Accused: The unsolved murder of Retha Welch

Retha Welch was a God-fearing mother of four children. She was soft-hearted and trusting, her friends said. The 54-year-old Coshocton native had fought to right her life after struggling to overcome addictions to drugs and alcohol, and she was unusually empathetic – so much so that, in her free time, she went to prisons to minister convicts because she reasoned most of them were simply addicts like she was. They just happened to have taken a wrong turn.

There but for the grace of God go I.

On April 13, 1987, Welch’s lifeless body was found in a pool of blood in her Newport apartment bathtub. She had been beaten and stabbed. An autopsy suggested she’d been sexually assaulted as semen from three men was discovered inside her. Police soon zeroed in on a convict she’d counseled, and within two weeks of Welch’s death, William “Ricky” Virgil was charged in her murder.

For police and prosecutors, the case was over. But not for Virgil.

He proclaimed his innocence to anyone who would listen. He filed lawsuits and legal briefs behind bars and eventually convinced a lawyer and investigator with the Kentucky Innocence Project that his case deserved a second look.

After 28 years in prison, Virgil was freed, his conviction reversed largely thanks to DNA testing. But he’s not cleared in Welch’s death. Campbell County Commonwealth’s Attorney Michelle Snodgrass and Newport police still point to Virgil as the likeliest culprit in the crime. They say there’s no longer enough evidence to convict Virgil a second time.

That’s the story that will unfold in these pages. The Cincinnati Enquirer spent a year re-examining Welch’s murder to figure out what happened in the original investigation. We began with the premise that one of two scenarios must be true: Either William Virgil killed Welch and the state can no longer prove its case, or he was innocent all along, meaning that the system indicted and punished the wrong man – and someone else got away with murder.

Something was amiss at the riverfront Newport Yacht & Tennis Club, but the people who lived there couldn’t quite figure out what felt wrong.

They lived in apartments, after all, and they weren’t the chattiest bunch. Neighbors’ hours could be unpredictable, and the apartments were the dingy, mid-rent type that catered largely to divorcees and the elderly. But, still, they were friendly to each other, saying hello as they passed, and they could hear each other coming and going through the thin floors and echoing hallways.

Welch's apartment had been quiet the past few days. No knocks on nearby doors asking for help with the VCR. No hasty footsteps getting ready for work in the morning. No faint hymns or religious chanting wafting down the corridors.

It wasn’t alarming, but it was odd. Welch was a divorcee who was usually among the friendliest in the complex. So it was mildly concerning to downstairs neighbor Richard Beale that the last time he’d seen her trademark pink Cadillac, Welch wasn’t in it. The driver appeared to be a man wearing a blue plaid shirt, and it looked to Beale as though the man was trying to hide his face.

Welch had always waved hello while driving by or swimming in the complex pool. Those who lived near her had only two complaints to level: Sometimes she kept a grandchild in her apartment overnight, which wasn’t embraced in the adults-only complex, and she occasionally sang her Christians hymns a bit loud. She wasn’t rude, and she rarely let her treasured Cadillac drive away without her.

Beale, readying for a jog, squinted at the fleeing car in vain for a better look. He thought it was strange, but the sight wasn’t amiss enough to call the police.

Later, Beale would testify that he regretted not making that phone call.

Welch wasn’t the type to miss work without calling. She had, in fact, taken off April 9, 1987 – a Thursday – so she could spend the day with her boyfriend. She called in first. She’d be back to work as scheduled on Sunday, she said at the time.

But Sunday came and went with no word. When Welch didn’t arrive Monday, her co-workers grew worried.

Welch's ministry to convicts was known to her colleagues, and they sometimes worried about her. One police report stated Welch had complained to friends at work that one of the convicts had stolen her credit card.

Harold Vick, then a 35-year-old nurse, lived on the Kentucky side of the metro Cincinnati area. He drove past the Newport exits to get home every day.

“I said, ‘Well, look, this is on my way home. Why don’t I stop by? Give me her address and let me stop by and see if she’s OK,’” Vick recalled.

He didn’t know Welch well. She worked the day shift and he, the night, so their conversations were brief and in passing. But he knew she cared about helping people. She was, he said, “kind of one of those bleeding hearts that went around trying to save people.”

It made sense for her job. Welch was a psychiatric nurse who worked at the Cincinnati Veterans hospital. Soft hearts went with the territory, Vick said: “The psychiatric unit’s kind of full of that.”

Vick arrived at the complex and asked a groundskeeper for help finding Welch’s specific unit. When they found it, Vick’s worry grew to dread. The door wasn’t locked, and as he pushed it open, he saw a mess of chaos and blood.

“I knew something was wrong because there were things all over the place,” Vick said. “I didn’t have a cell phone, so I said, ‘Go call the police, something’s happened here.’”

The groundskeeper ran off. Vick surveyed the scene.

“There were broken things and things overturned, and old, dark spots on the floor that I thought might be blood,” Vick said. “And I walked in carefully, and I was yelling for her. And when I walked into the bathroom, she was in the bathtub.”

Welch's face was pale, her eyes, cloudy. Vick, though still a young nurse, had seen death enough to know Welch was gone, and that whatever caused it had been violent.

Her hair was dried and matted against her face in a way that suggested she’d been wet at some point inside the bathtub. Blood stained the tub, her hair and her clothes.

“I don’t get upset easily, let’s say that,” Vick said, “but it was somewhat horrifying to see the state that she was in and the fact that there was blood.”

Laralyn Sasaki was a young Enquirer reporter in 1987 when she heard about a murder across the river in Newport.

The town wasn’t the family-friendly place it’s touted as being in 2017. In the late 1980s, it was still rebuilding its reputation after decades of corruption and scandal. Mob bosses ran the streets while police officials took bribes to ignore certain crimes and award promotions within the department. Most of the region’s biggest vice cases originated in Newport.

