 Mark Crotts (Jack Sink/Associated Press)
They were each stabbed about 10 times. A medical examiner concluded the couple were killed the night before.
More than eight months later, on August 5, 1991, Alamance County sheriff’s officers arrested 22-year-old Mark Crotts. He was charged with capital murder.
At the time, police said that Crotts had formerly rented a building from the Gilliam’s where he lived and operated a taxidermy business and a pool hall. According to the police, Crotts had been evicted for nonpayment of rent. The murder weapon was said to be a fixed blade hunting knife with a broken tip that police had found in a field adjacent to the former home of Crotts’s mother.
In October 1992, Crotts went to trial in Alamance County Superior Court. There was no physical or forensic evidence connecting him to the crime.
The prosecution’s chief witness was Billy Wilson, who was housed briefly in the Alamance County Jail with Crotts. Wilson testified that he heard Crotts admit to killing the couple. Wilson also testified that Crotts’s defense attorney, Clay Hemric Jr., had tried to bribe him before the trial.
The prosecution presented evidence that blood found on the floor of the victims’ home was type A, the same as the victims, but not the same as Crotts’s blood type.
The defense called Charles Manning, from Accident Reconstruction Analysis in Raleigh, North Carolina. Manning testified that the broken-tipped knife did not make the stab wounds. He performed a courtroom demonstration using a pork shoulder and pair of denim jeans and a cotton shirt similar to the clothing worn by Bill Gilliam.
Manning, who testified that he had helped recreate the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, put the clothing over the pork shoulder and used a sharp tipped knife to repeatedly stab the piece of meat. He then broke off the tip of the knife and repeated the experiment.
He told the jury that the holes in the clothing left by the knife without a broken tip more closely resembled the holes found on Bill Gilliam’s clothing.
“The fibers are uniform, not torn,” Manning testified. When he tried to stab the clothing with the broken-tipped knife, he said he “found it very difficult to penetrate the overalls.” He said the fabric was roughly torn.
On October 20, 1992, the jury convicted Crotts of two counts of capital murder. The prosecution asked the jury to impose the death penalty. During the penalty hearing, his parents, Paul and Linda, said their divorce years earlier had a negative effect on their son. They maintained that they did not believe he committed the crime.
Other family members said Crotts’s personality began changing after he graduated from high school in 1987 and that he had gone into a rehab for a month for drinking and drug abuse problems. A court-appointed psychologist said that Crotts began showing signs of schizophrenia during that time.
The jury declined to impose the death penalty and voted to sentence Crotts to life in prison without parole.
In June 1993, Crotts’s father, Paul, hired attorney F. Lee Bailey to handle the appeal. He ultimately filed a motion for a new trial, asserting that Wilson had admitted his testimony about Crotts’s admission was false.
At a hearing in May and June 1994, two women testified that they had met Wilson at an apartment complex in Las Vegas after the trial and after Wilson had been released. Both testified that Wilson admitted he had lied.
Randy Lee Williams testified that when he was in the Alamance County Jail, he met Wilson, and Wilson admitted he lied.
Wilson testified at the hearing and denied that he had ever told anyone that he lied. He maintained that he told the truth. He admitted that he had not revealed everything that he claimed Crotts had said.
Bailey argued that Crotts deserved a new trial because Wilson’s trial testimony that Henric had tried to bribe him had comprised the defense.
On August 31, 1994, Superior Court Judge Gregory A. Weeks vacated Crotts’s conviction and ordered a new trial. Referring to Wilson’s accusation, Judge Weeks noted, “After this devastating accusation, neither Hemric nor co-counsel Craig Thompson moved for a mistrial. Moreover, Hemric did not attempt to withdraw and did not testify to refute the allegation of bribery.”
The judge also noted that Henric had subsequently denied trying to bribe Wilson, and a jail recording of the conversation at issue had no language suggesting there was such an attempt.
The prosecution appealed, and in October 1994, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the order requiring a new trial.
On October 31, 1994, Crotts was released on a $200,000 bond pending a retrial.
In November 1995, Crotts went to trial a second time. By that time, Bailey was basking in the notoriety that came with representing O.J. Simpson, who had been acquitted weeks earlier on October 3, 1995. Crotts’s trial was broadcast on Court TV.
The prosecution again called Wilson, who elaborated on his testimony at the first trial. He now claimed that Crotts said he “got off” committing the murders, and that he had burned his bloody clothing after the murders.
Two other former jail inmates, Lawrence Sisk and Ellsworth Foust, testified that they heard Crotts screaming in his sleep about the murders. “He’d wake up hollering and screaming, ‘I already killed you old sons of bitches once,’” Sisk said. Foust said he heard Crotts yell, “I’ll kill you again,” and “I thought you were dead.”
Meghan Clement, a forensic expert at the former Roche Biomedical Laboratories, testified for the prosecution about performing DNA tests on flakes of blood found near a heater in the Gilliam home. “He [Crotts] is eliminated and excluded as a potential contributor to the DNA in the flakes,” Clement said.
Clement said the blood did resemble that of Alma Gilliam, and also detected traces of another person’s DNA, but was unable to identify it further.
Medical examiner Deborah Radisch, who conducted the autopsy on the victims, testified that the wounds were consistent with the broken-tipped knife. During cross-examination, Bailey asked whether it was unusual that some of the wounds on the bodies were deeper than the knife blade was long and narrower than it was side.
“Do you know of any cases you’ve had where a 5½ inch knife made an eight inch penetration,” Bailey asked.
“I can’t think of any specifically,” Radisch said.
During closing arguments, Bailey portrayed Wilson and the other two jail informants as liars and con men seeking to get favorable treatment in return for their testimony.
On December 22, 1995, a mistrial was declared when the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The jurors later reported seven had voted to acquit Crotts, while five voted to convict.
Ultimately, Crotts’s father hired a new legal team after Bailey was sent to jail for six months for contempt of court in Florida in March 1996 after he refused comply with a judge's order that he turn over millions of dollars in assets that a former client, a drug trafficker, had agreed to forfeit to the government.
Attorneys Joseph Cheshire V and David Rudolf represented Crotts at the third trial which began in January 1996. The defense had won a motion to move the trial to neighboring Oxford County.
Prior to the trial, the prosecution had exhumed the bodies in an attempt to determine whether a knife tip could be found. It was unsuccessful.
The prosecution called a witness from Material Analytical Services who testified about comparing particles of steel found on a button from Bill Gilliam’s overalls. The button bore slice marks. The witness said that the steel in the broken-tipped knife and particles found on the button were consistent with each other.
The defense called Robert Gould, an author of two books on metals, who testified that the microscope used by Material Analytical Services was not accurate.
For the first time, the defense presented the results of DNA testing on scrapings of blood found under Alma Gilliam’s fingernails. The testing had been performed after the mistrial. Crotts and Alma Gilliam were excluded as the source of the blood. The defense argued that the blood was that of the attacker.
On February 5, 1997, after a day and a half of deliberation, the jury acquitted Crotts. Afterward, his father, Paul, declared, “Hot-shot lawyers didn’t get him off. Money didn’t get him off. The facts got him off.”
More than 27 years later, in November 2024, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper granted Crotts a pardon based on actual innocence.
– Maurice Possley
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