New York Daily News - Crime File (original) (raw)
In April 1989, passersby stop by makeshift memorial where beating took place.

They were 48 hours that rocked a city and ruined lives.

New evidence in the Central Park jogger case is focusing fresh attention on the chaotic events that unfolded the night of April 19, 1989, and over the next two days.

Some of what happened is not in doubt: A knot of marauding teens stormed through the park; a woman was raped and beaten, youths made videotaped confessions about the attacks.

But two key questions remain open: Did Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise take part in that attack? If not, why did they confess?

Advocates for the five say cops coerced false admissions from them, but police insist the interrogations were by the book.

"It's appalling to me for anybody to say that they are innocent," retired Detective Thomas McKenna told the Daily News. "I'm not in the business of putting innocent people in jail and leaving criminals on the street."

The saga began on a chilly Wednesday night in Harlem with a band of teens milling in front of Schomburg Plaza.

"We planned to rob joggers and cyclists inside Central Park," Santana later told cops. "I counted 33 people who were going into the park to rip people off."

The youths swarmed through the 110th St. entrance to the park, creating a violent frenzy that came to be known as "wilding."

Path of destruction

A homeless man, Antonio Diaz, 52, was the first victim - knocked down, beaten, doused with beer, dragged into bushes.

The roving gang moved south, stopping at 101st St., where they formed a gantlet and surrounded tandem cyclists Gerald Malone and Patricia Dean.

"I was terrified," Dean testified. "They were grabbing at my legs and pushing at my shoulder. They were making animal noises, grunting. I thought for sure we were going over."

Malone and Dean got away. Others were not as fortunate.

British jogger Robert Garner, 30, was pushed down an embankment and pummeled. He thought he "was going to die."

Teacher John Loughlin, 41, was thrown face down in the grass and whacked in the head with a pipe until he was bloody.

"I yelled out, 'Fellas, why are you doing this to me? Stop,'" he remembered.

Those attacks were vicious in their own right, but they would eventually be overshadowed by the savage assault on the jogger.

The 28-year-old banker had been yanked off the road sometime between the ambush of the cyclists and Loughlin's beating.

Dragged into a ravine, she was raped, brutalized and left for dead. When the teens drifted out of the park after 10 p.m., she was still lying, undiscovered, in a puddle of blood.

Cops hunting for those responsible for the other mayhem spotted more than a dozen kids on Central Park West and moved in.

They got five - Santana, Richardson, Steve Lopez, Clarence Thomas and LaMont McCall - and took them to the Central Park stationhouse.

At about 4 a.m. on Thursday, Central Park cops were getting ready to release the first suspects with summonses for assault when they got a call from Detective Jose Rosario.

He had responded to the discovery of a female jogger found in the park and wanted to make sure the teens were questioned.

McCall and Thomas had nothing to say. But the interrogation of Richardson - in the presence of his mother, Grace Cuffee - was different.

Homicide Detective John Hartigan focused on a scratch on Richardson's face, and took his mother outside for a chat.

"I told Mrs. Cuffee this was the opportunity for her son to tell the truth," Hartigan said. "I told her they could take scrapings from underneath her fingernails. If it matched the skin of her son, that would be the physical evidence."

Cuffee later testified that when she went back inside, her son was being berated by cops.

"I heard them cursing at my son and saying to my son, 'You know you f---d her. ... And I heard this lady say, 'Why don't you tell? You don't want to go to jail for no one else?'"

After 11 hours at the precinct, Cuffee wasn't feeling well, and she left, putting her adult daughter Angela in charge.

Detective Carlos Gonzalez asked Richardson, 14, about the scratch. He initially said he fell; now he said it happened when he was arrested.

The cop said as he left to get the arresting officer, Richardson blurted out, "All right. It was the girl. She scratched me when we had the fight."

The teen wrote out a statement implicating Santana and Lopez, and gave up McCray's name. The last line of his confession read: "I was the one that didn't rape her."

The next suspect interviewed was Santana, accompanied by his grandmother, Navidad Colon, who would later argue she spoke no English.

