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| Kirk Bloodsworth |
Kirk Bloodsworth can still hear the sound of the 400-pound prison cell door closing on his life. Charged with the brutal rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl, he was convicted and sentenced to die in Maryland's gas chamber.
Bloodsworth spent nearly nine years in prison – two of those years on death row – for a crime he didn't commit. It was a crime that shocked the Baltimore, Md., area, dominating the news during the summer of 1984.
Overnight, Bloodsworth went from an anonymous, hard-working Cambridge, Md., waterman to a hated man fingered by five witnesses for the girl's murder.
He's also the first death-row inmate in the United States to be exonerated post-conviction by DNA testing. Although commonplace now, at the time of his trial, advanced DNA testing was not a common investigative technique. A tiny semen spot left by a depraved criminal saved Bloodsworth's life.
He was connected to the crime by a neighbor, who called police and said Bloodsworth looked like a composite sketch police had released. Five people, including the two young boys, identified Bloodsworth as the man they saw with the victim or near the crime scene.
Bloodsworth said he didn't come close to matching the description provided by witnesses who saw a man that day in the wooded area near Hamilton's home. That description was for a skinny man who was 6 feet, 5 inches tall with curly blond hair and a bushy mustache. Bloodsworth was 6 feet tall with red hair and glasses and was missing a tooth back then.
As it turned out, the real killer was 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed 160 pounds.
Bloodsworth said there was not one shred of physical evidence linking him to the crime, but comments he made were twisted around to make him appear guilty.
Bloodsworth was sent to the Maryland Penitentiary in 1985, one of the most notorious prisons in the country during the 1980s. “When I came in I could hear the cat calls from the other prisoners. They said they knew what I did, and they were going to do the same to me over and over. I was one of the most hated men there,” he said.
His new home was three steps long and as wide as his outstretched arms.
He talks about filling his ears with paper to keep the cockroaches out and flooding the cell's floor to keep cool in the summer. He saw an inmate get hit in the head with a sock full of batteries and another get stabbed over a snack cake. One of his best friends in prison stabbed himself in the eyes with pencils. Asked how he could survive under such deplorable conditions, Bloodsworth said, “I'm a Marine, so I could take a lot of stuff. It was like war. I did the best I could.”
Source: CapeGazette.com, Ron MacArthur, May 18, 2012
