Shotgun Justice

February 15th, 2001. A seasoned convict is set free after 28 years. Michael Pardue embraces his wife Becky who he married while in prison. This was no ordinary release. The man, with the help of his wife and his attorneys, won an unprecedented legal battle against the state of Alabama. They managed to overturn multiple convictions against him, including being freed for murder. But the debate still rages.. was he guilty of the murder he confessed to three decades earlier or was he wrongly convicted? You decide this mystery for yourself.

It began May 22, 1973 in Mobile Alabama. Mobile is an old shipping port known to be rough around the edges. Even so at the time, murders were rare. At around 2:00 AM at the waterfront, police responded to an emergency call at a gas station. A customer had found the corpse of 20 year old Ronald Ryder. The gas station had been robbed and Ryder shot in the head at close range with a shotgun. His killer or killers had gotten away with $58 from the cash register. By sunup in the nearby town of Saraland another gas station had also been hit. The attendant there was 68 year old Will Harvey Hodges. His great nephew, Michael Lloyd, says he was a very timid, shell shocked, World War II veteran who would not have put up any kind of fight. However the robber's had been merciless. He had also been killed by a shotgun blast to the head. Given the similarities between the two crimes police were convinced they were connected. Within three days Authorities believed they had solved the crimes.

They had secured a confession from a 17 year old petty thief and check forger named Michael Purdue. On the confession tapes Pardue explained that he had spent the night joyriding in stolen cars with a 16 year old female acquaintance when they decided they needed some cash. Pardue told police that during the holdup he pointed a shotgun at the attendant. Everything was going according to plan until the man came at him with a crowbar. He says when that happened he used the shotgun to block the crowbar and it accidentally went off. While the teenager didn't take full responsibility for the first murder, he admitted he wasn't provoked during the second one. Michael Pardue signed his name to a written confession. What could be more persuasive, yet he now insists it was all a big lie. The truth he says was that all he did that night was steal tires and joyride in hot cars. He says that when the police mentioned murder, he figured he could distract them by playing along.

In other words he was thinking that if he played along with the murder scenario, they would forget about the tires. Flawed thinking perhaps but since he knew that he hadn't killed anyone he figured that would be proven in court. In any event that is his explanation. It was no mystery why the police considered him a good suspect. At 17 years old, Purdue was well known as a wild insolent teen sitting on the edge of disaster. The year before the murders Michael's life had spiraled out of control. His parents decided to call it quits after a long marriage gone bad. His father, according to Michael, was a very violent alcoholic and was verbally abusive. He says he was extraordinarily explosive usually in a drunken rage and usually after he got beaten his Mother did as well. On April 24th, 1972 his Father, Thomas Pardue, came by the house to pick up some belongings. His Mother asked Michael to step outside and after he did a gun went off twice in rapid succession and Michael went back inside.

His Mother was lying on the floor with blood everywhere and his father was sitting there. Michael picked up a knife and was going to stab his Father. His Mother begged him to stop but those were her last words. She died before reaching the hospital. Pardue's Father was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Michael began experimenting with drugs. Author Donald Connery says he had barely finished 9th grade and was virtually an orphan. He was sleeping in the woods and getting into trouble, and arrested for Marijuana and alcohol. The gas station murders took place one year later on May 22nd, 1973. According to Pardue, he was that night, as usual up to no good. His 1963 Chevy Impala got a flat tire so he says he abandoned it at the Plantation Motel and decided to spend the rest of the night stealing cars and tires with two friends and that was it. He claims his troubles really began the next morning when he went to visit his grandmother.

When he walked in his Grandmother asked him where his car was. In his brilliance, his words, he said somebody stole it. She said well if that's true you need to call the police. Pardue says he was now caught in his own ridiculous lie. So he did what she asked and called the Saraland police to report his Chevy missing. The car quickly turned up with two stolen tires in the trunk. The police, knowing the teenager, were immediately suspicious. The police retraced his movements and discovered he had stolen two vehicles near the two murder scenes. Police called Pardue and told him to come down to the station. He says when he walked in no one was treating him like anything other than a kid. A sergeant told him to go have a seat in the interrogation room and some people want to talk to you. He says that three guys cane in the door very quickly and slammed the door so hard that it slammed backward. He says the bigger of the men remarkably favored his Father physically as well as his tone of voice.

