August 2, 2024 • 20 mins
Vanessa Tyler talks with Lionel Ray Williams and filmmaker Letitia McIntosh about the circumstances surrounding Lionel's conviction for the murder of actor Sal Mineo in 1979. Letitia has produced a documentary, "Unseen Innocence", exploring reports of false accusations and misconduct during the investigation in the hopes of erasing the stigma surrounding Lionel's name and reputation.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
An Academy Award winning Hollywood white movie actor from the
mid nineteen fifties and a black man who was only nineteen.
It was a time when who needs forensic evidence? Just
the word of a white cop is good enough, even
when eyewitnesses had the truth.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
All the witness sale the white man had committed to
murder and Nate, they're not going to send you the president.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, and he did.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Before we go any further with the man you just heard,
can I take you back way back to nineteen fifty five.
Many of you probably weren't even born sixty nine years ago,
but there was a movie hot on Hollywood screens starring
iconic white actors James Dean, Natalie Wood, and young, fresh
faced newcomer sal Mineo. The movie Rebel without a Cause.
(00:56):
The movie put Mineo on the map, got him that
oscar for supporting actor. Here is one of the scenes
the infamous shootout No to Turn On the Light, Mineo,
playing the role of Plato, is shot dead by copt.
(01:20):
Fast forward to real life nineteen seventy six. Salminio, the
teen actor, was now thirty seven and in the headlines
not for some new blockbuster, but because he was murdered.
Somebody knifed him, stabbed him to death right in front
of his Hollywood apartment on West Holloway Drive. Police suspect
a robbery gone wrong, and guests who went to prison.
(01:44):
You had all those witnesses, And just to tell our listeners,
how did you look back in nineteen seventy six?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I was five five and a half with a big ol'
affro and mustache, go tee.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
And the main thing, you're black, you're black, then you're black.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Marr right. I ain't never changed no other no other
color with black. That's all I am. That's all I
have a being, that's all I have a beat.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The story of Lionel Ray Ray Williams is a new
compelling documentary better than anything Hollywood could make in fiction.
Is a fact here in Blackland and now as a
brown person, you just feel so invisible where we're from.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
I welcome you to this joyful day.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
And we celebrate freedom where we are.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
I know someone heard something.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
And where we're going. We the people means all the people.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It made big news. Has been Hollywood actor murdered, bloody, violent?
Who did it? There was a description. The killer looked
nothing like Lionel Ray Ray Williams Ray Ray.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Welcome, How you doing? How you doing?
Speaker 1 (03:08):
What was the description of the killer and who were
the witnesses who saw him?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The description of the killer was from five to six
feet tall, with blue bre dan, no mustache, no hair
on his face. The witnesses was a white security guard.
(03:35):
The other witness was a little white guy walking his dog.
A nine year old girl. She was also white and
her mother was an eyewitness.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
She was also white.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Even with white witnesses to what happened in West Hollywood,
cops in California somehow got a brown skin black nineteen
year old with a big afro. He didn't fit the description,
but again it didn't matter. How did you even get arrested?
Back in nineteen seventy six, How did your name even
come up?
Speaker 2 (04:08):
The Los Angeles Sheriffs put out a bulletin stating that
if they'd seen a yellow car in that area, if
someone longed a small yellow car in that area, contact
the police. So O'Connor Lincoln called the police and said
that they loaned me a car, a small yellow car,
(04:30):
that that day and six six eight months later, the
police contacted me in the La County jail before I
was being extradited to Michigan to Battle Creek face charges
out there on poetry case.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Okay, for background, Ray Ray didn't own a yellow car,
but he did have a seventy one deuce in a
quarter the Electra two twenty five Bwick he bought from
O'Connor Lincoln, but the brakes went bad, so he took
the car to the dealership to be repaired. They gave
him a loaner, a little yellow Dodge Colt. So voluntarily
(05:06):
the people at the car dealership called the police and said, hey,
we lent a black man a little yellow car that
fit that kind of description. He might be the killer.
Is that how they made the connection.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
They made the connection, and right then when they came
to the county jail, they wanted to know did I
have any white friends that would commit murder, any kind
of crimes.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I told him I had none. They didn't believe me,
and here we are today.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Even the news reports from back in the seventies said
it was a white man.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
The witness has said they had seen a young white
male with blonde hair fleeing the scene.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
We know what happens a lot and documenting this tragic,
tragic turn of events in Ray Ray's life is Letitia McIntosh.
