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RALEIGH — Ed Taylor stood with friends and family in front of the Wake County courthouse Tuesday, each wearing a lime-green T-shirt with a simple message: “Free Greg Taylor.”

Greg, 47, is the Greensboro retiree’s son. Sixteen years ago a jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him to life in prison for murder. Since then, he has exhausted most every legal avenue to overturn his conviction, save one. Last month, the relatively new N.C. Actual Innocence Commission ruled unanimously there was enough evidence to warrant a review of the case.

Along with other friends and family, Ed Taylor hopes the display might speed the day Greg is released from a state prison in Johnston County.
Today he is certain his son isn’t a murderer. As he drove toward the same courthouse in April 1993, Taylor said, he was certain of other things.

“I was always a strong law-and-order man,” Taylor said. “I came down to the trial mentally prepared to hear evidence that he was guilty.” There’s a choke in Taylor’s voice when he confides he would have “thrown the switch” himself if prosecutors had proved his son was a murder.

What he heard during the trial and what he has found out since has convinced him of quite the opposite.

***

There are no angels in this story, although the demons of drug and alcohol abuse do rear their heads. And nobody has been declared innocent yet.
Greg Taylor was born in Greensboro and moved to Raleigh with his family when he was about 2 years old. Ed Taylor and his first wife split in the late 1960s. Ed moved back to Greensboro; Greg and his younger brother stayed with their mother.

Every other weekend and for weeks during the summer, Greg would visit his father. Ed’s memories are the stuff of just about any father-and-son relationship.

“Greg was big into fishing,” Taylor said. “He tried to teach me without success.” There were camping trips and a motorcycle the father let the son ride even before he turned 16.

By 1973, Ed Taylor was remarried.

“We bought an old house here in Greensboro,” Taylor said. “He helped me re-roof it, insulate it and whatnot.”

The father is straightforward as he tells his story. Problem drinking went a long way toward ending his first marriage. And he wasn’t a full-time father raising his son, so he doesn’t have latitude to second-guess anyone. But sometime in the 1970s the seeds of Greg Taylor’s 1991 arrest were sown.

“He had been messing with drugs since he was 14 years old,” Ed Taylor said.

***

There’s more to Greg Taylor’s story than a dead prostitute and crack cocaine. The Cary man was a husband, father, and held a good-paying job setting up phone systems, family members said. The week he was arrested, Greg was the only father present at a PTA meeting, Ed said.

But the night of Thursday, Sept. 25, 1991, Greg Taylor was out to feed his drug habit. He was 29 at the time and riding in his white Nissan Pathfinder with Johnny Beck, who was 31.

Sometime early on the morning of Sept. 26, Taylor told police, he and Beck pulled into a vacant lot off Blount Street so they could use drugs unseen. The truck got stuck in a ditch.

When he returned early Thursday morning to try to retrieve his truck, police were on the scene of a murder. Jacquetta L. “Jackie” Thomas, a prostitute, had been brutally killed the night before and her body left on the street.

In a police interview from the time, Greg Taylor tells investigators that he and Beck saw Thomas’ body that night.

“He (Beck) said, what is that, it looks almost like a body or something,” reads the report, quoting Taylor. “And I looked, and I said it is, he said let’s get out of here. I said what do we do, he said let’s just forget about it, I said well, I tend to agree with you.”

Taylor maintained throughout the interview he wasn’t a murderer. Late in the day, a police officer told Taylor he should fess up.

“Well, I’ll tell it to you right now if this judicial system is going to work for me it’s got to because I did not do it,” reads Taylor’s quote from the report.

“The judicial system is great and it will work,” said the detective.

“Okay, then if it works then I’ll be innocent,” Taylor shoots back.

“The judicial system don’t have anything to do with you being innocent because you’re not innocent,” the officer said.

“I am innocent.”

***

On April 19, 1993, a jury found Greg Taylor guilty of first-degree murder in Thomas’ killing. Among the most damning evidence was testimony from a jailhouse snitch who claimed Taylor admitted to the killing.

