Chapter 1: What led Jeff Wallace to question Violet Ellison's credibility?
Last time on Ear Witness. We knew the reward was offered because it was all over the papers. But we didn't know who got it or if Violet Ellison got it.
She was a very credible witness. We believed her. Obviously, we believed her because we convicted him. And it was on her testimony.
When I showed up at her house, she said, I didn't get a reward. I was like, oh, well, that's funny. I was like, I have some paperwork here that says you got a reward.
We got an email that said we found these documents. They'd been misfiled. And here they are. Does that sound strange to you? Or do you have any idea how that could have happened?
The AG's office, if they said it got misfiled, then I guess it got misfiled. Human error, I guess. I don't know.
Do you think that your impression of her would have been different had you known she was being paid $5,000?
I definitely believe we would have, as a jury, talked about that. Like, how credible is this testimony she's being paid for it?
Like, I had never been in trouble a day in my life, ever, before then. I'm going to jail. I've never been in jail a day in my life, ever, ever, ever. Never had gotten in trouble, anything.
I'm sitting on the couch in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Birmingham. It's warm outside. The door is open to let in a breeze. I'm talking with Marika Wilson, who's telling me and my producer Mara about a defining experience of her life, being charged with attempted murder in 1997 when she was 20 years old, a crime she did not commit.
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Chapter 2: How did Beth Shelburne uncover a troubling pattern in Violet Ellison's testimony?
But she, um...
The woman Marika is referring to is the witness who testified against her, a neighbor of the victim, who said she'd seen the crime unfold from her living room window at 2 a.m. She told the jury she saw Marika and two other people break down the victim's door and assault him. The woman's name? Violet Ellison. So do you remember Violet Ellison?
I remember her getting up there saying she's seeing me through the window.
She was wrong. She was wrong. Yes, ma'am. It wasn't me. They discredited her at my trial. They made her look horrible. I remember her like she just got up there and pointed at me.
Marika's attorneys showed the jury that Violet Ellison's view from her living room window was blocked by a tree. There was no possible way she could have seen Marika or anyone else on her neighbor's porch.
So she was a big part of the case against you?
Mm-hmm. And she lied under oath. Literally, literally lied under oath.
Violet Ellison testified against Marika less than four months after she served as the star witness against Taforist Johnson. Their trials happened in the same year, in the same courthouse, prosecuted by the same DA's office. In both cases, Violet Ellison knew the victim, spoke to detectives, and became a lead witness.
Mara and I find ourselves in Marika Wilson's living room a few weeks after I made a lucky discovery in Alabama's database of online court records. One afternoon, I'm sitting in my office poking around in the database. It's a clunky website with all these different drop-down menus.
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Chapter 3: What was Marika Wilson's experience with wrongful conviction?
And then there was the third case. It involved a local pastor named Bishop James Johnson, who was accused of inappropriately touching and kissing three teenaged girls at his church-run school in 1993. Violet Ellison was a school employee who testified about the alleged abuse, but Bishop Johnson maintained he was falsely accused and that Violet Ellison was lying.
The charges against him were eventually dropped by the state. We talked to Bishop Johnson, who's now in his late 80s, at his house in a suburb of Birmingham. And he told us Violet Ellison made up the accusations in an effort to get rid of him because she wanted to run the school.
Yes, she was part of my church. She was a liar.
We talked to one other school employee who corroborated what Bishop Johnson told us, that Violet Ellison made up the allegations. I tried to find some of the alleged victims in this case, but I wasn't able to track them down. Bishop Johnson said he's forgiven Violet Ellison.
That's over. Thank God it's over. I have nothing in my heart again.
But, he said, she is not a trustworthy person.
I don't trust her. She's not a person I trust.
George Holloway is the next person on our list of people that Violet Ellison testified against. What we know from court records is this. Between 2008 and 2016, George Holloway was charged in several domestic violence incidents involving his girlfriend.
But unlike Marika Wilson and Bishop James Johnson, George Holloway pleaded guilty to his charges, which included violating a protective order twice. He was sentenced to three years in prison. The documents don't show why Violet Ellison was a witness against George Holloway. So Mara and I get in the car and drive around for hours.
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Chapter 4: How did Violet Ellison's testimony impact Marika Wilson's trial?
Red pleaded guilty in that case and got probation. Is Red getting preferential treatment because his mother has been a witness for the state in multiple cases? I find no documentation to support this. But then again, are deals like that ever spelled out in court records?
Welcome to the A Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Alma Mater Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying.
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
While looking through Red's files, I notice an especially violent assault and battery from 1994. He was sentenced to supervised probation. I was able to dig up a report of the incident in which police say Red spits on a woman, grabs her by the neck and hair, and pulls her around a room. A child is listed as a witness.
The victim's name is Anita Davis, and her most likely addresses are all in central Georgia. So Mara and I get back in the car and make the four-hour drive to try to find her. Hi. We're looking for Anita Davis. She passed away. Oh, I'm so sorry. Are you her daughter? Uh-huh. My name is Beth. This is Mara. We are writers, and we're working on a story about a wrongful conviction.
And we're reaching out to people that may know the lead witness. Her name is Violet Ellison. Oh, I know who you are. That's my grandma. Oh, okay. So Violet Ellison is your grandmother. Okay. Unexpectedly, we find ourselves talking to Violet Ellison's granddaughter. Thais Davis is in her 50s but doesn't look a day over 40.
When I mention her grandmother, Violet Ellison, Thais comes out from behind the screen door. She keeps her earbuds in while we stand on the porch and talk. What kind of grandmother was she? Was she involved in your life?
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Chapter 5: What is the connection between Violet Ellison and other criminal cases?
Oh, okay. Is he here? Yeah. Do you think he would talk to us? Would it be possible for us to come see him, too? Yeah. Violet Ellison's grandson, Tony, lives about 10 minutes away from his sister, Thais. We get to his house, and the front yard is filled with cars and various states of repair. He's waiting for us on the porch. Hello. Hi, how are you? Are you Tony?
Yes.
After he finishes extracting an old bird's nest from the rafters, Tony talks to us for 40 minutes.
I can tell you one thing about my grandma, she is a, that's a true scam artist. That's a true, I hate to say it, I know that's my grandma, but that's a true scam artist. Any way she can get a dollar, I'm telling you, she ain't that type that's just going to help somebody just to help them. It got to have money, it got to have money involved. Wow.
It just had to, it got to have, if it ain't got money involved,
Tony says his grandmother tried to scam him out of $500 by claiming that he owed her for a loan. Mara tells Tony about how the state presented Violet Ellison to Forrest Johnson's trial and that she says she didn't know about the reward when she testified. He doesn't believe that.
Get in your bed and try to act like she's concerned about stuff, but really she ain't concerned. She's just trying to get in your bed and trying to see a way she can get some money or a reward for this. I don't find her believable at all. She lie too much. She's like my dad that lie too much. Like, she'll lie about anything and get away with anything.
He goes on to describe the relationship Violet Ellison has with her son, Red, who is also Tony's father.
They like Bonnie and Clyde. Tony then tells us the story about the assault and battery case that led us here, filling in details that are missing from the court files.
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