At about 3:30 p.m. on February 8, 1994, an electrician discovered the body of 85-year-old James Reid inside his apartment on the second floor of a building on 138th Street in upper Manhattan, New York. The building was being renovated, and construction workers had been using Reid’s apartment to store equipment.
Officers with the New York Police Department (NYPD) and paramedics arrived and found Reid in a pair of striped pajamas lying face up with a telephone cord across his face and neck and a pair of men’s underwear stuffed in his mouth and tied around the back of his head.
A pathologist with the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) performed an autopsy the next day. The pathologist said the underwear had completely blocked the opening of Reid’s mouth. Reid’s neck also showed an abrasion consistent with telephone cord. The pathologist said the cause of death was asphyxia due to gagging and strangulation. During the autopsy, Reid’s fingernails were scraped for biological material.
Detective William Spurling and other officers canvassed the building for leads. On February 11, 1994, they interviewed Russell Boles and his son, 17-year-old Brian Boles, who lived on the fifth floor. Brian Boles said he did not know Reid very well and had never been in his apartment. At the time, Brian’s friend, 17-year-old Charles Collins, was also staying with them.
Two days later, police arrested Boles after a fight with his father. During an interview at the 32nd Precinct, Boles was again asked about his whereabouts on February 7-8. Boles said he was with Collins and two teenaged girls, and they had spent most of the time at his father’s apartment. Again, he said he knew Reid only well enough to say hello but that his father had told him Reid had been strangled. Officers released Boles after he signed a statement.
On March 10, 1994, police arrested Boles again, this time in connection with the reported assault and robbery on February 19 of 80-year-old Burnell Meeks. Boles had known Meeks for several years, considered him as akin to a godfather, and occasionally helped him with chores and errands for money and permission to hang out at Meeks’s apartment on 135th Street with his friends.
Boles told Detective Martin Davin that he and Collins had gone to Meeks’s apartment to run an errand, but this time Meeks demanded oral sex from Boles as a favor for all that Meeks said he had done for Boles through the years. Boles said Meeks disrespected and betrayed him, and that he and Collins returned to Meeks’s apartment, hit the elderly man, and took cash from his wallet.
Davin wasn’t assigned to the Reid case, but he read the file on the murder. At about 12:45 p.m., Davin began questioning Boles about his involvement with the homicide.
Davin told Boles that he knew that Boles and Collins had committed the murder. He lied to Boles and said an eyewitness had seen him in front of Reid’s apartment on the day of the murder and that the police knew that he and Collins had done it. A short while later, according to Davin, Boles confessed his involvement in the murder. Boles said that he had knocked on Reid’s door to get him to open it, but it was Collins who went inside and committed the crime. (Davin did not take any notes or write down Boles’s statement.)
Now joined by Spurling, Davin interviewed Boles again at 3:15 p.m. In a statement written by Spurling, Boles said he and Collins planned to rob Reid because they thought he would be an easy target. Boles said he knocked on the door, but Collins kicked the door in and ran inside. Boles said that by the time he went into the apartment, Reid was unconscious and bleeding from the nose and mouth. Boles said he told Collins to gag Reid. The statement did not say how Reid was gagged. Critically, Boles’s statement said that the attack occurred between noon and 1 p.m. on February 7.
Police arrested Collins at his mother’s home in Brooklyn at about 10:30 p.m. on March 10. He initially believed the arrest was based on a bench warrant from Westchester County.
Collins arrived at the 32nd Precinct at about 12:30 a.m., and detectives questioned him about the Reid murder. They also took his Timberland boots into evidence because a bloody boot print had been found in Reid’s apartment. Collins denied any involvement in that crime.
At 2:15 a.m. on March 11, the detectives returned to the interrogation room that held Boles. Spurling falsely told him that Collins had said that Boles had killed Reid. Boles now signed another statement, also written by Spurling, that placed himself inside the apartment. The statement also said that Collins hit Reid in the face and that Boles had stolen money from Reid’s wallet. Boles said that Collins had gagged Reid with a torn shirt, and he repeated his assertion that the crime occurred at about noon or 1 p.m.
At 9:20 a.m., detectives recorded a video statement from Boles, where he said that he and Collins pushed in Reid’s front door, then Collins hit Reid several times and gagged him with a T-shirt. In this statement, Boles said that Collins grabbed Reid’s wallet and removed the cash. Boles said in the video that after he and Collins left the apartment, they bought some marijuana and returned to Boles’s apartment, where the two girls were waiting.
