Pen pal gets inmate freed, with help from lawyer son

Her daughter learned of the letter and was instantly alarmed. How could you share so much personal information with a stranger? What do you know about him?

Carol was shaken to the point of tears. What was I thinking?

The next letter from Dooly State Prison seemed to wonder the same thing. I’m surprised, Parkerson wrote. Why haven’t you asked the first question most inmates get from their new pen pals: Why are you in prison?

So Parkerson told her: He was serving time for theft. And murder.

“I need to know if I should call you James or Country. I love Country because if I could I would move to a rural place like the ones I grew up in.” Carol’s first letter, July 23, 2007

The news didn’t scare her off. She kept writing, setting in motion an astonishing chain of events that led them both to a place that neither could have predicted.

Carol was an unlikely murderer’s friend. She was the wife of a stockbroker and the mother of a lawyer, a real estate broker and a housewife. The Raebers enjoyed two homes: one in an affluent neighborhood north of Chastain Park in Atlanta and a cabin at Lake Rabun. At 64, she was fit and active and utterly smitten with her grandchildren.

Parkerson, then 37, grew up in Hawkinsville, south of Macon. He had a gift: an artist’s eye that enabled him to draw almost anything. But there was a darkness in him. He was depressed, uncomfortable around crowds. He dropped out of high school, ran away from home, dabbled in drugs. He followed a job to southwest Georgia, moving in with a family friend just a few weeks before both were charged with murder.

Carol warned her new pen pal not to betray her.

“I am a person who dies every time I put my trust in someone and then finds out they lied to me. I believe honesty is the most important thing a person can have besides faith in God. Please don’t ever lie to me.” Carol, August 2007

He promised. Over the next few years, the two built a relationship on paper.

Parkerson counseled Carol how to keep the deer from eating her flowers and how to kill the worms eating her tomatoes.

She wrote about baking sugar cookies with her granddaughters and how she used to play hide and seek in cornfields when she was a child.

What can we get you for Christmas? Carol asked as the holidays neared.

Parkerson replied that he was fine, but he asked whether she would mind sending some undershirts and boxers to an elderly inmate who never got any presents.

Parkerson later told her that her packages had made his friend’s holidays.

He also shared another bit of personal information. He was resigned to spending the rest of his life in prison, he wrote, for a crime he didn’t commit.

As the letters piled up, she began to believe him. Through his words, Carol saw a gentle man who cared for others. How could he have committed such a vicious crime?

“I know the world is not perfect and sometimes people get mixed up in things. I just happen to be one of those people. I can’t change it so I just have to accept it and move on with my life.” Parkerson, early 2008

Mike Raeber, then 39, was Carol’s oldest son, a partner at King & Spalding specializing in business litigation. He had been investigating a case to take on for free as part of the firm’s pro bono program, but it had just fallen through. Funny. Raeber needed a case. Parkerson needed a lawyer.

Carol never asked Mike to take on her pen pal’s case. But he decided to look into it anyway.

What he found surprised him. This was a murder trial that took place in a single day: jury selection, testimony, verdict and sentence. Did Parkerson receive a fair trial? And now Mike had an even bigger question: Was Parkerson innocent of the crime for which he had been imprisoned for 14 years?

He hoped so. This was one gruesome killing.

“I’m not sure how but my friend ended up with a knife in his hands and started stabbing the man. I probably could have stopped him but at the time I did nothing. I let that kid kill that man.” Parkerson, fall of 2007

On March 4, 1993, Ira Morris was found dead, stabbed 51 times with a small-bladed knife. Most of the wounds were superficial, but the killer cut Morris’ right jugular vein and punctured his heart and lung.

Sheriff’s deputies got an anonymous tip: They should take a look at Chip Thorpe, who was living in an old bus converted into a trailer that sat just down the road from the victim’s residence. When they found Thorpe, 18, they also found Parkerson, then 23. The deputies found two guns that belonged to Morris stashed nearby.

Parkerson and Thorpe eventually acknowledged being at the scene of the crime, but each fingered the other as the killer. In those circumstances — two suspects with different stories, no witnesses — a deal was perhaps inevitable: Flip one to get the other. The prosecutors chose to offer the deal to Thorpe, and he took it: Ten years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and theft and agreeing to testify against Parkerson.