She is the producer of Unseen Innocence, which tells the
story of this real life thriller. Leticia, welcome, Thank you
(06:05):
very much. I appreciate you taking interest in this story.
It really means a lot to both mister Williams and myself.
How did you get involved, Well.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
I've spent most of my career working in it. I
worked for a public accounting firm for most of my
career as a trainer and onboarding specialist, and I wanted
to learn how to animate my training video, so I
wound up going to a film school program so I
could learn how to use some editing software. And when
I got into the film school program, I was like,
(06:38):
you know what, I can do this. It was actually
a certification program for one year, and I wound up
making you know, a short and long story short, what
wound up happening is my I directed a music video
for a Southern soul artist and the manager of that
Southern soul artist was in contact with mister Williams. He
(07:00):
was trying to book that artist at his motorcycle club
in Bakersfield, California, and then missus Williams told them the
story that he really needed somebody to help him tell
his story, and they called me on the phone. And
then I said, okay, well, let me do a little research.
And I you know, got online and started googling it
and looking for information. And I said, you know, I'm
(07:21):
from the school that if it doesn't sound right, there's
a lie in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Boy, were there lies? And as luck, what happened this
rookie in the industry, Remember she was an IT and
took a course on editing, became a deep dive investigative
journalist who came upon a story of a man's life
that would beat anything produced in Hollywood.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
And you know, everything that I saw was that, you know,
witnesses saw a white man, a Caucasian man, you know,
hair bouncing in the wind, and I just kind of
felt like this, there's something not right here, so I
just started exploring it further.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah. Wow, First of all, it's almost it was almost
meant to be that. You look at the chain of events.
Most people would go to journalism school and kind of
look for stories like that, and this just basically came
to you. It was almost like you were trained to
cold and tell this story. That's amazing.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
You know what. The cold thing about it is a
brother name is sal Yea.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
My brother's name was Sala also. Yeah, so that was
another interesting thing because I had never heard of sal Minio.
I'm gonna be very honest, And when I started researching,
I said, well, I knew about Rebel without a Cause,
and then I learned about the curse, and then I
learned a lot of different things. And then because of
my background being in it, and I, you know, having
some background with programming and you know, I used to
(08:42):
have to find the missing syntax and the code when
when it wouldn't run properly. So I'm used to calmbing
through information and deciphering information. So when I came across this,
that's just kind of what I did. I just started
gathering all kinds of information.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
The curse of the movie we Rebel without a Cause,
besides sal Mineo's murder, the top stars of the movie.
James Dean, the popular handsome white actor of the fifties,
died at age twenty four in a car crash in
his German built Porsche. The movie also starred Natalie Wood.
She played the role of Judy, she died in a
(09:18):
mysterious voting accident, and of course Salmineo, who later in
life made news as one of the earliest actors in
Hollywood to come out as part of the LGBTQ community,
unheard of in Hollywood at the time. Mineo was murdered
and the unjustice system successfully fingered then nineteen year old
(09:39):
Lionel Ray Ray Williams as his killer.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
My goal is to help mister Williams not only get exonerated,
but then also to clear the record so that his
name isn't tarnished like this, you know. I mean, he
has always said I was no angel, you know, And
I can respect that, you know what I mean. I
can respect the fact that he's very honest about, you know,
(10:04):
the path and the road that he was on when
he was in his young age. But he has a child,
his children, But he has a young child, and he
has grandchildren, and I just kind of feel like his
legacy should not be tied to the death of Salmnio
the way it is.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
But it is just Google Salmonio or Ray Ray Williams.
They're tied together Ray Ray's life, Sal's death.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
But the stories that are out there that are so
grossly inaccurate, that needs to be, that needs to change.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
It's been forty eight years since the crime. Ray Ray
has been home twenty five years, still being railroaded. It
is something you never get over, serving twelve years and
infamous sin Quentin while innocent, especially since there were several
eyewitnesses he's.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
A white people who know who they people look like,
you know.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
And the jury went and believed everybody who gained something,
some money, some freedom, some money, and some more freedom,
you know, because because I was to get out of
jail free card for everybody who knew me. If you
had a case of your boyfriend was in jail, come
(11:25):
and say Ray Ray told him, told me that he
did it, and I'll let him get out. I'll let
her get out. I'll give them some money, you know,
you know, you know, I'll let them out of prison.
