Convicted murderer granted house arrest ahead of retrial

Faulkner is being held at the Talbot County Detention Center and is expected to be released to his family’s home in Ridgely once his pretrial release authorization is processed and cleared by the county’s corrections department.

Faulkner will be restricted to his family’s home and will be electronically monitored with a personal tracking unit, according to court documents. He also will be required to check in with a supervisor five days a week.

The murder for which Faulkner stood trial and of which he ultimately was convicted in the early 2000s occurred the afternoon of Jan. 5, 1987.

A woman identified as Wilford was found dead inside her home with multiple stab wounds to her face and hands. Wilford’s home, according to police reports, had been “ransacked,” and her purse, wallet and some of her jewelry were missing.

Faulkner pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, but his conviction relied heavily on the accounts of two witnesses and a confession by his accomplice Jonathan Smith, now 50, who also was convicted in the case and sentenced to life in prison.

The witnesses in the case were then 16-year-old Ray Andrews, who also was involved in the burglary and took a plea deal to testify against Faulkner and Smith for a shorter sentence, and Beverly Haddaway, whose account surfaced 13 years after the incident and was considered at the request of Wilford’s son, Charles Wilford.

After years of Faulkner and Smith unsuccessfully appealing their convictions, the Maryland Court of Appeals ultimately granted both men writs of actual innocence on Monday, April 27, 2020. Their cases were sent back to the Talbot County Circuit Court with orders for new trials.

The retrial orders came in response to the introduction of two new pieces of evidence: a recorded police interview that revealed Haddaway had been compensated for her testimony against Smith and Faulkner; and the delayed identification of palm prints that had been found at the 1987 crime scene.

In 2013, nearly 30 years after Wilford’s death, palm prints collected from what police believed to be the burglar’s entry point to Wilford’s home were identified as belonging to a previously overlooked suspect in the case, Ty Brooks, now 52.

Brooks had been on investigators’ suspect radar at the investigation’s onset after a confidential informant told police Brooks confessed to the crime — but Brooks’s prints weren’t checked to determine whether they matched those found at Wilford’s home until 2013, at the request of Faulkner’s and Smith’s new attorneys, according to court documents.

Prosecutors never introduced any physical evidence linking Faulkner, Smith or Andrews to the crime scene, court records show.

The second piece of new evidence indicates Haddaway, a key witness for the prosecution, had testified against Faulkner and Smith in exchange for the dismissal of drug charges against her grandson.

Haddaway testified that she saw the men walking out of a corn field, one of them blood-covered, near Wilford’s home the day she was killed.

During the trial and until the recordings’ public release in 2012, prosecutors withheld from the defense the recordings of Haddaway’s interview with police in which the deal was discussed, according to court documents.

Faulkner’s and Smith’s legal teams argued that if those two pieces of evidence — the recorded witness interview and the prints identification — had been made available to the juries during their trials, the juries might have decided differently.

Of Faulkner’s pretrial release authorization by the court, Faulkner’s attorney John Chesley argued in court documents obtained by The Star Democrat that Faulkner is not a threat to the community and is a candidate for pretrial release because he has a “debilitating knee injury,” and he is in “no physical shape to harm anyone.”

Chesley also said Faulkner was not issued “a single disciplinary infraction over 20 years of wrongful incarceration.”

The attorney said Tuesday, June 23, that Faulkner “hopes the state does not re-prosecute this case and that they devote their resources to finding out who committed this horrible crime.”

Joseph Michael, Washington County deputy state’s attorney who is representing the State in Faulkner’s case, declined to comment on the proceedings.