On the afternoon of March 10, 1999, the body of 63-year-old Virgie Perkins was found in the living room of her home on Hartford Street in Detroit, Michigan.
She had been strangled, and her throat had been cut. Her husband, Lemuel Perkins Sr., reported that a cordless telephone and a cellular telephone were missing.
There was no sign of forced entry. Because there were no footprints in snow at any other entrance and the front door was kept locked at all times, police believed that the victim had allowed her attacker inside, likely because the attacker was an acquaintance.
Police began working with the provider of the cell phone to determine if any calls were made. On March 15, shortly after 4 a.m., Ramon Knott received a phone call from a friend, 29-year George Calicut Jr., who was driving home from work at the Sweetwater Tavern in Detroit. Calicut told Knott that Perkins’s funeral was going to be that day.
On March 16, 1999, police were informed that the missing cell phone had made the call to Knott. Police brought Knott to the police station, and he informed them that the caller was Calicut.
The police went to Calicut’s home, where his mother, Forestine, told them he was at his job as a line cook at Sweetwater Tavern. She called Calicut to inform him that the police were coming. At about the same time, Calicut would later say, his manager told him that the officers wanted to question him about a murder.
When police arrived, they told him they wanted to talk to him about a missing cell phone. Calicut was taken to police headquarters and questioned by homicide detectives. He admitted that he had stolen a cell phone from the truck of Perkins’s son, Lemuel Jr., a long-haul truck driver. Calicut had grown up knowing Lemuel Jr. And he considered Virgie Perkins like an “auntie.”
Calicut gave his consent for the police to go back to his home and seize the cellphone. He explained that it was under his mattress. The officers obtained the phone and returned to the station
Over two hours, three different detectives questioned Calicut—two of them questioned him twice. Calicut would later say they did not ask him about the murder, but only about how he had gotten the cell phone. Calicut repeated each time that he had taken it from Lemuel Perkins Jr.’s truck.
The officers would later testify that they had been working overtime and were not approved for further overtime, so they turned the case file, including all of the reports, over to Detective Barbara Simon, a homicide detective with a reputation for obtaining confessions.
After about an hour, Simon emerged with a four-page statement that she had written out and that Calicut had signed. The statement said that Calicut, high on crack cocaine, had gone to visit Perkins at about 10 a.m. on that day to ask to borrow money to buy more crack cocaine. When she resisted, he choked her until she was unconscious, then cut her throat to make the crime look like a burglary. The confession said he dumped out her purse and left with $5 and a cell phone.
On March 16, 1999, Calicut was charged with first-degree murder.
He went to trial in Wayne County Circuit Court in October 1999. The prosecution’s case relied primarily on the confession and the evidence putting the missing cell phone in Calicut’s possession.
Simon testified about obtaining the statement, saying she asked Calicut questions, which she wrote down, and then wrote down his answers. She admitted during cross-examination by Calicut’s attorney, Thaddeus Dean, that Calicut had told her he got the phone by stealing it from Perkins Jr.’s truck, but she did not include that in the statement.
She also admitted that the statement said Calicut had gone to Perkins’s house at 10 a.m., even though the police reports quoted Cynthia Scott, one of Perkins’s daughters, as saying she talked to Perkins on the phone about 11:15 that day.
Cynthia Scott testified and said she talked to Perkins at about that time because she wanted to come by the house to retrieve some medication. Scott said she arrived about noon. She noticed the curtains to the living room window were drawn partially closed, which was unusual because her mother usually kept them wide open so she could watch the comings and goings of people on Hartford Street. She said she called the cordless phone, but got no answer. The front door was locked. Scott said she assumed that perhaps her mother had gotten a ride to a store and was not yet back, so she left.
A real estate appraiser testified that he came for a 3 p.m. appointment to do an evaluation on the house, but also got no answer. He asked a neighbor who knew Perkins to check. The neighbor gave the front door a shove, and it opened, although the doorknob was in the lock position. She discovered Perkins's body on the floor of the front room.
Knott testified about getting the phone call from Calicut on the cell phone. He was a longtime friend of Calicut and Perkins Jr. Knott said that on March 8, two days before the murder, Calicut and Perkins Jr. drove over in Perkins’s truck to visit him.
A neighbor of Perkins testified that he was walking his granddaughter home from school when he passed Perkins’s house at about 11:30 a.m. The neighbor said a man who ran a numbers racket in the neighborhood was knocking on Perkins’s front door. The man left, the neighbor said, when she did not come to the door.
Calicut’s mother, Forestine, testified for the defense that on the day of the murder, she got up and found Calicut in the kitchen at about 9:30 a.m., foraging in the refrigerator. He offered to make them both breakfast, she said. He brought her a plate at about 10:30 a.m., then took his plate to his room on the second floor. She said he was home until he got picked up at 4:50 p.m. by a co-worker at Sweetwater Tavern.