Murder was still pretty rare, Sasaki said, but Welch’s case stood out for more than that.

“It was big news because of how badly she was brutalized,” she said. “She was allegedly raped and murdered and stabbed and all of that, and that was, of course, a big deal at any paper.”

Sasaki reported that officials believed Welch had been dead at least three days before she was found, though that timing was soon questioned by Virgil's defense lawyer. (Lawyer Robert Patton believed the coroner tailored the time to match the police theory that Welch died on Thursday, but he felt the body wasn't bloated enough to have been dead more than a couple of days.)

Sasaki and other reporters had already been spending time in Newport. Just two days before Welch’s body was found, city police had shot and killed a knife-wielding man on Columbia Avenue, less than a mile from Welch’s apartment complex. An internal investigation was under way, and the tale of Isaac Grubbs – the man killed when officers fired four bullets into his body – was making its share of newsprint.

The three officers involved in the Grubbs shooting were put on leave, then reinstated after an internal investigation found no wrongdoing. 

Timing and location aside, police at the time said the cases weren’t connected.

James Becker was Welch’s boyfriend. They’d met a good decade earlier, and they’d been an on-and-off couple ever since.

James Becker had helped Welch work through her drug addiction and alcoholism. It had been a rough road, as addiction struggles tend to be, but Becker felt they were reaching light at the end of a dark tunnel.

All that changed with her death.

“I swear I didn’t kill her. I loved her,” Becker told Newport Police Detective Marc Brandt in a 1987 statement. “You know, if anything I loved her. I swear that. I’ll take your polygraph test or whatever to prove to you I didn’t kill her. I wouldn’t hurt that woman for nothing in the world.”

Becker made good on his word to try to prove his innocence: Brandt told a grand jury in 1988 that Becker had, in fact, taken a polygraph, otherwise known as a lie-detector test. He passed it, Brandt said. Thirty years later, The Enquirer would learn from Becker’s son that, polygraph aside, James Becker had lied to police about at least one thing. More on that later.

First, here’s what Becker said about his last encounter with Welch: The two had spent Wednesday and Thursday together – April 8 and 9, 1987. They’d had sex and, despite Welch’s battle with alcoholism, a few drinks.

They’d also spent considerable time messing around with VCRs, both rented and purchased. It’s a complicated tale, but the gist was that Welch had bought a VCR from an electronics store in the morning, and then she had trouble hooking it up to her television. Becker tried to connect it, knocking down some decorations from her living room wall in his attempt, but he failed at the new technology. Welch summoned a neighbor named Tom Whisner to help and he got it working, so she and Becker watched half of the 1987 movie "Top Gun," which they’d rented.

(Whisner, reached recently for this story, said he remembered keeping an apartment as a “temporary office” in Welch’s complex, but said he couldn’t remember Welch, her death or having helped her with her VCR, though he added that he must have because he told police he had at the time. Whisner said that Welch’s name sounded vaguely familiar, “almost like it’s tickling some brain cells,” but that he couldn’t remember anything specific.)

Midway through the movie, Welch and Becker packed up and went to Becker’s apartment, which was about a 10-minute drive. For some reason, they didn’t bring the new VCR with them. Instead, they rented a different video player from Kroger – video playback devices were expensive back then and renting them fairly commonplace – but the machine they’d rented wasn't compatible with videos they had, so Welch and Becker went back to her apartment to retrieve the purchased VCR.

It was during this return trip that Becker said someone knocked on Welch’s door. She opened it and Becker got a glimpse of a well-built black man wearing a gray hooded sweat suit, with the hood pulled up so that only his face was exposed. Becker, annoyed by the presence of this other man, walked ahead with the VCR to wait for Welch in her car. When she finally emerged from her apartment building, she said that the hooded man had just checked himself out of the hospital and needed a place to crash. She planned to let him stay in her apartment.

Becker said he balked. He didn’t want another man spending the night in his girlfriend’s apartment.

“Tell him you’re off for the night,” he told Welch.

She refused. “Jesus wouldn’t like it,” she replied.

She asked Becker to stay with her and the other man in her apartment, but he declined. He was angry, after all. As he testified the next year in trial: “I could have killed her myself that night. I was mad.”

Becker’s son, Tony, was a teenager when Welch died. He said recently that his father, who died in 2015, had been strict and protective of him as he was growing up.

“My dad was straight military, 23 years in the Marine Corps,” Tony Becker said. After leaving the Corps, the elder Becker worked for a while at Wiedemann Brewing Co., a beer company based in Newport.

(Empty bottles of Wiedemann's beer were recovered from her abandoned car the day after her body was found.)

“My dad’s always been a great man, highly respected by everybody,” Tony Becker said.

But he acknowledged that his father didn’t tell police everything about his last encounter with Welch. The elder Becker had said he was alone with Welch when the hooded man appeared, but Tony Becker said that wasn’t true. The then-teenager said he had gone with his dad to Welch’s apartment for dinner. He, too, spotted the hooded man in the apartment complex hallway, he said, but his father apparently withheld from police his involvement to protect him.

“I was right there with him and I saw the guy,” Tony Becker said. He clarified: He never saw the man’s face, and when the newspaper ultimately ran a photograph of William Virgil, he didn’t recognize him as the culprit.

“I didn’t say that it was him. I didn’t know that because I didn’t see the guy’s face,” Tony Becker said. “But I saw a guy with a hoodie and a sweat suit there.”

He doesn’t know if his father got a good look at the man, either. Tony Becker’s memory is that the hallway was poorly lit and the hooded man was turning his head away from them as they walked past Welch in the doorway and headed to leave, James Becker upset that his dinner plans with his girlfriend had been hijacked by a stranger.

