On March 16, 1992, at 11:50 p.m., two men robbed the Burger King on Richmond Avenue in Staten Island, New York. An employee of the store told officers with the New York Police Department that one man held a gun to his head and demanded money. The employee, identified in a court record as Witness #1, did not give a description of this man and said that the second robber was wearing a mask.
Eight days later, two men robbed the same Burger King, entering the building through a back door at about 11:55 p.m. An employee, identified in a court record as Witness #2, described the man with a gun as white, with red hair and a bushy red mustache and bushy red eyebrows. She said his accomplice was a young Hispanic male, approximately 15 years old.
In the week between the two robberies, on March 22, a detective received an anonymous tip naming Walter Tait, and a man identified in a court record as Accomplice #1, as the robbers of the Burger King on March 16.
Tait was 20 years old, and on probation from a 1989 guilty plea for possession of stolen property. He did not have red hair or a red mustache.
On March 30, 1992, at 11:10 p.m., two men robbed a different Burger King on Hyland Boulevard in Staten Island. Two female employees were present. Witness #3 said the robber who held the gun was a white man in his 20s. Witness #4 said both robbers were young men in their 20s, but she said she could not identify either man, in part because their faces were covered.
Several hours later, Witness #3 selected Tait’s photo from a photo array as the man who held a gun. She also looked at a photo array that contained a photo of Accomplice #1 but did not make any selection.
Tait had a court appearance on April 2, 1992, for a misdemeanor charge of driving while intoxicated, but he was arrested before making that appearance and brought to the police station, where he appeared in separate lineups before witnesses of the three Burger King robberies.
Witness #1 identified Tait as a participant in the March 16 robbery. Witness #2 did not identify Tait as a participant in the March 24 robbery. Witness #3 identified Tait as a participant in the March 30 robbery.
After his arrest, detectives read Tait his Miranda warnings and asked him about the three robberies. Tait said he knew nothing about them and then declined to answer questions without his attorney present.
Tait was charged with two counts of first-degree robbery for the Burger King crimes on March 16 and March 30. His bail was set at $10,000, which Tait posted.
Tait appeared before a grand jury on April 28, 1992. He testified that on March 16, he was with his sisters, his mother, his two housemates, his sister’s boyfriend, and his girlfriend. He said they went to two bars that night, arriving at the second bar between midnight and 12:30 a.m.
Tait testified that he was sick on March 30 and stayed home to watch the Academy Awards with his mother, two sisters, some friends, and his girlfriend. The program began around 9 p.m., and Tait said he never left the house.
These family members and friends testified before the grand jury that Tait was with them at the time of the robberies.
On May 7, 1992, Witness #1 and Witness #3 testified before the grand jury about the robberies and their identification of Tait.
The grand jury indicted Tait on May 12 on the two charges.
On October 7, 1992, Tait was arrested while driving a car with an altered vehicle identification number (VIN) and charged with possession of a forged VIN.
Later that month, on October 27, he appeared before Justice Norman Felig in Richmond County Supreme Court for a suppression hearing on the witness identifications. Prior to the hearing’s start, Justice Felig granted the state’s motion to remand Tait into custody based on the October 7 arrest, which it said was a violation of probation.
At the hearing, two detectives testified about the procedures used in arranging the photo arrays and the lineups. Witness #1 and Witness #3 testified about their identifications of Tait. Justice Felig ruled that the state could use the identifications at trial.
In December 1992, an investigator working for Tait’s then-attorney interviewed the two witnesses. In separate, signed statements, the witnesses said that a police officer had shown them a single photo of Tait before they made any identification.
Tait’s attorney moved to reopen the identification hearing, and a new hearing began on June 9, 1993. The two witnesses testified that the defense investigator had interviewed them and that they had signed the statements. They read the statements in court and said they were accurate, except that they denied telling the investigators they had seen a single photograph of Tait prior to the identification. Witness #1 said he had not read his statement before signing it. Justice Felig ruled that neither witness had seen the single photograph prior to identifying Tait and also set a trial date.
After the hearing, Tait retained a new attorney, his third since his arrest on the robbery charges.
Around the time that Tait’s investigator interviewed the two witnesses, police arrested a man identified in a court record as Suspect #2 for a weapons violation. Suspect #2 was a confidential informant and also under federal parole supervision. While in custody, Suspect #2 reached out to the detective who was his handler and offered to provide information on several Staten Island robberies. The detective contacted a detective in Staten Island, and they interviewed Suspect #2 on March 2, 1993.
Suspect #2 said he had been part of a crew that committed a string of robberies in Staten Island between June 24, 1991, and March 30, 1992, including the two Burger King robberies on March 16 and March 30. He identified the members of the robbery crew, most of whom were teenagers, although one of the participants, identified as Suspect #1, was an adult. Suspect #2 did not mention Tait’s involvement in any of the crimes.
Separately, the witness from the Burger King robbery on March 24 and a separate witness from an April 1992 robbery of a hair salon identified Suspect #1 in a photo array and a live lineup. He was arrested and charged with those crimes on May 3, 1993.
On July 20, 1993, Tait pled guilty to the March 16 robbery and the forged VIN arrest. He also admitted to violating a condition of his probation. In a pre-sentencing report, Tait told a court official that he pled guilty under the advice of counsel. The state asked for a sentence of five to 15 years, but Justice Felig sentenced Tait to four to 12 years, with credit for time served awaiting trial.
Tait was released from prison in 1996 and released from parole in 2000.
In May 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Tait contacted the Richmond County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Review Unit (CIRU) and asked it to review his conviction.
