Williams’s death on March 18, 1996. Kelly’s motion noted the similarities between the two crimes, which involved the deaths of young men involved in the drug business.
After receiving this new information, attorneys with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project interviewed a friend of Stacy Williams. The friend detailed a series of shootings and incidents arising from area disputes over drug territory. The friend said that Thomas L. worked for several top drug dealers, including “Boochie” and “Kendall,” and that he was a violent enforcer of the rules determining who could sell drugs on his corners.
Investigators with the CIU spoke with Ernestine Williams, who said she wasn’t changing her story. Baxter died in 2023.
In its response, filed July 11, 2024, the CIU said the state’s failure to disclose this exculpatory evidence had violated Kelly’s right to a fair trial. The response also said that the prosecutor’s office had not been given these documents by the police department.
The response detailed the overlap between police investigations into drug-related shootings in North Philadelphia and the frequent mentions of Thomas L., Kendall and Boochie as suspects in these crimes.
The exculpatory evidence, the response said, could have been used to undermine Williams’s credibility as an independent witness and show how the police had failed to investigate solid leads of alternate suspects. The response also noted problems with the conflicting testimony used to convict Kelly. Ernestine Williams had testified that Kelly was wearing a beige cashmere coat and Mullins had a black leather coat. Baxter said it was Kelly who wore the black leather coat, while Mullins wore a blue sweat suit.
The CIU’s response and an amended petition filed by Kelly’s legal team contain numerous redactions tied to ongoing investigations.
On July 18, 2024, Judge Glenn Bronson of the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas vacated Kelly’s conviction and granted him a new trial. He then granted a separate motion by the state to dismiss Kelly’s charges. Kelly was released from prison that day.
In a statement, the Pennsylvania Innocence Project said, “James, a proud father and veteran, is most excited to return home and see through his dream of having a modest house, a steady job, and spending plenty of time with his grandchildren.”
– Ken Otterbourg
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