SCREWED

October 14, 1998

Seventeen years.

That’s how long Jimmy Rodwell has been cooped up in prison. And for every one of the 6,167 dreary days he’s spent behind bars, Rodwell has been trying desperately to prove his innocence.
While most of the 11,000 people incarcerated in Massachusetts’ 23 state-run prisons will tell you “I didn’t do it,” in Rodwell’s case it just might be the truth.
The 42-year old Rodwell is currently incarcerated at MCI Shirley, sentenced in 1981 to life in prison for the killing of Louis Rose Jr.
Rose had been found dead 2 ˝ years earlier, slumped behind the wheel of his Buick Electra in Somerville. There were seven bullets in his head.
When Rodwell was arrested, the Middlesex County DA’s office offered to reduce the first-degree murder charge to manslaughter in exchange for a guilty plea. It would have meant about an eight-year stretch behind bars, but Rodwell turned it down.
Now he’s scheduled to die in prison.
Asked if he regrets not making the deal, Rodwell doesn’t blink.
“No,” he says, with a hint of indignation in his voice. “No, no. I didn’t commit the crime.”
Initially, Rodwell and his family – which has stood by him throughout his ordeal – weren’t even too worried about the murder charge.
“We thought the trial was just going to be a formality,” says his mother Carolyn Rodwell. “They had an innocent man.”
But the jury didn’t think so. They took just six hours to deliver a guilty verdict, even though the state’s case was thinner than a 15-year old supermodel:

- No eyewitnesses ever placed Rodwell at the scene of the crime.
- There were no fingerprints or other forensic evidence linking him to the murder.
- No weapon was ever recovered.
- The motive offered – a drug robbery – didn’t jibe with Rodwell’s prior scrapes with the law.

Rodwell hadn’t even been a suspect in the case until 2 ˝ years AFTER the 1978 murder. That’s when Frankie Holmes crawled out of the woodwork.
Holmes, a one-time employee in Rodwell’s vinyl siding business and high school classmate of the murdered Rose, was nabbed in 1981 for hijacking a truck in Rhode Island and bringing it across state lines. Worse still, he did it while on parole.
Facing hard time, Holmes needed something to trade. So he fingered Rodwell for the Rose murder, claiming he had watched as Rodwell shot Rose and stole $5,000 worth of drugs from his bleeding body.
Two months later, another con in need of a deal picked up the jailhouse phone.
David Nagle provided the corroboration the state needed to convict, and Rodwell was on the fast track to the big house.
Nagle, a violent career criminal with a lengthy rap sheet, was a long-time snitch who regularly swapped testimony in exchange for favors from the authorities. Facing six counts of armed robbery in two counties, he told police that Rodwell had bragged about killing Rose while the two of them were being held at the Billerica House of Correction.
Rodwell was quickly brought to trial, where he was painted by prosecutors as a violent thug. At the same time, Holmes and Nagle had their reputations buffed like a ’65 Corvette, a task that was made easier by the fact that the Middlesex County DA didn’t turn over to the defense the pair’s probation records or complete criminal histories.
In the case of Nagle, the DA's behavior was especially egregious. Nagle had been charged with 45 crimes in 10 years, most of them violent felonies. Yet the jury was informed of just 12 of them.
In a perfect example of how badly jurors were misled about Nagle, one newpaper account of the trial referred to Nagle as a "petty criminal."
Prosecutors also failed to disclose the full nature of Nagle's activity as a police informant, and the judge prevented the defense from bringing it up.
The word of two guys with everything to gain and nothing to lose sent Rodwell away for life. "It doesn't eat me alive, but I dwell on it," Rodwell says. "I just can't believe what happened, how they got away with it."

Jimmy Rodwell's story is a complex one, with a number of key characters.

NEXT PAGE - "The Cast of Characters"