Shortly after midnight on June 27, 1985, 26-year-old David Rainey and his 35-year-old sister, Nola Duncan, went out to buy cigarettes in Los Angeles, California. An hour later, they telephoned their mother to say that Rainey's car was having trouble, but they expected to be home in an hour.
However, at about 3 a.m., Rainey's body was found in his car in a parking lot at Vernon and Orchard Avenues. He had been stabbed to death. Duncan apparently had been forced out of the car and taken a few blocks away where she was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. Her body was found near 48th Street and Vermont Avenue.
The initial investigation focused on Theadry Art Powell, Jr. Hours before Duncan was murdered, she apparently had sold him low-quality or doctored PCP. A witness had told police that when Powell discovered what Duncan had done, he said, “I hate that bitch, go kill her.” Soon after, three men left Powell’s house.
Questioned by police, Powell initially claimed that he had not seen Duncan in three months, but later changed his story twice and admitted he had seen her on the night she was killed. Powell ultimately implicated two of his associates, Jerry Williams and Lonnie Wardlow, suggesting that maybe one or both of them took part in Duncan’s murder. A police polygrapher determined that both Powell and Wardlow falsely denied their involvement in Duncan’s killing. Despite these leads, the murders of Rainey and Duncan were still unsolved on August 17, 1985, when 18-year-old Harold Hall was arrested on a charge of robbery. After Hall was booked into the Los Angeles County Jail, he reached out to Los Angeles Detective Wayne Dufort.
Hall knew Dufort because 10 months earlier, in October 1984, Hall had witnessed a drive-by shooting in which 10 people were shot. Five of them died. The incident became known as the 54 th Street shooting. Hall was present and suffered a broken nose in a melee that broke out after the shooting.
Hall had agreed to testify and identified one of the gunmen as “Ace Capone,” a member of the Bloods gang. Police had provided protection at Hall’s home. He testified at the preliminary hearing. During the hearing, an attorney revealed Hall’s home address. He left the witness stand and had to be cajoled to return to finish his testimony. Afterward, Dufort sought to persuade Hall to move to a different location. Dufort was so concerned with Hall’s safety that he met Hall more than 200 times. They developed a friendship. Dufort gave Hall money and helped him get a job.
And so, when Hall was arrested on the robbery charge, he feared for his safety as someone who had testified against Bloods gang members. Dufort arranged for Hall to be moved to a jail section that housed other informants. There, however, three informants, all with cases pending, talked about Duncan’s murder with Hall. Hall had been living near the location where Rainey and Duncan were killed and had been among a crowd of neighbors who gathered after the bodies were discovered. A federal appeals court would later describe Hall as a “sitting duck for predatory informants.”
The informants falsely implicated Hall in the Duncan-Rainey murders by concocting a story that Hall had confessed to the murders.
Based on these claims, Los Angeles Detectives Mark Arneson and Kenneth Crocker then interviewed Hall on September 5, 1985. He said had “just heard some stuff” and that he was “just a witness.” Hall was not read his Miranda warnings.
Hall said that while visiting a friend at 48th and Vermont, he observed the body of a dead female in the alley. Hall also stated that two days later, while talking with Jerry Knox and Terry Ross at a beauty salon, he heard Knox brag that he had killed a woman and dumped her body in an alley.
On September 9, 1985, Crocker interviewed Hall again. He showed Hall two photo lineups containing pictures of Knox and Ross. Hall correctly identified the photos of Knox and Ross. During this interview, Hall told the detective that Knox and Ross had raped and stabbed Duncan. According to Crocker, Hall stated that he was in the car with Knox and Ross when they transported Duncan's body and dumped it in the alley.
Crocker and Arneson subsequently discovered that Knox was in prison at the time of the murders.
On September 11, 1985, Arneson asked Dufort to be present when Arneson interviewed Hall, though Arneson would not say why he wanted Dufort to be there. Dufort tried to refuse, but eventually Dufort and his partner, Aaron Martin, met Arneson and Crocker. Instead of meeting Hall first, they met Cornelius Lee, an informant who said that Hall was the driver in the 54th Street shooting and was not a witness as Hall had testified at the preliminary hearing.
