After 22 Years, District Attorney’s Office to Examine Possible Innocence of Philadelphia Death-Row Prisoner

Twenty-two years after Walter Ogrod (pic­tured) was sen­tenced to death for a mur­der he insists he did not com­mit, a new Philadelphia District Attorney’s admin­is­tra­tion has dropped the office’s long-time oppo­si­tion to Ogrod’s request for DNA test­ing and has referred the case for review by a revi­tal­ized Conviction Integrity Unit. 

As that review pro­ceeds, an hour-long doc­u­men­tary on the case — aired April 8 as part of CNN’s Headline News Network series Death Row Stories—presents what Philadelphia Daily News colum­nist Will Bunch describes as ​“com­pelling evi­dence that the snitch tes­ti­mo­ny that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office used to con­vict Ogrod was fab­ri­cat­ed” and that the con­fes­sion the intel­lec­tu­al­ly impaired man gave to Philadelphia police was coerced. Ogrod was sen­tenced to death in 1996 for the high-pro­file 1988 mur­der of 4‑year-old Barbara Jean Horn, whose body was found dis­card­ed in a tele­vi­sion box on a Northeast Philadelphia street. 

No phys­i­cal evi­dence linked Ogrod to the mur­der, but four years after the mur­der, police ques­tioned the 25-year-old truck dri­ver — var­i­ous­ly described as ​“slow,” pos­si­bly autis­tic, and lack­ing ​“com­mon sense” — for 14 hours, telling him he was repress­ing mem­o­ries of the mur­der. In the doc­u­men­tary, a friend of Ogrod’s recounts that Ogrod signed a con­fes­sion after police told him that if he didn’t, he would have to wait for a lawyer in a hold­ing area with oth­er pris­on­ers and ​“you know what they do to child moles­ters down there.” 

Author Tom Lowenstein, who inves­ti­gat­ed the case and wrote the 2017 book The Trials of Walter Ogrod, says in the doc­u­men­tary that the 16-page con­fes­sion, hand writ­ten by the detec­tive, ​“is a flow­ing mono­logue of thought and process and descrip­tion that Walter Ogrod is not capa­ble of…. He could not have giv­en the confession.” 

Ogrod was tried twice for the mur­der. In 1993, the jury in his first tri­al appeared to have acquit­ted him, fill­ing out ​“not guilty” on the ver­dict sheet. But as the ver­dict was being read, one juror said he had changed his mind, result­ing in a mistrial. 

Following the mis­tri­al, Ogrod was celled with John Hall, a noto­ri­ous (and lat­er dis­cred­it­ed) jail­house infor­mant nick­named ​“The Monsignor” for his pro­cliv­i­ty in pro­duc­ing con­fes­sions. Hall’s wid­ow, Phyllis Hall, explains in the doc­u­men­tary that Hall intro­duced Ogrod to anoth­er pris­on­er, Jay Wolchansky, and worked with police and pros­e­cu­tors to feed Wolchansky infor­ma­tion to impli­cate Ogrod in the mur­der. Wolchansky then tes­ti­fied against Ogrod in his sec­ond tri­al, claim­ing that Ogrod had confessed. 

Phyllis Hall says her hus­band ​“would get some of the truth and he would sit in his cell and make up sto­ries — and he was darned good at it.” 

For years, Philadelphia’s dis­trict attor­neys — first Lynne Abraham, who over­saw Ogrod’s pros­e­cu­tion, and lat­er her suc­ces­sor, Seth Williams — fought requests from Ogrod’s lawyers to test DNA evi­dence that might prove his inno­cence. While cam­paign­ing for District Attorney in 2017, Krasner told Bunch ​“it is clear that for decades the prac­tice and pol­i­cy of the District Attorney’s Office has been to win con­vic­tions at any cost, too often at the cost of justice itself.” 

When he took office in January 2018, Krasner ran­kled many entrenched pros­e­cu­tors by empha­siz­ing a reform agen­da that includ­ed a will­ing­ness to take a look at ques­tion­ably obtained past con­vic­tions. Krasner has not spo­ken about the specifics of the Ogrod case, but told Bunch, ​“Four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn was mur­dered. If the wrong per­son went to death row for it — and I spec­i­fy that I am say­ing if—then the per­son who did mur­der her walked free.”