He told the CIRU team that he was forced to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit. At the time, Tait said, he didn’t think he would qualify for a court-appointed attorney and his family had run out of money to fight the case. He said the risk of being convicted at trial of both robberies was too great and exposed him to a possible sentence of 50 years in prison.
After his release, Tait had gone into the sewage-pumping business. He was now married, with adult children. But he said he still suffered from the conviction. There were contracts and licenses he couldn’t get because of his conviction for a violent felony.
He acknowledged that as a young adult, he had been involved with stolen cars, but he said he lied under oath when he admitted taking part in the March 16 robbery.
The CIRU re-interviewed many of the original witnesses and Tait’s alibi witnesses. The statements of the alibi witnesses largely tracked their testimony before the grand jury.
On May 12, 2020, the CIRU interviewed the man known as Accomplice #1, who was mentioned in the initial tip. The man said he and Tait were close friends who had grown up together and that Tait would not have committed an armed robbery. “Walter was not that type of person who would do anything violent,” he said. “Walter never even handled a gun in his life.”
The man said the tip was untrue and could have been verified; at the time of the robberies, he was living in Florida and had an outstanding bench warrant and probation warrant for his arrest in New York. The man said he had been involved in stolen vehicles in the early 1990s, and it was his opinion that a “criminal competitor” gave police the false tip.
The accomplice had been arrested in New York in January 1993 on new charges and the outstanding warrants and placed in the Rikers Island jail. He told the CIRU that in 1993 he was traveling on a corrections bus to Staten Island for a court appearance when he spoke with a man he called the “Spanish guy” who had several charges, including those related to robberies of Burger Kings in Staten Island.
The accomplice said he told this man that his friend was awaiting trial on those charges. The accomplice said the Spanish man told him that he had done all the Burger King robberies, and that he had donned a nickname for the robberies, something like the “Purple Scarf Bandit,” because of what he wore over his face. The man said he didn’t know Tait and was willing to state that for the record. The accomplice said he took down some details of the Spanish Guy’s case, including his inmate number, and gave it to a member of Tait’s family. Tait’s mother told the CIRU that she gave this information to her son’s third attorney. The attorney told the CIRU he had no recollection of Tait’s case.
The CIRU investigated the accomplice’s account and found that it was highly probable that he was on the bus with Suspect #1, a 29-year-old Hispanic man. They had a shared court date on August 23, 1993.
During the review of Suspect #1’s case file, which included a note regarding Tait’s arrest, the CIRU discovered the 1992 statement made by Suspect #2. His initial statement included the March 16 robbery but at a later point one of the detectives on the case crossed out the date. The CIRU said in a court filing that the cases of Suspect #1 and Tait were pending at the same time before Justice Felig, and “It seems clear that the assigned detective on Suspect #1’s case, Detective #4, had an intentional awareness of the discrepancy that prompted his ‘cross-out.’”
The CIRU interviewed Suspect #2. He confirmed he had been a confidential informant. He was able to recall some of the details of the robberies, including the participation of Suspect #1, Suspect #3, and Suspect #4. He said he had never heard of Tait. Suspect #1 died in 2015.
The CIRU spoke with Suspect #4 in 2021. He said Suspect #2 recruited him and other poor teenagers from Brooklyn to commit robberies. He said Suspect #2 molested these young men and once told him that “someone was arrested for something we did.”
On March 6, 2022, Witness #1 told the CIRU about the robbery 30 years earlier, on March 16, 1992. He said one of the robbers wore a face covering but the man with the gun did not. He did not remember looking at photos but did recall the lineup.
The witness reread the statement he made to the defense investigator and was asked if the section of the statement about detectives showing him a single photo of Tait before the photo array was true. He responded, “Is a detective not supposed to do that?”
CIRU investigators then asked Witness #1 about his testimony at the hearing where he denied reading the statement before he signed it. He said he didn’t remember testifying at a hearing but added that he “would never sign something I did not read.”
The CIRU also interviewed Witness #3, from the March 30 robbery. She said that the two robbers entered through a back door and wore masks. When asked how she could make an identification, she said she could “remember seeing his face.”
Wanda DeOliveira had retired as the CIRU chief in 2022, but she continued working on Tait’s case as a consultant for the district attorney’s office. In an affirmation filed in late May 2025, she asked the court to vacate Tait’s conviction and dismiss his charge.
The filing said that neither Suspect #2’s statement nor the note in Suspect #1’s case file was found in the district attorney’s case file for Tait. It also said that although the CIRU could not determine whether Suspect #2’s statement was disclosed to Tait’s attorneys, “Our investigation led us to conclude that it was of no consequence that Walter Tait had pleaded guilty before a judge, as his guilty plea was not made knowingly and voluntarily, with the full disclosure of all relevant exculpatory facts and issues disclosed to him and his attorney.”
It continued: “Regardless of whether Mr. Tait had chosen to succumb to the pressure of financial hardship and accept what appeared to be a very lenient plea offer, our conclusion from this investigation is that he was actually innocent of the charge to which he entered a guilty plea. In that regard, our justice system failed him.”
On May 27, 2025, Justice Alexander Jeong vacated Tait’s conviction and dismissed the charge.
Tait told the Staten Island Advance , “My biggest fear was people finding out; it’s something I’ve been living with for 30 years.”
District Attorney Michael McMahon said in a statement that Tait was wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit. “There is no true way to return the time that was taken from him,” McMahon said. “The years lost, the opportunities missed, and the damage done cannot simply be erased. But what we can do is restore his name. We can acknowledge the mistake, correct the record, and honor the truth; today, the criminal justice system is doing just that.”
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 07-02-2025