In his initial statement to Hartigan and Detective Bert Arroyo, Santana, 14, admitted to being part of the pack but did not bring up the female jogger.

When Santana's father, Raymond Sr., arrived, he let Hartigan speak to his son alone.

Disputed confession

Hartigan was later accused of tricking the boy into admitting he was there by questioning his manhood, calling him a "faggot."

The detective denied coercing Santana into a confession.

"Antron came and started ripping her clothes off. Antron pulled her pants off and she was screaming," his statement read. "Kevin pulled down his pants and had sex with her. When she was on the floor, I grabbed her [breasts] ... I did not have sex with her."

The investigation had taken a dramatic turn, and investigators decided to move the operation to the 20th Precinct.

While taking Santana uptown, Detective Mike Sheehan and two other detectives took a detour into the park.

"I had nothing to do with the rape of that lady," Santana said, according to Sheehan. "All I did was touch her [breasts]."

McCray, 15, picked up after being named by Richardson, also was moved to the 20th Precinct with his parents Bobby and Linda, and grilled by Detectives Gonzalez, Harry Hildebrandt and Thomas McCabe.

At one point during the two-hour session, Gonzalez and McCray's father stepped outside.

"He said he knew his son very well and that he wasn't giving us all the information and that maybe it would be better if the mother wasn't there," the cop said.

When Linda McCray left the room, McCray started blabbing.

"He described exactly how the female jogger was attacked, who hit her," Hildebrandt said. "How he kicked her. How her clothes were ripped off and how different individuals, including himself being number three, jumped on top."

Later, Bobby McCray said he forced his son to invent the story: "I said, 'I know you're telling me the truth. You tell these people what they want to hear and you'll go home.'"

Extending the dragnet

By the end of Thursday, cops had two more teens in custody: Salaam, 15, and Wise, 16.

Cops first took a crack at Salaam. He denied to McKenna and Detective Rudy Hall that he was in the park, so McKenna tested him with a "fib."

He told Salaam: "We have the jogger's pants. They're satin. They're a very smooth surface and we have been able to get fingerprints off them. If they match, you're going for rape."

The ruse supposedly worked. "I was there but I didn't rape her," Salaam allegedly said.

The next step was getting Salaam to sign a statement to that effect - but it never happened.

Salaam's mother had arrived and informed police her son, who had a subway pass that listed his age as 16, was only 15.

By one account, cops continued to grill Salaam upstairs while Assistant District Attorney Linda Fairstein stalled the mom.

"[Ms. Salaam] walked over to Linda Fairstein and told her she wanted to see Yusef. She said, 'You do not have my permission to speak to Yusef,'" said David Nocenti, a federal prosecutor and Salaam's Big Brother.

"Then either Linda Fairstein or one of the detectives next to her said, 'We do not need your permission.'"

At any rate, the grilling was halted, and Salaam became the only suspect not to sign a statement or give a video confession.

It was very early Friday morning by the time Hartigan, Sheehan and Detective Robert Nugent sat down with Wise.

Wise began by saying he was in the park but left after the earlier assaults. Nine hours later, he admitted watching the jogger attack from behind a tree.

Hartigan explained the changing story by recounting how he confronted Wise with new information gleaned from the others.

Wise's explanation was much different. He said he was denied food and left alone with Nugent, who screamed at him for an hour and slapped him.

And in Wise's version, when detectives drove him back to the rape scene, one of them "told me to put my hand in the blood and put it on my clothes."

Well before Wise finished talking to detectives, the video camera was rolling on his cohorts.

'This is my first rape'

Prosecutors Fairstein and Elizabeth Lederer had been summoned by police at 8 p.m. Thursday. After everyone decamped to the 24th Precinct, they began taping statements, starting with McCray at 1 a.m. Friday.

Fourteen hours later, Wise was the last to go before Lederer. As with the detectives, he gave conflicting accounts, and it was his second interview that sealed his fate.

"This is my first thing I did to any type of female in the street. This is my first rape," he said. "I never did this before, and this is gonna be my last time doing it."

Chronology of the attack

Wednesday, April 19