Anatomy of Injustice (35 page)

Holt’s daring had a consequence she did not foresee, and certainly didn’t want. James Holloway Jr. learned about the request to dig up his father when a reporter called him for comment. He sent a searing letter to Zelenka. “For a decade my family has been subjected to all manner of rumor and innuendo crafted by Ms. Diana Holt,” he began. “This request to violate the sanctity of the grave is utterly despicable. Ms. Holt’s professional behavior is outrageous, exceeds the bounds of behavior in a civilized society.”

Holloway had grown up next to the Edwardses. Little Jimmy, or Jimmy Junior as he was called until he became an adult and insisted on Jim, delighted in throwing stones at the fish in the Edwardses’ pond. One day he found the bottle of liquor that Mr. Edwards kept secreted in his dad’s garage, poured out the liquor, and filled it with pepper and vinegar; he watched from a safe distance when Mr. Edwards took a swig, gagged, and spit it out. Carolyn Edwards often babysat young Holloway. When he went to college at The Citadel, in the late 1960s, Mrs. Edwards painted him a Citadel bulldog standing in the stadium, with the campus in the background. He still has it. After college, he served as a supply officer in the navy, then moved to Columbia, opening his own accounting office. His office, cluttered with putters and golf balls, was in a single-story redbrick building on Henderson Street, only a few blocks from Holt’s.

For years, Holloway had watched the case inconspicuously from the sidelines. Then, in the fall of 2000, a lengthy article about the case appeared in
The Charlotte Observer
. The reporter, Eric Frazier, had interviewed the police, the prosecutors, and several jurors, as well as John Blume and Chris Jensen. Holt had declined to talk to him. She is not only shy around strangers, but generally doesn’t trust reporters, believing them too sympathetic to the state. (This was confirmed, in her mind, by the reporting on the Elmore case. An AP story, for instance, said that Mrs. Edwards “had been raped.” She hadn’t. The article went on to say that hairs found at the scene matched Elmore’s pubic hairs. There was no mention of the possibility that the hairs might have been planted.)

Frazier’s article was the first serious look at the Elmore case by a journalist. “Race Often a Key in Death-Penalty Cases” was the headline of his article. That was hardly an astonishing conclusion. Near the end of his lengthy story, however, in a section headed “The Defense Attacks,” Frazier wrote that Elmore’s lawyers considered Jimmy Holloway a suspect. Blume and Jensen had not told Frazier this directly. What they had done was direct him to the six-page affidavit Holt had prepared after interviewing
Holloway Senior at his home in Greenwood in 1993, which was part of the record in the case. Citing the affidavit, Frazier wrote that Holloway had led the police to Elmore. Frazier also quoted from the affidavit that Holloway had told Holt, “I am the only one who could kill her and get away with it, the way she trusted me.”

The
Observer
did not put the story on the front page, and the accusations against Holloway Senior would likely have evaporated. Jim Holloway Jr. gave them prominence. He began with an op-ed piece in
The State
, South Carolina’s largest-circulation daily. “My dad died six years ago. Since he can’t defend himself, that’s now my job,” he wrote. “Notwithstanding convictions by three separate juries, Elmore’s latest defense counsel has its own suspect—my dad.”

Unless someone in Greenwood had been following the case closely, so closely that they had been going to the courthouse to read the filings, this was probably the first anyone knew that Holloway Senior was a suspect. His son also told the largest newspaper audience in South Carolina that there were rumors his father had been having an affair with Mrs. Edwards. That made him laugh, he wrote. “That would have been a sight. A 75-year-old woman and a 66-year-old man, in the pre-Viagra days—right!”

Jim Holloway then introduced the public to a woman few had ever heard of, “an aspiring law student” who had showed up to interview his father—Diana Holt. Holloway wrote that Holt had asked his father hypothetical, “what if” questions. “What would you say if I told you a neighbor told me you might be having an affair with Mrs. Edwards?” “Are you the only person who could get away with the murder of Mrs. Edwards?”

The Monica Lewinsky–Bill Clinton affair, with Clinton’s memorable redefining of the meaning of the words “sex” and “is,” had not been forgotten. Holloway bunched Holt with Clinton. “We live in the age of Bill Clinton where a lawyer can say anything, redefine words and misrepresent their intentions with impunity.”

