A sense of relief.
When First Assistant Ector County District Attorney Greg Barber and his colleague Carmen Villalobos read Judge Denn Whalen’s 57-page Findings of Fact and Conclusions of law in the James Reyos case, they felt a sense of relief.
Whalen took all of the evidence they presented him in the 40-year-old murder case and he has recommended the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals set aside Reyos’ murder conviction in the death of Father Patrick Ryan.
“We felt pretty confident going in, but you just never know what a judge is thinking,” Villalobos said.
“There was a sense of relief. We worked hard on this trying to determine what we think happened and whether we thought he was innocent or not and we feel he is innocent,” Barber added. “We also felt like we did justice based on what was in front of us.”
Reyos, 66, was convicted of beating Ryan, 49, to death at the Sage and Sand Motel in Odessa by an Ector County jury in June 1983 and sentenced to 38 years in prison. He served 20 years before being paroled.
In March attorneys from the Innocence Project of Texas put on witness after witness who testified over the course of four hours there is absolutely no way Reyos could be responsible for the Dec. 21, 1981 death of the Denver City priest.
More over, they said, there is evidence linking three dead men to the murder.
According to court testimony, Reyos and Ryan were both living in Denver City in December 1981 when Ryan gave Reyos a ride to his impounded truck in Hobbs, N.M., on the morning of Dec. 21, 1981.
The next morning a maid found Ryan’s battered body, his arms tied behind his back, inside the motel room he’d rented under a false name using a false license plate number. A silver chalice and an accordion were missing from the room and never found.
The Ireland native’s stolen car was found at a Moose Lodge in Hobbs, N.M., and his wallet and a bloody credit card was found at a nearby gas station.
Eleven months later, a drunk and stoned Reyos, then 27, called Albuquerque police and confessed to having killed the 49-year-old priest, with whom he’d had a sexual encounter. He then recanted.
During the March hearing, John Smith testified he and his fellow defense attorney, John Cliff, were “shocked, infuriated and nonplussed” at the jury’s guilty verdict and sentence. He suspects they chose to convict Reyos because of his homosexuality, which they had tried unsuccessfully to keep out of the trial.
Reyos’ conviction was affirmed in November 1984, but in December 1991, the prosecutor who represented the state during the appellate process came to the conclusion Reyos was innocent. That attorney, Dennis Cadra, sent a letter to then Gov. Ann Richards asking for Reyos’ conviction to be overturned. His widow, Yvonne, attended Friday’s hearing.
Cadra’s attempts to get the conviction overturned were unsuccessful, but his attempts started a snowball effect.
Ryan’s supervisor, a bishop, came out in support of Reyos, as did members of both the New Mexico and Texas Legislatures. Journalists from the Austin American-Statesman and Houston Chronicle wrote about the case. A book was published and A&E did a segment on Reyos. His plight was also featured on numerous podcasts.
Odessa Police Chief Michael Gerke testified in March his son, daughter-in-law and daughter came to him last year after listening to a podcast about Reyos’ case and asked detectives to pull the file.
After reading it, Gerke said he wondered where the rest of the file was because there wasn’t any evidence to support Reyos’ conviction. Not only was there no physical evidence linking Reyos to the crime scene or Odessa, there was actually evidence proving he was in New Mexico at the time of the murder.
Gerke asked detectives in his office to go over the file, too, and when they came to the same conclusion, they brought in the Ector County District Attorney’s Office.
At that hearing, OPD’s Sgt. Scottie Smith reminded Whalen of the evidence Smith and Cliff presented at Reyos’ trial.
While it’s unclear from court transcripts exactly when Ryan died, they know he died between 5:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. Dec. 21, 1981, the sergeant testified.
Reyos has a confirmed alibi for 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. that night; he was in Roswell with a friend and at midnight he was receiving a ticket west of Roswell for speeding, Smith said.
Since it’s 3 hours and 20 minutes from Roswell to Odessa, there’s no way Reyos could have made it from Roswell to Odessa back to Roswell in that time frame, the sergeant said. An added wrinkle to the timeline is Reyos couldn’t drive two vehicles at once and Ryan’s car was found in Hobbs.
Fingerprint analyst Stacy Cannady told that although everyone believed all of the fingerprints lifted from the crime scene had been destroyed, she found 11 fingerprint cards and photos of six latent prints. Seven of the fingerprint cards could be entered into a FBI database that didn’t exist in the early ’80s.
Thanks to a combination of the new technology and old-fashioned eyeball comparisons, Cannady said she was able to determine that bloody prints found in the room belonged to three dead men.
Following the hearing, Villalobos, Barber and Allison Clayton, Reyos’ Innocence Project attorney, provided Whalen with the depositions of a false confession expert and an expert on eyewitness testimony. The latter spoke about how witnesses can be easily influenced and manipulated.
The Innocence Project announced Whalen’s recommendation in a news release.
According to that news release, Reyos said, “I have always believed that one day the world would know I did not kill Father Ryan. Today’s ruling puts me one step closer to finally clearing my name.”
“We are so thankful for today’s ruling, which significantly advances our pursuit of James’ complete exoneration. We could not have gotten here without the outstanding work of OPD and the Ector County DA’s Office,” Clayton, Deputy Director of IPTX and Director of the Innocence Clinic at Texas Tech School of Law said. “We all anxiously await a final ruling from the Court of Criminal Appeals.”
In a later interview, Clayton said she wouldn’t be surprised if the court’s decision isn’t rendered for more than a year.
“This is stuff that’s going to require a good amount of time by somebody down in Austin to go through the trial transcript, go through the writ record, to go through the writ hearing, just to go over everything,” Clayton said.
The fact the victim was a Catholic priest could also play a factor even though, in this case, the Catholic Church has expressed their support of Reyos, she said.
“When you talk about these big deal exonerations where it’s a very violent offense that we’re dealing with, then it’s going to take awhile,” Clayton said. “This is a group of politicians. At the end of the day, the judges are nine politicians and they’re going to be very sensitive to the fact we’re dealing with a Catholic priest.”
If the prosecutors weren’t onboard, Clayton said she wouldn’t expect a decision for two or three years.