Charges against Beck were dropped. The case against him was too flimsy, and police couldn’t get Taylor to implicate him in the murder. That started years of appeals in state and federal courts, pointing to everything from weak physical evidence and conflicting witness accounts to ineffective counsel at trial.

In 2003, Greensboro lawyer Don Vaughan, now a state senator, petitioned the court to test DNA collected a decade earlier. New technology could help rule out Taylor, he said.

“The facts just didn’t add up in his case,” Vaughan said.

The court denied Vaughan’s motion in a matter of days.

In 2004 or 2005 — memories are hazy now — Vaughan recommended that Ed Taylor go with him to Raleigh. The General Assembly was creating a new kind of tribunal.

Unlike other routes of appeal, this one would be specifically set up to hear unconsidered evidence that an inmate was innocent of a crime. Matters of procedure or technical errors would not be in the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission’s purview.

Taylor never got to read his son’s story before a committee — too many witnesses jammed the room. But he did pass it along to someone who was interested, and the summary eventually found its way into the hands of Chris Mumma, executive director of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, a nonprofit that investigates innocence claims.

Mumma said she had been contacted by Greg Taylor, but the narrative from his father helped focus her attention on the case. “I’m as certain as I’ve ever been on any case,” Mumma said. “I’m 100 percent sure he’s innocent.”

Ed Taylor recalled talking to Mumma when she took on the task of proving Greg innocent.

“She told me, 'First I’m going to try to prove him guilty,’” Taylor recalled. “'If I can’t do that, then we’ll try to prove him innocent.’”

***

Mumma took the case as far as she could. In 2007, her group turned its work over to the Actual Innocence Commission, which has the ability to order evidence testing and other powers private attorneys and nonprofits don’t have. The eight-member panel is made up of people from across the law enforcement community, including a sheriff and a victim’s advocate.

During a two-day hearing in September, commission members listened as their staff picked over evidence in the case. Blood found on Taylor’s Pathfinder was from an animal, not a human. DNA evidence collected from Thomas’ body shows no signs it is connected to Taylor.

And most dramatically: An inmate in another prison has confessed to the crime.

Craig Taylor, 40, no relation to Ed or Greg, an inmate at the Lumberton Correctional Institution, told investigators he did the crime. A prison psychologist noted in 1996 the one-time drug dealer said he wanted to confess to two murders. In a taped phone conversation between Taylor and his mother, he says the same thing.

On Sept. 4, the commission declared the evidence in the case warranted review by a three-judge panel. The commission has ruled on only two other cases: one it rejected and one the three-judge panel refused to overturn.

Ed Taylor watched the commission’s proceedings and announcement over an Internet video feed from Germany, where he was on a long-planned visit to a daughter who works in an embassy.

“You can’t imagine the feeling of relief that drains through your body,” Taylor said, recalling that he had been up for 24 hours straight when the decision was announced. “It was a wonderful revelation.”

The commission’s finding doesn’t mean Taylor has been found innocent. It only says there is enough evidence to warrant a hearing.

Ed Taylor and other family members say Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby should move to dismiss the case on his own. Greg’s younger brother, Eddy, has set up a blog to help press that point. Willoughby said he doesn’t have that power, although other lawyers disagree.

“Only the three-judge panel can do that,” Willoughby said.

He is reviewing the file from the commission hearing, Willoughby said, adding he had just gotten the complete transcript last week. He will make a recommendation to the judicial panel before a 60-day deadline runs out.

“I believe the evidence of Greg Taylor’s innocence is resting on this confession and whether that confession is truthful,” Willoughby said.

***

So Ed Taylor and the rest of Greg’s family wait.

They plan to be back in front of the Wake County courthouse on Tuesday, again wearing their lime-green T-shirts, still looking forward to the last, best chance to free a man who has missed out on 16 years of being a son, father, brother and friend.

Said Taylor, “We’ve had lights at the end of the tunnel for 16 years, and they’ve all turned out to be freight trains.”

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com