The detectives returned to Collins and played him a five-minute section of Boles’s statement. Collins said Boles was lying; they had both participated in the attack on Reid. At 1:35 p.m. on March 11, Collins gave a videotaped statement confessing his involvement in the murder and robbery, which he said took place a little after 2 p.m. on February 7. He said in the statement that he gagged Reid with a T-shirt, which was inconsistent with the crime scene, and he would later say that investigators fed him information about other details to shore up his account.
On March 25, a grand jury indicted Collins and Boles on charges of second-degree murder and first- and second-degree robbery in the Reid case. The same indictment charged them with burglary, robbery, and assault in the Meeks case.
Prior to trial, Boles and Collins sought to sever the indictments of the two crimes, arguing that they were unrelated events. The state opposed severance, arguing that the two crimes showed similar intent, as both victims were elderly men, and that the motive in both cases was money, rather than Boles’s claim in the Meeks case of retaliation for an unwanted sexual advance.
On July 14, 1994, Justice Herbert Altman of New York County Supreme Court denied the severance motion.
On March 10 and March 14, 1995, Justice Charles Tejada, the trial judge, presided over a hearing where attorneys for Boles and Collins sought to suppress the statements the two young men made to the police. After hearing testimony from Spurling and Davin, Justice Tejada ruled that the statements were admissible.
Forensic technicians did not find any fingerprint evidence connecting Collins or Boles to Reid’s apartment. They also did not detect any blood on Collins’s boots. No testing was performed on the fingernail samples.
They were tried separately. Boles’s trial began on March 15, 1995. The prosecutor told the jury in an opening statement that the motive for both the Reid and Meeks cases was money.
Meeks testified and identified Boles and Collins as the men who robbed and beat him. He denied making sexual advances toward either defendant.
Davin testified about his interrogation of Boles. He said he lied to Boles several times during the interrogation but never threatened or coerced him into confessing. Davin said he took no notes about the homicide because he wasn’t the detective assigned to the case.
Boles statements, as written by Spurling, along with the video of Boles’s statement, were introduced into evidence.
Spurling testified about the investigation and how he and Davin concluded that Boles and Collins were involved with the Reid murder because of its apparent similarities to the robbery and assault of Meeks. He also testified about the statements that he wrote, and Boles signed.
After Boles signed the 3:15 p.m. statement, Spurling had added a sentence that said Boles saw Reid wearing striped pajamas when he opened the door. Boles never signed that addendum, and Spurling testified that a prosecutor told him the next morning to note the approximate time to the addition.
Spurling also testified that he conducted a visual comparison of the Timberland boots against the bloody boot print found in Reid’s living room. He said that “as far as [he] could tell,” the print was a “match” to the soles and heels of the boots.
Boles testified and said his statements came about after hours of physical and verbal abuse. He said that Davin slapped him in the head and tightened his handcuffs at times during the interrogation. He said he made the statements, “Because I was—I was scared and the—abuse that I was getting, I was never in that kind of abuse by an officer before. And I just wanted to go home.”
Boles’s cross-examination lasted two days. He admitted his role in the Meeks robbery but said he was upset at Meeks for the unwanted sexual advance.
Boles’s attorney, Stanley Thomas, declined to ask Boles any additional questions after the prosecutor finished.
Justice Tejada asked, “Any redirect?”
Thomas: “No questions.”
Justice Tejada: “No questions?”
Thomas: “No questions.”
During closing argument, the prosecutor linked the two crimes. He also said the detectives had not acted improperly in lying to Boles during the interrogation process. The deception, he said, was “not the kind of thing that would make an innocent person confess to a horrible thing like this.”
The jury convicted Boles on all charges on March 22, 1995. He later received a sentence of 25 years to life for the Reid murder and a consecutive sentence of five to 15 years for the Meeks robbery and assault.
A week after the verdict, on March 31, Collins pled guilty to second-degree murder and first-degree robbery. He received a sentence of 20 years to life on the murder conviction and a consecutive sentence of two to six years on the robbery conviction.
Boles appealed, arguing that Justice Altman had erred in not granting the severance motion. The state supreme court’s appellate division affirmed the conviction on June 3, 1997. It said Justice Altman had properly joined the two cases, but even if he hadn’t, the error was harmless “in view of the overwhelming evidence of guilt with respect to each of the criminal transactions.”
Collins was released from prison on parole on January 20, 2017.