“I walked out in front, and my dad was right there, right behind me, as we walked past the guy,” he said.

Because James Becker apparently never told police his son was with him this night, police never asked Tony Becker what he saw. But James Becker cooperated. He tentatively identified Virgil as the hooded man he’d seen in a photo lineup, and then became more convinced of the identification after seeing Virgil’s photo in the newspaper.

Brandt, the detective, told the grand jury that Becker might have also used the name “Ricky” to identify Virgil, and he provided proof that Virgil had on Thursday checked himself out of an Ohio hospital after being treated for several days with severe headaches.

Tony Becker never knew that his father was called to testify in the case.

“All he told me was just that he had an interview with the courts and stuff, and that was it,” the younger Becker said. “He was the one who called (police) because we were the last ones to see her. So he called them once he heard about everything.

“It was just so brutal. Man, we just couldn’t believe it.”

As word spread about Welch’s fate, the disbelief spread, too.

Welch’s pastor was a West Indes-born man named Nestor Stroude. He had to share the heartbreaking news with his tight-knit congregation. He had known Welch well. She was the type to tithe, donating to the church a portion of her modest income. When she left town, she made a point of telling Stroude and his wife, Tommie, who died in 2016.

Welch had, in fact, stopped by just days earlier with news she’d be out of town. As Stroude remembers it, she was headed to Florida.

“She told us she loved us and she went on vacation,” he said. “Three days after, we heard that she was dead.”

Her death hit the congregation hard. Welch had been vivacious and devout. She brought visitors to the church regularly, and she’d made friends as a volunteer minister who counseled inmates in local jails and prisons.

“Everyone was obviously shocked and experienced the pain of the loss,” Stroude said. “But they are people of strong faith because that’s one of the things that I imparted into the congregation. The whole idea is to trust God regardless of the circumstances. Otherwise, your faith is not really functional. It’s just something you believe in your head.”

Wanda VonHolle had known Welch for years. She described her friend as “wonderful, vivacious, full of life, happy, successful.”

“She had had a rough time,” VonHolle said. “She had a problem with alcohol and drugs in the past, which she overcame, and she was very religious. She was just exuberant. She was someone you were proud to have for a friend.”

But, she added, Welch was naïve. She routinely invited the inmates she counseled into her home, despite warnings from family members, friends and even Stroude, who oversaw the ministry.

After Welch’s death, some of those inmates told authorities that the relationships were sexual in nature, an assertion Welch’s family denies. VonHolle never suspected sex was in the mix, but she still didn’t approve of Welch opening her doors to men with criminal pasts.

“She wanted to help humanity, and she went too far,” VonHolle said. “She was too trusting.”

For then-teenage Tony Becker, Welch’s death was a pivotal moment in his young life. He had never lost someone he loved before. He learned of the death from his father, James Becker, who shoved in the teen's hands a newspaper story about Welch’s slaying.

“I just looked at it, and my whole body just got numb, just numb,” Tony Becker said. “Like, ‘No way, not Retha.’ And I just froze up and then I just sat next to my pops and scooted over to him to comfort him because he was bawling. And the next thing I knew, I started bawling because I couldn’t believe it.”

Welch was the last person in his life he could envision meeting such a horrid end, he said – not such a “kind woman who has so much faith in the Lord.”

“I thought she had powers,” he said.

Marc Brandt, then a 31-year-old detective heading the investigation into Welch’s death, was a high-ranking member of the Newport Police Department and, yet, still something of a novice when it came to murder investigations.

Newport had plenty of crime, but it mostly fell under the “vice” heading – gambling, drugs, prostitution and illegal booze sales. Brandt had worked for years in vice, and he’d been shot twice, too. But, as rough and tumble as Newport was, homicides were rare. The city typically might tally a couple per year at most.  

In his testimony before a grand jury, Brandt acknowledged feeling overwhelmed when he walked into Welch’s apartment to begin his murder investigation.

“What happens on one of these is you get a call to go somewhere, and you walk into a house and you find a dead body, and you see everything scattered all over, and you have absolutely no idea what to do, where to go with it,” Brandt said. “You do the things you’re taught and you collect the evidence.”

Brandt and his colleagues bagged area rugs and the broken pitcher and a soggy cigarette butt found floating in Welch’s toilet. They gingerly packaged items so that trace evidence – hairs, for example – wouldn’t shake loose before reaching the lab. They took photographs of the chaotic scene and of Welch’s body. They spotted a bloody shoe print on the white tiled floor in Welch’s bathroom and snapped a picture of its swirly pattern.

Then came witness statements and anonymous phone calls as Brandt attempted to piece together what Welch was doing prior to her death. Brandt said some of the tips that he fielded didn’t pan out. The ones that did seemed to center on Virgil.

Among the leads, he said: Sue Danial, a girlfriend of Virgil’s, told police that he began plotting to kill a “church lady” across the river soon after his January 1987 release from state prison, where Welch counseled him as he was held in the Chillocothe facility.

Danial stated that Virgil first approached her with a plan to kill Welch in February 1987, just weeks after his release and two months before Welch died. Danial told her probation officer, Bill Wilson, a man she claimed regularly bought drugs from her. Wilson didn’t alert his bosses, he told police, because he thought Danial was mentally unstable and prone to lie.

Instead, Wilson said he told Danial to go into drug treatment, stop contacting Virgil and “get herself straightened out or she was going to find herself in some serious trouble.”

What Brandt didn’t testify to was that, per his reports, Danial wasn’t the only woman who at some point told police Virgil tried to recruit her help to kill. Another police report describes almost the exact scenario Danial testified to – that Virgil reached out some two months before Welch’s death and asked her to help him “kill the woman Welch.”

