Edward Ates: Wrongful Conviction, Informant Recantation, and Parole

Edward Ates is a Texas man whose wrongful conviction for the 1993 murder of Elnora Griffin cost him 20 years in prison before he was paroled in September 2018. His case is treated as a wrongful conviction because the state produced no physical evidence tying him to the crime scene, leaned on a jailhouse informant who later swore he had been coerced into testifying, and secured its verdict only after a first jury deadlocked. The Innocence Project of Texas has continued working to clear his name.¹

The Crime and How Ates Became a Suspect

On July 23, 1993, Elnora Griffin, 47, was found dead in her trailer home in New Chapel Hill, Texas. She had been stabbed and her throat cut so deeply that investigators described the wound as a near-beheading. She was found naked and facedown. Her purse and keys were gone.²

Griffin lived next door to Ates’s grandmother. Ates, then a 25-year-old handyman, became the focus of the investigation after Griffin’s friend Cubia Jackson told a deputy that Griffin had said during a phone call on the night of the murder that she was “sitting here talking to Edward.” That secondhand statement was the thread investigators pulled on.³

Detective Dale Hukill interrogated Ates, checked him for scratches and blood, and found none. Ates denied being inside the trailer. He told police he had been at his girlfriend Monica Bush’s apartment, but Bush contradicted parts of his account. Ates later said he lied about the small details because he had taken his grandmother’s car without permission and feared his mother’s reaction. That inconsistency became a centerpiece of the state’s case. He was arrested on August 26, 1993.²³

What the State Actually Had

Ates’s first trial, in July 1996, ended in a mistrial when the jury deadlocked eight to four in favor of conviction. The presiding judge, Louie Gohmert, revoked Ates’s bond and ordered him held for retrial.¹

The retrial began in August 1998. Hundreds of pieces of physical evidence had been collected from Griffin’s trailer, but prosecutors presented no DNA, no fingerprints, no hair, no blood, and no semen linking Ates to the scene. No murder weapon was recovered. No motive was established, though prosecutors suggested robbery or a rejected sexual advance.³⁴

What the state offered instead was a stack of circumstantial pieces:

A scraping from the sole of Ates’s shoe that Detective Hukill claimed appeared to be human fecal matter matching feces smeared throughout the trailer. An FBI expert who later analyzed the scraping could only confirm it was “protein of human origin.” Despite that limit, Assistant District Attorney David Dobbs called the substance “human feces” six times during closing arguments.
A large handprint on a towel covering a door window, which prosecutors invited jurors to associate with Ates, who stood six feet six inches tall. Investigators never measured the handprint to see whether it actually matched him.
Griffin’s car seat, found pushed all the way back, consistent with a tall driver, along with witness accounts placing the car at the apartment complex where Ates had gone that night.
Jolly Rancher candy wrappers at the crime scene that matched wrappers observed in the office where Ates was interviewed.
Cubia Jackson’s account of Griffin’s phone call.
Ates’s teenage record of misdemeanor theft, introduced to suggest a criminal history.

The jury deliberated three days. For the first two, they were split ten to two in favor of conviction. On August 13, 1998, they returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Ates was sentenced to 99 years.²⁴

The Jailhouse Informant Who Later Recanted

The most significant thing the state added for the retrial was Kenneth Snow, a fellow jail inmate. Snow testified that Ates had confessed to the murder and paid him $1,000 to memorize a script implicating another man, Frances Johnson. A handwriting expert confirmed the document Snow produced was in Ates’s handwriting. Ates said the document was actually a set of personal notes he had prepared for his own defense attorneys about a confession he overheard from Johnson, and that Snow had taken the notes from his cell.⁴²

Snow swore at trial that no one had promised him anything for his testimony. After the trial, he pleaded guilty to two armed robberies and received ten years’ probation despite what the Innocence Project of Texas described as an extensive criminal record.³

Snow later signed an affidavit recanting his testimony. He said prosecutor Dobbs had coerced him into testifying by promising him probation on his pending robbery charges and threatening to withhold that support if he refused. According to the affidavit, Dobbs told him: “They told me that I would never box again unless I helped them convict Ates.” Snow also said in the affidavit that he had overheard Frances Johnson admit to attacking Griffin.²

