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From the outset News Reporter Douglas Glazier, a police-beat veteran, sensed the possibility of a railroading. The nomadic bikers had been picked up elsewhere on another offense; they were convicted of the Albuquerque murder after a motel maid fingered them and testified she had been raped, tortured with a hot knife and made to watch the killing. Glazier rounded up gasoline credit-card receipts backing the bikers' claim that they had not been in Albuquerque at the time. Then a former policeman admitted to Glazier that the maid had told him she had lied. News Reporter Stephen Cain found her in Minnesota, where she recanted: she had no scars from her supposed torture and said that police had promised to pay her tuition in secretarial school in return for her testimony. But when she repeated the new version of her story to a judge, he ruled that there was not sufficient reason to disbelieve her first story.
Then last September, a drifter named Kerry Lee "found God," as he put it, and confessed to police in South Carolina that he had committed the murder. With Albuquerque police none too anxious to attack their own original theory, Glazier and defense attorneys for the bikers went to South Carolina to get Lee's story. They confirmed that the murder gun, for example, had belonged to the father of Lee's girl friend. Though the district attorney persisted in backing his first charge, a judge last week finally quashed the murder indictments and turned the bikers loose. "Sure these were unsavory guys," says News Editor Martin Hayden, "but if they were innocent of murder, we couldn't see them executed."