You know, so many people that they tried to get at,
they got it. Everybody everybody that I knew, you know.
(11:45):
And it again to a point where when I'm calling
my friends, they telling me, look, I mean accept this
car but don't call me no more, you know, because
the police is on them, you know, and the police
is trying to get something on them so they can
get on me. So that's how a lot I lost
(12:05):
a lot of friendships behind this case because they was
just trying to turn everybody against them.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
So that's how they do it in this setup.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
There's actually a format that is traditionally used in these
kind of cases. It starts with inaccurate eyewitnesses, you know,
people giving inaccurate descriptions from an eyewitness. It also goes
to prosecutorial misconduct. It goes to misconduct on behalf of
(12:37):
the police and then also incentivizing witnesses or people to
turn on them, either people who might be jail house
informants which they recently changed or they changed that, but
other people having the incentive being given something like mister
Williams is saying to be able to say whatever it is,
(13:01):
you know, as they call it a script that they
will follow. And unfortunately that happened in his case. But
that happens even to this very day. I mean, it's
happening right now. And you know a lot of times
they you know, they they will put things in together
to make the case, to be able to win the case.
(13:22):
So sometimes it's about winning as opposed to who actually
might have actually committed this crime or what actually may
have happened. And that's the unfortunate thing. And like what
I was saying earlier was that, you know, I saw
in the inmate records that he had, there was a
lot of information that when I googled it and when
(13:45):
I was finding online, it wasn't lining up. It wasn't
making sense. And remember I told you when there's when
it doesn't make sense, there's a lion there somewhere. And
that's what we discovered is that, you know, there's not
there's some inaccuracies. And through the course of me working
on this, I was able to actually find the witness,
(14:06):
the eyewitness that saw Salmnio get murdered. He actually saw
it happen. He was seventeen years old at the time.
I found him online. I talked to him, I interviewed him,
and he's included in the documentary. And although he says
now he can't tell you for sure if this person
(14:26):
was white, light skinned, you know, Asian, you know, or whatever,
but he did say the man had blond hair, bouncing
in the wind when he ran away. And one thing
about mister Wims is he always had an afro. He
had long hair here and there, but he always had
an afro.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Letitia, did they ever find the white, flowing, blonde haired killer.
That person who killed Salmonio was still out there.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
They never looked for him after that. They pinned the
whole case on mister Williams. They made it sound like
it was the robbery gone bad because he had had
a history. You know, he said he was no angel.
So they just tied every hit, like he'll tell you
better than I can, every robbery that happened in that
area around that time that was not solved. They tried
(15:15):
to tag it to him.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
They didn't try.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
They gave me every unsolved robbery in the neighborhood of
the murder.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Everyone. They gave me a robbery ten minutes after the murder.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Now I'm a short black man, bald headed, and I'm
in a big white.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Car, four door, and I have a crime.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Partner who is tall and skinny and black three blocks over.
Now after the murder, I'm three blocks over committing a
robbery with a gun.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
This time, mister Ray Ray, how did you get out
of prison. You were supposed to serve. You were sentenced
to fifty one years. I need to ask you what
that felt like when you heard that sentence? And then
how did you get out serving a dozen?
Speaker 2 (16:04):
I really thought that I was I was a dead
man walking.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I really thought that I was a dead man walking.
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
I thought that I would never see the streets ever again,
you know. And then all of a sudden, my cousin,
Fernando Jackson showed up in San Quentin, and he was
pretty much uh knowledge knowledgeable about the law, and he
got my sentence overturned.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
He was he was not a lawyer, No, he's an
inmate lawyer.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
What is life like for you today?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Life for me today is uh, wondering do I have cancer?
Wondering how long I might have to live?
Speaker 3 (16:53):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (16:55):
You know, So you know I lived my life like
I'm finished in thirty minutes, go out of town a lot.
You know, I'm a motorcyclist. You know, I belong to
a motorcycle club. So you know, I'm on my I'm
on my bike doing what I want to do when
I want to do it, you know, And you know
(17:16):
I got married, but that that didn't I've been married
full times, so I guess marriage is not in the
works for me. You know.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
But it's been hard.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
But you know, you know, when I got out here,
you know, I found me a job, you know, in construction.
