Criminal - J.R.R. Ziemba

Episode Date: June 30, 2014

Crime victims are often put under the same scrutiny as the accused. Not only for their version of events, but sometimes for how they look and talk, too. We meet a man whose trial hurt worse than his assault. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different. Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Thank you. for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com. Oh, yeah. So, well, my parents were back-to-the-land hippie farmers when I was born.

I was born in a little teeny tiny town in West Virginia. And so my older brother, his name is Thorin Zimba. He was named after the dwarf king in The Hobbit. And my full name is Joseph Richard Reese Zimba. So it's like J.R.R. Zimba, like the author J.R.R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. So, you know, that's another thing. When they spoke to me in court, they would always say Joseph Zimba. And my parents never, ever called me Joseph. So it's almost like it's another thing. When they spoke to me in court, they would always say Joseph Zimba. And my parents never, ever called me Joseph. So it's almost like it's another person that they're talking about. I don't recognize that name as my own.

This is Reese Zimba. He's a pretty eccentric guy. You'll hear it in the way he talks. An eccentric doesn't always go over so well in court, even if you're the victim of a crime and not the perpetrator. In criminal trials, jurors are told, quote, you are the sole judges of the credibility of the witnesses. You will have to decide which witnesses to believe and which witnesses not to believe.

So while you're telling a jury what happened to you, they're sizing you up. Not just your story, but also your character. It can be sort of a double whammy, where the scrutiny of the trial feels worse than the crime. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Criminal. I walked past a gay bar that I had heard of. Some people had told me that there was a spot over there, but I had never seen it. I guess I just kind of wasn't in that particular area. That was when it was open. It was kind of like this shack set off of the street a little bit. It was April 20th, 2010.

Reese was walking in downtown Pensacola, Florida, late at night. And when I walked by there, I heard this kind of maybe middle-aged guy like pretty loudly propositioning these like younger guys who were getting in a car and getting ready to leave. He said, why don't you take me home, boyfriend,

stuff like that. And I was like, you know, the guy who was hollering at these young men, he definitely did not look like your typical, like, patron of, like, a gay bar. He was, like, kind of looked like, you know, you wouldn't be surprised he was living on the streets. He was, like, an older black guy, older, maybe, like, in his 40s. And, you know, he was just, like, really laying it on thick, you know, he was really coming on strong. And not long after that, a couple seconds, I heard this guy, it was clearly the same dude, yelling, hey, you know, behind me. And he yelled it a couple times. And I was walking, you know, fairly fast at this point.

And eventually he caught up to me and tapped on my shoulder. Reese has taken these aimless late-night walks for years. It's just another thing he does that makes him a little weird. He's never worried about his safety. If anything, he says he probably freaked out other people with his long hair and beard. When a stranger, like, comes up to you or approaches you, and sometimes you'll be like, oh, okay, this person wants a dollar or whatever. But I really kind of thought that this guy was looking for sex. And I don't think I'd ever really been scared that somebody would, like,

sexually assault me. I mean, this is just, you know, something that every woman that I know deals with. And this fear is very unfortunate that people have to deal with this at all. But I think this is really the first time I ever was kind of a little worried about somebody being sexually aggressive towards me. And in terms of what he looked like and his size compared to yours, was he visibly stronger than you? He was probably a couple inches short of me, but he was, like, thick.

You know, he was a cut guy. And furthermore, he kept, like, giving me daps, like, you know, where you, like, not fist bumps somebody, but, like, hit the top of their fist with the bottom of your fist, you know? He kept doing that, and he would say really strange things to me.

He said, I just saw this guy in that club. He looked exactly like a woman. And it was very clear to me that he assumed that if I hadn't just left the club, that I was, like, cruising for sex. And what happened next? He just, he asked me what time it was. And that's literally the last thing I remember.

