Proving Innocence
Knight in 2017. Photo courtesy the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
Edward Knight sat still and listened.
Behind him, in an eighth-floor courtroom at Suffolk Superior Court on a recent winter morning, his lawyer Ira Gant told a judge why Knight should be granted a new trial for a stabbing murder he was convicted of two decades ago.
There was a pattern of not disclosing all documents and information to Knight’s trial lawyer, Gant said. Aside for a knife Knight owned, there was no incriminating evidence at the 1998 trial when his former girlfriend testified he did it. There’s a recently discovered police report that suggests a third party threatened to kill the victim before he was found dead and handwritten notes suggesting multiple women had access to the victim's apartment, Gant said. There’s the recent DNA testing of more than 30 items, including one of the victim’s fingernails which had the DNA of a woman underneath it. None of it contained Knight’s DNA. And there is a pathologist's opinion on when the victim died and how Knight could not have killed the victim because he was out of town.
With his thin silvering hair slicked back, Knight looked at the ground through his blue eyes for a moment then peered at the judge, and then at Gant.
“How could this information not have been a real factor in
the jury’s deliberation?” Gant said.
“Justice was not done here.”
Since Knight was arrested in 1996 and convicted two years
later of murdering a 61-year-old North End man, he has
maintained his innocence and embarked on a quest to
prove he was wrongfully convicted. In that time, he halted
a heroin addiction, got married and lost a
pair of appeals – one in the state’s highest court in 2002
and another in federal appeals court in 2006.
But now hope has appeared once more for the 47-year-old:
A judge has been considering his motion for a new trial since
January, when arguments for the motion concluded. Even if
granted a new trial, though, prosecutors can appeal.
“I just expect the worst because I was found guilty for a crime I did not do,” Knight wrote in a March 15 letter to a reporter from a Maryland prison, where he was transferred in February. “With 23 years in prison now, it’s hard to trust in the system because it is rotten to the core.”
Knight would join a number of individuals who have been a step closer to exoneration in Massachusetts if the judge gives him a new trial. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 25 people have been exonerated of murder in Massachusetts and more than 900 across the country in the last 30 years.
“Post conviction law is very, very specialized and frankly, the judicial system is inclined to deny these petitions unless somebody forces them to stop and pay attention,” said Radha Natarajan, executive director of the New England Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization that works to identify and exonerate the wrongfully convicted. “The more you give resources and attorneys and ... partner innocent people with people who know what they are doing in court, you are going to see more exonerations.”
The Margaret Street apartment where the murder happened. Photo by Alejandro Serrano.
The murder
Pasquale “Jazzbow” Candelino was face down, blood from his punctured neck splattered on two walls and pooled on part of the floor, when authorities found him on a summer afternoon in 1996.
Boston police and EMS officials responded to a call from Candelino’s landlord who discovered Candelino in his second-floor apartment on Margaret Street. They said Candelino was unresponsive and declared him dead at the scene.
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The murder puzzled Candelino’s family and friends. His then 42-year-old nephew, Anthony, told The Boston Herald his uncle – who had diabetes and walked with a cane – was a private individual who preferred guests to call before swinging by his apartment.
The relationship, however, between Candelino and Knight
was not so virtuous: Knight was among people who sold
Candelino stolen goods, which he then resold.
Candelino’s customers visited his apartment to browse
and buy the merchandise he “hustled,” according to a
police report from an interview with one of Candelino’s
friends. Candelino’s apartment was cluttered with rings,
watches and random merchandise when he was found
slaughtered, according to police reports, court documents
and a crime scene video.
In the neighborhood though, he was known as a calm person, according to Gerard Recupero, a 59-year-old who grew up in the area and got to know the Candelino family when he worked at a now-closed butcher shop and at a barroom, both nearby Candelino’s apartment on Margaret Street.
“He was a good, good egg. Never bothered, never had trouble,” he said recently standing in front of the apartment building.
Video produced using crime scene footage.
The art of shoplifting
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It was a Monday afternoon in December 1996, and Knight was doing what he usually did when he needed cash: shoplifting.
The habit started when Knight was about 15 years old and left his family on Cape Cod to move in with an aunt in South Boston. He says he was always the “black sheep” of his family of two older sisters and four younger step brothers, and didn’t get along with his mother. His parents divorced when he was 2.
“Being poor, I had to shoplift for simple things like school clothes,” he wrote in a letter to a reporter dated April 7.
By 17 years old, Knight fell in love with his first girlfriend and got an apartment with her. The seemingly tranquil life didn’t last long: Someone threw a drinking glass at his knee when he was 18, lacerating it to the bone. After two surgeries, he couldn’t work. So he started selling drugs.