“I have something I want to share with you. My son, Mike, is an attorney with the law firm King & Spalding. ... I have been telling him about your story.” Carol, May 26, 2008

A steady rain fell the late-winter night of the killing. Thorpe asked Parkerson, new to the area, whether he wanted to meet one of his friends. The two men walked through the woods to Morris’ trailer and began watching “The Longest Yard” on television.

Thorpe told jurors that Morris, 41, had been paying him for sex. As they watched TV, Morris tousled Thorpe’s hair and Parkerson saw him do it, Thorpe said.

“You’re a [homosexual slur], ain’t you?” Parkerson asked Morris, Thorpe testified.

Morris told Parkerson to leave. As Morris led him to the door, Parkerson pulled the small knife and began stabbing him, Thorpe said. The men struggled, and both crashed down onto Thorpe, who said he picked up the knife, which had fallen on the floor. To get Morris off of him, Thorpe testified, he stabbed Morris a few times near the shoulder blade and left the knife sticking in his back. When Morris fell seconds later, it dislodged and hit the floor.

Morris got up and grabbed a .22-caliber revolver, but Parkerson slapped it out of Morris’ hand and began stabbing him again, Thorpe testified.

With Morris dying on the floor, Parkerson and Thorpe left, driving to a bridge where they tossed the knife and their bloody clothes into the Flint River, Thorpe said.

Parkerson said it never happened that way.

As the three of them watched TV, he testified, he heard Morris giggle and then say, “Chip, stop!” He said he looked over and saw Thorpe grab Morris and begin stabbing him.

Morris fell on the bed, breaking the bed frame, and the two men then fell onto the floor. Parkerson said Morris was pleading: “Stop. I won’t tell anybody.” But Thorpe continued stabbing him, Parkerson testified.

Parkerson said he drove Thorpe to a bridge where Thorpe threw his bloody clothes in the river. He said he did not go to authorities because he was scared of what Thorpe might do to him.

Jurors began their deliberations shortly before 6 p.m. Forty minutes later they returned with their verdict: guilty on both counts. The judge sentenced Parkerson to life in prison.

“I had a lawyer, if that’s what you call him. Well, I can’t say that I believe he tried from the start. I just felt somewhere during midpoint he gave up on me.” Parkerson, summer 2007

As Mike read the trial transcript, he felt he could make a strong showing that Parkerson’s attorneys had failed their client. After talking to Parkerson on the phone and then meeting him, Mike also believed his mom’s pen pal was no killer.

Mike wondered whether Thorpe’s testimony had inflamed the jury of nine black people and three white people. Morris, the victim, was African-American. Thorpe testified of Parkerson, “as long as I’ve known him, he ain’t liked too many black folks.”

Mike learned that Parkerson’s lawyers had summoned two black friends of Parkerson to testify and they were at the courthouse ready to do so during the trial. But they were never called. Parkerson also told Mike he did not know he was going to testify until his lawyers called him to the stand as the only defense witness.

King & Spalding not only allowed Mike to take the case, it let three of the firm’s lawyers — Michael Weiss, Amy Michigan and Jordan Stringer — work on it with him. The lawyers filed papers on July 1, 2008, seeking a new trial for Parkerson. They knew they had a tough road ahead.

“Carol, my way of thinking is no matter what happens I can feel certain that for once I had the best people working on my case.” Parkerson, fall 2009

It had now been 15 years since the trial and Parkerson’s two lawyers, Earl “Brother” Jones and his daughter Stephanie, were dead. How could the team prove the Joneses botched the case if they couldn’t talk to them about it?

Mike caught a break.

He called Brother Jones’ widow. She said she was just about to clean out her late husband’s law office, but he could go inside to look for the Parkerson file. Mike dispatched a paralegal to the law office in Albany and, after a lengthy search, she found it.

The file confirmed Mike’s suspicions. It included no notes to indicate the Joneses met with Parkerson before trial. It also included the name of their investigator, who later testified that while Brother Jones could charm a jury, he did little to prepare for trial.

Superior Court Judge Christopher Hughes heard Parkerson’s case in a courtroom at Dooly State Prison on April 21, 2009. Dooly is in Unadilla, about 50 miles south of Macon.

