Evidence of innocence: doubt cast on a murder case

On March 18, 1983, David Johnston, 71, left his home in Collingdale and walked down the street to Kelly's Deli to get his daily paper and his daily number. Seconds after he walked in - shortly before 1:40 p.m. - he was shot and killed by a masked robber.

On that same cool and drizzly day, in that same small Delaware County town, Terence McCracken Jr., 18, was sent home from school with an eye infection and spent the day hanging around his neighborhood.

He worked on a neighbor's car, greeted the mailman and, later, watched with friends as police tried to track down a murderer. They were looking for a man in a red sweatshirt, much like the one McCracken was wearing under his blue denim jacket.

Before the day ended, Terry McCracken, apparently by virtue of the red sweatshirt, became a murder suspect. Three days later, he was arrested. And six months after that, based mainly on the testimony of one eyewitness and a test for gunshot residue, he was convicted of Johnston's murder.

Today, there is compelling evidence that McCracken, who faces a mandatory life sentence, did not commit the crime.

A six-month investigation by The Inquirer has raised basic questions about McCracken's guilt, and about some of the evidence and testimony used to convict him.

That investigation produced statements from another man - supported by a lie-detector test - who said that he was involved in the crime and that McCracken was not.

In addition:

* At least three members of McCracken's family and two friends say they were with him either during or within two minutes of the time the crime was taking place at Kelly's Deli, seven-tenths of a mile from McCracken's home.

* A mailman had McCracken sign for a certified letter within minutes of - if not during - the robbery at Kelly's Deli, which began about 1:30 and lasted until about 1:38 p.m.

* A police scientist's conclusion, to which he testified in court, that gunshot residue was found on McCracken's hand was erroneous, according to a nationally known scientist who is credited with developing the test used to analyze residue on McCracken's hands.

* McCracken, in a polygraph test commissioned by The Inquirer, was determined to have given truthful answers when he said that he did not take part in the robbery or the killing, and that he had not fired a handgun - not that day, and not in his lifetime.

Moreover, The Inquirer's investigation indicates that it is mainly because of McCracken's conviction that the two men who, according to one of them, committed the crime have thus far gone unpunished.

*

Terry McCracken, who has been in jail for three years, was a senior at Academy Park High School when he was arrested March 21, 1983. He had planned to tour the country after his graduation, then join the Army. He had been, up until then, in only minor trouble with the law.

Still, to many in the blue-collar community of Collingdale, the news of his arrest came as little surprise.

McCracken is the son of Terence "Screw" McCracken, a former member of the Warlocks motorcycle gang whose reputation was widely known among Delaware County law enforcement authorities and whose poorly kept home on Pusey Avenue in Collingdale, later condemned by the borough, was considered by many a thorn in the community's side.

Primarily because of that, Terry McCracken was considered, in the private parlance of Collingdale police, an "NFG. " The "N" stands for no; the ''G" stands for good.

But within just two weeks, questions would begin to surface. First, while McCracken was behind bars, a robbery strikingly similar to the one at Kelly's Deli occurred at a beverage outlet in nearby Glenolden.

The following week, another similar robbery took place in Clifton Heights, leading to the arrest of two furniture deliverymen.

McCracken had been in jail 17 days when those two men - William Vincent Verdekal and John Robert Turcotte - were arrested, minutes after the robbery of a Clifton Heights market on April 7, 1983.

The .38-caliber handgun police took from Turcotte that day was determined by ballistics tests to be the same gun that killed Johnston at Kelly's Deli in Collingdale.

When that fact - reported in the Delaware County Daily Times on April 15, 1983 - made its way to the 6-by-9-foot jail cell Terry McCracken was in, he said, it was as if a bad dream had ended.

"I thought for sure I would be out that weekend," he said in an interview last year at Delaware County Prison, where he had been held since his arrest and where, pending a decision on his appeal for a new trial, he is still awaiting formal sentencing.

"I can understand why they arrested me. At the beginning I think maybe even I would have arrested me. But I can't understand, when they found the gun, why they didn't let me go," he said. "I thought that would clear everything up. "

It didn't turn out that way.

Instead, Verdekal and Turcotte were charged along with McCracken with the holdup and killing at Kelly's Deli, and investigators set out to show that the three men had conspired to commit the crime.

McCracken went to trial first and, after a mistrial, was convicted Oct. 25, 1983, of second-degree murder, robbery and conspiracy.

The charges against Verdekal were dropped during his trial when Delaware County Judge Robert A. Wright ruled that there was no evidence to firmly link Verdekal to McCracken. After that, the district attorney's office dropped the prosecution against Turcotte but reserved the right to try him later.

Both Verdekal and Turcotte were convicted of other robberies and sent to prison - Turcotte with the knowledge that the Kelly's Deli charges could be renewed against him at any time, Verdekal in a somewhat less vulnerable position.

Delaware County District Attorney John A. Reilly says he believes all three men were involved in the crime, and he still hopes to bring Verdekal and Turcotte to trial.