Next thing I know, there were EMTs standing over me with flashlights. I was laying in the middle of the road without my glasses on. They were smashed. And it was a completely bewildering experience. I've never been knocked out cold before. Do you have any idea how long you were out for? You know, I think it was about 15 to 20 minutes. I really don't know. On top of the broken glasses, his wallet and phone were gone. But other than that, he seemed to be okay. So the cops show up, the paramedics are there. I'm sure you're getting... Yeah, paramedics first, and then the cops showed up after them,

just not long. And what do the cops say to you? The first thing that they asked me was, would I be able to identify my attacker? And I must say, you know, I've read all these op-eds in New York Times and seen all kinds of documentaries about people who are wrongfully convicted and exonerated later by DNA evidence. And so often it's eyewitness testimony. And I got to say, I think that really affected me. I just said my first reaction was no. But I have to say also, as I was waking up, I was completely disoriented. The police asked me things like my address and how old I was. And I was really, it was hard for me to answer.

I actually could not quite remember how old I was. But you did end up recognizing this guy later. Yeah, what happened was there was another woman who was attacked, like probably like a quarter mile from where I was the next night. And she was, she struggled with the guy. And I think, you know, honestly, was hurt pretty badly. But she was able to identify him from a mugshot. So they had a wanted poster up, you know, it was like in the newspaper, on the news, and they had put up a bunch of wanted posters, like around, like downtown Pensacola. And I just was like, that's him.

You know, it was so clearly the guy. Reese went down to the police station and was shown a bunch of mugshots. He was told to circle the picture of the man who attacked him. And he did. The guy's name was Clarence Lamar Henry. And that was it. He didn't hear from the police again. It took him a while to get over it. Reese didn't want to watch boxing or violent movies.

But for the most part, the assault was behind him. He took a job in Kansas City and moved out of Pensacola. A whole year went by before Reese got a phone call from his little sister. She was still living in Florida. She said, Reese, the guy who knocked you out, knocked out a lot of other people and the state attorney's looking for you. She gave me the phone number of a state attorney in Florida who was prosecuting these cases. And so I called her and she was like really excited to speak with me and said that they had been trying to get a hold of me for some time you know I more or less kind of just disappeared as far as as far as they knew and they told me immediately that they needed me to come back to Pensacola and to testify and I was like okay well and I should should say that one of the first things they said was,

we're definitely going to pay for your travel. There's a per diem. So I was like, okay, great. So this is like a vacation. Well, you know. I mean, it's a free trip home. Yeah, it was. Actually, the first time that I went down there,

it was my mother's birthday. And I certainly wasn't planning on going to Pensacola to just hang out with my parents on my mother's birthday. So I must admit, that was kind of nice. If one person is accused of committing several very similar crimes, say punching people out and stealing their wallets, the victims can sometimes be brought in to testify in one another's trials. It establishes an M.O. Before going to trial, Reese and the other victims were asked to appear in court and tell a judge their stories. Then the judge would decide whether the prosecution had enough evidence to proceed to trial. But there was one small problem. I'm not a particularly fashionable guy or a sharp dresser.

At this time, I had these pretty wild, huge red plastic eyeglasses. I'm nearly blind, so please know that they were a prescription and not just a fashion statement. But they were admittedly pretty weird looking. At this time, I did not own a suit. I did buy one recently, you should know. What did you wear for that first try? Well, I wore like probably some, gosh, I guess it was like some black jeans and like, you know, it definitely would have been like a buttoned up shirt, but not a tie, not a suit. A few weeks later, the state attorney's office called and asked Reese to fly back down to Pensacola and tell his story to a jury.

But they needed a favor. The state attorney called me and said, you really need to wear slacks. And I actually took it, kind of took it as a cue that I would wear these, I had these older black framed glasses that were like an older prescription. I couldn't see so well with them, but I brought those with me to the court thinking that maybe I would look a little more serious perhaps. What do you mean? Like, how does he, what was that conversation? I mean, he must have prefaced this by something. Like, we're losing.