The detectives then interrogated Hall. First, Dufort and Martin questioned Hall for several hours about the 54th Street shooting. Arneson and Crocker came into the interview room to ask if they could speak to Hall after Dufort and Martin were finished.
Hall was then moved to a different interrogation room where all four detectives questioned him about the murders of Duncan and Rainey. The detectives did not advise Hall of his Miranda rights. The detectives claimed they knew more information than Hall thought they did.
They asked Hall whether, before the murder, he was smoking dope at a beauty shop near 47th Street and Vermont Avenue with Duncan, whether he had sex with her and whether he had stabbed her. Hall denied stabbing Duncan or having anything to do with her murder, but the police persisted. Arneson falsely claimed that the police had found Hall’s semen in Duncan’s mouth and his fingerprints on her body. At this point, Hall became very afraid. He asked for an attorney. Arneson asked Hall why he needed an attorney if he was innocent and said that the only people who need attorneys were guilty and trying to hide something. Arneson then told Hall that the police had found his footprint in the alley near Duncan’s body.
Hall repeated his denials.
Dufort warned Hall that if the police filed murder charges against him and a jury convicted him, he would go to prison with Ace Capone, the Bloods gang member he testified against, and that Capone would kill him. Crocker added that if Hall ended up in state prison, all the Bloods would be after him for testifying against Capone and that all the Crips, the Bloods’ rival gang, would be after him for driving Capone to the 54th Street shooting.
The police continued to reject Hall’s claims that he had nothing to do with the murders.
By then, Hall was worried that if he did not confess, the police would file murder charges, he would be convicted, go to prison, and be killed. He also worried that if he did not cooperate, the police would remove him from protective housing and put him back in the jail’s general population, where he would be in danger. Hall broke down and cried, hoping his display of emotion would inspire mercy. But it did not.
Ultimately, Hall gave in to desperation, fear, and fatigue. The detectives fed Hall the “facts” about what happened the night of the Duncan-Rainey murders. Hall either agreed to each statement or repeated it back to Arneson.
In the statement, Hall said that he arrived at the beauty shop in the early morning hours on June 27, 1985. Duncan was being held there in a back room by four men, one of whom was Terry Ross. Hall and the other men took turns raping Duncan. The other men took turns stabbing Duncan. Hall stabbed Duncan twice in the arm. The men then placed Duncan's body in the trunk of a car and three of them, including Hall, drove to the alley and dumped the body there. Hall gave a description of the position of the body that matched the police crime scene description. The men then discussed returning to kill Rainey, because Rainey knew that Duncan was with them. Hall left the group at that point and heard later that Rainey had been killed.
Hall signed the statement that Crocker had handwritten. He did not read the statement. This interrogation lasted somewhere between two and six hours, and Hall was not given any food or bathroom breaks.
After Arneson and Crocker left, Dufort and Martin continued to interrogate Hall about the 54th Street shooting case until the early morning. In all, Hall was questioned between 17 and 19 hours that day. Hall was handcuffed during the interrogations and denied food.
Hall was then charged with the murders of Duncan and Rainey. He also was charged with the five murders in the 54 th Street shooting. Those charges were later dismissed, however.
In the spring of 1990, Hall went to trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court. He was charged with the first-degree murder and rape of Duncan and of the second-degree murder of Rainey.
No physical or forensic evidence connected him to the murders. The prosecution’s case relied on Hall’s confession and two documents provided by jailhouse informant Lee, who had initially implicated Hall as the driver in the 54th Street shooting.
Lee had told the police that he was in the cell next to Hall, and that they had passed sheets of paper back and forth between their cells, with Lee sending over written questions and Hall sending back written responses. Hall’s answers, generally innocuous taken by themselves, appeared to incriminate him in the Duncan murder. The prosecution presented testimony from a handwriting analyst that the handwriting on the notes belonged to both Hall and Lee.
Lee did not testify.