Until his reality buckled again.
Knight was sitting in a car with his best friend one day when he was shot. Knight’s friend died next to him. “I was wounded, put on pain meds, and found escape in them,” he wrote. “Within six months, I was into heroin.”
Soon after, in the early 1990s, Knight became an expert high-merchandise shoplifter to keep up his drug use. “I could write a book on the art of shoplifting,” he said in a letter.
It was stolen goods that connected Knight at the time with Candelino. Knight would meet Candelino in the North End and sell him stolen items.
But the artistic touch of shoplifting slipped from Knight’s hands on a December afternoon in 1996 at the Chestnut Hill Mall in Newton.
Three days after police issued an arrest warrant for Knight for the murder of Candelino, an off-duty police officer recognized him and secretly called for back-up. When a Newton police cruiser arrived, Knight darted across the mall’s parking lot and toward Route 9.
Police caught Knight behind an apartment complex and booked him that night.
Six months before the arrest, and weeks after Candelino was found dead, Knight’s name was mentioned to Boston homicide detectives who were trying to identify people in Candelino’s social circle – including those he conducted business with.
Detectives received an anonymous letter in August 1996 sent from the Billerica House of Correction. The letter asserted Knight killed “the old man” in the North End and “his girlfriend may have had some involvement.”
Detectives determined the letter was written by a previous cellmate of Knight’s, John Murphy. Murphy told investigators that Knight confessed to the murder while they were cellmates, and that Knight’s girlfriend and another women were present, according to a police report.
Knight, citing his record of shoplifting, drug offenses and larcenies, acknowledges he was in and out of jail – but never for anything violent.
“I am not happy nor proud of it,” he writes of his record. But “nothing major and violent like the Suffolk County DA’s office made me out to be.”
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There are a few things Charles Horsley, then the sergeant detective leading the investigation, remembers about the case now: “I remember the names. I remember the scene,” he said during a brief interview in the kitchen of his Dorchester home.
Horsley remembers that Knight was convicted for the murder and that the state’s Supreme Judicial Court upheld the conviction a few years after it was reached.
“I had too many cases back in the day,” he said, adding he retired from the Boston Police Department 12 years ago and the 1990s were among the busiest years for homicide detectives. “I don’t want to speak on something I haven’t reviewed or seen in 20 years.”
Among the people involved in the case, Horsley also remembered Knight’s girlfriend at the time.
A romance made in prison
In the six months after Candelino was murdered, Knight and his girlfriend shared a drug-teemed romance.
Knight's girlfriend met him roughly a year after she graduated from Revere High School, where she grew up living with her parents. She met Knight while visiting someone at the Billerica House of Correction, who was an inmate there for a separate offense, in the spring of 1996.
After he was released, they started dating and eventually shot heroin together nearly every day, she later testified at Knight’s trial. When they didn’t have money for drugs, they stole. They continued this lifestyle through the summer and fall of 1996, she testified, until Knight was arrested in December.
Weeks later, after she learned of a warrant for her arrest, she surrendered.
“That D.A. woman looks like she wants my throat!” she wrote in a letter to Knight, dotting the “i” in “Eddie” with a heart. “It’s almost like she knows that we’re innocent and she just wants to bust balls!”
That claim of innocence was fleeting, though.
The girlfriend, then 20 years old, testified at Knight’s trial more than a year later that he suggested robbing Candelino on Wednesday, June 19, because they needed money for their morning dose of drugs – or else they would be “really, really sick” from apparent heroin withdrawal.
The pair developed a plot, she said: She would ask Candelino to use his bathroom or buy pills to get into his apartment, then sneak down a flight of stairs and let Knight in, who would rob Candelino, she testified. But the plot went awry.
Once Knight was in the apartment, she testified she heard him push Candelino into a bedroom and a struggle ensued. She said she heard Candelino ask Knight what he was doing and to stop.
“I just was in the kitchen. I didn’t do anything,” she testified, according to a transcript of the trial.
After the minutes-long struggle, silence filled the apartment, she testified. When she asked Knight if he killed Candelino, she testified he said yes.
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The next day, they left the state and went to Florida with friends, she testified. When they returned, she said she and Knight went to the Boston Public Library and looked up newspaper reports of the murder. The reports said Candelino was killed and found on Saturday, so Knight told her there was no reason to worry about the murder because the dates were wrong and they were in Florida then, she testified.
Knight’s lawyers have challenged this part of her testimony: If Candelino was killed on Wednesday – instead of within 48 hours of when his body was found on Saturday – the trip to Florida appears as a getaway, rather than the alibi it was first presented as.