It's because you're dressed like a slob you need to pull it together what does he actually say to you yeah i mean he well he you know um this is something that that's like you know happened to me in many ways in my life mostly probably coming from my mother like very gently like reese you're we we we love you we love how you're independent and uh and do what you want but you really need need to present yourself as being more serious because people will take you more seriously. Reese flew back to Florida and testified in the trial of the woman who'd been attacked the night after Reese. She was the one who'd first identified Clarence Lamar Henry's mugshot, the one Reese had seen in the newspaper and recognized. Reese wore the more serious black

glasses instead of the gigantic red ones. He tried to look respectable. And did you, you know, I know the prosecutor told you that you needed to clean up your act, but what about the jurors? You know, sitting in front of the jury, did you ever get the sense that they thought that you looked weird? You know, the whole process of testifying in court, it's just, it's so, it's so strange. It's so ceremonious. And when I first did it, it was, I mean, I was just totally, totally out of my element, I suppose. And so, you know, when the defense questions you, they're basically trying in whatever way they can to suggest that at best you're misremembering, at the worst that you're just lying. As I was testifying, you know, the public defender, you know, just cut me off.

He would say, you know, you told the police that you wouldn't be able to identify this guy, and then the next day you said that you could. And, you know, I would say, yes, that's true, but... And nobody wants to hear the but. The jury found Clarence Lamar Henry not guilty, and Reese went home. The state attorney called a third time.

Clarence Lamar Henry was accused of attacking an elderly Vietnamese man just a couple nights before Reese. The man didn't speak English well and the court had to hire a translator. He'd been homeless and was hard to find. Basically, he was a terrible witness. The state attorney needed Reese to fly down and be a witness in this man's trial to bolster the case. You know, it was getting to be a real pain. I mean, thankfully, my boss in Kansas City was pretty accommodating of me.

And, you know, we just kind of all were like, well, it's the criminal justice system, you know? You kind of just have to do what they tell you to do, right? He testified again and again, not guilty. Did you ever like at some point say, listen, I got hit in the face. I got robbed. I moved on. And now you're calling me. You're having them come down there. You're criticizing the way I look. You're telling me I'm not good enough. Screw you.

I'm not doing it anymore. And we're not even winning. No, I got to say I wasn't really like that. You know, I definitely felt a little bad that they thought that if I dressed nicer, you know, it would give them a better chance to successfully win the case. But it was just kind of the whole process, it did kind of leave a bad taste in my mouth in the sense that I didn't ever ask for any of this to happen to me. And I just went and did what I was supposed to do and told the truth. And it didn't matter at all. Nevertheless, about a month later, the state attorney asked Reese to fly down again for a fourth time.

This fourth trial was his own. He bought a blazer, but as you might have already guessed, Reese lost his own trial. Clarence Lamar Henry was acquitted again. I didn't feel like they believed me, not at all. Or they didn't like you. The sense that I got as I was telling the story, and as I said,

it involved me walking past this gay bar and feeling kind of like scared that I was going to be sexually assaulted. I think that they didn't believe me. That they thought I was a closeted gay guy who couldn't admit it.

I mean, I don't know why. There's nothing that anyone said to me that made me think that. It's just that's how I felt them looking at me. I mean, I'm just wandering around, you know. It doesn't sound... It sounded suspicious, you know, and I can't tell people there's a good reason that I was doing that.

There really isn't. I was just, this is just me. I just like to just get out and walk around. I know I'm not the only one, but I really think that a couple of my appearance that I just, the jury just didn't believe me. They just didn't. The Department of Justice has some boilerplate tips on being a good witness. You find it reproduced on state attorney websites all over the country. There's a heading called Appearance is Important that says, a neat appearance and proper dress in court are important. Further down the page, you're advised to, quote, be yourself.

It says, most important of all, you're sworn to tell the truth. Tell it. Which is all well and good, until the truth is, you're kind of a weirdo. I honestly think he was pretty savvy in the way that he chose his victims. And he chose people who, I don't know how acquainted he was. Apparently he had a long rap sheet. I don't know if that really entered into his calculus about who he should or should not mug, but it so happens, by design or otherwise, that he picked several victims who are, I guess,

less than 100% credible, and myself included. Clarence Lamar Henry did wind up going to prison. Last year, he broke into an empty building and committed grand theft. His current release date is May 2028. Criminal is produced by Eric Menel, Lauren Spohr, and me. Thanks to Argo Studios in New York for help with the recording. Julianne Alexander does our cover art. Take a look at thisiscriminal.com.

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