CRIME

Wisconsin Innocence Project wins appeal for man caught in serial killer Walter Ellis' wake

Bruce Vielmetti
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Before DNA tied serial killer Walter Ellis to a series of rape-murders around Milwaukee, a jury wrongly convicted Chaunte Ott of one of those crimes, based on false testimony from witnesses pressured by detectives.

Sam Hadaway

Though Ott was released in 2009 and compensated after Ellis was tied to multiple crimes, one of the witnesses against him remained caught in the wake of the scandal —until Tuesday.

The Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered that Sammy Hadaway's conviction related to the 1995 death of Jessica Payne be vacated.

"We're ecstatic. We've been celebrating," said Hadaway's attorney, Steven Wright of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. "We talked to Sam. He's very happy and enthusiastic for this opportunity to clear his name."

Hadaway, who is cognitively and physically disabled, was 17 when detectives interrogated him for days after another man said he had driven Ott, Hadaway and Payne to an abandoned building.

Hadaway agreed to plead guilty to armed robbery and testified against Ott. He served five years in prison.

Last fall, the Wisconsin Innocence Project asked Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Joseph Donald to vacate Hadaway's conviction based on Ellis killing Payne, a fact not known when Hadaway pleaded guilty. 

RELATED:Innocence Project pushes to exonerate man caught up in serial killer's wake

Though he completed his sentence years ago, Hadaway still wants his conviction removed, Wright said, for employment purposes and to bolster his assertions he never helped kill Payne, a high school junior.

But prosecutors opposed the move because they still think Ott is guilty. The Court of Appeals had granted him a new trial after Ellis was tied to the crimes, but the district attorney decided the evidence was too old. They never charged Ellis for killing Payne murder.

Ott did get money from the state claims board, and from a $6.5 million settlement of his suit against the City of Milwaukee claiming officers violated his civil rights.

Prosecutors point out that all of Ellis' known victims were black women who died from strangulation, whereas Payne was white and her throat had been slit. The fact his DNA was found on Payne didn't mean he killed her, prosecutors say.

Walter E. Ellis

In 2011, Ellis pleaded no contest to charges that he killed seven women in Milwaukee over 21 years. He died in prison in 2013.

The District 1 Court of Appeals, in a decision written by Judge Timothy Dugan, agreed that the original trial judge would not have accepted Hadaway's guilty plea if he had known all the facts now at hand — including that Ellis' DNA was found on Payne, who was killed in generally the same manner and general area of Ellis' other victims, and how badly detectives had violated protocols in extracting Hadaway's confession, which he later recanted.

Reviewing Hadaway's petition, Donald found that the state's decision to dismiss the original case against Ott and not retry him, and not charge Ellis, did not "conclusively prove" who killed Payne, and therefore it wasn't really new facts. 

That was too high a standard of proof, the Court of Appeals ruled. Hadaway had shown by clear and convincing evidence that Ellis killed Payne, a fact that if known at the time would have prevented a judge from accepting Hadaway's guilty plea to a crime related to helping Ott commit the murder.