In documents found in the files, Betty Kelow, another of Virgil’s many girlfriends, also made the claim. Oddly, her statement came during a police interrogation in which she repeatedly had denied Virgil was capable of killing anyone.

Kelow had said this again and again: I don’t want to cause him any trouble. He isn’t the type to do this. He told me he didn’t do it.

And then, detectives turned off the tape recorder for 17 minutes. Once they turned it back on, Kelow’s story had dramatically changed: Virgil had asked her help to kill, she said.

Despite this damning statement, Kelow ultimately was not called to testify in trial. Reached earlier this year for this story, she refused to explain what had happened during the interrogation to cause her story to change. Instead, she left a profanity-laced voicemail asking that she not be contacted again.

Brandt, who has not responded to repeated requests for comment, quit the Newport Police Department soon after the investigation began. He told the jury that he’d taken a job at Fifth Third bank.

According to Enquirer archives, Brandt had been shot twice in the line of duty in the 1980s, and he was quoted as saying the close calls had upset his wife. His colleagues didn’t seem surprised by the career change.

When he left, he handed over the Welch investigation to another detective. That detective soon quit, too. By the time Virgil faced trial, the bulk of law-enforcement testimony against him would be provided by two former officers, neither of whom had been dedicated long to his case.

Their testimony was supposedly bolstered by other circumstantial evidence, most notably:

• Danial's assertion that Virgil asked her to help with the murder.

• Hair collected at the scene that state experts asserted was microscopically similar to Virgil’s.

• Shoe prints that experts said were similar to the pair Virgil wore.

• A spot of blood determined to be human on the inside tongue of Virgil’s shoe.

• One fingerprint identified as Virgil’s was found on a lamp in her living room.

• A jailhouse informant's testimony that Virgil confessed the crime to him.

Serologists – or scientists who study bodily fluids – had found three different semen samples inside of Welch’s body, in both her vagina and anus, but DNA testing was brand new in 1987, and not nearly as sensitive as it is today. The lab could only determine blood type of the donors, and Virgil couldn’t be excluded as one of them.

Virgil was a longtime criminal who’d just been released in January from state prison. He was, he said, a disappointment to his parents. He said his mother had worked for Procter & Gamble and his father ran a dry-cleaning business. He was raised an only child, one who could have studied abroad overseas.

He’d been a stellar baseball player, he said, even getting scouted in high school by the Cincinnati Reds. But he was rebellious and had long been drawn to criminal pursuits. It broke his mother's heart especially. 

She died of a heart attack in 1978.

By the time Virgil was released from prison in January 1987, his rap sheet was hefty.

In 1973, he served two years of a 10-25-year prison sentence for armed robbery. A year after his release in 1975, he was charged with rape in connection with an assault he admitted against a girlfriend at the time. For that he was sentenced to 14 to 50 years in prison, but released after six. 

In 1983, he faced charges of burglary, receiving stolen property and carrying a concealed weapon. He was on parole for that conviction when Welch was killed. 

About two weeks after Welch died, he was detained by his parole officer for leaving the state without permission. He said he didn’t know that Welch had died. He thought he was being nailed for violating the conditions of his parole, and he was ready to lie in hopes of beating the charge.

So when Brandt asked him whether he’d ever been to Kentucky, Virgil said no. Brandt told him police had a photograph of him sitting in Retha Welch’s kitchen, so Virgil came clean: Yes, fine, I’ve been to her apartment. So what?

“Then he told me that she had been murdered,” Virgil told The Enquirer in a June interview. “I sat a few minutes and didn’t say anything. He started asking me a bunch of questions, like where was I? Automatically, living that lifestyle, I’m like, ‘OK, am I a suspect in this crazy stuff?’”

According to law enforcement, Virgil was then – and still is – the only suspect in Welch’s death.

Virgil said then, and maintains today, that he had nothing to do with it. Brandt did not believe him, and neither do Welch’s grown children. Campbell County Commonwealth’s Attorney Michelle Snodgrass has said in court several times that the jury rightly convicted Virgil, but she’s still declining to pursue charges now that Virgil’s conviction has been overturned.

For his part, Virgil spent the first few years of his conviction figuring the time he was serving was payback for the other bad stuff he’d done and gotten away with.

“There’s stuff that I did then that I know I paid for in that 28 years because karma is a beast,” he said. “Regardless of the fact that I was innocent of this, I was still paying for things that I had done.”

He’s not talking about violence, he said, but still things "contrary to God’s laws."

“The Bible says you reap what you sow, and you do,” Virgil said.

Science has advanced lightyears since the evidence was collected in Welch’s slaying.

Much of the mountain of circumstantial evidence that seemed to solidly point to Virgil back in 1988 has become far shakier, and the most critical advancement – DNA testing on even tiny amounts of biological material – points elsewhere altogether.

A rundown:

• Microscopic hair analysis has been undermined, declared inaccurate in more than 90 percent of cases, according to a 2015 FBI study.

• The shoe prints featured so prominently in the trial were, in fact, largely useless because they were smudged and improperly photographed, making them impossible to compare.

• The blood inside of Virgil’s shoe did not belong to Welch, as prosecutors hinted during trial.

• The semen recovered from Welch’s body did not match Virgil's DNA.

None of this would have been discovered if Snodgrass, the prosecutor, had won in court.

Snodgrass is a former broadcast journalist who began working for then-Commonwealth’s Attorney Jack Porter as an assistant prosecutor in 2001. Six years later, when Porter retired, she was appointed to take her former boss’ place, and she’s held the post ever since.

In a 2015 profile that ran in The Enquirer, Snodgrass said she aims to speak for crime victims but added that she’s not unsympathetic to those she prosecutes, either.

