Billy Bosko returned home from a six-day cruise aboard his ship, the U.S.S. Simpson, on July 8, 1997. He found his 18-year-old wife, Michelle, dead on the bedroom floor. She had been raped, strangled and stabbed.
Danial Williams, a sailor who lived across the hall from the Boskos, called 911. Williams then drove to police headquarters to answer questions. Detectives interrogated him throughout the night. Williams admitted to being infatuated with Michelle but denied ever having sex with her. He took a polygraph test. As the night wore on, his story changed. Maybe he had been sleepwalking, he said. He couldn't remember. Eventually, Williams cracked. He admitted forcing himself on the victim, but said he never ejaculated, that when he left she was screaming and hollering. Later, he again changed his story, saying he raped her, then hit her wit his fist and his shoe, and finally, that he stabbed her. Then, in police vernacular, he stopped cooperating. Months later, the DNA results came back from the lab. Williams' DNA did not match that of the rapist.
Detectives brought in another sailor, Joseph Dick, Williams former roommate. He too volunteered to take a lie-detector test. The police told him (incorrectly) he had failed. After hours of interrogation, Dick confessed, saying that he had participated in the rape with Williams and had stabbed the victim. In March, the lab test came back. Dick's DNA did not match of the rapist.
Police brought in another sailor, Eric Wilson. They shoved crime scene photos in his face. Hours later, he offered yet another version of the crime. The three men had gone to the apartment together, roughhoused wit the victim by tickling her, but the fun turned violent. He said he participated in the rape, but left before the murder. Wilson's DNA did not match the DNA that was found at the scene.
The cops were stymied. There must have been someone else at the scene. They went back to Dick, who now said six men had been involved in the rape and murder. He identified one by pointing to a photo in a yearbook.
Derek Tice had left the Navy, married and moved to Orlando. Detectives extradited him to Virginia for interrogation. Tice confessed, naming two other men, Rick Pauley (his former roommate) and Geoffrey Farris (a friend from the Navy), as participants. Then the ever-helpful suspect now said there was a seventh man involved, John Danser, a former sailor.
The Norfolk police now had seven men in custody. But none of the evidence---14 different fingerprints, DNA from cigarette butts found in the apartment, DNA from the semen recovered from the victim and a blanket found near her body---matched any of the men in police custody.
The police might have worked their way through the entire Atlantic fleet but for a woman who handed investigators a letter she'd received from a man named Omar Ballard. Ballard, in prison for raping a 14-year-old girl, had written: "You remember that night I went to Mommy's house and the next morning Michelle got killed? Guess who did that? Me. It was not the first time. Send pictures of you in panties, bra and a nasty letter and send money, or you'll be with Michelle in hell."
When police questioned Ballard, he readily confessed to the murder of Michelle Bosko. That he had never been a suspect defied the odds. Two weeks before the murder, Ballard had been picked up for sexually assaulting a woman in the Bosko's apartment complex. (In a bizarre twist, Michelle and Billy Bosko had kept Ballard, whom they knew, from being beaten senseless by angry neighbors.)
Ballard identified the murder weapon. He described the crime scene in great detail---no guessing from him. His DNA matched that taken from a vaginal swab, semen on a blanket and biological material found underneath Michelle's fingernails. His fingerprints matched those found on the murder weapon. In his confession Ballard said that he acted alone and that he didn't know any of the other seven charged with murder. Ballard said of the other accused, "The people who opened their mouths is stupid."
It's not that simple. Criminologists who have studied similar cases say the Norfolk seven show how easy it is to manufacture a confession. The sailors were subject to interrogation sessions lasting from 12 to 18 hours. They were denied attorneys, not allowed to sleep, not apprised of their right to remain silent, lied to about the evidence against them (a common and quite legal tactic) and allegedly beaten. The four who originally confessed---Williams, Dick Wilson and Tice---said they had been so fearful of the lead investigator that they confessed, in the words of one, "just to get away from the detective---I was afraid he was going to kill me."