That man was Mobile County Sheriff's Deputy Bill Travis, now deceased. He had a reputation for solving crime and for being rough with suspects. As the conversation began the relaxed mood changed in an instant. Pardue says the three men came at him with a rapid volley of questions. He says he starts hearing words like shotgun, blood thirsty, evil, and a lot of profanity and he is trying to figure out what is going on. When the teenager hadn't returned to his house in several hours she sent Attorney David Barnett over to the police station to find out what was taking so long. Barnett says that he intended to go in and tell Pardue to shut up but Pardue never got that advice. As a 17 year old he was legally responsible for obtaining his own lawyer. Authorities did not have to accept an Attorney his family had sent. Pardue says for the next four nights they hammered, threatened, and late on the second night they got really pissed because they wanted some facts and he says he couldn't give them to him.

He says they were very violent to him by kicking, slapping and punching him. Pardue says that sometime on the fourth day he broke down and confessed to killing the two attendants. It was at this point Purdue says that the police began taping the conversation. The 17 year old seemed to be confused about the motives of the crime. Pardue confessed to killing the second man and said that after pulling the trigger he had a vision of his Father killing his Mother one year earlier. Becky Pardue says it took the cops four days of feeding information to Pardue until he finally said back to them what they were telling him. Makes one wonder why anyone would talk to the cops even as a witness. Pardue truly thought that he told them what they wanted to hear he was going home, which exactly what the cops want you to think during an interrogation which is why it is never, I repeat NEVER, a good idea to talk to the cops without an Attorney whether you are innocent or not.

There was no indication of the beating appeared on the interrogation tape because it had taken place before the conversation was taped. The teenager was confronted with something else during his interrogation. While he was in custody the remains of a 43 year old drug dealer named Theodore White was found in an overgrown ditch. Coroners could not determine the cause of death. The cops figured he must have done that murder as well and by that time he was ready to confess to killing anybody. So Pardue confessed to White's murder as well. While Pardue was being arrested, police had arrested the man who was with him the night of the murders, 21 year old John Oscar Brown. In an interview shortly before his death in April 2000, Brown claimed the Detectives treated him just as roughly as Michael Pardue. Even though he was illiterate, Brown signed a confession the officers wrote for him.

Brown says at one point during the questioning the Detective pulled a gun on him and he felt like if he didn't say what the Detective wanted him to say he was going to die. Between the two men the police believed Brown was sidekick and further believed the leader was 17 year old Michael Pardue. He first faced trial in Baldwin County for the slaying of Ronald Ryder. He recalls that his first meeting with his attorney didn't go well. He says the only thing his lawyer told him was that he was going to prison regardless of his protests if innocence. In court on August 14th 1973, the state put on the stand the 16 year old girl Pardue admitted he had been with the night of the murders. She said both Michael Pardue and 21 year old John Brown took part in the killings. Prosecutors also showed the Jury Pardue's signed confession as well as a shotgun that Pardue had led them to at his uncle's house. No ballistics tests were run to determine if it was in fact the murder weapon.

For his part, Pardue's Attorney failed to even question the integrity of the confession or the utter lack of physical evidence. There was no blood found on any of Pardue's clothes nor any gunshot residue on him. The trial was over in less than two hours. Pardue says he walked in there and an hour and a half later he was convicted in less than two hours. He was baffled. Prosecuting Attorney David Whetstone says he firmly believes the guilty verdict was correct but does concede that there were procedural problems in how the case was handled. Author Donald Connery says he believes his own attorney believed he was guilty so what was the use of trying the case. He also says Michael Pardue had no effective defense whatsoever. But the teenagers troubles were far from over. He still faced charges on two more murders in Mobile county. At that point the District Attorney approached Micheal and his Attorney with a plea offer.