In March 2022, Jane Pucher, an attorney with the Innocence Project, contacted the Post-Conviction Justice Unit (PCJU) of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, asking for a reinvestigation of the case. Pucher’s letter said that Boles accepted responsibility for the Meeks robbery and assault but was innocent of Reid’s murder. The request asked for help locating physical evidence and conducting DNA testing. It also said that Boles’s statements to police were unreliable and consistent with known false confessions.
The PCJU opened an investigation, which included testing the material found under Reid’s fingernails. The OCME performed the testing and found a mixed DNA profile that included a major donor and a minor donor. The testing identified Reid as the major donor and excluded both Collins and Boles as the minor donor.
Separately, the PCJU also reviewed the police and prosecution files and found several documents containing exculpatory evidence that had not been given to the defense.
These included:
Police statements from witnesses who said they either saw or heard Reid after 1 p.m. on February 7, undermining the credibility of Boles’s statements about when he and Collins attacked Reid. The electrician told police he saw Reid at 5 p.m. that day, and the neighbors who lived below Reid said they heard a lot of noise in his apartment at around 10:30 p.m.
A report from the NYPD Crime Laboratory on February 2, 1995, that said the footwear impressions from the crime scene were too partial for comparison to Collins’s boots. Spurling had testified about a visual comparison, but he was never asked about this report that appeared to contradict his testimony.
The PCJU also interviewed Sean Chatham, Reid’s great-grandson. He said that Reid got dressed every day at 7 a.m., and didn’t put on his pajamas until 8 or 9 p.m. He also said that Reid never used a wallet. He kept his cash in his pocket or a money clip.
In addition, Sabrina Knowles, one of the young women with Collins and Boles that day, told investigators with the PCJU that a police officer told her during an interview that her fingerprints had been found at Reid’s apartment and that she would go to jail if she did not “tell the truth.”
Boles was released from prison on March 8, 2024. He continued his studies after his release and earned a degree in sociology from Bard College in May 2025.
On May 22, 2025, Boles moved for a new trial. His motion, filed by Pucher and Shabel Castro, said that the new DNA evidence supported Boles’s assertion of innocence, and the discovery of the undisclosed exculpatory evidence was at odds with the details of his statements to police.
“These reports undermine the reliability of Mr. Boles’s custodial statements about the Reid homicide, the only evidence the prosecution had to present against him at trial as to that crime, because they show that Mr. Reid was not killed at the time to which Mr. Boles confessed, and they reveal other factual improbabilities that further undermine the reliability of the statements,” the motion said.
Collins, represented pro bono by Christopher Conniff, Ethan Fitzgerald, Insia Zaidi, and Bryte Bu, of the Ropes & Gray law firm, moved for a new trial on June 4, 2025. The motion noted that prosecutors supported tossing out the convictions.
“The record is clear that detectives questioned Mr. Collins using repeated instances of deception, and this tactic is now known, through scientific study and wrongful convictions brought to light, to produce false confessions,” the Collins motion said.
It later said: “This evidence of coercion is particularly significant here because Mr. Collins’s confession was the only real evidence of his involvement in the Reid murder. It is telling that Mr. Collins repeatedly denied knowing anything about the murder until after the detectives played him a video of his friend Brian Boles purporting to implicate Mr. Collins. Put in this precarious position, Mr. Collins sought to shift blame to Mr. Boles for the murder. To do so, Mr. Collins needed to put himself at the scene—a fact which he did not appreciate (although detectives certainly did) made him guilty of felony murder.”
In a response filed on July 8, 2025, the PCJU agreed to vacate the convictions and dismiss the indictments for both the Reid homicide and the Meeks robbery, based on the new DNA evidence and the undisclosed exculpatory evidence. “The documents contradict Mr. Boles’ confession as to time of death as well as testimony by the lead homicide detective at trial that a bloody boot print at the crime scene matched his co-defendant’s boots,” the response said.
Although this new evidence was only connected to Reid, the state said it was proper to also throw out the Meeks-related convictions because the crimes had been joined and there was a “reasonable possibility” that the evidence and arguments from the homicide case influenced the outcome in the robbery case.
On July 10, 2025, Justice Ruth Pickholz of New York County Supreme Court vacated the convictions and dismissed the indictments against Boles and Collins.
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, said at a press conference that officials had no leads on the identity of Reid’s actual killer.
“Unjust convictions impact all of us because they harm public safety,” he said. “When the wrong people are convicted, people or persons who committed the harm are not held accountable. That means victims and the public are left with questions unanswered.”
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 07-23-2025