I started building houses, churches, you know, and doing that
kind of thing. Driving still across the country, you know.
So you know, it's been hard, but you know I've
been living now.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Many people try at least to get compensation for wrongful convictions.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, well, we we're in the process of suing the
State of California for the sentence fifty one million dollars.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
That's what I want.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
That's the only thing that I'm gonna accept. Fifty wasn't
million dollars for what they did to me. You know,
they tortured me. You know, they made me miss out
on my family. You know, they did a lie. You know,
they turned my friends against me, you know, with lies,
you know, they get people saying that I implicated them
(18:27):
in in this case. How I'm gonna implicate somebody in
a case that I ain't got nothing to do with,
you know, I mean, who who you really gonna believe
the eyewitnesses.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Or you're gonna believe the lie.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Ask people that they got up there to get to
lie on me to get something.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
There's some freedom, some money, you know.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
In the meantime, he's getting his story out there with
Letitia Macintosh's documentary Unseen Innocence.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
We are in the process trying to work through distribution
right now, but you can go to Unseen Innocence dot
com and purchase the book. He's got a book called
fifty one Years to Life and that's gonna tell you
the whole entire story of what happened, how things happened
in court and everything. So if you go to Unseen
Innocence dot com, you'll be able to purchase the book
(19:21):
and then all of the information I in my prayer.
We had a meeting and my prayer is that we
can get it on HBO Documentaries. We had a meeting
with them. We're waiting to see what's gonna happen next.
We would also like to do a movie about his
life that we go into detail about, like the whole
thing with his first wife. You know, the stories that
(19:43):
are out there saying that she committed suicide. She's not dead,
she's still alive to this very day. The whole trajectory
of all the things that happened in the case and
in his life, and how he you know, how he
was then and then what he became later.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Line Old rap Ray Williams and Letitia Macintosh thank you
both for your story.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Vanessa Tyler, we appreciate your time and your interest in
this story. It means a very lie to us.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Unseen innocence. How a five foot five inch black man
with an afro paid with a dozen years of his
life for the white five foot nine inch killer with
the flowing blonde hair. I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me next Friday,
where we will have a news story impacting us here
on black Land.
An Academy Award winning Hollywood white movie actor from the
mid nineteen fifties and a black man who was only nineteen.
It was a time when who needs forensic evidence? Just
the word of a white cop is good enough, even
when eyewitnesses had the truth.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
All the witness sale the white man had committed to
murder and Nate, they're not going to send you the president.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, and he did.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Before we go any further with the man you just heard,
can I take you back way back to nineteen fifty five.
Many of you probably weren't even born sixty nine years ago,
but there was a movie hot on Hollywood screens starring
iconic white actors James Dean, Natalie Wood, and young, fresh
faced newcomer sal Mineo. The movie Rebel without a Cause.
(00:56):
The movie put Mineo on the map, got him that
oscar for supporting actor. Here is one of the scenes
the infamous shootout No to Turn On the Light, Mineo,
playing the role of Plato, is shot dead by copt.
(01:20):
Fast forward to real life nineteen seventy six. Salminio, the
teen actor, was now thirty seven and in the headlines
not for some new blockbuster, but because he was murdered.
Somebody knifed him, stabbed him to death right in front
of his Hollywood apartment on West Holloway Drive. Police suspect
a robbery gone wrong, and guests who went to prison.
(01:44):
You had all those witnesses, And just to tell our listeners,
how did you look back in nineteen seventy six?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I was five five and a half with a big ol'
affro and mustache, go tee.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
And the main thing, you're black, you're black, then you're black.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Marr right. I ain't never changed no other no other
color with black. That's all I am. That's all I
have a being, that's all I have a beat.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The story of Lionel Ray Ray Williams is a new
compelling documentary better than anything Hollywood could make in fiction.
Is a fact here in Blackland and now as a
brown person, you just feel so invisible where we're from.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
I welcome you to this joyful day.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
And we celebrate freedom where we are.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
I know someone heard something.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
And where we're going. We the people means all the people.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It made big news. Has been Hollywood actor murdered, bloody, violent?