At trial, Hall’s defense attorney, William Genego, offered evidence that Hall had made two oral statements which were contradictory, and that his written statement contained multiple facts that contradicted evidence from the crime scene. According to Hall’s written confession, Todd Smith initiated and directed Duncan’s rape and murder, and her body was transported in Smith’s car from the beauty parlor to the alley. Smith had been questioned by Detective Arneson, and, while he admitted knowing Hall, he denied any knowledge of or involvement in the murders. Smith's car had been examined by police; his tires did not match any tire marks found in the alley, and an examination of his car did not reveal any evidence linking it to the crime or to Hall. Smith was never arrested or charged.
According to Hall's confession, the back room of the beauty parlor was where Duncan was raped and murdered was at 47th and Vermont. The owners of the beauty salon testified that it had no back room, and that there had never been signs of forced entry, blood, or evidence of any bizarre occurrence. The owners testified that they had not been contacted by police. Detective Arneson testified that he did not search the beauty salon because he never believed it was the scene of the crime.
Hall's confession stated that Duncan was repeatedly raped prior to her murder. A forensic pathologist testified that it was his opinion that Duncan had not engaged in sexual activity for at least two hours prior to her death. According to Hall, when Duncan was stabbed, her blouse was open, her brassiere was off, and she was otherwise naked. The pathologist contradicted this, stating that his examination indicated that Duncan's clothing had been moved or removed after her death. Cuts in her brassiere matched stab wounds on her chest, and blood on the pants indicated she was probably wearing her pants when she was stabbed, the pathologist said.
Based on information obtained from Duncan's husband, who had investigated her murder on his own, the defense submitted testimony from various individuals that suggested Duncan may have been killed for selling “bad water” [bad PCP] to Theadry Powell.
In April 1990, a jury convicted Hall of first-degree murder of Duncan and her rape. He was convicted of second-degree murder of Rainey. He was sentenced to life in prison.
In 1994, the convictions for Duncan's rape and for Rainey's murder were overturned by the Second District California Court of Appeal because of insufficient evidence, but the conviction for Duncan's murder was upheld.
A few months later, Lee recanted his statements and admitted to altering the notes to make Hall look guilty. Lee said he had erased and re-written the questions after Hall answered them, making it look as though Hall had confessed to killing Duncan, when he had not in fact done so. Lee said he had lied because the police threatened to kill him and his mother if he did not lie, and because the police promised him a manslaughter conviction on his pending murder count.
After experts confirmed that the notes had been erased and written over, Hall filed a state law petition for a writ of habeas corpus, and, in 1995, the trial court overturned his conviction and granted him a new trial. The court said, “If Cornelius Lee were to tell me what time it was, I would still want to look at the clock…He is plainly a liar. I almost wanted to have the bailiff clean the witness stand after he left.”
The prosecution appealed, and, in 1996, the Second District California Court of Appeal reversed the trial court's decision and upheld Hall's conviction.
In December 1996, the Los Angeles Times newspaper published an article detailing allegations of police perjury. Featured prominently in the article was Arneson, who was reported to have transferred out of the homicide division after his credibility became an issue in other cases.
Hall continued to appeal, but was unsuccessful until September 2003, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted Hall's federal habeas petition and ordered a new trial. The appeals court ruled that Lee’s handwritten notes were false evidence.
On August 20, 2004, the prosecution dismissed the case, and Hall was released.
Eric Robinson and Lavont Guillory were subsequently exonerated of a murder in Los Angeles because Arneson failed to disclose the identity of the real shooter.
Hall sued the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department, and several police officers, alleging the defendants had used false evidence against him. While the case was pending, Hall unsuccessfully moved to amend the complaint to include a coerced confession claim. A judge eventually found that Hall's unamended complaint had not raised triable issues of fact to support his fabrication-of-evidence claim.
In 2009, Arneson was sentenced to 10 years in prison following his conviction for racketeering, identity theft, and wiretapping for taking part in a wiretapping scheme operated by Hollywood private detective Anthony Pellicano.
In September 2012, a split panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for Ninth Circuit revived Hall’s lawsuit, reversing the District Court and allowing him to amend the complaint. The lawsuit, however, later was dismissed.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 08-14-2025
