Eddie Joe Lloyd: False Confession, DNA Exoneration, and Lawsuit

Eddie Joe Lloyd was a Detroit man with bipolar affective disorder who spent 17 years in prison for the 1984 rape and murder of 16-year-old Michelle Jackson, a crime he did not commit. Detroit police extracted a false confession from him while he was a psychiatric patient, feeding him crime-scene details to make it sound credible. DNA testing arranged by the Innocence Project cleared him in 2002. He died two years after his release from medical problems that developed in prison, and the lawsuit his estate pursued forced the Detroit Police Department to begin recording homicide interrogations.¹²

How Police Got a Confession From a Psychiatric Patient

Michelle Jackson disappeared on January 25, 1984, while walking to school in Detroit. Her body was found the next day in an abandoned building. She had been raped and strangled with a pair of long johns, and a broken glass bottle was recovered at the scene.³

At that time, Lloyd was a patient at the Detroit Psychiatric Institute, diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder and showing symptoms of grandiosity and disordered thinking. He wrote 15 to 17 letters to Detroit police from the hospital, offering theories on how to solve local murders, including Jackson’s. Police initially dismissed the letters. Eventually Detective Thomas DeGalan went to the psychiatric facility to interview him.¹⁴

DeGalan met with Lloyd four times inside the psychiatric institute. None of those interviews were recorded. DeGalan told Lloyd that confessing and being arrested would help police “smoke out” the real killer, and Lloyd, who genuinely wanted to help, agreed. To make the story credible, DeGalan supplied him with facts only the killer and police would know: where the body had been left, the type of jeans the victim was wearing, and what her earrings looked like.²⁴

One of Lloyd’s earlier letters betrayed his lack of independent knowledge: he wrote that a bottle had been found in the victim’s vagina, when in fact it had been found in her rectum.⁴ On October 26, 1984, Sergeant William Rice was brought in to witness a taped confession. DeGalan also wrote out a statement for Lloyd to sign. Blood tests from the crime scene were inconclusive, but the confession became the prosecution’s case.

A Trial the Defense Barely Contested

Lloyd’s 1985 trial in Wayne County Circuit Court, before Judge Leonard Townsend, was undone by his own lawyers as much as by the state. His first court-appointed attorney was paid a flat $150 for all investigative work and passed $50 of it to a private investigator who turned out to be a law student with a criminal record. That investigator never met Lloyd and did no meaningful work on the case.¹

When that attorney fell ill on the day of trial, a replacement was appointed eight days out. The new lawyer never consulted with the previous counsel and never challenged how Lloyd’s confession had been obtained. He did not cross-examine the detective who had run the interrogation, called no witnesses, and closed in about five minutes. No psychiatric expert was called to speak to the reliability of a confession from a hospitalized mental patient, and no forensic testing was requested on the blood, hair, or fingernail scrapings recovered from the scene. Lloyd’s lawyer wanted to run an insanity defense; Lloyd refused, insisting he was innocent.²¹

The jury convicted Lloyd of first-degree felony murder on May 2, 1985, after less than an hour of deliberation.⁵ At sentencing, Judge Townsend told Lloyd that the “only justifiable sentence” would be “termination by extreme constriction,” meaning hanging, but that state law required him to impose life without parole. Lloyd told the court, “I did not kill MJ. I never killed anybody in my life and I wouldn’t.”²

DNA Testing and Release

In 1995, eleven years into his sentence, Lloyd wrote to the Innocence Project at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and asked for DNA testing. Finding the evidence took years, with cooperation from the Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.²

When testing was done, semen on the long johns used to strangle Jackson, biological material on the broken bottle and a piece of paper stuck to it, and samples from her autopsy all pointed to the same unknown male. Lloyd was excluded across every sample. The Michigan State Crime Lab independently confirmed the result. On August 26, 2002, a judge overturned his conviction and he walked out of prison after 17 years and four months.²³

Two Years of Freedom

Lloyd died on September 22, 2004, from medical complications that developed during his years in prison. He had been free for just over two years.¹

The Lawsuit and the Recording Requirement

On March 11, 2004, months before he died, Lloyd filed a federal civil rights suit, Lloyd v. Detroit City, against the City of Detroit, Wayne County, the Detroit Psychiatric Institute, and more than a dozen individual defendants including former Police Chief William Hart, former Mayor Coleman Young, Detective DeGalan, and Sergeant Rice. The complaint alleged, under Section 1983, that police had coerced a false confession, used it to secure a wrongful conviction, and concealed evidence, and that the psychiatric institute had cooperated in prolonging his hospitalization to help extract the confession.⁶

After his death, his estate carried the case forward. It settled in stages during 2006 for a total of $4,075,000, with the City of Detroit paying $3,250,000, the State of Michigan $600,000, and Wayne County $225,000. About $2.6 million went to Lloyd’s heirs, including his daughter, sister, and brother; the rest covered fees and expenses.⁴

The settlement’s most durable piece was not the money. Negotiated by attorney Barry C. Scheck for Lloyd’s family, the agreement required the Detroit Police Department to begin electronic video and audio recording of all interrogations in homicide cases and in any case carrying a possible sentence of life without parole. The department had to file bi-monthly progress reports to Lloyd’s estate on how the rollout was going.⁶⁷ The reform targeted the exact hole that had swallowed Lloyd: because none of DeGalan’s interviews at the psychiatric institute had been recorded, no jury or court ever saw crime-scene facts being fed to a mentally ill man who wanted to help.

Who Actually Killed Michelle Jackson

For years, the DNA profile from the crime scene matched no one in the FBI’s database.³⁸⁹ The real killer had been free the entire time Lloyd was in prison.

What Happened to the Judge and the Sergeant

Judge Leonard Townsend served 24 years on the Wayne County Circuit Court bench. He was known for sentencing above state guidelines and for openly defying the Michigan Court of Appeals on his sentencing practices, and attorneys accused him of demeaning defendants from the bench. Asked about his hanging remark in the Lloyd case after the exoneration, Townsend expressed no regret.¹⁰

Sergeant William Rice, who had witnessed Lloyd’s taped confession, went on to lead the Detroit Police Department’s Homicide Division. In 2012 he was charged with 18 counts including operating a criminal enterprise, drug dealing, and mortgage fraud.¹¹¹²¹³

1
ACLU. Case Profiles
2
Innocence Project. Eddie Joe Lloyd
3
Los Angeles Times. DNA Clears Michigan Man Convicted of Murder
4
Prison Legal News. City of Detroit Must Record Suspect Confessions; $4 Million Wrongful Incarceration Award
5
Forejustice. Eddie Joe Lloyd
6
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. Lloyd v. Detroit City
7
Death Penalty Information Center. Wrongful Convictions Prompt More Jurisdictions to Videotape Interrogations
8
Fox 2 Detroit. Family of Woman Murdered, Raped in 1984 Hear Man’s Confession
9
ClickOnDetroit. Man Charged in 1984 Rape, Murder of 16-Year-Old Michigan Girl
10
Metro Times. Judging the Judge
11
MLive. Ex-Detroit Police Homicide Leader Faces Preliminary Hearing
12
CBS News Detroit. Former Detroit Detective Gets 2-20 Years in Criminal Case
13
Deadline Detroit. Ex-Big Time Detroit Homicide Cop Gets 2-20 Years