Yet Verdekal, in four interviews held over six months at three different prisons, said that he played a role in the crime and that McCracken did not.

Verdekal said he went into the store briefly before the holdup, then waited in his leased white Mercedes-Benz truck outside the delicatessen as Turcotte committed the holdup. Then, he said, he drove Turcotte from the scene of the crime.

And, he said, the first time he ever met Terry McCracken Jr. was when he and Turcotte joined him as inmates of Delaware County Prison.

Verdekal's statements were supported by a lie-detector test administered to him on behalf of The Inquirer by a former FBI polygrapher.

The deliveryman said he was coming forward with the information "in order for me to rest, in order for me to sleep at night, to have a clear conscience. I can't live with seeing a kid 18 years old getting life in prison for something I know he didn't do. "

In addition to Verdekal's statements, The Inquirer investigation revealed that:

* Ten people - including Verdekal and five other prison inmates - say Turcotte told them that he robbed Kelly's Deli, and shot Johnston accidentally. All 10 say he blamed it on having consumed large quantities of drugs and liquor that day.

* Turcotte, in a letter sent to Verdekal in prison, wrote, "All I can really say is that I'm sorry. I know if I told you about the gun or anything about what happen . . . it never would have happen. All I can say is you know I've never in my life been as drunk as I was that day."

* Turcotte, two lawyers involved in the case say, was at one point willing to plead guilty to the Kelly's Deli killing. In exchange, he wanted assurances that he would not get the death penalty, nor more than one life sentence for all the crimes of which he was then accused. No such assurances were given.

* Verdekal, also while awaiting trial, was willing to testify that Turcotte was the triggerman in the Kelly's Deli case and to give police information about other unsolved crimes in exchange for a lenient sentence, according to Verdekal and his attorney, Luke McLaughlin 3d. The district attorney's office turned down that offer, too, saying, according to McLaughlin, that if the information Verdekal could supply did not implicate McCracken, they were not interested.

* Two key pieces of evidence either disappeared or were destroyed by the time of McCracken's trial - the substance identified as gunshot residue, which, according to the police scientist's report, was destroyed during testing, and a sketch of the gunman made by a customer in the delicatessen, which officials in the district attorney's office said was lost in the shuffle of pretrial paper work.

* There was disagreement among law enforcement officers investigating the Kelly's Deli case as to McCracken's involvement in it. One night, that disagreement almost led two investigators to come to blows. Some police officers involved in the investigation, though not willing to step forward publicly, say privately that they believe McCracken is innocent, and that Turcotte and Verdekal alone committed the crime.

* One of the customers in the store at the time of the holdup said in an interview that, although she never mentioned it to the authorities, she remembers thinking at a preliminary hearing attended by all three men that Turcotte more resembled the Kelly's Deli gunman than did McCracken. None of the customers or employees interviewed remember being shown pictures of Turcotte during the police investigation.

* Michael Aldridge, a former schoolmate of McCracken's and the only witness who identified him as being at the scene of the crime, originally told police that he did not recognize the man who fled the store. Three days later he told police it was McCracken. In subsequent court hearings, Aldridge further altered his account, and at one point he admitted on the witness stand that he had lied about certain aspects of his story to make it more believable.

Two acquaintances of Aldridge's say he has admitted in private conversations that he was not sure whom he saw fleeing the store, and that he identifed the man as McCracken because police were insisting it was McCracken. Furthermore, Robert Brown, who was standing with Aldridge across the street from the deli at the time of the robbery, said in an interview that until police arrived, Aldridge gave no indication of having seen anything unusual at the store.

The Delaware County district attorney's office, informed of those findings, put little credence in them, and officials there said they remained convinced that McCracken is guilty, calling the case against him "among the strongest collection of circumstantial evidence against a defendant that we have ever had. "

They discounted the statements from Verdekal and other prison inmates, saying that the veracity of jailhouse statements is questionable and that - though they had no proof of it - the inmates could have been threatened or intimidated by members of the Warlocks who are in prison.

*

March 18, 1983 was a dreary, cloudy Friday. Terry McCracken, as usual, slept as late as he could, then dragged himself out of bed to get ready for school. As he pulled on his clothes, his friend Tommy Akins drove up and honked his horn.

"I always picked him up in front of his house, and I always had to wait 10 or 15 minutes because he was usually still sleeping when I got there,"

Akins said. On the way to Academy Park High School, where McCracken was a senior and Akins a junior, Akins stopped at Kelly's. McCracken waited in the car while Akins ran in for his usual breakfast, a soda and cupcakes.

Because he'd missed the previous two days of school, McCracken checked in at the vice principal's office with a note from his stepmother. From there he was sent to the school nurse, Mary Panny, who, from across her desk, immediately saw that the eye infection that had kept him home had not cleared up. "You can't even keep them open," McCracken recalls her saying. The nurse

sent McCracken home.