“Sometimes my heart breaks for the person I am prosecuting,” she said then. “Good people make bad mistakes. Most of the time, there is tragedy all around: for the victims and for the defendants, and their families.”

Snodgrass agreed to an in-person interview for this story, but canceled the night before it was scheduled. The Enquirer’s efforts to reschedule that interview have not been successful.

She said in a brief phone conversation that she’s limited anyway about what she can say regarding the case.

“Unfortunately, under my ethical rules, there’s not really much I can say about it, because of the status of the case,” Snodgrass said.

With Virgil’s conviction overturned, the case is once again open, though Newport Police Chief Tom Collins said he isn’t pursuing new angles because Welch’s family hasn’t asked him to.

Elliot Slosar, a Chicago-based lawyer representing Virgil in a civil lawsuit against police and prosecutors, said he's still trying to solve the case. He's examining other murder cases that had been flagged as similar to Welch's back in 1987 to see if connections were overlooked.

The civil suit is weaving its way through court. Depositions are under way.

While Snodgrass won't talk much about Virgil now, she had been vocal about him during various court hearings over the past seven years, which is when the Kentucky Innocence Project adopted Virgil as a client. The organization pushed for DNA testing of the evidence. Snodgrass fought against that testing, saying it wasn’t allowed by law and was pointless anyway because "the jury got this right.”

“There were 12 jurors that sat here and heard the case. To say that their decision and that their verdict was not the truth, I think, is a slap in the face to every one of them,” Snodgrass told Judge Fred Stine in a 2011 court hearing.

“I disagree that an innocent man is in prison,” Snodgrass said in another hearing. At yet another: “(Virgil) had his chance to search for the truth ... He exhausted those remedies."

Snodgrass also said allowing the DNA testing would be unfair to Welch’s family, who has the right to expect closure after the conviction and appeals process. 

Lastly, she argued that if the court allowed biological testing, it would “open the floodgates” for anyone else wanting DNA testing.

“Why are we picking and choosing?” she asked Stine. “It seems like we are affording Mr. Virgil a right that another prisoner at the same facility as him, in a similarly situated situation, does not get.”

As Virgil languished in prison, one aspect of his trial ate at him more than others. It came courtesy of a fellow convict whom Virgil said he’d never met before.

Joe Womack was a 23-year-old man serving time for his first state conviction at the Lebanon Correctional Facility when he took the stand in Virgil’s trial and testified for the prosecution.

The tale Womack told was damning: He said that in August, about four months after Welch was killed, he and Virgil shared a cell while in isolation together.

The two shared a couple of marijuana joints a friend had smuggled in for Womack and the pair got to talking. That’s when, Womack said, Virgil confessed to murder.

According to Womack, Virgil had gone to see Welch and tried to get money from her. They drove to the store in her pink Cadillac and then came back to her apartment.

“Then he said they got into an argument,” Womack testified. “He bust her in the head. He panicked and he stabbed her.”

Virgil’s defense lawyer at the time, Robert Patton, pressed Womack for more detail during the trial. “Did he tell you approximately how many times he stabbed this woman?” Patton asked.

“He said he stabbed her a whole bunch of times,” Womack testified.

Asked what Virgil did with Welch's body, Womack said: “He drug her into the bathroom and put it in the bathtub.”

Womack had details that prosecutors said only someone who had spoken with the killer would know: He knew Welch’s name, the approximate number of stab wounds she endured, the type of car she drove and what had been used to bash her skull before the stabbing.

As a jailhouse informant, Womack’s credibility was challenged on the stand. He said he was testifying to clear his own conscience because Virgil’s release would endanger women everywhere.

“I’ve got a mother, sister out there. And if you let that guy out there, man. If these jurors of his peers let him walk, do you know what I’m saying?” Womack testified. “I’m putting a little more values and scruples in my life. I’m getting a little bit more morals.”

Patton pressed: What are you getting out of testifying today?

“Not a McDonald’s hamburger,” Womack answered.

Virgil, serving as his own co-counsel, also aggressively cross-examined Womack himself. The scene was tense and confrontational.

“You got a raggedy defense,” Womack said in front of the jury.

Patton objected, then warned Womack: “We’re asking the questions, son. You’re just supposed to answer them.”

“Announce me as Joe, sir. I’m Mr. Womack,” he shot back.

Virgil kept his line of questioning focused. He said he knew he couldn't get Womack to admit that Virgil never confessed, so it'd be one convict's word against another.

Instead, Virgil hammered Womack about the isolated cell the two were supposed to have shared.

“So if I check the records, it’ll show that you and I celled together?” he challenged. Womack never wavered: That’s right. We shared a cell.

To onlookers, Virgil looked repetitive and unhinged. He asked the question again and again until the judge told him to stop. “Asked and answered,” Virgil was warned.

Virgil said he felt like Perry Mason.

“I really didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “I just felt like something just told me to stick to that particular matter ‘cause I felt like, if it was exposed that we weren’t in the cell together, which I knew the records would reflect, then it would prove that this man lied.”

And that mattered, he said: "From what I'd read, perjury was an issue that'd get your case reversed, and I knew that's what he did, so I didn't care about nothing else."

Whether the men shared a cell might seem an easy issue to verify or dispel within minutes. In truth, it took Virgil years – and a clever lawsuit – to get the state to acknowledge the truth: Womack lied about sharing a cell.

He did this by filing a lawsuit accusing the state of violating his rights. In the suit, he presented a statement: I was allowed a cellmate in isolation. The state replied: No, you weren't. No one is allowed cellmates while in isolation. That's how Womack's lie came to light.

Thirteen years of legal battles later, an appellate court ruled that the lie didn’t matter after all. Just because Womack lied about sharing a cell didn't mean the rest of his testimony was bogus, ruled the Kentucky Supreme Court.

Virgil’s conviction would stand.

Linda A. Smith, the Kentucky Innocence Project’s only full-time lawyer, got involved in Virgil’s case after this ruling.

The year was 2009, and the Project had been awarded $1 million in federal grant money named after Kirk Bloodsworth, a former Marine who became the first death row inmate exonerated based on DNA testing.

Aided by that money, Smith and a former military investigator named James “Jimmer” Dudley began sending questionnaires to Kentucky inmates trying to unearth wrongful convictions they should re-examine. Virgil applied. Several of his prison-mates also alerted Smith and Dudley to his case.

Smith and Dudley flagged Virgil’s application and marked it as one that looked promising. They set out to get all of the documents and court records they could, and they interviewed Virgil at length.

They believed the story he told them but, more than that, they exulted in the realization his case had biological matter to test.

“First we sent in a really detailed letter to the prosecutor and kind of outlined why his case had hallmarks of what we look for in terms of what could have gone wrong,” Smith recalled.

She listed some of the usual hallmarks: Was the case overly circumstantial? Was there a rush to judgment? Could an eyewitness identification have been faulty?

For Virgil’s case specifically, Smith focused on the semen collected from the scene. She asked Snodgrass, the prosecutor, to allow for testing rather than demand a court battle. Snodgrass declined, and was legally justified to do so: At that point in Kentucky, the law stated that post-conviction DNA testing was only allowed in death-penalty cases.

Virgil had been sentenced to 70 years in prison, not death. Snodgrass fought the Project’s request, and at first, she won. Judge Stine said he was limited by what the law allowed: “I don’t want to do something just because it’s the right thing to do,” he said in 2011.

So Smith and Dudley worked to change the law.

“There was a lot of pushback from prosecutors,” Smith said. “I think finality is a big issue giving victims peace of mind that the cases are settled. There was also kind of a fear that this would bring a deluge of cases.”

That’s the opening of “floodgates” that Snodgrass had predicted.

Smith’s efforts got the law changed in 2013, which finally allowed the testing in Virgil’s case. She said the floodgates have remained closed.

“That hasn’t happened in any other state,” she said, “and it hasn’t happened in Kentucky since the law was changed, either.”

The testing showed Virgil wasn’t among the three men who left semen inside her before she was killed. But those results weren’t enough to overturn the conviction.

As Snodgrass said in court hearings, Virgil hadn’t been convicted of – or even charged with – rape. His crime was supposedly murder.

Still, Snodgrass at one point seemed to point to the test results as proof of Virgil's guilt. In a hearing, she incorrectly asserted that Virgil's semen was found "on my dead victim's body." It wasn't. A spot of his DNA was found on a housecoat retrieved from her bathroom, but not on Welch's body. 

If Welch and Virgil had been sexually intimate, as Virgil contends, the housecoat semen could be explained by such a relationship.

(Welch’s daughter Holly Wise told The Enquirer in October she doesn’t believe a consensual relationship ever occurred, and so the discovery of his DNA in her mother’s apartment leads her to believe that Virgil must have had accomplices in the slaying that he’s keeping secret.)

With the DNA results seeming murky, Virgil’s new lawyers uncovered two more issues that helped bolster their argument that Virgil deserved a new case.

First, they learned that police hadn’t thoroughly investigated an alternate suspect who allegedly confessed the crime to his brother – and later destroyed the sole piece of evidence that could have proven his involvement.

Second, the lawyers tracked down and interviewed Womack, the jailhouse informant, who alleged a disturbing tale of corruption that, if true, suggested police and prosecutors conspired to frame Virgil.

Isaac Grubbs was a 27-year-old man with a lengthy criminal history whose life ended in gunfire April 11, 1987. That was the day he reportedly showed up uninvited to a woman’s house and demanded to see her daughter.

Grubbs had a knife, the woman told reporters at the time. She called police, and he lunged at them with the knife. Police opened fire, killing him.

“They tried to talk him down,” the woman told an Enquirer reporter at the time. She said she heard an officer say, “Isaac, drop the knife.”

The Enquirer is not naming the woman to avoid identifying her daughter, who was Grubbs’ girlfriend at the time and requested that her name not be published. That daughter said Grubbs had been violent toward her, and that she had been in hiding the day he died because he had threatened her for ending their relationship.

“I could tell you that he was violent when he was drinking. Very violent,” she said. “Could he have hurt somebody? Yeah.”

Grubbs’ death back in 1987 was reported as a separate incident from the Welch murder, and 30 years later, there’s no definitive proof the cases were connected. But Virgil’s lawyers have questions.

Grubbs had been charged and convicted for various crimes in his 27 years, including terroristic threatening, assault and trespass. He’d served time in prison for third-degree burglary and, based on the news reports from 1987, police knew him by name.

Newport's police chief at the time, Rick Huck, told reporters that Grubbs had an outstanding warrant because of a probation violation related to aggravated burglary. His then-girlfriend recently told The Enquirer that she recalled him calling her from jail after an arrest at least once in their two-month relationship.

His autopsy showed he’d known violence: Not only did then-Campbell County Coroner Fred Stine (father to Judge Fred Stine referenced earlier) find the four bullets fired by officers in Grubbs’ body, but he found a fifth bullet that had been lodged in an earlier altercation as well.

Grubbs was shot dead about three-quarters of a mile from Welch’s apartment two days before her body would be discovered by her coworker. She’d been stabbed, and Grubbs was armed with a knife.

These details weren't the only reasons Patton, Virgil’s original defense lawyer, came to believe that Grubbs perhaps was involved in Welch’s death. The lawyer also talked to Richard Beale, Welch's downstairs neighbor, who testified that he was sure he heard Welch's footsteps above him through Saturday. Another neighbor, Joe Sanderson, said he last saw Welch about 11 p.m. Friday.

The police theory was that Welch was killed Thursday, the day Becker said he saw a hooded man in her hallway.

Beale also said he saw Welch's Cadillac being driven away Saturday by a man in a blue plaid shirt. Another man – a convict named Brian Cave – said he spotted a guy in a blue plaid shirt suspiciously wiping a pink Cadillac clean in Covington, where Welch's car indeed was recovered the day after her body was found. 

Patton put another convict on the stand named Andrew Becker, no relation to Welch's boyfriend. Andrew Becker testified that he overheard Womack in jail saying he was framing Virgil for murder. In a recent interview, Andrew Becker stood by his testimony: "I know what I heard," he said.

Patton's favorite witness was a woman with no criminal past. Karen Walling testified that she’d seen Grubbs the day he died at the fishing lake she owned, a pay-for-the-day hole.

Walling said she’d dialed a phone number for an inebriated Grubbs, who screamed at and threatened the woman who answered. Walling said she remembered the number she’d dialed, and that it was Welch’s home phone number. Like Beale and Cave, she said the man she saw was dressed in blue plaid.

Walling has since died. Linda Spurlock, one of her daughters, said the Welch case bothered her until the end of her life. Spurlock said her mother and stepfather both talked about the case because they were certain they’d seen Grubbs intoxicated, threatening and armed with a knife the day he was shot dead by police.

“She would always be upset about it because she didn’t think it was right that someone innocent got arrested for something that they didn’t do,” Spurlock said.

Patton believed Walling’s tale and felt she’d been a solid witness on the stand because she had no connection to the case and no reason to lie.

He also believed her because he heard a tale from Grubbs’ brother that seemed to substantiate it.

“I had a fellow come in that I happened to know was a criminal, and he happened to be a half-brother by a different name to Isaac Grubbs,” Patton said. “And he said, ‘Yeah, Isaac came up to me and he said, ‘I want you to burn these clothing for me. I’ve gotten in an altercation or something with the lady down at the Yacht and Tennis Club,’ and he said, ‘I might have killed her.’”

The half-brother’s name was Billy Ray Hensley. Patton asked him to testify to spare Virgil a false conviction, but he said Hensley refused, saying his family was suing the Newport Police Department and wasn’t willing to jeopardize any payout.

The Enquirer has not been able to locate Hensley to confirm Patton’s story. Any connection between Grubbs and Welch’s death would be easy, thanks to modern science, to confirm or dismiss by testing the knife Grubbs was wielding when he died, but there’s a problem.

In 2016, Slosar, the Chicago lawyer representing Virgil in his civil suit, asked Campbell County officials to have three knives – two collected from Welch’s apartment, and one retrieved from Grubbs at his death scene – tested to see if any DNA might remain to link them to Welch’s death.

Instead, officials turned over a decade-old court order indicating that the Grubbs knife had been destroyed after one of Virgil’s appeals failed. It was the only piece of evidence stored in connection with Welch’s death to be ordered destroyed.

“There were other knives that they could have destroyed,” Slosar said. “There were other, larger items of physical evidence that they could have destroyed, and they chose not to. They chose to seek the destruction, and actually destroy, the single weapon that was recovered from an alternate suspect, who was killed by Newport police officers.”

That destruction order plays a key role in the civil suit Virgil has filed against Newport police and Campbell County officials as he tries to win money for wrongful conviction.

Equally important, however, is new testimony from Womack, the jailhouse informant who once testified that Virgil was a danger to women everywhere.

Slosar and Dudley, the Kentucky Innocence Project investigator, asked to interview Womack in prison in the summer of 2016. By then, they knew he’d lied about sharing a cell with Virgil, but they didn’t know why.

They were shocked Womack agreed to talk.

Jailhouse informant testimony is notoriously unreliable because it’s usually proffered by convicts looking to get better treatment in prison or time shaved off their sentences. Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at the University of California’s Irvine School of Law, wrote a book on the subject in 2009 called “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice.”

Snitches are “basically paid criminal offenders who the government is cutting a deal with in order to get information,” Natapoff told The Enquirer. “One of the most famous risks of using informants, of course, is that they’re going to lie, that they’re going to give false information in exchange for their own liberty, which many courts have recognized is just about the most tempting deal you can offer someone facing years in prison.”

But in Virgil’s case, Womack didn’t say he simply lied. He said he was both coerced and coached.

In a 12-page affidavit dated Aug. 9, 2016, Womack said Lebanon jail officials asked him to testify against Virgil, and at first he refused. He was put in isolation for 15 days as punishment, he said. After he was released, a corrections officer took him out of the cell and into a deputy superintendent’s office, where he was forced to wait in too-tight shackles for two hours.

Then the jail official showed Womack a photo of white woman and asked, “Did (Virgil) tell you how many times he stabbed her?”

“The detective made it clear to me that he wanted me to lie and say that William confessed to the murder,” Womack said in the affidavit.

Womack said he agreed to cooperate, and detectives began feeding him details about the crime and how it was committed to make his testimony more believable.

“The detective told me that if I gave a statement, and later testified falsely that William confessed to me, that he would get me out of prison,” Womack wrote.

Just before he was to testify, Womack said detectives helped him rehearse the false story they’d fed him. They even supplied a “cheat sheet” to help him study, he said.

“When I got the answers wrong, one detective got really angry at me because I didn’t have his cheat sheet memorized,” Womack said in his affidavit. “He threatened me. He went on a verbal tirade before leaving.”

C. Houston Ebert, a longtime Campbell County prosecutor who died in early 2016, was the prosecutor in Virgil's case. Womack's affidavit described him as a co-conspirator in the lie told on stand. He said one of Ebert's underlings even thanked him for cooperating in the investigation because it was helping to put Ebert's career back on track after alcoholism had threatened to derail it.

After the trial, "Hoot" Ebert wrote a letter to the head of the parole board praising Womack's role as a "material witness in the case," who "represented a large piece of the circumstantial puzzle of evidence we presented."

Womack said he believes that letter "resulted in my early release from prison after serving my minimum sentence." He served five years for an aggravated robbery and burglary charge that carried a maximum 25 years in prison.

(Both Patton, the original defense lawyer, and Judge Stine have said Ebert's reputation was beyond reproach. Stine ultimately recused himself from Virgil's case because he said he couldn't be impartial regarding allegations his friend Ebert did anything unethical.)

Slosar, Virgil's new lawyer, said he was floored by the allegations, especially those leveled against detectives. To him, they cast doubt on all of the other statements gathered in the Welch investigation. He wonders: Was Sue Danial strong-armed into lying? Was Betty Kelow asked to lie but refused? Is that why police reports indicate they had such similar stories, and yet only one was called to testify?

“Knowing what (detectives) did with Joe Womack I think should add a cloud to every single statement that implicated William in this case,” Slosar said.

Current Newport Police Chief Tom Collins told The Enquirer that the original jury convicted the right man.

“I’ve looked at the officers’ notes, I’ve read through these things, I’ve seen the photographs, and they did an outstanding job for what they had and the capabilities – with not having DNA at that time,” Collins said.

He points to Virgil’s original lie – that he’d never been to Welch’s home in Newport – as proof Virgil had something to hide. He also suggests that the bloody shoe prints weren’t as ambiguous as the trial experts had testified.

“It went the way it seemed like it should’ve went,” Collins said. “Now, I wasn’t on the jury, I wasn’t a prosecutor, I wasn’t there as a policeman at the time, but the old – and I hate the cliché – but if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

Collins doesn’t believe Womack’s new story suggesting that corrections officers in Ohio helped coerce him to lie about Virgil.

“I don’t really understand why somebody in jail that’s not connected with the police department would try to influence a person to say and do things,” Collins said. “Could it happen? Absolutely. I’m not a fool. But that makes no sense to me.”

Womack, in his affidavit, said Newport officers in recent years have asked to interview him again about his trial testimony, but he's declined. He said he regrets lying for them in the first place, and he won't lie anymore.

If Virgil’s indeed the killer, he isn’t likely to be tried again, but it’s possible. The case against him was dismissed in January 2017 without prejudice, meaning that he could be charged again in Welch’s death if evidence is found connecting him to it.

Snodgrass, the prosecutor, dropped the charges after a grand jury determined she didn’t have a strong enough case to secure a conviction. 

“I know that a grand jury does not make a declaration of innocence, which I do not think this is,” Snodgrass said at the time. “However, as Commonwealth’s attorney, I think it’s my duty to listen to what the grand jury said.”

Virgil insists the evidence to justly convict him never existed. He said he doesn’t know why police zeroed in on him, but he acknowledged his criminal past didn’t help.

At the time, he was wrapped up in a nefarious lifestyle. He said he wasn’t a pimp but acknowledged accepting money for women’s sexual services. When he saw something he wanted, he often just took it.

He tried to right his path in prison working as a legal aid helping other inmates file briefs and appeals. He took that job seriously, he said.

“You’ve got a person’s life in your hands, and this is not the place to play with people’s lives,” he said.

Released from prison, he says he’s no longer drawn to the illicit. He’s been out since December 2015 and hasn’t been accused of reoffending. He’s 65 and far slower than he once was – and sicker, too.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m likely to pick up the phone and call the police on somebody I see doing something.”

His life post-conviction is in limbo, he said. Because his conviction was overturned, he’s not eligible for the life reentry programs offered to parolees. He has a 30-year gap in his resume, and health issues keep him from holding a full-time job anyway.

The world changed drastically in the three decades he was imprisoned. Smith, the Kentucky Innocence Project lawyer, said Virgil got spooked by automatic doors that opened when he approached a gas station. He has a smartphone paid for by a cousin, but he’s not as accustomed to it being the appendage it is for most people these days, so he keeps losing it.

New technology is hard to navigate, but so is the mundane: It took Virgil months to get a state identification card because he had no idea where to find his birth certificate and social security card.

Money is tight, and he feels a cloud of guilt hanging over him in Welch’s death. 

Virgil hopes the civil case will help on both counts. He needs money to live, he said, and he wants his name cleared of murder.

Before Snodgrass opted to drop charges, Virgil said he was offered the chance to plead guilty and avoid a second trial. It would have meant admitting he killed Welch.

Slosar, Virgil’s current lawyer, said a similar deal had come down before the first trial that would have capped Virgil’s sentence to seven years if he told a judge he’d caused Welch’s death.

A guilty plea would've meant he spend 21 fewer years in prison than he ultimately spent.

But Virgil wasn’t interested in that deal, and he wasn’t interested in pleading guilty decades later, either.

“William didn’t sit in there for almost three decades after rejecting seven years to come back and get a new trial based on this new evidence of his innocence, and then plead out,” Slosar said. “It wasn’t what he fought all that time for.”

Virgil, sitting with his lawyer, interjected.

“I’d plead guilty to something that I did,” he corrected. “I mean, you’d be a damn fool, sitting in there and you’re charged with a murder and they offered you seven years. If I had participated in something like that, I’d probably have kissed them on the forehead and said, ‘Thank you.’”

He didn’t do it, he said, so he wouldn’t say he did.

“I ain’t never gonna plead guilty to something I had nothing to do with. You’d have to hang me,” he said.