Who did it? There was a description. The killer looked
nothing like Lionel Ray Ray Williams Ray Ray.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Welcome, How you doing? How you doing?
Speaker 1 (03:08):
What was the description of the killer and who were
the witnesses who saw him?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The description of the killer was from five to six
feet tall, with blue bre dan, no mustache, no hair
on his face. The witnesses was a white security guard.
(03:35):
The other witness was a little white guy walking his dog.
A nine year old girl. She was also white and
her mother was an eyewitness.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
She was also white.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Even with white witnesses to what happened in West Hollywood,
cops in California somehow got a brown skin black nineteen
year old with a big afro. He didn't fit the description,
but again it didn't matter. How did you even get arrested?
Back in nineteen seventy six, How did your name even
come up?
Speaker 2 (04:08):
The Los Angeles Sheriffs put out a bulletin stating that
if they'd seen a yellow car in that area, if
someone longed a small yellow car in that area, contact
the police. So O'Connor Lincoln called the police and said
that they loaned me a car, a small yellow car,
(04:30):
that that day and six six eight months later, the
police contacted me in the La County jail before I
was being extradited to Michigan to Battle Creek face charges
out there on poetry case.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Okay, for background, Ray Ray didn't own a yellow car,
but he did have a seventy one deuce in a
quarter the Electra two twenty five Bwick he bought from
O'Connor Lincoln, but the brakes went bad, so he took
the car to the dealership to be repaired. They gave
him a loaner, a little yellow Dodge Colt. So voluntarily
(05:06):
the people at the car dealership called the police and said, hey,
we lent a black man a little yellow car that
fit that kind of description. He might be the killer.
Is that how they made the connection.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
They made the connection, and right then when they came
to the county jail, they wanted to know did I
have any white friends that would commit murder, any kind
of crimes.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I told him I had none. They didn't believe me,
and here we are today.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Even the news reports from back in the seventies said
it was a white man.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
The witness has said they had seen a young white
male with blonde hair fleeing the scene.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
We know what happens a lot and documenting this tragic,
tragic turn of events in Ray Ray's life is Letitia McIntosh.
She is the producer of Unseen Innocence, which tells the
story of this real life thriller. Leticia, welcome, Thank you
(06:05):
very much. I appreciate you taking interest in this story.
It really means a lot to both mister Williams and myself.
How did you get involved, Well.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
I've spent most of my career working in it. I
worked for a public accounting firm for most of my
career as a trainer and onboarding specialist, and I wanted
to learn how to animate my training video, so I
wound up going to a film school program so I
could learn how to use some editing software. And when
I got into the film school program, I was like,
(06:38):
you know what, I can do this. It was actually
a certification program for one year, and I wound up
making you know, a short and long story short, what
wound up happening is my I directed a music video
for a Southern soul artist and the manager of that
Southern soul artist was in contact with mister Williams. He
(07:00):
was trying to book that artist at his motorcycle club
in Bakersfield, California, and then missus Williams told them the
story that he really needed somebody to help him tell
his story, and they called me on the phone. And
then I said, okay, well, let me do a little research.
And I you know, got online and started googling it
and looking for information. And I said, you know, I'm
(07:21):
from the school that if it doesn't sound right, there's
a lie in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Boy, were there lies? And as luck, what happened this
rookie in the industry, Remember she was an IT and
took a course on editing, became a deep dive investigative
journalist who came upon a story of a man's life
that would beat anything produced in Hollywood.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
And you know, everything that I saw was that, you know,
witnesses saw a white man, a Caucasian man, you know,
hair bouncing in the wind, and I just kind of
felt like this, there's something not right here, so I
just started exploring it further.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah. Wow, First of all, it's almost it was almost
meant to be that. You look at the chain of events.
Most people would go to journalism school and kind of
look for stories like that, and this just basically came
to you. It was almost like you were trained to
cold and tell this story. That's amazing.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
You know what. The cold thing about it is a
brother name is sal Yea.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
My brother's name was Sala also. Yeah, so that was
another interesting thing because I had never heard of sal Minio.
