Smith’s wife, Carole, however, knew Joe and never believed he was capable of hurting Mickey. Though he had initially been skeptical of the state’s case against Joe, he was mindful that two juries had returned guilty verdicts.
Moved by Whitley’s appeal and intrigued by the idea of revisiting the two crimes, Smith agreed to help. Before these killings, no one could readily remember the last homicide in Clifton. His daughter was killed just four months before Mickey Bryan, and he wondered if the crimes were somehow linked exactly how, he wasn’t sure, but he thought they should be investigated together. The show should look at both of the 1985 murders, Whitley said.
The day of doom summary tv#
He told Smith that the Clifton police had abandoned his family - “They just walked away,” he said - and he asked if Smith would be willing to write to “Unsolved Mysteries” in the hope that the hit TV show might decide to dig into the case. Whitley had little faith that local law enforcement was still looking for her killer. No one was ever apprehended, and the anniversary of Judy’s death had just passed. The Whitley family was struck by tragedy six years earlier, when Whitley’s 17-year-old daughter, Judy, was murdered, her nude body left in a cedar thicket on the western side of town. What prompted his trip to Huntsville was a recent visit to The Record’s office from a Clifton man named Don Whitley. The Clifton Record announcing the verdict from Joe Bryan’s retrial.
The day of doom summary movie#
He had a fearsome work ethic, routinely pulling all-nighters, and if he took a rare break when he was on deadline, he often ventured no farther than the Cliftex movie theater next door to grab a box of popcorn. His amiable, unhurried manner and dogged reporting quickly earned him the trust of many people in Clifton. In 1979, he and his father bought back The Record, and Smith became the editor. Smith briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a lawyer before spending a year writing a novel about a black newspaperman in the fictitious Texas town of Emporia. He went off to college but then dropped out to get back into journalism, and for much of the 1970s, he worked for and then ran newspapers in small towns around North and Central Texas. After school and on nights and weekends, he did everything from running the printing press to sweeping the floors. He began working at The Record as a seventh grader in 1965, when his father bought the paper. Smith was a prolific chronicler of small-town life, sometimes writing nearly every article on the weekly’s front page. He could not help wondering how Joe, who had no criminal record before he was charged with his wife’s murder, had fared inside.
Bounded by guard towers and crowned by barbed wire, the Walls is a foreboding sight, and as Smith surveyed the red-brick monolith, he was awed by its magnitude. Two days after Smith’s visit, a death-row inmate would be executed there by lethal injection.
The maximum-security penitentiary, named for the towering ramparts that form its perimeter, houses what was then, and what remains, the most active death chamber in the country.
The day of doom summary trial#
Smith, the editor in chief of The Clifton Record, had overseen the paper’s coverage of Joe’s trial and a subsequent retrial, but he had never stepped foot inside a prison, and as the Walls Unit came into view, he felt both excitement and apprehension. Though Joe has always insisted on his innocence and the evidence prosecutors presented was entirely circumstantial - Joe was attending a conference 120 miles away, in Austin, around the time of the killing - he was convicted and sent away to the Walls Unit in Huntsville. Once a beloved figure in the Central Texas town of Clifton, the former high school principal was serving a 99-year sentence for the murder of his wife, Mickey, an elementary-school teacher who was shot to death in their home six years earlier. It was a warm September day in 1991, and Smith, a mild-mannered 38-year-old newspaperman whose wire-rimmed glasses lent him a slightly owlish look, had come to interview an inmate named Joe Bryan.
IĪs W.Leon Smith neared the East Texas town of Huntsville, he did not know what to expect. This article is Part 2 of a two-part investigation. This article is a partnership between ProPublica, where Pamela Colloff is a senior reporter, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a writer at large.