"If you know anything about conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, you notice it right away," Panny said in an interview. "It's not just bloodshot eyes, there's a discharge. "

McCracken said he walked home in the rain, not quite a mile, and went back to bed, where he remained until about 11:30 a.m.

Shortly after noon, McCracken went to the home of a neighbor, Andrew Leicht, who was working on his car in front of his house. McCracken, whose family's phone had been disconnected, needed to call school to make arrangements for his English teacher to pick up a term paper due that day.

"He had told us that this paper was real important and that, if we couldn't be in class, to call him and he'd make arrangements to pick it up," McCracken said. His topic was the U.S. Marines.

McCracken called his school from Leicht's house. School secretary Edith Chestnut remembers the call. It was about 12:30 p.m., she said. She paged English teacher Joseph Tortorelli over the public address system, spoke to him, then told McCracken that Tortorelli would drop by his house after school to pick up the report.

After the phone call, McCracken went back outside, where Leicht enlisted his help on his car.

"Terry didn't know a whole lot about cars," Leicht said in an interview. ''I said, 'Why don't you give me a hand here and take off a few bolts, I'm in a rush. ' He said 'all right' and he started undoing some bolts for me. "

Leicht recalled that the intake manifold on his 1970 Chevelle was leaking and that he was working in the rain, rushing to install a temporary gasket he'd made out of cardboard so he could get to his job at a Radio Shack by 2 p.m.

At McCracken's trial, Leicht said he was with McCracken until shortly before 1 p.m. In the interview, he said he believed he was with McCracken until about 1:20 p.m., when he put his tools away and went inside to clean up for work, leaving his car running.

McCracken said that about 1:20, he left Leicht and went back to his own house. There, his father and stepmother were getting ready for a doctor's appointment. A friend from across the street, Vincent Cefaratti, was in the McCrackens' living room watching television. And McCracken's brother Daryl, 17, and his brother's girlfriend, Claire Montanero, were quarreling. The dispute was over who would go to the store for cigarettes. McCracken volunteered.

Shortly after 1:25, McCracken said, he was on his way back from Larry's, a small corner grocery two blocks from his home, when he saw his mailman, Robert

Vance.

Vance, in an interview, said that he told McCracken he had a certified letter for his father and that McCracken walked with him to his house. McCracken ran upstairs to tell his father he needed to sign for the letter. Terence McCracken Sr., who was in the bathroom, said he told his son to sign. ''What the hell, we have the same name," he recalled in an interview.

No records are made of the times of delivery of certified letters, Vance said, but as he remembered it, the younger McCracken signed the receipt for the letter between 1 and 1:30 p.m.

McCracken, his brother and his parents, who were watching the clock because of the 2 p.m. doctor's appointment, said the mailman came at 1:30 p.m.

*

David Johnston, meanwhile, was well into his daily routine that Friday.

Johnston, retired from his job as a security guard at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was a slightly built man with white hair, blue eyes and, neighbors recall, a meticulous appearance. After the death of his first wife, Johnston had remarried. About six years after that - in 1979 - he and his wife moved from Philadelphia to Collingdale "because they thought it would be safer in the suburbs," said his stepdaughter, Connie Youkon of Philadelphia.

There, they lived a quiet life, for the most part keeping to themselves, occasionally going out for dinner and a movie, as long as it didn't interfere with a Phillies game on television. Johnston watched those regularly.

And every day, he walked to Kelly's Deli. He bought a newspaper and he played his state lottery number - the same one every day, according to Kelly's Deli employee Delores Bright - 800, straight and in a box.

On March 18, Johnston, who had been suffering from ulcers, was walking a little more slowly than usual as headed down Sharon Street to Kelly's Deli. It was wet outside, and he'd only recently completed a long hospital stay.

It was shortly after 1:30 p.m.

*

On March 18, 1983 - like most every weekday morning - William V. Verdekal, 34, and John Robert Turcotte, 22, sat in a booth at Tony's Bar in Collingdale.

After going to a furniture warehouse in Bridgeport, N.J., and loading the day's deliveries into Verdekal's Mercedes-Benz truck, they generally went to Tony's to plan their delivery route.

That morning, though, Verdekal, an independent subcontractor, was calling customers to tell them his deliveries would be late because of the rain. ''Nobody likes their furniture delivered in the rain," he said. Both men were drinking and had taken drugs that morning, Verdekal said in an interview late last year.

"Bob was drinking, and I know for a fact he was really gone on the meth, that and Jack Daniels in the bar," he said. "He came back and offered me some meth. I told him, 'No, I have some coke anyway. ' "

Verdekal, who spent much of his late teens and 20s in prison for burglaries, had picked Turcotte up hitchhiking one day in late 1982 and offered him a job. It was sometime after the busy 1982 Christmas season, he said, that they began committing robberies. While Verdekal maintains that he was the gunman in only one robbery - "it was a show-of-faith type thing" - he acknowledged that, generally, the planning and the profits were shared.