He told Michael that if he wanted to see his 18th birthday you sign this paper saying you plead guilty to these two murders right now. He say he was told if he didn't sign them he would see that he would see to it that he was the first person to die in Alabama's electric chair. According to Pardue, his attorney had failed to tell him that the supreme court had invalidated all the country's death penalty laws in 1972. So Michael pled guilty to avoid going to the electric chair at a time when he couldn't have gone to the electric chair because the death penalty didn't apply. Even the District Attorney says that if that was true that it was improper. Even so for the family of one of the gas station attendant the conviction seemed fair. In the end, 17 year old Michael Pardue was given a life sentence. His accomplice, John Brown was convicted in a second trial and was also sentenced to life in prison. Pardue ended up in the Holman Correctional facility, one of the toughest in Alabama.

The teenager says he had to play a role to survive. He not only survived but prison gave his life a new sense of meaning. He says that he gained a measure of respect because of the persona he was playing to stay alive. But after 3 1/2 years behind bars, Pardue had had enough. He was moved to a minimum security prison where he volunteered to train dogs used to catch escapees. His job was to run through the woods and let the dogs follow him. One afternoon he just kept running. He was captured after three days. A year later he devised a new escape plan. For a full day he drank large amounts of salty water but not urinate. The prison Doctor assumed he had appendicitis and sent him to a Mobile Hospital. Pardue says when he woke up they had done taken his appendix and there was nothing wrong with it. Pardue found himself to a bed with a security guard sleeping in a chair nearby. He managed to reach the guards keys and make his escape. He borrowed a car from a friend and made it all the way to Texas.

His downfall came when he started picking up hitchhikers. He passed a patrol car who subsequently pulled him over, took him to the police station, and he was quickly identified by his fresh appendectomy scar. After that the escapee decided to settle down and try to earn parole as a model inmate. He began working on the cattle ranch at Atmore prison. In his free time he kept up correspondence and one of the people he contacted to sell his T Shirt artwork was the owner Becky Cogado. Soon the two were corresponding regularly. Visits followed the letters. The seasoned inmate again began looking beyond the prison walls. Pardue says that until he met Becky he was firmly convinced that he was destined to be in prison and that was what he was born for and had found peace there. Now, however, he had an incentive to get out of there. The difference this time however was that he was going to find a legitimate way out of his prison cell. Pardue knew his best hope for freedom was a parole.

The Warden began allowing Pardue to take day passes. He spent that time with his new girlfriend. Then State prison stiffened and Pardue lost his privileges. On March 31st 1987 while working on the cattle ranch, Michael rode away from his prison job on horse back. He made his way to the assistant Warden's house. Nobody was home and he took the warden's gun and the keys to a Corvette and drove away. Officials informed Becky and then monitored her in case her boyfriend made contact. But Purdue had went to his Father's house. He had been paroled after serving seven years for murdering his wife. He was now dying from the effects of alcoholism. Pardue says he made peace with him. After that he was quickly recaptured and returned to prison. The third escape together with the theft of the gun and the car qualified Pardue as an habitual offender. This meant a new sentence of life without the possibility of parole and without Becky. The couple was married in a prison ceremony on May 18th 1988.

They now set to work using the same legal system that put him behind bars to get him out. It was Becky and Purdue against the world. She began gathering data on his case while Michael studied law books in the prison library. The statute of limitations had expired for almost all of his appeals. Then in 1994 they found an issue a Judge would listen to. Michael's attorney in the trial did nothing. Whether he was the killer or not was beside the point. The U.S. Supreme court gives every individual the right to a vigorous defense. In 1995 after 22 years in prison, Pardue's three murder convictions were wiped out due to ineffective assistance of council. Prosecutors in Mobile Alabama were certain they had the right culprit in the gas station murders the first time around. But now they were in a nearly impossible position. They scrambled to put the old case back together. But they couldn't find the shotgun that was actually used in the murder.

Prosecutor David Whetstone found that most of the original investigators were now dead. In a last ditch effort, Mobile Assistant District Attorney sent investigators to comb through the evidence warehouse at the Saraland police station. The biggest surprise was the reel to reel confession tape. It was a critical find and became the most controversial evidence at Pardue's retrial in 1995. On it 17 year old Pardue, goodnaturedly, recounts what he did the night of the murders. Nothing on the hour long tape indicated that Pardue had been beaten or otherwise coerced while in custody. In court Pardue's Attorney's fought back by saying that all of Pardue's interrogators had faced corruption charges. Over 150 complaints of coercing suspects had been filed against lead interrogator, Bill Travis. Within a year of Pardue's arrest, Travis had been fired from the Sheriff's office.

