Jan. 22--Tears began streaming down Eddie Bolden's face Thursday after a Cook County judge threw out his murder convictions and ordered a new trial in connection with the fatal shooting of two men in a 1994 drug deal gone bad, according to his lawyer.
Judge Alfredo Maldonado faulted Bolden's trial lawyer for failing to take any steps to interview a crucial alibi witness in what was a death-penalty case that an appeals court later found to be "extremely thin" on evidence.
"The evidence against Mr. Bolden was not overwhelming," a transcript quoted Maldonado as saying in his ruling. "There was a single (eyewitness)...There is no physical evidence. It was that single finger. It was a less than overwhelming or compelling case."
Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, said the office is considering whether to appeal the ruling or retry Bolden, who has been in prison for 22 years.
Bolden's current attorney, Ronald Safer, said the case marked the latest murder conviction based on a single eyewitness' testimony to crumble in Cook County.
"After 22 years, he can finally see the end of the tunnel, the end of a nightmare of sitting in jail for a crime he didn't commit," Safer said.
Bolden would never have won a new trial without the efforts of a relentless North Shore woman who late in life traded a career making commercials as a production designer for scouring the streets and dusty murder case files as a private investigator, according to Safer and others.
Susan Carlson, who suffered from severe asthma, died in 2013 at 63 without ever seeing any legal victories from her substantial efforts. She had located and interviewed three key witnesses overlooked in the original trial by an overburdened assistant public defender, according to Safer and her family.
"She was the hero of this for sure," said Safer, noting Carlson had even persuaded him to read the case file and take on the defense.
Her investigative partner, William Sheehan, said Carlson made Bolden's case her personal mission, taking on it for free after the attorney she was working with no longer represented him. She took a lightweight Smith Wesson handgun with her on street interviews, trudging up stairs to knock on doors despite her asthma.
"She looked like a suburban housewife," Sheehan said with a chuckle. "Why she enjoyed it so much I'll never know. I tried to talk her out of this all the time."
But her persistence -- finding a way to interview a suburban gang leader, tracking down video of a fatal hit-and-run accident -- paid off, particularly in Bolden's case, he said.
"This would've vanished off the face of the earth long ago, everyone would've washed their hands of it (if not for her)," Sheehan said.
At a 1996 trial, a county jury convicted Bolden on two counts of murder and a count of attempted murder mostly on the testimony of Clifford Frazier, who was wounded during the shooting near 64th Street and Minerva Avenue. Frazier's brother, Derrick, 24, and Irving Clayton, 23, were killed.
Bolden was sentenced to life in prison.
In June 2014, an Illinois Appellate Court ruled Bolden had made "a substantial showing" that his trial lawyer had been ineffective and ordered a post-conviction hearing. The court also ordered a new judge to hear the case, noting that the trial judge, William Lacy, had blamed Bolden as "the cause of all the delays" in the case.
At hearings last year that stretched over several weeks, three people testified that Bolden was with them inside a South Side fish restaurant at the time of the shooting. Bolden's trial lawyer never called those alibi witnesses to the stand during his trial.
In his ruling Thursday, Maldonado questioned the credibility of two of those alibi witnesses but found that testimony from the third, Todd Henderson, likely would have led to a not-guilty verdict.
The three witnesses said Bolden was in the JJ Fish Chicken near 64th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, playing a Pac-Man arcade game at the time the shooting took place.
Sheehan said he bought a small Pac-Man game for Carlson to give to Bolden once he's finally released from prison. After she died, he made sure one of her sons had it.
"She would be very, very, very happy to know this," her son, William Carlson, also a private investigator, said of Thursday's ruling. "It's a shame she's not around to see this."
sschmadeke@tribpub.com
