A yellowed, one-page Springfield police report had lain hidden in a file since the 1980s until just recently. Its long disappearance may have kept Edward Wright in prison for four decades for a murder he says he did not commit.
The report ultimately proved what defense attorneys had long claimed, that someone had broken into Penny Anderson’s Springfield apartment just days after her brutal killing there, while police were still processing evidence. It could have lent credence to Wright’s insistence that the shoeprints police found on the linoleum floor weren’t his.
Those shoeprints were the only forensic evidence at trial that linked Wright to the murder scene.
Last week, Hampden County Superior Court Judge Jeremy Bucci pointed to the report about the break-in — the existence of which the government had long denied — as proof that prosecutors had knowingly and intentionally withheld key evidence for decades. The judge further faulted the government for allowing the “blatantly false” testimony of the Springfield detective who had written up the break-in but failed to remember it on the witness stand, telling the jury that only police had been inside Anderson’s apartment after her murder.
In his ruling last week, Bucci took the rare step of throwing out Wright’s conviction for first-degree murder and ordered a new trial. Wright, who has been incarcerated since 1984, remains in prison at MCI-Norfolk as the Hampden district attorney’s office appeals the judge’s ruling — making him one of the longest-serving inmates in Massachusetts history whose conviction was eventually overturned.
“The prosecution hid and lied about important evidence for years,” attorney Stephanie Hartung of the New England Innocence Project, which represented Wright, said at a press conference Thursday in Boston. “Edward Wright was sentenced to die in prison based on lies. We should all be outraged by that.”
Joining the legal team were a half-dozen of Wright’s friends from prison who had all been released after judges overturned their convictions. Like Wright, they were all Black men convicted in part because of police or prosecutorial misconduct, which factor in 90 percent of wrongful convictions of Black men in Massachusetts, Hartung said.
“It’s been a very, very long, very hard road,” said Wright’s wife, Mimi Olivier, who held a poster that read, “The fight continues,” over a photograph of her husband. “I’m overwhelmed but I’m so proud of my husband.”
Wright’s lawyers had alleged for decades that the likely killer was Anderson’s former boyfriend, Allen Smalls. They said Smalls threatened her the night she was killed and told his mother he had broken into Anderson’s apartment a few days after the murder. Smalls, who died in 2021, also later told a girlfriend on two occasions he was the real killer, she testified.
But prosecutors insisted there was nothing to substantiate the claim about the break-in, writing as recently as 2014 in a brief to the Supreme Judicial Court that there was “no evidence that there was ever a break in or theft from Ms. Anderson’s apartment.”
Then, in 2021, they turned over the long-missing Springfield police report on the break-in in the days after the murder.
Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni issued a statement Wednesday criticizing the judge’s ruling, saying that his office stood by “the integrity of the original prosecution and the many judicial reviews that this case has already received over the past four decades.”
“We strongly disagree with this decision and we have filed a notice of appeal and intend to argue this matter, once again, to defend the integrity of the conviction,” Gulluni said.
Wright’s legal team pushed back.
“This is a shocking statement given the unassailable evidence found by the judge,” said Radha Natarajan, the New England Innocence Project’s executive director. “If this is integrity, then there are many more convictions out of Hampden County that need to be reviewed.”
A Gulluni spokesperson blamed Springfield police for the long-missing report, saying that prosecutors did not receive a copy of the document until 2021.
But the judge made clear that police are part of the prosecution team and that the district attorney’s office has a duty to provide any evidence that a defendant may be innocent.
“The prosecution team knew of the break-in and was required to produce the break-in report to the defense,” wrote Bucci, a former prosecutor who was appointed to the bench by Governor Charlie Baker. Bucci added: “It was relevant and exculpatory because it cast serious doubt on the inference that the defendant made the shoe prints on the tiles, which evidence was heavily relied upon by the prosecutor because there was no other forensic evidence tying the defendant to the murder.”
It is rare, but prosecutors can face misconduct charges for withholding such evidence.
“There was zero prosecutorial misconduct,” said Gulluni’s spokesperson, Payton North. “The second we had this information, we handed it over.”
Like most convictions later deemed wrongful, Wright’s case highlighted questionable tactics. His legal team says the only three Black men in the jury pool were excluded by prosecutors, leaving an almost entirely white jury. (One black woman was selected, but the record was unclear on whether she was an alternate, they said.)
The defense team also conducted new testing that found Wright’s DNA was not found on key items connected to the murder, including a bloody washcloth. While Bucci found that DNA evidence admissible, he wrote that its evidentiary value was “negligible as best” because nothing linked it to the murderer.
Despite throwing out Wright’s conviction, Bucci did not exonerate him. “The incriminating evidence against the defendant was quite strong,” he wrote.
But, he added: “It was circumstantial and not overwhelming. There was no credible evidence of the defendant having a motive to kill the victim. Nor was there any forensic evidence that the defendant was at the victim’s apartment during or after the murder, except for the significant, and now believed to be highly unreliable, shoe print evidence repeatedly highlighted by the prosecutor at trial.”
On May 14, 1984, Wright and Anderson left the nightclub where she worked as a dancer and were seen entering her apartment at about 1 a.m. Anderson was stabbed repeatedly and died sometime before 6:15 a.m.
That afternoon, Springfield detective Alfred Ingham helped process the crime scene. Most of the physical evidence, which included bloody washcloths, towels, and pillows, was taken from the murder scene between May 14 and May 16, 1984.
The next day, Ingham responded to a 911 call reporting a break-in at Anderson’s apartment, where he found a broken bathroom window. Ingham wrote a one-page report memorializing the break-in, but there was no follow-up investigation.
It was not until May 18, the day after the break-in, that police collected the floor tiles with what prosecutors claimed were Wright’s bloody shoeprints.
At Wright’s trial, Ingham told the jury that, to the best of his knowledge, only police had accessed the crime scene. “Ingham knowingly misled the jury by testifying falsely,” Bucci concluded.
After leaving the Police Department, Ingham began teaching criminal justice at Western New England University in Springfield, where one of his courses examined wrongful convictions. In December 2024, he was called by the New England Innocence Project to testify at an evidentiary hearing in Wright’s case.
When defense lawyers confronted Ingham with the break-in report, he identified his handwriting on the document. But he said he did not recall telling prosecutors about the break-in and could not explain why he told the jury in 1985 that only police had accessed the crime scene.
“I believe my testimony could present a false picture because the jury was not told about the break-in,” Ingham said in an affidavit. “A break-in to an active crime scene could have resulted in contamination of evidence, especially evidence like the floor tiles that were not collected until after the break-in.”
Reached by phone Wednesday, Ingham declined to discuss the case in detail because he could still be called to testify. He said he did not feel guilty about Wright’s case, adding that he had not given it much thought over the years.
“If the guy is innocent, he should be set free,” Ingham said. “I feel sorry for anybody who is wrongly convicted, but I have no knowledge of whether he is guilty or not.”
Andrew Ryan can be reached at andrew.ryan@globe.com or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at @andewryan.61