In the eight years since Carol Moore's daughter Michelle was brutally raped and murdered in Norfolk, Va., the holidays have always seemed to shine a spotlight on that empty chair at the table. This Thanksgiving was one of the worst. Just two weeks before the feast, three Navy sailors who had confessed to killing her daughter and are serving life sentences filed a petition maintaining their innocence and requesting a full pardon. Wounds Moore had hoped were slowly closing were ripped open again. She went through the motions of the holiday like a zombie, forgetting things, unable to focus, crying. She can't imagine those men going free. She knows they did it, because she heard them--as she listened to their taped confessions at the trials--describe the gruesome things they did to her daughter. "They're guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. That's it," Moore told TIME over the phone last week. "How could someone confess to something like that if they didn't do it?"
But giving a false confession is precisely what the three sailors say they did do. In their Nov. 10 petition to outgoing Virginia Governor Mark Warner, Danial Williams, Derek Tice and Joseph Dick Jr. claim that after Norfolk homicide detectives subjected them to hours of harsh and manipulative questioning, they fabricated elaborate details of a rape and murder that they had absolutely nothing to do with. The three were only part of a larger group of eight men who, over the course of a two-year investigation and three trials, were charged with the 1997 murder of Navy wife Michelle Moore-Bosko. Five of the men at one time or another confessed, but just one, Omar Ballard, had any material evidence linking him to the scene of the crime. (One of the men, Eric Wilson, was convicted only on charges of rape and released earlier this fall after more than seven years in prison; charges were eventually dropped against three others.)
Over the past year, a team of lawyers, approached by the nonprofit Innocence Project, spent thousands of pro bono hours conducting interviews, gathering documents and asking experts to compare the confessions of the sailors with the crime-scene evidence. What the team compiled was a laundry list of inconsistencies that it hopes will be enough to sway Warner just as the Governor is about to leave office and possibly make a run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Warner just last week spared the life of death-row inmate Robin Lovitt, citing the destruction of DNA evidence that might have cleared his name. But with no looming execution date for the Norfolk Three, their request could fall to Warner's successor, Tim Kaine.
Hard as their story may be for Carol Moore and others to believe, the Norfolk Three's case is just the latest instance of judicial reappraisal in which DNA evidence seems to contradict previous criminal confessions. In recent years, new DNA sequencing technology has allowed the American justice system to right more than 150 wrongful convictions--and almost a quarter of those had been based on a false confession. The most high-profile example is the 1989 Central Park jogger case, in which five teenagers who had confessed to raping a woman were cleared 13 years later after DNA analysis of evidence couldn't link them to the crime scene.