Holloway concluded that there was “a lesson to be learned. It’s the age-old story of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s one I wish my dad had learned.”

Holloway, fifty-two years old, continued to vent in other forums. He was against the death penalty, not on moral grounds but because it was dysfunctional and unduly expensive, he wrote in another op-ed piece. “What I find disgusting is the death penalty has given birth to an entire cottage industry that has learned how to feed on it.” The death penalty lawyers, tax-exempt foundations that fund their work, even journalists were part of it. “Death row pimps,” he called them, “people who use the bodies of convicted murderers for their economic enrichment.” Holloway was so convinced that journalists and death row lawyers were in connivance that he ranted on that he had told a
New York Times
reporter that he would write a letter to the governor urging him to commute Elmore’s death sentence to life imprisonment. “The reporter immediately rejected my offer on behalf of Diana Holt without so much as a telephone call to her,” Holloway wrote. Holloway dismissed the reporter’s explanation that it wasn’t his role to serve as an intermediary between parties, much less act on behalf of one of them.

He found that the Greenwood
Index-Journal
was willing to carry his case when he wrote another op-ed piece, angrier and less restrained than the one published in
The State
, and more revealing in intimate details about his father. The paper had covered Elmore’s arrest and his three trials on the front page, while completely ignoring his PCR hearing. The executive editor of
The Index-Journal
, Robert Bentley, now gave Holloway the front page. It was styled as “A Letter To Our Readers” from the executive editor. “Legal fight for convicted murderer’s life at great cost to others” was the six-column headline. Bentley filled his readers in on the background of the case: Edward Lee Elmore was now the longest-serving inmate on South Carolina’s death row, having been convicted, not once, but three times, for the murder of Dorothy Edwards; the case had attracted national media attention; Elmore’s lawyers were now trying to blame
Holloway Senior, who, Bentley wrote, had been a “pillar of the community.”

Then Bentley effectively turned the space over to Holloway. What had been intended as an op-ed ran as if Bentley had interviewed Holloway.

“The story’s three main parts are sex, violence and racism,” Holloway wrote. That was sure to keep any reader interested.

It would be hard for Holt to make a case that his father had carried out the violent act and raped Mrs. Edwards, he went on. He then laid out for the readers of
The Index-Journal
personal information about his father that they would not have found anywhere else, not even if they had read every page of the record from all three trials. His dad was five foot seven and weighed about 155 pounds, Holloway began. He “wore a hernia truss, similar to a man’s athletic supporter in that it has a supporting undercarriage. The difference is that the truss has a six-inch-wide waistband made of heavy medical elastic designed to hold and support stomach muscles from rupture.”

He went on to say that if it were a trial and Holt were the prosecutor, she would “have to overcome the jurists’ mental picture of a smallish, elderly man gaining entrance by knocking an exterior door from its hinges.

“While using one hand to restrain a horrified woman fighting for her life, he uses the other to extract himself from his hernia truss. After a successful sexual encounter, he summons the energy to stab her 66 times and, without rupturing himself, drags the body to a closet.”

Holloway Junior had taken some liberty with the facts—Mrs. Edwards had allowed the killer in, the door was not knocked off the hinges, there weren’t sixty-six stab wounds, and she had not been raped. Holloway was entitled to these liberties, playing defense lawyer for his own father. But if he had been a witness in a courtroom and subject to cross-examination, his defense might not have persuaded a jury. In January 1982, Holloway Senior had been strong enough to lift a five-gallon canister of kerosene out of the trunk of Mrs. Edwards’s car and lug it into
her den. He was working in his woodshop regularly and was even building a boat. The onset of his illnesses, including diabetes and the need for kidney dialysis, wasn’t until the late 1980s, his son said years later.

As Holloway came to the conclusion of his op-ed–cum–“A Letter To Our Readers,” he turned on Holt. She had asked his father hypothetical questions, he said, and then proceeded with an argument that was somewhat hard to follow. “The word ‘might’ is a wonderfully permissive word,” he wrote. “It allows one to say something without being responsible for its factual correctness. By saying something might be, you are also saying something might not be. Therein lies the protection.” Holloway was building up.

“I could also probably find someone who would be willing to say Holt ‘might’ be a pedophile.” Produce some documents, he said, “and I can publicly infer that she has had sex with little boys and girls.”