The judge at Knight’s most recent hearing did not let a pathologist testify his opinion about Candelino’s time of death because Knight’s trial attorney didn’t call such an expert during trial.
Through a lawyer who represents her, Knight's former girlfriend declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. She now lives in a suburb of Boston with her husband and young children, according to state records and social media profiles.
When she negotiated a plea bargain with investigators, the Commonwealth agreed to recommend an 18-month sentence – leaving her a free woman after Knight’s trial.
“The way that I understand this case, they were weighing the credibility of an incentivized witness versus the reliability of scientific evidence that would have made it impossible for Eddie Knight to commit this crime,” said Natarajan of the New England Innocence Project, which is currently second counsel for Knight.
As he was led out of the courtroom that day, Knight shouted and cursed after the guilty verdict was delivered. “I don’t know if you read up on my trial, but when they found me guilty, I flipped out at court and had to be restrained,” he recounts now. All these years later, he’s still thinking about that moment. “I am innocent and wanted the world to hear of my innocence and how wrong the DA and judge was!”
A timeline of events
“I am very lucky to have her”
In his jail cell, Knight has learned through the years what helps keep his mental health intact. He reads allegorical novels (like Edward Rutherfurd’s “London,” which he recently finished) and newspapers, listens to NPR, meditates, tries to run in the two hours every day he gets outside of his cell and writes in a journal.
“I like taking care of my body,” he wrote in the April letter.
Throughout two decades, Knight earned a barber’s license and fell in love.
In 2008, he was having issues with his mail and wrote to the post office. A woman helped him sort it out so he sent her a thank you note, which started a correspondence that lasted four years, at which point the two met in person.
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“From that day we have been together solid,” Knight wrote in a letter, adding a smiley face next to the word solid.
In May 2013, Knight married Ran-Dell Knight, who is now 56 years old and retired, living in her Lunenburg home with a dog and cat. Her 26-year-old daughter works in real estate and her 23-year-old son is expected to graduate college this spring.
“I am very lucky to have her,” Knight wrote. “But I feel the time and stress of waiting for me to come home has worn her down.”
Hope emerged again for Knight, who through two failed appeals has maintained his innocence. His motion for a new trial, with new evidence and different arguments, felt strong.
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But then his life got complicated. Again.
Department of Correction officials shackled Knight in early February – weeks after he was in court – and drove him from a prison in Walpole to a facility in Baltimore, where he was processed before being taken to a maximum security prison in northwestern Maryland.
He’s among seven Massachusetts inmates who have been transferred out of state this year as of mid-February, according to numbers obtained through a public records request. Last year, there were 23 transfers.
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Kate Piper, of Prisoners' Legal Services of Massachusetts, said there may have been an uptick in the amount of inmates taken out of state in 2018 because of a sweep of persons involved in a big fight. It may not necessarily be a trend. Knight said officials told him three weeks after the fight that if he didn’t cooperate with them, he would be transferred out of the state. But when he was transferred, he said he was not told why.
“Being sent out here to Maryland is worse because I am so far from home,” he said in a letter. “Just having to start over and not knowing anyone is stressful.”
For now, he waits
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If anything, Knight has apparent momentum on his side. There’s a Lowell man, Victor Rosario, who spent three decades in prison for a fatal fire before he was exonerated in 2017. There’s another man, Darrell Jones, who was granted a new trial in 2017 for a 1985 slaying in Brockton. And there’s another man, Angel Echavarría, whose murder conviction was overturned a few years ago after 21 years behind bars.
It hasn’t always been like this. Before DNA testing was common, Natarajan said people didn’t believe wrongful convictions could happen.
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“Now we are able to apply the lessons learned to non-DNA cases … and see those red flags,” she said.
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In his Somerville office on a recent afternoon, Knight’s lawyer, Gant, had yet to hear from Knight after he was transferred to Maryland.
“The highs are very high and the lows are very low,” Gant said, reflecting on cases such as Knight’s.
When an innocent person is vindicated and reclaims their freedom, it’s exhilarating to be a part of the experience. “But when you fail, it’s devastating,” he said. “Especially when you fail in the face of what seems like legitimate proof of a person’s innocence.”
Knight knows his freedom isn’t as close as it feels. In his Maryland cell, he clutches to the hope that has appeared, and dreams he can soon inhabit the life he started to build from inside of prison. The newspapers he subscribes to and the novels he enjoys – Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones – help him travel in his mind. Dreams of getting an RV and driving across “this great country that we live in,” before settling down, renewing his barber’s license and working, help keep him sane.
“Having my freedom will be heaven and easy to do,” he writes.
But for now, he waits for the judge to make a decision, which could be tomorrow or it could be in months.