Sept. 10--For years, Carlotta Jackson thought she'd been in the embrace of saviors -- William Rice and the other Detroit homicide officers who caught her daughter's killer with a confession, got him sent to prison and gave her some small measure of justice's comfort.
"I never questioned any of the evidence," she said. "My faith was in them. I just knew they had the right person.
"I was just so naive," Jackson said through wracking sobs last week. "I was just so trusting. Unbelievable."
In a city that seemingly can shrug off astonishing homicide rates for decades on end, a single killing turned Detroit upside-down in 1984.
Michelle Jackson, 16, disappeared in the darkness of a January morning on her way to Murray-Wright High School -- one of a number of schoolgirls who were attacked on their way to school that year.
She was found by her family the next day in a trash-filled vacant garage. She had been raped and strangled.
Then-Mayor Coleman Young ordered a rape summit of top city and community leaders. Classes were pushed back so kids didn't have to wait for buses in the dark, and utility trucks were labeled with logos so youngsters could get help in hurry. Volunteers escorted children to and from school.
When psychiatric in-patient Eddie Joe Lloyd reportedly confessed and was convicted nine months later, Michelle's family was relieved. With his conviction, they were thankful that police had gotten a dangerous man off the streets.
Seventeen years later, the family was stunned when Lloyd was freed after the Innocence Project used DNA evidence to clear him.
"We had no inkling that there was a challenge," Michelle's mother said.
The case was built around Lloyd's chilling confession -- supposedly given during the one interrogation with Rice present -- including details that had been withheld from the public.
But Lloyd contended that police fed him the crucial information for his confession. He said he had a plan to "smoke out" the real killer with a bogus confession.
Lloyd filed suit against the city and Wayne County in federal court, naming Rice and other cops. He died while the case was pending, and his estate got a $3.25-million settlement that dismissed the claims against the officers.
Rice has declined to be interviewed because of his pending criminal enterprise, fraud, conspiracy and drug charges. The trial prosecutor, Timothy Kenny, said it would be improper to discuss the Lloyd case because Rice's case could come before him in his current position as presiding judge of the Wayne County Circuit Court's criminal division.
Detroit police consider the Michelle Jackson case still open.
"There are no new leads at this time," said Maria Miller, spokeswoman for the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office. "If that should change, we remain committed to reviewing whatever is brought to us in an effort to charge a case in the homicide of Ms. Jackson."
Carlotta Jackson cannot set aside her daughter's death or Lloyd's unnerving route through the courts and its revelations.
Uncertainties still gnaw at her. Was Lloyd in some way involved, even if someone else's DNA was recovered by investigators? Was he just a delusional man who derailed any hope of solving the case?
And if the cops really did frame Lloyd with a rigged confession, did it happen in other cases?
"As crazy as Eddie Lloyd was, it still wasn't right," she said. "If he didn't do it, it allowed other people who did kill her to go free. What other kind of things have happened? I just don't know.
"And if they told me, how could I trust it?"
Contact Joe Swickard: 313-222-8769 or [email protected]
Copyright 2012 - Detroit Free Press