That morning in Tony's Bar, Verdekal was wearing cowboy-type clothes; Turcotte was wearing jeans and a bandanna, Verdekal said.

"Right around that time, the kids were wearing bandannas around their leg, and also around their neck. . . . In Bob's particular case he wore it most of the time because of the haircut he had. Sometimes he would just pull it down and wear it around his neck. I remember a time he said to me, 'Why not

dress the way the kids dress here, they would never know,' which made sense, you know. Dress like a college kid and they'll think a college kid did it,

dress in a suit, and they think a businessman did it. That was a diversion kind of thing. "

Verdekal said he and Turcotte would steal clothing from various bars to wear during robberies. In his truck that day were a variety of jackets and sweaters, including a red sweatshirt, stolen earlier, he said, off a coat

hook at Tony's. Also in the truck, Verdekal said, was a loaded .38-caliber revolver, which had been stolen in a house burglary and had been used in at least one previous robbery.

When they left the bar that day, Verdekal said, "I know he (Turcotte) was really stoned, and I was feeling pretty good myself. " About 1:20 p.m., Verdekal said, he parked his truck across the street from Kelly's Deli and

went inside.

Verdekal does not admit planning the Kelly's Deli robbery, or even

discussing it beforehand. Nor does he admit that, when he walked into Kelly's that day, it was to "case" the store for a robbery, though the Delaware County district attorney's office, and others involved in the investigation, believe that to be the case.

At 1:23 p.m., Verdekal purchased a lottery ticket at Kelly's. While he was in the store, Edith Chestnut, the school secretary who had talked to Terry McCracken on the phone about an hour earlier, walked in. She knew Verdekal. Her brother is married to one of Verdekal's sisters.

They talked briefly, walked outside together and went their separate ways.

Verdekal said he returned to his truck. He said Turcotte checked the .38- caliber revolver, slid it in into his pants, and got out of the truck. "He said, 'I'm going for cigarettes' . . . but I know he's going to rob the place at this point," Verdekal recounted.

Verdekal said he started the truck and drove a half block down the road. He parked, he said, but left the truck running. He sat there nervously as the windshield wipers slapped back and forth. The rain started coming down heavier, he remembered.

It was about 1:30 p.m.

*

Situated on Collingdale's main drag - MacDade Boulevard - Kelly's Deli was a small, family-operated store that did business mainly in lunchmeat and lottery tickets. By 1:30 p.m that Friday, the lunchtime rush was waning and only two customers were inside.

Robert Murphy, a cashier for SEPTA, recalls that he stopped at Kelly's amid a heavy rain on his drive to the MacDade Mall. He parked in front of the store and went in for cigarettes. There was no line at the lottery machine, he said, so he decided to try his luck. Marie Fawns, whose mother, store owner Anna Dannelly, was in a back room, sold Murphy his lottery ticket.

The other customer, Catherine Laurie, was at the deli counter, where Delores Bright was filling her lunchmeat order.

It was then that the gunman entered.

"When he came in the store, I thought he was kidding," Bright said in an interview. "Kids used to do that all the time - walk in and say, 'This is a stickup. ' And this guy had a sort of kidding look on his face - what you could see of his face. "

The gunman's speech was later described by witnesses as slow and lethargic, perhaps slightly muffled by the bandanna that covered his face from the nose down. He wore blue jeans and boots, and the hood on his red sweatshirt was pulled over his head. Under the hood, he wore a dark-colored knit ski cap that covered most of his forehead. Virtually all that was visible were his hands and eyes. Two customers later described the gunman's eyes as "deep-set," but none noticed their color and none noticed any unusual redness or any discharge around them.

"This is a holdup. I'm not kidding, Lady," he said, waving his gun. ''Everybody in the back. "

As he herded Fawns, Bright, Murphy and Laurie toward the back of the store, he spotted Dannelly in the back room. "You too, Lady," he said. "I see you. "

Fawns warned her mother, "Mom, he's got a gun. Do what he wants. "

All five went inside the store's walk-in refrigerator, and Murphy, the victim of four previous robberies, quickly took steps to secure the door should the gunman try to enter.

The gunman returned to the front of the store and went to the cash register, only to be interrupted - five times - by more customers - first an elderly woman, then an employee from a local lumberyard, then a park guard, then Eugene Schoffield, the owner of a nearby tire store. The gunman could not put them in the refrigerator, which was being held shut by those already inside. So he ordered the first four to lie on the floor in the back room.

The fifth was David Johnston.

"We heard a shot and a man screaming, and I guess maybe another 15, 20, 30 seconds went by and it was all quiet," Richard P. Duffield, the lumberyard employee, later said in court.

Johnston was on the floor dying when yet another customer, Dudley Denison, approached Kelly's. He, like Duffield, his co-worker at Collingdale Millwork, was stopping for a sandwich to go.

