The Associated Press
CHICAGO — For nearly 26 years, the affidavit was sealed in an envelope and stored in a locked box, tucked away with the lawyer’s passport and will. Sometimes he stashed the box in his bedroom closet, other times under his bed.
It stayed there — year after year, decade after decade.
Then, about two years ago, Dale Coventry, the box’s owner, got a call from his former colleague, W. Jamie Kunz. Both were once public defenders. They hadn’t talked in a decade.
“We’re both getting on in years,” Kunz said. “We ought to do something with that affidavit to make sure it’s not wasted in case we both leave this good Earth.”
In January, Kunz called again. This time, he had news: A man both lawyers had represented long ago in the murder of two police officers, Andrew Wilson, had died in prison.
Kunz asked Coventry to get the affidavit.
And so, Coventry began reading aloud the five-line declaration the lawyers had written more than a quarter-century before:
An innocent man was behind bars. His name was Alton Logan. He did not kill a security guard in a McDonald’s restaurant in January 1982.
“In fact,” the document said, “another person was responsible.”
They knew, because Andrew Wilson told them: He did it.
But that was the catch.
Lawyer-client privilege is not complete; most states allow attorneys to reveal confidences to prevent a death, serious bodily harm or criminal fraud. But this case didn’t offer that kind of exception.
So when Andrew Wilson told his lawyers that he, and not Alton Logan, had killed the guard, they felt powerless -- aware of information that could free a man they believed to be innocent, but unable to do anything with that knowledge. And for decades, they said nothing.
As they recall, Wilson — who was facing charges in the February 1982 murders of police officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien — was even a bit gleeful about the McDonald’s shooting. To Kunz, he seemed like a child who had been caught doing something naughty.
“There was no sense of unease or embarrassment.” He smiled and kind of giggled. He hugged himself, and said, ‘Yeah, it was me,” he said.
Coventry and Kunz brought Wilson to the jail law library and this, they say, was when they confronted him and he made his unapologetic confession. They didn’t press for details. “None of us had any doubt,” Coventry said.
And, he added, it wasn’t just Wilson’s word. Firearms tests, according to court records, linked a shotgun shell found at McDonald’s with a weapon that police found at the beauty parlor where Andrew Wilson lived. The slain police officers’ guns also were discovered there.
But bound by legal ethics, they kept quiet. Instead, they wrote down what they’d been told. If the situation ever arose when they could help Logan, there would be a record — no one could say they had just made it up. They say they didn’t name Wilson, fearing someone would hear about the document and subpoena it. They didn’t even make a copy.
Behind bars
In prison, Alton Logan heard the news: First, Andrew Wilson had died. Second, there was an affidavit in his case.
“I said finally, somebody has come (forward) and told the truth,” Logan said. “I’ve been saying this for the past 26 years: It WASN’T me.”
In January, the two lawyers, with a judge’s permission, revealed their secret in court.
Two months later, Marc Miller testified about his client’s declaration of Logan’s innocence.
But an affidavit and sworn testimony do not guarantee freedom — or prove innocence.
And Alton Logan knows that. After spending almost half his 54 years as an inmate, this slight man with a fringe of gray beard, stooped shoulders and weary eyes seems resigned to the reality that his fate is beyond his control.
“I have to accept whatever comes down,” he said, sitting in a visitor’s room at the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet.
He insists he’s not angry with Andrew Wilson. Nor is Logan angry with the lawyers who kept the secret. But he wonders if there wasn’t some way they could have done more.
On April 18, Logan will be in court as his lawyer, Harold Winston, pushes for a new trial. Along with the affidavit, Winston has accumulated new evidence, including an eyewitness who said Logan wasn’t at McDonald’s and a letter from an inmate who claims Wilson signed a statement while in prison implicating himself in the murder — and clearing Logan.
Logan said if he is released, he’ll move to Oregon to be with his brother. “After spending 26 years in this hellhole, I want to get as far away from here as I possibly can,” he said.