Among the witnesses were Parkerson, his two African-American friends and the investigator.

Parkerson is innocent, Mike told the judge. There is not a shred of physical evidence tying him to the crime, and Thorpe’s testimony was unbelievable.

At the close of the hearing, Hughes indicated he was eager to issue his decision.

“Can you have a garden or work in one? I would think that would be good therapy for you — it’s so relaxing.” Carol, early 2008

The days waiting for the order turned into weeks and then into months. Each mailroom delivery jolted Mike’s thoughts about the case.

Sometimes his heart would start racing. He’d already pictured what the envelope would look like. He imagined tearing it open. And he had already warned his mom and Parkerson that such petitions rarely succeed.

Finally, on March 16 — almost 11 months later — the envelope arrived.

Mike immediately knew the outcome by the heading on the 22-page decision.

About 120 miles south, Parkerson was helping teach a GED math class to fellow inmates. He got a call to leave the classroom and returned with the envelope in his hand.

“I’m too scared to open it,” Parkerson said.

“Just open it up and see what it says, Country,” the teacher urged him.

Parkerson could not figure it out until he flipped to the back pages. Right above the judge’s signature was his decision to grant Parkerson a new trial.

Even though Parkerson broke down, he insisted on staying on and helping out with the class. But the teacher would have none of it. “Go call your mama,” she said.

When Parkerson gave her the news, she dropped the phone and began sobbing.

At King & Spalding, Mike first called his wife. When he called Carol, she began crying so hard she could barely speak.

Parkerson had won the unwinnable. But he was not out of prison. And, Mike soon warned him, he may never get out.

“Well I guess by now you and Steve [Carol’s husband] have heard that our prayers have been answered. WE WON” Parkerson, March 2010

It took years, but Parkerson had come to terms with prison life. This is my home, this is my life now. Make the best of it.

He worked maintenance, earned his GED, helped with teaching. He began drawing again and was so good at it other inmates came to him for tattoos.

Prison may have taught him responsibility and how to think through his problems, but Parkerson was ready to go. And now Mike was telling him the state could appeal Hughes’ decision and get it overturned. The state could also try him for murder all over again.

Mike had a strategy: Parkerson could plead guilty to a lesser charge and end the case once and for all. He would be released from prison for the time he had already served.

He called District Attorney Joe Mulholland, who said he’d take a plea to voluntary manslaughter — the same charge accepted by Thorpe, now seven years out of prison. For him the murder was history; he had served his time and moved on.

Mike didn’t like the offer. He wanted to hold out for obstruction of justice. But Parkerson said take the deal. Do whatever it takes to get me out.

On May 19, Parkerson appeared before the same judge who presided over his 1994 trial. He pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received time served. Mike made sure Parkerson did not have to admit to stabbing Morris.

The next day, Parkerson walked out of Dooly State Prison. Carol was there with his family to give him a hug.

As his greeting party mingled in the parking lot, Parkerson asked, “Can we go home now?”

He never looked back as they drove away.

“Fresh fruit and vegetables are the best things of all to be healthy.” Carol, third letter, 2007

A few weeks later, Parkerson arrived at Steve and Carol Raeber’s home bringing watermelons, peaches and cantaloupes. They’d soon drive up to the Raebers’ cabin on Lake Rabun. Steve took him fly fishing. Parkerson shared his Beetle Spin lures.

Now 40, Parkerson has been living with his parents in Hawkinsville and studying to become a welder. He runs his own business, Tattoos By Jimmy, which he says is doing better than he ever imagined. This week, he plans to move into his own trailer. “It’s time for me to quit depending on everyone else,” he said.

Parkerson says he never makes an important decision without first talking to Carol about it. They aren’t writing letters anymore, but they talk on the phone at least twice a week.

“That lady gave me my life back,” Parkerson said. “She brought me all the way back from the pits of hell. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for that family.”

Carol says the only thing her pen pal can do for her is to make a good life for himself.

As for what happened since she wrote her first letter three years ago, “It’s one of those God-given things. In my heart of hearts, I believe it. There was too much coincidence. How else could it have fallen into place like that every step of the way?”