Denison, in an interview, said he was reaching for the doorknob when the door to Kelly's opened and he came face to face with the masked gunman and his revolver. He put his hands in the air and backed up until he was in a parking lot on the side of the store. He placed his hands against the building.

The gunman ran behind him and along the side of the store, turning around once to point the gun at Denison. As soon as he was out of sight, Denison looked into the store, then ran to nearby Brennan's Bar.

"Somebody's been shot down at Kelly's," Harry Rudolph, a patron at Brennan's, remembers Denison saying. Rudolph ran to the delicatessen, and Denison followed, after telling the bartender to call police.

Police received that call at 1:39 p.m., less than a minute after getting another call from a woman who had heard the gunshot while standing on the street.

The shooting apparently occurred at 1:37 or 1:38.

At 1:40 p.m. - as a white Mercedes-Benz truck was winding its way toward Interstate 95 - police arrived at Kelly's.

According to the driver of that truck, William Verdekal, John Robert Turcotte had not mentioned anything about his gun going off, and would not until the following Monday. At that time he said only, "I scored big. . . . I've got some money. "

As paramedics arrived and tried in vain to save the life of David Johnston - the single bullet had been fired at point-blank range into his upper back and had exited through his neck - Verdekal's truck merged into the sparse, early afternoon traffic on Interstate 95. Turcotte, according to Verdekal, was counting money and talking about buying a car as they headed north to make their scheduled deliveries.

"Damn," Verdekal says he remembers Turcotte saying. "I have, like, $900 here."

*

Andrew Leicht's homemade cardboard gasket was doing the job. His Chevelle was still idling in front of his house when Leicht, cleaned up for work, glanced at a wall clock and came out his door. It was 1:40 p.m., he said, and Terry McCracken was standing on his front porch.

At most, this was three minutes after the shooting at Kelly's - seven- tenths of a mile away.

"I had looked at the clock right at the door, and I remember thinking, 'It's 20 till 2, I better get a move on. ' I went outside, went toward the street, looked up and Terry was leaning up against his door," Leicht said in an interview.

"I said, 'Terry, I'll be home tonight about 8 o'clock, maybe a couple of minutes later; save some beer for me. ' "

McCracken said he had walked out on his porch after a quarrel with his brother Daryl. The issue was the certified letter McCracken had signed for: It was a citation for Daryl.

"Terry came down to the kitchen and told me that my dad wanted to see me

because I had another ticket, so I went up and he threw it over to me and said, 'You got another citation,' " Daryl McCracken recalled. He said that the citation was for underage drinking or violating curfew, and that he was angry because Terry had given the citation to his father.

Cefaratti, the neighbor who was at the McCracken home at the time, said in an interview last year that shortly after 1:30 p.m., he overheard the quarrel as he watched television in the McCrackens' living room. He said he could not remember what he was watching.

Cefaratti lived until his death in November across the street at the home of Florence Orsini, who said she also saw McCracken on his front porch just after 1:40 p.m.

Orsini had heard police being summoned to Kelly's Deli on her police scanner. About two or three minutes later - after calling her son in nearby Glenolden, who was planning to visit her - she looked out her door and saw McCracken standing on his porch, she said in an interview.

McCracken's father said he and his wife left their home about 1:45, telling Terry to clean up the house. Cefaratti said he left at that time as well. Across the street, Orsini's son James arrived. James Orsini and Cefaratti then told McCracken about the robbery that had just taken place, they recalled.

When, shortly after, McCracken heard a siren and saw a police car speeding down a nearby street, he walked over to see what was happening.

On the way, McCracken said, he approached a member of the local school district security force, which was helping in the search for a suspect. McCracken said that the officer, whom he knew, told him that his clothes resembled those of the gunman and advised him to go home and change so he wouldn't be mistaken for the robber.

As he walked back home, Cefaratti and James Orsini, who had been listening to the scanner, came out of the Orsini home. "They've got the guy who did it on Cherry Street," Orsini said he told McCracken.

That was less than a block away, and McCracken went to the area with his brother, Cefaratti and Orsini. McCracken had not bothered to change clothes. ''I figured since they had caught the guy, why should I bother to change?" he said.

Under his blue denim jacket, and over two other shirts, McCracken was wearing a red sweatshirt with a "Puma" insignia on it. It drew the attention of one of the out-of-town police officers at the scene, where it turned out that the person police had stopped had simply been walking his dog.

That officer called McCracken over and searched him.

During the search, Collingdale Police Officer James Clifton approached. Clifton had been the first to arrive at Kelly's after the robbery and had broadcast the original description of the gunman.

In court later, Clifton noted that McCracken lived only about 35 feet from Cherry Street, and he said he didn't question McCracken at that time "because of how long it had been since the crime. . . . Besides, I know Terry McCracken. "

According to McCracken, Clifton told the officer who had stopped him, "I know him, he's OK. " McCracken went back home.