I'm gonna be very honest, And when I started researching,
I said, well, I knew about Rebel without a Cause,
and then I learned about the curse, and then I
learned a lot of different things. And then because of
my background being in it, and I, you know, having
some background with programming and you know, I used to
(08:42):
have to find the missing syntax and the code when
when it wouldn't run properly. So I'm used to calmbing
through information and deciphering information. So when I came across this,
that's just kind of what I did. I just started
gathering all kinds of information.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
The curse of the movie we Rebel without a Cause,
besides sal Mineo's murder, the top stars of the movie.
James Dean, the popular handsome white actor of the fifties,
died at age twenty four in a car crash in
his German built Porsche. The movie also starred Natalie Wood.
She played the role of Judy, she died in a
(09:18):
mysterious voting accident, and of course Salmineo, who later in
life made news as one of the earliest actors in
Hollywood to come out as part of the LGBTQ community,
unheard of in Hollywood at the time. Mineo was murdered
and the unjustice system successfully fingered then nineteen year old
(09:39):
Lionel Ray Ray Williams as his killer.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
My goal is to help mister Williams not only get exonerated,
but then also to clear the record so that his
name isn't tarnished like this, you know. I mean, he
has always said I was no angel, you know, And
I can respect that, you know what I mean. I
can respect the fact that he's very honest about, you know,
(10:04):
the path and the road that he was on when
he was in his young age. But he has a child,
his children, But he has a young child, and he
has grandchildren, and I just kind of feel like his
legacy should not be tied to the death of Salmnio
the way it is.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
But it is just Google Salmonio or Ray Ray Williams.
They're tied together Ray Ray's life, Sal's death.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
But the stories that are out there that are so
grossly inaccurate, that needs to be, that needs to change.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
It's been forty eight years since the crime. Ray Ray
has been home twenty five years, still being railroaded. It
is something you never get over, serving twelve years and
infamous sin Quentin while innocent, especially since there were several
eyewitnesses he's.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
A white people who know who they people look like,
you know.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
And the jury went and believed everybody who gained something,
some money, some freedom, some money, and some more freedom,
you know, because because I was to get out of
jail free card for everybody who knew me. If you
had a case of your boyfriend was in jail, come
(11:25):
and say Ray Ray told him, told me that he
did it, and I'll let him get out. I'll let
her get out. I'll give them some money, you know,
you know, you know, I'll let them out of prison.
You know, so many people that they tried to get at,
they got it. Everybody everybody that I knew, you know.
(11:45):
And it again to a point where when I'm calling
my friends, they telling me, look, I mean accept this
car but don't call me no more, you know, because
the police is on them, you know, and the police
is trying to get something on them so they can
get on me. So that's how a lot I lost
(12:05):
a lot of friendships behind this case because they was
just trying to turn everybody against them.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
So that's how they do it in this setup.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
There's actually a format that is traditionally used in these
kind of cases. It starts with inaccurate eyewitnesses, you know,
people giving inaccurate descriptions from an eyewitness. It also goes
to prosecutorial misconduct. It goes to misconduct on behalf of
(12:37):
the police and then also incentivizing witnesses or people to
turn on them, either people who might be jail house
informants which they recently changed or they changed that, but
other people having the incentive being given something like mister
Williams is saying to be able to say whatever it is,
(13:01):
you know, as they call it a script that they
will follow. And unfortunately that happened in his case. But
that happens even to this very day. I mean, it's
happening right now. And you know a lot of times
they you know, they they will put things in together
to make the case, to be able to win the case.
(13:22):
So sometimes it's about winning as opposed to who actually
might have actually committed this crime or what actually may
have happened. And that's the unfortunate thing. And like what
I was saying earlier was that, you know, I saw
in the inmate records that he had, there was a
lot of information that when I googled it and when
(13:45):
I was finding online, it wasn't lining up. It wasn't
making sense. And remember I told you when there's when
it doesn't make sense, there's a lion there somewhere. And
that's what we discovered is that, you know, there's not
there's some inaccuracies. And through the course of me working
on this, I was able to actually find the witness,
(14:06):
the eyewitness that saw Salmnio get murdered. He actually saw
it happen. He was seventeen years old at the time.
I found him online. I talked to him, I interviewed him,
and he's included in the documentary. And although he says
now he can't tell you for sure if this person
(14:26):
was white, light skinned, you know, Asian, you know, or whatever,
but he did say the man had blond hair, bouncing
in the wind when he ran away. And one thing
about mister Wims is he always had an afro. He
had long hair here and there, but he always had
an afro.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Letitia, did they ever find the white, flowing, blonde haired killer.
