Three Detectives Remember: Read the most thorough, brilliant report on the Central Park Jogger case!

VI. Three Detectives Remember: Read the most thorough, brilliant report on the Central Park Jogger case!
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

[“I. Preface”;

“II. The Crime: April 19, 1989”;

“III. Harlem Goes Bonkers”;

“IV. Harlem Says They’re Innocent”; and

“V. The Harlem Spokefolks Materialize.”]


Three Detectives Remember

The detectives who investigated the Central Park gang rape are not pleased by all the loose talk about conspiracies and coercion. Three of those detectives have defended the confessions.

Mike Sheehan is now a respected and well-liked correspondent for Fox Channel 5, in New York; thirteen years ago he was a detective working on the jogger case. Sheehan challenged defense lawyers outside the Manhattan Supreme Court. He called all talk of exonerating the defendants “ridiculous.” He denied that the defendants’ confessions were coerced. He said the defendants confessed “to a lady prosecutor . . .on videotape in detail” in front of their parents and guardians. “Where’s the coercion?” Sheehan also helped to convict Matias Reyes of other rapes and murder. He said of Reyes, “He was never a suspect [in the jogger case]. Hence we never submitted his DNA”

Retired detective Thomas McKenna had gotten Yusef Salaam to admit, “I was there. I didn’t rape her.” McKenna explained that he couldn’t have scripted Salaam because “I didn’t have a clue about what happened. I had no knowledge of what other people were saying.” The police also had no idea what the victim would say. If the victim’s version contradicted some bogus police script, then the whole case would have been wrecked. Added McKenna: “The confessions were absolutely not coerced.”

In an extensive interview with the New York Daily News, retired detective Humberto Arroyo dismissed the defense lawyers’ accusation that their clients’ confessions were the result of coercion or trickery. He explained that detectives working in separate locations while questioning more than 40 suspects could never have pulled off such a conspiracy. “All the different detectives asking questions – that’s how the case came together.”

Mr. Arroyo, who retired from the NYPD in 1994 after almost 15 years on the force, described the turbulent and congested atmosphere inside the cramped Central Park station house on the 86th Street transverse on the morning after the gang rape. Reporters milled about outside, while detectives from several divisions read suspects their rights and tried to elicit the truth. Later that same day the investigation was moved to a more spacious station house, where detectives from the Manhattan North homicide division began more detailed questioning. Arroyo recalled how Raymond Santana, with his father at his side, admitted his participation in the wolf pack attack. On videotape Santana described how he fondled the victim’s breasts and how Santana’s buddies beat the woman to a bloody pulp.

Mr. Arroyo said that he doubted that Matias Reyes acted alone; he expressed doubt that a small person like Matias Reyes could drag a grown woman the distance from where he says he attacked her to the place where he says he left her for dead – a distance of almost 100 yards. Humberto Arroyo observed: “It defies logic. It’s unbelievable that he would drag someone one football field in length.”

He repeated how “ridiculous” it was to believe that the confessions were coerced because the questioning was done at various locations, including the suspects homes, by cops who were often strangers to one another. “Their lawyers are making it seem like a quasi-Moscow-Afgani interrogation room. Absolutely not. This was Interviewing 101.”

I. Preface
II. The Crime: April 19, 1989
III. Harlem Goes Bonkers
IV. Harlem Says They’re Innocent
V. The Harlem Spokesfolks Mobilize
VI. Three Detectives Remember
VII. A Prosecutor Remembers
VIII. The Star Witness
IX. His Story Stinks
X. The Confessions
XI. How Guilty is Harlem
XII. The Forgotten Victim
XIII. Update to the Central Park Rape Case
XIV. The Victim’s Doctor Breaks His Silence
XV. The Jogger Rape Saga Continues
XVI. Thursday, December 5, 2002
XVII. The Matias Reyes/Kharey Wise Connection
XVIII. Don’t Be Fooled
XIX. The End Game
XX. Here Comes the Judge
XXI. Is Nancy Ryan Trustworthy?
XXII. Nancy Ryan’s Twisted Vision
XXIII. Twisted Justice


Additional Material

Stix: “‘It Was Fun’—Robert K. Tanenbaum vs. the Central Park Five, 25 Years Later”; and

Stix: “Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five: The New To Kill a Mockingbird—Fiction Designed to Induce White Guilt.”

(N.S.: These were not the first reports I wrote on the Central Park Jogger case. I’d already written many, going back at least to 2000.)

“The Report That Ken Burns Doesn’t Want You to Read: The Armstrong Report on the Central Park Five’s Many Violent Crimes, and Matias Reyes”