Pardue's Attorney's also insisted that their client, who was 17 at the time, was in no condition to withstand any kind of sustained assault from interrogators. Pardue's new Attorney, Barry Johnson, says that at his age and coming from the violent background he came from was not about to let them know that he was scared. Bill Travis might as well have been his alcoholic abusive Father. Further, she says that Pardue knew that the way you didn't get beaten was to tell them what they want to hear. Pardue's case went to the Jury on May 25th 1995. At least one Juror had his doubts. Juror Robert Deakle says he was one of the last holdouts but finally went along with the rest of the panel. For a second time Micheal Purdue was found guilty of murder. His Attorney's immediately appealed arguing that the critical piece of evidence against his should have been ruled inadmissible. The reason was that their was no signed waiver proving that Pardue had been given his Miranda warning before the questioning had begun.

However, the State argued that the elements of Miranda appeared on the tape and should suffice. Officer: "If you decide to answer questions without a lawyer present, you still have the right to stop answering questions at any time. No promises, threats, or inducements have been made against me, and no pressure or coercion of any kind has been used against me. And that means that we haven't worked you over too many times with a rubber hose, or promised to turn you loose or anything like that. You understand your right?" Pardue: "Yes sir". The Alabama Supreme court then ruled those taped statements weren't enough. There was simply no way to know if he received the Miranda warning before he was interrogated. In August 1996, Pardue's conviction was wiped out for a second time. It was a tremendous setback for the prosecutors in charge of the cases. David Whetstone says without the confession, without the shotgun, and with the witnesses being dead, the likely hood of another conviction was nonexistent.

The Authorities soon announced that they would not pursue another trial against Michael Pardue for any of the murders. Tom Harrison says that is the Judicial system in our country and that while he is not happy with that result he works within that system and must abide by it. Becky Pardue says she thought Michael was coming home. But no, Pardue still owed the State time because of his three prison escapes. In a hearing before the court, the prosecutor reminded the Judge of the fact that Pardue was a habitual offender and the Judge responded with "Life without parole, may God have mercy on your soul". In May 2000 Micheal Pardue, his wife Becky and their Attorney went back to the courts and managed to get two of the escape related convictions overturned on technicalities. Becky say she is really grateful that the state of Alabama can't seem to put together a conviction without making a mistake. Now Pardue was guilty of making only one escape.

In February 15th 2001, in a courthouse in Brootin Alabama, Pardue was re sentenced to time served and probation. Barry Johnson his Attorney says she was looking back at Becky and she was looking up at heaven and crying and can't believe it. After the hearing, however the guards snatch Pardue out of the courtrooms, away from his Attorneys, and literally threw him in the prison van. His Attorneys made it very clear to the Judge that Michael Pardue had been kidnapped by the State of Alabama. Prison officials explained that there was still paperwork to be done before Pardue could be released. The defense team began making frantic calls to the Governor's office. A few hours later they got word that Pardue would be set free off prison grounds. Becky says that there were police cars, prison vehicles, and all these people there, and she finally saw Michael with all his possessions in a paper sack. Michael Pardue says he plans to live quietly with his wife.

Today there are those who disagree with his legal battles but aren't upset that he is out of prison, but rather by his persistent claims of innocence. Michael Lloyd says that after all those years it wasn't that him getting out on technicalities that bothers him but rather that continued insistence that he was innocent that bothers him. He says Michael knew how to manipulate Becky and she knew how to fight the system. Tom Harrison says he has no doubt that he killed those people and has had the benefit of every break in the Judicial system and everything has just turned to work his way. There is no way he could have planned that out, he is not that intelligent. He has just been superbly lucky in the way things have turned. David Whetstone says he thinks this case may represent the ironies of ironies. As long as Michael Pardue acted like a thug, escaped and broke the law, he was incarcerated.

But when he quit doing that and used the law to his advantage and his wife should get credit for a lot of this, he was released. So the American system works. When he got out of prison he told people to obey the law and he thinks that if that is the Pardue that has been released than good things have happened. Right or wrong? You be the Judge. But there is one nagging question. If Michael really didn't kill the gas station attendants, then who did? That part remains a mystery.