That person who killed Salmonio was still out there.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
They never looked for him after that. They pinned the
whole case on mister Williams. They made it sound like
it was the robbery gone bad because he had had
a history. You know, he said he was no angel.
So they just tied every hit, like he'll tell you
better than I can, every robbery that happened in that
area around that time that was not solved. They tried
(15:15):
to tag it to him.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
They didn't try.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
They gave me every unsolved robbery in the neighborhood of
the murder.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Everyone. They gave me a robbery ten minutes after the murder.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Now I'm a short black man, bald headed, and I'm
in a big white.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Car, four door, and I have a crime.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Partner who is tall and skinny and black three blocks over.
Now after the murder, I'm three blocks over committing a
robbery with a gun.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
This time, mister Ray Ray, how did you get out
of prison. You were supposed to serve. You were sentenced
to fifty one years. I need to ask you what
that felt like when you heard that sentence? And then
how did you get out serving a dozen?
Speaker 2 (16:04):
I really thought that I was I was a dead
man walking.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I really thought that I was a dead man walking.
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
I thought that I would never see the streets ever again,
you know. And then all of a sudden, my cousin,
Fernando Jackson showed up in San Quentin, and he was
pretty much uh knowledge knowledgeable about the law, and he
got my sentence overturned.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
He was he was not a lawyer, No, he's an
inmate lawyer.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
What is life like for you today?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Life for me today is uh, wondering do I have cancer?
Wondering how long I might have to live?
Speaker 3 (16:53):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (16:55):
You know, So you know I lived my life like
I'm finished in thirty minutes, go out of town a lot.
You know, I'm a motorcyclist. You know, I belong to
a motorcycle club. So you know, I'm on my I'm
on my bike doing what I want to do when
I want to do it, you know, And you know
(17:16):
I got married, but that that didn't I've been married
full times, so I guess marriage is not in the
works for me. You know.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
But it's been hard.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
But you know, you know, when I got out here,
you know, I found me a job, you know, in construction.
I started building houses, churches, you know, and doing that
kind of thing. Driving still across the country, you know.
So you know, it's been hard, but you know I've
been living now.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Many people try at least to get compensation for wrongful convictions.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, well, we we're in the process of suing the
State of California for the sentence fifty one million dollars.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
That's what I want.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
That's the only thing that I'm gonna accept. Fifty wasn't
million dollars for what they did to me. You know,
they tortured me. You know, they made me miss out
on my family. You know, they did a lie. You know,
they turned my friends against me, you know, with lies,
you know, they get people saying that I implicated them
(18:27):
in in this case. How I'm gonna implicate somebody in
a case that I ain't got nothing to do with,
you know, I mean, who who you really gonna believe
the eyewitnesses.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Or you're gonna believe the lie.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Ask people that they got up there to get to
lie on me to get something.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
There's some freedom, some money, you know.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
In the meantime, he's getting his story out there with
Letitia Macintosh's documentary Unseen Innocence.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
We are in the process trying to work through distribution
right now, but you can go to Unseen Innocence dot
com and purchase the book. He's got a book called
fifty one Years to Life and that's gonna tell you
the whole entire story of what happened, how things happened
in court and everything. So if you go to Unseen
Innocence dot com, you'll be able to purchase the book
(19:21):
and then all of the information I in my prayer.
We had a meeting and my prayer is that we
can get it on HBO Documentaries. We had a meeting
with them. We're waiting to see what's gonna happen next.
We would also like to do a movie about his
life that we go into detail about, like the whole
thing with his first wife. You know, the stories that
(19:43):
are out there saying that she committed suicide. She's not dead,
she's still alive to this very day. The whole trajectory
of all the things that happened in the case and
in his life, and how he you know, how he
was then and then what he became later.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Line Old rap Ray Williams and Letitia Macintosh thank you
both for your story.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Vanessa Tyler, we appreciate your time and your interest in
this story. It means a very lie to us.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Unseen innocence. How a five foot five inch black man
with an afro paid with a dozen years of his
life for the white five foot nine inch killer with
the flowing blonde hair. I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me next Friday,
where we will have a news story impacting us here
on black Land.
Host
Vanessa Tyler
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