The description of the gunman, at that point, was that of a white male, 5 feet 9 or 5 feet, 10 inches tall, wearing blue jeans, boots, a dark knit ski cap and a red jacket or sweatshirt.

Authorities say it was the similarity between that description and what McCracken was seen wearing that day - blue jeans and boots, a black felt hat with a brim, and among his other shirts and jackets, a red sweatshirt - that led police to return to his home later that afternoon.

McCracken agreed to accompany police to the station for questioning, and at 4:45 p.m. he agreed to let police take samples from his hands for a gunshot- residue test. It was then that he made a statement that would later be used against him.

McCracken attributes the question he asked to simple curiosity, but prosecutors would later portray it in a far more ominous way. After asking how the test worked, McCracken asked what would happen if the person receiving the test had washed his hands. The residue would still probably show up, he was told. What, he then asked, if the person had rubbed alcohol on his hands?

Those remarks were noted by the detective administering the test, and the samples he took were sealed for later analysis at a state police laboratory.

Police then obtained warrants - one allowing them to photograph and fingerprint McCracken, another to search his house and take his clothing. A little after 7 p.m., McCracken was taken home so he could change into new clothes.

"When I got back to my house, the cops and CID were there already and searching," McCracken said. "I went up to my room. Someone was standing on my bed and ripping down all my United States Marine Corps, Army, Navy and Air Force posters and my flags. "

In the search, police found one round of .38-caliber ammunition - the same caliber, but a different brand from the one that killed Johnston - and a box of Remington .380 automatic-pistol ammunition, which is incompatible with the revolver that killed Johnston. Both were found in the bedroom of Terence McCracken Sr., who was at work in Lansdowne, loading trucks, at the time.

Police also took the clothes McCracken was wearing - a red sweatshirt, blue velour shirt, red plaid flannel shirt, blue denim jacket, blue jeans, black felt hat, boots, a beige cloth that was in his trouser pocket, a grey silk tie that was on the living room floor and three socks.

One of his socks had a hole in it, he explained, so he wore a sock from another pair underneath. He'd been using the cloth to dab at the discharge

from his eye, he said, and he, his brother and a friend had been using the tie to blindfold each other as part of a game they were playing.

The detectives, after McCracken ran and got it, also took a receipt from Certified Letter No. 743583 - the letter McCracken said he signed for at 1:30 p.m. that day. They left without arresting him.

On Monday, though, they were back. "I thought they came to apologize for the inconvenience on Friday," McCracken said. But this time, they had come with a warrant for his arrest on charges of murdering David Johnston and robbing Kelly's Deli.

The arrest came after Michael Aldridge, McCracken's former schoolmate, amended his first statement to police after three days of questioning. Now he told them the person he saw running from the store was Terry McCracken.

As McCracken was being taken into the police station to be booked, he would say something else that would be used against him in court.

On a desk at the police station, McCracken saw some sketches - sketches that, although they were of a masked man, looked nothing like him, he said. He had been asking officers why he had been arrested, and as he passed the desk, he said, "Is that supposed to be me? "

"No," McCracken said he was told. "We have an eyewitness. "

"I know," McCracken said. "Michael Aldridge, right? "

Prosecutors would later say that the only way McCracken could have known that was if he knew Aldridge had seen him fleeing the store.

According to McCracken, though, he had been told over the weekend - by a cousin of the delicatessen owner and other Collingdale residents - that Michael Aldridge had seen the gunman and was being questioned by police. Several other Collingdale residents, including one whose house Aldridge visited during those three days of questioning, said in interviews that Aldridge, while not discussing details, did tell friends at the time that he was being questioned at length by police.

"So when the cops said they had someone that knows me and went to school with me and can put me at the scene of the crime, I couldn't believe it, but I knew it had to be Michael Aldridge," McCracken said last week.

*

William Verdekal and John Robert Turcotte made all their scheduled deliveries that Friday after the robbery at Kelly's Deli.

It was not until Saturday, Verdekal said, that he learned that a shooting had taken place. When Turcotte came to his home on Monday, Verdekal confronted him with an article in Saturday's Inquirer headlined, "Fleeing Robber Kills Man, 71. "

"When he came in the house, I said, 'You know what happened, don't you? ' He said, 'What do you mean? ' I said, 'You know what happened. How come you didn't tell me you fired that gun? ' He said, 'I don't remember. ' I said, 'You better read this,' and that's when he read it. I mean that kid sat there and he looked like he was dead himself. . . . And I'd be willing to bet, him being so stoned, that he really didn't remember it. "

On March 28, 10 days after the killing at Kelly's Deli in Collingdale - while Terry McCracken was locked in his jail cell - a masked gunman entered Koban's Beverages Inc., in Glenolden, a town that adjoins Collingdale, about 1 p.m. He forced the owner and an employee into a walk-in refrigerator, rifled through the cash register and left with about $400. Witnesses saw a white Mercedes-Benz truck leave the store.

