By Derrick Nunnally
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
MILWAUKEE, Wisc. — Until he confessed to police, Freddie T. Dudley had the perfect alibi for the Sept. 20 murder of Douglas Mitchell: On paper, he was in jail.
But in real life, the Milwaukee County Community Correctional Center inmate had phoned in that evening, saying he’d be working late and would turn himself in after hours. Then a buddy forged Dudley’s name on the work-release jail’s inmate log while the 32-year-old stayed out, a practice Dudley told detectives “wasn’t uncommon,” according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday.
The account so surprised police officers that they challenged the confession. How, they asked, could he have shot Mitchell around 2:45 a.m. when jail records had him in custody?
But one phone call to a guard and the forgery on the sign-in sheet might have been enough to keep Dudley on the streets for the drug-related slaying.
A supervisor at the downtown facility, home to 350 inmates who walk out daily on work release, called the sequence plausible. The standard procedure, he said, allows an inmate to get permission to stay out late simply by calling to say he or she needs to work overtime.
“That’s entirely possible,” said Lt. Ron Drzewiecki. “We get a lot of that. All we require then is that they bring in a letter from their employer showing that they were working overtime. We call the employer the next day.”
The AWOL inmate’s confession to a slaying is the latest in a series of incidents that have brought scrutiny to the downtown work release center in recent weeks. It follows the early release of 50 inmates to avoid overcrowding and a proposal during the county budget debate to close the center entirely.
Drzewiecki said Dudley, who has a 1999 felony conviction for fleeing police, had been at the facility for violating a domestic-abuse restraining order, but he did not know whether Dudley ever reported back in as the sign-in sheet said. He could not say where Dudley was employed for work release or say what he did at that job.
According to the complaint, detectives stopped doubting the confession when Dudley pointed to the sign-in sheet at the correctional center, which he had purportedly signed 20 times.
“It is obvious to the average person that there are several different signatures of ‘Freddie Dudley,’ some of which look nothing alike,” the complaint says, quoting a police detective.
Then Dudley gave this account of how he spent the day he killed Mitchell, according to the complaint:
Dudley never went to work after leaving the work-release facility on Sept. 19. Instead, he went to a hotel to drink and do drugs. Later, he was with two friends when Mitchell, who police said was 62, drove up in a silver BMW, wanting to buy crack early in the morning of Sept. 20. The three decided to rob Mitchell. Dudley pulled out a gun, fired into the car four or five times, then ran to his girlfriend’s house. Mitchell was found after crashing in the 6200 block of W. Custer Ave.
Three weeks later, on Oct. 12, Dudley called police to talk about the killing. Eventually, he confessed: The drug robbery had gone badly. But the complaint notes that Dudley refused to say what he did with the gun “because it may have other homicides on it.”
If convicted of first-degree reckless homicide while armed and possession of a firearm by a felon, Dudley could face up to 75 years in prison.
Copyright 2007 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel