On the evening of April 15, 1985, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the life of eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead was tragically cut short. The young black girl was found in her home, having been brutally raped and murdered. The cause of her death was determined to be repetitive blows from a rock and attempted strangulation. Her mother, Dorothy McGriff, discovered her daughter's body upon returning home from work. As she arrived, she caught a glimpse of a man's shoulders as he fled through a window.
The police investigation that followed would lead to a profound and enduring miscarriage of justice.
The investigation quickly focused on eyewitness accounts from two teenagers in the neighborhood, Chiquita Lowe and Gerald Davis. Both described seeing a man in the area around the time of the murder. Based on their descriptions, a composite sketch was created. Not long after, Lowe's family spotted a man they believed matched the sketch trying to sell them a television. That man was 38-year-old Frank Lee Smith, who had a criminal history. Based on Lowe's identification, Smith was arrested and charged with Shandra's murder. At the trial, the prosecution's case rested heavily on the testimony of Lowe and the victim's mother, who identified Smith by the shape of his shoulders. Despite a lack of physical evidence connecting him to the crime, and Smith's claims of insanity, the jury convicted him and recommended the death penalty.
For years, Frank Lee Smith sat on death row, maintaining his innocence. Doubts about his guilt began to surface when Chiquita Lowe recanted her testimony in 1989, stating she had been pressured by the police and prosecutors. She later identified another man, Eddie Lee Mosley, as the person she saw that night. Mosley was a known serial offender in the area and, it was later discovered, was even related to Shandra's mother. Despite this, and numerous appeals, Smith's requests for DNA testing were repeatedly denied. Tragically, Frank Lee Smith died of cancer in prison on January 30, 2000. It was only after his death, in December 2000, that DNA testing was finally conducted. The results posthumously exonerated Smith, proving he was not the perpetrator. The DNA evidence conclusively identified Eddie Lee Mosley as the man who had raped and murdered Shandra Whitehead. This case stands as a stark and somber reminder of the fallibility of the justice system, where an innocent man was condemned to die for a crime he did not commit, while the true killer remained free.