Ten days after that, on April 7, a masked gunman robbed the Westbrook Market in nearby Clifton Heights. This time, unbeknownst to the robber, he was being watched. A sign painter had seen him pull a bandanna up over his face before he went into the store. The painter called police and, as the robber fled, ran after him, losing him for a minute, then spotting him in a white truck.

Seconds later, police stopped the truck, a white Mercedes-Benz.

Clifton Heights Police Chief Ronald Berry approached the driver's side of the truck, pointed his gun up at the window and said, "Don't move. "

Myron Blankley, then the police chief of nearby Aldan, ran to the other side of the truck, his gun drawn.

About that time, a third police officer arrived - Sgt. John Hewlings from Collingdale. He climbed up on the truck bumper and pointed his weapon at the windshield.

The two men inside the truck were ordered out and frisked. Verdekal's cowboy hat fell off as he was pushed into the side of a squad car.

A .38-caliber revolver was taken from Turcotte, who told officers, "I'm just a guy with a gun trying to make a living. "

Verdekal and Turcotte were taken to Clifton Heights police headquarters and their truck was impounded.

A further search of the truck by state police four days later would reveal a lottery ticket that the state Lottery Commission would confirm had been purchased at Kelly's Deli at 1:23 p.m. March 18, plus assorted items of clothing, including two knit caps - one brown, one blue - a box full of cash and a newspaper folded over to the article headlined, "Fleeing Robber Kills Man, 71. "

A ballistics test performed on that gun would reveal it was the same .38- caliber revolver used to kill David Johnston at Kelly's Deli in Collingdale.

*

"I start this journal on my (19th) birthday which I am celebrating in Delaware County Prison," McCracken wrote April 18, 1983, on a yellow legal pad - one of three he would fill with words while spending 22 hours a day in his jail cell.

"I am in here for a murder I did not commit," he wrote. "The police believe that I did do it, and contrary to popular belief it is not innocent until proven guilty, you must prove yourself innocent. While no matter what I have as evidence I can not prove myself innocent until trial and trial can take up till 6 months to come. "

McCracken, who on Friday celebrated a fourth birthday in prison - he turned 22 - is one of seven children, the eldest son of Screw McCracken, the former Warlock who now drives a truck for a living.

When he was 9, McCracken's mother killed herself in a hotel room. The next year, his father got out of the Warlocks. "I guess for Terry growing up it was pretty unstable," his father said in an interview. "I was strict; I just wasn't there enough. "

As a teenager, Terry McCracken got into his share of mischief - most of the time with his younger brother Daryl.

When McCracken was 16, he and his brother broke into a school cafeteria. As his brother served as lookout, McCracken took a 25-gallon barrel full of cookies and crackers. He was caught rolling it across the schoolyard. Daryl got away.

Shortly after that, McCracken was caught with his hand inside a soda machine. He had managed to steal four sodas.

His third brush with the law came the same year. Daryl was serving as a lookout as Terry looked through boxes behind a beverage store for beers. Daryl got away. Terry was convicted of criminal trespassing and sent to the Juvenile Detention Center in Lima for two days.

"Terry was the good one," said his father, now living in Upper Darby. ''Daryl was the one who was continually getting in trouble. Terry had three or four little things, but he always had this sense about him that he never

went overboard. "

The home in which the McCrackens lived on the south side of Collingdale was, most neighbors agreed, an eyesore. In 1984, after McCracken's arrest, the house - where local teenagers frequently gathered to drink or just hang out - would be condemned by local health department officials, and, later, destroyed in a fire.

Most of McCracken's jailhouse diary is filled with memories of his neighborhood, along with details about his friends and his family, plans for the future, when he slept and what he ate in jail, who wrote him a letter and who paid him a visit.

"I have also learned that they finally found the real killer, but they still keep me," he wrote in April 1983. "My lawyer, John McDougall, tells me now they suspect me in a conspiracy. If this makes sense then I am a rather big moron."

*

In the hours after their April 7 arrest, John Robert Turcotte and William Verdekal were not cooperating with authorities at Clifton Heights police headquarters.

Verdekal, who had declined to talk with the arresting officers, was shackled to a chair in the hallway, where he was on the phone trying to reach his attorney, he recalled in an interview.

Turcotte was in a holding cell, where he had removed the brown sweater he was wearing - and had worn during the Westbrook market robbery, according to Verdekal - and had torn it up and tried to flush it down the toilet.

"He was being rowdy with them (the police)," Verdekal said. "When I first saw him was after he'd been pushing parts of the sweater down the commode. He was shackled feet and hands to the bars. "

Later, after seizing the sweater for evidence, officers attempted to question Turcotte. Turcotte noticed that one of the officers had a Collingdale Police armpatch on his uniform.

According to police, he made this remark: "You're not going to pin that Collingdale murder on me. "

That statement, the similarities in appearance between Turcotte and McCracken, and the similarities between Turcotte's gun and the one described by witnesses at the Kelly's Deli robbery, intitially led investigators to

suspect that Verdekal and Turcotte may have had a role in the Collingdale crime.