Holloway wasn’t trying to “tank her case,” he would explain. “I had one objective: to keep my Daddy in the ground.”

Whatever Holloway’s objectives, Holt took it personally; she was hurt and angry. “Unadulterated horseshit,” she said about his claim that she had asked his father hypothetical questions. She wanted to sue Holloway for libel. Her husband, and just about everyone else whose advice she sought, cautioned her against it. Her friend Marta Kahn said she shouldn’t; but she understood why Diana felt she had to, and she knew that once Diana decided she was going to do something, there was no way to stop her. Diana sued Holloway. The statements made by Holloway “impugned my character and attacked my reputation for honesty, morality, and chastity,” she alleged. “The statements also attacked my reputation and professionalism as an attorney and accused me of being unethical and dishonest in my actions as an attorney. One of the statements even went so far as to accuse me of being a pedophile.”

I
N
E
LMORE’S CASE
, Holt lost the motion to have Holloway’s father exhumed. It didn’t matter that an unidentified Caucasian
hair had been found on Mrs. Edwards’s body, Judge Kinard said. “One hair from the victim’s body from the bedroom floor that could have come from various sources does not mandate a new trial,” he ruled. “Even if DNA testing showed the single hair to be Holloway’s, the prior jury verdicts would not have been undermined.” Kinard would also not allow Elmore’s lawyers to test the blood on the jeans and shoes. “I will not now authorize further testing,” Kinard asserted sternly.

Young Holloway adopted the same line of reasoning. “So what if that was my father’s hair?” he said in an interview in his office. “I guarantee you, the first thing he would have done when he found that body was reach across, and that is when his hair could have fallen on her.” This seemed a strange response, an indirect admission that it had been his father’s hair. Further, there was nothing in the record that indicated his father had leaned across the body, that he had done anything more than open the door and look in. Told this, Holloway responded that there were plenty of other ways his dad’s hair could have gotten on the body. “Everybody knows he was in that house, many times,” he said. “How does it get on her body? I don’t know. Open the door, whoof, the wind blows one of his hairs on her.”

I
T WAS SPRING
2004. Diana’s emotions were stretched. Elmore’s fate was now in the hands of the justices of the South Carolina Supreme Court. Her twenty-year-old son, Justin, was also facing death. Following the 9/11 attacks, in a burst of patriotism he had joined the army. In March, Diana saw him off for Iraq, a member of the Second Regiment of the Fifth Cavalry Division, out of Fort Hood, Texas. Even before reaching Iraq, while still in Kuwait, he had cut and burned his hands when munitions he was handling exploded. On the drive to Baghdad, one of the men in his vehicle got out and into the vehicle in front. A few miles later, Justin came upon his friend, his head and body crushed; the vehicle had crashed. In Baghdad, Justin’s unit was assigned to Sadr City, where anti-Americanism seethed. Seven men from his unit were killed in the first week. In e-mails and phone conversations, Justin told his mom about searching for
body parts from men in his unit who had been blown away. He was scared. On guard duty, he worried about mortars, and when he went on patrol, he told his mom, he saw Iraqis who hated Americans.

In a conflict familiar to many Americans, Diana found that her love and support for her son clashed with her views about the war. On a towering pine in the front yard of her modest redbrick home on a leafy cul-de-sac, the Stars and Stripes flew from a pole at roughly forty-five degrees; a yellow bow was wrapped around the huge tree trunk. On Holt’s black Volvo, the silver metallic license plate frame said “Army Mom.” She had also affixed a bumper sticker: “Bush Is Lying. Soldiers Are Dying.”

Holt worked at home, in the glassed-in porch with an idyllic view of a pond. There was a mimosa tree just outside her window, which she’d planted to remind her of the tree she escaped to as a child in Houston. In the spring, it yielded its wispy pom-poms; long-necked Canada geese, a blue heron, and baby mallards with their mother waddled about. “It’s comforting,” Diana said. Legal papers were scattered on the floor, along with a bag of chips. Dressed in Ralph Lauren blue jeans and a striped jersey, she fidgeted in front of a large flat-screen computer monitor. An e-mail came in from her daughter-in-law in Texas: Diana was about to become a grandmother.