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A Story of Betrayal and Corruption
In mid 2008, Jennifer Lynn Caldwell, who co-founded and directs the website, PoliceWatch.org, was alerted to a legal case of Civil Rights violations and denial of due process. Caldwell’s aim with Police Watch is to use technology to protect people from police crime and brutality. She recognized an opportunity for justice after reviewing the case sent to her for Contreras’ sake by a Catholic Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Sister Veronica Brutosky, C. S. J., who had befriended him and saw that he had not gotten a fair trial. The Sisters of St. Joseph is an order that works for Justice.
Sister Veronica, volunteering in detention ministry, had been working on the case ever since she had received a letter from Contreras in 2007 asking for help. By that time Contreras had been both, encouraged and let down by several people who had tried and failed to carry through to help him after his conviction May 20, 1997. Brutosky, determined not to give up trying to get justice for Contreras, sent Caldwell a copy of Edward Philip Contreras’ Complaint File against the two detectives who coerced, frightened, manipulated, and coached Lisa Marie Garringer, the key witness to the murder of Freddie Walker by Scott Anthony Taylor, to lie during Contreras’ trial. To top that, Lisa maintains that the coaching had been done in the presence of the prosecutor, Joseph Payne. Contreras tried and later convicted and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, was in total shock at the fact that Garringer had lied on the stand. To add to the pain of the false conviction, Judge John S. Fisher refused to allow Taylor to testify to the innocence of Contreras. Thus, Contreras was betrayed by many people in his efforts to get justice both before and after incarceration at the California State Prison at Lancaster. The two women, Sister Veronica Brutosky and Jennifer Lynn Caldwell are not about to allow betrayal of Contreras again.
Garringer, who had been seventeen years old at the time, is now ready, after thirteen years of suffering with pangs of conscience and fear of the police, to come forward to make a statement to the courts that she knows very well that Contreras is completely and factually innocent of the murder and also the crime of lying in wait to rob. Garringer is ready to state what the two police detectives,J. Jones and Greenwood, did to her. She had been so frightened of being killed by the real confessed killer, Scott Anthony Taylor which she confessed to the crime herself because she feared to tell the police at the time of the interview that Taylor was the murderer. In fact, for a whole month before the interview with Garringer and her mother, Rosalyn Blaser, who herself was on parole at the time, no one who knew about the murder of Freddie Walker told the police that Taylor attacked, killed, and dismembered Walker with a machete. Contreras tried in vain to stop the murder and was himself cut. Garringer, in fact, was later threatened by Cinnamon Meyer, Taylor’s jealous girlfriend. Allegedly, Meyer had helped Taylor dispose of the body parts with her mother’s car, yet Prosecutor Payne insisted that Contreras had helped dispose of the body higher up in the mountains at Saugus, California, but that would have been impossible because of the condition of Contreras’ car. Not only was the car unable to climb but Taylor had disabled it so that Contreras would have to stay another day as he had originally promised. Both Lisa Garringer and Edward Contreras were in fear for their lives and those of their family members that night and in the weeks afterward because Taylor knew where they lived. Garringer will say in her statement that she and Contreras were terrified and sobbing while Taylor went coolly about cleaning up the blood. Garringer said she never saw any blood on Contreras’s clothing, which also helps his case because later the police search of the murder scene on the patio revealed that there was blood sprayed everywhere, even up into the eaves.
Jennifer Caldwell, a paralegal, after investigation and interviews, is prepared to bring Lisa Garringer forward to the courts to help exonerate Contreras, who all these years has maintained his innocence and that he did not get a fair trial. In fact he tried six times to fire his public defender, Avrum Harris, because Harris had come to court unprepared to defend Contreras and did not cooperate with Contreras who was trying his best to show Harris the evidence that would have freed him. Caldwell has in her possession evidence to bring Garringer’s statement into the courts in an effort to get his charges completely dropped.
Contreras is to be admired because he has never given up hope and his own efforts to get his freedom and his good name back. The puzzle is that Freddie Walker had been one of Taylor’s best friends, their having gone to school together in Canyon Country. However, the fact that Taylor was paranoid schizophrenic, delusional, and not in control of his anger may be a partial answer to the seemingly arbitrary and unplanned spur of the moment killing of his good friend who had only, to his doom, shown up the evening of his death to ask Taylor if he could rent a room from him. The corrupt courts and police got it all wrong, but the Catholic Sister and the paralegal are going to set it right for Contreras. |