Calicut testified and denied committing the crime. He described making breakfast for his mother and said that after eating his breakfast, he went back to sleep until it was time to go to work.
He denied telling Simon that he committed the crime. He said that Simon began the interrogation by telling him that the other detectives wanted to charge him with first-degree murder, which would mean a sentence of life without parole.
He said she wrote out a statement and told him that he would be charged with manslaughter, which would mean he could get a bond and go home. Calicut had never been arrested, he said, and he did not want to be in jail. He said Simon told him that manslaughter sentences ranged from probation to 15 years, but that he would likely only get three years.
Dean asked Calicut: "What did you think when you were told by Investigator Simon that if this was written up like a manslaughter, you could get out on bond?"
"I thought I was going to go home after I had signed the statement," Calicut said.
Dean asked, "That you'd go home and that would be the end of it?"
"I knew that wasn't going to be the end of it," Calicut said. "But I knew I wasn't going to spend the night in jail."
"And if you went home, what was your plan after you got home?" Dean asked.
"Contact you," Calicut replied.
"Why didn't you ask ... Investigator Simon to contact me while this was going on?" Dean asked.
"I did," Calicut said.
"What did she say?" Dean asked.
"If I contacted an attorney, then she had to turn it over to the arresting officers, which then, they was going to charge me with murder one, cause she said they had enough evidence to do that...by me having the cell phone," Calicut said.
"What other evidence did she tell you that they had?" Dean asked.
"That was all that she told me they had was the cell phone," Calicut said. "That's all they kept talking about was the cell phone."
“I signed that because I wasn't willing to go to prison for the rest of my life for a crime I didn't do,” Calicut declared. “It was not hard for me to understand that I did not want to go to prison for a crime that I did not commit. If I had to go to a prison for a crime that I did not commit, I would rather go for three years than to go for the rest of my life.”
He said he never read the statement and that he partially signed the first page, but then hesitated and asked Simon what it meant. She assured him it meant he could go home. So he finished signing the statement.
He admitted that he smoked crack cocaine, but he said he did not need money because he had been paid two days earlier.
Dean argued that Cynthia Dennis, a woman who had been temporarily living with Perkins, but had been asked to move out five days before the murder, had been angry about the situation. The police never seriously investigated her as a suspect, Dean said.
One witness testified for the defense that she saw Dennis that day and Dennis appeared to have blood on one of her boots. Another witness said that Dennis had once threatened to cut Perkins’s throat.
In addition, Dennis had claimed to have been with her grandmother all day, but her grandmother told police that she first saw Dennis at 6:30 p.m.
On October 8, 1999, the jury convicted Calicut of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to prison for life without parole.
On December 7, 2001, the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction. Calicut, acting as his own lawyer, filed a motion for relief from judgment in 2004. That was denied, and the denial was upheld on appeal.
In 2005, Calicut filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus. It was denied in 2007.
In October 2020, the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School (MIC) began re-investigating Calicut’s case. In the years since the conviction, investigations of other cases handled by Simon revealed similar patterns of coercion of suspects and witnesses in wrongful conviction cases. Her misconduct had been uncovered in the exonerations of Gregory Berry, Mark Craighead, Justly Johnson, Lamarr Monson, and Kendrick Scott.
MIC asked the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) to re-examine Calicut’s case.
The CIU investigation showed that Perkins Jr. had a “documented history of stealing from his parents and had, in fact, stolen a cell phone from them at least once before.”
In 2025, DNA testing was conducted at Bode Technology by agreement of MIC, the Cooley Innocence Project at Cooley Law School, and the CIU. Testing was performed on the victim’s purse, the knife and a knife sheath. A mixture containing male DNA was obtained, and Calicut was excluded.
In early 2026, the Michigan State Police tested the victim’s fingernail clippings. No male DNA was found. However, there were two female profiles.
On March 3, 2026, CIU attorneys Valerie Newman and Matthew Stoloff, MIC attorneys, including Olivia Vigiletti, Jenna Cobb, and Imran Syed, and law students Elizabeth Estep and Ruben Piñuelas, and attorney Jessa Weber from the Cooley Innocence Project, filed a joint order to vacate the murder conviction and to dismiss the case.
“The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office and Mr. Calicut stipulate that there is reason to believe that, if the jury knew the information about Simon’s pattern of coercion that resulted in false confessions, it is reasonably likely it would not have convicted Mr. Calicut in this case, as there was no other evidence typing him to the crime,” the order said. “The exclusionary DNA evidence further supports the lack of any evidence tying Mr. Calicut to this crime.”
The order was signed by Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Bradley Cobb that day, and Calicut was released. He had served more than 26 years from the date of his conviction.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 03-11-2026
