Central Park rape: 13 years on, district attorney calls for youths to be cleared

One of the most brutal crimes in New York's recent history may have ended in one of its gravest miscarriages of justice.

Manhattan's district attorney called for the five men convicted of the 1989 rape and beating of a Central Park jogger to be cleared.

The woman, then a 28-year-old investment banker for the Wall Street firm of Salomon Smith Barney, was left for dead at the foot of a hill in the northern reaches of the park. Her skull was severely fractured.

She was the worst casualty by far of an evening in April 1989 when dozens of teenagers descended on the park for a night of "wilding" - mugging cyclists, runners and walkers.

The case came to epitomise a city riven by violent lawlessness and racial tensions. The jogger was white and the five youths arrested for the crime were black and Hispanic.

The five made detailed and unequivocal videotaped confessions, several in the presence of their parents, which sent shockwaves through New York.

"We grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we got a bunch of turns getting on her," said Antron McCray, 15 at the time.

"This is my first rape ... I never did this before," Kharey Wise, 16, added. McCray and Wise, along with Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson, both 14, and Yusef Salaam, 15, were convicted of the rape, and of attacks on eight other people in the park that night, They were given sentences of between five and 15 years.

Only Santana remains in jail, on unrelated charges.

But earlier this year, Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer, made a startling claim from his prison cell: he said that he alone had raped the Central Park jogger.

"It's time," he told a television interviewer. He still thought of himself as a "monster", but jail counselling had motivated him to tell the truth.

The jogger remembers nothing of the attack. But DNA from semen found on her sock turned out to match Reyes's.

Plank after plank of the prosecution's case has since appeared to fall away: hairs found on the suspects were presented at the original trials as belonging to the jogger, but test results have contradicted that claim.

Many of the details in the confessions, furthermore, bear no relation to the facts.

Kharey Wise, especially, rambled off into make-believe, claiming the youths had also attacked a blue van full of police officers. The convicts' relatives have alleged coercion by New York police.

An investigation by the New York Times this week claimed that the gang, if they were involved in the other muggings to which they have been linked, could never have had time to loop back up above the park's North meadow, attack the jogger, drag her 300ft, then race back south to the reservoir where they were next spotted.

But that is not part of the convicted men's argument. They claim they were involved in no crimes at all. The district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, seemed to accept that yesterday when he urged that all convictions be revoked.

The final decision rests with state supreme court Justice Charles Tejada, who is expected to have a ruling by February 6.

The victim is reported to be working on a book about her life after the attack.

"Our clients are innocent of everything they were charged with. Matias Reyes's confession is substantiated by the DNA, and our clients's statements were coerced by one means or another," Roger Wareham, the lawyer for three of the five, said yesterday.

"They were children, kept separate from their parents, sleep-deprived, they weren't fed regularly, they were interrogated for 20 or more hours. All those factors certainly induce adults to make false statements."

They are "victims of a criminal justice system where race rather than truth determines guilt or innocence".

Sharonne Salaam, Yusef Salaam's mother, is one of many relatives campaigning for their 's exoneration. "Our children have paid a heavy price, and so have our families," she told reporters.

But their views enrage Mike Sheehan, a former NYPD detective of the old school who heard the confession that resulted in Reyes's conviction, and who was also involved in questioning the five boys in the jogger case that night in 1989.

"My blood pressure is about to bust through my head," he said. "These guys are laughing out loud. Once again the city will, say, give them $50m and let them go."

He strenuously denies that the confessions were coerced and believes Reyes's modus operandi as a rapist - acting alone, with advance planning - does not fit the facts in the jogger case. He believes Reyes appeared after the attack, assaulting the woman separately, which would explain the presence of his DNA.

It would also explain why, when Mr Sheehan took some of the suspects to the scene of the crime that night, they could not account for why the jogger was at the bottom of the hill. They had already confessed, and had no motive for lying about moving her.

"So Reyes takes her down the hill after they've gone," says Mr Sheehan, now a TV reporter. "He's a very, very sick guy. Of all the maniacs I sat across the table from in my career, he was one of the five sickest guys."