In the following week, on April 11, ballistics tests would show that Turcotte's gun had killed Johnston, and other incriminating items - such as the lottery ticket purchased at Kelly's minutes before the killing - would be found in Verdekal's truck.

By then, Detective John Slowik of the Delaware County Criminal Investigations Division (CID) had gone to Bridgeport, N.J., to interview employees at Better Homes Delivery Inc., the warehouse out of which Verdekal and Turcotte worked.

Theorizing that McCracken might have worked with the two men, Slowik on April 8 asked managers of the warehouse about Verdekal's helpers. Because Verdekal was an independent subcontractor, the warehouse had no records of who worked for him. But they told the detective of a shabbily dressed young man, 18 or 19 years old, about 5 feet, 9 inches tall with sandy hair, Slowik would later testify. No one knew him by name.

Five days later, Slowik and another CID detective went to the warehouse with two photographs, both of Terry McCracken. The detectives took statements

from the manager and assistant manager, both of whom said the picture resembled the young man whom they had never met or talked to but had seen working there.

With that, McCracken on April 27 was also charged with conspiracy to commit the Kelly's Deli murder and robbery, along with Verdekal and Turcotte.

In the weeks after their arrest, Turcotte and Verdekal were charged with other robberies. Verdekal was charged in April with the March robbery at Koban's Beverages in Glenolden. In May, Turcotte was charged with the robberies of two Delaware County gas stations in February - a Sunoco Station in Middletown Township and a BP station in Concord Township.

At the latter robbery, on Feb. 25, 1983, a shot was fired into the floor of the gas station and tests on the recovered slug showed it was fired from the same gun that was later used at Kelly's - the first indication that the two men, in addition to having the gun after the Kelly's killing, also might have had it before.

By then, Verdekal was in touch with his attorney, Luke McLaughlin 3d of Norristown. He had met McLaughlin months earlier while making a delivery to his home, and the two had gotten together at Verdekal's request to discuss Verdekal's delivery business.

"His wife called me after he was arrested, and I went to talk to him down at Delaware County Prison," McLaughlin said in a recent interview. "We talked and we decided that it would be in his best interests to approach the district attorney and talk about a possible arrangement, whereby he would cooperate with the police in exchange for consideration at time of sentencing. "

McLaughlin said he went to Delaware County in search of a deal. He spoke to John McKenna, head of the CID, then to a top official in the district attorney's office, he said.

"I was very circumspect, and I had to be vague to protect my client, but I told them that I believed we could help them. We believed that John Robert Turcotte had been pulling these robberies, and we believed he may have been the one who pulled the robbery at Kelly's delicatessen. "

McLaughlin said he was told "unless Bill Verdekal was prepared to indicate that Terry McCracken was the triggerman at the Kelly's delicatessen robbery, that they didn't even want to talk to us. "

McLaughin said he later told authorities that his client was willing to take a polygraph test to support his statements, but "nothing ever came of it. They never reopened discussions or negotiations, although I went to the D.A.'s office on multiple occasions. "

Verdekal admits that his prime goal at that point was saving himself, but he said that during the summer of 1983, as McCracken's trial drew near, he

went as far as he could to help him.

"I had told my attorney Terry's not the one who did this. But there were no deals to be made," Verdekal said. "And you're not going to jump out, when they're asking for first-degree and the death penalty, and say, 'I'm the one who did it. ' Nobody in their right mind would do that. "

McLaughlin said that until McCracken's trial, he continued to seek a deal for Verdekal. Amid continued rejections from the district attorney's office, he said, he went to a state police detective, Thomas Ansel, who also requested that a polygraph test be administered to Verdekal. That request, too, was turned down by the district attorney's office.

Officials in the district attorney's office said they were not willing to give a lie-detector test to Verdekal because they did not believe he was telling the truth about his own involvement in the Kelly's Deli killing, and they were not willing to offer a deal because they felt he was the mastermind behind it.

According to sources close to the investigation, Ansel almost came to blows with McKenna one night at a Delaware County tavern. Ansel had been investigating a string of robberies he believed Turcotte and Verdekal had committed. Although Ansel declined to discuss the Kelly's case with The Inquirer, law enforcement sources said it was Ansel's belief that Verdekal and Turcotte were solely responsible for the killing and robbery. It was a shouting match over that point - whether McCracken should remain charged with the crime - that almost led Ansel and McKenna to blows, the sources said.

Two police sources close to the investigation said in interviews that they did not believe that McCracken was involved in the Kelly's Deli killing and robbery. Both, however, declined to be identified, saying they feared public comment would strain their working relationships with the CID.

Verdekal's attorney, McLaughlin, showed no such hesitation, however.

"From everything that I have seen, everything I have reveiwed in the records and my conversations with various people, including Verdekal and Turcotte, I am as sure as I can be that Terry McCracken was not involved in the situation," McLaughlin said.