In 2010, attorneys Randy and Josh Schaffer filed a writ of habeas corpus arguing the state had withheld a favorable deal for Snow in violation of the constitutional duty to disclose such agreements. Tyler judge Kerry Russell denied the writ, finding “no credible evidence that the State had any agreement, unwritten or otherwise” with Snow.¹

Suspects the Investigation Left Alone

Griffin had been dating at least three men, and only Ates was pursued as a suspect. Leonard Moseley, a man she had been romantically involved with, could not be excluded by blood type as a possible source of a semen stain found at the scene, but he was never checked for scratches or blood the way Ates had been. Frances Johnson, the man Snow said he heard confess, was never interviewed. A third man Griffin was dating was likewise never contacted.²

Jury selection has also drawn scrutiny. Texas Monthly reported that Dobbs used peremptory strikes to remove six Black jurors from the pool in a city where roughly one in four residents were Black.²

Dobbs himself was later a subject of broader controversy. In 2000, the Houston Chronicle published an investigative article, “Justice Under Fire,” alleging that the Smith County District Attorney’s office, and Dobbs by name, took a “win-at-all-costs” approach that included withholding exculpatory evidence, planting evidence, and encouraging perjury. Dobbs and other prosecutors sued for libel. A Texas appeals court allowed the case to proceed, finding genuine factual disputes about whether the article was defamatory. That ruling did not resolve whether the underlying allegations were true.⁵

How the Case Reopened

On direct appeal, the Texas Court of Appeals in Tyler affirmed the conviction on January 31, 2000, ruling that a rational jury could have found the essential elements of murder beyond a reasonable doubt.⁴ Ates filed multiple motions for post-conviction DNA testing under Texas law but got no response from the courts.²

The case sat dormant until January 2016, when Michigan-based podcaster Bob Ruff began investigating it on his true-crime show Truth and Justice. His listeners, calling themselves the “Truth and Justice Army,” transcribed all 27 volumes of trial transcripts, researched case law, analyzed 1993 crime scene reports, and picked apart the state’s reliance on Snow. Their work identified the “script” Snow described as the personal notes Ates had prepared for his defense lawyers and highlighted the gap between the FBI’s limited forensic finding and the way Dobbs described it to jurors.⁶

Ruff brought the case to the Innocence Project of Texas, which took it on. Listeners raised $7,000 to fund DNA testing of crime scene evidence.²

Parole Is Not Exoneration

Ates was denied parole in 2012 and 2016, in part because he refused to admit guilt. With attorney Allison Clayton and parole attorney Roger Nichols preparing his third hearing, and with support from Ruff, his family, and the advocacy campaign around the podcast, he was granted parole and released from the Walls Unit in Huntsville on September 5, 2018, after 20 years.¹

Parole is not exoneration. Ates’s conviction remains on his record, and he was released under parole restrictions, including an ankle monitor. As of his release, the Innocence Project of Texas was pursuing two legal avenues to clear his name: a joint motion, filed in December 2017 with the cooperation of Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham, for DNA testing of 20 items from the crime scene, and a potential writ of habeas corpus under Texas’s 2013 “junk science” statute challenging the forensic claims used at trial.¹ The Smith County District Attorney’s Office separately agreed to conduct DNA testing on stored evidence.⁷ As of the most recent reporting available, the Innocence Project of Texas was continuing its work toward a formal declaration of actual innocence.⁸

1
Texas Monthly. Ed Ates Paroled Still Wants Name Back
2
Texas Monthly. Truth Justice Podcast Army Free Ed Ates
3
Innocence Project of Texas. Ed Ates
4
FindLaw. Ates v. State, No. 12-98-00282-CR
5
FindLaw. The Hearst Corporation v. Skeen
6
Texas Monthly. Truth Justice Podcast Army Free Ed Ates
7
KETK. Tyler Woman Tells Smith County Commissioners There Needs to Be Criminal Justice Reform
8
KERA News. Exoneration Doesn’t Pay Back Lost Time but It Helps